VIII-82 Butchery Beneath Paradise (I) (Patreon)

I am traitor, kinslayer, oathbreaker. 

And for whatever regret I hold for my treachery, I find greater relish in the pain I inflicted upon my own kind. 

It's wrong, I suppose. But when you are loathed by our own kind, when you are segregated, discriminated against, and used as nothing more than expendable meat—regarded closer to beast than individual, simply because you and yours were born to a particular bloodline mutation—what's one more mark to the grand tally of your birthright sins? 

It's not that I didn't hesitate. Oh, I struggled with the decision, even as I stood first in line, placed there next to my brothers and sisters by our great tormentors to stem the tide of the invaders. I warred with myself as the monsters waited for my answer, saliva dripping from their fangs, my death all but certain to follow if I refused the bargain. 

Do you know what finally pushed me to accept? It was when he said our corpses would be placed at the very bottom of the mass grave his sons intended to dig, before those who'd spent their entire lives thinking themselves better than me and my blood would be placed on top of us. 

One final insult.

A dead eternity of still being deemed less. 

Too much to bear. 

And it will be too much for the people around you as well. You cannot place your heel upon an entire population and expect loyalty. You will be betrayed, slaver. 

Know this. 

Expect this. 

Suffer this.

—Betrayal at Triskelia by [Redacted under authority of the Auroral Council]

VIII-82

Butchery Beneath Paradise (I)

Warning! 

Hidden World Quest Failed: Slay Tanner “Shiv” Lowe, the Deathless, before he fully comes into his power and drives your world beyond its current Mana Stability Threshold. 

Failure: A specialized Incursion is triggered to destroy Integrated Earth in 0 years, 0 months, and 0 days.

Morgan read and dismissed the notification in the same second. The barest flicker of a scowl graced his face before he returned to the task at hand. He didn’t have time to worry about whatever madman nonsense the oversized man-orc was up to—Gate Piety had enough shit to deal with right now, and the gateway—

Which promptly blinked out on the Diviner’s table. The collapse arrived with about as much warning as the notification. One moment, the Terminal Opus' magical telemetries were harvesting mana frequencies and dimensional densities from the gateway. The next, there came a catastrophic cascade of devastation. A series of error notifications flashed across the illusion—then the gateway itself winked out entirely, like the Diviner's table couldn't process what was happening there.

“Sooth?” Morgan growled.

“I… I’m trying to fix it, boss, I’m trying—I don’t—looks like the collapse happened from the inside.” Sooth's thoughts were as unbound as Morgan's. She wasn't prepared for this. She didn't see it coming. As she scrambled to catch up with an unexpected development, a new set of warnings blinked across the table.

Warning: Ambient Mana Threshold spiking…

Attention: Legendary-Tier Dimensional Ceiling Disabled—Full Integration in progress

“Uh, boss,” Gunhead said, sounding more uneasy than ever before.

Morgan gritted his teeth. “I know, I see it. I see it.”

“No, I'm not talking about the notification! We got a problem coming down right on top of us!” The tension in Gunhead's voice degenerated into full-blown panic—and Gunhead never panicked. With a thought, Morgan wired his mind into the Terminal Opus' visual targeting systems and pointed his attention skyward.

He promptly found himself sharing the same emotional state as Gunhead.

Morgan’s throat went dry, and his hand went to his revolver. The Colt and the Will crackled as the higher power made his gun cylinder spin, but it offered no comfort nor advice; it spat forth no commandment toward war nor bloodshed.

The firmament was coming undone. Riven by a nest of crystalline channels, the sky resembled an arterial ocean filled by a melding of three Unique mana types, further bathed in the azure-incandescent glow of the Gate-Lord—a glow that had flared to fullest radiance mere seconds ago. Yet, the fissures paled before a larger rift unzipping reality down the middle from above. A colossal wave of pressure smashed down upon the Gate as something of immense mass and mana began its intrusion into this dimension.

Even the hull of the Terminal Opus groaned; a dozen enchantments were strained to the limit—with multiple warning icons flashing through Morgan’s mind, begging him to draw back or risk structural failure. The Siege Crawler staggered and threatened to buckle; its biomechanical legs found themselves torn of tendon and burst of carbon fibers. All across Gate Piety, the topsides of buildings were pressed flat, with roofs plunging inward while their structural supports barely endured.

