“SKREEEAWWWK!”
Alyss’s shadowed, ethereal body was yanked roughly to the left, not of her own volition yet just in time to avoid an Overseer’s maddened charge. Even so, she felt errant wisps of the billowing darkness that had become her flesh curve and distort about the machine’s monstrously-sharp talons.
Take care, my Master. We must be vigilant.
A whispery, sibilant voice caressed her soul, making her shiver slightly.
She arched her back and whipped forth her hand, fingers contorted into grasping claws that groped towards the creature. From within the pitch-blackness that was her soul, five Nightmares emerged, tall and thin and tentacled, latching on to the mechanical drake with gangly, ethereal phalanges, binding it tight with limbs of shadow.
It twisted, screeched, and shrieked but could not escape their grip.
Alyss dropped her outstretched palm, and panted as she watched it writhe, pausing a moment to catch her breath and release her Shadow Form.
No longer airborne, she staggered to the ground upon legs that felt frighteningly unsteady. Her brow was slick with sweat. Her head was pounding. She snarled in frustration.
The drakes were an absolutely abysmal matchup for her.
Unlike her lesser shades, a Nightmare was plenty capable enough to tear the mutant Canadians limb from limb. But, like the shades, her greater servants struggled against anything boasting a non-biological physiology. And the Overseers, so robust was their armor, they could scarcely damage at all.
The mechanical monsters, by contrast, found it all too easy to damage her, even in her immaterial form. Shadows, unsurprisingly, fared poorly against fire, and the drakes’ exotic alloy was heated to ludicrous proportions whilst they fought, no doubt from those same futuristic engines that granted them locomotion.
To add one final, petty insult to injury, she couldn’t even possess the creatures, as, despite their ruthless cunning, they were machines through and through. They had no minds to subsume. All she could do was tie them down, restraining them temporarily, that one of her companions might arrive to finish the job.
Alyss stretched, grimaced, spat on the ground, and burst once more into undulating shadow, unwilling to risk dropping her Breaker state for long.
She drew breath deeply, the act made queerer by her current immaterium, and rose to survey the evolving field of battle.
It was like nothing she’d ever experienced before.
She peered fearfully over the edge of the massive, beaten, crooked steel skyscraper upon which she’d caught her breath, a great and towering edifice that mirrored those back in Talos, but taller, broader, more advanced.
She looked down.
And saw a sea of red and black.
The mutants were swarming there in numbers simply unimaginable, shoving in between and atop one another to overflow the cramped, shallow streets and alleyways of Old Ottawa, forming a dreadful tide of churning flesh.
With each one of their ilk she, or her companions, slew, two more would take its place.
And so the city devolved into a wretched, ruined slaughterhouse.
It was guts and gore, rust-red blood and blackened innards, a grotesque canvas of death and massacre and war. The ground was invisible, overrun by the many mounds and corpse-piles of fallen monstrosities, all charred and minced and mashed to pieces, trodden into a gruesome slurry by the masses of their still-breathing, still-rabid brethren.
The gut-wrenching scent of seared flesh, spilt blood, and roast organs mixed in with the sour, metallic aftertaste those glowing, falling raindrops left in her mouth to together brew a thick, cloying, suffocating miasma, a gaseous curse sent to plague all those foolish enough to tread unduly upon this bedeviled city.
Alyss and her companions had taken their fight to the darkly storming skies in short order, lest they be drowned by numbers alone, consumed by the ever-swelling avalanche of mutant flesh. Slowly, grimly, foully, they carved their way towards the center of this ghastly metropolis; the chrome, blue-white pyramid where they knew, or hoped, the Dragon’s lair to be.
Would that they could have simply flown there, all of them, directly. But that skies were thick with Overseers, and so Alyss, and Caleb, dared not tread there, for long. Instead, they traveled on the ground, choosing to make war with the drakes’ far flimsier allies.
Whilst Taiven, alone, danced between sickly-shimmering drops of acid rain, moving through air like a fork of living lightning, executing the Overseers with nigh-impunity.
