The walls of Reality cracked and the First Construct bled away into the Foreverness...
One moment her wellness and self-possessed state of being had been calm and stable. But in the next she had been assaulted by wave after distressing wave of seething, incandescent havoc as she felt something essential to her very existence break.
She was in the grips of an agony and a horror beyond anything she'd ever before experienced. Everything was saw-blades and razors ripping at her flesh. Something poisonously cold was burning its way through her guts and something that stung like acid was flooding her skull, washing across the membrane of her vibrating mind. Fianaxis screamed as the head of an erupting thunderbolt catapulted her through the dark deepness beyond the borders of four dimensional Space.
She futilely tried to focus, to concentrate her awareness on a point of origin from which the maelstrom of pandemonium came, but the attempt was doomed to fail. The power of her enhanced and mutated mind was among her greatest weapons, the source of her powers as an Arbiter. However, she wasn't able to activate the extrasensory key to unlock that power. Something was blocking her. Her connection with the Source from which she drew her strength had been suddenly and violently severed.
She could no longer feel Quhr.
It was all too much for her, the assaultive nature of the turmoil too great to overcome.
She could feel herself levitating, being physically stretched to the breaking point and then beyond even that. She had only the most peripheral sense of being caught in the tremendous, irresistible pull of an electro-nuclear force beyond description as both she and the world around her were glacially chilled, partitioned and fragmented, then jarringly disassembled and flushed outwards, forced through a spiraling warp-tunnel set ablaze. She was coming Undone, unraveling through Space and Time.
Her herculean strength, enhanced by alien technology, meant nothing. Her dazzling array of powers, birthed by the biological mutational necromancy of an ancient, inhuman demi-god, meant nothing. Her indomitable willpower, the most native gift of her few remaining original, natural attributes, amounted to nothing.
There was just the pain. The suffering was everything.
She had the nightmarish sense that planets and galaxies were breaking.
Her scream echoed endlessly down the corridors of broken Creation. She was being summoned back to The Withered Land. Arbiter or no, Fianaxis was being called home...
* * *
Drawing in a deep breath, Rae'vynn Wyyng ignored the painful stiffening begining to make its urgency felt along the lower right side of her back, above the haunch. She hadn't suffered any deep cuts, but knew she had probably cracked a pair of ribs. It had been the result of a brutal encounter only moments ago against a pair of Honor Guard Shieldswomen. Sleek and lithe as panthers, the fierce Shieldswomen, dressed in their standard garb of kevlar-weave pantaloons tucked into the death's-head decorated cuff of knee-high, articulated steel boots and a torso-enveloping combat blouse of anatomic-fit, flexible and reinforced light-armor, had leapt out from inside an interior archway of the main corridor. The women, one a lanky brunette with a long, braided pony tail and the other a thickly-muscled red-head with an assymetrically-cut short hairdo, had wielded their two-headed war pikes with practiced, expert-level efficiency as they'd cut-off Rae'vynn's avenues for escape and stalked her from either side. The pair had moved as one, a cruel swagger to the circular spiral pattern in which they moved as they sought to contain Rae'vynn. But the pirate Captain was no stranger to the combat tactics of defending against multiple assailants and she adopted movements that carried her in a rapid, diagonal path that doubled back on itself, throwing the Shieldswomen off. When they had finally lunged at her, Rae'vynn had positioned them into an attack path that took them straight into the path of her own aggressive, low-sweeping, kiri age-defense variation. The ensuing fight had been short and murderous, a bloodthirsty dance of keenly-edged metal in trained hands, but the effort of defeating the women had cost her.
Rae'vynn didn't know how much longer she could keep up such a furious pace.
Don't think. Fight. Keep moving forward.
She nimbly darted back to the corridor's entrance and signaled to the rest of the jetellin's Landing Party that she'd cleared the way deeper in of any further resistance.
