Imagine a hypothetical scenario if you will. Concept A is an entirely new idea. Concept A spread through word of mouth, pictures, and videos. Where it has spread, it becomes real. Where it is real, it begins to embed deeper into reality, absorbing adjacent concepts and burrowing through time. It has a physical population north of two billion. It has a thought imprint on 99.9999% of the sentient population. It has been recorded on most media produced by the governing civilization. Roughly a percent of all language is contaminated by it, as are multiple common abstract concepts. To remove concept A, you must simultaneously remove everything it has touched.

So where do you begin?

General Halla had proposed they start by rallying an anti-tumbo movement and allies. An impossible dream. Nobody with a conscience would ever hurt something so cuddlable and innocent. No, there was only one way to begin an undertaking of this scale.

The flying vehicle Pren had borrowed wiggled a bit. The trunk made sounds.

"Hold on! We'll be there soon," shouted Pren.

The neon trail of the vehicles mana engine painted swerves around the massive dead pillars and chambers that'd once been the great planet devouring dragon's internal biology. She flew over the ruins of a civilization that'd lived and died within its body and the long-dead corpses of beings that'd once defended its core.

Pren squinted, scanning the gloom. "Shouuuuld be about here-ish…"

The vehicle's comms cracked. All screens blinked from blue to red. Code rippled into the shape of a female avatar.

"Do not resist…" she said.

Pren waved. "Hello~"

"...you are detained for violating restricted airspace under Union regulation one-five-eight, section three. Remain seated and comply."

The vehicle set a new heading towards distant blinking lights at the far end of a vaguely familiar tunnel.

"Yeah. Yeah, this is the place. Alright. Fantastic." Pren leaned back to wait.

The other passenger made noises in the trunk.

They zipped into the former mana core chamber of the great dead beast. Within sprawled a vast research complex of white domes, walkways, and cannons and barriers and a couple thousand magical soldiers armed. They'd progressed a bit since last time.

Every grunt was blinking with magic. Their guns had multiple switches. Their armor had glowing runes. A couple teleported right up next to the vehicle and escorted them to a landing site.

"Exit the vehicle. Hands up. Mana still," ordered a grunt.

"Yeah, yeah." Pren hopped out. Hands very much wherever she wanted them.

"Hands up!" Mana thrummed within several barrels. Personal barriers activated, blurring reality around the soldiers. "Freeze!"

"Chill. I'm unarmed and helpless. Just driving around on my floating automobile thingy."

Violent protests and muffled screams emanated from the trunk. One of the guns pointed at it.

"What's in there? HQ, scan? W-what? A person?"

The aggressive gun-aim posturing intensified, as did the grunt's tone. "Who do you have there, private Fen, open it."

"She's General Halla, your war hero and my frenemy. We had a small disagreement on the details on how to save this reality."

In the trunk, General Halla's gagged sounds grew increasingly desperate and pleading. There was a clank and a bang. A punch dented the plasteel hatch. You could sorta make out the words 'no please don't open the trunk, don't open it, don't let me out'.

So of course, they popped it open.

A tall frazzled woman was back there, hogtied. The cyborg half of her writhed with the same black-purple-ghostly biomechanical mass as the dormant cave floor beneath them and her non-human eye glared at the world with an unending hunger.

"What the–"

Several biomechanical tendrils skewered the first soldier's torso and limbs and lifted him off the ground. His scream turned to a gurgle. His body convulsed. Glistening black biomechanical mass ruptured through his skin.

The others had opened fire.

A miniature version of the older battleship's reality erasing lance deleted General Halla's tentacles. The resulting vacuum collapsed with a violent clap. Another gun shot a silent pulse. Colors that did not belong in this reality twinkled around the general. Parts of her began melting into hallucinatory shapes.

Still, the general's remaining human eye sought the soldiers out, as she spoke her plea.

"Run…"

One of them was fast enough to pull the trigger a second time. She deleted the vehicle and bottom half of the general from this world.

Then, a blink later, they and five of the closest aircraft were buried beneath a rapidly worming briar of black biomechanical tendrils and spines. Concrete cracked. General Halla's roots burrowed deep, coursing through the facility's foundations, racing towards the last flickering remnants of the great Doom Dragon's dead core.

