*** For him, his dark journey into foreignness and lifelong bondage had all begun during a long stormy day in the territories of the LowShore, past the Undefined Provinces of the Aggregotham Incendia. The LowShore, more properly known by Void-faring travelers as the 'Epidermatus Planescapes', a submodal isthmus of the Far Frontier, had been a temporary refuge for he and several members, survivors actually, of his decimated tribe. He'd been tall and strong, emotionally rough-hewn through his experiences as a native child of the Ventriculum, though he'd been intellectually segregated by virtue of his LowShore origins from the artisans, engineers, philosophers and scientists who had become the Ruling Class of the civilized places in the Far Frontier.
But his captors had cared nothing for that. They overran and seized the edgelands of the Aggregotham Incendia through sheer force. He and his motley brethren had apparently possessed something, some special spark, that the invading army of brutal conquerors had considered to be valuable. So they had been captured and subjected to political and medi-genetic 'reconditioning', forcibly metamorphosed, by order of the Monarchical BioPresence of the Arkyngales. Chemical Mutagens, radioactive isotopes and viral-nanotech enhancements had been bonded to his morphological base and his flesh had been re-sculpted. He had been irreversibly changed. He had not been born a Vamfyrr... No normal humanoid organism had ever been born that way, it was developmentally counter-intuitive -- being born a rapacious, conscienceless, cannibalistic parasite was intrinsically detrimental to human evolution. Self-destructive. Those who fed on their own would presumptively end their own bloodlines. But Vamfyrr's were useful to conquerors and terrorist nations. So he and his brethren were re-made.
Before that, he had been, by most societal benchmarks, little more than an adolescent. But as he grew into adulthood, his power had blossomed. It was a power born of the mind, a power capable of warping another sentient individual's perception of Reality. It was the power to actualize illusion and nightmare, the ability to unhinge and derange other minds. And he physically fed off that madness. Next he'd been unceremoniously dragged into an audience with the intimidating Arkyngale military commander who had been responsible for the slaughter of his people... And since that day, he'd seen or participated in all things illicit, felonious and nightmarish.
He was a victim of Fate, abandoned by Destiny. He had no remorse. He had no regrets. What would be the point? He had never known whether or not what was done to him had in any way improved or benefited him. All things considered, it hadn't really mattered. His situation became such that he could no longer escape his circumstances. He was, for all intents and purposes, alone. One by one the other survivors of the massacre of his people succumbed to the ravages of disease, rejection of their artificially-induced mutations, and, ultimately, Time and disease. He remained, untouched by Mortality. He was forever. He was left to do what he had to do to survive.
He became a predator, a weapon, a killer, and he discovered he had a taste for bloodshed and chaos. He didn't look back. ***
Pylott's eyes opened slowly. Her face felt stiff, as if the muscles under her skin had become unused to flexing. There was an electric buzzing resounding inside her head and she felt slightly disoriented. She felt the presence of a light and filmy, diaphanous hood over her head. The hood did not restrict her breathing nor her vision. She looked around: she was hovering some distance, she estimated it to be about the height of a tall man, above a stone or tiled floor, her arms outstretched at her sides at shoulder height and her hands encased by an odd orange light that felt solid and cold as polar ice. She cautiously moved her head from side to side, taking in her surroundings as best she could through the haze of her blurred vision. She could see that she was inside a small saucer-shaped, internal amphitheater flooded with soft, muted light. The predominant colors of the chamber's interior were shades of copper, brass and dulled antiqued gold. What few details she could make out revealed the chamber's walls to be lined with complex machine circuitry, like the face of an open computer motherboard. She turned her head just a bit further to look over one shoulder and could see Poli'Artta Ranzireth and Lt. Cmdr. Syngulareus hovering a short distance away, suspended just as she was.
There was a strange man with asymmetric, hybridized morphology on the floor below. He was tending to a large, waist-high, crescent-shaped computer console festooned with an array of elliptical viewscreens. She could feel an air of malevolent authority emanating from him.
When she spoke aloud, her voice sounded like a dry rasp. That croaking tonality made her briefly wonder how long she had been in her captor's possession.
"Who are you? How did we get here? Where is this place?"
"Don't act dim. You'll bore me and that will not produce good results. I have no doubt you have a good idea who I am and you probably have some semblance of an idea where you likely are," the man answered irritably.
