Etan Za'Darmondiel.

***

<<"You should have killed them.>> I snorted derisively, turning away from the dwarves retreating into the night.

<<"Why, for being fools?">> Amun snorted in kind. <<"If I killed every person who reacted to me with violence, humans, dwarves, and elves would be endangered species. Besides,">> He lifted his eyes from the sleeping goblin to give me a knowing grin. <<"Even fools can become wise, given enough time.">>

I started to retort before a soft groan cut me off. Simultaneously, we dropped our gaze to see a pair of yellow eyes grow wide before overgrown rat ears sank to the sides of a chevroned head. A head that was cradled by spindly arms of darkness that reached eagerly at something beneath his flesh. A head clouded by a faceless visage that marked the end of the goblin's time on the Mortal Plane- the Shadow of Death.

"PLEASE!" the goblin pushed away from us in a frenzy, uncaring of his ragged legs dragging through the snow. "DON'T KILL ME, S- SIR ELF- SIR DARK ELVES! PLEASE! I'M JUST A CHI-" It stopped suddenly, looked around the barren fields, and began thrashing just as quickly as it stopped. "I'M JUST AN ORPHAN RUNT, PLEASE!"

Amun gave me an amused look while the tirade repeated with several variations of the same thing. Being hardly able to interpret it, I could only shrug. While what the goblin said may have been true, it was nothing short of what would be said by any other goblin in the same situation.

This one, however, took it to the extreme.

"Please! I- I just wanted to stay in the great rift. Cooking and cleaning. But they made me torture. They found a guy. Clock! They called him Clock! He kept dying and coming back so they tortured him. They made us torture him. I- I didn't want to do it! Kill! They said! You have to know how to kill! Then they brought me out here. It's my first battle. I haven't done anything. I didn't want to do it. I-"

"What's your name?" Amun asked, cutting the ramblings off instantly.

"Leary! Oh!" it collapsed at the sight of the Owl perching on Amun's shoulder, much to my amusement. "Please! I'll do anything to live! Whatever you want! I'll be your slave! Your servant! Forever and ever! I'll cook! And clean! I'll even steal! I- I'll kill! I'll do it! Whatever you say! Just… I don't want to die! I wish to live!"

The last thing I saw was Amun's devilish maw curl into the foulest grin imaginable. Then an abyssal darkness consumed my senses. If only for a moment.

"Beware what you wish for, Leary."

It was not that the magical darkness dispersed. Only that I could now see through it. And within, I saw the unconscious goblin groaning and churning beneath the Owl's claws while Amun watched with a complicated expression.

With all the secrecy, I thought it a perfect time to practice the sign language practiced by his clan. Slowly, my fingers danced in the darkness, sending ripples through the shadows that danced in his ears in the form of spoken words. 'What is this? What are you doing?'

'You'll see.' Amun signed back, amazing me by the sheer efficiency of the language. So akin to speech, it was. Heard only by those loved by the darkness.

Nodding accordingly, I seated myself to watch him withdraw divine materials as I saw in Bakewia; nearly two dozen Dimensionite ingots of varying sizes were teleported away with some Arcanite Canisters before he turned his gaze to an ambiguous point for a few moments, then turned back to me.

"Are you aware that Goblinoids have blue blood?"

"I have killed many and tortured more." I nodded. "I am aware."

{"I didn't know that."} Blude's voice echoed across the net.

"That's because goblinoids and perhaps the other creatures born from the Betrarthean Tree of Life have a copper-based blood called hemocyanin. Coincidentally, so too do invertebrates like squid, the octopus, and." He gestured to our home, hidden in the distance. "Cuttlefish."

A popping sound punctuated his words, signaling the arrival of several items, including the now mana-infused ingots. The curious item was in his hand, however- a strange hand crossbow of glass and metal loaded with a vial of fluid rather than quarrel. I examined it while Amun turned to check up on the Owl, seeming to be enthralled in an attempt to stare the goblin awake. What the net responded with, however, were flags and warnings stating that what I was searching for was heavily classified before my authorization approved me to learn of some sort of 'Nanite Injector.'