Red and red warning lights twinkled to life all around the facility. Barriers blinked to existence, coating floors and walls in layers of glyph-littered transparent fields. Outside the rapidly expanding thicket of biomechanical corruption, spells and spell guns sang in an orchestra of pure obliteration.

Inside, at its center, Pren frowned at the unpleasantly despairing moans of her frenemy, while gathering the smoking remnants of the car to make a chair for herself.

"No…" Groaned general Halla in a hundred small voices half machine half monster. "Stop this… You can stop this…"

Pren huffed. "Yeah, well, you didn't want me to blow up the planet. So–"

"Nooo!" Tears in her eye, General Halla let out a pitiful roar. "I cannot… not after everything… after the lives we lost. I cannot. Please… Don't make me do this."

Fake humor disappeared from Pren's face.

"I'll give it. I'll hand it over. Take it! It's in…" A monstrous roar broke her speech. Her features were being buried beneath a draconic face with too many jaws and a small forest of eyes. The voice she growled out was barely legible. "Mmmmmmmrah ahheey… Mmmmaaaah aiiiiee…"

Her cybernetic eye stared at Pren.

"Aiieehhh… pih… pih… pihchtuuuhr… sah… shaaahh… shaaaaiiiived… phichtuuure ihn aaiiieeeh… shaaivvee… aiihh…"

"Alright, alright, I get it. It's in the eye. You can stop."

"T… t… ke… mhaaiikkhh… eeehht… shhhhdaaaaap…"

"Sorry frendo, no can do. I promised didn't I? No matter the cost. No matter the pain."

General Halla, whose body had now absorbed three quarters of the research facility and over half of its staff, let out a roar that shook the ground. Deepest most otherworldly purples pulsed across her biomass.

The general's face froze. "Ahhh… feeeelll… theemm…"

The tendril-skewered bodies of soldiers near them twitched. Their now mutated bodies gurgled with sound, echoing the general.

"Mehmmorrriiihhh… aahhh… what?"

"You're becoming a hivemind. Hang in there, okay? This'll be much, much easier if you stay half-way sane."

An echo of the pulse that'd rippled through General Halla appeared on the cavernous ceiling. The same light spread throughout the world ending dragon's continent-sized corpse with a command, consume.

Far away, kilometers underground, decades-dormant organs the size of cities shed off a crust of stone with their first pulse. Far above, higher than any mountain should've reached, vents wide enough to have their own atmosphere cracked open. Their awaking inhale changed the planet's climate. Blood rushed through veins as vast as rivers and entire jungles of interwoven muscle and machinery hummed to life.

And as the machine and biological awoke, so did the magical.

Mana stolen from the victims assimilated to the great being gathered through the channels and canals of the resurrecting dragon, coalescing inside General Halla. The formerly human general screamed as veins of glowing mana burst across her and her shape ignited. Her growth was fast, but it'd take a couple days for her to fully reform as the dragon's core and truly begin the hard work of absorbing all of mankind to free them from the terror of the tumbos.

***

Mankind fought fiercely.

Not as bitterly as some other realities, these guys didn't have that fanatical order of the End here, but they put up a fight. It didn't matter, in the end, of course.

2356, a few years behind schedule, the last saints of the Grand Alliance (names started getting messed up because of tumboed up causality) fell defending the launch of a cryogenic arc. The Last Salvation was a ship capable of interstellar travel, housing the genome of humanity, all of its knowledge, and every survivor.

General Halla had regained a type of control of herself. She now projected a glowing red avatar of her humanoid form onto the mountainous dragon back, watching mankind's last hope rise like a shining star.

Pren was with her, exhausted, ragged, and totally done with her job. "Welp. I'm starting to think tumbos never existed. Never saw a live one ever, but I remember touching them and the sound they make. Hiiiiop hii hiip! This super chipper happy 'hiiup'. Fuckers got me good. I'm not usually this sensitive to mental influences."

"To save humanity, I must shoot down the last hope of mankind fleeing a world consumed," mused General Halla with tragic stoicism. She'd grown a bit over the century, as a character. Hardened if you will. Being a hivemind tends to do that. Half the time she looked dead inside and the other half she looked like she wanted to murder Pren.

