ALL NOVEL Far Future Ch. 331 – Setting Your Feet Down
The World-Ring there seemed to be in constant motion, bands of metal moving in different directions, with different colors and purposes. On the surface it was a massive engineering feat, revolving rings of that level of mass using orbital mechanics as a power source, but it took only seconds of analysis to confirm that it was all a big, clockwork-based, confusing waste of time that showed massive complexity and intellectual accomplishment without doing anything productive whatsoever.
Summed up jRaztl pretty good....
From this world, the ships emerged with the aura of ships of the Warp; Klaw’s bloody flames, Riggibuhl’s tentacles and swarms; jRaztl’s psychedelic flares of power; and Amourae’s illusory and enchanting pastel mists.
They headed over to Amourae’s world to get the final touches: the ornamentation unique to each Warp God, making them temples of slaughter in the name of them.
From orbital heights, that world looked pristine, almost friendly. It had blue seas, white-capped mountains, golden deserts, stretches of green forest, gleaming polar caps... all interspersed with artfully-laid out cities actually arranged like paintings in color, visual tricks that made them blend into the planet and seem like extensions of the topography here and there. Even the great pathways between the cities and the conduits of power were in soft, friendly colors, arcing here and there as they attracted the eye and begged you to follow and decode the many patterns...
Yeah, this world and its auspicious clouds making you want to inhale hallucinogenic poison like candy got heavily polarized. The cities below and their pristine, artistic heights would be covered in rot and gore below. The forests were probably fed on blood and flesh, and death danced beneath the greenery. The waters were probably poison, and if they weren’t, the things in them would be so lethal you wished they were. I doubted that was ice water at the poles or the mountaintops, especially given their albedo, and those great fields of grain were fed with blood and harvested ceaselessly by slave labor, more than a few of whom probably joined the grain in the processing plants.
Beauty above, rot below. That was the fate of all worlds sworn to Amourae.
Its world-ring was flat, and actually adorned like extra living space, where countless square miles of grain and forests were grown by mutated servants of Amourae. The incoming ships simply set down wherever, crushing fields and field workers flat, and the servants of Amourae swarmed to them, painting, riveting, sculpting, and affixing onto the ships the appropriate symbols and sigla of the gods the ships were pledged to. They worked in a basically primitive manner of constructed stands, ladders, ropes, traverses, platforms, and the like, and even the cranes tended to be powered by thousands of laborers pulling ropes in homage to their crazy masters.
When they were done, the ships lifted off, and if a few of the workers didn’t get off in time, it was only an appropriate final blessing from the Warp Gods as the ships rocketed off, sometimes roasting miles of the pastoral landscape as they did so.
The workers would pick themselves up, and hurry on off to the next ship with insane enthusiasm for a new job.
I was sure that if we could take a metaview of the whole process there’d be some maddening truths on display with each worldring and the whole process, but y’know? If someone wanted to look at that shit and think crazy things, they could come down here and metaview themselves. I had better things to do with my time.
I did not, however, have something better to do with my time than to drop in on the Rotting World back there.
A Linejump at Valence Nine goes a long, long way. Chalice brought me right through the disease-laden bacteria bath of the atmosphere, all the way down to a random surface somewhere that had the consistency of a city-sized wart beneath my feet... and which I wasn’t going to touch, because it wanted to extend cilia into and start growing into my soles.
But that was fine, as I inserted Chalice into the Veil, and a certain song rang out there...
Above in Marktell, Grandmother Sama’s head turned in a direction she hadn’t known existed before. She left off the random carnage on the solar disc of conflict she was not really wasting time on, and headed off in a certain direction, while I waited calmly there for her to arrive.
------
It didn’t actually take all that long, as travel in the Warp was via willpower, and she had rather excessive amounts of that built up by now. The song didn’t have to be long, but it was pervasive, as many people had heard it by now, in some pretty extreme and violent circumstances, and it stuck. It carried a long, long ways in the Warp... including from areas that weren’t exactly in the Warp.
I stood there making sure nothing came wandering in randomly in this area. I did end up shooting a few things that decided to get close, Paten in Autobow form for the punch, but couldn’t do vivus as that would muck things up ahead of time. Sealing the Veil Grandmom needed to come through was kind of stupid...
The ground was polite enough to reach up and drag down the corpses and erase the evidence for recycling elsewhere in proper fashion, and since I was a nice contributor, it started encouraging other things in my direction so it could eat them up. Soon, asymmetric, plague-ridden, boil-covered, pus-leaking things with their insides on their outsides were wandering my way for the right to be eaten by the ground and made into even more stylish examples of the fate of those who gave themselves to the Warp.
Gratuitous violence set the mood, and I certainly wasn’t one to turn down a scrap, even if I couldn’t burn these things down. The ground was soon pulsing in joy as corpses sprawled out in various states of disassembly, gore that wasn’t blood splashed across it and was sucked down thirstily, and calls from the distance indicated ever more things were coming for me to enjoy the company of, and help the corrupted world below enjoy additional munchies.
