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”This is complete overkill.” Valor protested.
Envy grinned. "Want to make a bet? I say we'll all agree that the current defenses aren't nearly enough by the time we're done." In her opinion, Valor was still too young and had not yet seen the full extent of what reincarnators could do.
“You’re on.” Valor nodded in agreement.
“You’d think you would’ve learned not to bet against Wrath at this point.” Envy laughed to herself.
"I have, and just saying that out loud is making me second guess myself, but this is different. This is just stupid amounts of overkill just for the sake of it.” Valor pointed out. He wasn’t entirely wrong.
Shiva had found a previously devastated world to use for this project. Only about two-thirds of the world were still left, and the remains looked like the broken pieces of a cracked egg with all the yolk leaking out. The world was uninhabited, mostly because the battle that had devastated the world had rendered it useless from a resource point of view. The two rank 14 psions, Dee and Selendil, had woven a net of psionic energy around the world, reinforcing it with multiple layers of psionic shielding by Selendil, and golden threads of divine power from Dee. That was just one layer of defense. Wrath had created her own containment formations on the world itself, and the four gods, Shiva, Indra, Gaia, and Khaine had created their own golden barrier beyond the boundary set by the two psions.
“Even if it ends up being overkill, I think we’ll all prefer that to being underprepared.” Hope was the voice of moderation.
The tiny form of a Cobra Dragon flitted towards their position at the very edge of the gravity well created by the broken world. The Rank 14 being spoke in a cheery voice. “Are you all ready? Remember your assignments?”
“Dee and Selendil will take the brunt of whatever Wrath has cooked up this time. They’ll be the buffer to keep most of whatever happens out of everyone’s hair. The titan gods will provide support and maybe some divine intervention if things go pear-shaped. They’ll also be the last line of defense in case something gets past the two crazy psions, in addition to keeping the space around the world locked down to prevent Wrath from just using her spatial abilities to skedaddle out of here. You’ll make sure Wrath doesn’t do any indirect bullshit like attacking the grand formation. The three of us will be on problem-solving and outside influence duty." Envy summarized.
“We’ll intercept if any outsider decides this is a great moment to attack us. Which at first glance it would be unless we just feed them to whatever Wrath has cooked up." Valor added. "We'll also deal with it if she for some reason decides to summon something."
“Good enough!” Ysendra nodded in approval. “Well, let’s get this show on the road. I’ll send the signal to the girl of the hour.”
At first, there was no change. This wasn't just because it would've been hard to detect any small changes through the barriers surrounding the broken world. Something like ranking up wasn't like flipping a switch. You could be on the cusp of making the leap, but you still needed to break through the barrier preventing you from ranking up. The less potential you had, the more powerful that barrier would be. Even if Wrath didn't have a problem pushing through that barrier, that didn't mean the barrier didn't exist at all. After a time though, power started flowing towards a certain spot on the largest in-tact chunk of the world.
This world hadn’t been chosen just because it was remote and disposable. They fully expected even what little remained of the world to be annihilated so they couldn’t be anywhere that couldn’t be damaged, but there were other contributing factors as well. The first among them was the fact that this world was still a nexus of power. A lot of divine power was present in the surroundings, as it was one of the nodes of the grand formation that encompassed the entire universe. And with no one using the power, some of it stayed around and saturated the place. Another reason the world remained abandoned despite that power, was that on certain worlds where specific elements of concepts were powerful enough, all the ambient power took on the same quality. On ocean worlds, water-aligned power was aplenty. On a lush jungle world, the power of life was ever-present. The power of this world was influenced by the death and destruction of the world, and it was heavily aligned with the concept of death, annihilation, destruction, and even hopelessness. In a word, it carried the concept of ending. And that was the exact concept Wrath wanted.
The form and bloodline of the Sacred Beast that she’d used for her Ascension to the 11th rank were heavily conceptual in nature. Such beasts existed in the multiverse, but they were in large part formed by the unified protective instincts of people around them instead of being born naturally. The form was a bloodline, but only in the vaguest sense. The only reason she'd even tried using that bloodline was because her unified totem opened her to new possibilities. This time she was doing something even more experimental. Her newest form was purely conceptual, and was even more vague in being a bloodline, since the being didn’t have blood in the first place. It was even difficult to call it a being. Just like the Sacred Beast, it was the sublimation of the unconscious desires and fears of every living being in the multiverse. A thought made manifest.
Everyone knew the end came someday. Even reincarnators recognized that one day they would live their final life, if for no other reason than because they ran into the Reaper or someone else with similar abilities. While some welcomed that end, having lived for long enough to see themselves become tired and bored to the point of becoming apathetic, they on some level feared that ending even when on another level they welcomed it. The vast majority of people simply feared the impending doom. The death of self, and the death of all they knew and loved. The disappearance of everything that made them what and who they were. There was a reason why the end-times were such a popular topic among writers, bards, and all sorts of creators. The impending apocalypse, the Ragnarök. People feared it, and yet they all understood the futility of fighting against it, even as they mounted their final defiant resistance when it all ended. This concept was universal and shared to some extent by everyone.
