Artilleries and guns spat out a sideways hail of death, magicians hurled beams and bolts and constructs of mana-stuff, and a few individuals with striking garbs spat out streams of pure kinetic energy from their swords. Mines, shells, and missiles both mundane and magical punctuated the constant drum with chains of detonations. In the distance, nukes and world-spells provided the bass. Earth around the fortress was rendered to ruins and craters, and still the tide of chimeric horrors threatened to overcome the tide of death raining down upon it. In the horizon, beyond the atmosphere, loomed a draconic leviathan of late-space age technology and early-worldwalker magic as it sat on a now sinking continent.
Pren was watching this unfold 5 kilometers underground from a screen half the size of the conference room. She had with her a cup of something blue and brewed, a weirdly crusted donut, and a handheld device loaded with 8Tb of tumbo pictures.
Pren was already in love with tumbos. They were evolution’s answer to ‘what would happen if seals, but with bunny ears’, and were as dorky as puppies.
“Heh.”
She grinned at a conga-line of tumbos slide down a grassy hill and into each other’s buts. Their noses got squished.
“Heh heh!”
“I take it you’re pleased with the offering,” said an anxious woman in a sharp navy-blue uniform. General Halla was middle aged, with a few more wrinkles than Pren herself had. But where Pren was blessed with a forever tan and thick black hair, this lady looked like an undead animated by the grace of caffeine and stress.
The shouting match she’d had with the other military suits after hearing her demands hadn’t helped. Pren didn’t feel guilty for causing it though. Her rates were incredibly competitive, considering she had a near perfect monopoly on the business.
“Love it. I’m gonna keep this okay? ” said Pren, lifting the device and pocketing it.
Halla nodded, lips pursed with strained patience.
“Yep, yep. So… to business.” Pren sipped tea and gestured at the screen. “So what’s the situation here exactly?”
“Dire.”
General Halla let out a weary breath, flicking her gloved hand to project maps and data over the video feed. Roughly 1% of the map was green. Half was angry red, and another half was straight up blacked out.
“The Void King has shattered Jurope. It and the Corrupt Sentinels are engaged in battle with every Battleship-class mage, adventurer, and freelancer, while we hold the line to try preserve what little humanity is left, but we’re rapidly running out of nuclear weapons and other meaningful ammunition. Our strategists predict total collapse of frontline in a maximum of two–”
“Right, right, okay. Hold up.” Pren lifted a hand. “I don’t need the nitty-gritty. Let’s try a checklist. Your world is ending?”
General Halla’s control slipped momentarily, her face flashing with briefest outrage. “Evidently,” she drawled.
“Well, you’d be surprised! A planet ending is not always the same as an actual reality apocalypse. Has anything unusual happened lately?”
“Has anything…” General Halla took a moment to compose herself, mumbling something about ‘summoning worked’ and ‘she isn’t human’.
Rude of her, though Pren let it slide. Some humans don’t treat regular zero percent altered kin as humans, and she had ran out of energy to change natives’ views long, long ago.
“Just give me like a quick top ten history changing from the last ten decades,” Pren said helpfully.
“Top ten… Well, mana sensitive individuals first appeared 2056, roughly sixty years ago. In 2058, the first Battleship-class individual awakened, prompting the creation of…” Blah-blah-blah faction this, blah-blah faction that. It took a while for Pren to gather the important bits, but she let the General continue.
“OK. So, natural law changes and invasive species. That’s a check for minor conceptual damage. Definitely a sign of an apocalypse right there. How are the colors? Are colors still normal?”
General Halla blinked. “Pardon?”
“Sorry.” Pren smacked her own forehead. “Checklist. Go through the checklist. Have you noticed the color pink going missing, or perhaps a new color popping up that makes people insane? Anything like that?”
“Ah… Not that I am aware of, no. Should we expect color changes soon?” she asked warily.
“Nah. Just checking for conceptual damage. Colors are usually a good first indicator, especially the wrong ones. How about missing hours, lost days, a sudden appearance of hyper-competent individuals who seem to know what is going to happen ahead of time? Wars between powerful individuals happening in the span of seconds without warning? No? All guns suddenly being replaced with water squirters all across the globe?”
General Halla continued to shake her head, her expression perplexed.
“No problems with causality. Check.”
“Does that happen? Can magic control time?” she was dead serious now, hope twinkling in her eyes.
“Not here. Not yet. Never if I do my job here. Now, last question: How much is one plus one?”