"The last that I remember we had been surrounded and overrun by an attacking force of Manifold Predators..."
"So? I know all that. The Manifold Predators serve my will. Why are you wasting my time?" the man who was obviously the creature named Fellmanghul responded.
Pylott held her temper. "I suppose it goes without saying that I shouldn't bother to ask you about Queen Infernyya Rebekkon then..., no doubt you'll find that question offensive, too."
Fellmanghul shifted his gaze away from the viewing monitors and raised his eyes to lock with Pylott's.
"Considering the circumstances, it is a perfectly reasonable query. Queen Rebekkon is secured in the chamber adjacent to us where, like you, she is my prisoner. She is important. You, on the other hand, are a distraction. Additionally, she is royalty and, as such, is due some measure of respect. Though she is shackled and rendered powerless, I saw no need to add insult to injury by forcibly exposing her to evolutionarily diseased, alter-human trash like you – and certainly not to an anthropoid-mockery like this metal-implanted Argossyan simulacrum you have as an ally."
Fellmanghul's unexpected distaste and breed-specific bigotry struck Neuronia Syngulareus with the force of a physical blow.
"Well, I guess that would be an attitude one could expect from a psychotic, bottom-feeding, hermaphroditic bio-aberration like you."
Fellmanghul smiled frostily. "Ah, so you expect me to be repulsed by you. I commend you for your foresight, being, after all, no more than a steel puppet with delusions of personhood."
Cursing in her native tongue, Lt. Cmdr. Syngulareus violently strainedagainst her bonds... to no avail. Pylott made eye contact with her and, shaking her head as Syngulareus raged, frowned, clearly indicating the Naval officer should regain her professional detachment and calm. Reluctantly, the sentient cyborg-anthrobot acquiesced.
"Where are all the people, the inhabitants of Lobarth Ceryndum?" Pylott asked. "What did you do with them?"
"Oh, yes, that. I sometimes forget that outsiders would find their absence to be disconcerting. The people... They're sequestered, impounded within a series of corrals I constructed. Not actual physical cages, but mental corrals, telepathic enclosures. Inside those pens, frozen in mid-thought and paralyzed in physical space, they are dreaming."
Pylott flinched at Fellmanghul's use of the euphemism "dreaming". As a member of the Star Legion, she had been trained in defenses against telepathic incursion by antagonistic sentient creatures and she knew that there was far more ferocity and violence involved in forcibly overpowering and hijacking another person's mind than most people could imagine. And it took icy control, a lot of it. Any being who could do such a thing would possess very little in the way of moral decency. Ripping away another person's sense of self, re-directing their thought processes and usurping their perception of Reality was an act that left lasting mental trauma on the victim or victims, often leaving them with dissociative amnesia or locked permanently into a paranoid schizophrenic state. A Cyonik Vamfyrr would be a tremendously formidable enemy to have to defend against. "So you're saying you telepathically puppeteered their minds, all of them, and induced a psychic fugue state, placing them in torpor?"
"It would appear you've been exposed to some measure of enlightenment about mental telepaths. Fascinating. But to your point, Yes, that is what I am saying. I want them calm and docile. In that way, I can feed without having to resort to brutish physical methods that would maim my cuisine's fleshy vessel."
"But ALL of them? Really? I mean, Lobarth Ceryndum is a city... don't you need all the assorted utility systems running, like power, water, communications, transportation, health services, law enforcement and urban militia defense? What do you gain by shutting down an entire metropolitan eco-system? How do you attend to even the most basic and minimal of needs for all these people while they are in torpor? Who feeds them? Who attends their health problems? Surely not you by yourself and I doubt the Manifold Predators in your service could be convinced to do so, even were they capable...," Neuronia queried, clearly puzzled at the manner in which the Vamfyrr's choices defied, to her mind, common logic.
"I am invisible to them and to their technology. Masked. They don't know I'm here. They aren't aware that they should look for someone or something like me. All they know is that they sometimes have odd and mystifying sensations that something in the world around them might not be quite the way it was the day before. They don't know that such a thing as a Cyonik Vamfyrr even exists. It's a simple matter of causal redirection and selective observation...," Fellmanghul explained. "If anyone they know suddenly and inexplicably disappears or dies, whether friend, family member, employer or foe, I make them forget that person ever existed. They each maintain a constant, all-inclusive dream state rich with detail and are unaware that everything they are experiencing is a fiction, a fantasy. And it works because they themselves create that fantasy, not me. The only time they become aware of the reality of their situation is when I pull back the veil of illusion before I end them, draining them of all their life energy..."
