I stared off into space for quite a while after sending the Leva King away. The tiny snake-dragon form they originally gave him was cute and hardly a representation of what a massive and deadly entity he had become over the ages. This image of deadly dominance was put even more to the test when I managed to summon him, only to have his cute and adorable little form be spitting mad at another trespass he said that the Last Engineer had made against him and his kind. It was like he was a tiny kitten hissing at an offending feather toy. Getting him to recount what had upset him so much was spotty at best. He said that, for the longest time, the Last Engineer had been trying to study, kill, and dissect his fellow sibling creations ever since he had arrived in this dimension. The Last Engineer was cunning and had no moral reservations when it came to obtaining power over the denizens of this dimension.
Such proof of evil was displayed with the Leva King’s latest encounter. The Last Engineer had done the unthinkable. He had used his only true weakness against him.
He had created what appeared to be a Leva hatchling and had sent it to follow the King. It had even been made to sound like a child too!
I had stopped him at this point, needing clarification on how, if the eighty-eight creations had to fight to the death at the start of their lives, how had he managed to have children? His explanations were the result of spread, or in his case male and female offspring that were tied to him. He just had to sacrifice parts of himself to create the first Leva female that was bound to him so that they could have hatchlings.
It was all rather interesting and eventually led to the story of how Leva existed in our dimension, of how he had sent his offspring away after losing his mate in a devastating attack. He had known that sending them away would gradually deplete their energy, making them into ghosts of what they were originally capable of if they managed to feed off of the richer energies of this dimension. Though weakened, they would always be stronger than most of the creatures of my home dimension, able to live in the inhospitable depths of space and to grow into truly formidable Leva with time.
Hearing his story made me realize several things, that perhaps the parasites that hung around stars weren’t originally from our side. They might have hitched a ride with the Leva and ended up making a home wherever they had migrated, seeing as how they ate the essence of life, just like all of the denizens tended to do here.
In the end, I had been forced to let him go back to what he was doing, as he was so sure that the Last Engineer was involved and would seize upon any weakness that he could find. He was positive that if there was one test, then there would be more on the way. Personally, I had a strange gut feeling about the encounter.
I couldn’t argue with the logic of the Leva King, that it might be an attack by the Tela Engineer but it also could have been my people trying to reach me as well. I promised him that I would give him some time to get to a secure location before summoning him back, needing to have him perfectly calm before I picked his brain and perhaps revealed that he had, in fact, truly encountered Sublimis, a distant offspring of his.
If my hunch was correct he had encountered her in swarm form and subsequently destroyed her before she could say anything. If anything the Leva King seemed to have PTSD and I could only imagine it had everything to do with losing his mate, all contact with his children, and being alone for so long. I would try to be tactful and wait until he was calm.
As for how I summoned him… let’s just say that I had a deeper understanding of how things worked and I now knew that I probably didn’t want to have anything to do with some of the other concepts that were just laying around in orb form.
Hunger had managed to get everyone’s hidden concept, even the Leva King’s before he encountered whatever had set him off. The list was eye-opening and the Leva King had even been generous and had gone into great detail about methods that would work to summon him. His concept was “Indomitable”.
Yes, “Indomitable”, as odd as that may seem. The interesting thing about empowering it was that it was very similar to how I had managed with Loss and Hunger.
I had to experience whatever its core concept embodied.
Loss was an inversion of life, where you experienced sadness to the point where you breathed in anything and everything around you simply to try to feel. In essence complete “Depletion” and revert everything to a zero state. Hunger was a form of gluttony where you just kept allowing your needs and wants to expand, in whatever form it or you might manifest, be that in body or an ability.
The Hive Mother was actually “Knowledge” and an ability that I was already deeply ingrained with. Assimilation was just a part of what she did to utilize her concept. Focus was “Manifest” and every time I tried to understand it while Hunger was explaining it we kept butting heads and disagreeing on semantics. It started to make sense that there was a language barrier and they were trying to translate alien concepts as closely to my dialog as simply as they could.
Corruption was “Divergence” and Time had been “Delay”.
