ALL NOVEL Far Future Ch. 334 – Timely Withdrawals
I wasn’t looking for much, just a very complete navigational chart of the entire Abyss...
The demon that should have been safeguarding the knowledge wasn’t, since it was screaming on vivic fire with the rest of the Warped shit on this ship. Electrokinetic control got me through all the psychic defenses and what programming idiocy they had tried to use; I had gotten used to their insane excuse for a programming language a long time ago.
I dumped the data quickly, and headed back out, not looking back as the corpse of the Warmaster began to crystallize in some very Axiomatic patterns.
Axiom loved putting broken technological systems back together in perfect patterns. When the incoming Axiomatics did that, they’d find themselves in total control of a kitted-out Warp battleship. My, I couldn’t picture what they might do with such a thing in a system full of Warped souls.
I just had to get out faster than the ship was being devoured behind me. Not a problem. I picked up my heels and zipped away, skating on the walls to avoid the many scattered armored bodies burning on the route to the big hole I’d blasted into the main access tunnel to the auxiliary feeds for the primary Worldburner gun, while Axiom began to expand very, very rapidly behind me.
The midsection iconography was already starting to rearrange itself, the hull of the ship was losing its paint and dye and getting polished ever brighter as I grabbed onto the Finder and Grim slid us back and away. Chalice Blinked us inside as soon as we were out of the Interdiction of the burning ship, and we got out of tactical range and zipped away, having no desire to be anywhere near an Axiomatic Battleship when it woke up and saw that everything around it direly needed to be rearranged to perfection...
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I was creating entertainment for the many masses. Grandmother was creating dead Warped planets. We were both amazing distractions for the scout ships scribing Reality onto the Warp, locking in temporal steadiness and stressing out the planar structure of the Abyss.
Of course, their slow and steady progress meant I had to make fast and wild progress, which I, um, so did not have a problem with.
Once again, careful stealth techniques and sneakiness charting everything mission got tossed out the window, and turned into scan-on-the-fly shoot-everything-while-I-did-so. Oh, and don’t dawdle, hurry onto the next place, please, generally while it was just getting good...
The Ruk were highly impressed at the speed I was using up some very high-end munitions, and really impressed when they got to see what I did with them. They could only wish to be lucky enough to be inserting singularities and anti-matter and quark-busters into the places I was, and creating the sort of chain effects all their demolition experts had fantasies about in somnolence.
Well, I suppose all the best exploration vessels and traders were all heavily armed. These natives certainly deserved the best of everyone.
Even Briggs was shaking his head at these crazy escapades. My mental and physical endurance compared favorably to durasteel or something right now, and hours upon hours of wildly gyrating aerobatics, multi-directional offensive actions, and tracking hundreds to thousands of enemy combatants while keeping multi-tiered tactics and strategies in mind was nothing more than entertainment now.
After all, I still wasn’t afraid, which meant I was crazy. Woot! Back to your regularly unscheduled display of multi-denominational fireworks...
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It was a most unconventional invasion, and certainly the Warp wasn’t equally geared to handle it. A full armada of the Empire? They’d be toast if they came in here, wouldn’t even be a contest. The system fleets here were closer to subsector fleets for the Empire in breadth and depth, if a bit more restricted in not being able to leave this realm. Chaositech could run into problems in the mortal realm with just a little bit of disruption to the ol’ power supply, after all.
That said, I think I managed to piss off just about everyone with what I was doing... probably because they didn’t know where I’d show up next, which was because I didn’t know where I’d show up next. I was spatially and temporally locking down my backtrail as the kids followed quietly after me, but I really didn’t have much of an idea of where I was going.
That was fine, that’s what exploration was about, right? Getting effing lost and hoping you find your way home in one piece, while the money-makers follow and chortle at all the phat lewt they are picking up...
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Sage Sama ignored the hundred-mile fireball as it blew through durasteel and plascrete, and fed a lot of vivus into the planetary network. She watched a mile-high wall of white flames eating black and red flames streak towards the horizon thataway, confirmed that My Queen (such a cute name for a grandson-in-law) had exited stage left in plenty of time, and headed into the sky.