A sound, the slap of metal on stone masonry... she turned. At first, she didn't recognize just what it was she was looking at, but then the details of the picture fine-tuned themselves, rapidly resolving into a startling scene. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw him.
He was astride his steed, a massive, hoofed lizard with a flowing mane of wild hair, and the beast had the broken mechanical remains of a huge humanoid figure caught in its cruel jaws. The metal body flopped and jerked with a sick, inanimate slackness. The steed's rider, a menacing and brooding figure, carried the scarred and dented decapitated head, an oval-shaped, bulbous wreckage, that likely belonged to the same mechanical entity in one of his gauntleted fists. The other hand, holding onto the twisted reins to the lizard's bridle, also managed to be clasped around the hilt of a dual-bladed sonic sword. A rain of orange sparks still rained from inside the ragged edges of the remaining stalk of the metal thing's severed neck. Smears of black oil and crimson blood streaked the rider's scuffed and abraded tactical armor. The lizard-steed growled from deep in the back of its wide throat with a sound that resonated with the savage satisfaction from having slain its prey.
The pirate captain vaguely recognized the splintered and sundered metalloid form as belonging to a Scyke-Bane A.I. unit, a formidable, autonomous man-machine called a Connexion Algorithmyste. It was common knowledge that it took a lot to bring one of them down. Not for the first time since meeting him, Rae'vynn Wyyng felt herself intimidated by The Knight.
Rae'vynn heard familiar footsteps behind her as the rest of the assault team caught up with her and she opened her mouth to speak ---
The air ignited, as if the very atoms that composed its molecular structure had all suddenly combusted.
The walls of Reality cracked and the First Construct bled away into the Foreverness...
Then, amidst the eruption of a blinding flash of searing light, it suddenly seemed as if the whole goddamn world collapsed down upon them all.
* * *
It was a million wildly beating hearts pounding against the restraints of a crumbling, colossal rib cage, it was a hot knife blade thrusting through her inner Mind's Eye...
Nygeia was on-board the jetellin back inside the bridge's pilot-house, standing under flickering fluorescent lights next to Durkka-jan and Pnoom-Aig as Akkitus Orthwaine physically reconnected the damaged craft's failing Global Locality Navigation system to the Emperium's planetary sky-grid. She felt something alien and hungry abruptly claw at the back of her brain, seizing her psionic senses with a feverish grip that was all fish hooks and scorpion barbs, invading her consciousness.
It was Realization. Not "a" realization, but actual physicalized, crystallized, unrestrained Cognizance -- a full-on look at Realization Itself on a macrocosmic level. Nygeia's senses became flooded with and immersed in a stupefying rush of apocryphal input, raw data about this little section of the greater universe in which they existed.
Doom was coming. She knew it. She could feel it. It was coming with polar cold, quicksilvery slickness and traveling with the speed of a comet.
Murshipaz and Oerdyke, sweating and frantically working the barely responsive controls at the jetellin's echo altimeter and gyroscopic inclinometer, stopped their ministrations long enough to look around the interior of the pilothouse as if they'd never seen it before.
"What's going on? Does anyone else feel that? Do you?" Oerdyke said, croaking past his wheezing respiration. "Somebody tell me I'm just imagining things. No, really. Please."
"Princess? Uh, pretty metal lady? Something's not right...," Murshipaz sputtered. "What was that? Something feels really off right now. I think the sky is shaking..."
The air currents surrounding the jetellin hastily retreated, drawing backwards and away, like a tide receding from the beach, and there was a quiet moment where gravity seemed suspended as the huge vessel's spatial inertia was temporarily beyond the restriction of aerodynamic physics.
This was The Withered Land, where the interactions of matter, motion and energy could morph into inverted, funhouse-mirror versions of themselves at the deviant whim of a dying, eccentric Natural Order. There was no Whereas or Therefore nor was there any longer an Appropriate or a Rightful. There was only Calamity and Consequence...
And Doom.
"How can this be? There's something's wrong here," Pnoom-Aig said frowning, her mannerisms disjointed and confused. "Something is really, very wrong!"
