Amorra Glory had many things planned. So many things planned. Yet she felt as if the powers of existence themselves worked against her.
Her day had started as normal as any other day. Things had been shaky while her people worked on infiltrating the society they now worked to gain a foothold in, but since their first successful attack, she’d noticed traction being gained.
Her spies had been placed high and low throughout Maelstrom. Many, if not all, of the assassination attempts had also proved successful, but now…
A thud was heard, and Amorra’s entire flight crew looked up toward the front of the spaceship. A beautiful woman in a void-black armor suit stood atop the ship, appearing to stand on nothing as the ship was still invisible.
Her white hair flapped in the chaotic winds that were common tens of kilometers from the ground. Her eyes seemed to be looking at each and every person hidden within the ship’s flight deck, until her eyes met Amorra’s.
“She can see us, can’t she?” asked Amorra to her attendant. The man nodding to the queen as the woman waved directly at Amorra.
“It appears so, my lady.”
“Do we have a problem on our hands?” Before her attendant could answer however, the same woman that had just been seen outside, answered from not even 10 yards away, now inside the ship.
“To be honest, you wouldn’t have had a problem, it's just that the Oligarchs wanted to know who’d attack their lands, so I did digging of my own. It seems that since you have been in this realm layer you have done a lot, joined my alma mater, made friends with my enemies, and even began to show an interest in my dear dump…” Guards rushed from every portion of the ship, a silent alarm triggered by Amorra’s attendant. While the white haired woman sat crouched on a railing that enclosed the captain's chair from the rest of the flight deck. Perfectly balanced, resting her elbows on her knees and her chin in one palm.
Why is her stance so familiar…
The thought struck Amorra, only for the answer to fill her mind in the same moment that Amorra learned exactly how sparked she was.
“However… stalking my son, claiming that you were coming for our Sovereignty… Cute by the way, and now you destroyed a club that was the foundation for a fresh start for my dearest Arson. For what... notoriety?”
“You're Arson’s mo—“
“Yes, dear, I’m his mother, and by the way… he’s happily taken.”
Amorra didn’t even get the chance to speak before Arson’s mother disappeared. Guards and the ship's staff in a complete scramble to find the woman.
“Sensors have a strange anomaly coming from the engine rooms, feeds on the deck screens now,” came yelled from the flight crew.
“Oh no…” The white haired woman was shown on screen punching a photosynthesis engine. The core built from hardened sunlight fused with a mana stone normally burned hot enough that even the strongest of cultivators couldn’t touch the material as it channeled energy. A problem this woman did not have.
Chunks of the core broke from the floating orb of light that spun at the center of a room filled with roots that connected the core to every section of the ship. The organic technology was incredibly advanced, yes, but that didn’t mean it was equally as fortified, or unbreakable.
The first of three cores was broken in a mere handful of punches and the ship began to bob slightly, yet even that was enough to send horror and panic through the ships millions of inhabitants.
“What should we do, my queen?” Amorra could feel the panic in her attendant's voice, as on screen Arson’s mother was seen dropping the second core into a portal, completely undamaged, before she teleported again.
“Prepare for a crash landing!”
“Emergency Procedures!”
“Back up generators inbound!”
Amorra dashed off the bridge of her ship and toward the back up generators in hope to at least slow down the woman that moved through the ship’s interior freely. Her guards had rushed in majority when the silent alarm had been triggered, leaving much of the ship unguarded.
“Not that it would probably matter,” Amorra said to herself. Runes running down the length of her body. She became a blur. Everything around her becoming like that of running weightless at the bottom of a pool, even while Amorra shot through the ships many corridors at mach one.
Her increase to mach 2 and 3 was ludicrous, but even that was eclipsed by what Amorra saw when she reached the backup generators.
She rushed into the normally guarded archway, and almost froze in place before she darted blindly toward the now helmeted woman attacking her ship.
“Prepare to die!” The intense weave of runes, grew more dense around Amorra. Large runes pressured to take up space across the canvas that now was her body, to allow for even more runes.
Her form emitted a dense light that rippled off Amorra’s body in a deep red. Waves of mixed energy created a ring of power around her that grew in size with each emanation that left her body.