"You're disgusting," Neuronia Syngulareus said. Fellmanghul shrugged.
"Your methodology... That's a little cruel, isn't it?" Pylott remarked.
"You think it cruel? I would disagree. It would far more cruel for them to fearfully wander the streets of the city knowing that I will eventually hunt them, reap them and drain them of their vitality. Locked as they are in mental submission, in stasis, they do not fear my approach..."
Fellmanghul's dispassionate and unsympathetic, utilitarian pragmatism set Pylott's teeth on edge.
"Why are you doing this, any of it? You have a pretty good thing going on here for yourself. No one, and by 'no one' I mean the Authoritarchs, knows you're here. People mostly turn a blind eye to this region of the Flow. By attacking The Glide you draw attention to yourself, to Lobarth Ceryndum. Curiosity will prevail. Others will come to investigate. You didn't need to alert us or anyone else to your presence...," barely controlling her simmering anger, the Argossyan Naval commander spoke as much in an effort to obtain information as to control her own impulses.
Fellmanghul slowly drew in a deep breath past clenched teeth. He, too, was working to control something inside himself, something wilder and more hot-blooded. He answered in a growl that was strangled by the effort it took not to allow himself the luxury of losing control.
"I owe someone very important and very powerful an ancient debt I cannot hope to repay," he said. "My survival and my liberty are at his discretion. It is his wish that you proceed no further in your journey and that you peer no deeper into the darkness at the core of the recent events that brought you here. He is of the opinion that I can supply the leverage needed to ... redirect ... the focus of your efforts."
"There's still time for you to stop all this, time for you to choose a different course of action. This doesn't have to end in death, not for any of us, but especially not for you. I get it. You're somehow compelled, in some way duty-bound, to do someone else's bidding. You're under orders. But we can negotiate a truce. Otherwise, I'm going to have to kill you. You know that, don't you? And if I fail, then my partner will follow in my footsteps and, trust me, you REALLY do not want that to happen," Pylott said calmly past the permeable force-hood encasing her head.
Fellmanghul ignored her.
Surprisingly, it was the Hexabreed warrior woman who next spoke. Poli'Artta was at first hesitant to engage with the arrogant and sinister mutant-variant, but as she spoke, she became more attuned to addressing his unspoken curiosity. "I think it's safe to assume, given our surroundings, that you're something of a scientist. Apart from the Authoritarchs, the Nebulancers and perhaps even the Quegfellum, you strike me as being more informed about the true nature of the MetaFlow than most its humanoid inhabitants. I suspect that you're a being who is somehow, someway, immutable and stands outside the boundaries of TimeSpace affecting the rest of the normal sentient biological population. It's because you're a Vamfyrr, isn't it? You exist across timestreams, and if there are Multiversal replicants of 'You', they won't at all be linked to one another, the way most the rest of us are linked to our alternate selves. Not quite in the Past, not truly a thing of the Future, but not at all anchored in the Present. Not quite dead, not quite alive, either. Would I be right in assuming that? You are probably aware, I'm sure, that something strange has happened, something wide-ranging and potentially dangerous that has negatively impacted the very foundations of the Ventriculum."
"Yes," Fellmanghul said slowly. He raised an eyebrow as he regarded Poli'Artta, surprised at her observations. He had incorrectly judged her to be little more than a wild and undomesticated mercenary criminal or sellsword. Now he had been made aware of her intelligence. He found her to be intriguing. Ugly and repellent, as were most Hexabreed, but intriguing nonetheless. "It appears that our great celestial clock is broken. The countdown to structural re-ignition, the Reset, has stopped."
"I would say that's just a little important, wouldn't you? And a possible indicator that the Metaflow is somehow damaged. So what do you intend to do about that?"
"Do? Why would I care? As you said, I exist independent of the re-ignition. Whatever the reasons for the anomaly, you and your kind, regardless, would remain the prey on which I feed..."
"You care," Poli'Artta said. "Otherwise, you'd have slaughtered us from the very start and then drained away our bioelectric energies. But you caged us instead. You're curious. You're concerned. After all, what will you do if all your prey are dead?"
