236: Pale Rider vs. Headless Horseman (Patreon)

Eye of Ptah Corporate Complex, XX-123 (Hive World 2):

“What in the holy fuck is a Nephilim?” Horacio Tell blurted out as he watched the raw feed.

Pablo shrugged.

Horacio considered telling his assistant to research it but decided he might as well do it himself. It would take less time and a lot fewer shrugs. His yearly subscription to the System Encyclopedia was paid up. Time to get something out of his fifty Essence a month.

There was very little information in the entry. Some kind of hybrid with entities outside the System he also hadn’t heard of.

Horacio gritted his teeth at the extra homework and looked up the Anunnaki. That was more interesting. They were ancient even in astronomical terms and had fought several wars against the Primals and the Primordial Fae – beings that made the current crop of Fae deities and Factions look like toddlers.

“This guy is either the luckiest bastard in the Agglomeration or the sorriest son of a bitch to ever be born,” Horacio muttered, chewing on an unlit cigar, which he found was easier on his larynx while still helping his image.

Someone with that kind of pedigree would easily sail to S-Grade. Hell, he would place a hefty bet that the Dual-Path would join the ranks of the Ascended while his show was still being watched. The Song of Roland could become the first show to chronicle the rise of a System inductee from F-Grade to Ascended, or Deity if he went that way, although godhood was alleged to be something of a dead end.

My show could be the stuff of legends. That meant more than a pile of Essence Stones.

“They’re gonna kill him,” Pablo said, in an unusual unsolicited comment.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Horacio admitted.

‘They’ didn’t want newbies to start rocking the proverbial boat. Roland’s enemies list was already long enough that his life expectancy would be measured in months if not weeks, and that only because Crucible Worlds had heavy restrictions on outside interference. Otherwise an A-Grade heavy-hitter would have just turned him and his entire Territory into a deep hole in the ground.

The World Boss that Roland was dismantling had been sent specifically to kill him. Horacio thought one of the Death Pantheons had paid for the hit. Gods didn’t like competition, and they would love to use a Primal to kill another. Of course, they hadn’t expected their target to also be part Anunnaki, who happened to be an equally big deal.

‘They’ might start messing with my show.

The sobering thought sent a chill down his spine. EPC had divine backing – it was right in the name – but Ptah wasn’t a Pantheon Patriarch. There were much bigger fish out there. Some were literally fish, like the Great Kraken.

If great Powers got involved, Horacio’s life might become a tad more interesting than he would like. And a lot shorter, probably.

I’m going to have to spend my bonus hiring security, he thought.

Maybe he should start hoping that Roland’s career didn’t last very long. He’d get a great show out of it without risking getting in the middle of a Crossworld Faction dispute.

Life is never easy, he lamented.

*

“Good to have you back!” Nkosi shouted as he swooped past Roland, a dozen ghostly machine guns surrounding him as they blazed away at the Dullahan.

“Glad to be back!” Roland replied.

The Dullahan ignored Nkosi and everyone else, focused only on Roland.

He was fine with that. The two riders charged each other, a joust conducted in the air, neither side armed with a lance.

Their auras collided first. Roland’s was charged with Divine Mana. Death and Terror melted against its cleansing power.

Ten Thousand Fists! Final Verdict!

A hundred-plus spears – four of them loaded with Final Verdict, which ate away all of Roland’s Mana – tore into the headless monster as it swung a whip made of its own vertebrae toward him. He dismissed the Pale Horse and teleported out of the path of the weapon as he assessed the results.

This time, the attack had torn the World Boss to shreds. The arm that had been holding its flaming skull was gone. The black horse had been transfixed dozens of times and was plummeting to the ground, much like the Dullahan’s Health, which was at the twenty-percent mark.

The black energy pillar reached out to heal the Dullahan. Roland let it happen, replenishing his Mana with Vital Energy – it had replenished at half its normal rate since he wasn’t using Death energy, but it had still gained a good twenty-thousand points back. He dismissed Sangini, who was climbing in the air thanks to blood wires lifting him from the ground. The Wampyrhi wasn’t doing enough damage to justify tying up two-thirds of Roland’s Mana pool.