When General Halla seemed reluctant to answer, Pren gestured wildly.
“C’mon. How much is it?”
“Two?”
“Neat-o. So your abstracts are a check. Good news ma’am. Things are not as dire as they seem. Your reality has what I like to call a Monday Apocalypse. It’s kind of inconvenient, but Tuesday comes and it’s all over with no ill effects. In fact, in many cases people actually prefer a small shake-up to the laws of reality, especially if they grant you magic or superpowers.”
“Inconvenient,” said General Halla slowly, holding her tone even, though Pren saw the quiet deadly fire in her eyes as he met her gaze. “Billions dead. Billions. Humanity on verge of oblivion. And you laugh.”
Pren sighed, lifting her hands in a placating gesture as she leaned back. “Yeah. Well, not laugh-laugh I heh’d at the tumbos, but I am enjoying myself for sure. They’re fantastic.”
That gave the woman a pause.
“I still can’t get over them. What kinda world evolves tumbos? Were there no predators that could catch these fat ass round helpless balls of fluffy? Makes no sense whatsoever. No wonder you’re getting grilled by some basic ass biomass corrupting technomagic mutants. And how can I focus on the important things, while a billion nameless nothings die you ask? Why, my dear contractor, because you’re barely real to me. Like any responsible person, I’ve tinkered with my ego to ensure a healthy ‘emotional distance’ to my work, and while my seeming murderhoboism may be offensive to you – so sorry by the way – it’s absolutely essential for my own long-term sanity.”
Not the first awkward silence Pren had endured, nor the awkwardest.
The battle continued to play out on the big screen. A flying battleship got wrestled down into a sea by an eight winged angel-like chimera with faces for skin. A digital tag marked it as ‘Battleship-class Corrupt Sentinel’.
It plummeted into trench lines. A magical reactor of some kind exploded, consuming an entire frontline.
Another tiny pixel of green area was lost.
Pren watched none of it. A clip of two tumbos slapping each other with their floppy ears demanded her full attention.
“You called them biomass corrupting technomagic mutants,” said General Halla, composed once more. Desperation tends to do that. You can get away with being really cheeky if the other side is having an apocalypse. “Have you faced them before? What can you tell me about them?”
“Not these exact ones, but yeah. A common enough trope. Pretty effective too. I’d wager at a glance that this ‘mana’ you’ve got is going on here is their infection vector. On contact they spread contagious mana, which proceeds to rapidly transform your oncology if your defenses aren’t up to snuff. Reversal might be tricky without breaking causality, but you should be able to block the process by disrupting that mana as it undergoes change.”
“Hm. This aligns with Dr. Randoffel’s experiments from six years ago,” General Halla said evenly. “However, halting the infection as you call it requires a trained mage to react within seconds of infection. We haven’t had success in finding more scalable alternatives.”
“Catch.” Pren tossed a tiny pale-blue marble at General Halla.
She caught it, perplexed. “And this…”
“Squeeze it.”
General Halla did.
An invisible wave shuddered through the room within less than a blink. Forcefield sealing the room flickered and sounds of panicked orders could be heard from the hallway outside. An alarm began ringing somewhere.
“What–”
“You’ve been shot by a Tumbo Wave. It’s what happens when you release a bunch of mana frozen from aligned superposition. Think of it as splashing ripples on the big mana-lake, but more like a magnetic explosion. Takes a bit of finesse to craft them, but should be doable for your mages. I’ll draw you a tutorial if you’ve got some crayons. Does seem to disrupt your own magics too, but that’s a skill issue you can solve yourself. On the flip side, it’ll stop whatever magical ass-pullery your enemies are using to regen like that.”
“Write it down!” General Halla rushed to a side table to fetch a datapad of some kind, then set it down and rummaged through a cabinet for pen and paper.
“Uh, just hand me the whatever-pad. I can probably write on it,” Pren said.
General Halla ran to her with the pad and turned it on. The UI was idiot proof, and Pren began sketching a tutorial on a painting program.
“So you’ve been hiding your mana rings? This changes things.” General Halla leaned with her hands on the table, thoughts racing through her face. “Another potential Battleship-class mage won’t make a difference, unless… You have ascended past it. You’ve solved the tri-halo bottleneck. How?”
“Girl, don’t throw your native system-lingo at me like that. I started playing around with mana like five minutes ago.”
