--- Victor Cale / Cilia Ulein ---
Finally, the distractions were out of the way. It was time to focus on what really mattered.
This was going to be a rare opportunity for Victor to get accurate data on Rania Mortal. Once she was shunted into a subplot with Maru, he would have to limit his direct interactions with team Nundru. Every interaction would be an opportunity for gathering more accurate data, but it would also risk Tonos drawing him more deeply into the story.
Maru would need to fill the role of primary antagonist for Rania, and he would need to keep his own interference to a minimum. Observing them from afar would have to be sufficient. A scientist should avoid participating in his own experiments anyway, so this was no great loss.
He noticed Rania fire another arrow, and moved to avoid it by interposing Atrog between himself and it.
The arrow arced around the paladin and went for Victor. But while the arrow seemed empowered, it was nowhere near as powerful as the arrow that had killed one of his soldiers in an explosion that left almost nothing behind. He had watched that fight through scrying spells, and he had actually been somewhat nervous when he saw that. That was an obscenely powerful magic weapon, and a "Perfectly Normal Elf" had no business wielding something like this.
The Black Legion soldier had been a sacrificial goat he had placed there specifically to test the effectiveness of Rania's arrows, just like the presence of the two scientists had been arranged to test team Nundru's behavior and Rania's reactions. That experiment had been a success, and yielded valuable observations.
"*This sucks. Why are my arrows not working against the Main Bad Guys? They didn't work at all against the Mini Boss, and even the Villain is less Evil than some of his Minions. I would rather fight someone more Evil. Moral ambiguity sucks!*"
"*Focus, Rania!*" Atrog replied to the alleged elf's whining.
Victor kept toying with his opponents in melee.
Balron seemed to grow desperate. Victor kept evading his attacks, so the dwarf switched to firing a larger amount of telekinetic projectiles in a barrage, to make them more difficult to dodge. But at this point, Victor's mana drain had done its work, and his armor was not just for show, and neither were his shield generators. Did the dwarf think he was the only one who knew how to use defensive enchantments? Victor had earned his fortune founding the very company that produced the best shield generators on the market. He kept them configured to specialize against ranged attacks, so that they would not interfere with his own movements in melee.
He did not bother to dodge. He simply allowed the hail of projectiles to bounce off his armor and shields. Rania's arrows might still be a danger, simply because she wasn't predictable, but the dwarf was no longer a serious threat at this point.
Atrog swung at him again, but he easily ducked under the orc's blade. In the same movement, his own sword went directly for Dov's throat.
She jumped backwards and evaded his strike at the last moment.
Unsurprising. He wasn't expecting her to die, not with Tonos watching this. But then again, he had not been certain. Her species was new, and there were no established narrative tropes for it, yet. Two of her siblings had died before, so it could be that being resurrected was meant to become a theme for the Davlash.
The Davlash were amazing. An entire species that was built around the ability to modify and improve themselves. They practically embodied Brytius' ideals, even more so than the goblins did. Goblins needed to constantly grow and improve themselves, or else they would degenerate. They were required by their biology to follow the ideals of Brytius. The Davlash in contrast were not forced to do so, but by their very nature their potential for growth was much less bounded than that of other species.
Cilia Ulein had lost count of the number of times she had despaired after achieving the pinnacle of performance in a skill, only to realize that further progress was impossible because of biological limitations. The Davlash had no such restrictions. If they encountered a limit, they could change their genes until they managed to surpass it. Doing so might come with heavy drawbacks, but what did that matter if it meant being greater in the long run?
If circumstances were different, Cilia would have loved to reincarnate as one of the Davlash.
It was such a pity that they all needed to die.
It wasn't the time for that yet, though. Dov at least could be allowed to live for longer. Rania kept talking about a crossover, which contradicted his own understanding of Tonos' plans. There were a lot of open questions here. Killing Dov now could prevent him from gathering valuable data about the way the anomaly thought.
"Why are you doing this, you Bad Guy? What's your evil plan?" Rania suddenly shouted at him.