"Yeah, or I guess you could get started on the satellite elimination now. Piggy pag on that ship."

General Halla gazed at the rising star. "So time has come for the final stretch of our undertaking?"

"Better start now. You'll also need to send an offshoot to the moon and glass it. Make sure nothing tumbo shaped remains. Earth actually needs the same treatment… yeah, yeah, I know, you didn't wanna break it. Tho I couldn't find any tumbos, I did find the cave paintings. And murals. And hieroglyphs. And fossils, somehow. We're gonna need to get rid of a couple tectonic layers."

The general's gaze was ice. She asked, "And the infected abstracts?"

"All in good time. Physical evidence needs to go first, or they'll have new places to latch onto. You've got access to their minds?"

General Halla's gaze returned to the distancing spaceship. It'd begun to breach the upper atmosphere.

"Two billion, four hundred thirty-one million, nine hundred seventy-five thousand, three hundred twelve."

"Great."

"Pren."

"Hm?"

"The being I am right now can see through you. I can see you." Much of the now planet sized all devouring entity's attention focused on Pren. The very air around her choked.

She met the general's eyes with one of her polite smiles, waiting.

Resentment boiled from the blood of billions stormed within the blazing red avatar. Power capable of shattering reality and extinguishing the sun pulsed a hand's breadth from Pren. The planet sized hive mind considered its words very, very carefully.

"Is there a promise I can make, which would persuade you to help me fix what comes after?" asked the general's avatar.

Pren let out a breath, offering her a sorry smile. "Well… You already promised me the one thing I want, and you'll be fresh out of cute animal pictures once we're done."

General Halla turned back towards the space ship. Her mana twitched with the slightest twinge of sorrow. She spoke of the last survivors.

"A man prays."

"Lovers kiss. They hope."

"The captain burns with determination. His oaths are to mankind itself."

"The engineer fixing a malfunction in reality drive sacrifices her arm to keep fixing the reactor."

"A child is hugging her mother. She has a tumbo plushie."

General Halla's avatar flickered with emotion. "These are the last moments of mankind, the last glimpses of our history before all is erased. These are the last moments of this world and its legacy."

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

She turned to Pren. "Will you remember what we were?"

"Once in a while. Not often, but every now and then."

"I… We wish you had seen more of us than this. More than tumbos and war."

"Mmmh."

There was a moment of quiet.

Pren did not need to explain that she would be the last person to ever speak of or hear of this Earth or its history and culture and people ever again. General Halla, with her planet sized cognition, understood.

It was calming. Almost nice in a way.

Wasn't often Pren felt this serene. The combination of a century or so of tumbo hunting, mankind ending, and a nice view of the stars and the last rocket just did something. And she didn't exactly dislike this current General Halla either. After being resurrected and turned into a civilization-ending hivemind she was starting to be at a point in her life where she felt a little bit relatable.

Maybe that's why Pren felt talkative.

"Black Lantern. Black. He, she, they – whatever form it has now – was my husband."

"You mentioned this in passing," said General Halla.

"He was… she… well. We kinda met by accident. It's a fun story."

General Halla glanced at her. "We are not friends."

Pren made a pop with her lips. "Alrighty. Oookay."

"You forced me to devour my world and every living soul upon it."

"Yeah. Alright, I get it. I was just… Yup. Yes. Ahem."

They watched the last survivors for a bit after that in awkward silence.

General Halla waited for the single child aboard to fall asleep before launching parts of herself to take it down. Everyone onboard was assimilated instantly.

Not a single human consciousness remained in that reality.

***

Centuries passed into a millenia.

A hundred thousand Battleship-class entities spawned by General Halla turned the moon into a pearly marble of glass.

Battleship class entities equipped with reality drives were launched to hunt down every deep space satellite, while others scoured the solar system orbits.

The tendrils of her main body ground Earth and rearranged tectonics, removing any and all sign of human civilization.

All physical evidence of tumbos was erased.

Then came abstract surgery on the scale of an entire species' cognition.