He focused on the healing process. The black pillar was using the victims inside it: 1,488 people, to be precise, all horribly mutilated but kept alive by the same energy holding them captive. Their terror and suffering somehow turned them into batteries, converting their Bound Essence into energy.

The process was shockingly efficient: none of the victims had lost more than ten percent of their Bound Essence, but each point consumed had generated thousands of units of Vital Energy – the healing force was identical to Roland’s. That meant that it would take billions of damage points to exhaust those living, tormented batteries.

Have to attack the source, Roland decided. But I’m not going to hurt those people. I’m going to free them.

His friends had already tried, of course. Bob had used his Freedom-attuned abilities, and been rebuffed. Barton’s attempt to interrupt the process had resulted in painful backlash. Even using Life or Divine Mana, Roland doubted he could stop the process; it was a high-conceptual ability with a death’s grip on reality.

He had a weapon he had been saving for a special moment, however, and this seemed like the perfect target.

Vengeance of the Dead.

Over a hundred thousand spirits – fragments of the souls of the Wampyrhi’s victims – awoke at his call. A dark purple cloud, tens of thousands of anguished, wrathful faces appearing within them – gathered around him, heavy with dreadful Significance. Roland greeted them solemnly, showed them the thousand people being tormented, much like they had been, and asked for their help in saving them.

The spirits found themselves craving something more than revenge: sparing others from their suffering while striking a blow against those who would torment others satisfied a yearning they hadn’t known they had. Half of the faces in the cloud howled in terrible, joyful wrath and washed over the dark pillar.

Healers, get ready to tend to the victims in the pillar! Roland sent out via Party Chat. Wendy was already heading there, taking the other healers along, including Barton, busily uploading all the Cleric Hexes he knew.

The black smoke, made of Death, Nightmares, and Terror, began to come apart under the fury of the dead. The bodies that had been suspended high up in the greasy black smoke began to drop like dreadful fruit. Roland’s aura grabbed the hideously wounded people and lowered them gently to the ground, where the healers were gathering. He could tell that some of them wouldn’t survive – their bodies had suffered so much that their souls no longer wanted to inhabit them. They just wanted peace.

May you find peace, wherever you go after this, he told them, and they sighed as they let go. Witnessing their departure broke his heart and filled him with a deep and abiding anger.

Half of the vengeful spirits headed toward the Dullahan. A cruel monster as bad or worse than the Wampyrhi, a being who delighted in suffering. A fitting target for their anger.

Roland joined in.

“You are a tool. A willing tool. You enjoyed what you did,” Roland told it, his voice loud and terrible.

The cowl of the Reaper rose behind him. So did a quartet of wings that glowed in strange colors and vanished into impossible dimensions.

“You did not kill and torture out of hunger or need. You are worse than the Wampyrhi, who could at least make that excuse.”

The Headless Horseman hung in the air as vengeful spirits swirled around it, taking small pieces of its inhuman flesh with every pass. The glowing skull it had dropped had been dragged over its shoulders, to witness its execution.

“I find you guilty of crimes against the laws of men and God. I find those who called you upon this world equally guilty.”

The skull’s empty eyes looked into his.

“I am the scale that measures your crimes. I am the sword that exacts justice.”

Death Bringer’s Gaze!

The sentence was carried out by his Death Bringer Bloodline, pouring out Death energies empowered by the need to bring the guilty to justice. Roland felt the monster’s unholy will fight back – and be overwhelmed by a power far greater than it could wield.

The skull exploded into a thousand shards. The body below fell apart as the spirits finished unraveling it and departed, carrying its spiritual realms away, perhaps towards further punishment from a higher power.

Roland exhaled slowly, feeling oddly exhausted. When he spoke, the words leaping unbidden into his mind, the feeling resembled the time he had assumed the Reaper’s mantle, becoming something both greater and more limited than what he was.

It hadn’t been as extreme, though. His Bloodlines balanced each other now. He felt complete. His Nephilim nature and Adjudicator lineage explained a lot about himself.

His dual nature and his choices made him what he was. And he would do his best for that person to be someone he could live with.

