(Mickey POV - Heaven's Key, Outside the Raven's Eye Casino)
[https://i.imgur.com/l29NGt1.png]
"He's back!"
"This is a lot sooner than I thought!" Some of the remaining enforcers yelled out.
Having finished off half of the officers present there, Euclid considered finishing off the rest and then turned around. He took a few steps towards the body pile. Those cowardly troops that had faked their fall were still lying there dishonorably, not moving. He stepped over them and got back into the middle of the mole hill. Then he raised his hands and manifesting above were scores of missiles, like the one he used to blast the officers. Explosive rain soon fell upon the remaining enforcers, and the only things left after the smoke cleared were white tags. He didn't forget to send a small present to the rest of the officers either as they had been replaced with tags as well.
Now that this has happened, the remaining enforcers completely broke. Without the officers to keep them in line they scattered like mice, some of them tearing off their golden uniforms, tossing them on the ground like trash and running into the crowd naked.
A minute later, Euclid emerged where he stood previously. The rest of the tags had vanished.
Solemn, he scans the crowd and seeing no more enemies, roars in triumph.
"Uoooooohhhh!!!" The crowd breaks into applause. Clapping and cheers come his way.
"You did it, kid!" My companion yells out.
"Euclid! Look my way!" Some woman in the crowd screams.
"Euclid!"
"Uoooooohhhh!!!" He raises his hands in triumph!
"Euclid!"
"Euclid!"
"Euclid! Euclid! Euclid! Euclid! Euclid! Euclid! Euclid! Euclid! Euclid! Euclid! Euclid! Euclid!" The crowd chants his name. I joined in.
Those pricks keeping their boot on us have finally gotten their comeuppance. A single person was all it took to do it! This city has crumbled! What I am looking at now is the new ruler of the city!
"Ahahahahahaha!!!" Euclid laughs happily, basking in the joy. My swells with pride to be able to witness such an event. I kneel out of respect.
The festivities continue like that for a while, and Euclid stands there looking smug. He's earned it.
Eventually the emotions subside and the people pick a representative. He separates from the crowd and moves up to Euclid.
"Euclid, the people want to know what you intend to do next?" The crowd goes quiet hanging on his every word. Right now, he could say he wants the top position in the city and the people would support him. That is how high our infatuation with him is.
"Hmmmm..." Placing his hand on his chin, he thinks for a moment and then smiles. With a childlike cheer, he pronounces: "Kill all of you!"
Missiles manifest in the air, and start wiping out the crowd in loud explosions. One of them lands some distance away and wipes out the group next to me, replacing them with tags. If I was a couple of feet closer to it, I would have gotten caught in it. I feel a sudden chill.
Huh? This wasn't supposed to happen!
"Ahhhhhhh!" A surviving woman screamed and started running.
"What the hell is he doing!" A man yelled.
"The Enforcement Division, where is the Enforcement Division!? Just what is the government doing?"
It seems today is when I die after all. I am a ghost so I am just waiting for it to happen anyway. The rest of the crowd quickly disperses in a panic, but our own group just sits there prepared to accept death should Euclid turn his attention to us.
Now that he has started attacking civilians, the rest of the ED arrives. The Epistemes belonging to it have all been killed, and the punitive corps have scattered, so what remains are the mid ranking enforcers, all of them Aleators.
They wait tensely for the duel against the crowd to finish, and when Euclid emerges they challenge him.
"Even if it costs us our lives-" Before the Head of the Enforcement Division can say anything, Euclid once again releases a missile barrage. Explosions rock the streets. I just sit there at the side, watching with dread at what is going to happen next. To be fair, I am kind of enjoying myself. I've gotten too caught up in the fervor of the crowd, and this reminded me that I was just waiting for death originally.
Even if Euclid takes up the mantle of the ruler, what difference would that make to me? I'd still be as doomed as ever. Somebody else winning does nothing good for me.
It is actually really good that he has started killing regular citizens, they got it coming too. They were bootlicking without limit, and now that somebody stronger has come around they switch to kissing his ass in an instant. Wretches. They deserve to be put to death, all of them.
This just shows how better Euclid is than me, and how his mind works on an entirely different level from us regular people. If it was me, I'd have yielded to the temptation and lived the easy life as a ruler. He is a true hero to seek war instead of riches.
