Crushes-Valiant stared at his terminal for a long time, then reached out a thin, fibrous tendril and tapped the screen. The numbers changed, but they didn’t change the way he’d have liked, and he rolled backwards with a faint, for him, grumble before slowly turning his massive body.
He looked out the false window in his study at the striped planet that vexed him, at the frustrating red spot that could be his peaceful legacy, if only it would cooperate. He rotated the iron spheroid currently serving as his head, and was about to call out to his Infra-mandated assistant when he noticed the awful little thing already zooming into the room.
“Good,” he said, the rest of his spheroids, forty-six in total, an auspicious number, grinding together as he drew a breath he only needed for speech, “you’re here. Emergent, massive. Make a note-”
“There’s a Type-B emergency, sir. A breach event,” four-sided, floating, and golden, his assistant spoke in a voice like modulated Pullican wind chimes. Valiant hated wind chimes, but never as much as he had in the past twelve Earth years. “Is your requested note regarding the emergency? My functions will be restricted until the breach is sealed.”
“No, hmm,” he inhaled slowly, the iron that made up the majority of his body swelling and shifting, and then he breathed out all at once, sending the annoying pyramid halfway across the room in a gust of wind. “How would it be about the emergency that you’ve only just informed me of?”
“Happenstance?” chimed the robot as it zoomed back. “Prescience?”
“Table the note, and brief me on the circumstances of the breach,” Valiant said, ignoring what would have been insolence in a more intelligent sentient. “Most importantly, hmm, which impatient fools are at fault this time?”
There was a beep as his assistant accessed the information, a beep that he could never ascertain the actual point of, and it said, “Humans, sir.”
“You have officially outlived your usefulness, object,” he said as he stood, shifting his spheroids until he reached a comfortable fourteen feet in height. “If the humans have breached dimensions, on their own homeworld, that is, hmm, an enlightenment, not an emergency. I would tell you to check your pathways, but I think I will simply request a new assistant on my next assignment.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but the manifold signature doesn’t match an enlightenment. In fact, it’s roughly the same, within acceptable statistical bounds, as the breaches in Kabul, Juneau, and Plano. It is likely the same, with less confidence, as-”
“I see,” Valiant said, interrupting. “Type-B it is, then. Systemic, metaphysical, technological. How is the emergency response progressing? Kabul was handled, hmm, before the second wave of ripple effects, if I recall. Quite astounding.”
“The emergency response is,” his assistant paused mid-sentence, beeped once more, and then paused again. “It is barely existent. It is blocked. The breach has reportedly been open for two Earth days with little to no response. I have only received secondhand reports from apparent survivors, thirdhand reports from others meeting with apparent survivors, and-”
“Wait,” he said, interrupting again, with a deep, resounding roar that, in his opinion, only fifty tons of iron could provide. “Blocked? On whose authority?”
“There were three separate broadcast injunctions in place, officially requested and granted. I will list them, chronologically,” the robot said. “A group-level messages control, requested by System Polity for ‘disciplinary functions,’ and granted in two-thousand seven, Earth year. A wide-spectrum, geo-locked message dampening, requested by System Polity for ‘experimental variance factors,’ and granted in two-thousand eighteen. A full, root-level hold on all extradimensional traffic, requested by System Polity for ‘maximum safety concerns,’ granted conditionally due to historical request response two days ago, waiting for your approval.”
Crushes-Valiant sighed, long and hard, kicking up a windstorm in his little study and sending the assistant tumbling for a few brief seconds of silence.
“First,” he rumbled, “deny that request. Obviously. Second, gather all my notes regarding System Polity, prioritizing, hmm, any in which I used the words ‘monolithic,’ ‘authoritarian,’ or the phrase ‘tribe mentality.’ We will need those for the review. Third, prepare an immediate emergency response to the breach, the same parameters as Kabul except scaled up to, hmm, thirteen percent higher efficacy.”
“Complete, complete,” his assistant rattled off, “Failed. Type-B emergency reclassified as Type-F, transversal containment failure. It was detected when the broadcast injunction was dropped. My best estimate places the current age of the reclassified event at six to seven Earth minutes.”