It wasn’t until Hunger had spent a while relaying his conversation with the Leva King and the subsequent requirements to summon his presence that I began to understand a little bit of what I was missing.
The concept of “Indomitable” had to do with the understanding that no matter what happened to you, whatever you suffered, whatever happened to your body or mind, everything that made up what constituted you, would never give up.
It didn’t matter what form I was in, flesh and bone or this mental state trapped inside the relic, what mattered was that I needed to understand what I wanted and to obtain it at any cost, forcing my mind and body to obey my will.
So, in essence, I had to injure myself to obtain something and force my willpower on my entire being to maintain itself regardless of what I experienced.
Well, not really injure myself but to go through a trial-by-fire test, which would result in my being injured regardless of how it was attempted.
Case in point, Hunger had summoned three tunnels, trials of a sort, to choose from that each had something priceless at the end to obtain. Each tunnel had its own hazard and Hunger recommended that I not be allowed to reset everything and use my control of the space to cheat my way out of the trial. In order to reach Loss the first time, I had needed to completely be consumed by my sorrow.
Reaching the Leva King would take the same complete effort.
The first test tunnel was filled with little insects that looked like grasshoppers that were mated with piranhas. The second tunnel was a sheet of molten liquid that I had to pass through. The third was, in my opinion, the easiest and was a tunnel of pure cold. At the end of each tunnel was a glowing orb that had images swirling inside its surface. It was supposed to represent whatever I would give up everything to obtain.
Yeah, no. Nope. Not going to happen.
Instead of an actual cave-like tunnel where I would have to physically move my entire body through, I decided to shrink everything down so that it would just be my arm that I had to stick inside to grab whatever was at the end.
Surely I could do that…
Yes, I know I am an idiot, that has never been contested. I thought that I could endure my arm experiencing some pain and even thought that choosing the cold tube would be the quickest and easiest way to achieve the prize.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I spent hours in and out of using my Prime Speed Control key suffering through the cold tunnel test, only to find that, with frozen fingers, I couldn’t grasp anything. I even managed to shatter my hand when I tried to cheese the process even more, simply by jamming my hand in as fast as possible.
And yes it was painful. Probably just about as painful as each of the other tunnels would have been, seeing that one you would lose your nerve endings to millions of tiny teeth, and the other, more fiery one, you would simply have them seared off.
I learned the hard way that it wasn’t about speed, pain, or anything obvious like that. It all only had to do with my willpower to command my arm, regardless of what it had to endure, to remain functioning and in obedience to my will.
It took a long time but I finally felt something resonate within me, within my being.
The concept stirred and flowed through me, morphing my concept of self, and enforcing obedience to my will. When the cold tunnel attempted to freeze me, my flesh puffed up, sacrificing the outer layers of skin to create a bubble of air between the cold and my internals. My blood pumped hotter and harder, giving me the few moments I needed once my hand reached the orb for it to close around it, cracking my skin and flesh to sacrifice for what I needed it to do.
I still lost the limb and had to regenerate it after the simulation, but in those brief moments, I understood what the concept was all about. It was the ability to force your whole existence to continue to function, regardless of what it went through. That was how the Leva King still remained alive, even though, from what I had seen of his body the last time, he had great wounds pocking his body from old battles and from creatures still feasting on him. He was able to press on, each cell separate and indomitable till death, as long as he had the willpower to live. He could stop his body from bleeding, stop poison from being absorbed, and control what happened to himself intimately.
This was how I managed to summon him and how we had our brief conversation together where he was fuming at the Last Engineer’s evil nature.
All of these events left me where I was now. Staring at the little orb rising upwards inside the relic.
Was it just me or was my little orb about to reach the lowest marker?
I checked back through my memories and simulated its rate of speed. This latest addition, adding the concept of “Indomitable” sure seemed to speed things up.
I verified it, using my perfect memory and the Hive Mother’s incredible ability to simulate things.
Sure enough, just under eleven hours remained.
Eleven hours to try to get another ability under my belt. I had no way of knowing what the incremental marker did or signified but I wanted to be as ready as possible before I rose to its level.
Right off the bat I looked at the last few remaining traits that I had left to fully connect with.