Fellmanghul sighed and tilted his head as he read the dark turmoil within the whirlwind of thoughts past Poli'Artta's face. "You are an excellent judge of character. I respect that. I can also respect that you have no private agenda that you're trying to hide from me. That kind of honesty is --- both rare and compelling."
"You haven't answered her question," Neuronia Syngulareus, still smoldering from her earlier heated exchange with the Vamfyrr, interjected pointedly.
"Oh, but haven't I? As to be expected, subtlety is lost on the rudimentary level of comprehension governing a mere machine."
"He needs to know what we know, how much we know, and if we've shared anything that could be dangerous to him with the Authoritarchs," Pylott concluded. "He doubtless read our minds after the Manifold Predators brought our unconscious bodies here, but when we're unconscious we, meaning our minds, can't access our higher brain functions. So while he can see our most recent memories, but he can't know what we deduce or what we reason or what we have planned to do with that information in our memories. To know that, he needs us awake. But if we're awake, then we can resist his telepathic probes, though probably not for very long. And he knows that Mune'stahr and I aren't always truthful with the Authoritarchs because he can see from my memories that we don't fully trust them..."
"As I said, 'subtleties'," Fellmanghul said as he raised one of his talonedfists and held his hand in view. In it he held a long, thin metal implement that split into three dagger-like blades of differing sizes, the longest of which was jaggedly serrated on both its outer edges.
"Ah, time to play, is it?" Lt. Cmdr. Syngulareus said sourly upon seeing the Vamfyrr admire the vile looking implement. "Well, come on then, do your worst!"
Fellmanghul stepped onto the caged platform of a motorized boom lift and, after typing a numeric sequence into the LCD read-out of one of his forearm guard-gauntlets, smiled serenely up at his three captives as the hoist-arm raised the platform...
A quartet of thunderous percussive blasts boomed throughout the chamber, shaking the foundational frame beneath them and sending tremors along the walls around them. It was ominous. It made their skin crawl. Each pounding reverberation was a measured strike, separate from the one before, and each felt as though it increased in intensity.
Something very powerful was trying to get in at them. And it was something that didn't sound at all friendly.
They could see from the look of growing alarm crossing the finely sculpted androgynous features of Fellmanghul's face that he'd been unprepared for the resonant bangs. He was surprised and startled, and he was having a difficult time identifying their source.
The evolutionarily advanced, skilled and powerful telepath closed his eyes, obviously expanding his conscious senses, exceeding the limits of physical space and material dimension as he searched his surroundings.
His eyes abruptly snapped open and his lips curled into a feral grimace, like a wolf's snarl.
"You dare? You come HERE and challenge me? I'll KILL you," the Vamfyrr shrieked, his voice raw with an emotion that could only be described as hate.
Pylott, Poli'Artta Ranzireth and Lt. Cmdr. Syngulareus, shackled and caged as they were in the chamber enclosure, quickly exchanged glances of alarm and astonishment.
They didn't speak, but the message they communicated to one another was clear: this was not good. Not at all.
Who in hell was Fellmanghul speaking to?
***
Alone. Again. Always. Dreaded, misunderstood, feared and hated, and justifiably so. She was a serpent in the dark, watchful and mistrusting and ready to strike. A symbol of reverent apprehension. Ever alone. Always dangerous.
... a true queen of malediction ...
Kneeling in the shadowed gloom, imprisoned as she was within a flexible but impregnable shell of a molecular chained-matrix, she smirked, an expression partly fueled by secret triumph and by bitterness born of frustration. He had, as she'd expected, underestimated her. He hadn't given deeper thought of just what it was that made her special, that made her a commanding and potent force in the civilized territories of the Metaflow. For that failing, he would doubtlessly pay. But it was the fact that he had only superficially considered the fact of her royal heritage that provoked the bulk of her resentment. He'd only thought her to be, erroneously assumed her to be, a spoiled, queenly dilettante in the management and mastery of wielding celestial-based macro-nuclear power as opposed to being a skilled, experienced practitioner of radical transformational teratodynamics. His assumptive arrogance was insulting. She was the undisputed Queen of the terrifying nation of the Paranescience for a reason...