"That aside," Amun turned to face me while I read on. "Despite being from the same Tree of Life, Goblinoids have differing physiologies than orcs. Whether that is a surprise or not is up to you. But what's truly surprising is the rejection of any implant or augmentation not imbued into their skeletal systems. Any tampering with the flesh results in a spontaneous and horrendous rejection. The only exceptions are augmentations born from cursed or divine mana. Like this." He waved the injector around.

"Fascinating." I gasped, mostly from what I learned about the injector. Yet, I was still curious. "Is the same true for orcs?"

Amun shook his head. "A bit of the opposite. Orc flesh adapts to wood and stone-based prosthetics, implants, or augmentations exceptionally well. However, they can receive normal or cybernetic implants too. But bone augmentations do little for them, often weakening their bodies. Now, if you'll give me a moment."

With a polite and unneeded nod, he walked into the cloud of shadow, allowing the Owl to flap out and toss aside its cowl and mask to land before me as a mirror image of Amun, leaning atop an exquisite cane.

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"So," I began to sign. "This is your companion?"

"Our companion." Amun's clone corrected in a coldly harsh tone. "The last member of the Troupe. For now, at least. Though he will make the journey to our destination alone."

"And why is that?"

"As you all are blessed to be Celestials and Gods, they are cursed to be undying, and eventually Devils. Undying Fiends. They will journey alone until we rendezvous to grow familiar with their new nature as undying beings."

With a jerk of the neck and an unsettling smile, my eyes were brought forward to gaze into the abyss. "Like this one, they all had the Shadow of Death hanging over them. A man in Bakewia experimented on himself with potions, poisoning himself in the long run. A girl in Chor lived in a toxic hole, thus she developed cancer. A girl in Redagh was tainted by the Blighted Woods, so she was banished and murdered by her family. And, then there's Leary. A goblin runt who simply ran out of time.

"In one way or another, all of them were greedy, sinful, or became wicked in their ways. One sought immortality to achieve his magnum opus. One lost her wealth, and then lost herself to vengeance. One killed everyone in her tribe, including her parents. And Leary went against his conscience by torturing and killing an innocent man, thus tainting his soul with wickedness. In turn, they all walked willingly into the darkness. Thus they all had to die, so they may toe the line with death evermore."

"And be corrupted into fiends," I concluded. "And then be blessed tremendously to be made into a paragon of his species like me, perhaps."

"Exactly. But that's only the beginning." The clone turned with a flash of his jagged teeth. "Observe."

I needed not the clone to tell me. Like the Satellite, I was enthralled by Amun's deliberate actions. Analyzing all I saw with the Net to leave nothing unnoticed.

After suspending the goblin in the air like a butcher would a rothay, he took a precision cutting instrument- a scalpel- and carved a line down Leary's nearly severed back. Pausing when needed to allow the shudders and twitches of the nearly dead body to pass until he met the tail bone and he peeled away the flesh to expose the shattered spine beneath, then wove a field of magnetic mana to pin the skin in place with thin needles; only to cut it away. On and on he continued, cutting out the flesh entirely to expose the bone beneath. Leaving, in the end, a brain housed within a bloodied skeleton.

A pulse of shadow-fused spatial mana spawned a spool of thin black fibers and a roll of vibrant blue silk alongside several ingots of magnetically treated adamantine beside Amun while small cards and fields of text inscribed themselves in the ambient mana, describing how Amun projected x-rays from one eye and received the radiation with the other to scrutinize every detail of Leary's skeletal structure. Seconds passed and more information clouded Amun's vision, in turn flooding my eyes with tales of the utterly insane. But of course, they were anything but tales.

