“What next?”

This was the only question that needed to be answered now. Here in this place devoid of protection there was nothing to stop David from killing all present, and yet not all places in this world were so conducive to his growth. He needed to rid this world of the protection of its maker. They had already cast him off. They had already doomed themselves to the slow culling of the new master’s hand, and yet David could not so simply begin it. He needed to rid this world of its thorns and pesticide for his blighted hands to truly begin taking what belonged to them.

This process would require power and that would require time, yet with every passing day his enemies grew stronger; the thorns grew larger and his hands would become more bloodied in attempting to cut them away. Great speed was necessary, so David needed to find the fastest approach to power possible here.

Venturing into Yaldabaoth’s territory would rob him of power as he was and thus he would need to yield this form to its weaker self, and yet before doing so he needed to use the superior intellect a worm cannot possess to understand the process necessary to cast such a weak form forever aside. He was sure it would follow his instructions— lacking even the will to live as it once had made for a vessel highly convenient for the plans of the new man that now embodied the old one’s flesh— but these instructions first needed to be found.

“How many enemies have range and speed?” he asked Amanda.

She blinked, wiping the remains of vomit from the corners of her lips. A pool of bile was slowly sinking into the sand beneath her feet, and fresh splatter-marks were speckled all across the bottom of her blue patchwork robe and sandaled feet. There was no food in the mixture, only acid and possibly a hint of blood. It must have hurt on the way up, as there were tears in her eyes. She did not wipe them away, merely trying to stop the stomach acid from burning her skin any further.

He asked again.

She was trembling slightly, barely able to collect her voice but just barely able to answer him with a pained expression, “All of them,” she replied, “my magic is slow but I can still teleport and most others have abilities far beyond mine when it comes to speed.”

“Can you slow them?”

She spent a few more words than necessary to say “No.”

“If only she was specialized for support,” David thought to himself, annoyed by how weak and pathetic she was, but he supposed her utility was not to be found in combat.

“In that case how many towns like this are there?” he asked with a disturbingly even voice.

“If you,” she began slowly, finally able to speak somewhat normally, “do this,” she continued, gesturing broadly in an inability to speak of exactly what had just happened, “too many times word will spread. Someone will watch on the hillside, or an archon will investigate why so many sources of mana are disappearing. We should just join a school or something, you’d be super welcome and this… isn’t who I think— what I think the best approach would be.”

“And how long would it take to train at a school?”

“A few hundred years would be enough to—”

“Can you see the problem?”

Amanda did not speak. She finally wiped the tears from her left and then right eyes.

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“We’ve been over this, with every passing day our enemies grow stronger.”

“But surely we can be better than them?”

“What use is morality buried six feet under the earth? When words fail, action is all that remains, and we’re long past the point where words have lost all possible meaning. States don’t go to war because words are able to solve their problems, they go because all the possible meaning of words has failed. At this point long past where all dialogue has been exhausted there is no further room for hesitation. There is only the path forward and the ditch beside it. We either press on or lose in this game of war. Ten years have passed and I don’t even know what’s changed. Who is weaker?”

Amanda collected herself. She thought it would be harder after having witnessed the brutal murder of children, and yet it wasn’t. Past her visceral reaction there wasn’t really anything that had changed. She’d been to war… Yaldabaoth above, far too many times. She’d seen many corpses, and caused the deaths of countless men, women, and children alike. This wasn’t fundamentally different, just far… closer to home. She’d never directly seen children butchered, treated worse than livestock, thrown about by holes carved in them like nothing more than food butchered for consumption. It was disgusting, and yet was he wrong?

She’d killed so many, surely some children had died by her hand when their parents died and left them alone. Surely Xevis had done worse to others than he had done to her. Surely this was justified. Surely she hadn’t begun to fall in love with someone so awful… he had to have a good reason beyond a lust for power, right? Behind his hard exterior and seeming lack of care she knew he was better than this. He had to be, he just had to be.

She began to explain what had happened after Henry died. At first things were calm, the Triumvirate did not retaliate against the slaughter of its troops. Its Scourgeborne were easily replaceable and Regulus was one of the many vassals of the Hidden Emperor who did not have to fear death, so their loss meant nothing to the empire. Tensions continued to rise between the Covenant and Triumvirate, but nothing boiled over as the two tried to stabilize themselves as new states in a time just after all the old borders had dissolved.

Two years after Henry’s death the warring states had consolidated themselves enough that the larger and more stable of them had begun attacking their smaller neighbors. Research had concluded at the diamond-domed outpost some six months after Henry’s death, and so the base had little further strategic value given how stretched-thin the supply-lines were to get there.

When Xevis at last grew tired of needing to spend great resources and manpower on sustaining a worthless piece of territory, the Triumvirate decided to utilize the asset one last time. They escalated tensions with the Covenant over their vicious attacks on its assets beginning some two years prior, and began weakening the guards in the area. As tensions rose and the fortification began to appear weak, the Covenant grew enough confidence to besiege it.

A small garrison had been stationed there, but starving and demoralized soldiers given orders to die did not make for great defenders. Zorvilon burned the outpost to the ground in an effort to repel the Triumvirate’s presence in the area and rid them of inroads to The Covenant’s outermost territory.

The Triumvirate, meanwhile, used this wanton massacre of their citizens— a few thousand scientists and their families amounting to ten-thousand or so— as a justification for all-out war. Given the united front behind the conflict, other territories were deprioritized and the full strength of a united empire bore down on the Covenant.

In the present the Covenant is almost defeated. As the war drew on, other battles emerged and the Triumvirate’s priorities shifted. The war still drags on and the Covenant is a shell of its former self, but actually defeating them would require a great deal of resources and the full attention of at least two of the three emperors. Every battle was costly when the enemy was a collection of ancients that had opposed the absolute god that was Yaldabaoth.

Worse, as the war continued the ancients that were not already members of the Covenant began to learn of its existence and purpose— to repel the Great Scourge that had given rise to alternative gods and powers in the world— and join them. Four of the nine known to be still living ancients have joined the Covenant by this point: Zorvilon, god of fire; Epheris, goddess of light; Dagon, lord of blood; and Indevlyn, goddess of nature.

By this point David had heard enough. It did not matter how powerful these enemies were, he would defeat them. It did not matter the nuances of their conflict, it would all be forgotten. He did not care about who died to make the balance of power shift, only who was weak at this moment. The only thing that mattered was who to strike next, and he had made a decision.

“That’s enough,” Henry began, “thank you.”