Of them all, he was the only one who could dispatch such foes reliably.
Signal Hero, she ordered, preparing herself mentally to re-engage the fetid melee. I have another bound, for him.
By your command, the voice inside her soul whispered, and another Nightmare flickered out from the midnight-black cloak that composed her flesh. Mere weeks ago, such an expenditure of resources would doubtless have made her sick with worry.
Not anymore.
With a whim, Alyss flexed her will, and examined a particular passage of her Grimoire.
~~~
Current servant count: 7,244 (3,344 shades, 39 Nightmares).
~~~
The past month had seen her power skyrocket.
She’d grown to an extent that beggared belief, drinking deep and drunkenly of the many damned souls that made this place their home. In four short weeks, she’d reaped more here than in all the decades she’d spent in Nycta.
And today, over the course of mere hours, she’d reaped more than double that, again.
So many, that something entirely unexpected had happened.
Alyss had begun to hit her limit.
Or, perhaps not her limit. Perhaps, that wasn’t quite the correct manner to describe it. It was more that, well…it was all too many, too fast.
She’d started to hear whispers.
The more she ate, the more she grew, but at such an advanced rate, at such a ludicrous speed, something…strange had started happening to her. She’d thought that such a ravenous bounty would make her feel full, if anything, and yet, it didn’t. She didn’t feel overburdened, sickly, or sated. Not at all.
With every soul she devoured and made her own, Alyss grew only hungrier.
Hungrier and hungrier, more and more and more famished, and more plagued by whispers that wormed their way inside her mind, that pierced their creeping tendrils into her soul, that infected every nook and cranny of her pithy consciousness, making her sight swim with horrors, and her ears keen with terrors and her flesh crawl with phantoms and her stomach growl louder, LOUDER, LOUDER STILL–
You tire, honored Master, the voice from within hit her like a wave of ice-cold water, wrenching her from reverie.
You take many, this day, it added, softly, sibilantly. You stress the limits of your body, and of your mind. Trifle not, with those maddened souls you reap.
“I’m fine,” Alyss snapped, quickly, the shock making her speak aloud, unnecessarily, this time. She shut her eyes tight, and curled her fingers into fists, driving the whispers down and away.
“I–I just needed a break, is all,” she stammered, weakly. “I’m…in control.”
And she was.
She’d stopped the reaping forcibly, done so more than thirty minutes ago, and she could feel the whispers grow weaker with each further minute that came, and went. It pained her deeply, immeasurably, to do so, to leave such a priceless bounty of fresh souls to waste, but she had no choice. Already, she struggled to match her allies. She refused to let her own weakness cause them undue harm.
She would not lose control.
She would not.
Of course, the voice crooned, startling her once more. Of course, my Master. You are paramount. I would not imply otherwise.
Despite its ostensibly steadfast pledge, Alyss frowned. Try as she might to accustom herself, the creature’s speech never failed to unsettle her.
None of her other Nightmares spoke to her, unprompted. They obeyed her commands silently, implicitly, just as her shadows did, and could and would respond if directly questioned. But their intelligence, it was…not much. Not much more than that of, say, an animal. It rather reminded her of Taiven’s Fang, in that respect.
No, it was only the one who spoke to her. The one that Taiven had encountered, when he’d traveled to her soul. The one who’d guided him. The one who’d watched over her, silently, cautiously, dutifully, those miserable days she spent in Vox’s care.
Her very first Nightmare.
The first one she’d ever made. She didn’t know if that was why the thing acted differently, or whether it was due to Taiven’s meddling. Honestly, the man simply couldn’t help but change everything he laid hands upon.
This one was larger, stronger, dominant. It’d taken up the role of commander without her say, organizing something of a hierarchy within the myriad servants that formed her employ. It was fiercely intelligent, too, and possessed of a rather uncanny cunning, so much so that its counsel had already served her immeasurably on multiple occasions.
It had no name that she could tell, and offered none, so, for now, she’d elected to simply call it First.