Waves of force continued falling in an unceasing torrent, battering the Terminal Opus and the rest of the Gate over and over. The arriving wind bled into the Crawler’s insides, flooding the command center with suffocation. Every breath Morgan took was a feat of Physicality displayed by his lungs. He wondered if someone at Adept could even survive this. He wondered what might be the fate of those who were Initiates or less, but just as soon as the crushing presence arrived, it broke apart, dissipating horizontally, as if a heavy layering of lead-heavy water was gushing away along both sides.

Suddenly, Morgan was able to breathe again, as was Sooth and everyone else within the command center. As air entered their unburdened lungs, a final notification followed. This one was accompanied by an unmistakable voice—one personally addressed to Morgan.

“Hello, Hero-Ranger Munny. I have been looking forward to this reunion of ours. I'm not surprised to find you within this Gate, but I'm pleased you are here nonetheless. Few others are more deserving of this moment's honor—to be on the frontlines of the butchery to come.”

Morgan’s mind went empty—then the space detonated like napalm graced with flame. White-hot hate exploded within him, and his jaws pressed against each other so hard that cracks spread through his teeth. 

“But before I go and overinflate your ego, know that I am currently speaking to a great many individuals other than yourself. But what I tell them will be much the same as what I tell you: The dimensional threshold for this Gate and Integrated Earth is thinning. I hope you understand what that means. No more difficult little routes, walking across several interconnected worlds to smuggle ourselves onto your land.”

The God of Strife chuckled, and there was a tinge of deep satisfaction rumbling in the undercurrent of his voice. “No more, indeed. I also wish you to know that, in the coming moments, you are not going to be given a chance that several other Pathbearers will receive. They will be able to choose if they wish to die fighting in a hopeless struggle to protect the evacuees of this place, or bow their heads and submit themselves to the deliverance of Paradise. In simplicity, they are to choose between me and Avalon. But not you, Hero-Ranger, because you have always belonged to me. I know what your choice would be: resistance, of course, always, no matter how futile. You haven't been fighting for your own sake for a long time. And so, what greater torment could there be for you than a lonesome paradise while everyone else is left behind?”

A vacuum opened inside Morgan. “Sooth—Wards up, now! All mages—”

His words were cut off. The Challenger was many things, but across all his time, he never stood as a liar. A deceiver, perhaps, but not a liar. 

There was no predicting the blow, no intercepting it, no stopping it.

Sooth cried out the full second after Morgan was already gone. 

A blade of golden glory smashed through the Terminal Opus' Magical Resistance as if a broadsword greeting armor made from paper. When it slipped past the matter and dipped deep, deep to the base of its core, it struck only one, ignoring all others. Its edge so thin, so fine, could have cleaved a single neutrino away from existence while leaving all else untouched if it so willed.

Morgan felt its domineering pressure sweep through him, cutting deeper and deeper, until something anchored to the depths of Morgan’s being was nicked as well. The Colt and the Will rattled a final time as the Sword of Paradise subsumed the nascent Divinity and pulled it away from Morgan—slicing it from his hand to deprive him of any final, fleeting words of comfort from the only faith he still held.

It was only an eternity too late that Morgan realized that in his shock, he had missed the third option which the Challenger did not name: He could have directed his gun at himself, as a final act of spite.

But that would mean abandoning his Rangers regardless, and so all three paths converged at the same point in hell.

Something the Challenger knew. In the end, there was no hope. No hope at all. Everything was just a struggle, before the inevitable ruin.

And so Morgan Munny went, howling impotent hatred as he was surgically hewn from one reality, and carried skyward, to a paradise he had no desire to inhabit…

***

“Nononono! Fuck!” Rose’s mind devolved into a whirlwind of terror as her lips spewed a deluge of curses and slurs. The notification arrived first, and the nightmares followed close after. She and Can Hu passed by the Ascendants and exchanged brief and hurried words with Veronica—then accelerated to aid her husband and son.

She was just over the Grounder District when the sky burst open ahead. It arrived as a divine portent so loud that the System itself seemed to be blaring in alarm. Then came the falling weight of the formless mountain. It was only thanks to Can Hu’s Toughness and Physicality that they stayed airborne, but their progress slowed to a crawl. The automaton had to be pointed up to stop themselves from being pinned down to the ground. They couldn't afford such a thing. A straight fall would render them a missile, and whoever they struck, unless they were Master-Tier or higher in darkness, would end as gore stains upon gleaming metal.