Methodically, Amun went about the brutalized body, infusing the essence of the ArcaTech into the adamantine ingots before his gravitational magic pulled them to rest atop the bones. He then wrapped the divine fibers around the discarded flesh, tying them around the frame as if he were preparing a crude mummy. Or if not that, as if he was trying to fill in the muscle with the wire and fill the skull with Attosilk, data crystals, and Biogold, much to my horror.

Once he was done, he went around the body a final time, sinking the injector into every rib, every vertebra, every bone that he could find. Probing down to the marrow with sickening crunches to fill the chasm with a sample of the thick blue-green slurry.

That was simple. But what the Net told me, even my blessings struggled to help me understand.

Nanites, they were called; another device born from his realm of gods and made more revolutionary through magic. Even without magic, they were machines made as small as machinations could physically be, capable of manipulating the basic blocks of the universe as we would stone to make a building. They manufactured molecules from atoms like Edward Pascal made those vehicles from metals. With magic, however, the so-called Arcanites could infuse a magical affinity into every molecule they touched. As was the case with Leary's skeleton

The Arcanites, housed within a slurry of carbon, calcium, boron, and other elements, awoke from their dormancy shortly after entering Leary's marrow. Immediately, they began stripping the environment of every molecule present in an effort to build a swarm with the mission to disassemble and quickly reassemble the entirety of Leary's skeleton. A process that would take hours without the temporal domain Amun enclosed him in.

It appeared like a living thing. A blue-green goo that consumed the body wholly, leaving the magically-infused ingots and black threads floating or poking above the amorphous fluid like ice on the water. Until they too began to sink and disappear. Yet, through the Net, I could bear witness to an illusory simulation of the process, involving a field of cascading mechanical hands that moved countless times per second. From a grid-like wall, they stripped spheres of varying colors, injected them with mana, and passed them down the chain, mixing them with other materials to create complex structures that were carefully laid into a lattice at the far side. An effort that, on a large scale, would grow a new skeleton in real time.

A minute through the process saw the goo recede in various places as the flesh-wrapped wires were consumed, in turn exposing an incomplete skeleton of adamantine, laced with veins- circuits that glowed a deep blue; bringing about the true moment of disbelief. Though, in hindsight, I should not have been so shocked. Indeed, just as he had done with Zaraxus, Amun went about the body, placing the dozens of magic-infused Dimensionite ingots into recesses and housings and open hands made by the goo. But whereas the Umbra Emperor had enchantments in his bones and thus could use each as a single spell. The majority of Leary's very bones were infused with a different magical affinity.

The adamantine was found throughout his skull and in the marrow of his bone. Ordinary, it was, though it was infused with the essence of the ArcaTech and some electromagnetic mana to negate the ferrous properties of the metal while simultaneously granting him control over any machines he'd create in the future. And of course, his body.

Everything else, however, was a tool of destruction.

Each of his fingers and toes was tipped with Dimensionite- adamantine that could change form- infused with blade mana. Similarly, his forearms were infused with shield mana. Each of his ribs held charge mana as well as Volterum, and to eject it, beam mana was infused into his sternum. Gravity mana was infused in the lowest portion of his metallic spine. Rubber mana infused the once-shattered vertebrae in his lumbar region. And each vertebrae higher was tainted by the color of a different magic. The lime green of barrier magic. The slate-gray of scale magic. The off-white of bone magic. The soupy black of shadow magic. The pearly ivory of feather magic. The five thoracic vertebrae of the goblin's anatomy remained exposed to the air, even as the gray goo swelled to consume the body and dispersed in an anticlimactic mist minutes later. Leaving quite the exotic-looking goblin to drop unceremoniously into the snow.

When all was said and done, the clone grinned at me with supreme satisfaction while Amun turned to me with an anticipatory grin. <<"Last two stops.">> They both said, ascending into the air. <<"And we'll be wasting no time to get there.">>

<<"In a hurry for once?">> I chortled in full surprise. <<"To where?">>

While the clone only grinned, Amun turned his gaze to a curiously bright point of silver in the distant mountains. Yet they both replied.

<<"My houses of worship.">>

<<"My ascension.">>