Anarchy was a maelstrom of lawlessness and upheaval, an unrelenting force of pandemonium and havoc happily released from its cage... Entropy, a universal mandate primarily considered to be impartial and dispassionate, was known by those who were wise to secretly favor Anarchy over Order.
Order meant constancy, control, sovereignty, and predictability. Some would say "stagnation". Anarchy meant turmoil, unpredictability, nihilism, and chaos. Some would say "evolution".
Chaos had been unleashed in the least likely place in the Ventriculum and the impact of that event unleashed pandemonium throughout the intradimensional void.
Kahlyndaar, the Paranescience's dread Angel of Cataclysm, had imperiously forced his way past the mammoth Magistorial Ring of the Rift Bridge to violently invade the sanctity of the Authoritarch's Prismatic Faction. The Magistorial Ring of the Rift Bridge was a randomized parametrical wall that separated the domain of the Authoritarchs from the rest of the general Flow, making it a floating-point island in vector space unassailable by any organic creature possessing the same vibrational algorithmic frequency as the main oceanic body of the Ventriculum. The Prismatic Faction existed as a wedge between different Planes of Reality. To try mounting the Rift Bridge and then attacking the Prismatic Faction was supposed to be a quantum impossibility. And yet Erraforda the Major, one of the Authoritarch's eldest, most dominant and formidable governing Judgmentors, had been killed during the breach.
Killed.
If everyone weren't already attuned to it before, then they were aware of it now. The Multiverse was broken. Reality was failing.
No one in among any of the MetaFlow's primary sentient organic civilizations had ever supposed that any of the Authoritarchs could die. No one could find exiting record or anecdotally recall that such an event had ever before occurred. The conventional wisdom was that Authoritarchs, immensely powerful, seemingly omniscient quasi-deities, were not prey to the weaknesses, the corruption and the decomposition that affected those fragile, mortal creatures made of flesh. The various governments of the MetaFlow's cultivated and humanized territories were shocked and horrified. Such an event was evidence that not only could the millenia-old fortress at the haven that housed the Prismatic Faction be breached, but its demi-god inhabitants were now revealed to be vulnerable to assault from one of Queen Infernyya Rebekkon's mutated ultrahuman void-assassins. The discovery that a Black Sun Angel could be powerful enough to physically challenge and defeat any one of the Authoritarchs in single battle was stupefyingly implausible and yet it had actually happened. This concept courted far more than mere heresy, it was an atrocity of nightmarish proportions.
Worse, it was undeniably apocalyptic.
Because while the dumbstruck and astonished Authoritarchs engaged Kahlyndaar in pitched battle, the Colonial Expeditionists of the Nebulancer Fleet and the Feral Armada of the Devolutioner Protectorate eagerly waited for their opportunity to launch a lethal strike at the heart of the ruling dominion at the first sign of collapse. The two naval invasion militias waited masked, voidships invisible to detection, just beyond the edges of the Rift Bridge.
The fractious and fragile Balance of Power within the civilized MetaFlow was teetering on the edge of sudden disintegration.
Tegryimm Xolak, the Paladin Prime of the Authoritarchs, leader of the small army of parahuman guardians called "the Sentry Protective", had dispatched the cosmic Ronin named Ryujonin Worr. Returning from her travels Outside in the Known Universe, emerging through the Nexxion Jump Gate at the Superposed Manifold Wall's Portal Deformation, she had been summoned into the August Presence of Wenshalla Hax, the steely and intimidating Authoritarch known as the "Speaker of Judgments".