For this occasion, Pren had some rubber gloves, a face mask, and a very special scalpel. Silver of sharpest thought gleamed in its unreal metal.

The true body, or the condensed core of General Halla's mana core, was laying on a surgery table. The two were in a psychiatrist's office decorated with diplomas and posters on mental health and old textbooks. The carpet and sofas had that inoffensive gray almost home-like, but not quite cozy enough color and the palace smelled vaguely of citrus. It was all an illusion created by General Halla's body.

"Is this necessary?" asked the woman in the chair.

"Totally. The symbolism is extra important since this place no longer has a functional noosphere. We need to make sure the scalpel works."

General Halla gave a nod at that.

"Alrighty, so. Looking at the list here… it's looking very oof. Would you like to know what's gonna happen or–"

"Begin."

"–veery well. Connect to every mind within you. I'd say this may tingle, but you're a big girl now. Heh."

General Halla gave her a thousand year glare. "End it."

Pren muttered at today's youth and set to work. She took a deep breath. The list of concepts to cut was long and she only had so long. This required absolute focus. Another deep breath. She dipped ever so slightly out of reality.

World of thoughts engulfed her. Grays and dreamcolor. Blurry shapes and flickering mists. This world was connected to beyond by the thoughts of two beings, herself and General Halla. The power that the scalpel lended to Pren allowed her to see it all in clear detail. Every concept, every abstract, every thought, every memory.

A thousand years of pain and sorrow. And buried within it, linked to it through a hivemind, billions others.

Pren peered deeper, allowing the bizarre ontology of the scalpel to shape her way of thinking. Concepts became webs of concepts. Blurry scenes multiplied into kaleidoscopes of meaning.

There, at the center of everything, Pren found it.

A tumbo.

Or, perhaps, the tumbo.

Woven into the zeitgeist of an entire world, the cute floppy eared animal sat there with a derpy grin on its adorable face and flopped around helplessly. Foolish denizen. As if Pren could be seduced by such attempts at cuteness.

She struck with a slash of her scalpel.

Concept of tumbo was eliminated from memory.

Concepts it had touched began to warp, making up for what was lost. The hole in the web started knitting itself back together.

Pren cut off the concept of cuteness.

And fluffiness.

Roundness.

Floppy ears.

Fur.

Softness.

Pet.

Animal.

Unconditional love.

Emotional support.

Brand symbols.

Words.

All the words.

Languages.

Ranching.

Soft gray and white and black and most of the brown colors. Also silver and gold. And orange. And red. Most of the colors…

She cut and cut and did not stop cutting until the hole she'd torn in the web of the zeitgeist gaped at her unmoving, lifeless.

Pren released the power and the scalpel.

She was back in the psychiatrist's office with General Halla's core on the table. The glowing being was clutching the surgery chair, crying, opening and closing her mouth.

"It's done." Pren peeled off the latex gloves. "You can give your biomass a kill command and release them. Maybe create some plant life first, and clothes, and habitats. Otherwise it's gonna be rough."

General Halla grit her teeth. Her silent sobs wracked her core and would not stop. She gestured for Pren to leave.

She did.

***

Some time after all was done, General Hall and Pren stood on a small hill. Strange web-like mess of trees grew in the distance. A small group of humans were wading through a meadow made of harsh spiky cacti.

They wore simple clothes of reed and woven leaves and had haggard appearances. Pretty much cavemen. They did not speak much, except in annoyed grunts and occasional shouts. Language had yet to develop anew.

A long fluttering cloak of black-purple biomass flapped at General Halla's back. She'd compressed much of her planet-sized body, assuming human form, on the outside at least. Her true existence could no longer be classified by the understanding of her old civilization.

This, the two had agreed, would be their last meeting.

"I honestly recommend you leave. It's fine being a transcendental being in a reality full of them, but here… it'll get lonely," said Pren.

"I must stay and teach them what I can. It is the only way I can atone for unleashing you upon this world."

Pren gave her a wry smile at that. "Yeah. I guess. Just to be clear, you can only die if someone else comes along with causality twisting stuff. You might live throughout the end of this universe."

"Then that shall be my sentence."

"Okay."

One of the humans fell.

