Ten thousand spheres and shards vanished in a flash of bubbling, white-hot, light, as beams of divine, infernal, angelic, spiritual, and draconic energy clashed with the already chaotic energy of the chaotic sea. Jack, Kalpana, and I were busy settling the Harvesters down within our private dimension and we all ended up feeling grateful that we’d decided to get the job done today instead of tomorrow like we’d initially intended.
The entire private dimension shook and I felt a wave of something ominous that sent my heart rate spiking through the roof. It was a feeling of stepping out of the house only to have something blur past the side of your face and explode a short distance away. We initially thought we were being attacked and when we extended our senses beyond our private dimension what we found was a sea of shocking hostility, and countless enemies determined to destroy everything in sight.
I might have considered evasive maneuvers but Jack was already moving for a counter-attack, emerging out of our dimension in her true-form. Naturally, that meant that I had to follow her out to back her up. So, I quickly gave some instructions and minor authorities to Kalpana so that she could look after her people while we were gone. Since the private dimension was a part of Jack and me, there was no getting the harvesters to safety. If Jack and I died, the Harvesters would fall with us, a fact that Kalpana and her fellow royals seemed to be resigned to. Wishing Jack and us look in...whatever...it was that was happening outside.
Jack and I emerged from our private dimension only to find ourselves surrounded on all sides by what seemed millions of immortals. There were gods, who’d come out in their full divine mantles and holy regalia, the light of holy essence taking forms associated with the things that they were gods of. There were devils immense balls of fire and cold, radiating the energies of sin and negativity. Their demonic mantles carried slices of the hells that each devil came from. There were myriad transcendental-mortals accompanying both the gods and devils. Each one bearing their own lesser divine and infernal mortals. Having mimicked the methods of the devils and gods to attain immortality.
There were the spirits, strange and ephemeral beings made of the elements. Supermassive collections of earth, wind, water, fire, and more. There were angles, blinding bright. Terrifying to behold. Things with countless eyes, and countless wings, and countless hands, that radiated an aura of a pure goddess that made the pretender-gods’ light look dim. There were the fae, contradictory, living maelstroms, of warped reality and magic, whose true-bodies looked like a mid-point between the spirits, the gods, and the devils. Then there were dragons.
At first, we didn’t realize that was what they were, but after a fraction of a second, it was almost painfully obvious. Massive, burning, freezing, blustery, and more elemental than the actual elementals themselves. Majestic and primordial. Apex predators, one and all. No wonder most dragons with true-dragon blood had a strange obsession with eating the worlds and the stars. A true-dragon was like a supernova, or a big bang, given ego and a sleek, scaled, and often feathered, form. They were hurricanes of might, destruction, and change, and Jack and I could only watch as an army of these things tore the gods, devils, and spirits, a new one.
“Oh...Shit….Okay, uh...what do we do?” said Jack. Her initial anger and intent to attack vanished in face of the forces arranged against us. She turned to me, the hungry darkness of her true-body exuded a touch of fear.
“I...Fuck! Look out!” I struggled to come up with a solution for the fine mess we’d inexplicably found ourselves in, then I realized that a new attack was coming our way.
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A devil, with countless spikes piercing its body, rushed at us. Each of those spikes was decorated with the corpses of giants. Considering the women and children dangling from the devil’s body, I didn’t need to look too deeply with my data-sampling to know that the entity’s infernal mantle was a homage, and gloating remembrance, to some long-forgotten genocide. That devil swung a sword that reeked of blood, and had a blade long enough, and sharp enough, to cut the entire shattered world in half.
I tried to teleport Jack and myself out of the area and discovered that unfortunately some utter wanker had elected to lock the space we were in. A fraction, of a fraction of a second later, I shifted Jack behind me. Deciding to tank the blow. Absorbing the aura of severance and loss imbued in the demonic blade with my nothingness, and retaliation with a glittering shower of fallen stars.
Each star was filled with a kind of platonic fanatical anti-logic. In essence, the situation was so dire, that the only real way to win this impossible battle was to literally start fighting with insane troll-logic. I was semi-surprised to find that this was working, but maybe I shouldn't have been because the secret of insane troll-logic was that insane trolls don't really care about the "logic" part. You just needed to make enough of the right pieces fit in the wrong places. Simply smashing everything with literal and figurative violence, if one could. Smashing the world to bits until all that was left was anarchy.
Our section of the chaotic sea was already cacophonous with all the immortals present in it, but it became even more so, as I began to draw on the power of my emptiness. Countless voices came from nowhere, slowly drowning out the holy arias of the angels, the howling and curses of the devils, and the roars of the dragons.
The voices that came from within me rambled math and logic equations, drawing on my countless stories to call the very cosmos into question. Black became white, and white became black, as my anti-logic attacked the holiness of the gods, the goodness of the angels, and evil of the devils, the instrumentality of the spirits, the longevity of the transcendental-mortals, and the very existence of fae and dragons.
Suddenly the chaotic space around us was a whole lot less crowded. I’d just turned myself into a dirty bomb. The anti-logic was like a type of conceptual radiation that attacked the essence of what things were by calling into question the impossibilities, irregularities, and improbabilities of their existence. The cosmos was nothing in the very beginning...and now I reminded the very fabric of worlds that nothingness was the most natural state. It wasn’t an instant-kill attack by any means, but I’d definitely peeled some skin off our myriad foes.
Jack piggybacked off my attack by adding in an attack of her own. I’d seen her turn into many things, and form a great myriad of weapons with her darkness, but I’d never thought she could become what she turned into now. Jack became...an entire civilization. Before my very eyes, or before the vacuous light that currently served as my eyes, I watched the hungry darkness of her true body, become a planet filled with countless clones of Jacks.
Then at 100-billion times the standard speed that planet rapidly evolved and changed. With countless nations emerging and falling, and rising until a single unified nation arose, becoming increasingly technologically and biologically advanced until suddenly there were multiple planets under their control, and then entire solar systems, and then entire galaxies. Jack’s dark civilization enslaved the stars turning the lights in the sky into naught but caged batteries.
The level of technology and war power rose as the scale and expanse of the dark civilization grew. Eventually, these beings of hungry darkness were numerous enough and powerful enough to start conquering entire universes...They conquered one universe...then they conquered two universes….Then they conquered three universes. Then as their empire reached its highest heights, they looked out in the beige-black night and noticed the array of gods and monsters surrounding them and in a strange mixture of greed and fear they declared war on all the hells, heavens, and wonderlands.