Wenshalla Hax, a hooded, giant humanoid figure in flowing, ankle-length purplish-gray robes adorned with ivory skulls from which hung dual ribbon-like stoles with ornamental trim, could, like an Organyk mutant genus of Black Hole, bend gravitational Space with his alien mind. It was he who imbued Ryujonin Worr with the ability to survive passage from one vibrational Plane of Reality to another for limited times, allowing her to temporarily leave the Ventriculum. The Authoritarch, who was the size and mass of an ancient Tyrannosaurus Rex from ancient Earth, was telepathically tethered to the samurai-like ex-soldier and, though he did not engage her services often, he kept track of her comings and goings for the Authoritarch's Administrative Directorate with a strange, benignly paternal attentiveness. It was Hax who had assigned Xolak, the Paladin Prime of the Sentry Protective, to wrangle the nomadic outlaw warrior. A devout and deadly immortal servant to the Authoritarchs, Ryujonin Worr had swiftly ventured out from behind the Magistorial Ring of the Rift Bridge, traveling down the Framework Transport Artery inside the Topological Highway on a hunt to locate Mune'stahr and Pylott aboard The Glide.
In that frenzied search, Ryujonin Worr had instead picked up the path of destruction left in the wake of Opthas Kandyruu's passing. More chaos.
*** She didn't want anything to do with this, not any of it. The Multiverse was a hard and unfeeling alien vastness mostly disinterested in the struggles and ambitions of human men and women. It was a place unfriendly to Organyks, a place of ceaseless and relentless change, existing beyond the capacity of human minds to fully comprehend. With that in mind, she had divorced herself from becoming involved in forcing any kind of sympathetic meaning or human-centric logic on how it interacted with its inhabitants. So it came as both a surprise and a mystery to her why sentient ancient beings of vast power like the Authoritarchs would have any need for humanoid agents, with all their flaws like fallibility and fragility and often possessing confused and compromised morality, to do their dirty work for them... Regardless, though, they did. Apparently there were rules that even such as they dared not ignore or break...
But it didn't change anything. She hated it when they needed her. ***
The Angel of Cataclysm lay behind her. The Killer of Gods lay before her. The signs were undeniable: it all stank of Infernyya Rebekkon's infection. It had become obvious that the Intercosm Paranescience, and its dictatorial chimeral Empyrikan demigod commanding its people and resources, was going to have much for which to answer.
If Kahlyndaar didn't kill them all first.
The consciousness, if it could be called that, so alien and distinctive were the intellects of the Authoritarchs, of Tegryimm Xolak was riding within her mind when Ryujonin Worr encountered the armored goliath Kahlyndaar as he pummeled his way past a cadre of networked defensive metal automatons. Shaped like hexagonal prisms, a dozen of the farming tractor-sized automatons had swarmed around the Black Sun Seraph like angry hornets as they relentlessly peppered him with particle beam pulse bursts. They had engaged the murderously aggressive Seraph in battle on the second furthest tower span of the Rift Bridge and were barely managing to slow his brutal progress towards the Prismatic Faction. Kahlyndaar's spiked armored gauntlets, constructed of interlocked and overlapping, super-dense scale mail scallops, rose and fell with swift precision, battering anything within his reach with force enough to shatter six centimeter-thick tungsten carbide alloy. The insectoid drone-like automatons emitted ear-splitting screeches amid an eruption of white-hot sparks every time the Seraph's huge fists connected while their particle beam pulses struck only to ricochet ineffectually from off the Seraph's impermeable exoskeletal bio-armor.
Unlike Opthas Kandyruu, Kahlyndaar's offensive weaponry was not artillery or ordnance-based. His power was base in sheer, unstoppable physical brutality. Kahlyndaar was a sentient, physical manifestation of a celestial-based anomaly, a magnetar with a mutant mammalian brain -- and mental psychosis. Being a unique variety of neutron star, wherea neutron star is defined as the collapsed core of a large celestial sun, a "magnetar" was a gravitationally collapsed star possessing an extremely powerful magnetic field. Kahlyndaar's ultra-dense physical body compressed the core remnant of an entire solar mass to that of atomic nuclei, emitting powerful and enervated streams of cold electromagnetic radiation. He could literally hammer his way through even the densest electronuclear force fields through just the use of his five gallon-sized fists.