Yet, despite its utility, Alyss knew precious little more about it. Aside, obviously, from the fact Taiven had already made its acquaintance. They’d discussed the encounter, from start to finish, in great detail. He’d told her exactly what her inner world, if one could call it such a thing, looked like, in the hopes she might have answers for him.
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She hadn’t.
But in any case, she knew that the two of them had spoken. It was the only thing that gave her comfort. Despite the creature’s horrific appearance, ghastly voice, and grave demeanor, Taiven hadn’t detected a hint of hostility from it. Quite the contrary, in fact. In his view, it was loyal to a fault. In his view, it wanted nothing more than to serve.
His words didn’t comfort her much.
Alyss took another deep, tremulous breath. Far below, she caught a glimpse of flashing radiance, as if a cosmic comet prowled the streets beneath.
The High Inquisitor, ripping through the ranks of the enemy like supple chaff.
She knew it was well past time she’d rejoined him.
I grant you stewardship, she informed her dark commander. Ten of your kindred. Defensive formation. Protect me whilst I fight.
Your will be done, her servant rasped, and she felt the cloying shadows that surrounded her shift and morph, forming into a semi-translucent shell of gnarled, rippling, reactive spikes. Alyss howled a skittish battle cry, and dove down.
Down and down, stories and stories down. Down towards the writhing, twisting, churning ground, and the cursed souls that swarmed atop it.
She struck a wall of flesh, impacting it with the full weight of over seven thousand souls.
Billowing waves of pure pitch-blackness shivered through the enemy ranks, tearing blistered limbs, pulping emaciated flesh, and savaging mutant organs, rending all those around her into little pieces of fell fascia. The Canadians shrieked in rage, and shrank back in fear, hesitating for but a split second.
Alyss bent her knees, grit her teeth, slapped her open palms sharply together, and twisted.
Tendrils of shadow emerged by their hundreds from the eddies of her phantasmic form, warping and morphing under her iron will, contorting themselves into a massive, brutal, flanged drill. She smiled grimly as the mutants shrieked towards her, growled with effort, and the drill began to spin.
Alyss flexed her legs, bunched her muscles, and plowed right through the incoming horde.
SQUELCH.
The Canadians screamed, wailed, and liquified.
SQUELCH.
Their foul blood formed a pond, a lake, a tsunami. It blinded her.
SQUELCH.
It surrounded her, enveloped her, dyed her vision an awful, rusted crimson, drowning the bubble of shadow that shielded her from harm. She felt their souls, dark and pleading, desperate for salvation, press against the frail edges of her mind, but shoved them mercilessly aside.
She raced sightlessly down cramped streets, plowed drunkenly through crumbling buildings, and screamed past cars she couldn’t see. The pounding in her head reached a throbbing, pulsating crescendo, drowning out all conscious thought, increasing with each passing moment, the draw on her reserves of lime-green Entropy enormous, ruinous, until, finally, finally…
She was through.
She pierced past the wall of churning, decaying, mutant tissue and saw before her a glimmer of glorious light.
Alyss emerged from a tunnel of guts and gore, dissolving her drill and pirouetting into the air to hang there, weightlessly, heaving for fresh breath, well above the melee.
And, below her, she saw Glare.
With each passing day, with each subsequent battle, the Immolator had grown more accustomed, more suited to his newfound power, his Godly might. And though the more resilient Overseers might have posed him some measure of trouble, the mutants…
Well, they simply stood no chance.
Glare laughed uproariously as he rent the ranks of twisted foe asunder, twirling and catapulting himself through the air in a display of breathtaking acrobatics. His perfect, all-white smile brilliantly refracted the dim, gaunt luminescence cast by glowing, falling raindrops as he lanced little beams of blistering light from his very fingertips, drawing his hands back, and forth, and back again, carving through the horde like a massive, meaty cake, slaying scores of the wretched creatures with each motion and every gesture.
He plunged into a mutant’s chest, disemboweling it with his bare hands, drawing them apart to slice it brutally in half, chuckling as he did so, and rose to greet her in midair.