Once I thought that, my admiration for him restores itself. He didn't betray us. He was never on our side to begin with, so there is no need to hold a grudge. Had he been weak, none in the crowd would have helped him, so what need does he have to fulfill their expectations?
None.
Though rather than a hero who liberated the city, he will in the future be known as a villain who went on a killing spree, a bogeyman to serve as reason for the continued existence of the existing order.
Euclid emerges again, thousands of tags vanishing all around him like wisps spirited away to the world beyond. Everyone, but us ghosts had escaped from this place. He looks around, and for a moment I thought our eyes met, but he ignores us. Instead he grasps at the skies and the city becomes shrouded in darkness.
[https://i.imgur.com/Xjrrwgv.png]
Eyes, innumerable demonic eyes cover the skyline, looking down at us.
I gulp. A bead of sweat rolls down my face. It feels like the sky has cracked upon and a demonic god is looking at us from beyond the rift.
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I hear a click of the boots, and as I turn towards the sound, it was in time to see a huge wave of flame wash over Euclid, leaving only his tag. I look down the street and see another where the blast came from.
(Heaven's Key, Celestial Realm, Battle again Eln)
[https://i.imgur.com/dIpszDY.png]
"Why did you kill the citizens!?" Some older dude barked at me, scowling all the while. Let's see, what would be the based thing to do here?
"Ahahahaha!" I laugh arrogantly aiming to piss him off. "They'd die sooner or later, so they might as well add to my pile now!"
The taunt was a success as I saw his veins bulging. His glare becomes even more intense.
"You shit faced kid! If all you wanted was to become a ruler I would have supported you!"
"Humph." I twirled a chip in my hand in arrogant unamusement, snubbing my nose at him.
"Talent is wasted on pieces of crap like you!!!" He moved on the attack.
It was the same flame attack he used on me earlier. A wave of superheated air, hot enough to turn me to ash washes over me. My clothes and hair burst into flames, and quickly incinerated. Flames spew from my mouth, nose and eye sockets as I try to scream and my skin melts away before I am burnt to a crisp. All of my biological matter is consumed, save for my skeleton which gets reduced to tiny scraps of cinder. Everything burns away save for one, my brain core. It alone remains pristine and unblemished, untouched by flame.
"You are-!!!" This seems to shock him. While he is gawking, I take advantage of his distraction to manifest a shotgun and fire it. The high velocity metal tears his left arm straight off his shoulder.
"Agghhhh!!!" He screams in pain, clutching at his shoulder. He looks around at what has happened and notices all the weaponry, 100s of shotguns pointed at him from above. "Shit!"
I scatter him into a pile of meat. No matter how long I wait, he doesn't come back.
It is time to kill everyone.
(Mickey POV - Heaven's Key, Outside the Raven's Eye Casino)
Nothing can stop Euclid. I imagine he will kill Episteme Eln effortlessly. And just as I'd suspected he would, he emerged after a couple of minutes as if nothing big had occurred.
With a demonic grin, he grasped at the skies once more. The eyes came back.
"NONE OF YOU WILL SURVIVE!" A demonic voice rasped out with grim determination, striking fear into the hearts of people. I was sure that right now, every single person in the city was looking at the skies, staring out the windows at what is going to happen next.
[https://i.imgur.com/g6v2D6B.png]
As I watched something manifested in the air above. It felt faint at first, but what came to life was an enormous chunk of rock, far larger than the entire city. Large enough to flatten it completely, it blotted out the sun. Soon enough it was released, and gravity started to take hold. This is how we will die.
Once the rock hits the city, it will start a culmination match with everyone in it. And Euclid is the one who will emerge victorious, no doubt about it.
Sigh, I suppose it would be better to die like this than lose the last of my chips to some rando in the tournament.
"AHAHAHAHAHAHA!" The demonic, godlike laughter rang out from the air above and the huge chunk of rock came ever closer. It was even bigger than I imagined it to be, it was far larger than the entire city, I had merely misjudged the scale and the distance. Before the gigantic object, we were less than ants. It gave an imposing pressure as it fell, pushing the air inwards
As the rest of the group are saying their prayers, Euclid does something surprising.
"Ah, forget this. I am done." In the next moment, the huge rock that had just about touched the tip of the largest building in the city vanishes.
Not paying us any attention, Euclid starts walking towards the edge. We watch him in tense silence. After a short walk a few blocks away, he grasps the railing and hurls himself over it.
