When humans and other mortals talk about time, teaching history in their books it’s typically a linear path. A straight line, a graph. Speaking of the multiverse is never that simple, time travels differently for many entities. The same can be said for Matthias, the Soul-Eater. There was even some confusion to what manner of creature he was.
By most accounts he looked human, but was made or chose the form to be incredibly tall. Boasting eight feet most of the time with military hair, Caucasian in skin. By most accounts he was born in a vat or growth chamber. Whether by humans or not, he may have taken the form when he took interest in an Earthen-based timeline. After that, how he ascended or acquired godly power was anyone’s guess. That’s all most research can come up with, just snippets of truth scattered around but the details had been lost. Possibly by his own doing.
The source of his mental instabilities were in the air as well. By some accounts he was a largely normal immortal in his first several centuries, but perhaps by the limitations of the technology behind his creation came into play. Maybe a mere birth defect but the crushing weight of eternal time did not play well with his mind. It may have at first but the older he became, the angrier he became. By his own reports, he could not settle down in any timeline for very long before the undead came crawling out of their tombs and slaying his friends and loved ones. Eventually he grew tired and enraged. He utilized chaos magic to pierce into the veil of the aether and acquire secrets and power that while may have been beyond him at the time, he would eventually come to master in his own way.
To some Gods, he more or less just ‘showed up’ in force, but they would be lying. In truth his existence was known, the earliest accounts are of him taking over what was at the time a low-yield hunter’s group. The kind of hunters that go after the myths of vampires and werewolves. A small outfit at the time but always held military level discipline to its core but could not receive funding, until Matthias himself took it over. Once he discovered the ability of time travel, he focused such power in gathering soldiers and transporting resources up until the point where he was able to import said ability into a technological nature. They were able to create a variety of waygates, including modular chunks of tech that could be tossed out into space for them to connect themselves and create a portal to parallel worlds.
That’s when the misunderstanding came into play. In the very youth of the Vanguard’s new order, they did not have routes or road plans for their fleet. In their new voyage, traveling through new ground and new timelines, they had to take a shortcut. They had siphoned enough divine energy to travel between the aether without interruption but in order to do so they had to take something of a shortcut, which brought them right inside the court of the gods. At first it was Elysium and then onto others, they traveled quickly but once the various pantheons got into contact with each they assumed it was an attack and acted accordingly.
That was Matthias’ initial claim to fame. There was a pantheon-wide assault on his fleet as it passed through their various realms. They were summarily defeated. No grand battle or duels between gods, they flew into their fleet but lacked the technology to pierce the Vanguard’s defenses. Many gods were shot down, and several were slain personally by Matthias himself. To this very day he would claim that it was self defense, but without announcing his arrival, many of them take it as a weak defense for his actions. It was his entrance to the immortal plane, a sting that would be felt for an epoch.
As the Vanguard’s technology evolved, their siphoning techniques demanded more. Most of the time they took to various Hell realms, the dark energy there served just as well to fuel their tech. They took ethereal energy, destroying the undead utterly and utilizing what energy they could get out of it to convert into a heavily modified ectoplasmic solution that fueled their anti-undead weaponry. This was a glowing green substance, which informed the Vanguard’s consistent black and green visage, through uniforms and banners.
Much, much later he would cement his fame by sacking Valhalla as a result of their growing need for ethereal energy. Valhalla is a stomping ground for warrior ghosts, a place to collect thousands upon thousands of dead warrior’s souls to prepare itself for the coming Ragnarok. While the warriors were successful in defeating Matthias through the Prime Valkyrie, the realm itself was nearly in ruins. Despite his defeat, the godly realms learned a few things. Chiefly, that his string of victories finally came to an end. Upon his defeat, the entire fleet let out an order that they were to flee. Matthias was an incredibly powerful combatant so by Vanguard logic, once he is felled then whatever entity was capable of doing such a thing would probably be too much trouble to continue their current battle. It’s a policy he himself instituted in order to save his people and resources. There’s no point in completing a battle if they’d lose their occupying force so once he was taken down, the rest followed. That alone was the good news, but it was followed by more terrifying news.
