"I found it. After all this time, I FOUND IT. BROTHERS, COVER ME WHILE I OPEN THE PACKAGE!!!" claimed the captain Jonathan Lacks of the third brotherhood by a certain encrypted audio transmission.
He found the exact location of a mysterious black portfolio, the size of a modern laptop, in the debris of an abandoned cave, under some tens of meters of dust, full with corpses of old demihumans, fossilized random monsters and, in the middle of the medium sized cave that was in total darkness was a human corpse's remnants still plugged to something deep under the rocks, yet the corpse stood dead, holding the black package with what back in the day were a pair of hands,
but fortunately, the place wasn't inhabited by anything
In the surface, two hundred kilometers over him, his legendary W12 attack bike was destroyed, almost all his brothers and serfs hunted down by cyberfurries that served the god Darwin, zombified hobgoblin megahordes measuring billions, or whatever horrors this aggressive, parallel world would throw at them
Over the surface of the world, a massive, apocalyptic clash between various gods and their followers was happening. Six gods, Ala, Escher, Tlaloc, Amaterasu, Darwin and JC brought massive fleets, billions of tanks, millions of titans shooting, smashing, fighting barefist and nuke, ramming over each other until after a hundred twenty years of siege, the iron wall, a massive defensive complex that surrounded the whole parallel world, started to crack from the extreme and cataclysmic forces of that single battle.
Destruction would ensue for a certain amount of time:
Memetic weaponry from Escher,
Titans measuring hundreds of meters high at the minimum and kilometers high at the most, fighting as organized and coordinated as literal armies, in the millions, from JC,
Tlaloc's low orbit thunder arrays and thousands of battlecrushers dropping fighters and bombers hailing the skies with virus, flames and basically heaven and hell combined until they exhausted their resources and saturated the planet's atmosphere with random gases
Amaterasu defending her world tooth, nail, and cunning, jamming transmissions here and there, causing havoc that made each invader attack each other instead of her at every chance but not actively fighting the invaders
Trying to communicate with each other was impossible at best, and I don't know what would have been at worst, best not described I suppose
Until the gods continued their fight in the planet's actual surface
The real battle would begin then, the race for the black package would come to an end after hundreds of millenia. Whoever gets the package could, with the required resources to handle an infinite amount of information in such a little package and the ruthlessness to defend it from even oneself, become instantly a true god and all the involved parts knew that.
The transmission of the captain didn't pass ignored by anyone. Amaterasu didn't know what she was holding, felt betrayed by that one who called a 'hero', the other gods heard the message, the sound file's source was then found after a day
The race became a carnage, the carnage became slaughter, from the skies would rain not water but blood and burnt metal, fallen aircraft and flying monsters. The sounds of nature died the very first hour after the first two gods clashed in the world's skies. The world could not longer support life and its surface died as well. No more bacteria, no more fertile ground, all native monster species extinct, almost all humans as well disappeared
And after a week of running back to the surface using detour tunnels and passages, the captain called for whatever thing could extracted him from the world, but suddenly, Escher cuts all transmissions to all the gods for a while, as if it spoke to all the other gods.
After a minute, the war stopped suddenly, dropships and teleporter beams appeared to evacuate all who could be rescued.
A mechanical kraken titan that measured half a kilometer long appeared identifying itself as an avatar of Escher, so the titan spoke with a childish voicetone, asking our hero Jonathan if he wanted to be reincarnated, which he answered firing a full mag, or mags, of a rifle someone lent him millenia ago.
The rifle itself is a relic piece of equipment without telescopic sight based in the template for a barret .50BMG with enriched uranium cartridge to let the bullet fly impulsed by a nuclear explosion after impacting a target, double electromagnetic rail barrel and option for dual mag, dual drum, dual ammo box, or even, a dual ammo feeding band for certain situations.
