The space between dimensions had a spongy texture with pockets of scintillating air between the cloying strands that glued reality together. The stuff of worlds, all caved beneath Trinch’s might. He dug up through the layers, clawing, heaving, slicing — he was the incursion; he was the energy of the Black Star piercing dimensions; he was the tip of the spear —
Air.
The sweet taste of the air as he stepped out from a black portal onto alien grass. Whisper of wind through the trees. A night sky swirling with deep mauves and purples and streaks of gold. He breathed deep, devouring gulps. The air of the Crimson Armada System!
His chains reached out around him, stroking at leaves, branches, and dirt, catching insects in their clanging coils — the playful curiosity of the system as it stepped into enemy territory amazed him, but it really shouldn’t have.
The Black Star was ultimately a world of optimism and love, after all. Nothing like the oppressive bloodlust of his home system but still…
He gazed up at the hallucinogenic sky — the same living sky that pulsed and bled across all worlds in the system — and he sighed. Home was home, and no matter how far you went, some part of you wanted to return. An itch drawing him like blood draws a louse.
He bent and rubbed a hand over the grass at his feet. Strange stuff. Short, green, fuzzy, and prickly. The surrounding trees were also too short. Barely a few times taller than him. There were signs of growth, in the disturbed dirt around the roots, and the fresh budding leaves. Small shoots swayed in the wind that was not there. The trees were growing with the influx of the system’s energy, but it was not the same as his long-established world.
There were no spiders to speak of at all. Though of course, this was only his system, not his world. He chided himself. There was no way that he would have returned to his world… seeing Zoe’s weak, inferior body was enough proof that the Mirrorbell Dungeon had moved, but still… Hope is foolish by definition.
No wonder he never lost it while listening to that Blackstar voice. He stroked a chain idly between thumb and forefinger. The childish presence was gone from his mind, replaced by that feeling of the Crimson Armada. Another thing lost and left behind. He patted at his side where his lost rib regrew with the itching intensity of Vitality. If only he could regrow friends. It was a shame to leave Oriz behind, but the others could rot.
He started walking, idly, there was nowhere to go, but if this was a newly incorporated world then it was effectively his. There would be nothing as powerful as him on the surface for some time. He walked through the trees and breathed, and expanded his senses — Willpower and Insight dancing out to embrace the floating island and everything it held.
Growing up in the system he never knew what it was, but having left and now returned… it felt like a dusty scabbard, and his mind was the sheathe. Was the system happy that one of its weapons had returned?
There was no greeting, and a laugh rumbled from his chest.
“Again, I return,” he broke out in spontaneous poetry. “Not to mine, but to a home. A new world for me, and me alone.”
“How droll,” said a woman, and he could hear her rolling her eyes in his tone.
He started, spinning so fast that his chains lashed through the weak trees. Who dared sneak up on him? If it was an inhabitant of this world, another Zoe, then they would quickly learn the nature of their new king…
But how could someone like Zoe sneak up on someone like him?
His eyes burned yellow as he gazed about the gloomy forest. Where were they hiding?
“Show yourself,” his Willpower flexed out, sweeping through the trees like a comb. “Bow down before me and I shall spare you.”
His Willpower shattered, and the woman laughed.
“Who are you to give orders?”
He inhaled, ready to shout — despite the niggling fear — when she appeared in front of him. A woman in skintight red armor made up of interlocking jeweled pieces. He stepped back as his blood ran cold. His Willpower passed over her as though she were not there, but he felt as though he were looking up at a mountain.
Who was this woman?
“I am Trinch,” he growled. “Prince of the Curling Mountain Shores.”
She tapped a clawed finger against her jeweled chin.
“The Trinch I remember had yellowed fur and no chains. He also favored a form that was less…” She gestured up and down Trinch’s body. “Grotesquely muscled.”
Trinch snarled and the lice scurrying through his bared fangs. Did she know the truth of his backstory? Or was she just pretending?
His snarl became a smile as he realized it didn’t matter. There was only one person this could be, or rather, one affiliation she could have.
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“You work for Rue the Bladed Forest, don’t you?”
She stopped tapping her chin and straightened.
“I work with Rue.”
“Part of his cohort,” Trinch shrugged. “Incorporating a virgin world into the nightmare meat grinder of the Crimson Armada System.”
“Heretical words.”
“Live in another system for a few centuries and tell me how you feel.”
“I don’t think I will.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Pets enjoy their leash, don’t they?”
Intent crackled through the air as she focused her Willpower upon him. His blood bubbled in his veins, he was an inch away from death, but he laughed.