First, Matthias himself did not die that day. His physical form was destroyed but it’s not so easy to slay gods, as his body reformed into a different timeline entirely and it took a lot of time for his fleet to find his energy signature again. Without him present to ‘aim’ the technology behind time travel properly with his own form of magic, the process can sometimes take decades or more while he was stranded.
Secondly, he proved to be an evolving force in the cosmos. His technology was improved after the battle. The Vanguard began to develop massive weapons called “Spires”, like a colossal, building-sized syringe that could land on planets and realms with a massive internal spike that would dig into the realm and siphon energy. It streamlined the previous process, was much quicker, and was also able to be utilized to detonate incredible amounts of energy that would later be used to wipe out the undead in entire cities. It’s comparable to an EMP blast, massive in scope and certainly not clean. Often shattering glass and crushing metals, usually closer to the center of where it was lodged. Mortals were largely unaffected, physically. But the spires do not account for the various destruction of infrastructure. Loss of roads, homes, and business often leads to massive refugee groups and camps and with all of the economic turmoil that that would imply.
It was in fact the detonation of one of these spires that slew one of Tiwa’s lovers and began her path into hating the Vanguard or more accurately, Matthias himself.
Brian McGee, his right-hand man, also helped him develop the Templar program. They had a unit called “Knights” since the induction of the organization, which also wielded fairly hefty powered armor but the Templars became the extreme evolution of the concept. These warriors are given specialized power armor, heavy sets of cybernetics, their own ship and an on-board AI to assist them. Their technology was designed to counter nearly every form of combat, including humans with supernatural or extra-natural abilities. If they came across a mortal hero with a speed-running ability, Templars would deploy Whistlers. Tiny spines they could launch from their gauntlet that traveled at nearly the same speed as they would, but taking tighter corners and routes that would eventually lead to the runner’s death. Templars acquired many sayings, including “There’s a Bullet for everything”. They became the most feared unit in the Vanguard, to the point where they could handle combat with various gods. Immortal entities would fear them almost more than Emperor Matthias himself due to their mindless search-and-destroy nature, because at least the Emperor would actually speak and reason.
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They were the recipients of all the best and freshest technology. Their ship and AI would come alongside them and launch modular pods to reequip them for any situation they would run across, eventually they’d become larger and taller than Matthias himself with how hefty their equipment became. They were still spry in their armor with rockets and thrusters but their job was always shock and awe so their unwieldiness was hardly relevant when destroying buildings is exactly what they should be doing. They got the harshest training with the message drilled into them that they should be completely unyielding in their mission. They almost never remove any section of their armor until they are in absolute safety, usually when in their personal ship in orbit. They never took challenges or duels and always used overwhelming, vicious force against all enemies. Typically, their arrival meant victory was imminent, but they’re saved as siegebreakers and do not join every battle.
Lastly, after he reconvened with his faction he eventually found and hired what would later become a terror in the underground world. At the time a young mortal woman of Spanish-Italian descent, with dark brown hair and a sad lot in life meandering through it. A woman named Kyna Vance, who he took on under the Trahl program in the Vanguard.
Matthias did not just look into the cosmos, but also outward. The void of space, the space between universes was often a host of its own lonely creatures. The void is not a place that fosters life very well, so it can sometimes be a place for darkly incomprehensible entities to thrive. Most space travel just burns right through places like this without much interruption but on occasion some expeditions can be made into the void. It rarely ends in success, leading explorers to be stranded to be starved or killed by the monsters within. However, Matthias was incredibly resourceful and he had nothing but time on his hands. Especially through one alien race he helped develop the Eu’sou gene (named after the aliens themselves) that expanded mortal life, slowing their aging process and made them largely immune to most diseases. This typically got humans into the hundreds while keeping their youth, but they would fade eventually. This turned out to be incredibly helpful when he established space stations on the very cusp of the void, and was even militarized to make his soldiers much hardier.