“Come on, Can Hu!” Rose shouted, committing every ounce of her magic and strength to keep pushing. She could see them through Can Hu’s sensors—Jessica and Roland, who had an azure glow bleeding out from his insides. And Jessica—fuckkk—had that empty look in her eyes. Rose had seen that look more than once. It was a look Jessica gave when she gave herself over to the sword and let the person inside bleed away.

Even from over a kilometer away, Rose could hear Rusty shouting at Jessica—calling for her attention. But she was gone now. The person was lost, and the killer was out. And so Rose had to reach her. She had to reach her before Roland—

“Rose Van Erren.” She felt the hot, feverish breath of the Challenger brush across the nape of her neck—even within the armor. “I have not had the pleasure of directly conversing with you. Truth be told, I had little interest in you before—aside from your commendable predilection toward violence. There is little remarkable in you as a warrior or a mage in the grand scheme of Integration, and I would have never bothered to hold you in mind—except for the deliciousness of agony I can deliver through you and the other survivors of Blackedge against my Vaketh-Bakal. Oh, right, Can Hu. You may go now. This conversation does not concern you. Go and be returned to the one that forged you.”

Without warning, a massive edge of gold pierced down from the sky above and plunged straight down. It passed through the mana core and all its crystalline veins; through the Skyfolk District and then the buildings around Rose—then finally through Rose herself and the ground beneath her. But deep as the cut ran, it only carved one piece of reality away. 

Suddenly, Rose found herself falling, and before she could get her bearings, her shoulder clipped the edge of a building, snapping with a violent crack. A scream slipped out of her throat, but it only lasted for half a second before she struck the ground, driving all the air from her lungs. She choked and stayed choked as the metaphysical weight from above only intensified. It was like the heel of a giant was being driven into her sternum. Her bones broke, her eyes bled, and her vessels burst. Her trachea was bruised and threatened to collapse entirely. Even her heart was on the verge of bursting.

But then, the weight folded over her, and Rose took in a ragged, desperate gasp of all the oxygen she could muster. Her body felt like a bag of broken glass; her bones were messy puzzle pieces misplaced against each other in a nest of agony. She sobbed and crawled on her still-working shoulders, trying to wriggle her way to Roland—to the surface gateway. Then, the world got bright—too bright for her to see, and her Divination Skill began to burn inside her, like there was a blazing coal inside her soul.

Unable to resist the System’s compulsion, she was made to turn and gaze upon the bifurcated sky, and there she saw it—a colossal entity that was grander than the sky itself, too colossal to fit within this meager dimension. It was shaped from cities and worlds—like countless civilizations stitched together into a vaguely humanoid form. Looking at it made her mind reel and fracture, and then there was the blade in its hand, trailing an ocean of gold in its wake, appearing like it had been unsheathed from the body of this celestial monstrosity. 

Looming behind it was the grinning face of the Challenger. And as he smiled, she saw every droplet of cruelty he intended to rain down upon her and the people of this Gate. She was going to be drowned within his malice—but with how gleeful he sounded, death would not follow.

No. There was something else he wanted from her. And Rose’s guts tightened so much she felt like they were about to prolapse themselves out from her skin.

“No, fuck you! Fuck you!” She kept crawling. She crawled as far and fast as she could—but her body was broken, and every flop brought more agony than distance.

A shadow fell over her. And as soon as it did, Rose bounded as fast as she could—only for the boots of a laughing orc to come crashing down on her spine with a call of: “LUMBAR! L1 TO 5!”

Things broke inside her—so loud that the sound briefly was all she heard. Then there was numbness as her eyes rolled. Rose plunged into herself for a moment—dissociated for a heartbeat—then came back howling as she was dragged in the opposite direction of her husband and son by a shattered ankle as her captor began whistling a happy jaunt.

“Roland!” she screamed. “Adam!”

“Oh, don’t worry none, lassie.” The orc giggled. “You’ll be seeing them boys soon enough. You and all the others of Blackedge. We got a big ol’ meatball to make—and a certain Scornful bastard to make more than a little happy.”

Rose tried to kick and struggle, but her body refused to do even that now. There was nothing below her hips she could control, and there was too much of her torso broken that the remaining ligaments had nothing to draw upon.

A smear of blood painted Rose’s pathway from her family as, in the end, her resolve crumbled in broken sobs.

***

Maria saw her death approach alongside Cain Hauser’s poleaxe.

She called upon her summons as a first resort, but both her Hound of the Eclipse and Belmonte, her blood dragon, had little hope against a butcher of Legends like the Semper-Paragon.