"DECIDE: YOU WANT REDEMPTION IN REINCARNATION?!" asked the imponent titan with a childish voice, more specifically, one of a ten year old little girl, even if that voice belongs to a god. The titan's tentacles pointed at him without attacking him
The captain charged in defiance to the titan, which instantly obliterated him in one hit. The rest of the titan squad did not move only until another assault squad of dragongods of an enemy faction fired their rad-fire bombs. The titan squad attacked the dragongods with anti air laser fire protecting the squad leader titan until it got extracted by air via a titan transporter
------------------------------{A year later, in a disclosed location}----------------------------------------
Escher, Jonathan Lacks and Amaterasu were discussing the terms of renewal of the parallel world affected by the war
Escher proposed to eliminate the full populace and start again, Amaterasu demanded the other gods to repair the damage made to the world
Jonathan demanded to get its body back, for the previous one was destroyed and beyond any kind of repair
"I propose the creation of a backup system so the populace can restore its sanity after the war and reward them for finding any remaining resource" I, the captain, said to the goddesses
Escher and Amaterasu didn't like the proposal but didn't have any better ideas, so they let the captain to create the system
Escher proposed to Jonathan to create a leveling system that could be simple to understand and master
Amaterasu then, demanded to him and Escher to start repopulating the world with the civilians first, for that was ingrained in its programming. Amaterasu herself was safe, so Escher. But captain Lacks wasn't, so for destroying him, she prepared him a new, bulky, heavily armored custom mechanic body where to inter his remains, if by remains one can refer to its pair of brains, then its remains can be interred in a mechanical body
This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.
------------------------------{Another "five" (millenia?) later, in a disclosed location}------------------------
The palace of Escher was composed of a massive megametric structure in a virtual reality not so different to the real dimension in any sense but for the ability of Escher to reshape this dimension to
"Transfer me the system's template before the end of the century so I can insert it into the world's new structure" Amaterasu asked to the captain Lacks
"Would you like to see the new world structure so you check if the system could adapt to it?" asked Amaterasu
"I shall trust in you, so the rest is up to you. Just don't edit nor alter the system in any way" Jonathan said to Amaterasu. "By the way, don't you know where's Sylvie-Marie?"
"Who is it?" asked Escher and Amaterasu
The hero answered to them both "Is one of my lots of children"
"Why do you claim to be the hero?" Shouted Amaterasu furiously because, indirectly, he was the responsible for destroying her world and having herself repairing it, so she had a point in getting angry each time she saw it
"May I go back to earth?" asked the hero with a tired voicetone, as if he worked during a lot of time in something
Joyfully, Escher said "What makes you confirm you are from earth? being a human, big bro? teehee"
"Escher, HERS is not the first world I destroyed. Be thankful that actually she has a world it can repair. And make them remember, I'm not a hero in any sense"
"DO I HAVE TO THANK YOU FOR ALMOST DESTROYING MY WORLD?! WHAT IN MY NAME YOU THINK AM I? HUH!?" Amaterasu fired sunflares out of fury and hatred towards Jonathan all over Escher's palace's main room without damaging anything
Escher asked kindly to our hero "BTW, might you make me a favor? I helped you back then. Not saving your soul's remnants, not stopping the recent war, but with the other thing, you remember?" ignoring Amaterasu's rage moment
"What ya want?" the captain asked while working in new updates to the provisional leveling system he had to make as compensation to Amaterasu while also ignoring her
At this time, Amaterasu didn't acquire a fixed form so the other two could see her as more than a sun moving here and there, which made her upset each time she entered Escher's palace
The captain said to the goddess of sunshine "Sorry, I don't understand what you are (and I better don't) so I can't see you in another form, but is subjective. You can see yourself as whatever you are, so..."
The captain got distracted with the system updates he sent to Amaterasu, so he couldn't hear what Escher told to him
Escher summoned a wooden table that changed constantly in form, color, texture and pattern. Jonathan summoned a bunch of chairs and a bone-white leather couch with a replica of his own head in each side for him to seat
"So, what you wanna ask me?" said the hero after taking its seat
Before Escher told him what he needed to hear, she changed her black dress for a red one, the dress was and is designed to vary from person to person, so an approximate description cannot be made, except for the V-neck in the back and half a meter long blood-red tail made of gold cloth. Her hair was as long or short as one wants to see it. Only four people know her real appearance and that's how she wanted to keep it, including the captain, of course
"Aight, aight, first, lemme out this thing" referring to Amaterasu
The goddess of sunshine asked then "What you talkin'about? hehe" only to get such an answer as
"get a NINE TAILED FOX MIKO FORM OR GTFHO HEREEE!!!!" before getting outed because the sunshine goddess didn't change her appearance to the one demanded by Escher
"Sorry, Escher, but one shall know, there are 3 types of NTFs out there. One shall not anger a NTF, for they tend to be gods by 'emselves; just don't use the..."