“Impossible. That finesse…”
Pren cringed a little at the peanut gallery response, but mastered her expression. “It’s all about tossing different things at the wall and seeing what sticks. Once you’ve done it enough times, you grow an intuition for these things. I like to start by checking if local metaphysics is energy, matter, soul, or mind based, if it’s a purely physical system, dual system, tri-system, or a hodgepodge mess. Then it’s about narrowing it down. Your mana is energy so I check if it’s a wave, particle, string, bling, or whatever. Then comes figuring out how it interacts with local reality, they’re usually analogous to the world’s natural laws with some twists. Easier to work within constraints of the reality you’re in once you know the limits you shouldn’t break.”
“Unified Theory of Mana,” the General swallowed. “If what you say is true we have a chance. Draw it for me.”
“About that.” Pren paused her scribbling, having finished a beautiful cartoon tutorial for Tumbo Wave. “Your initial offering pleased me, but we’re going to have to talk about payment before I accidentally save you early.”
“Now?” General Halla’s eyelids twitched and she pointed at the big screen.
Thousands of magitech mechs ground against unending waves of wiggly-purple-black hordes of limb and claw. It was like watching two army-sized cheese graters do a mating battle, except one could regen and the other could not.
“Seems like a good time, no?”
“No. You will be compensated if you deliver, and after we survive. This is not my first time summoning a demonic entity, precautions have been taken to ensure that the object of your obsession will be destroyed, should you attempt to renege on your promise. Now write down the theory.”
“Lady, you should probably get some sleep or up the dose on whatever stims are keeping you upright. You kinda ping-ponging between awed-annoyed-hostile triangle. A woman of your status and age should be a little more stoic and play along.” Pren grit her fist and lowered her voice. “Like ‘Mrrrh, I suppose I shall do what I must and seal the deal with you o’ stranger.’ Or just keep it in the awed-annoyed axis. Leave hostility out.”
Determination hardened General Halla’s expression and squeezed remnants of her patience. With swift, precise movements she took the datapad, sent Pren’s drawing somewhere, and handed it back.
“Theory of Mana. Or you’ll never see the photograph of the Black Lantern.”
Neither Pren’s smile nor lazy posture twitched. She continued half-heartedly flipping through the tumbo videos, as relaxed as ever.
All the same, something in that room changed.
“Lucky you there’s someone I hate even more than uppity little bitches who don’t know their place,” said Pren cheerily. “You have contingencies for my reward in the event of your untimely death?”
General Halla continued her death-stare.
“You don’t? Aight, I’m gonna suggest we shake hands and you swear to deliver my reward no matter what.” Pren held out her hand.
General Halla eyed it suspiciously, then glared again at Pren. “Contract magic?”
“No magic. No tricks. A promise.”
They shook.
“Done. Your apocalypse will be stopped.”
Pren clapped her hands and started drawing on the datapad, geometrics, figures, and cute smiley-faced mana-particles. “This is a big bonus for you by the way. I don’t usually do technology development if I can help it, but you are getting your asses handed pretty badly here.”
The forcefield flickered again. Pren hadn’t caused it this time.
General Halla’s pupils flitted around as she conversed something through some kind of telepathy. Her face grew grim.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
“They’ve breached through the outer bunkers,” she said to Pren, her voice curt. “We’re evacuating. Keep up.”
Angular lines and sharp runes glowed on her black glove. The forcefield dropped. A brisk pace took her to the door. It opened to a bare-bones bunker hallway of organized chaos. Military staff ran one way and lines of bulkily armored soldiers the other.
Pren hurried along and had to dodge a few people who hadn’t noticed her behind the general. Tremors shook dust off of the ceiling and cracked concrete. Muffled gunfire echoed from the distance.
A short helmetless man in armor not much taller than Pren paused when he noticed them rounding a corner. “Ma’am, do you need help securing asset-09?”
“Oh-nine? Budby, I’m oh-oh unique.”
General Halla ignored Pren. “Negative. 09 has been confirmed as a pure information asset. Minor disruptive capabilities. Mana saturation at below five. No halos.”
The man nodded in understanding. “Roger that. Results?”
“Hyep, here’s your world’s mana explained through family friendly pictures and squiggles.” Pren offered her datapad to the man.
General Halla snatched it. “Details classified for now, but hope is alive. Stay strong commander. Saints yet live.”
“Saints yet live,” said the man, a white grin breaking through his full beard. “You hear that, losers?”