The first of her guardians to fall was Belmonte, who tried to rise against his former master. He was pinned down to the ground as Cain Hauser exerted his crushing Magical Resistance. All mana succumbed within the Semper-Paragon's presence as gravity was amplified over a thousandfold. Belmonte struck the ground, and in the same instant came the flame as Hauser held down the trigger of his bayoneted flamethrower. A spew of pitch-black fire flooded the world, and it came forth with malicious intent. It adopted the form of a soldier from eons past, and he charged, carrying with him legions of foul entropic heat that soured and scoured her blade from existence. There was no struggle to be had, no battle that followed. Belmonte tried to escape across time, but time refused to move within Cain Hauser's wake. As the flames spread across the body of Belmonte, the blade holding him burst first, and then the dragon tried to flee, only to be unraveled from the inside.

All this happened within a millisecond.

In that same span of time, her Wolf of the Eclipse died as well. He came forth bearing his great blade, gathering the coldness of shattered moonlight as he prepared to go to war against his looming foe. Hauser’s poleaxe never fell on him either; it was disregarded as he swung his tail instead. It cascaded in a waterfall of flowing, folding strikes, each blow transforming into another, each one coiling as attack and defense at the same time.

Maria's guardian had made quick work of most Low Legends he'd faced. He survived just a second longer than Belmonte. He parried and struck past the first thousand blows, but with every one he warded, another came, another chipped into his flesh, peeling, scraping through his armor as if it wasn't there. As the Semper-Paragon’s tail-tip finally struck his chest, it pierced his heart and left him punctured in body, flesh, and soul.

The wolfman made three steps before he folded over and collapsed as well—the power of his great blade and the strongest of his skills halted from ever spawning the Fullest Moon. And with the banishment of his form, so followed Maria’s hopes as she realized there would be no chance of her pulling out of the Semper-Paragon’s magical gravity well even with her Harbinger.

“Ah. I always wondered what happened to Sir Belmonte. I seem to have found my answer.” Hauser’s voice was deadpan with contempt. “What a wretched fate indeed, to be made thrall to a vampire. But a misery amended now that I have struck him from this coil; you are avenged and cast on, Sir Belmonte. By corpse and creed you were made, and of corpse and creed you return.”

The entropic flames that devoured Belmonte's form proved the Semper-Paragon's words true, as the shell-helmeted warrior leading the midnight black inferno was followed by a new presence. This one, the shape of Belmonte, restored in the shifting dark of entropy—returning to the flamethrower alongside his murderer, with hints of resignation and dignity combined. Into the nozzle they both went, and there they stayed—but before finally fading, the helmeted soldier lifted his right hand in a knife-shaped salute to Hauser, who righted himself and did the same with solemn responsiveness.

Through it all, he never stopped pouring his contempt down upon Maria—his prismatic eyes dull with boredom—viewing her as less than a true threat.

The gateway pulsed behind him. The Dimensionality was dense and rich, but no orcs came forth, and Maria's characteristic calm threatened to burst as she wanted to rage and curse the name of the Challenger for spending her so callously. She was supposed to be his Nemesis-Commander, but instead she felt like just another piece of munition, no different from the Realmrunner. Both of them were players in a game of greater powers, and ultimately, nonetheless pawns; valuable in a moment, but easy enough to replace thereafter.

The portal was wide open. They could spew across. The Breaker should be invading right now. She didn't know what was keeping him back—she wasn't focused enough to take a peek across her Harbinger.

“But you must be quite the sturdy one to survive a hit from Line-Ender. Congratulations, Ophereus. I am going to discover the worth of your soul and spirit by how many strikes it will take to remove you from this world.” Hauser smiled, displaying teeth individually the size of orcs. Within his eyes, she saw a malice surpassed only by the Challenger. The Semper-Paragon was someone who fed on victory but nursed himself especially upon the destruction of bloodspawn. “Count with me if you can. One…”

As he lifted his poleaxe high, Maria looked back on both of her lives, to all she'd experienced, all she'd survived, only to be banished now in a miserable instant—

Then came the notification, a flash of gold, and Hauser was gone. 

Maria's eyes tore open. The arrival of Avalon was unmistakable. But before her relief could flow out from her, she felt a searing ache spread through her soul as her Harbinger was burned from within, burst, crushed, and mangled over and again. 