“You cannot harm me. By the rules of your system, no member of a cohort can interfere directly with a new planet within the first year of its incorporation. Or have the rules changed while I was away?”
The bubbling stopped. Blood flowed languidly through his veins.
Around him, the glooming shadows deepened.
“He’s got you there, Lorrilla,” a faceless woman slunk out from the shadows and drew them around her like a cape until all the glade was bathed in the stark hallucinogenic light of the skies. “Whatever will we do?”
Lorrilla, as the jeweled woman was called, floated up from the ground until she hovered above the trees.
“We can’t interact with the denizens of the new world, you say? But you are not of that world. Look at you, stained by the energies and influence of an alien system, you are an incursion. And we are within our rights to deal with an incursion.”
His blood boiled, but Trinch stilled it with a quick flush of his Willpower.
“You think I’m afraid of you? I am level 99. I am a god amongst mortals. Not even Rue himself could kill me!”
###
Rue, as he sat in his cylindrical chamber and watched Zoe on the screen of blood, heard the challenge over Morn’s plucking, as a god must hear all challenges. He should let it go.
He should…
But his mood was sour as the next beer he would brew, and Pride is ever ready to be pricked.
“Rue?” Glassik asked where she sat beside him.
He did not see the worry on her face, did not hear the tremble in her voice, did not know her at all as his face darkened and he reached out into the air.
[All the World Has One Neck]
###
Trinch pointed at the floating woman and her shadowy counterpart. A yellow-nailed finger stabbed through the air as his chains flexed and crashed through the undergrowth.
“I’ll take you both on at once and then maybe I’ll get Rue’s —”
A hand squeezed his throat.
He grabbed, but there was nothing to grab. Only pressure. It squeezed, and his bones creaked. Air, sweet air, stopped flowing into his lungs. The pressure built behind his eyes. He was level 99, he could hold his breath for months, but right now it felt as though he had no levels at all.
Lorrilla floated down, leering at him through the crimson glass of her helm.
“You are level 99, but you have no mountains. No peaks to your power, and so you are like a babe in the woods compared —”
She fell.
Grasped at her throat.
The shadowy woman sank to her knees. Her ear-to-ear smile dipped into a horrific grimace as she gurgled.
“Rue!”
###
All across the shattered world of the new Earth, humans choked. Nobody could explain it, the pressure, the fear. Humans stumbled to their knees, woke up in the middle of the night, collapsed, and wept, as their airflow ceased under the controlling grip of an alien god.
###
Morn stood, his scarecrow limbs withered and creaking, and raised his lute over his head. He felt the grip around his throat but he stopped breathing after he climbed the Mountain of Death five hundred years ago. He swung the lute down against Rue’s head.
The ancient wooden instrument shattered with a mournful twang.
Rue twitched and stared at him with eyes of dull steel. No burning rage, just the implacability of an iron maiden. Morn held Rue’s stare until, with no fanfare or acknowledgment, Rue blinked, and released his technique.
Glassik gasped for air. She edged away from Rue, faded into translucency, and vanished with a pop.
Morn shook his head, but Rue raised a finger before he could speak.
“Don’t,” Rue said.
“The rules…”
“Don’t lecture me. Not now.”
“Why all the production, Rue?” Morn bent down with a creak and gathered his broken lute. “Why go to all this effort if you just want to die?”
Rue sat for a moment as he watched the red screen above them. His fingers twitched.
“Because it is what I want.”
“You want to drag us all down into a hell of your own making?”
Rue smiled.
“I didn’t make this hell, old man. If you can’t see that, you can’t see anything.”
Morn stiffened and stared, but Rue ignored him.
The air trembled, and Rue sat alone, watching the screen of blood and its view of the Mirrorbell dungeon.
###
Trinch gasped for air as the technique vanished. Spots boomed across his vision. He stood, swayed, as though drunk. What was that? What kind of power was that?
He shuddered with a fear he couldn’t control. His Willpower flushed through him, but it did nothing to remove the terror. Only when his chains wrapped around his bulging arms, his thighs, his ribs, did he feel the gentle caress that told him everything would be alright. He nodded to the chains and thanked them as they helped him stand. Only a fool believed that any one system was perfect. That any one system held all the answers.
He might not have any mountains, but he had ten thousand chains. The Black Star system was not weak. It lost the war because of its nature, because of the vast resources of the Crimson Armada, but when it came to a small-scale battle…
The power of friendship was not one to be underestimated.
The two women crawled toward each other. He felt no bubbling in his blood, and he noted the shadows leeching back to their rightful places. The women lay distracted.
It would be dishonorable to attack them…
Trinch grinned and charged. His chains lashed out like the fangs of a hydra as his bestial roar split the air.