... because she could do what no one else could do. She could discern the atomic states of and then split asunder the quantum nature of elementary constituents, shifting and inverting the very point particles composing the molecules of whatever target she concentrated upon, and corrupt their base design. Where she could then, diving down to the subatomic level, restructure and transmogrify living organic matter, the multi-environmental building blocks of biochemical substances, and change it with little more than a wave of her elegant hands.
She could, whenever she wished, make, unmake, command and destroy monsters.
She was Infernyya Rebekkon, damn all gods to hell, and she was a spawn of The Empyrikans, the near-mythic, lost last tribe of the mighty Devolutioners. Empyrikans. The very same para-biological race of militaristic hunter/predators that saw Time as a series of interconnected parallel and serial events wherein the ratio of the number of outcomes in which a specified event occurred as statistically congruent to the total number of trials for that event. The very same Empyrikans whose biological gene-matrix spawned the nomadic, uncontrollable Aingyllic Horde. More than merely a superlatively-developed native species and culture that dominated the evolutionary apex of the Ventriculum, they were celestial examples of true bio-sophistication. She was of that blood lineage. She would not be underestimated by a genetically-engineered, evolutionary one-off and dead-end parasite like Mondrum Fellmanghul.
The Vamfyrr had moved her location to a different part of his mobile fortress. Thespace in which she was held wasn't very large, a slanted-ceilinged, rhomboid chamber off the main corridor bisecting the pentagonal central hub of Fellmanghul's ship, running perpendicular to a hallway that led to the engineering section and the access to the propellant housings. A quartet of Manifold Predators, bulky para-simian, hairless anthropoids with wide, triangular faces and skulls resembling those of giant vampire bats, the large ears replaced by large cartilaginous horns resembling those of an Earth-born sable antelope, surrounded her, standing guard at each corner of the room. The beasts appeared to be paradoxically both fierce and doltish, their slanted amber eyes glittering with barely repressed homicidal impulses and yet possessing an expression of unfocused confusion. Even at rest, the creatures appeared tense. There was no doubt in the Queen's mind that they still instinctually and desperately fought against Fellmanghul's telepathic domination for control of their minds.
There were things of which the Vamfyrr, and most others outside the Paranescience , were completely unaware when it came to the Intercosm Paranescience's interactive homogeniety. The most striking of these unknown elements was in the category of communications --- because all members of the Court of Territorial Nobles submitted to being ratio-cerebrally converted and reconstructed into psychic hive-reflections of Infernyya Rebekkon's consciousness, she was able to ride atop the consciousnesses of the Nobles and remotely observe the events of 3-dimensional space through their five human senses. She could literally be anywhere and everywhere all at once, using her psychic connection with her Nobles to feed her spoken conversation and optical data mapping their environmental surroundings. It wasn't true telepathy, like that which Fellmanghul practiced, but was instead a mental faculty allowing her to get detailed, real-time information about targets inaccessible to her own senses due to physical proximity. And Queen Infernyya's own multi-cortexed mind could handle the simultaneous influx of data from a dozen external, roving intellects.
But she had to be careful. Thought-energy was, in some ways, much like any other form of energy. It transmitted along recognized frequencies. Being a Cyonik, Fellmanghul would be especially sensitive to extrasensory mental energies used anywhere in his proximity. She didn't want to prematurely garner his attention.
She steadied her resolve, silently repeating her mantra of rebellion: I will be your annihilation.
With great effort, she stilled her powerful mind, isolating her individual tactile senses and then freezing herself in Time, placing all sensory stimulation into an abnormal state of dormancy, concentrating and letting her perceptions expand into the hollow places beyond waking awareness. She reached out into an expansive bathymetrical ocean bled free of all color and texture, a place she rarely ventured into, but recognized as a major source of dynamic energy beyond mechanical manipulation, an ever-present, but hidden, well of great mental power. She knew no formal scientific name for the pelagic expanse, but she had always referred to it as "The White Nihility". Once her mutant mind touched that realm, she was capable of doing nearly anything -- and bringing that anything out from within the ghostly Nihility to actualize within the Ventriculum.
Infernyya Rebekkon's mental projection reached out and scooped up dual quivering handfuls of the blank, cool liquidity and raised the parapsychic neuro-matter over her head and let in fall, running over her spirit-form...