"HOLD ON TO SOMETHING!" Durkka-jan barked as he threw his burly musculature into a wrestling match with the vessel's piloting controls.
The walls of Reality cracked and the First Construct bled away into the Foreverness...
The air in the immediate vicinity of the jetellin rushed back in to fill the void it had left with the speed and force of a rocket-propelled hammer striking a floating nail. The giant airship bucked, shuddered and leapt forward, reacting beyond the fragile control of its already compromised system avionics.
The jetellin hurtled forward, hurtling uncontrollably through the sky above The City's skyline. It was a steel bullet twice the size of a Terran-Earth sperm whale and it was moving at just under Mach velocity. The massive ship rammed into the topmost floor of the tallest building in Niyaddour's Third District of the Altex Prefecture...,that being Kolag Y'phree's personal command center.
Nygeia thrust both her arms forward, palms out, and mentally reached deep into the dark wellspring of The Discipline to wrench forth frightful and forbidding forces she quickly shaped into a mighty spell...
* * *
Grimmurmanthe's cataclysmic headlong charge into the fortress interior produced a whirlwind sequence of violent chain events...
His dramatic and volatile appearance convinced the remainder of Kolag Y'phree's purportedly loyal Honor Guardsmen that protecting the The City's pugnacious Warlord-Magistrate was an endeavor far too fraught with danger for what they were being paid. None of them were of the opinion that they were being paid anywhere near enough to be slain by a giant bloodthirsty alien demon. Without a word of discussion, the men ran, as rapidly as their shaking legs would carry them.
They didn't get far. The monstrosities that Grimmurmanthe had released from their interdimensional portal descended on them and tore them to bloody pieces.
Next, the impact of Grimmurmanthe's raging, muscular bulk far exceeded the structural limits of the fortress-castle's walls and flooring. The giant Arbiter literally brought down half the ceiling in Y'phree's private conference chamber. The floor partially collapsed in on itself, folding and buckling into a cascade of bent iron girders, broken wood beams and shattered masonry that fell three floors to the ground.
Arvenall Dampiko, Mikaas Drem and Karliandras Dru'ell rode the sliding chute of wreckage and its ash-cloud into the shadowed gloom of the ground floor, the manic, murderous roar of the attacking monster ringing in their ears.
Kolag Y'phree had speedily bolted from out his conference room chamber and down the corridor towards the archway to the stairwell that led to the ground floor, his heavy cloak fanning out and flapping behind him. He was openly carrying the serrated-edged, Uzdaqh-Da'malign, Hell-Troll sword in his metal-wrapped fist.
The time for plans and for stratagems had passed. Once more, as in his youth, he would need to call upon his prodigious combat acumen to extricate himself from the chaos threatening not only his dominion and his rule, but his very life.
The feeling was intoxicating.
As he descended the stairwell and reached the first of three landings, he peered out at The City's inner skyline through a latticed window.
A flash of light. A burst of brilliance so bright it made his eyes water. And then something eclipsed the light. Something large and in the sky.
What was that? What was he seeing? His heart leapt into his throat.
It was the jetellin airship he'd assigned to the Knight, D'Spayr, and to the Princess Nygeia for their foray into the Pang Xa'Omathra region and the harborside city of Peravendath. The jetellin... Armored. Bristling with cannons and ordnance. Carrying within it enough explosive ammunition to level a small city --- or an antiquated age-worn fortress.
That was the moment the concussive blast from the explosion outside Niyaddour's walls shook the central fortress like a toy in a giant's fist...
* * *
The walls of Reality cracked and the First Construct bled away into the Foreverness...
They had crossed extragalactic SpaceTime and returned to MeatSpace, breaching the Realm of the Biotyk.
And their anger still blazed.
They should never have had to return here, to this isolated galactic backwater.