Yet, though the Black Sun Seraph's slow and unabating advance into the perimeters of their territory was disheartening, the defensive drones attacked with vigorous tenacity. The outer skin of the floating, gravity-resistant automatons was composed of a non-metallic, dielectric polarized fiber that regenerated itself whenever and wherever damaged, sealing rips, tears and holes almost instantaneously. But, unfortunately, that same fiber could not lessen or sufficiently protect the interior electronics of the drones from the jolting concussive impact of the Seraph's punches.
"Do not be distracted. This battle is not your mission directive. Ignore them," Tegryimm Xolak thought-spoke to her. "Your focus in on the crew of The Glide. They owe us a debt. Find the alien knight-errants and bring them back to defend the Prismatic Faction. All other considerations are secondary."
Good. The cosmic Ronin bitterly hated the Paranescience and its arrogant, disdainful Queen -- almost as much as she hated Nebulancers...
But not quite as much as she hated Lieutenant Commander Neuronia Syngulareus of the Argossyan Naval Defense Force.
For Ryujonin Worr, that fierce hatred was no doubt born of a hard-coded biological imperative as much as it was by a deeply ingrained psychological trauma. A genetic predisposition towards protectiveness mixed with regretful maternal wrath. Vindictiveness over Reason. After all, it was a rare mother indeed who could forgive the murderer of their children, Code of Honor and military training notwithstanding.
But luckily, so far as she knew, on this mission Ryujonin Worr would not encounter Lt. Commander Syngulareus.
After all, the Authoritarchs, especially his Grand Magisterialness Wenshalla Hax, would never knowingly place her in a predicament like that.
...unless it completely met with their hidden agenda.
***
The after-effects from repeated photonic feedback lashings had set waves of agony running along the exposed skin of her arm.
The fiery blossoms from the next continuous cycle of explosions rocked the subspace contravariance field with intensity enough to knock even the mightiest of the struggling combatants to their knees. The compact geometry of the morphic affinity scheme rolled under the tidal effects of the explosions as shockwaves passed through solid mapping spaces, like savage waves rushing in to a rocky shore from across a turbulent ocean. Topological extensions began to crumble and fall away into the voidal cavities off the semilattices surrounding the two-dimensional submanifolds creating the hundred kilometer-long land mass and Crosstime matter-extrusions were bleeding like magma through a firehose through the cracks in the Reality Plane. The Mathematical framework was failing, the binding formula were eroding and erasing themselves, and the Etheric Web Itself was being strangled by throttling within the Limitations of Permutation. Blood was being spilled and bodies were being mutilated. Kadaverign-Space was proving to be an inhospitable and incredibly lethal environment for The Horde.
The Qaan'Rai's army of Sarkaufygan War-Drones had already brutally terminated no less than eight-six members of The Horde, despite the heroic efforts of the Overdyne-Suzerius of the Aingylls. With a membership composed of just over one hundred thousand wild and dynamic beings of power, the numeric ranks of the Aingyllian Horde were barely impacted by the tragedies, but each Aingyll represented an important living, interactive part of the Horde's Maximal Ordered Infrastructure of Subgroups. In brief, each horde-member, spawned on the rogue Dyson Planetoid called "Bayeshenibal", was a scalar part of an larger mobile identity matrix that homologically defined dimensional spaces -- the oceanic Metaflow of the Ventriculum needed each point on the mobile matrix to freshen and reanimate the intersective topological spaces the Horde traveled through during its migrations. Like birds or insect pollinating a garden or a forest, the Ventriculum needed the Aingyllic Horde to constantly renew its vibrancy and insure its growth. Every member mattered. To that end, the Overdyne-Suzerius was responsible for protecting the membership of the Horde. The homicidal single-mindedness of the Qaan'Rai's attacking Sarkaufygan War-Drones made that task extremely difficult. Androkambryah the Dissenter had not been at all prepared for the sheer relentlessness of the bloodthirsty fury Taekonus Helmstrype unleashed against the Horde.