In the "real" world, Mondrum Fellmanghul's quantum ion-shackles dissolved from off the Queen's kneeling form, the throat-collar and wrist cuffs and chains washed away, disintegrating into a scintilla of tiny flares that burned brightly and then faded to nothingness. The heat drained from her tangible form and then returned in a rushing flood of hot sensations. Then the White Nihility penetrated past her flesh and unlocked the extrasensory fetters that confined her physical perceptions... She could move again. She was free.
She quickly disconnected from the Nihility. Remaining linked to it for too long ran the risk of mesmerizing a person and lulling them into a drowsy, docile state wherein the Nihility would drain away their intellect.
But once she was uncoupled from the realm, her mind, and her powers, resumed being a supercharged weapon.
And the first thing she did with that weapon was to capture the biomolecular-biomechanical matrices of the Manifold Predators guarding her captivity, forcibly permeating their chemistry and rewriting the RNA polymerase-coding of their flesh, catalyzing latent mutative genes and supercharging a physical, and very, very painful metamorphosis...
Inside the passage of one hundred heartbeats the creatures whom Fellmanghul had enslaved became something else evolutionarily, something more, something alien. They became biogenetic chimeras, lower-level versions of the Queen's Black Sun Seraphs --- demogorgons.
They became soldiers of the Paranescience, incontrovertibly loyal to their maker, Infernyya Rebekkon.
Immediately, something sharp and needle-like launched itself furiously at her mind, hungrily invasive and all red rage, making a sham of the seduction inherent in its message...
...tinkle, flicker, twinkle, clatter, click-clack... This isn't what you want. This isn't what you need. You long for the serenity of my domination. Can you not hear the music of my Glory?
Fellmanghul.
Standing tall in the murky gloom enveloping her cell, the Queen smiled to herself. It was a feral, wolfish expression that was all teeth and militant belligerence. The Vamfyrr was straining to again capture and occupy her perception and cognition -- and failing. Unlike before, when she was on her ship unsuspecting of his mental assault, she was now ready for him.
I can hear you just fine, brain-worm. Now can you hear ME? It's important that you do. Because I'm going to hurt you. I'm going to strip away the chains of your domination from the people of Lobarth Ceryndum and I'm going to make them oh-so-very aware of your existence and what you've done to them. They will know your name and know your crimes. I'm going to shield them from you so you can't take them over and re-puppeteer them. Then I'm going to lead them to you and they're going to tear you apart. You're going to die screaming, strangling on your own blood. And as they gut you like the filthy pig you are, I'm going to laugh while I ride your mind down into the blackness of Hell. Can you hear ME?
You're going to die, Fellmanghul, and die SOON. Say something, you repulsive, cowardly leech, tell me your fantasy of how you'll survive that...!
His response was not a telepathic one. She could, with her enhanced ultrahuman auditory perception, hear his baritone bellow even through the walls of the ship's inner bulkhead. The sound of his piercing voice was nonetheless fragile. He was unused to losing control, was unprepared for it. More, she could hear the first glimmerings of a growing fear behind the empty defiance of his words.
"You DARE challenge ME? I'll KILL you!"
***
She barely navigated the superheated cloud of electromagnetic feedback ignited by a growing blossom of compressed radiation. When she'd emerged from the streamwave tunnel inside the barrel of the Syntopic Jump Under-Axis, the very first thing she'd had to do was duck as a Mandelbulb Transit Wing-fighter blew up. She'd emerged from the streamwave tunnel four ring-terraces inside the second perimeter out of three encircling the Aggregotham Incendia's Epidermatus Planescape and moving really, really fast when she abruptly encountered the blindingly bright explosion.
Luckily, Ryujonin Worr's reflexes were finely honed enough for her to swiftly alter her trajectory to climb and bank to starboard before slamming into the wreckage left by the detonation. Her Warpstream Envion Hypertransit Life-harness absorbed most the crippling G-force smashing into her body as she changed course. She slowed her injection into the territorial nullificity of the Planescape, committing her forward momentum into a looping turn that brought her around to face the entrance of the streamwave tunnel... where she saw, only a relatively short distance away, the vastness of a pod-tier metropolis over a wine-colored sea. The skies above the shadowy city's uneven skyline were intermittently lit by the strobe light flares from the Inferno Pits surrounding the far borders of Lobarth Ceryndum.
Peering through her protective helmet's multi-frequency optical scanning visor, she could see a mammoth spherical craft, almost the size of a small planetoid, hovering overhead wrapped within the aura of a camouflaged optical profile. That unique shape made identification of the craft effortless. It was The Glide.