"*No talking! Concentrate on the fight!*" Atrog replied telepathically.
"*No! I got this! I'm going to get the Villain to reveal his Secret Evil Plan, and then we will know how much is at stake! Then we will win because losing would be unthinkable!*"
It was a good plan. Victor had to commend her on that. Although the execution was somewhat lacking. Directly asking him to reveal his “Secret Evil Plan”? Really?
It was unfortunate for them that he had thought of the possibility himself, and so he had already prepared a little speech.
A speech with enough drama to draw Tonos' interest, but also enough moral ambiguity in it that it would not empower team Nundru in the way Rania hoped. He would stay close to the truth, but twist it where necessary. There was no chance that Tonos would let him get away with actually talking them out of a fight entirely and calmly discussing things like rational adults. That just didn't happen in the types of stories that Tonos was formed from. So it would be stupid to even try.
Victor adjusted a toggle on his helmet to ensure that his voice would be suitably bombastic and expressive.
"You fools believe yourselves to be the heroes here? You are just the puppets of a corrupt government. Your leaders caused the Cataclysm, and you call me the villain?"
"Gasp! That's not true!" Rania responded. "Tell me more!"
...did she just say "gasp" out loud? The anomaly really needed to take acting lessons.
"Your ancestors are responsible for the end of the world. They tried to grasp beyond their reach. They saw no other way to survive against Azad, and in their arrogance they doomed us all. These short-lived mortals are foolish, and if nobody stops them they are sure to try it again."
That last part was unnecessarily insulting and Victor did not actually believe it. There were plenty of non-foolish mortals. Some of Cilia's best teachers had been mortals. But a typical story would have the villain act grandiously and give ham-fisted speeches without subtlety or compromise. It offended his sensibilities somewhat, but following along with those expectations was better than defying them.
"*Don't listen to him! He is an expert at lying to people!*" Dov told the others.
It was true. Victor was a proficient liar. Cilia had once won the international liars' competition, hosted by the archdevil Glabrozan. She had even succeeded in the final task, which was to convince the world that no such event had ever taken place, even though it had been publicly advertised for years. This was important, as a liar who was known as a liar would simply be mistrusted on general principle. To achieve this, she had made sure that people thought of the competition as something between a joke and an urban legend.
It was actually kind of vexing. Even though she had successfully erased that competition from public consciousness, Cilia was still known to be good at lying, simply because she was known for being good at everything.
Rania did not respond to Victor's speech, or to Dov's warning. She stayed silent as she continued to shoot arrows at him, presumably in thought.
How disappointing. Her utterances were the single most valuable part of this fight. They provided important data to analyze later, to gain insight into her mind.
Cilia had seen similar entities before, during the course of her many lives. But Rania was different. More extreme, and less stable. And after what Cilia's parallel selves had learned about these entities, they were cursing themselves for not studying them in depth earlier.
Now, they were almost out of time. Some of her alternates reported the first sightings of the mythical Genesis Dragons. The species that had allegedly seeded the world with life. Why would they come back into existence now, if not because they were going to be needed again, soon?
Hopefully, entities like Rania did hold the key to knowledge that still eluded them. Maybe that could help them achieve their shared goal before it was too late?
Rania was different enough from the others that the various versions of Cilia had collectively decided that studying her should take priority over Victor's own contributions to their plan. There were enough versions of Cilia that his own efforts there should not be essential. Luckily it turned out that gaining control over Transcendence Laboratories could be useful for both goals, so it had not been a waste of time, after all.
Of course, buying time for her other selves to achieve the primary goal was still important as well. Pitting Oruk against the Shan Kingdom should be able to do it. It had worked well enough for several of her alternate versions, after all.
Summoning alternate versions of people between the universes was much more expensive than expected, and came with side effects. It would be up to the others to study the phenomenon further, while he focused on Rania Mortal.