I gape. Just like that? It is going to end just like that?
"He, he left? That monster just decided to let us all live and suicided?" Some of the citizens started wondering.
"He really did leave?" I heard a woman saying in the distance. She was one of the citizens who was miraculously spared in Euclid's barrage.
"We are alive?"
"We will survive?"
The mood of the city turned jubilant.
"UUUEEEEEEE!!!" Cheers rang out.
"He left!? He really left!" Some looked in disbelief.
"He is gone!" Some of them burst into tears.
"It's over! It's finally over!"
"We're safe!"
"YYYAAAAAAAA!!!" The yells of joy rang by the thousands.
It was the most exciting day the city had experienced in millenia, possibly much longer. I myself was disappointed.
Just what am I doing caring about my life, when my hero who had reached the peak threw it away so easily. How can I just continue to wait for death after witnessing his glory? I am done. Done with the city, and done with this life. Ignoring the bustle and the celebration going behind me, I make my way to the rail and follow after Euclid.
"Long last the city!"
"Long live the ruler!"
"We won!" "We won!" "We won!" "We won!" Before I crossed the railing, I could hear the crowd chanting this far behind me.
We were content. They to live, and I die.
None of us could ever have expected that in a blink, the universe we are in would stop existing.
---
Character Sheet
Name: Euclid
Rank: Inspired
Title: Aleator
Substrate: Universal Brain Core of the Transcendi - Rank 7 (low)
Halfway to becoming a Transcendi already. He has the mind of one, but his actual power is only a step beyond that of a human. Rather than unleashing the entire power of the core and attaining it, since he has no pressure to develop quickly he has instead opted for gaming. Currently, his allocated storage capacity is 100 thousand fold in excess of a regular human. As neural representations get exponentially more efficient the more capacity is allocated to them, his actual memory is far better than just that figure. His processing speed is at 100 billion fold greater than of the human baseline giving him godly reaction times.
# Skills
## Programming
For humans, programming and artificial intelligence are just skills, but to the Inspired, these skills are directly related to their actual intelligence and are a measure of it. Nanotech on the other hand, is a substitute for relying on society for production, it is a measure of raw power of the individual.
### General: Rank 6 (low).
Has developed a workflow where he integrates his mind with the algorithm has developed. Much like humans do not need to program the individual neurons when they move their limbs, so is programming an expression of will for Euclid. At his processing speed, regular languages and compilation methods would be too slow for him, so his programming is an indescribable mix of desire being passed through stages of neurally boosted evolutionary algorithms which gets compiled to an intermediate language and then Assembly.
### AI: Rank 6 (low).
Has an intuitive understanding of high dimensional geometry that allows him to derive and reason about a ML algorithm for a particular domain directly. Based on his goal he can derive a behavioral program and apply it to himself. Behavioral programs are higher forms of what humans call personalities.
### Nanotech: Rank 5.
He didn't have the chance to put too much effort into this, still the eyes he designed in a 4 hours of real world time would have required decades of work by a large team of very smart humans. His understanding of matter, biology and cybernetics is at the very peak of humanity, even if it has not reached the transcendent stage. Once it does, he will be able to program the world around him at his leisure. Moving beyond programming simple devices to programming arbitrary matter is one of the key developmental milestones in the life of any programmer.
Euclid calls the idealized higher ranks of this particular skill the Titanic Form.
# Stats (Psy)
## Externus: Rank 2 ~ exp(N(log(2.9); 0.2))
Has a strong desire to leave the weak group he belongs to, as well as the urge to gain power. He is starting to attain the willingness to take from others according to his desires and has an inkling of what the true form of justice in the universe is.
## Gnosis: Rank 3 ~ exp(N(log(3.05); 0.2))
During the 45 million years of playing poker against himself, the deep thought he put into how he could defeat the simulator of his reality sent his character development in a weird direction and changed his personal philosophy. Still, the experience left him longing for more of where that insight came from. Novel worldviews are rare and precious to him.
## Pathos: Rank 3 ~ exp(N(log(3.0); 0.2))
Has cultivated a will that can endure eternity in solitude and has a soul capable of endless self sacrifice for the sake of his future self. He has already grasped the piece of divinity he sought for. He is enjoying the game and does not want to rush it unnecessarily.