They had long ago lost interest in the dismal biological and cultural evolution, collective actions and petty flesh-sack intrigues of the sentient bio-viruses infecting the gargantuan, inorganic celestial object in this solar system. They had determined that it in its totality, the planet and its human population, was a waste of their time and intellectual resources. There were far greater wonders and mysteries abroad the Universal Macrocosm. There were deeper undertakings and attractions infinitely more worthy of their attention. But they had their responsibility. There were duties even they, as lofty and elevated as they were in the apex hierarchy of powered sentient beings, could not shirk.
The guidance and policing of the squabbling semi-deities populating the ranks of The Mokaeren Host, those unique beings renowned as the Lords of the Infradimensional Realm, was foremost among those duties. And among them one creature was a standout.
Quhr. Quhr, the First Decreer and Invoker of Judgment, eldest of the Mokaeren Host, was their responsibility. His transgressions had brought the Xherim'efarr back across SpaceTime into the organic sewer of the Biotyk.
Ayunn Bahzee'lysk, the HyperLord who was called "The Retriever", led the expedition of four HyperLords back to Teshiwahur --- just as he done nearly a millenia past during the raid on Urab Kulphorem, when they'd first been forced to imprison Quhr. Ayunn Bahzee'lysk was not at all happy about the assignment. He had always met his committments. His record was impeccable. He did not fail. Not ever. But this Mokaeren anomaly named Quhr, his history with that creature was a different story... The Retriever would make certain this creature was made aware of the penalties for arrogance and for disobedience.
Quhr would be punished.
The ship Ayunn Bahzee'lysk piloted was an immense penal transport vessel the shape of an Terran-Earth Yellowfin Tuna fitted with a frontal triangular "head" positioned transversal to the body's vertical axis. The ship was twelve hundred and sixty meters long, eighty meters wide and twenty-six stories high, possessing relatively stubby, horizontal, delta-shaped wings and, at the rear, three stabilizing horizontal keels on each side of the lunate caudal keel. The ship was a mind-collective etheric-foam construct devised for simplicity in standard Einsteinian/Newtonian Space.
The Xherim'effar didn't need physical starships to travel through their native environment in the Ventriculum's Metaflow, so, whenever they had to leave the Metaflow, they would generate a free-form mob of subatomic virtual particles they could mold into any physical shape or design they needed, for any size they required, aping whatever mechanical technology they could imagine. Utilizing their power to travel through physical space without a mechanical vehicle in normal SpaceTime required expenditures of quantum-psionic power that HyperLords found to be metabolically draining, despite the fact they did so infrequently. They also ran the risk themselves of developing systemic quantum abnormalities due to unexpected negative interactions with the magneto-gravitic fields surrounding most planetary bodies. It was far easier to telekinetically create from virtual particles an aircraft or a space vessel in which they could journey for the short time they were among the extradimensional home of humankind. To further adapt to such travel, the Xherim'effar also adopted, as best they could, humanoid morphologies. HyperLords possessed a tremendous amount of physical mass, though, and could comfortably compress that mass only so far when adopting a biological form. They could and would resemble humans, admittedly humans possessing four to six long, muscular tentacles emerging from their backs, tentacles they could camouflage through optical cloaking. Even still, no one would possibly mistake the eleven to fourteen story-tall aliens as regular human people.
Targeting the continent of Qundin in the western hemisphere, the ship broke screaming into Teshiwahurian airspace at a speed of just under 3.5 Hyper Mach, exceeding Mach 14 in relative flight speed terms.
In seconds, Ayunn Bahzee'lysk saw the the arroyos of Jebenna'Seid, a landscape of intersecting tectonic gullies, volcanic sand wadis, from which ion radiation emanated from beneath the planet's broken skin. The crumbling walls of embattled Niyaddour rose in the near distance. The cloak of oily smoke and particulate ash permeating the air over the conflagration and battle below ignited, again catching flame in the elephantine prison transport's streaking passage.
That was the moment when the Gravitakyon "weapon of last resort" blew up in Quhr's snarling face.