Focus-Manifest
Time-Delay
Corruption-Divergence
If I understood things correctly, Corruption and “Divergence” was something that I did not, under any circumstance, want to try to embody and enable as a trait. Yes, power was power but when it came to some things, there was just a line that I wasn’t ready to cross yet. From my understanding, having spoken to Hunger, and subsequently the frozen hell that I just went through to learn the Leva King’s trait… Corruption was all about pestilence and decay.
I would have to bathe in rot, embody necrotizing flesh, and live gangrene. Corruption’s ability was unrivaled in power, no creature could stand against it, but becoming a living bio weapon of uncontrollable mass destruction was not something that I envisioned.
Time though… wasn’t even a concept that I knew how to approach. Hunger had done its best, grilling the Hive Mother’s memories for anything that she recalled about Time’s ability and how, as they grew, he strengthened it and empowered it. His ability was a higher concept and was not easily explained.
Focus was my last option and it had to do with taking what you had and condensing it further. The way that I understood it was that Focus could make even the air into a weapon, simply by condensing the molecules to such densities that nothing could slip between them.
The image that I got was that somehow Focus could rearrange the atoms closer together, making even the weakest material into a barrier. A fragile barrier when dealing with air but still a barrier.
I turned on my Prime Speed Control key to save as much time as possible while I tried things out. My first test was to try to envision all of the atoms in my hand moving closer together…
Pain ripped through my arm as blood gushed from the parts of my wrist that weren’t part of the command to condense. I stared at my hand in shock, more of a dagger-like toothpick at this point really, before quickly willing it back to how it should be.
“Why the heck does everything have to hurt so bad?!?” I shouted at the mess that I had made before willing it all to clean itself up.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Regardless of my frustration, I had done it on my first attempt. I could feel the ability as it settled in my bones and knew that Focus would be waiting for me outside of my mental space.
I willed the little rock entity into my space, finding that it resembled a tiny inverted geode ball. As I inspected it closer, I could just make out a tiny heart-like organ at its center, pulsing colorful blood throughout the crystals in tiny blood vessels.
“Kevin, why were you screaming?”
“Oh, it was nothing,” I said as I described what I had just done and how it had been instrumental in activating his trait and summoning him.
The little sparkling geode was silent for a couple of seconds, simply rotating back and forth as it seemed to look at my hand and back at my face.
“Does your body not generate anything that can be used as a weapon?”
“Hmm? Nope, humans are not designed that way…” I began to say as my eye caught on my fingers, more specifically my fingernails.
Surely, it couldn’t be something so simple?
Out of curiosity, I commanded my fingernails to grow, quickly making my hands look like I was getting ready for a time at the nail salon before incrementally commanding the outer surface of each nail to slowly condense down upon itself.
Sure enough, there was no pain as the fingernail continually grew and became more and more condensed.
“Holy crap,” I uttered as my fingernails gradually became more reflective the longer they compressed. They had long since entered and passed the hardness of diamonds and were reaching a point that felt oddly unstable.
“With certain materials, there is a point where you might want to stop. Unless you want them to explode, that is.” Focus said as I suddenly felt that I had reached a line where it became even more difficult to condense any further.
I held my hand away from myself as I studied the change that had taken place. I now rocked five gloriously long and lustrous lady nails.
I frowned at that thought, stemming from how society viewed guys with nails and instead decided to name them talons or claws, simply because Eagles and Lions naturally had weapons attached to their limbs to survive in nature.
“So, what would happen if I embedded this in some creature and then willed it to “Manifest” even further?”
“It would explode, leading to considerable internal lesions and embedded shards. That is one of my favorite tactics when dealing with denizens that have plenty of soft tissue that it uses as blubber armor. Even separate from my body, I can command the shards to continue to condense themselves and the materials around them. This leads to lethal cavities forming and, in most cases, the doom for whatever denizen the affliction is within.”
“I see,” I said, envisioning the macabre scene. Trypophobia was the only word that came to mind as each shard would create holes in the body around it.
“So, beyond that. Your ability probably makes for some great armor.”