Victor wasn't sure what to think of it. Their research so far had shown that, to put it bluntly, the multiverse did not make any sense. The butterfly effect did not happen, or at least not reliably. People would be born with the same name in two different universes, with backgrounds that were at once notably similar in some ways, and completely different in others. Such coincidences made no sense if the universe relied on physics alone.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Of course, if the universe did not work the way you expected it to, then that simply meant that your model of reality was wrong. Finding out that his understanding of physics was so fundamentally flawed was actually quite exciting. It meant that there was so much left to learn. It just would have been nice to find out a few millennia earlier. As much as Cilia enjoyed the challenge of discovery, time was running out for all of them. They could have done without a mystery of this magnitude only decades or centuries before the finish line.
Luckily at least the influence of the gods did not seem to stretch across the parallel worlds, which made studying this all much easier. Each universe had its own versions of each god, and they appeared to be unaware of each other, as far as the Cilias could tell. In this, they had already become greater than Brytius. As it should be. A student who never surpasses his teacher in anything would be a poor excuse for a student, after all. It had taken her long enough to exceed her god in even just this one single aspect.
And even so, it hadn't really been Victor who figured it out. Some of Cilia's alternate versions discovered the method to reach across the multiverse independently of each other and made contact with him. He understood how they did it by now, but it still grated that this knowledge was something that had been handed to him, instead of being earned through his own efforts.
"*Give me your backpack!*" Galanys thought at Atrog as she approached him. Her hands were still broken, and useless for casting.
Atrog did not think long and simply cut off the straps in one swift motion. Galanys caught it as it fell down.
What were they doing?
Galanys quickly opened the backpack and pulled out a smaller Bottomless Bag.
"*Be careful! We don't know what any of those potions do. Rania didn't label them.*"
"*Exactly.*" Galanys responded.
Then she started throwing bottles at Victor at random.
He dodged the first two on instinct. He needn't have. Those were healing potions.
He was very lucky that he decided to dodge the third one. It exploded in a shower of flames that clung to the nearby walls and ceiling and started eating through the metal.
He dodged the fourth, which appeared to do nothing at all.
The fifth expanded into an opaque sphere two meters in diameter, and when the effect ended two seconds later, everything in that sphere had vanished and a hole had been carved into the metal floor.
Victor spent the next minute dodging a bombardment of mostly harmless but sometimes terrifying bottles. He was pretty sure he should have been able to do more than dodge, but presumably Tonos did not want him to stop this attack too quickly.
He had no idea what was going on here, but he knew this was all Rania's fault.
When Atrog and Balron joined in and helped Galanys to throw the bottles more quickly, Victor actually started to have trouble dodging.
Finally, one bottle exploded into a massive cloud of fire, and a supernatural feeling of dread overcame them all. As one, Victor and team Nundru stopped fighting.
"FINALLY I AM FREE! AFTER UNTOLD MILLENNIA! I WILL VISIT SUCH VENGEANCE UPON... OUCH. WHO THREW THAT BOTTLE AT ME?"
Then a second cloud formed inside the first one as another bottle shattered. This cloud was even larger, and made of lightning.
"AT LAST I AM RELEASED FROM MY PRISON! NOW THE WORLD SHALL KNOW THE WRATH OF... WAIT. WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?"
"ME? WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? YOU INSOLENT UPSTART BELIEVE THAT YOUR OWN PETTY..."
The voice never managed to finish its threat, as Rania regained control of herself and fired two of her arrows at the voices.
The clouds vanished in a massive explosion of blinding light that knocked them all to the floor.
"*Ok. So the arrows do scale pretty well to more evil Bad Guys. That's interesting and good to know. I just wished that they worked better against our own Villain.*" Rania commented. "*Wait. That gives me an idea.*"
"Hey you, Villain!" She shouted at Victor.
"Yes?" He responded, momentarily too perplexed by these events to keep up his act.
"You want to become better at everything, right? Did you know that you can become better at being a Bad Guy by kicking puppies?"
"*It's a cunning plan I just came up with! It will make the arrows work better against him! Kicking even one puppy gives just so many Bad Guy Points.*" She added telepathically to her teammates.
