“Not bad,” Tanya said approvingly as he approached the moat. “A nice mix of styles. The gunshot was a good changeup, really tied the fight sequence together and threw off the implied pacing.”
“Whatever,” muttered Nathan. He immediately regretted the rudeness, inasmuch as he was feeling any emotion. “I didn’t do it because of that,” he added. “I’m just…”
“You’re just very definitely done with this universe,” Honeydew said in tones of complete understanding. “We get it.”
“I get it,” Tanya snarked. “You’re only down with the mission of breaking the universe because you’re down bad for me, and the world was mean to me.”
“Do you… really think that?” The sorceress stared at her partner in undisguised, hurt astonishment. “I… that did not sound like a joke, and even if it was, it wasn’t funny.” She glanced over at Nathan, shaking her head. “A conversation we can have later, I guess.”
Tanya was quiet for a long moment. “A conversation we can have later,” she conceded, emotions Nathan couldn’t place—perhaps because he had effectively no common ground with them, or perhaps because he was at that moment rather too dead inside to empathize with much of any emotion—flickering across her face. “If Nathan’s done, I can break open a Nexal route and we can drop out of the delve. It’ll give you a chance to meditate on your gains or whatever.”
“How does that even work?” Nathan managed a flicker of genuine curiosity, fleeting though it was. “The only life where I got any actual instruction about it, it always came with extra lives and people just sort of knew somehow.”
“Reports are conflicting,” Honeydew said with a deep frown, as though it was a mortal sin on the universe’s part. “Wildly conflicting. But I’ve got a few different angles to work. Meditation, self-hypnosis, communing with the Fulminator and the Slut, each on their own or together. And… experimentation.”
“I’m going to do something like this.” Tanya brought a hand up and clenched it, and Nathan felt a pulse of intent resonate through their shard of the piece of the universe they were inhabiting. “And if it doesn’t let me flex better, I don’t give much of a shit.”
“Flex?”
“Sit down, kid,” she told him, smirking. “But avoid getting too comfortable. This is unlikely to take long, even if I have to be very careful not to kill you by accident.”
“As opposed to on purpose.”
She inclined her head at him, acknowledging what he’d said without responding. He shrugged at that, appreciating her lack of rancor while also not appreciating it at all, and sat for lack of anything better to do. Or so he told himself.
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Reader: it was not for lack of anything better to do that he sat and paid such very attentive attention.
Nathan was curious, and as a Millionborn, was possessed with just under a million lives in which to indulge that curiosity.
“Long ago,” Honeydew started up in the silence, “we lived on the surface. We ruled the skies and the seas, and the soil gave freely of its bounty. Or something, I don’t actually remember how Dethin Guntabrillic Dethins wrote it? Anyway, there was… I dunno, ten billion of us.” Her voice was casual, whimsical, and distracted; her voice sounded as though her heart wasn’t into anything she was saying, or in finding the right words in the first place. “They built spires high enough that the wizards had to cede the ground to engineers to get supplemental oxygen and architectural strength up above the manasphere, the Benthic Cities… existed, apparently.
“And then the archies, the archmages and archsorcerers and archdivines and arch-whatevers started ascending to godhood, which was Bad, Actually, because you’re supposed to do that instead of getting all archful. And then they started killing each other, which was Worse, Honestly, especially when it went from assassinations and duels to wars and weapons of mass destruction. So they broke the world, and then they picked up the pieces and held them all hostage to force a few of the actually non-douchebag archgods to sacrifice themselves to make the Dungeon.”
Tanya’s face went from a smirk to a glower to a glare over the course of Honeydew’s retelling, and her hands came together in front of her to form a fist and an open palm. As they pressed against each other, the world began to palpably shiver—not an earthquake, a phenomenon which Nathan was more intimately familiar with than he’d anticipated due to the fact that the Pacific is a very bad place to go if you want to get away from earthquakes and potentially earthquake-caused tsunamis, but something which shook the fragile fabric of reality around them.
“Most of them still live Topside as far as they can, draining Reality to maintain their ascensions and their ways of life. Meanwhile, the Shaper’s Engine does this self-sustaining creation of new Layers shit that I don’t feel like explaining, which says a lot about how upset I am, doesn’t it? But Topmost keeps breaking because the very presence of the arches renders any Layer unsustainable, and they see no issue in leaving everyone whom they’ve been parasitoidally feasting on behind. And whoops we’re out of time.”
Tanya’s hands constricted, and the world stopped shivering and started shaking instead. She reached out with one hand and grabbed as if to crush the fortified keep across the moat from the three of them.
The keep obliged.
It crumpled, initially. Not like an earthquake, and not like it was being subjected to compressive force. The stones did not shatter, nor did they crack or crumble; not a fleck or mortar was displaced.
Instead, it was as though the world they were inhabiting were made out of pieces of paper affixed to a corkboard or other method of mounting and organizing such things, pieces of paper that had more pieces of paper pinned to them in a fashion that was not entirely haphazard. And when Tanya clenched her fist, the greater piece of paper which was the keep and its surroundings… crumpled.
Fracture lines of void, nega-existence, and Unreality flickered as the supporting infrastructure of the bubble of reality failed—the pins, in this metaphor, by which we mean this absurd lie in the service of comprehensible abstractions, popping out and scattering on the floor and/or table. Space twisted and folded in on itself as colors dimmed and the world felt to Nathan as though it were about to break and dump them all into whatever their respective next lives might represent.
And then it was done.