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Ever since he had ascended, and somewhat ironically plunged from the upper atmosphere of his homeworld to the surface, Crushes-Valiant had been fond of deorbital entrances. They were quick, they were efficient, and in a world he sometimes found bereft of it, they were fun. However, they were purposefully and messily destructive, and so when visiting Earth, his ward planet, he usually chose the more subtle option of an intrarealm transport.
The moment after his massive body was flawlessly and instantaneously rewritten in a new area of spacetime, he twisted his gravitic affinity until the spheroids he was using as feet no longer made divots in the ground. One liked to make an impression, but not in that particular manner. He chuckled to himself in a low rumble, and made a mental note to use that turn of phrase in his next casual conversation with a human. He also assessed the situation, being perfectly capable of more than one thought process at once.
There was, at first glance, a catastrophically failing Slide, so at least his assistant wasn’t completely useless. It was cycling between its point of origin and what appeared to be a cognitive processing center brane at regular intervals. He estimated, based on the rate and manner of the transversal portal’s current error profile that it would sustain this state for another sixteen minutes before inverting, most likely destroying the local landmass, and possibly disrupting the planet’s orbit. Approximately sixteen minutes, Valiant reminded himself.
There was also a small personal transport vehicle, trivial importance, a possibly sentient robot that he might interview later for a new assistant, and three humans, one alive, one dead, one possibly dead. The definitely alive human appeared, if he accurately remembered their emotional state variances, to be in distress, so he approached slowly, dialing his weight back by another factor.
“Hello,” he said, and then after noticing the human’s decorative fringes being blown back, remodulated his volume and repeated himself. “Hello. May I be of assistance?” Then, because he suddenly remembered both a human tendency in conversation and the word that had been evading his grasp, he continued, “I like your hair.”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
The human looked up, face wet from nearly every orifice, confirming his suspicion of distress, and then made a noise that Valiant decided to hear as bluh. He crouched down, more of his spheroids touching down on the dirt to put his head, if not level with the human’s, then at least merely three times higher off the ground.
“Is there anything I can do for you, little,” he began, but then paused, feeling like perhaps calling the little human exactly that wouldn’t feel reassuring enough. He began to make a guess at the gender of the human, but he wasn’t an expert on their secondary sex characteristics, so he cheated and scanned the nameplate. “Eleanora? Do you require help?”
“Red’s dead and we screwed up the emergency and I never killed anybody before,” Eleanora said quickly, and then slumped back down across the possibly dead human. Valiant cross-referenced her apparent level of distress with her statement, and found it well within bounds.
“Which human, hmm, is Red?” he extended a tendril out from between his spheroids and gestured to the one that was in multiple pieces. “That one is certainly dead. This other one barely appears injured.”
“No, but he’s dead, he got shot. I got shot, and it was a lot of damage, and he got shot twice, and he’s so small,” Eleanora said, the human’s voice muffled, pressed against the other human’s body and surrounded by that fringe. “And it’s all my fault. I knew there had to be someone in there, someone who did all this, but if I told Red, he’d be like ‘Gee maybe they can help or something,’ so I stayed quiet and then he came out and shot him.”
Crushes-Valiant paused for a moment after the human was done speaking so very quickly. Micromanagement could be quite vexing, but he liked to think he’d always had a talent for it.
“He was shot with, hmm” Valiant extended a tendril past the human and pointed to the discarded pistol on the ground after scanning it, “this gun? High energy projector, maximally resilience-tuned. Commonly known as an OV-gun, for opening volley, a Source-blaster, or rarely, a scrambler. Very effective against, hmm, Infra-created entities, essence monsters, and sapients past the transcendental barrier. Not so much for mortals, as these weapons don’t tend do enough actual physical damage to impair their bodily functions.”
“So he’s gonna be ok?” the small human said, looking up from the slightly smaller human.
“He is well into the negatives in resilience. The common procedure Infra would take is a full upload of his neurochemical gestalt to review at a later date. I’d estimate he has at least, hmm, one to two minutes before his lower brain function fully shuts down and ceases to sustain his body further,” Valiant mused, which for some reason made the human emit a much louder, longer, and higher-pitched bluh noise. “But,” he continued, a bit louder than before to disrupt whatever that new sound was, “there are ways to extend that period.”
One of the perks of the Regency Structure that Crushes-Valiant found particularly useful was a real-time, in-depth view of every being, phenomenon, and object within a certain radius, although he kept the scans of sapients muted by default. Eleanora had a large number of objects in the pockets of her lower garment, but none that would suffice. The dead man apparently came here with his clothing and his gun, which seemed unprepared to Valiant.