"*Please don't encourage the Old Power to go around kicking puppies, Rania.*" Atrog thought in exasperation. "*What if he actually does it? Do you want to have it on your conscience that one of the most powerful beings on Hyd takes up puppy kicking as a hobby?*"
It did not happen often, but Victor was at a loss for words.
He was still trying to process this stupidity, when he suddenly sensed very excited chatter from Dov.
"*Oh gods! I recognize this device. It looks just like the technology my parents used to create me and my siblings.*"
He looked around, and noticed that she had used his distraction to sneak around him. Presumably she had been planning to attack him from behind after the bombs ran out, but now she was staring at the mysterious artifact he had set up in this room. The one whose purpose he had never discovered.
"*Try using it! It's our only hope!*" Rania responded excitedly.
"*It's asking for a password. I think this is what the fey were talking about. 'J7Hi9v%f&HVFE4'.*" She repeated mentally as her fingers flew over the device's interface.
"Password accepted. Logging in." The machine suddenly spoke up, in a strange dialect of Common.
"Outdated Psi-interface detected. Initiating update. Please stand by."
Absolutely not.
Victor recognized a Deus Ex Machina when he saw one. He had expected the machine to come up in some way, but not like this.
This could not be allowed to go on.
He knew he should have stopped them earlier, but they were all moving and talking at the speed of plot right now, and it simply hadn't been narratively appropriate for him to interrupt their discovery.
Dov's eyes suddenly started glowing, her body was floating above the ground, and her hair was waving dramatically in the still air.
Great. A powerup sequence. He needed to stop this.
The problem was: He genuinely had no idea what was going on there. It was an artifact of unknown origin. As powerful as Cilia might be, Victor was just one version of her, and fighting an unknown artifact backed by Tonos head on was suicide.
Fortunately, it should be possible to change Tonos' allegiance here.
"You fool, you are not ready, yet!" He shouted at Dov, feigning a concerned tone of voice.
Ready for what? He had no idea. But Tonos would surely eat it up.
"You must master your powers first, or else this will destroy you!" He added.
As if on cue, Dov started screaming in pain, even though the process had previously looked entirely harmless.
Victor cast a telekinetic spell, putting a significant amount of mana into it. Combined with Cilia's skill, it made Balron look like an amateur in comparison. He caught Dov in a telekinetic grip, and formed a fist with his gauntleted hand as he did so.
That gesture was entirely useless, and actually made the spell a little less efficient. But it sure looked dramatic, and that was more important.
With a wide sweeping gesture, he threw Dov against the far wall. The impact knocked her out, and disrupted whatever the device was doing. She stopped glowing.
That had been far too close for his liking. A mysterious powerup in the middle of their darkest hour could do a lot for a team of heroes.
After this experience, he decided that discretion was the better part of valor.
Better to knock them all out quickly, than to risk something like this again. He had already learned a lot from this encounter, and the instruments must have gathered plenty of valuable data on the anomaly by now.
"You have performed reasonably well. Within expectations. But I expect better the next time we meet. I think I already know what I will do with you all. Let's see if the trial I will put you on will toughen you up." He told the remainder of team Nundru.
He was planning to put their unconscious bodies in a particularly interesting Cataclysm Containment Zone. Their actions there would yield valuable data. The hole in the middle of the room led to that area, and he had initially planned to allow them to escape on their own. But it now looked like that might be unsafe, and the wiser course of action would be to deposit them there himself. They probably wouldn't even question it. Being the high priest of Brytius gave him a reputation that made this something he could plausibly do without an ulterior motive.
But first, he needed to knock them out.
He stopped holding back, and teleported directly behind Rania. Best to take out the unknown factor first, to prevent her from gaining another powerup at the wrong time.
He punched the "elf" in several nerve clusters before she could even turn around, and she crumpled unceremoniously.
The others did not fare much better after that.
Galanys first, because followers of Unir should never be left unattended for long.
Then Atrog, because taking out the leader last would almost guarantee that he would get to do something dangerous.
Finally Balron, who was by now virtually useless. Victor's mana drain had taken away almost all of the dwarf's power, and the spell was broad enough in scope that it affected all of his contingencies and magical items as well.