Wrath was very familiar with the concept of ending, and she had facilitated many such endings. Too many. Endings for individuals, for reincarnators, for beasts and humanoids alike, for gods, for worlds, for stellar bodies, for galaxies, and even for universes. She’d been party to nearly all kinds of endings you could imagine, from pleasant and heartwarming to dreadful and sudden. There was no one more familiar with the concept of ending, and as adept at bringing that end about. And it was this power of ending that she harnessed. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a concept like that had spawned physical manifestations of itself, even if they were rare and came in multiple shapes, just like the Sacred Beings.
“It’s starting.” Envy noted sharply as she could feel the power radiating from the world below reaching some sort of invisible apex point. She wouldn’t have been able to say how she knew that, but she knew.
It started off as a layer of dark smoke started to billow out from the place Wrath had chosen. Just the mere fact that the fog was reaching out to cover what remained of the planet implied that the wards Wrath had erected personally had begun to fail. The smoke grew in thickness and became darker, more ominous. Everyone gathered here could sense a shiver of foreboding running down their back. They knew that despite their inability to sense what was going on inside the haze, touching it would be a very bad idea indeed. It took minutes for the smoke to cover the entire world. Despite that, it was obvious the smoke was actually moving quite quickly as the world wasn’t a tiny one even in its broken state. No natural phenomenon moved this quickly. Not that anyone present would make the error of thinking this phenomenon was in any way natural. In fact, the unnatural nature of the smoke was raising everyone’s hackles.
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As the entire world was swallowed, the smoke seemed to be thickening. It started to take on a firmer shape. It wasn’t quite to the point of seeming solid, but it didn’t quite have the gaseous nature of smoke anymore either. The dark, somewhat ethereal matter seemed to become something akin to energy. Then it seemed to start another wave of expansion, now starting to reach out from the world below, slowly coming into contact with the protective barrier the two extremely powerful psions had wrought. The multilayered barrier shined brightly, a clear sign of it fighting against whatever power the growing darkness possessed. The barrier flexed under the constant pressure, the makers having intuited that an inflexible and rigid barrier would give away more easily.
"The strain is pretty bad, but it's still manageable," Selendil reported mentally to everyone, her psionic voice showing early signs of strain. They were all connected by a psionic connection forged by the two rank 14 psions, as normal communication between these kinds of distances was not feasible and magical communication could be intercepted. The fact that there was any real strain at all on the two rank 14 beings was not missed by anyone.
After spending a bit of time pushing against the barrier, the smoke suddenly started condensing smaller and smaller. After a few minutes, only a mass of swirling energy, darkness, and just plain weirdness remained, no larger than an average dragon. That also meant that the broken world was entirely gone. Not a pebble remained. The mass seemed to pulse all of a sudden, and the psionic link between them seemed to shatter in an instant, though they were all too busy to notice.
Envy felt small. It was like she was a child staring at an endless ocean spanning in front of her, feeling the enormity and pressure of the vast mass of water pushing down on her. For a tiny moment, her psyche wavered because she suddenly felt like she was staring into the endless abyss of entropy and inevitable death. She felt like a tiny ant in front of the universe ending, futilely trying to lift a toy sword to fend off the inexorable wave of inevitability that was about to wash over her. It felt like she was a tiny speck of dust being offered a grand view of the entire multiverse, and she’d never felt so small in all her lives. In that moment, she felt the futility of resistance, and how irrelevant she was in the grand scheme of things.
However, her own mind managed to reassert itself and bring her back to reality. She also felt some kind of protective psionic energy wrapping around her to protect her psyche, as well as all the others, just as the psionic link between them re-established. She couldn’t tell how long she had been lost in the delusion, but it couldn’t have been very long even if it had felt like an eternity. “What the blazes kind of attack was that?” Someone cursed over the mental connection. Judging by the voice it had been Indra.
“That wasn’t an attack.” The resigned voice of Ysendra came over the connection.
“Then what was it?” Gaia asked, sounding more than just mildly panicked.
“That was the being just existing.” Envy replied to everyone. Unlike most, she'd understood more about what had happened. “That was Wrath’s soul putting pressure on all of us, amplified by her form, and us coming eye to eye for the first time with how small and insignificant we truly are in front of someone truly old. I suspect that will happen every time someone comes into contact with the form for the first time.”
“She didn’t mention anything about soul attack before this.” Valor pointed out through the link. “In fact, I seem to recall she has quite a bit of distaste for such attacks.”
"As I said, that wasn't an attack. Those are only about to begin. And we should not assume this being shares Wrath's thoughts on what is and isn't proper." Envy said firmly, and almost as soon as she spoke a blow from the now much smaller and denser mass struck the barrier. It looked like a tornado formed of the black mass extended from the center to hit the barrier, which bent grotesquely under the pressure but held. Cracks spiderwebbed outwards from the impact point, but quickly fixed themselves. The tornado seemed to be made of pure energy, yet it also somehow seemed almost solid, as if the mass had suddenly created some sort of weird tentacle to strike at the barrier.
