For now, I was still an unaffiliated Realm Lord. That meant that I didn’t have a true Realm, and I didn’t get the buffs and bonuses to power from being inside it, nor the weakening of those who would intrude upon it, the latter of which was a substantial benefit.

However, not having that tie also meant not having the metaphysical weight attached to it that signified such power. It meant I could actually cloak myself far more easily, and if I was willing to give up that figurative level of power, I could actually go into someone else’s Realm that wasn’t completely barred to me and act all stealthy and stuff.

Perception and Stealth, the King and the Queen of Skill sets. I had naturally kept them maxed out as far as I was able, and advancing to Human/30 had given me another flat +4 to my Exemplar racial bonus to all Skills, maxing out at +12 on top of everything else.

And it was an Insight bonus, which was amazingly relevant for what I wanted to do, which was go back down into the Netherworld and really, really piss those guys off.

Insight bonuses involve timesighting. Now, I was Beyond Law and Chaos, and these guys couldn’t timesight me in return, although they didn’t know it. They also had Awareness of the immediate future, meaning it was impossible for a normal person to take them by surprise. They could also extend their Awareness up and down the timestream to look at the future and the past, enabling them to study an enemy, see their weaknesses and prior actions... unless said enemy was of equal power to themselves, and just blocked them.

I didn’t care about all of that, as I was going full stealth mode down here. Quasi-Divine Awareness was just one of the senses that Darkstalker foiled. Contested skill checks or go home!

The biggest threat to me were the chronal waves that crisscrossed in invisible, erratic manners, no true way to avoid them except to go ‘around’ them, which meant blinking forward or backwards in time, as required. As far as they knew, no mortal creatures could sense such things reliably, let alone flit back and forth between ticks of the clock to avoid a wave that was going to hit you in the present, future, and past, with no way to avoid them except to be in the past, present, or future when they crossed you, which I could do with some clever time-shifting.

Rote things like incorporeality, shadow-riding, invisibility, Aura-dampening, thought-clouding, motion-veiling, form-shifting, path obfuscation, particle suppression, and all the routine stuff stacked up on top, simply because they were required, all on top of ungodly Ranks in Stealth just to comprehend how to move so that the eye basically ignored what it was seeing.

It was complete ninja stuff, stuff I’d only ever used to observe others, or break into places people wanted to keep secret, like, oh, libraries of hidden grimoires and stuff, and copy everything for the Coralost databases.

I was helped by the absolute reliance on Awareness of just about everything, other physical senses trailing after that universally-used perception of anything one wanted to focus on. The spiritual side of it actually made it fairly easy to deflect or fool, feeding it what it wanted to see, and as long as my Stealth modifier was high enough, I was as good as invisible to everything.

These guys, especially the Shadow-users, probably thought themselves among the stealthiest things in existence. Heck, Sama was Singing to me in the Markspace, giving me a reality-warping Morale Bonus to Stealth, making me sneakier because I was even more confident in how sneaky I was!

How’s that for teamwork across the Netherworld?

I was sending nothing, just listening to her spin a tale about artful revenge, at least half of which I was sure was actually true, as I wafted across the Netherworld and closed in on my target.

Realm Lord Six was recuperating in seclusion toward the middle of the conjoined Realms, nominally protected by the other five, but in truth merely left to Himself and out of range of a raid from the Lords of Light. The Nirvanans couldn’t get to Him without the others detecting them and responding in time.

I had no attacking intent at this time. I had mischievous trickster intent, which we all know is far more nebulous and hard to discern. After all, it’s not a prank unless it’s a surprise!

------

I didn’t know the name of Mr. Yellow Eyes Black Skin, but He was Meditating in the center of a deep, dark crater, pulling power out of the blasted, burning land at the heart of the Netherworld and trying to ply it against the massive burns at play on His withered body and soul. Ninety percent of His Mana Reserves had been Burned away, bringing Him down to the capacity of a mere High Emperor, and the vivic injuries had consumed whole portions of His oversized form, wrought from the energies of the netherworld and so delicious fodder for the Fires of Life.

Replacing such things was not as simple as Casting a spell. The spiritual injuries were ruinous, His size was because he was using His body to store Mana, and the combination of the two meant it would take a long, long time to get everything back, as He basically had to rebuild Himself back to His full power.

I personally found it rather amazing the others weren’t taking advantage of Him, but it probably meant they didn’t dare to with an external threat around, and they needed Him to maintain an absolute advantage. Even wounded as He was, joining a fight against four Lords of Light would give the Nether Lords an unbeatable advantage, and burning that status by abusing Him during His recovery from a massive sneak attack that had probably unsettled all of the bastards was not conducive to the long-term partnership that had been established here.

So, He was sitting there on a throne of what looked like blightfire-seared ugly black sinstone, Dark energies of various kinds were hissing about Him, especially tiny tongues of unholy fire seeping up from cracks in the floor about his seat. I noted that it was a Dark energy not yet released onto Earth, and I had no wish for that to happen, either.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

The sparks and spurts were nasty things, flames that wanted to sear souls and feast on pain and sin, and I had to be careful to dodge them, in addition to escaping His Awareness and avoiding or riding the currents of Dark Mana around.

But that’s the thing about being Typeless. I wasn’t actually barred from using Dark Mana, and actually I was very, very good at controlling pure Shadow Magic. What they called the Shadow Element was actually Darkness, which was a whole different animal.