The other human, whose name was apparently not ‘Red,’ and who seemed vaguely familiar to him in a way that meant Valiant would have to check his notes at a later time, had the appropriate device. It wasn’t a Living Crown, forged from harvested oldgrowth, imbued for years by priests of the contentious concept of life, but it would do. He reached out with a tendril into the container next to the two humans, took the stabilizer cap out, and placed it firmly on the prone young man.
After a moment, he removed it, then the headcovering the boy was already wearing, and after was able fit the cap onto him much more easily.
“Now,” he said as he stood back up, feeling like he had taken this experience in stride and acquitted himself well, “it’s time to fix your mess. Take that stick and place it between the anchors you implanted on the other side of the portal. A resonance ritual such as the one you attempted needs nonreactive buffers at its stress points. I will correct the pattern deficiencies on this side, before we are vaporized, or worse.”
After the human’s questions were answered with a “Yes,” and then a “Yes, really,” Eleanora ran off to do his bidding. He calculated what would be the safest, quickest, and cheapest procedures to fix the misalignment in the ritual the humans had attempted, and decided to take the option that satisfied his first two conditions. From his currency folder, Valiant produced a Divine Fount Shard, three Earth feet of perfectly-aligned raw essence kept stable only through some metamathematical means he didn’t understand. It was a fairly expensive piece of loot, one that couldn’t even be produced in this realm yet, but it was the best tool for the job.
He placed it near the middle of the improper ritual, realigned some of the extant shards with his earth affinity, and then charged the entire array with enough magic to banish a Slide thrice this one’s size. Crushes-Valiant, the Fortress-Breaker, did not know the meaning of the word ‘overkill.’ Actually, he did, but he liked that idiom enough to feign ignorance.
When the portal began to stabilize and shrink on its way to vanishing, Valiant left, before the small human returned, the smaller human woke, or the large human decomposed any further.
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Valiant suspended himself in the air above the area known as Rapid City, his spheroids shifting places with one another until he found a configuration that felt most comfortable. His assistant had interrupted his plan to journey straight back to his satellite base, and had met him here.
“Yes, you were right,” he said, begrudgingly, to the small robot. “That is a worrisome anomalous vacuum signature. Perhaps Co-AL?”
“Perhaps, sir,” the assistant chimed, “but based on cosmological quadrangulation, I’d say it’s more likely to be fRiend.”
“Hmm,” Valiant said after a long moment, pondering. “I suppose it doesn’t much matter. This is Infraspace, and we can’t have interlopers of any sort, can we.”
Crushes-Valiant’s signature attack, dropping himself in free fall, his body rearranging for maximum fluid dynamics, his gravitic affinity increasing his weight beyond countable numbers for a brief moment of impact, he thought, would have been effective. It also could have been easily traced back to him, and then the humans would wonder why their Overlord Regent had taken such a violent interest in a small, Order-aligned town.
Instead, he just manifested a small, graviton twist in the middle of the city, not anything powerful enough to be called a singularity or a black hole, nor was it quite that mundane. He watched for a few minutes as the buildings shook but continued to stand, and stayed until every single possible-sapient formed out of obfuscating shadowflesh in the vicinity had been pulled into his magic and crushed. There still might be some wandering the countryside, he imagined, but with the Slide closed there wouldn’t be enough to attempt a substrate subversion, if that was indeed their intent.
“How many, hmm,” he asked his assistant, when that was all done, “blanket mute injunctions have been given to System Polity for experimental exceptions?”
A beep emanated from the golden, hovering robot, “Thirteen, sir. Not including the one in this area, that is.”
“And what are the statuses,” he momentarily checked the notes he kept stored in both his personal and regency Infra screens, “of my enrichment experiments, numbered one-zero-five and one-four-three?”
“One-zero-five, labyrinthine restoral, at ninety-two percent readiness. One-four-three, mass conflict proposal, fully ready to enact.”
“Set them both into motion,” Valiant said, before preparing to transport back. “The humans have a concept they call the carrot and the stick. If you want a recalcitrant animal to move forward, you either offer it a reward at the destination, or you prod it from behind. At least, that is my understanding of the idiom. It’s time to see how well they respond to both, simultaneously.”