“Saints yet live,” echoed soldiers behind him.
“And so we fight!”
Raahs and hurrahs came from all but one throat.
Emergency lights flicked on as Pren and General Halla passed through a massive cafeteria and more hallways. Another squad of soldiers jogged past. Gunfire and spells sounded beneath the emergency klaxons. They arrived at a station to board some kind of underground train, when a vault door flew off its hinges. Biomechanical monsters of black metal and ghostly luminescent flesh tore through turrets and blender soldiers.
General cursed and dragged Pren to a side elevator. The train was abandoned. A couple squads of soldiers and a handful of mages were left behind to protect their retreat through elevators. A few important looking wizardry types were in the elevator with them.
“New plan,” said General Halla. “You will board a raptor fighter to Skyway Bastion. General Alba will receive you there and nominate your handlers, who’ll interrogate you for spell designs and magical knowledge.”
“Hm?” Pren blinked, her focus broken. “Oh? Nah, I can do my thing from here. You’ve got like a source of mana I can plug into? One of those generators your flying battleships had or something similar. I’m ready to speedrun this system.”
General Halla’s eyes flashed bright blue as they scrutinized Pren. “Six percent mana saturation? Your asset class will be re-evaluated once you reach fifty and awaken, but we won’t be providing you with magical resources. We need everything to hold the frontlines.”
Pren studied her expression. “You can’t or you won’t?”
“There’s no difference at this hour. I am a blade of the Union. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
“Right.” Pren crossed her arms over her dirt-brown traveling coat, re-thinking her approach.
Pren started stretching, limbering her muscles. Already she could feel her mundane biology augmented by the world’s magic, however slightly. She was stronger, her senses sharper, and her mind clearer.
She let out a long breath. “Huuu…”
“What are you doing?” General Halla asked.
Pren closed her eyes. In the blackness she sensed mana within herself. Hair-thin blue lines traced out her veins and nerves, slowly widening as she ‘magnetized’ them to draw in ambient mana. Her power grew, but nowhere near fast enough. The focal point of core growth seemed to be the lower abdomen.
“You’re making some of the younger ones panic,” whispered General Halla. “Stop it.”
“And there’s no way for us to get me a mana reactor?” she asked to confirm.
“Not for you.”
“Absolutely zero totally never no way? I’m asking ‘cos the alternative is gonna hurt.”
“You will never be given access to a mana core, much less a mana engine.”
After a moment, Pren nodded. “Right. Right. Rogue we go then.”
A question died in General Halla’s throat as Pren punched it, took a knee, stole her pistol, and burrowed a bullet in her lower abdomen. Pren stabbed two fingers into the general’s guts and magnetized her mana.
General Halla choked on a grunt of pain, her eyes bulging.
In the black space of mana and souls, brightness as violent as sunlight flooded into her from the General's core. An invisible whirlpool rushed towards her, blowing clothes and hair of everyone around them. A torrent of fire and pain flooded Pren’s nerves. She heard a pop somewhere that shouldn’t pop and tasted iron on her tongue.
Shouts of alarm turned into guns pointing at her. Eyes lit up with inner light. Tightly packed arcane circuitries glowed on gloves and clothes. Several circles and cages of ghostly energy began forming around Pren.
Inhaling the last of General Halla’s mana-stuff, Pren willed every mote of energy within her to rapidly align and de-align. The resulting Tumbo Pulses crashed through the twenty-plus souls in the elevator, giving them the spiritual equivalent of a concussion.
All but two youths with the ‘I’m just an intern’-look about them dropped. Some groaned. Others drooled, their eyes blank.
Oh, yeah and General Halla was up too, since she no longer had mana.
“Sorry about that, I’ll put it to good use.” Pren laid her to the ground and stuffed the pistol in her pants.
General Halla grunted stoically, glaring at the interns. “Subdue her! Now!”
“Best if you don’t try,” said Pren. “But do something about her. She’s got a bullet wound. Use a stapler and whatever magic medical gel you probably have. I’m gon– whoah…”
Her step faltered. Pren’s nose was bleeding profusely. Everywhere inside her still burned like she’d pumped 100 ml of fire ant piss into her veins. She did feel stronger though. Whatever bad stuff the mana was doing to her body, it felt kind of like a second set of muscles, and brain-muscles and eye-muscles and everything-muscles.
General Halla hauled her to a sitting position while making struggling noises. She pressed on her wound and somehow managed to draw a firearm from a downed officer.