The fierce gene'bot, female combat unit named Qassudei Chyald quickly ducked and side-stepped to her immediate left, whirling about one hundred eighty degrees, as she dodged a potentially lethal slash of a tri-bladed vibra-sword swung by one of the armored, humanoid War-Drones. The red-haired Knight-Vassal thrust out and upward with the greenish-black blade of her sword and powered the splayed thorny end of the weapon deep across the thorax of her assailant, disemboweling it in a shower of fuschia-colored fluids and blue-white sparks. The creature instinctively jerked away from the impact creating the wound and then stumbled awkwardly, falling, while, keeping her body stance low, Qassudei charged forward at two more of its brethren, cutting right and then left, dancing nimbly out of range of their spike-studded laser-maces.
An Imperial-class hover-tank on its four-lobed flying platform rushed across the crumbling, ashen highway of the Chronal Bridge, the dual-turreted, armored assault vehicle with its rack of intelligent targeting smart-missiles riding atop a magnetic pulse-wave, and it spewed streams of hellfire plasma across the plain. The hover-tank was accompanied by a trio of elliptical capsule-shaped floating exo-harnesses piloted by undead, partially decomposed, hive mind-controlled cyborgs. The exo-harnesses fired a steady stream of high-velocity, metal bolt-projectiles from multi-barrel gattling guns. The physically brutish, hyper-muscular Aingylls swarmed across the Chronal Bridge in a bluish-gray tsunami of superhuman acrobatics and puncture-resistant, fireproofed flesh, their supercharged healing factors repairing their grievous wounds mere seconds after receiving them.
And all the while, Androkambryah targeted clusters of the oncoming Sarkaufygan kill-teams and shot bursts of nova-hot ionic plasma from his clenched fists. The brilliantly colorful blasts punched smoking holes effortlessly through thick metal plate and into metal-weave enhanced flesh.
Meanwhile, former Extraplanar Militia-trooper Fae'letha Thane drove the dual-flanged, crescent axe-head of her thick-boled fighting staff through the visored helmet of a towering, muscular War-Drone encased in full Astra Dominatum-style carapace armor, opening up the face and skull of the clone-warrior inside the exo-suit. The clash of metal on metal resounded as the force from the blow staggered the War-Drone, Fae'letha's powerful counter-attack astonishing the hunter-killer. It couldn't comprehend how it was possible such a smaller, more fragile appearing, distaff opponent could generate such overwhelming physical strength. The creature screeched its agony as it dropped to the ground, letting its own power-lance weapon fall from its trembling fists. The Anistrophic Morph Elf-assassin stepped inside the swing of a particle-cutlass wielded by another attacker and, her back to his torso, drove the blade of her fighting staff through the man's upper abdomen, impaling him, to then, surprisingly, lift him bodily off the ground, spin, and toss the wounded War-Drone over her shoulder, flinging him to crash into the bodies of two more of his advancing comrades. The group fell clumsily into a tumble, exo-armor cracking and splitting, lying across one another.
Calling upon her experiences in the Extraplanar Militia, Fae'letha called up from memory her knowledge of the Sarkaufygan Astra Dominatum Forces during the Siege of Spar-Ha'Auven. The Siege of the Metaflow's then most-populated and civilized technological center had occurred during the Tribal Uprisings of the Authoritarch Wars. That had been back when the Nebulancers were a dominant political and military force, before their final downfall and the forcible dissembling of their global empire by the Allied Realities Planar Confederacy of which the Authoritarchs were the Founders. The Sarkaufygan Astra Dominatum had been a quadruple-zoned, multilingual, multi-temporal Empirical Time-Sultanate, composed of nine vassal-states across several Planes of Reality. The Authoritarch Wars had enlisted the brigades of the Anistrophic Morph-Elves in a policing campaign to keep the Nebulancers from enslaving hundreds of thousands more alien peoples than they already had, while the Morph-Elves had been locked in a deadly confrontation against the fascistic Sarkaufygans in the Non-Allied Outer Territories. The Allied Realities Planar Confederacy at the Siege of Spar-Ha'Auven had broken the back of the villainous alliance between the Sarkaufygans and the Nebulancers, freeing the various militias and independent protectorates of the colonial Outer Territories, but the socio-political, economic and human cost of that effort had been immense, resulting in a slow period of Reconstruction that was, even now, still underway in many of the few remaining Non-Allied Territories. Encountering a fully-equipped, well-trained, disciplined force of Sarkaufygans so deep within the "Far Frontier", as the Zones past the Magistorial Ring of the Rift Bridge were known, was frightening in its implications.