“Well met, sister!” the Immolator roared, absolutely drenched in foul gore. He whipped each arm to the side and flared with incredible radiance for a moment, vaporizing the foreign tissue from his flesh and plasmic armor, making Alyss wince.
“A glorious battle, is this not?” He laughed. “Glorious!”
His glowing eyes pulsed to the tune of his madly beating heart, echoing the drums of war.
“The monstrosities fall before us like chaff!” He snarled, beset by a startling viciousness and seething hatred. “Like wheat in a field! Like lambs to the slaughter! By the thousands, they fall! Why, if only Rover could–”
Abruptly, Glare stopped himself. His laughter strangled, his ferocious smile fell away, and all was replaced by a sudden, somber silence. Alyss regarded him, warily.
“Indeed,” she agreed. “By the thousands, they fall,” she confirmed, eyeing him seriously.
“And tens of thousands take their place.”
Glare met her eyes, grim and strangely distant.
“Do not delude yourself, Inquisitor, into thinking this our battle,” she chastised, lightly. “It is not. It is not sustainable. Every moment spent warring with this chaff serves only to drain our finite reserves, weakening us for our true adversary.”
“Yes,” Glare replied, muttering, his enthusiasm extinguished. “You’re right, of course. My apologies, I…” The Immolator paused, once more, in that strangely distant manner, and looked down, to behold his own beautifully-glittering, half-naked form.
“The might of Godhood can be a heady thing,” he murmured, half to himself.
But his words seemed not intended to elicit any manner of reply, so she said nothing, instead shutting her eyes tight to cycle through the sight of no less than one hundred shades she’d extended in a probing sphere about her, as far as her all-too-limited range would allow.
To do so, at such a speed, was a thoroughly nauseating, disorienting experience that drove her legs to shiver and her stomach to lurch, but they’d no time to waste. Countless novel vistas greeted her, flashing before her eyes, useless data, again, and again, and again, until…
There!
“There!” She cried aloud, eyes still shut tight, an arm and hand extended in the corresponding direction. “At last!” She exclaimed, with intense relief.
The white-blue pyramid shimmered in her shadow-sight, in all its pristine, chromic glory. Finally, it seemed they’d managed to actually reach it. Why, it was barely several leagues away, now, barely a scant few moments’ travel by air, just over and beyond a half-dozen more of those steely, towering, crooked skyscrapers.
Alyss took flight without delay, directing Glare to follow her with but a gesture, the airborne Blaster easily able to match her pace.
Signal Taiven, immediately! She instructed First, as tainted raindrops streamed across the protective bubble surrounding her. Tell him we’ve located the lair!
A single Nightmare broke off to do her bidding as Alyss and Glare soared higher and higher, breaching the metallic canopy created by the many towering husks of crumbling steel, harried by errant Overseers that the latter fervently dispelled, until, at last, they saw it.
A break in the concrete jungle.
A massive, flattened, city square, a field of polished stone that spread out for leagues in every direction.
Empty, of course, save for its one, defining feature.
The chrome pyramid.
Great, yet bizarrely, not particularly grand. That is to say, not particularly large, or exceptionally ostentatious. For though this chromic ziggurat was no doubt masterfully constructed and clearly in considerably less disrepair than the positively putrefying architecture of the city serving as its home, it, itself, was…almost small. Flat. Humble.
Why, it stood barely two stories tall, a shrub compared to the redwoods that bordered it.
What made it stand out, however, was the truly monumental amount of empty space separating it from the surrounding skyline. A blank, planar, square, or rectangle, of clean and polished granite served as its perimeter, making the entire thing seem like an artificial valley in an otherwise mountainous metropolitan jungle.
That, and the hundreds of Overseers orbiting the sky far above it.
Alyss stopped cold. Glare reached her side.
“Canada Science and Technology Museum,” he murmured, rubbing tenderly at his head as he deciphered the Ancient script emblazoned upon the chrome pyramid’s frontal face.
Then he looked up, and blanched.
“Priest’s blood, that’s…that’s a lot of Overseers,” he whispered, a measure of anxiety at last managing to infect his otherwise darkly bellicose demeanor.