He got interrupted when Amaterasu appeared in a miko outfit, but a blood-red outfit with some engrams or characters in it, golden skin actually made of gold, white-hot eyes and with a more cunning attitude. Escher spawned a billion cyber-dobermans around her, just in case, to which the captain suggested to disappear them all
"THIS. IS. YOUR. LAST. WARNING.!!!!!" Amaterasu shouted. She was absolutely, surely, pissed off with Escher. Escher defied her with her most powerful memes to battle against her
Escher wielded a .50 cal glock called "The power of old internet", a weapon designed to be both dangerously memetic on sight and capable of firing memetic phenomena (memes). A god's weapon couldn't be less. Only seeing or knowing about the weapon causes madness and random things, generally lethal, to anyone who knows, listens about, somehow watched it in images or actually sees it
Amaterasu wielded a replica of the legendary Kusa sword, ready to battle against Escher
"Death protects me. Sanity has passed all over me, the fear chatted with the doubt to meet me now, behind the alley, but they run away when madness appears behind me, to guard me against them"
The hero quickly spawned "the three weaknesses" which were
1. a bowl of pho, but the size of Mountain Home,
2. a hundred kilos of hardboiled eggs, another thousand kilos of scrambled eggs, a single hardboiled egg with edible gold coating with his own blood around the egg,
3. and finally, another ton of fried tofu, all to please the golden entity, or at least, don't get attacked with memetic phenomena and things (possession) better (sanity coming back) not said
The golden entity stopped attacking Escher when she saw the food and ate it all, getting pleased with the subtle taste of blood and porkchop, she considered a little the soy a little too salty and the eggs were just fine. So he got her pleased for now
Amaterasu then banished from Escher's palace, unmaking any possible damage made, every scratch, even the less visible ones
But the outburst of power from Escher left Jonathan on the brink of true death
Estimated time to death......................................20:00:00:000:000
twenty hours to finally, truly, surely, with all guarantees, die.
All because a goddess spent almost all my energy to unleash an attack she didn't use, literally wasting my life. But I don't blame her. I did the same to my brethren, to the recruits back then, to my first child
HEY, WAKE THE FUCK UP!!! Escher shouted to me after I lost consciousness for nineteen hours of a good period of eye-closing.
I, who I think I'm still Jonathan Lacks, stood up after several fails. How did I fail several times in just getting up?
"I have to tell you something" Escher claimed to me, sat down in her throne, too big for her to actually fit, so her feet didn't reach the ground, which is a thing one could call... cute? please correct me if I'm wrong
Still in her blood-red dress but plugged from her back to the throne, she proclaimed "Onii, for you, I have a task: Fine the demon Lord, is somewhere deep in the world where you were a little time ago"
"I require a name. I require a location" I asked to her while kneeled before her throne
"A name has not been given to me. A location, neither. Last seen in the parallel world I picked up at. Neither a form, measurements, anything. Your task then is to find it. BTW: you'll be capable of speaking with me, only me and you, you and me"
I then, asked for the time for the operation "confirmed time to accomplish?" before getting such a short yet hard answer to digest "One year"
After some random talking and headpatting she demanded me to give, she added "You will start from the top, as estimated, AIGHT!?". After that, I stood up again and gave a thumbs up, both thumbs, then I gave my best smile to make sure she still trusts me
"What's that ribbon you carry at your right?" Escher asked me with curiosity
And I answered the truth: I'm engaged to someone, and not only a simple someone: but a princess that just happens to be an apocalypse rider
"With who? Lerna, Katja or Hanabi?" I answered that is a secret kept with my life, which I literally offered her eons ago
"You can kill me, obliterate me. But the moment she knows about my death, she is tasked with annihilating the one who destroyed me. And she's an apocalypse rider. Are you sure to kill me?"
For some reason, Escher watched with a horror face after I smiled. Is is rare to do it? idk
"I will give you a surprise, just wait for it, ok?" Escher moved her hand and I started to see strange symbols all around me until darkness rounded me
A moment later, I was watching some HUD-like interface and a timer that was already starting to count
"Onii, please, I beg you: DO. YOUR. WORST, teehee" said Escher into my mind with a sinister accent in her girlish voice
This world seems to be dark, just as I like, my day visor that lets one to see as clear as if day it was even in the darkest of places is my help, aid and only one I can still trust in
A random monster came towards me, but I sliced it with... a claw?! Another came and with,
a microgun?! I slaughtered using a thousand shots
Those monsters sounded like humans to me, but they are maybe acting as them to ambush me. Better be careful...
massacring them ALL!!!
DEATH
HAS
A R R I V E D