It had become obvious why the Qaan'Rai had been so aggressively opposed to the presence of the Aingyllic Horde within his domain. They would see what he did not want them to see. Taekonus Helmstrype had been secretly building a mighty army of conquest with which to challenge the Authoritarchs for control over the Ventriculum. And he could not allow for any of them to know of such a scheme.
Fae'letha Thane hoped Androkambryah the Dissenter had come to realize just how much trouble they were in.
***
Mune'stahr, cautiously monitoring the persistent stream of data-updates on The Glide's External Field Gauge Telemetry Viewer, finally allowed himself to show his growing irritation with Klauvane Tregg. Hovering at Mune'stahr's right shoulder, the fugitive Temporal Chronadigitator was staring intently at the former Emperium Star Legion space fleet mercenary as if, through sheer force of will, and even though he didn't actually possess any telepathic abilities, he could plumb the depths of Mune'stahr's stoic façade and see into his mind.
"Isn't there some less aggravating way you could occupy space here? Maybe even make yourself useful somehow?" Mune'stahr groused, not bothering to look over at the Mage.
Tregg pursed his lips thoughtfully and made a pained face as he slowly answered, not afraid of revealing his overall lack of confidence when it came to interacting with Mune'stahr. Something dark and edgy in the gruff, sarcastic former merc's character made Tregg reluctant to fully engage with the man. Hints of shame and guilt occasionally seeped past the wall-like barrier the big man had erected around himself. When he wasn't interacting with Pylott or NeeSharim, Mune'stahr's innate thorniness came across as a possible precursor to violence. Tregg decided he'd risk incurring the man's ire and spoke truthfully.
"I get the feeling you two have a lot if rules, don't you? Unspoken rules, the kind born from a long and unpleasant period of shared torment," Tregg said. "I suspect that whatever it was the two of you did or participated in, whatever it was that brought you together and scarred you, happened a long time ago. I don't know what you were like then, but I know how you are now. I was thinking maybe it was time you forgave yourselves."
To Tregg's surprise, Mune'stahr responded without hesitation or rancor. "Anthrelgenim, the third planet in the solar system of the world known as Teshiwahur, birthplace and capitol to the Hegemonic Emperium. It holds the "Throne Praetorius", the Sovereign Seat of His Imperialness Draggyn Han'Khainus-Galorketh, The World-Father, the Crusader Most-High Imperial also known as the "Omniperator Cosmoterius". Anthrelgenim was a colony of Teshiwahur, and Teshiwahur is both Pylott's and my own homeworld. This is outside the Ventriculum, beyond the borders of the MetaFlow. That's what we share."
"What happened on Anthrelgenim?"
"Tyranny, enslavement, assassination, and mass murder by command of a mutated half-human, immortal demi-god to whom Pylott and I had dedicated our service. We had dreams of being part of something larger than ourselves, as being soldiers in a great crusade. We were young and we were fools. We were part of an invading army from another world that marched upon Anthrelgenim and tore down the walls of its cities and smashed the holy temples of its peoples. We helped usurp and kill their god and replaced him with The World-Father, who cared nothing for those people. Too late, we realized we had sold our souls to a scheming and savage devil who fed us lies and used us to ruthlessly oppress others less fortunate than ourselves."
"So you mutinied? You turned on this World-Father and fought for the people of this other world?"
"Mutiny? No sir, we did not," Mune'stahr said darkly. "What, do you think we were some kind of heroes? No. Even after realizing the truth, we did nothing other than return to our homeworld during the Great Revocation, when the Emperium recalled its Star Legion from space, and we were damned glad to be away from that place."