A dense fog formed from the same energy plumed outward from her feet in a burst.
The open room Amorra had just charged into was filled with all their portal connections. The cavernous space was used as connection points to any realm the ship had previously visited, and spliced. Normally impossible to traverse, the ship's four backup generators sat enclosed on all for sides by open portals and gateways.
Each location’s spliced gateway open, just enough for the cores to pull energy from the various realms. All while being the very anchor points that allowed their travel back to those same destinations.
The room was a beautiful stretch of open space the portal and gateway slivers once twinkling like stars. Now being consumed by the woman’s armor as she collided with the portals. The black void that wrapped around her body like a stretch of night sky, eating the portals with each movement through the room made by the woman.
Her flickering form could be seen teleporting through the space, a once very bright room being snuffed out by subtle touches, or taps of the woman’s pointed kicks.
Even as Amorra ran a fourth of the portals had already been consumed, And Amorra knew how fast she was moving, but as she chased Arson’s mother, she saw a new aspect of teleportation she’d never been able to witness until that very moment.
She can move faster than any mere Kicker I’ve ever come across, and moves as if she can see everything within the room…?
The armored figure wasn’t only moving to strike all the entrances to other realms, she moved capable of seeing where the spacial cracks would be, all the portals moving to balance the energies sent into the four cores in the center of the room.
Amorra tried to aim where she thought Arson’s mother would be, and paid for it dearly, one of the slivers of energy smacking her aside only a moment after she’d entered the chaotic space.
Amorra gasped for air as she was sent bodily on a flight that ended with her being rolled across the ground. Quick to rise, she paid for it when pain filled her lower abdomen, and she grunted with pain as she tried to race after the infiltrator once more.
“Stop now! You don’t know what you are doing!”
“You think that this is the first time I’ve raided a Titan Steel Tree. I know exactly what I am doing, child. I’m separating a very normally funded and resource driven society from its ability to easily travel the realms, and use its more advanced technologies,” yelled the woman laughing the entire time.
“Stop, I beg of you,” yelled Amorra in a last attempt to save her ship's teleportation grid. Only she knew the moment she’d managed to get close, that any chances of that would never occur.
The pair collided as Jade closed around half of the thousands of available portals and gateway slivers.
As undignified as it was, when she was brushed aside, she knew that it was both with a soft hand, as well as without the care for whether the young queen lived or died, that she was mashed into the ground. The yelp that came from her enough to make her cringe at the thought of her displayed weakness.
She’d never been treated with such a casual hand except the few times she’d attempted to fight Arson. Only this was made worse by how much more his mother was currently doing to render her forces a severe blow.
Arson may have tried his best to ignore what he’d felt to be a spoiled princess, but this was something completely separate.
“I’ll give you anything, please just stop!” Three fourths of the spliced spacial cracks had at that point been consumed, and the woman showed no signs of stopping.
A few of her guards finally entered and even more screams began to fill the ships halls. The normal unnoticeable effects of gravity now being felt with the lack of power that fed the majority of the ship being disrupted in a matter of moments.
Even if we get the backup generators online right now, we still may—
Amorra’s thought was cut off by the ship the size of multiple skyscrapers colliding with one of the many mountains that was sprinkled throughout the expansive forests that enclosed the dump and junkyard of Maelstrom.
The ship rolled down the side of the mountain, and Amorra’s life was changed forever for the second time by a member of the Omni family.
Where the son had once helped her grow and learn more than she would ever be able to thank him for, she had now crossed lines that had caused the mother to directly target her.
For this I will kill you myself, Mr Kim. If I survive, nothing you hold dear will stand.
Amorra was flung bodily through the air before she smashed into a wall. Her eyes catching a glimpse of the unaffected woman still closing all of the anchor points, still seemingly unfazed by gravity nor the ship's downward dive and crash. Thousands of teleport points gone, the lack of light noticeable even as Amorra was dropped from ceiling to floor and back again in what felt like blinks. Doing her best to gather herself, Amorra managed to trigger one last rune, before she passed out completely. Darkness stealing any ideas she may have had to continue any further.