“Indeed. Hardening parts of the body is just the start. Wait until you master the ability to influence the elements around you. That is how I seem to fly…” Focus started to stay before he blinked from existence and was gone.
“What just happened?” I asked as I looked at the representation of the relic, finding that Focus was falling back down towards the bottom and that my little sphere had begun to pulse and vibrate.
I was seconds away from arriving at the little circular marker! Somehow, adding Focus to my ability set had sped up the process even more, deleting all the time that I thought I had left.
“Here goes nothing,” I said as my little orb rose in perfect alignment with the hole and everything went dark.
I waited and waited. Surely this was just like the first time that I had accidentally encountered the Seven. Surely, someone would come to talk to me soon. I tried to will my personal space back around me and to check on where I was within the relic. Nothing happened. I couldn’t seem to do anything.
“Am I dead?” I thought after a few moments of nothing happening.
A low boom sounded off in the distance, more of a low-sounding sonar pulse than something you would hear in the atmosphere. Like an explosion happening underwater.
With the sound, something seemed to move off in the distance in the dark.
A pinprick of light raced upwards from below my point of view, quickly flattening out and becoming a line of light that seemed to flow up and down as though it was following a strange topography of something in front of me. It almost looked as though it was a light bar from a photocopy machine scanning a humongous brain.
As the bar of light drew level to me, a tiny thread sparked over towards me for a brief second, seemingly finding an anomaly within the perfectly empty blackness where I hovered. The tendril of light was withdrawn, pulled away as the bar raced upwards into the distance, causing me to watch in disbelief as it seemed that I hadn’t been worthy of consideration.
Darkness returned for a moment before lights began popping up all around the corners of my vision. It seemed that whatever the tendril of light had been that had touched me for that brief moment, it had been considered and further investigation was needed. The dots of light quickly became bars of light that stretched out and centered on closing in around my location. Interestingly, the lengths of light didn’t overlap…. they bent… forming a massive shining eye that hovered over the surface of the dips and valleys that it had just scanned.
Sparks from the edge of the circle leaped inwards, forming a massive iris that focused on me. I couldn’t help but feel like I was a bug under a microscope.
“Hello?” I thought, hoping it would hear me, seeing as I didn’t have a throat in this form.
A thin tendril whipped into existence from the side and circled around my vision, causing my view to skew as it started to do something to me, to pull at my mind, flooding through my essence, boiling my soul.
“Stop! What are you doing?!?” I shouted as the process continued.
I didn’t feel any pain, beyond the disorienting discomfort of sensing as though my existence was being manhandled. It almost felt like it was reaching through me. I began to hear voices, cries of pain, and odd warbles for the briefest of seconds around me that sounded exactly like my voice before they cut off abruptly.
“You are not mine.” A voice called out suddenly, shocking me as I watched the vast eye as it slowly started to shrink. “You are a cross-contamination.”
“I…” I started to say, intent on naming myself, explaining my problems, and asking to see if it could help me. I was ready to tell it everything but I never got the chance.
“Yes, I know.” It interrupted me as the shining eye shrunk even faster before coming to hover several feet in front of me, filling my vision with sparks and tendrils of light that looked very sharp and wicked.
“Ordinarily I would just exterminate breaches into my domain…” It went on as I found my ability to voice my thoughts to suddenly be muted. I could think, I just couldn’t hear my thoughts speaking inside my mind. “but you and your kind are worthy of study and dissection.”
Alarm flooded my mind as one of the shining tendrils swept forward and cut into me, spikes of light driving and gouging all throughout my being.
“Yes, this must go.” It said as it yanked, pulling something out of me and vaporizing it.
I tried to scream.
---
The arrival and observation by the Skism Sentinel had caused massive realignments in the encircling lines of division between the alien races present who had claimed stakes in the outcome of the artifact.
When the Sentinel simply observed, remaining stationary regardless of the movements of the many armadas around, the Tela ordered the U’lennea to begin driving some of the known weaker alien races away, firmly broadcasting that the artifact belonged rightfully to the Tela and that any alien race who remained would suffer the consequences and be attacked.