As if noting that the attack wasn't enough, hundreds more similar tornados formed and stuck the barrier in all directions. The damage spread but kept repairing itself as soon as it happened. Continuous blows rained on the barrier, seemingly without any sign of slowing down. At first, the attacks seemed to probe the barrier for weak spots before starting to focus on a single area, and only occasionally sending random attacks elsewhere to make sure those areas hadn't grown weaker. The focused area started to slowly accumulate damage as the barrier couldn't quite repair itself as fast as it was damaged. It would take a moment for any breaks to occur, but it was only a matter of time.
“Time to see if it can be dissuaded by forcing it to defend as well.” The voice of Ysendra came over the connection again.
The Cobra Dragon wielded her considerable magic, and it seemed multiple tiny stars had suddenly come to life inside the barrier, hoping to push back the darkness, before being hurled straight at the dark mass. They had not expected the attack to be enough to kill the darkness, as they didn’t want to really hurt Wrath, but they were still shocked as the powerful attacks seemed to simply fizzle away and die out by the time they came close. Emboldened by that fact, the two powerful psions joined the attack, seemingly rotating through their vast array of deadly methods, ranging from simple blasts of psionic energy to streams of deadly gravitic and spatial forces, and even what the one known as Dee had called Flames of the End. All the attacks seemed to do was agitate the mass further, and the Flames of the End actually seemed to make it stronger. It seemed like such attacks were futile at best, as the barrage on the barrier only intensified.
The break in the barrier happened by surprise, as a different kind of attack had been mixed within the tornados. A dark scythe of energy smashed into the barrier, making that section simply vanish, while another scythe dashed towards the second barrier created by the gods before coming into contact with a golden mass of divine power launched by Indra. “Beware! It’s a conceptual attack! It carries with it the concept of ending anything it comes into contact with. Avoid contact at all costs!” Indra warned everyone, understanding the nature of the attack after meeting it with his own power.
The barrier formed by the two psions was already segmented, which is why only a portion of it had been destroyed by the attack. However, the web of psionic power that was woven through the barrier was vulnerable. Perhaps fortunately, that part of the barrier had mostly been worn off by the earlier attacks already. That allowed Envy to realize that the being didn't have Wrath's tactical intelligence, or it wouldn't have made such a silly error.
As if angry at being stymied, the mass started gathering power again, obviously preparing for something big. “Uh-oh. She’s planning on striking at the formation just as she suspected. And she’s planning on using a conceptual attack similar to the last one to do it! Only, since it won’t have to travel across space, the barrier won’t stop it.” Ysendra called out, and Envy could feel that the Cobra Dragon was right. Neither of them could predict what would happen if the attack were to land, as it seemed unlikely the grand formation could be unmade so easily.
“How are you planning on stopping something like that?” Valor asked with a bit of worry in his mental voice.
“By fighting a concept with another. Let’s see how much of Wrath is there.” The Cobra Dragon materialized the largest and most luxurious pillow they’d ever seen. Even Envy had to admit that it was almost equal to her handiwork when size was taken into consideration. Then the Cobra Dragons sent an open mental message towards the swirling mass. “If you attack the formation the pillow gets it! I'm going to burn it right in front of you! I mean it!” She threatened.
The trio of reincarnators made a synchronized facepalm at the sight, and could only sigh deeply as the dark mass suddenly stopped and seemed to hesitate, before the power it had gathered started to slowly dissipate. “That’s it. Now act calmly until you regain control, and the pillow will be yours.” Ysendra called out again, as if trying to coax a child or a pet.
“Why am I not surprised that somehow worked?” Valor asked with a tired voice. He was close enough to be overheard by Envy and Hope.
“Because despite everything, Wrath can be very simple at times, even when she’s not herself. A fellow dragon truly knows how to appeal to the hoarding instinct even in the direst of situations.” Envy chuckled. “By the way, still think this was all overkill?” She gestured around her.
“Well…the barrier made by the gods never did come into use, and they didn’t have to interfere too much…” Valor argued. “So, while you’re not wrong, I’m not going to concede so easily.”
"Yet she did get through two rank 14 psions and completely shrugged off the attacks of three beings of that rank before striking at the gods. The only reason the other defenses were not tested is because Ysendra cheated.” Envy insisted.
“Just call it a tie you two.” Hope laughed and relaxed a bit. As seconds passed, the dark mass seemed to grow less agitated and more in control.
“Fine.” The two reincarnators finally chorused after considering it for a moment. They hadn’t even agreed on a wager anyway.
As they relaxed though, Envy suddenly felt like someone had observed them. The feeling lasted only for the briefest of moments, and she couldn't locate the source of the feeling before it disappeared, but it was there nonetheless.