Perhaps they thought Riggibuhl was watching. Did the planet realize I was an outsider? Did it care?
Chalice was very disappointed over there that she couldn’t be enjoying the fun, and I was actually using a backup, non-intelligent Sword Focus over here while she was occupied. However, Grandmother was getting very, very close, and then she’d be back in her proper place in my hand...
-----
I’d only killed a few thousand by the time she showed up. Her arrival was as ominous as expected, a wash of something Big and Solid from the other side of the Rift Chalice was stuck in, and then the massive claws came ripping through the thin barrier of the Veil here, tearing that narrow little slot wide open.
The instant her hands came in, the atmosphere flared vivus for a hundred feet around, but that didn’t stop her from ripping the gap open, and Chalice whirling back to my hand. I consigned the spare to my offhand, as Paten and Host were occupying my Arakne Arms at the moment, while Faith was hovering around me, deflecting any of the incoming fire from spraying AoE weapons that came too close.
That gap tore pretty wide, and she stepped through, looking as overwhelmingly dangerous and unspeakably beautiful in her crazy chimeric way as before.
The ground shuddered with one step, two, and then exploded into vivus all around her six clawed feet. The atmosphere boiled and swept away in burning vivus from the intensity of the titanic orichalcum Swords in her six hands, giving pretty much everything converging on the area an unobstructed view of her.
They all blew apart, liquified, crumbled, or burst into flames as soon as they laid eyes on her, maybe whimpering a bit as they did...
That living mass of golden hair waved at me. -This place is light enough that if I keep moving it cannot throw me back. I shall go create some distractions,- she /informed me, raised six Swords over twenty feet long, and shot away.
I let the ripping wind of her passage blow past me as she charged away into the murk, which burned away before her.
Look upon her, ye mighty, and despair upon missing that DC 60ish save against death, I mused to myself.
Chalice insisted I at least go hack a few of the natives who hadn’t seen Grandmother, so I ranged out into the mist where some suddenly apprehensive insane maybe-once-human things were looking at the burning swathe that seemed to be extending through the sky, and this time I was using full vivus as I laid out my own path of annihilation.
------
-Hey, boss, it’s been sixty-three hours. You want to wrap it up now?- Grim /asked me from where he was still plugged into Mom’s Finder, parked up in stealth up beyond the planet’s magnetosphere.
I blinked out of my combat fugue, having been enjoying myself far, far too much. Killing undead was all well and good, but burning the Warp en vivus was just a Higher Cause, and I loathed everything here with every cell.
I wasn’t like Sage Sama, who could just let these things look on her and die. However, I could certainly kill everything around me very quickly, indeed, and I didn’t much care how powerful it was supposed to be as I did so.
Greater Demons of Riggibuhl weren’t supposed to die so easily, but I’d somehow wandered across more than six dozen over the past two and a half days of fire, set off some nasty vivic explosions, and then just followed the flows of pre-corpses and pestilence to more of the things.
Oh, yeah, and I’d left the dead burning en vivus arranged in sweeping Axiomatic Runes, just to make the effects of their deaths more impressive. Grandmother Sama was doing the same thing, but her Runes were much bigger than mine... and tended to cut across the rotting canals, pulsing arteries, writhing tendrils, and fields of lesions that formed the Runes for this planet.
The motions and actions of the swarms and hordes that populated this fallen planet were in full-blown panic mode, trying to deal with an entity that mountain-sized Sluggors didn’t have a prayer of dealing with. She was annihilating them, and burning through their wonderful Shrine World, knowing exactly how to damage it for best effect.
She was fully intent on blowing apart the World Runes on it, setting the whole planet on vivic fire, and then going after the World-Ring. I gathered she had gained lots of practice at such stuff in the Warp
From there, it was only a Linejump to the War World of Klaw right over there a quarter-orbit away, and we’d see how all those billions of warriors dealt with a combatant that to see, was to die...
Chalice zipped me to within thirty feet of the cloaked Mom’s Finder a million miles away, and then Blinked me inside the cockpit without skipping a beat.
It was a busy system, and there were always ships coming and going in this direction and that one. Without pausing much, my Toys all inserted themselves in their proper places, and I turned my Gunboat around and headed out after one of them.
Behind me, I left a system whose days were numbered. There was a Forsaken pseudo-Titan come out of the Warp to stomp them into vivus. We’d see how these bastards liked things when she was done with one of their centers of industry.
Honestly, it wouldn’t make all that much difference, most likely... but the key thing was that Grandmother Sama was now here... and that meant she could be ANYWHERE in the Abyss, as long as she got a positional lock.
She could rampage throughout the entirety of the Abyss without pause or mercy, and if she knew where to strike, she could possibly unmake the entire Abyss here!
Guess who was going to give her all of those positions?...
Chortling to myself over the possibilities of pissed Warp Gods to come, and Void Brothers quietly exulting over the possibilities, we shot out of the system we decided to call the Four Shrines...