Pren confiscated it and shoved it in her pants. “Shhhh. Take it easy. You’ll tear something if you move around. Come on guys, she’s been shot! Hurry up!”
“Demon filth,” the general spat. “Should’ve never let you out…”
“Should’ve, would’ve. Now’s not the time to bother with hypotheticals, General. You’re in a grave situation. Come on you two, keep her alive!” Pren stayed by the general until the two interns finally came over.
“You’re bleeding,” observed the male specimen, his wide brown eyes staring down at Pren.
“Shot her,” whispered the general to the female intern. “In the guts. We need her alive.”
“Ma’am, I’m… I’m scared,” replied the intern. “My hands are shaking, I can’t.”
“How bad do you think it is? Be honest, I’ve only a vague guess how your magic works with biology.”
“You’re dead. Killed yourself you stupid bitch.” General Halla laughed, then grunted from pain. The other intern fussed over her stomach with medical supplies. The general continued through red teeth, “Mana of a Frigate-class mage in an unawakened body. You’ve less than a day before death without treatment.”
“It’s bad,” confirmed the male intern.
“K. Thanks. Let’s finish up quick and try deal with this afterwards then,” said Pren. “How’s the general looking up?”
“Please don’t shoot, I won’t shoot you!” shouted the female intern and threw her pistol at Pren’s feet.
Looked like she had everything handled with the general.
Pren wobbled over to the next knocked out wizard, one who’d had particularly bright glowy eyes, while the general continued to loudly demand the interns to stop her. They didn’t. Pren willed mana around her fingers to strengthen them, and shoved them into the person’s guts. She drained this person’s mana, and then the next.
With every mage drained her head grew lighter and the sounds more distant. Thankfully, Pren found some tissues to stuff into her nostrils and ears, which took care of the blood.
The nine or so extra mages amounted to about two-thirds of General Halla’s mana mass. Pren’s soul felt really, really bloated.
“Whew!” She swept her hair back, turning to face the fast approaching end of the elevator ride.
Up there, on a pier-like platform that received the diagonal deep-earth elevators, a delegation of automated turrets, drones, and soldiers awaited them. Pren was a bit surprised the snipers hadn’t shot her already. Oh well.
Pren unleashed a Tumbo Wave at the reception.
Forcefields flickered. A few men fell to a knee. No one collapsed.
“Nice! You’re fast to adapt,” said Pren to General Halla, smiling. “Good, good. Make sure everyone learns that, everyone you want to live anyway. You’ll need it for the mop-up once we nuke the big boy.”
“Evacuate all nuclear armaments! Don’t let her get near them,” shouted General Halla into an earpiece. Seems they had redundant comms. Must be how the general warned them of her.
Pren laughed. “Figure of speech. No magic nukes today. We already have a perfectly fine trick already, just need a lil bit of extra oomph to pull it off. Now let’s make sure we don’t die.”
Because the soldiers up at the pier were taking aim. Even if they shot non-lethal rounds, Pren’s body felt like a too watery jello held together by pure willpower. One good shove would knock her out, nevermind a real bullet!
No problem. She’d already produced a kinda okay-ish beginner mana-bubble with the marble.
Topaz-blue gleamed around her hand as she expelled mana from her veins, encasing herself in hardened mana.
Gunfire ripped through the air. Bullets ricocheted off of her. Belt-fed turrets sang ratata. Large caliber rifles glowed behind the firing squad, charging. Their projectiles broke the air in a straight line. Thunder clapped. Unconscious people and stuff flew about.
Pren remained standing beneath a shimmering blue veil, unharmed. One problem though. She couldn’t move an inch. That was unexpectedly successful, she’d locked herself in place on a conceptual level. A bit weird, considering how fine this reality was.
Actually, this wasn’t so bad. Freezing herself on a conceptual level had also stopped the nosebleed. It wasn’t elegant, but this might be the easiest way to not die from magic overdose.
The soldiers rushed in. Interns evacuated General Halla and the knocked out wizards. They took out magic blades of some kind and started chiseling at Pren. Someone was jogging at her with explosive charges. A tacticool wizard was drawing glowing circles on the floor.
Very efficient and methodical. Always inspiring to see how the end turns people into survival machines.
Pren began to mentally wrestle the fickle liquid-like mana with her mind. Practice is always different from theory. Even if you’ve done something kinda similar a hundred times before, there’s always new quirks and tricks to learn. Always some fickle variable that takes a while to grasp, but she got there.