Simultaneously, she saw a bulkily-armored humanoid shape four times the size of a normal human astride a narrow bridge spanning the entrance towards the wave-tossed burgundy sea. The powerful figure was in the midst of a wildly savage battle against two dozen armored,antelope-horned primates who wielded las-pistols.She didn't know who it was exactly that she was watching, but she knew from the armor configuration that it had to be one of Queen Rebekkon's infamous Black Sun Seraphs. And that thought unsettled her...
She set the physical profile of her Warpstream Hypertransit exo-suit to obfuscate optical reflectivity and camouflage her against the sky. She didn't want to be seen.
Tegryimm Xolak had imbued her with many abilities and enhancements to ensure her survival while in service to the Authoritarchs, like greatly amplified muscular strength over a super-dense skeleton and nearly impenetrable flesh, both external and internal, that could quickly repair itself after suffering extreme damage, and heightened tactile senses enabling her to isolate and track her prey across or through any atmospheric or para-celestial environment. But he hadn't changed her biomolecular human physiology enough that she could compete against the deadly metahuman deviations constructed by Infernyya Rebekkon's mutagenic powers. Ryujonin was still essentially a human being, although she was an evolutionarily advanced, amplified version of one, while the Queen of the Paranescience employed the services of transmogrified creatures whom she had rendered no longer human, changing them into another species altogether... like the Black Sun Seraphs.
Ryujonin Worr had made the mistake once before in trying to oppose one such being in open combat and the effort had nearly killed her. Her flesh had been burnt and mangled, many of her bones had been broken, and the internal organ damage was fearfully severe -- and the beast had only struck her half a dozen times. Even with her greatly enhanced healing abilities, it had taken her several solar heliars, by Teshiwahurian reckoning, to recover enough to even walk again, much less fight.
She would, if she could, give the Seraph a wide berth before risking a physical confrontation.
That was why, when Opthas Kandyruu slowly turned to look up above the city skyline and locked his gaze onto hers, she felt her heart skip a slow beat. Kandyruu, the infamous Killer of Gods.He could see her, there was no doubt in her mind. But the telemetry data from her scanning probes revealed he did not target her with his weapons systems. To her surprise, she heard his voice, like low-pitched thunder but urbane as that of a scholar,transmitted through the audio-circuitry of her comm-phones.
"Ah, I know you..., the Huntswoman of the Authoritarchs. You do know it's both impolite and dishonorable to watch a fellow warrior, regardless their allegiance, do battle against great opposition and not make even a pretense at offering aid." He sounded a little exasperated.
"This isn't my fight. And I don't know the disposition of this conflict. Those Manifold Predators may have good reason to swarm against you... For all I know, you may well be the aggressor here, invading their territory on illegitimate terms," she said.
"Be serious. They're Manifold Predators," Kandyruu responded irritably. "That means they're cannibals. They eat human flesh. And this territory? We're past the Undefined Provinces, in the planescape rim of the Far Frontier, pretty much a lawless zone. Now get off your pampered ass and help."
Crossing her arms across the torso of her exo-suit, Ryujonin shook her head. "Did you know that the Angel of Cataclysm is running amok, out on the warpath, back at the Magistorial Ring of the Rift Bridge, murdering his way into the Authoritarch's Prismatic Faction?"
"No. And I don't care. Got no time right now to discuss territorial politics," Kandyruu said, avoiding her question. "So far as I know, none of that is of any concern to my superiors in the Intercosm Paranescience. What I DO know is that there's an entire legion of these bloodthirsty, dull-witted things charging across the bridge from out of the city. I could use a hand."
She had the distinct impression that the vexed and beleaguered Seraph was being truthful. This wasn't what the cosmic Ronin expected. "Well, I suppose if it comes down to a major disagreement between us, we could always work it out later..."
Uncrossing her arms, she sighed loudly into her comm-mic and, enabling her suit's flight actuator, initiated a short streamburst to fly down to Kandyruu's position.
But that was the moment when an incredibly large and ominous looking alien craft appeared, rumbling into view in the skies above Lobarth Ceryndum. It was a mammoth saucer-shaped craft easily dwarfing the mass of the still-cloaked Glide.
And emblazoned on the bow of its hull was the grotesque insignia of the Qaan'Rai of Kadaverign Space.
***