////
Instantly, our web of sight caught its fly.
The rotating gears of the great machine aligned perfectly in syzygy, cogs of shadow overstressed. Under the influence of the [Jörmungandr-Tincture], they spun in reverse.
Through a thin, cascading chain We encircled the anomaly and bound it within a circle of consummate slaughter. It died by the hands of its own flesh and blood, and We knew its name.
////
Entity: [Protoplast//Omniglot]
Sphera: [Antediluvia], [Luna], [Golgotha]
Para-class: [Yellow]
Esoterica: [Cnidaria]
Hubris: [Ommetaphobia]
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Esoterica: [Cnidaria]
Ignosis: [The esoterica of {Cnidaria} derives from the sphera of {Antediluvia} and {Golgotha}; establishes a commissural tract in the implanted entity matrix between the ontological concept of stingers to the platonic ideals of assimilation and excruciation.]
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Hubris: [Ommetaphobia]
Ignosis: [The hubris of {Ommetaphobia} derives from the sphera of {Luna}, establishes an antipodal ligature in the implanted entity matrix between the esoterica of {Cnidaria} to the platonic ideal of being observed.]
////
More of the specialized units We came to call scarecrows formed from the carcasses that littered the battlefield. The hive mind of [Antedilluvia] was adapting to Our weaknesses.
But so were We adapting to theirs.
Through a mixture of Bao’s gaze-sensitive skin and Juan’s [Panopticon], We stupefied the scarecrows. Their hubris was a phobia-type bound to their esoterica—trigger the phobia and their esoterica was effectively disabled.
When the specialized units weren’t doing enough, the hive mind doubled-down further, creating more of them to attempt to overwhelm Us. By then, Juan could not create more eyes without drowning in sensory input and epileptic convulsions. Horribly-mutated and heavily-modified tarantula hairs shot through the battlefield, having broken through the phobia through sheer number.
“[The Lord will smite you with madness and with blindness and with bewilderment of heart.]”
A wave of darkness emanated from Eli’s mouth, washing over the morass of Antediluvian horror. Where it passed, anomalies were left befuddled, blinded, and brainless.
Well, more brainless given that this sphera used networks of redundant ganglia to increase its survivability.
In the wake of Eli’s manifest hallucination, Alex took root, fanning the dark fire of violence that dwelled within the remnants of earth’s animal kingdom. Inside each husk, each mutated shell, was an agonized being that knew it had been infected with a parasite unlike any before. Cordyceps paled before the [Ark-Of-The-All-Life], a mooncalf reality whose sole purpose was spreading its perverse mycelium through the infinite iterations of existence.
With the reprieve afforded by Eli, We ran like bats outta Hell’s Eighth Circle.
////
While most of my team ran towards the tip of the [Finger], I rummaged around its innards in roughly the same place that Johnny had been when the titan toppled over. Juan could not maintain a connection this far and I knew that his ability to help would soon come to an end.
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I kept an even step on the writhing, molded-over ground. Whenever a scythe or reaper decided I was home-delivery food, I flicked a pebble at subsonic speed through them. Emphasis on the subsonic because it was just a few kilometers shy of the sound barrier—there just wasn’t enough mass for me to accelerate the stuff past that ephemeral threshold. Regular old rock turned to dust that sand-blasted the anomalies like diamonds through toilet paper.
To say that they didn’t get up was an understatement. They were indistinguishable from the ground.
Premonition washed over the hairs of the back of my neck.
I felt a pulse of something that didn’t blend into the homogenous red.
Turning a corner I came face to face with Johnny.
What was left of him, that is.
////
A handful of meters away from the fingertip, We were divided, Our Tower of Babel toppled.
I shook my head, the return to a sense of self untethered from a collective hive-mind like a punch to the ear. The world rang, not with sound but with dissonance. For that brief stint melded together, we had begun to melt into one another and now there were foreign bodies in our souls.
“Ugh. I have memories of a sister that I’m certain I didn’t have before. My parents did not adopt a Spathian last time I checked.”
“Har. Har.” I drawled back at Alex, my voice disconcerting in that I could no longer recognize it as my own. “Her name’s Anjela.”
“Of course, they needed to give both of you similar sounding names.”
Though Alex said that I knew for certain that had been a gripe I carried with me since childhood. The deja vu sent a shiver down my spine; by instinct, a layer of bone oozed from my pores and coated me in armor.
“Move it people!” Raj pleaded with all the gusto of a middle manager on his wits’ end. “We’re on the last push before we can call it quits.”
I could not wait to close my eyes and make it look like I slept.
“I miss being able to sleep.” Someone murmured, echoing my own thoughts and eliciting another shiver.
////
When I awoke from my nightmares and delirium, it was to a world that didn’t make a lick of sense. The moon had eyes and rings, an angel belonging to the ophanim. There were no stars. The ground was covered in fungal blood, buildings fallen over and a strange red shape large enough to beggar the tallest old-world edifice; only it had been toppled over.
For a split second I was a lost twenty-something-year-old.
And then I was once again deathless.
Reality’s eyes grew scales and so it ceased to observe me. I flickered to stand on my feet and to my right was Juan, slumped on the ground like a drunkard on the sidewalk of a bar. The Aztecan-Vespuscian was knocked-out cold.
I touched two fingers to his glabella and took from him everything he’d ever had, ever been and could be. One moment, he was there and then gone as if he never was. [Zeroth] was a monarch’s absolute mandate, allowing me to usurp natural law and bend it into itself until it recursed away into nothingness.
In the dream gestated by [Ragnarök-Womb], Juan slept, suspended in the ether between worlds. I knew of the insensate slumber of that unreality, of the no man’s land that intersected all universes. With the barest flick of my will, I could return the man into [Golgotha]’s consensus reality. For now, I held him in limbo, letting his wounds reknit under the influence of non-euclidean space.
A pulse from my ontology sent my metaphysical senses outward, encompassing everything in a hundred kilometer radius. Most idolaters learned how to use their idol’s as vessels for their ontology at around yellow-class. I had expanded [Stygia]’s clause of skin to become the air around me, letting go of the manifest delusion to let it ripple out on the fabric of reality.
I flickered, each moment of intersection between the probability waves of fundamental field perturbations forcing me to re-enter the consensus. The technique was not dissimilar to what Antediluvians did to teleport their troops from [Finger] to [Finger], only I did not leave behind strands of an antithetical reality in my wake.
The void’s effects were deleterious in nature, artefacts only manifesting once enough entropic saturation was present in a locus of space-time. I did not let myself seep into my surroundings, be it at the macro-scale of a human woman or the microcosm of the quantum realm.
Static electricity accumulated through interplanar friction crackled around me like a halo each time I resurfaced to [Golgotha] from the nothing-waters of [Lethea]. I built up charge, my body becoming the ammunition for a rail-gun whose substance was naught but twisted spatial-temporal fabric.
The corkscrew reached its apogee and then it spun back with a thunderclap that exceeded the sound barrier by a factor of ten. I was carried forth and slipped in between the threshold’s fibers, my momentum transferring into the shadow-reflection of consensus reality.
When the universe caught me again with its sight, I was nine kilometers above the [Finger]. The next pulse I sent out was through the soles of my feet, focused through a ray rather than an aura. Instead of vague outlines and concepts as with the last time, I got back a crystal clear picture.
For the first time in eons, rage came over me.
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