Solidified mana globs began oozing out of her, wiggling about according to her whim.
The sword guy retreated. Explosives began piling up around frozen Pren’s legs. Red light lit up beside them. The wizard released a spell that sealed her in.
Whiteness.
Dust and debris and zap-crack of broken cables the width of adult men. Fighter crafts flew by high overhead in death-brown clouds. A gust of wind revealed Pren’s surroundings, a crater of steel and concrete. The wizards and soldiers had evacuated.
South, the stratosphere parted around a titan of geological scale. Earth quaked with the lumberous rhythm of its footsteps. All colors of rainbow and beyond sparkled around it, when heroes the size of microbes peppered its black hide with magic. Several of those floating battleships not currently engaged with other lesser creatures were firing beams and salvos at the thing.
The closest of them was right overhead, a big town sized steel ship with too many guns, layers of blue bubbles, and a score of engines spitting blue mana at gravity. Skyway Bastion, said the white text on its side.
Perfect.
Pren wrapped the dough-like blobs of mana around her frozen self and applied her magnetism trick with a tweak.
Nothing happened.
She gave it another tweak.
Slowly, she began lifting off, falling up. World backflipped around her as she accelerated skyward, towards the battleship.
Above, gun turrets changed targets from the planet-resculpting titan to her. A squad of drones dispatched.
Showertime.
The rain opened with light. Pren rocketed through the little asteroid field made out of mana, metal, and death, picking up speed.
Faster.
Faster.
A sonic boom clapped behind her.
The drone swarm broke. Barriers of magic shattered like glass. The hull was there and a blink later, she was burrowing a Pren sized hole through fifty meters of metal. It slowed her enough to give her a glimpse of a room washed in mana-blue light, walls of glyph-engraved cylinders and magictech contaminants, and a big, big blue ball made up of concentric halos.
Pren smacked bodily into it.
For just a second, Pren lifted the conceptual freezing on her body.
A blazing sun.
The presence dwarfed her manacore like a star.
Spells woven throughout the containment chamber pressed upon her on all sides with the weight of an ocean, burying her into the core.
Half of her skin evaporated on contact.
Every cell in her body screamed on an existential level.
Mana rioted inside her.
Powers began to unmake her.
Pren reached deep with fingers that turned skeletal half-way through and touched the center.
She magnetized it.
A flood of light.
Pren’s consciousness blinked. In the span it took to activate her conceptual lock, she’d lost an arm, an eye, most every organ, half her matter, roasted her genome back into pre-life stages, and erased half of herself on an existential level. She might’ve screamed a bit. Honestly, it’s no shame if you do, when you’re dipping an arm into battleship reactor cores on a strange world.
Gravity reasserted itself on her, and as life dimmed out of the chamber, on the metal hulk around her as well. The battleship began to fall.
Not yet boyo, I’ve got a use for you.
Pren flooded the chamber with doughy mana and let it gush out, filling the pipes and hallways and cracks she’d made in the hull.
The crew started jumping off the ledges and into escape shuttles. Most had made it off by the time Pren had finished, and re-did her little magnetizing trick while wearing a broken battleship as a disguise.
The only thing large enough to pull her was the planet ending leviathan.
Half-way through its plummet, the battleship righted itself. It reached its max speed of some hundreds of kilometers per hour and continued soaring through the battlefields. Beneath and above, mankind fought tides of rapidly evolving all corrupting chimeric beasts. Their magic and metal were outmatched, but their spirits never broke.
“Saints yet live,” they screamed in their dying breaths, when they saw a burning battleship fly above on a kamikaze course with the beast.
Disguised Pren flew past the frontlines.
No more men. Only a tide of writhing horror. They flew onboard and began tearing through structures with tooth and claw.
The ship became a writhing hive, its corridors veins flushed with monsters. Corrupting infection seeped into metal and magic. The very structure around Pren began to pulse with a life and a will of its own. Dead grav engines ignited to a second life at full reverse as the undead battleship tried to change its course.
Engines tore off their sockets, when they met the magnitudes greater force of Pren’s little magic trick.
Bad boy. Naughty.
The undead battleship roared in defiance.
Pren hoped this wouldn’t totally ruin her disguise.
Explosions grew louder again. Infested zone thinned. The battleship approached the ongoing fight between Earth’s mightiest beings and the planet ending thing. It promptly took aim and started peppering the heroes with projectiles and magic lances.