Still, within the void he discovered an entity. A black, oozing creature that would later take the form of a large leaking eyeball which Matthias would come to name “The Eye of Trahl”, trahl being an alien word for shadow or darkness. At first it barely had any sentience of its own but through experimentation it was able to either create or transport a multitude of creatures throughout various points in the universe. Using both magic and technology he manipulated and modified this creature to have its own time-travel capabilities, able to take point from a host to be utilized through the multiverse. His scientist warned of this capability, if the Eye became agitated by its lot in the cosmos it could unleash a horde of void creatures and take a universe over just by itself. Matthias took this to heart and made some concessions, allowing the Eye to remain in his home, within the void to do mostly what it pleased… as long as it made hosts of Matthias’ choosing.
He had attempted with some allied aliens but the pain and power broke most of their minds. After every attempt he would modify some of the rules behind it, like only allowing a specific number of the creatures to come through the void, only training six or so Trahl soldiers at a time. He made sure nothing was overwhelming for anyone involved as a defense of things going wrong, as one of the original hosts had a mental breakdown during one of their missions and mass murdered 90,000 citizens in a town the Vanguard was supposed to occupy. A deep cut and foreboding mark on the Vanguard’s reputation, the Eye of Trahl was modified further.
Kyna was not the first to host this void entity, but she was the most successful. She was the first one to mostly hold onto the connection between mind and body, and once she was given proper immortality through the void she actually went on to work for the Vanguard for many centuries. She became his top stealth operative and spy. At first most of her work was spying on the highest hierarchies of vampire society, which by itself was boring at the best of times. Typically watching vampire nobles enter and exit buildings, but eventually she became an assassin and picked off the nobles that Matthias deemed to be problematic.
We come to an interesting point. Matthias, despite all his instabilities and violent nature, still had a mind of his own. He loved combat, war, and the smell of ashed vampire corpses on the battlefield but he was also realistic. He put many cells of spies throughout the multiverse to monitor specific death rates of mortals from specific ways. They monitored victims of neck wounds and blood loss, and once those numbers passed a certain threshold, it could spark a Vanguard invasion. If those numbers were too low or the vampire-mortal population were cooperating with each other enough, then the Vanguard would move onto the next timeline.
Let it not be said that Matthias does not utterly despise the undead. He always has and always will, but at heart he is still a military commander. He will trust the numbers, and he trusts them because the Vanguard is heavily skewed through refugees. He gathered everyone up from every timeline that were escaping various forms of persecution from racial to sexual preference. He has little to no opinion of anything outside of the undead, and their destruction is his only goal. So he constantly recruits those looking to escape their previous lives, and a good portion of that is through survivors of vampire attacks.
Ultimately he grew an Empire heavily based on loyalty, many of them thankful that he took them in from a world that wanted to kill them. He gives them all training, safety, and understanding. Despite his reputation there is still something of a man beneath the violence. Many of them justify what is absolutely genocide through their own experience of surviving monster attacks. Many believe that the occasional vampire culling is necessary for life on Earth to continue. Some ignore the concept of genocide altogether, but his space-faring society have also modified the culture over time to make light of it. Often offhandedly mentioning the word but in a more comedic tone, and after a few generations the genocide of vampires became something of a joke. A dark truth that traveled in the undercurrent of society, and it’s an impossible task to convince them otherwise.
In one argument, it’s a fairly useful organization for filtration. They can come in, destroy the problematic elements of monsters taking over important points of worldly infrastructure. In its place a new force of sentient undead can step in and foster a more cooperative life between them and the living world.
On the other hand, his methods are considered too severe. He destroys cities and leaves planets reeling in confusion, sometimes discovering that aliens, time travel, and several fantasy myths exist all in the span of a week. That can lead to its own societal instabilities, but Matthias doesn’t much care for that. Sometimes the Vanguard remains to help stabilize the world before leaving. He’s simply not terribly concerned for how long that stability lasts, as long as the undead are properly annihilated. The time he remains to be the Emperor on Earth can vary from various circumstances. If there are too many problems, he can leave Earth to fend for itself which as one can probably imagine, leads to a whole new set of problems when an entire world order just leaves.
In this, the Vanguard “problem” is almost never a simple affair. They are not conquerors, Matthias is certainly not a tyrant that commands everyone to live a certain way. He leads a highly goal-oriented space-faring, militaristic Empire. As in many things, the situation is not black and white.