A Dark Tower, the Dread Lands:

The viewing pool lacked the immediacy and detail of the viewing crystals the rabble on Hive Worlds favored, but it had the advantage of leaving no traces. No expensive and intrusive System-arranged licenses, and none of the restrictions against analyzing the Skills and other abilities involved.

The water’s surface rippled, blurring the still image of the helmeted man in the leather jacket, hovering over the dust that was all that remained of the Dullahan. The hostess had decided that was a fitting image for the discussion ahead.

“Does anyone here doubt the meaning of what we just witnessed?” the Incarnation of Ereshkigal asked the other three deities in the room.

She could pass as a normal, beautiful woman, except for her feathered wings and clawed hands. Oh, and the owl-like eyes. Personally, she found those affectations somewhat silly. Especially when socializing with her peers without mortals to overawe. Pantheons didn’t often mingle with each other. It would have been nice to just be themselves instead of leaning on the trappings of their power.

None of the other godly representatives looked happy. Watching the end of the Dullahan on XXI-993 hadn’t been an edifying spectacle. Even if the Primal’s incarnation was a mere D-Grade in a barely inducted world. Or they could be unhappy to be there in the first place.

Convincing them to attend the meeting had required much cajoling, bribes, and promises. Even sending Incarnates was somewhat risky, even for entities who had followed the Divine Path and become gods under the System. They all had been mortals once, although all that remained of their humanity were faint memories; the weight of belief and Significance had erased everything else.

But enough of the mortal side remained to fear death. They were manifestations of greater beings, but once killed, the greater being would simply find another worthy candidate and replace them.

For a moment, nobody spoke. The first one to speak did so angrily.

“A Nephilim,” Asto Vidatu spat.

He was the Daemonic Prince of Death, best known in ancient Persia as the Dissolver of Bones. His Incarnation was red-skinned and heavily muscled, surrounded by a nimbus of shadows, his eyes had a feverish gleam that annoyed Ereshkigal.

Asto Vidatu held a noose with his right hand; his fingers idly toyed with the braided cord as he went on: “How many times must we exterminate that Anunnaki-tainted vermin? He is one of them. A threat. A God Slayer in the making.”

“Justice is his calling,” Orcus’ Incarnate said. His rough, almost bestial features looked respectfully at Roland Webb’s frozen figure in the viewing pool. “We should perhaps allow him to do his work. Help him instead of trying to bring him down.”

“Do you think you will be spared when Justice comes to you? Are your hands so clean you do not fear a reckoning?”

The challenge came from Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec lord of the dead, all skin-and-bones, a golden crown and a necklace made with human eyeballs being his most notable features. Ereshkigal resisted the urge to roll her own eyeballs. The Mexica could be so dramatic.

The Mexica Incarnate had a point, however. None of them would survive the scrutiny of someone like Roland Webb, steeped in the moral framework of Judeo-Christianity, where the weak were fetishized and those who took advantage of them painted as monsters. A terrible belief system, and yet despite the lack of an active pantheon, it had conquered far and wide, casting down the idols of the likes of Mictlantecuhtli.

A being like Roland Webb could become a threat to them all. He was an Ascendant – a Dual-Path one, no less – augmented by the Bloodline of the Grim Reaper and the Lineage of the Adjudicator, a figure of legend that even the eldest gods spoke of in fear.

“He has angered the Egyptians,” Asto Vidatu said. “Anubis-Inpu is working his own schemes. He will not work with us, worse luck.”

“Then we must work together,” Ereshkigal said. “Divided, we will end up cowering in our Domains, hoping he chooses someone else to destroy.”

“Why would he strike at us?” Orcus argued. “Surely there are many others who deserve his ire. His world will be beset by one calamity after another. If he cares so much, he will have to stay there and defend it. And if he doesn’t, he will be just another Path follower, concerned only with growing in power.”

“That would be bad enough,” Mictlantecuhtli said. “If he follows the Divine Path, he will compete with us. His legend is growing by leaps and bounds, thanks to those fools Ptah indulges. In a few centuries, his Significance could eclipse us.”

The argument went on for some time. At the end, Orcus left the meeting without coming to an agreement. The others stayed longer and prepared stratagems to stop the rise of their potential enemy. And in doing so, they created the enemy they feared.