Shadows, after all, existed because of the Light, and so using Shadows was very effective against the Darkness.

Additionally, I didn’t sidle up to Him. No, no, that would be silly. I sidled up to His nasty Staff, screaming of so much death and misery inflicted with it that all I really wanted to do is shatter it to pieces, watch Him scream in yet another terrible vivic eruption as His soul-linked toy blew to smithereens...

But that would be too direct for me. After all, He was merely the first!

Nope, this was all about treating His toy, and getting out of here. It seemed to me that a good number of the bastards had their own Toys they liked to wave about, and that made them just dandy targets as far as I was concerned.

The best part of all this? Curses and their iterations were all machinations of Fate, in the end. Mages called the Curse Element evil because it had been corrupted to draw on Evil spirits, and it was all about spiritual attacks, pain, and inflicting agony rather than punishing wrongs.

So when He eventually reached over and grabbed His newly Holy Disrupting Toy and the Divine Judgment came down on Him, the only thing He was going to sense was Axiom at work, and who was He going to blame for that?...

Of course, all that meant I would have to take a trip over to the Lands of Light, as well!

-----

It was bright.

It was dazzling.

It was artistic, complex, and fascinatingly glittering.

It was cold, crystalline, and utterly soulless and regimented.

The Lords of Light would have been very unhappy to know that someone could actually enter their perfect Realm of ceaseless ordered motion and interlocking patterns without their permission. Striated layers of solid light extended for thousands of miles in every direction from me, multi-layered, connecting by geometrically-perfect curves of spun photons, perfectly timed pulses of radiance delivering souls striding forth in time with the chimes and beat behind every flicker of light, letting them know to keep to the rhythm, keep to the pace, with no deviation permitted.

Fractal patterns shimmered and diverged in a maddeningly complex but still decipherable pattern, what looked to be a new iteration just part of a long and endlessly-repeating formula that denied any true change or growth. I could see the places where new souls were being fit as the faithful died and were allocated to their endless labors, drones of hard light whose only thought was devotion and obedience, uncaring of the why or what they did.

The only changes here were uncontrolled events, or if the Lords themselves responded to something and so changed the baseline... but that would only affect the very highest levels, while the lower levels of existence continued their obedient, unthinking existences, all choice sucked out of them as their souls arrived in a Realm of Axiom.

Purpose and duty until their souls wore out with the ages, and dissipated back into the cycle... except that wasn’t happening here, just like down in the Underworld.

Souls that had lost all vestiges of motion and motivation were transmuted into forms of light, welded together, and busily assembled into new photonic fields, expanding the Realm of Light. As they blended together, they formed a new field with a unique hue and tenor to it, and were fit into the unflinching Logic and Light of the Realm.

For all the brilliance and illumination, to eyes with Devasight and Vatic Sight, the place looked as cold and soulless as a shattered glass sitting in the sun. Age hung heavy about the place, both timelessness and soul-cracking weariness spread through the Realm, old and tired of mindless continuance, with no true purpose behind it at all.

Nothing, save the will of the Realm Lords and their personal servants in charge of this place, who suppressed all thought that was not of them and for them, gave them tasks to do that did nothing but contribute to the power of Law and Order here, and sought ways to grow their Realm with new souls, uncaring of the crushing weight of Time upon it.

Feral, animalistic mindlessness with pain and fear your only thoughts, or becoming a complete automaton, bereft of all desires but to serve without hope of an ending to your task, one tiny cog in a machine that turned and worked to produce... nothing...

What was better? At least Sin was right up front in how horrible it was. Axiom put on the bland face of assurance, comfort, community, and brotherhood, and then you made it here and realized that corporate drones and worker bees had it easy compared to what eternity was holding for you.

Chaos wasn’t much better, of course, where you either stood alone or you were dominated, and nothing proceeded because everyone was going in all directions at once, or they were regressing and following and lost their individuality rapidly in doing so. Only events of great emotional magnitude, like wars, could stir the spirits of Chaos to head in the right direction, and even then, it was as a horde of impassioned souls, not an army. It was a place where all your decisions were yours, or you lost yourself to the elements, and all the competing desires ensured that nothing actually happened.

If you had any desire for a decent afterlife, then you aspired to Good. Alas, too many people thought what was good for them and theirs was Good, when that was Sin’s biggest lure, or that not doing Evil was the same as doing Good... which unfortunately was also not true, or all wildlife would go to Heaven...

I was going to visit all four of these bastards in their coldly perfect domiciles and flawlessly sterile abodes, manipulating their hollow and frozen Light with The Light and passing through it as less than a glimmer of a reflection. I was going to put my eyes on them, just like I had put them on all of the Lords of the Underworld, and I was going to learn more about them than they wanted me to once I did so.

Then I was going to trap and trick and I was going to bring Judgement upon them, and see how they goddamn liked being Cursed.

The Curse was very basic, making regaining their power as slow as that of a mortal... which was pretty damn slow at this level. They would burn through days-worth of accumulations with but one Realm-level spell. Monstrous expenditures would take them years to recover from, if not decades.

Once they realized how badly they were screwed, that they couldn’t pass my Caster Level and their precious Light or Curse Elements had no damn effect on their Judgement, which arguably embodied both, how would that change their plans?

It would buy time, especially if they couldn’t locate the one responsible, and blamed one another. One side would see a Curse powered by Law, the other a Curse powered by the Curse Element!