Three individuals with presences as radiant as the battleship’s core barred its way. One was a constellation of small moons, another a man inside ever expanding architecture, and third a woman with a… was that a denizen inside her? Shit, Pren thought she could sense a denizen. Well okay, props to General Halla or whoever did the summoning. There was at least one sorta competent person here.
Or it was Black messing with them.
Pren’s mood soured at that.
Magic of a caliber she had not yet witnessed bent reality around her.
The battleship cried as it peeled open like a thousand cans and spiraled into a pretzel of twisted architectures mid-flight. Impacts the magnitude of planetoid collisions flattened what remained.
A small sliver around Pren remained airborne. Last remnants of the undead battleship cried in agony as she surfed it through its falling corpse and towards the horizon-defining figure.
Then the denizen was unleashed.
Reality folded backwards around a spot that moved towards Pren. It was an absence of fire, blue, and an abundance of metal this world could not define. A nameless thing without a narrative, it had the feel of artificial and intentional design. Pren’s frown grew graver.
Fuck.
It met the end of her little disguise and gobbled up everything.
The undead ship screamed in terror.
Could she make it? Pren looked up. Still a couple of seconds to go. Nah, she’d get eaten by this thing.
Damn it. It had been such a perfect disguise too. The leviathan would’ve never expected her. Damn it and damn Blackie or whichever meddler asshole planted knowledge of that thing here, she’d make them eat a sock for making her do this.
The denizen was behind her. It promised a swift end.
Pren pulled something of her own into this reality for the briefest of moments.
There’d been sunlight in this world for as long as mankind could remember. Stars had shined on it for eons unknown. Fire had warmed hearts and electric and magic glow had dispelled the night.
But not once had this world yet beheld the light souls turned real.
The tiny lantern of silver she held existed in this reality for only a heartbeat. It was the smallest glimpse of pale light in a battlefield a planet wide. A vanishing little thing.
And all who bore witness remembered it forever.
For it was right and correct.
And the unreal thing it shined on was no more.
Pren put the lantern away. The saints and heroes and whatnot had stopped to gawk and no longer bothered her. Hundreds of eyes the size of houses and cities turned on her. The full attention of a continent’s worth of mass focused on her.
Too late for it to dodge.
She and the spear-like remnants of her battleship pierced its center. The undead battleship died on impact. Magic propelled Pren through canyons and caverns of biomechanical super-being. Tiny inhuman civilizations unaware of the outside world saw her fly-by. Monsters with the task of guarding the being’s innards opposed her and their biomechanics became pure physics.
She reached a core the size of a small moon. Red and malevolent.
The moment she undid her conceptual lock, Pren had a microsecond before death.
Which is why, she took a couple looks before, while face-hugging the big burning ball.
Humm humm, what do we have here? Clever girl, trying to copy mommy’s trick? Yes you are, you are. Such a clever girl.
Seriously, the leviathan had already mastered her mana draining trick! Wow. Talk about a fast adapter. No wonder the mankind of this world were struggling. Pren would not be able to drain it.
Which was fine. Quick thinkers and adapters are the reason it’s good to be stingy with your methods. Only show them the tricks you have to, so you can use the rest later.
Pren undid conceptual freeze.
A pulling force was applied on her mana.
In the same instant, she coded her mana with an infectious command to disperse.
She was drained empty.
And the one who drained her had all of its mana yeet itself out of the solar system. A consciousness and body that had been sustained by magic alone died. Lifeless, the continent-sized chunk of now dead biomechanical waste began to collapse.
Most of Pren’s biology also resigned simultaneously.
Her vision and senses exploded with blood. Stuff that was supposed to be solid melted like nuclear waste and became a puddle around whatever solid remained of her. She was pretty much toasted.
Oof did it hurt. Her brain released every last endorphin it had left, but wow, the tingles were something else.
Pren laughed a bloody laugh. “Like tumbos dancing on my nerves.”
A footstep.
Several individuals had descended near her. Going by the random geometry spilling from one of them, these were the saints and heroes of mankind.
“Ey hello folks. No need to clap. So about the payment. You’re gonna want to call General Halla and tell her to hurry. I’ve only got…”
Pren coughed up another organ that should not look like a microwaved roadkill.
“...I’ve got a minute at most, so she’s gotta hurry. Chop chop. I need my picture.”
A flash and it was over.
Pren was killed.