She nearly blacked out from the agony. Her flesh, mirroring her soul, her actualized form, tarnished and scarred in turn. Spreading wounds stretched across her skin as she grew inflamed in a way her Lineage Core could not fix. As one of her arms was burned down to a nub and her features were deformed as if her face had been pressed against an open flame, she finally called her Harbinger back. It was in pieces, on the verge of full destruction, with the corrosion having spilled across the surface, mangling her mana field, devastating the skill from within. She couldn't fathom why the Breaker had wounded her so or compelled him to be so destructive in such a careless way—

And she didn't get the chance to have a thought either, for Avalon's emergence came with an unspeakable pressure. When such immense force was applied to her open wounds, all Maria could do was scream and wail in anguish, as her voice was joined with another at the other end of the Gate. 

***

Heaven or hell? Make your choice.

All across Gate Piety, the offer was made to every Legendary-Tier Pathbearer. An opportunity was granted: to take the hand of Avalon and be spirited away, out of this reality and into the grasp of Paradise, or to stay and to assert their free will. 

Choosing the latter, of course, meant being fated for a miserable death at the hand of the oncoming orcs, and the orcs were oncoming indeed.

For rather than requiring a gateway to filter a claw across, they were being channeled through time, through Avalon itself, as they emerged in flashing blinks of gold. Their beings were anchored back to the Gate through the Sword of Paradise as the Challenger loomed behind.

He looked down upon the Gate, pleased with what was to come, yet feeling slightly… wrong on the inside.

It wasn't that this was far too easy for him. Far from it. The end was almost preordained. The Paragon, the Deathless, and the Seeker were unique and powerful, at least relative to the shallow waters they occupied, but he was ancient and beyond power. There was no way a few children less than a millennium old could ever match him in wit or power, but they had fought remarkably, with every ounce, taking every chance, using every single resource they could in this desperate situation.

Could they have been more perfect? Of course, but the Deathless had surprised him time and time again, even all the way toward the end. The Breaker should have delivered a humiliation ritual, a means of incensing the Deathless as he was beaten down and forced to watch his people die. He wasn't meant to win that battle, but, as with all things with Shiv, he did the unexpected. Through food rather than martial violence, he prevailed and was commendable. The Challenger realized that was why he felt so wrong; it was like he was cutting the Deathless away from his rightful triumph.

There was something so deeply sorrowful about trying so hard, doing so much, yet not realizing that you yourself would be the means of your people's destruction. He was always the most reliable vector of Gate Piety's fall, for the simple solution, done through brute force alone, was to flood the Deathless with levels and bring forth the Incursion before anyone on Earth was ready.

But the mere fact the Challenger had to resort to such means, rather than direct an overwhelming victory through tactics or struggle, was a testament to Shiv's tenacity. That would just make the tragedy greater, the Challenger told himself, and that soothed that almost sympathetic ache he held for the boy. He saw Shiv's unresponsive form lying in a crater a few hundred meters away from the perch.

A pitying sigh slipped out from the Challenger as he shook his head. “All those skills, all that cunning, and there you lay, Bruiser. Sorry you had to learn things this way, but in the end, we all fail ourselves before we finally learn to accept what we are. Isn’t that right, Avalon?”

When no reply came, the Challenger rolled his eyes. “What a remarkably lacking conversationalist you are! Well, just as well. I think I will be having that conversation with another instead. Where is the Great One? Old foe, are you down there? Are you looking up at me? Are you hiding?”

The Challenger displayed his teeth in a joyous smile as he waited. He had a feeling that the Great One wasn't done yet, that there was something else in the undertow that neither he nor Avalon were seeing. But until that surprise was sprung, he would give his sons what they wanted, which was a butchery beneath the coming of Paradise.

To his satisfaction, a substantial number of Legends refused to take the offer of Paradise; they would stay and fight. 

They would die, of course, miserably, horrendously, torturously, but they would go down with bleeding hand and spell upon their palms, just as a Pathbearer rightly should. Then the Challenger's attention fell upon the Ascendants, and a particularly savage notion came to his mind. He saw them arrayed against him: false, puny gods prepared to make a stand.

Or maybe not so much. Or maybe he had a means of further inflaming the Deathless' rage, and he saw that means within one person in particular, a pragmatic snake birthed in the skin of a human—now a prime vector for more torment.

“Avalon, a moment, please. And keep your blade away from the Ascendancy, as we discussed. I have a new idea I wish to indulge.”

The Sword of Paradise made its assent known as it summoned forth the cage of blades that surrounded, but never cleaved down upon the Ascendancy. For the first time, the Challenger took his first true step into Gate Piety as he prepared to make the Queen of Yellowstone the offer of a lifetime.