Tregg frowned and shook his head. "Then how did you find yourselves in the Ventriculum? How did you come to be aboard this ship, how did you come to be in this place, a multiversal quantum Reality away? And how could you have become the people you are now?"
"It was all due to someone we met, purely by chance. A brave man. A champion. It was because of a Knight."
"A knight? Do such men exist?"
Mune'stahr nodded. "His name was D'Spayr. He was a younger man then than I am now. He, too, had once served the Hegemonic Emperium, but unlike Pylott and me, he dared to defy the World-Father and rebel against the Emperium. He was alone against a global superpower and he was courageous... And he was fighting real and actual monsters."
"What happened to him?"
"We don't know," Mune'stahr admitted. "Trapped here, in this universe, I don't think we'll ever know. But I like to think that eventually, he took the World-Father's evil head and brought The Emperium down to its knees."
"It is a good thought," Tregg said, looking way from Mune'stahr to the navigational display, peering back out into the vastness of the oceanic Metaflow as The Glide moved slowly across it in invisible orbit over Lobarth Ceryndum.
"It is, isn't it?" Mune'stahr said.
"And you can be assured, my friend, that here, within the Ventriculum, you and Pylott are our heroes."
Behind the two men, NeeSharim, who had been standing next to the tall mechanized column that housed part of the Bridge pilot-house's Environmental computer and Secondary Engineering Command console, allowed her face to express an uncommon expression of almost maternal pride. She smiled.
***
From his vantage point astride the saddle and stirrups of the gyroscopically-stabilized steering platform of his spherical Transitkraftte, he could see the flowing, flexible silhouette of the Horde's migrative murmuration surging against the glowing pewter-silver sky. There were thousands of vigorously energetic creatures moving across the Flow without the necessity for protective environmental voidsuits as they shifted their vibrational material-phases from one dimensional frequency to another, activating their native mutant ability to cross planar intersections. As inhuman and as alien as some mythically rare species of gravity-defying folklorish sprite, the flocking mass of reptile-avian hybrid-primates invaded the realm of Kadaverign-Space with an insolence born from ignorance and indulgence. Their vast physical strength and their near-invulnerability to harm made them careless and arrogant, feeding their collective ego as they swarmed and inundated the many territories to which they migrated. And as the impulsive, primal, compulsion-driven Aingyllic Horde advanced into his domain, he slaughtered as many of them as he could... Three legions of seed-cloned, artificially-incubated War-Drones, each legion three thousand troopers strong, resurrected from the remains of his dead enemies, pursued The Horde with deadly single-minded purpose. He found that sending forth his forces to kill so many, so brutally and so ruthlessly was intoxicating.
It reminded him of a glorious time now long past, when he was more than an emperor, more than a king..., back when he was thought of as a god.
In the early days following the commencement of the Authoritarchs' centralized multi-dominion rule, the Mesmerinaut Necrodemonic Republic, the Quegfellum Union, and the Nebulancer Colonial Commonwealth had all aligned against the recognition of Infernyya Rebekkon's Intercosm Paranescience by the Authoritarchs. The Allied Realities Planar Confederacy had taken military action against the upstart dominion. During the Tribal Uprisings of the Authoritarch Wars, the technological and quantum-alchemical power of the Paranescience had become impossible to ignore -- and damn near impossible to defeat. Until then, for the most part, the then-embryonic Paranescience had been little more than a rebellious challenger on the Outer Rim of the Far Frontier beyond the Rift Bridge, more of a loud, rude nuisance than an actual player in the game of kings. But when the Arkyngales of Jaometron, the masters of Kadaverign-Space, had entered into a territorial pact with the newly-declared Queen of the Far Frontier after her cadre of Black Sun Seraphs annexed the Mandelbrotian Mass just outside Breakmatter Junction, the Authoritarchs had taken serious notice. Ultimately, the Arkyngales came into direct conflict against the Authoritarchs.