…
Arson battled internally at what he was doing. He’d found himself needing something to hit, and decided to fight in the dump, once more gaining stat points he knew he’d probably need at some point, and with the addition of Frost Beam to his arsenal, he was having a blast doing so.
Jill and Jane sprayed anything that approached Arson with beams of frost, as Arson worked on his first quest for Sky, still uncompleted with the, 0/1 rare material portion, undone.
“Thank the maiden, there isn’t a time limit for this one…” Arson sliced through his enemies still wishing he knew how to teleport the more densely compacted his enemies became with each step forward into the territories of robots he currently fought.
He honestly didn’t remember them being such fierce opponents when he was younger, and wondered if he’d been wrapped up in excitement while in the dump rather than the building apprehension he now felt.
Though he was having fun, the further into the area he pushed toward, the more he felt a growing danger in the back of his mind.
“Anastasia, are you picking up any potential anomalies within this—“ Arson was cut off by a sound like continuous ripping metal. Footsteps felt and heard rushing toward him.
“Other than the machine running toward you, nope!”
Arson turned his head and watched as a titan of a robot rushed toward him, trash heaps exploding as the creature of metal and energy plowed through any and everything in front of it. Even its fellow robots being stepped on and left in the wake of its mad dash.
“Anna I know you genuinely wield an undertone of hate for all things, so please don’t be insulted when I ask you this, it's just that I have no one I think of who is more educated than you on this subject matter,” said Arson. Preparing for the giant robot, its 11 meter frame growing taller in Arson’s vision as it closed in.
“Ask away, runt,” said Anastasia with a smile from his wrist.
“Does the maiden hate me?”
Arson was forced to move. The robot was moving fast enough that he wondered if he’d be able to outrun it even if he could fly currently.
“I really need to finish the climbing challenge at Adroit and get my ability to fly back,” yelled Arson. Trash heaps by the tens bursting into sprays of trash once thought too heavy to be moved, now creating a fog of dust and debris as Arson fled more than fought.
“Jill, Jane!” The two hands sped after Arson, two beams of focused white golden energy spraying the metal giant’s joints and limbs on its lower half.
The robot seemed so unaffected that Arson’s panic lowered his mental fortifications enough for him to make rash decisions.
“Spark it, let em have it, you two!” The beams of frost stopped, and Jill and Jane started to charge Conductive water orbs, Mana Lightning rings charging at their wrists in a blink of time.
Sensing the incoming object hurtling through the air at him, Arson was forced to flip through the air to avoid a car-sized, do-it-yourself steam cleaning laundry. His spinning slice with Sky in his hands enough to separate the large metal equipment so easily that his momentum was maintained.
Even still Arson noticed that the machine had been something his people needed either to repair, use for parts, or could have even sold with his new auction potentially becoming a real thing, he growled, turned around and roared at the giant robot. Jill and Jane firing at the same moment.
“I’m tired of this!”
Arson ran in a full dash toward the robot, cocking back his weapon as he moved. The power of conductive water pooling around his weapon's blade.
“Even if the maiden loves you, boy, you're too ambitious to heed the warnings given…” Arson barely heard the words as he jumped through the air and toward the giant as two conductive water orbs splashed ineffectively off the chest of the metal giant. The only thing noticed by Arson being accomplished by the attack a subtle surge of sparks that rolled across the robots chest plate.
“This can’t be good…” Arson swung down with all his might. His swing missed, and Arson was punched by a fist larger than himself, sent flying as if he’d just been flicked like the picked remnants from a child’s nose. Trash heaps now blown apart by his travels through their centers at incredible speeds.
What Arson was unable to see were the two rings of Mana Lightning that struck the giant robot like the fists of an equally powerful opponent.
Twin dents left behind. The giant not flung back, but shoved hard enough that its two massive feet left trenches in the ground on the path just made by its blitz toward Arson. The two lines half a field’s span at least.
It took Arson a brief moment to get upright, half lodged into a trash heap as he’d ended up becoming after being struck.
“Owww, that didn’t feel like anything I want to experience a second time.” Arson quickly found the robot rising as he rose, and prepared himself for more.
“Bring it!”