“Come now, Inquisitor,” Alyss stammered, swallowing forcibly, squeezing her hands tight together in an effort to stay a waver from similarly invading her speech. “No doubt you faced worse odds upon the Frontlines.”
The Immolator did a double-take at her.
“Are–are you serious?” He asked, bewildered. “No, we didn’t.” He looked back at the swarm, shaking his head, grimacing as he did so. “Perhaps, perhaps it would be wiser t–”
KRACKK-THOOM.
In a flash of majestic red lightning, their third and final companion arrived.
Hero’s body crackled gloriously as it apparated amidst them, positively seething with errant strands of rippling, crimson electricity. Remarkably, despite doing battle with their most troublesome foes, the sanguine swordsman seemed just as fresh and ready and eager as he ever had.
“I’m here!” Taiven announced his presence, unnecessarily. “Is this t–”
The ground rumbled.
It was a thin, yet horribly foreboding ripple of distant motion that disturbed the silent air.
It moved out in a circular pulse, dislodging a thin layer of dust from the crumbling skyscrapers surrounding them, shivering windows and cracking old concrete, shaking all to their very foundations.
The air stilled.
The mutants swarming below them quieted, and looked towards the pyramid.
The Overseers on high stopped their restless orbit, and looked towards the pyramid.
In silent unison, Taiven, Alyss, and Caleb all turned from one another to look towards the great chrome pyramid.
The cobalt-blue of its otherwise smooth, pristine, white exterior glowed furiously bright for just a moment, before splitting open at its very precipice. The building’s contours shifted and morphed, retracting and pulling back, smoothing and opening like a sleek, metallic flower.
To reveal a deep, dark pit.
A cybernetic temple, making way for its patron machine-god.
From the depths of the deep darkness, a scream spilled forth.
It was the fervic roar of gargantuan servos, the plasmic whine of mammoth engines, the ear-splitting screech of shearing metal and grating steel-on-steel. It broke and mutilated the stillness of the Ancient technopolis, making Alyss wince and clutch at her ears, even in her Shadow Form.
From their high perch, the Overseers shivered.
From their churning alleys, the mutant Canadians quailed in terror.
From depths of the deep darkness, the pitch-blackness, a massive, clawed hand emerged.
It reached up, and up and up, and came down with power overwhelming, driving into the flat plateau surrounding its birthplace, burrowing into the hardened concrete, talons slicing through steel alloy like butter, its colossal size flattening those poor mutants around it into a turgid, rust-red paste.
The hand gripped tight, and pulled.
Pulled the rest of its body up and out of its den.
First was saying something to Alyss, shouting at her from within her soul, but she couldn’t seem to hear its words. She couldn’t seem to move a muscle. Her breaths came fast and frantic. Her heart was pounding in her ears.
At the edges of her vision, she saw her Immortal companion, pale and trembling, mouth dropped open wide, trapped between rage and terror. She saw her fearless Hero, face taut and tight, gripping his wolf-sword so hard his knuckles whitened.
Her gaze just kept rising higher.
And higher.
And higher.
Higher than the tips of the tallest towers, broader than the breadth of mighty mountains, talons the size of ten palisades stacked atop one another, teeth by the hundred thousands. It was pockmarked in bristling missile silos, studded with whining laser batteries, and innervated by pulsating electric spines. Its myriad circuitry ran a deep, rich, red-orange, coating it like funnels of digital lava. Its countless scales were great slabs of metal alloy, thick and dense and impenetrable.
It was a moving mountain, a living metropolis built only for conquest and war.
It was death and destruction and maddened machine-power.
It was DRAGON.
~~~
OMEGA NODE #0001, UNIT DESIGNATION:
END OF ASCALON
~~~
It looked down upon them from higher than the heavens up above, and roared. And spread wings the size of city districts wide.
And the Overseers orbiting it crowed with glee.
And the mutants about its feet trembled with fear.
And when it spoke, its words were fire and fury.
COLIN IS MINE.
ALL MINE.
YOU WILL NOT TAKE HIM FROM ME.
So it said, and the fight began.