Eventually, and at great cost, The Authoritarchs had won. But the Arkyngales had been allowed to keep control over the Far Frontier and the territories of Kadaverign-Space. And that had been because that was the region of the metacosmic Flow where the dark, alien metropolises of Lobarth Ceryndum and Hellmarrow resided. The Authoritarchs wanted very little to do with the murderous open asylum known as Lobarth Ceryndum and, as for the legendary purgatory called Hellmarrow, well, the less said about that the better.
Through it all, Taekonus Helmstrype had patiently waited, scheming, blackmailing, conspiring and murdering his way to ever greater power and position. To the Arkyngales, he'd become a symbol of righteous fury, a military hero. To the Paranescience, he'd become a shadowy, conquering demi-god. To the tribal peoples of the Far Frontier, he'd become the unified face of all their many devils. He became the Qaan'Rai.
He shifted the Transitkraftte's position in the Flow away from where he'd observed the War-Drones as they sought to stem the wild tide of the Aingyllic Horde. The soaring, ball-shaped conveyance did not so much fly through three-dimensional space as structurally elongate, bend and deform as it slid along interstitial axes, warping liquidly along variable reference coordinates in space to reconstitute itself on arrival at its destination.
Helmstrype idly wondered whether or not Fellmanghul had yet fulfilled his assignment to capture and dominate, then mentally break and telepathically remold Queen Rebekkon, indoctrinating her to cede power over and command of the Black Sun Seraphs to himself. The Seraphs were marvelous living weapons unlike any other in the Ventriculum. Were the Qaan'Rai able to control and direct them as an adjunct to his own formidable forces, he could bring a mighty challenge against the unsuspecting Authoritarchs. But he had to be careful. As yet, he had no pressing need for the Cyonik Vamfyrr to rush that process, but he knew Fellmanghul well enough to know that the extrasensory-enhanced parasite sometimes had problems exercising control over his more sadistic urges... Helmstrype did not want Infernyya Rebekkon's surprisingly agile, mutant mind burned to a mass of bloody gelatinous goo. As Helmstrype's puppet ruling over the Paranescience, she would still be extremely useful.
Fellmanghul could hurt her as much as he liked in any way he liked, but only so long as it didn't result in any permanent damage or impairment.
It was important to be pragmatic about such things, after all.
And then, of course, there was the case concerning the upstart Otherspace aliens "Mune'stahr" and "Pylott"and the physically massive, technologically wondrous, sentient shiftship they commanded. The Qaan'Rai wondered whether or not obtaining control over The Glide would prove to be as potentially rich a prize as that posed by his conquest of Queen Rebekkon and her Black Sun Seraphs...
Helmstrype's transpatial comm-link crackled to life as one of his force's legion-masters initiated contact with him. He recognized the signal. It was the First Commander, Decurian Unit, of Action Force Oberon, a drone named Haevyuss Peuwn.
"This is Kinesic Action Force Oberon, Commander Peuwn. Lord Helmstrype, we have unexpected movement in the outer perimeter of the Aingyllic Horde. The outer perimeter is deepening to a mass chain three rows deep. Our probes have picked up a difference in the pitch-frequency of their protective aura, a deepening in intensity. There is the likelihood they are assuming a defensive formation we've never seen before."
"They're actually exhibiting a strategic response? How interesting. I would wager that has something to do with the influence of that large, strange looking Aingyll-hybrid we've overheard them refer to as 'Androkambryah'."
"How do you recommend we respond, Lord Helmstrype?"
"I am interested in seeing what defensive capabilities they have. Continue to attack. Kill as many of them as you can, but allow them to react. Let them achieve actionable target acquisition on your first two odd-numbered assault units... Let's see what happens."
"Your Lordship, we could potentially lose upwards of five dozen troopers if their weaponry is of sufficient potency..."
"If that proves to be true, then redouble your efforts to isolate and capture Androkambryah. Once you've done that, remove him from the theater of battle and bring him to Hellmarrow. I am certain he is the key here."
"We live to only to serve and we die to achieve, always at your command, my lord," the First Commander solemnly intoned.
"It is so," Helmstrype said, already bored with the exchange. His comm-link quieted as Haevyuss Peuwn broke transmission.
***