This did not go well, as one of the Jaz’era Prime vessels was approached by one of the larger U’lennea mercenary carriers and due to their race being blind, entering within proximity of attack caused them to do just that.
Regardless of being a smaller combat vessel, everyone quickly witnessed that the Jaz’era had been paying attention to the anomalies occurring within the realm of the supernova. It launched all of its escape pods directly at the larger war vessel, causing the U’lennea commander to broadcast his humor at this futile action to his fleet, only to change his tone after the pods had rammed into the impenetrable Tela armored hull. With the pods firmly seated against the massive ship, practically crushed in half due to the impact against the cr armor, the Jaz’era commander caused each of the pods to turn on their cr propulsion drives all at once, thereby acting like a beacon to the starving denizens in the supernova.
While it may have seemed like an insignificant thing to do, to the starving and scattered denizens floating around in space, the cr propulsion sang out like a massive dinner bell. The ship was practically shredded as the creatures rushed towards the escape pods from all directions, killing most of the crew and causing a cloud of debris to fill the area.
This one act had shown that the elite mercenaries of the Tela were not as fearsome as they had been known. They could be killed. There was blood in the water and everyone now saw the hated Tela and U’lennea as prey.
In retaliation, the U’lennea began firing on all vessels rather than simply attempting to bully them away.
War had begun.
---
“Why aren’t we doing anything?” Invicta asked as they all watched the battle raging outside in the VR war room. It had begun and all they had done since then was slightly pull back and observe while the vast armadas sent ships darting forward into the fray like wild wolves.
“Oh, but we are.” One of the many Meditati’s answered as she showed their current fleet locations and how far away they were from the center of the event. “The ship containing the Skii has arrived and we are now just waiting for our time to claim the relic. Soon we predict that someone will break out the skism weapons and we don’t want Kevin’s trump card anywhere near the epicenter when that happens.”
“If it is allowed to happen.” Tutor said as she cast a glance at the massive and oddly still Skism Sentinel. Nothing that was happening seemed to bother it, not the display of cr-backed weapons nor the denizens that had been employed in causing havoc against those ships who were armored to the gills with cr plating. The escape pod attack had proven to be a one-trick pony once everyone realized that it had drawn all of the denizens in the system into that one location. If anyone wanted to use it again they either had to get behind an enemy ship and to draw the denizens toward them, which no one was willing to let happen, or to figure out some new creative way to use the creatures who could tear through cr like it was nothing.
At present everyone was just using tried and true methods of punching through parts of ships hulls who were not completely armored with cr. Cr, being exorbitantly expensive courtesy of the Tela’s monopoly, was hard to come by, and covering entire fleets’ hulls tended to be too much for most races. This was why it was troubling that so many races had sent so many ships.
“And there it is,” Meditati said as she brought up a strange-looking weapon being aimed by one of the tiny Xeath interceptors that had managed to get close to a Tela fighter while it was busy fighting another Jaz’era Lesser vessel. Visibly nothing happened for a second as the weapon swept rapidly from tail to stern towards the Tela vessel. It was only the seemingly instant actions of the Tela that showed just how badly the weapon had affected them. The Tela fighter had stopped moving entirely while the rest of the nearby Tela fleet had instantly pulled back and fired upon the tiny ship, as though the tiny vessel had become a source of pure revulsion and a target to be destroyed. All across the battlefield, there was a marked retreat from any Xeath vessel attempting to get too near to a Tela vessel.
“What was that? It killed the cr just like the Blidda weapon.” George said as he worked it out rapidly. “The Xeath managed to create a beam weapon?”
“Indeed. I knew something like this would happen one day. Each race has had enough time to make remote labs and to study cr in secret environments. Heck, they might even have secretly sold their continual research to each race as time progressed. There is no way of knowing who managed to crack it first but I predict that the only reason why each of these fleets are here is because they all have some weapon of similar effect. That or they are just really stupid and thought that they might be able to loot an active war zone.”