* * *
It was like some mighty mythological hammer wielded by a demonic god had struck down upon an anvil far too fragile to fend off its fury.
The brutal blast wave from the explosion spiraled out from the detonation point at a speed of over two hundred twenty meters per second and encompassed a topographical area of over twenty-six square kilometers. The sonic ferocity of the concussion wave exceeded two hundred seventy decibels, loud enough to be powerfully felt as well as heard. It was intense enough to cause temporary deafness, bruising the human ear's tympanic membrane, and dense enough to create a heart-skipping tidal surge in the liquid of a human's blood stream. The blast wave blew solid objects weighing as much as fifty-four hundred kilograms a height of three meters into the air, tossing them over a dozen meters away from where the shockwave had hit them. The ambient temperature of the air in that immediate locale catapulted from a hot 92 degrees Fahrenheit to a punishing 240 degrees. Correspondingly, the normal atmospheric electrical static charge surged from 80 microCoulomb volts per centimeter to a staggering 3.8 Coulomb volts, releasing charged energy equal to that of a standard lightning strike. At Ground Zero for the explosion, a crater two stories deep and seven acres square was burnt into the soil, moving and atomizing nearly ten million kilograms in soil weight. The awful power released by the detonation of the Gravitakyon-Bulb built into Manduryus Ha'akmar's armor was staggering.
When the concussion wave hit the walls of ancient Niyaddour, the detonation had lifted the ground a full one and a half meters upwards from the foundation's original position... the fortifications of the city-fortress were punched inwards, toppling the entire front face of the forward battlements, postern gate and collapsing the terminal portcullis.
From where he lay, curled tightly into a ball on his right side, facing away from The City, Emaris Staurqe weathered the power of the blast as best he could, feeling its effects ravage his body like nothing he'd ever experienced. An enormous pressure far exceeding that of the atmosphere pounded down on him, pummeling him almost a quarter inch into the sand-draped, rocky ground. Sections of his body armor sagged and buckled, unable to absorb or displace the torrent of energy washing over him. Whatever exposed flesh the blast wave touched became burnt and then the topmost epidermal layer of his synthetic flesh was flayed off in the super-heated winds. The force of the airblast threatened to toss him across the clearing and he was forced to reach out with one arm and, spreading his hand from a closed fist into a claw, sink his trembling fingers deep into the rocky sub-stratum to anchor himself...
It felt like he'd been very close to having his arm ripped off.
When the wave at last passed, he was left dizzy and on the edge of consciousness. It was a major exertion to get his battered body to respond to any command, however small or minor. The act of raising his head was a titanic effort. He focused his blurred vision towards the point where he'd last seen Manduryus Ha'akmar's body.
The power of the explosion had struck like an enormous piledriver and driven Quhr down on one knee.
On one knee. The explosion should have atomized him, shredding his body in a million different directions, and at the very least it should have burned him to cinders. It had not. It had only knocked the dread Mokaeren Invoker of Judgment down on one knee. No living being could --- or should -- be that physically powerful. It defied all logic and all the laws of physics, at least as Staurqe understood them. It was obvious that the Mokaeren Host were beings whose physical durability far outstripped that of any mammalian human or artificial human in existence.
Staurqe was beyond amazed. He was absolutely awestruck.
Quhr saw him and returned the Alpha Progenitor synthezoid's stare with a look of feral hatred. There was more than a hint of madness about the alien demi-god's hot glare.
"You. I see you. That... hurt," Quhr intoned in his buzzsaw-raw, booming baritone. "I didn't think anything here in this cesspool meatspace could do that. For that indignity, I will kill you, then resurrect you, and then kill you again and again."
Staurqe had no response. He could only stare helplessly.
And then a deep and enveloping shadow suddenly dropped over Ground Zero, positioning itself to block the sight of the planet's setting dual suns from overhead.
It was an absolutely enormous airship of alien design...
* * *