On an unnamed island in the Pacific
Andrew Munro lay by a palm tree, meditating on his Dao and his purpose in life. His ever hungry legion of nanites writhed in a thick mat around him, devouring everything on the island save for him. They were growing and growing in size and power, and soon he would be able to do wondrous things with them. His Dao followed the path of many other swarm related Daos, but it was also imbued with the coldness of metal, and the implacability of a machine. He was working in the footsteps of the Iron Legion Dao, the details of which had been imparted to him by the Prophets. It was another one of their twisted gifts that he had claimed for his own. As he fought to clear the madness from his mind, he conquered them with his will.
However, as he meditated, he could sense a foreign presence intruding upon his sanctum, and he cracked open one eye, spotting a woman striding across the water at high speed, moving so fast that she was almost a blur. A wave of energy cascaded around her lower legs, propelling her faster and faster. Andrew leapt to his feet, his nantites surging back to him, creating a suit of armor and a sword in his hands. He drew back his leg and slashed forwards, projecting a crescent of Dao energy mingled with nanites towards the woman. The slash ate through the ground and into the water, heading for the woman at supersonic speeds. However, she batted it aside with one palm and vanished, appearing in front of him a moment later.
The woman slammed one fist into his abdomen, cracking his armor, and then another into his jaw, causing him to stumble. Whoever she was, she was leagues beyond his own strength. Andrew struggled to move, and he tried to slash the woman with his sword, only meeting air. A moment later, he was on the ground, a large crack in his helmet. The woman picked him up and raced off onto the water once more, not seeming to notice the additional weight.
The AI piloting the woman's body did not feel any emotions, but a smile made its way onto her face regardless. That extraction had gone far more smoothly than she could have anticipated. However, a moment later, a pillar of light shot down from the sky, revealing the astral projection of a gray skinned man, glowing with power. He growled at the woman, and snapped his fingers, causing the air around her to explode, knocking her off her feet and into the water.
“Your petty sect dares to steal from me?” Tantalos Veruvax said through his proxy, one of the millions of proxies that kept order around the universe, against the invasion of aliens that sought to steal from him. He cared for no resource beyond the lives of those living in his universe, and this woman had tried to steal one of those from him. The AI fled from the woman’s body, not wanting to be implicated later on.
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Tantalos squeezed the air with his will, and the woman was crushed into a tiny ball of flesh, which he then destroyed with a snap of his fingers. Even in this form, he was still on par with an E Ranker, more than enough to deal with anything at this stage of the initialization. None of these proxies took much out of him to maintain, and the real Tantalos simply laughed as he was relayed the information from his favorite planet, of having thwarted the attempts of the Prophets to poach one of his slaves. Even better, there was nothing that they could do about it, not unless they wanted to risk a costly war against Tantalos and his allies.
Sure, the Prophets were an incredibly powerful force, but moving en masse would draw the attention of every faction in the Multiverse, who would not wish for the technology obsessed heretics to gain any more influence than they already had.
In the Overlord’s Headquarters
The Overlord was doing very well for himself indeed. Now the possessor of three of the Seven Seals, he had fused them together into a monstrously powerful weapon. The Lance of Longinus, the Sickle of Cronos and the Lightning Bolt of Zeus had turned into a gigantic halberd, made out of black stone, ran through with streaks of lightning and of blood. As it evolved, his weapon gained more abilities, and soon it would be powerful enough to destroy almost anyone around the Overlord’s level.
On that matter, he was not slacking either, and he had been farming monsters, reaching level 75 in the process. The man still had his month of training to cash in, and his intelligence told him that Sam Atlas had already used his. He had decided to wait until Sam had come back to use his own token, taking advantage of the time to claim as many of the Seals as he could. There was only one left unclaimed, Gungnir, the mythical spear of Odin.
The Overlord had his sights on the weapon, but he was unsure of whether other forces were also moving to claim it. However, it mattered little. Now that Sam Atlas was gone, he was the most powerful human on the planet. It was time to ramp up his game a little bit. It was strange, knowing that he was that man’s father, yet feeling nothing but burning hatred for him. He knew that he was being controlled by an outside force now, but it did not bother him in the slightest. His Dao had started to take root, and it demanded that he kill Sam, lest his Supremacy waver. Being defeated once was alright. Defeat again would be cataclysmic. His cultivation path was irrevocably intertwined with Sam Atlas, the only man to ever have defeated him. They would rise and fall together, and only one could survive.