Those predictions made by Meditati proved to be true as, one by one, other alien races started to reveal their trump cards. The Blidda ships present quickly revealed that they each possessed a field that extended around their ships, causing any tela weapon to fail to detonate when it got too close. They even started to attempt to ram into Tela ships, though it proved to be a difficult task as everyone was limited to traditional propulsion engines. The Tela didn’t have flesh and blood bodies inside their vessels, allowing them to reach higher speeds quicker than the Blidda’s vessels were able to.
Things took a turn for the worse for everyone once the Gurn revealed their version of the weapon.
“They doom themselves and everyone else.” Nurse said as she saw what the sporelike creatures had envisioned creating using research designed to destroy anything that relied on Tela cr technology.
Bombs. Millions of nearly invisible and tiny bombs flooded the area, blowing up and affecting not only the Tela, practically putting them on the run, but also destroying everyone else’s cr propulsion engines in the process.
It was this use of the weaponized field that stunned everyone present. For anyone caught in the blast of the bombs, their ships were not limited to only traditional propulsion. Without cr propulsion’s rapid and continual thrust through space, no ship caught in the blast would ever make it back home before all of the crew died of old age.
“Hmm… those tricky Blidda,” Meditati muttered as she used her stolen encryption channels to listen in on private communications that she had connections with on the front.
“What?” George asked as he noted that they didn’t seem phased by the turn of events, choosing to continue to pursue the fleeing Tela regardless of if they had been caught in one of the blasts.
“They seem to have developed a means of shielding their engines against the harmful effects. I guess that they had to seeing that they radiate a field around their ships. I don’t see any other vessels using that technique yet. Some of the other races are actually thinking about withdrawing because of the Gurn’s weapon. They don’t want to be stuck here forever without a means of getting home.”
“That must be why many of the Gurn’s command carriers are sitting a great distance from the battlefield. They…” Invicta said just as explosions started to dot the region of space that she had just been watching, the very space that housed the main collection of the Gurn’s armada.
One by one, each of the massive Gurn ships disappeared from the radar, being quickly snuffed out by an invisible foe. The remaining Gurn ships amidst the conflict quickly began to turn their coms to open broadcast as they cried loudly for the loss of their fellows. There were no words, simply complete sorrow as thousands upon thousands of their race were quickly snuffed out.
“Ouch.” Nurse said as she watched the display.
“Yeah, that was brutal. I wonder what kind of weapon that was.” George commented, not realizing that Nurse had flinched in pain.
“Oh, I know exactly what kind of weapon it was. Or at least, what it was made of.” She said as she stood up from her seat to look off into the distance at empty space beyond the conflict. “It was tiny particles of gold cr, moving at insane velocities and it killed many of my swarm that I had observing the Gurn fleet.”
Everyone turned to look in the direction that Nurse was facing as an image slowly started to appear as she moved her swarm into the area to investigate.
“The Solar Citadel,” Meditati said as the image of a truly gargantuan object started to come into view. “General Magus has arrived.”
“He has access to gold cr?” Tutor asked with worry in her voice.
“It would appear so.”
It was then that something strange was felt by Kevin’s entire team. A feeling of pressure swept through them all, spreading out through Nurse’s swarm, into the communication channels, and into and through the countless neighboring armadas of all the fleets in the theater of combat.
Something else had shown interest in what was happening and it far superseded the arrival of Magus the First. Everyone felt the pressure, Nurse the most, as it was being channeled through her connection to Kevin as the Designer gazed upon Kevin and through him at the situation.
Everyone froze like birds caught in the gaze of a deadly viper as the presence swept through the area before withdrawing.
“What was that!?!” Meditati and George practically shouted in unison as they sought to find the source of the invasion. Whatever had just happened had been impossible. It had swept through their subroutines and had seen everything about them in an instant.
“That processing speed is impossible,” Meditati whispered.
“Nurse? Are you alright?” Tutor asked as she noticed Nurse’s fists clutching at her shirt in front of her chest. She seemed to be trembling in fear, knuckles white, as her lovely eyes were wide and pitch black, iris completely dilated in fear.
“No! Don’t hurt him!” She cried as pain and blazing fire was felt by everyone present, causing Meditati, George, Tutor, and Invicta to join Nurse in screams of pain as their world was rent asunder.