The others did not rush to help her.

General Halla's breath shuddered.

Pren stayed quiet.

"Your payment is due," said the general.

"Yeah."

General Halla turned up her palm. In a blink of black and purple, a torn half of an old photograph materialized on it.

The person in the picture was a beautiful tall woman in her early forties, though her true age was ageless and her gender mutable. Her straight shoulder-long hair was black with white stripes or white with black ones and her irises were as black as her pupils. She wore a dapper black suit with an overcoat. She appeared to be holding something that would've been featured on the torn half of the image, while beaming with that handsome coy smile of hers.

Pren knew exactly what Black had been holding there.

The implications were not great.

"Thank you," said Pren. "You can destroy it."

General Halla raised an eyebrow. "Very well?"

Purple black mass absorbed and erased the photo.

"Was the payment satisfactory?"

"Oh yeah," sighed Pren. She then rubbed a hand to her face. "Damn. Yeah. Good stuff. Alright. That's it then. Reality saved."

"Reality saved," said General Halla, voice oozing sarcasm.

"Yeah. Aight, gonna hop off then, unless you had something else?"

"No. Begone, demon of the Undereal."

"Pren. It's Pren, if you ever get in trouble again. Use the name, makes summoning easier."

"I would have our interactions end, Pren."

"Yeah, it was… yeah, be not seeing you, General Halla."

With those words, Pren stepped out of that reality and into her real body. She stood in a hypnotic place of waxing forests – dreamlike reflections of the Earth she'd just left. In those dreamlike forests prowled the dreams and nightmares of the freshly reawakened civilization's subconscious. These were young dreams and small myths, barely shaped and weak, base reflections of nature.

In that bizarre place, Pren set down her little white-silver lantern glowing with pale light. Its prismatic hue stabilized the surrounding Undereal, giving the ever-shifting vistas near her solidity and consistency.

Pren sat onto a dream cacti-log beside it and took out the scalpel made of thoughts. She had a ritual she did after every world. A little something to keep her human.

She touched a spot on her brain with the scalpel, the place where she imagined her empathy to be. There, she cut the threads she'd bound it with.

It began with a drop.

A child holding onto a tumbo, journeying towards stars. Love and faith in mankind.

A haggard woman from a cave age stumbling. No one helped her.

Emotion clutched Pren's chest as did her fingers. She let out an ugly scream. A mankind destroyed.

What had she taken from them?

Could they ever recover?

Two billion souls stranded in a cruel loveless world that did not know the very concept of softness.

All done by her.

Another ugly heaving scream left Pren. Tears burned her eyes, blurred her sight.

She'd taken from them kindness and pets and all things fluffy.

And General Halla.

What she'd done to that woman was beyond cruelty. She could never be forgiven for it. Never. Oh, how she'd treated her.

Pren sobbed, ashamed, furious, bitter, absolutely condemning herself.

"Please remember us," she had begged.

And Pren had barely known what their world was like. What had been special about it? Urgently, in regret fueled panic, Pren scrambled for memories. The mana and magic, had there been something unique and special? No, she'd barely paid it any attention. She'd just figured it out and discarded it. The culture! The culture… she knew nothing about the culture except tumbos.

Anger seized her at the memory of her ex's photograph.

Pren's soullight lantern crackled. Her surroundings turned hyperreal, then began to melt under her wrath.

That Abyss damned Black, smiling while holding a tumbo. Untold eons of dark emotions bubbled forth, clouding Pren's vision.

Quickly, before they could overwhelm her, she redid her usual ego surgery.

Calmness took some moments to return.

Black remained in her mind.

This newest development was troubling. First the fishless world and now this. It wasn't quite a pattern yet, but two instances were enough for Pren to conclude that Black had upped her game.

The old bastard wasn't just ending worlds anymore. Nah, she'd turned to experimenting on mass producing apocalypses.

Pren's head fell to lean on her hand. A sigh took out the last shivers of emotion left from unleashing her empathy. She remained seated for a long time, thinking.

If Black was on her way to developing a method to mass produce apocalypses, Pren could no longer keep up cleaning after her. She'd need to rethink her methods. Might be she had to bring other people in on this, again.