Victor found himself alone in the room. Everyone else was unconscious, but nobody was dead. Perfect.
Ah, no, not quite. Rania was lying against the wall. Her eyes were still open, but she wasn't moving.
He recognized this sort of scene. It was a classic. He was meant to approach her, say one last dramatic line, and then knock her out. That would end the scene.
There was a small chance that this was a trap, but it wasn’t likely. This was only the second of his three-stage plan. Heroes usually only pulled off last-ditch efforts in the very final confrontation, not in preliminary fights like this one.
He approached, his mind already busy going through the list of one-liners he had prepared for just such an occasion. Now, which of them would give the most useful results?
Ah yes. That one. It would only raise further questions, and set them on a path of discovery. Perfect.
He checked his instruments as he walked. It would not do to become complacent. His divination spells detected no life signs larger than a mouse. No magical signatures at all. Not even a familiar. Everyone was unconscious, except for himself and Rania.
He leaned down to Rania, his masked face almost touching hers.
He set his voice modulator to "dramatic villain, #4" and prepared to speak.
--- Aranea ---
Aranea was nervous!
Her big, soft friend had been moving a lot in the last few minutes. She was getting all rattled around in her friend's cloak.
But then she suddenly stopped moving at all!
"Rania needs your help! This is your time! I believe in you!" Her small, hard friend told her.
Since a few weeks ago, she was smart enough to understand when her friends talked to her. Understanding things was great. It made her much better than other spiders. In fact, both of her friends kept telling her that she was the best spider. It made Aranea feel very proud.
Her friends were the best, too.
Her big, soft friend was called Rania, and she gave her lots of food, and provided her with a nice cloak in which she could seek shelter. Rania even gave her headpats sometimes, which was amazing.
Her small, hard friend was called Pebble. He didn't do much, but he was very talkative. Even though Aranea had only been sapient for a few weeks, she felt like she had learned a lot from him in that time.
But now it looked like Rania was in danger! And Pebble told her that it was her chance to help! He believed in her!
Aranea gathered all of her courage, and ventured forth from the nice, warm cloak she was hiding in.
There was a Bad Guy there! She recognized him at once, because he looked just like Rania and Pebble said that Bad Guys looked like. He even had the glowing red eyes!
He hadn't noticed her yet, but he was getting close to Rania.
There was no time to hesitate.
Aranea remembered about the poison tattoo that Rania had given her. Pebble had taught her how to use it, and she was sure that now was the time.
She walked up to the Bad Guy, who didn't notice her.
She bit him in his boot. Her fangs bounced off the metal, and it hurt her a lot!
But the poison didn't care that she hadn't managed to pierce his boot. A dark, necrotic energy immediately spread from the point where her fangs hit the metal. In seconds, his entire body was covered in a roiling black energy.
"What is this? I don't..." The Bad Guy never finished his sentence, as his entire body was dissolved by the necrotic energy.
The black miasma consumed him in his entirety, armor and body, until nothing was left except for a small coating of dust on the ground.
Aranea looked at the dust, and she could only think one thing: "What a stupid poison. How am I supposed to eat that?"
There was no corpse left! Honestly, how was that supposed to help her hunt? This was dumb.
But Rania was safe, and that was all that mattered.
She was so glad that she was able to save her friend from the Bad Guy.
--- Pebble ---
It was difficult to recognize the facial expressions on a rock, but if Rania had been looking at Pebble right at this moment, she would have noticed the smugness radiating off of him.
"Just according to Keikaku." He thought to himself.
"Translator's note: Keikaku means plan." He thought a few seconds later.
It was an old word, and not part of Common, so it required some explanation. You never knew when incomprehensible eldritch beings from beyond time and space were reading your mind, or what languages they spoke, and it was generally a good idea to stay on good terms with them.
Of course, understanding anthropic reasoning like he did actually made a lot of incomprehensible beings quite comprehensible. He just hoped that he had guessed the time period right. Otherwise the meme would make no sense to them.