Anybody on the ground who saw her died, except possibly the mightiest titans among the Massacre Demons and their ilk. Combusting servants of Klaw, their servants and their slaves, all died when they looked up at the streak crossing the sky, and burned.
And then the entire planet shuddered.
Sage Sama smiled, an utterly terrifying thing for any Warped to see, and the head of a titan of the Massacre Demons blew right apart at beholding such awesome deadly beauty. Her Chalice cut, the five Cups spread it wide, and she charged through the Gate to another system as the first anchor world to the Abyss began to twist and wrench itself apart under planar waves sufficient to bend and crush a star.
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Acknowledging the fact, the nearby star did indeed start to twist and distort. Massive sunflares blew out in all directions as rumbles started in the star’s core, and things that should not have happened for hundreds of millions of years were suddenly brought forward very quickly indeed. The spatio-dimensional stress of thousands of captured star systems was suddenly uncorked on the hapless planet, transferred itself to the sun, and things went rather badly on a stellar level.
There is little like a star going nova to apply some widespread rules of reality to all and sundry in a very impressive area. The other planets in the system got to watch a multi-stage eruption in various directions only possible in some place as twisted as the Abyss, but when it came their turn to watch the void get very bright and hot indeed, there wasn’t any place to hide from a star giving up its life.
I gave my mom a big thumbs-up, while the Chaos Math People began to point to empty areas on The Map, jabbering about where the other anchor worlds had to be. The Worldminds said goodbyes to their corrupted kin, noting to nobody in particular that such unlucky relatives were probably going to be VERY Energized after the explosion... hmm hmm...
Firesword Abram, riding with Cleo and Antony, confirmed I’d found a second anchor world at one of the six locations I’d been told to wander into. Looked like one of jRaztl’s pointless projects, covered with six Worldrings in different inclinations, just looking for someone to mess with their inertials and make them go off in multiple directions.
Grandmother came out of a slice in space on the innermost Worldring, and made for the first of the mass inertial compensators that kept the thing steady in orbit. When it began to wander, both the planet and the other Worldrings were suddenly going to have major problems, but that’s what happens when you introduce precise amounts of brute force into complex mechanisms at all the wrong spots. La.
Planar mechanics you’ve twisted into a pretzel for your vanity play are one of those complex mechanisms, and there were some bars being inserted into them in very specific places and ways, magnifying the stress the unnatural planar field here was undergoing.
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The first Reality Storm cracked a section of the Abyssal Wall, and disgorged a random system that had been lost by the Elvar long ago, as well as everything inside it. There was quite a bit of consternation, since Reality didn’t exactly support the existence of demonkind. The denizens of the Warp destabilized and were sent back to home unless they were tied to and in Possession of something.
Likewise, background Warp energy in the system dropped like a rock, hampering all that wonderful stuff powered by Warp Sorcery that was so ungodly powerful in the Abyss. Systems designed to run on that hellaciously powerful stuff suddenly couldn’t be used at all.
To every system that had ever suffered Warp invasions, marauders, pirates, raiders, or even Warp Events, this was a chance for payback, and that wasn’t restricted to humans. Before the first human fleet of older ex-Imperial Ships powered into the system with their new Tachyon Drives, the Elvar were already there picking apart the outer defenses and driving the Warped ships back into the inner orbitals.
By the time Callagogrix was subdued, there were nine different system fleets involved in containing any breakouts, defenses that would have rivalled any Crown World had been pounded into scrap, and every planet had been Omega Sanctioned without hesitation.
Very soon there were Elvar ships on monitoring duty all around the Abyss, measuring the increasingly rampant and uncontrolled fluctuations there, while their Seers stewed, unable to see what was going on.
Well, they could see what was going on, when the adventures of a certain red-headed neo-human Contessa were blithely downloaded by Sunhawk onto the Sensalist. They just couldn’t predict any of this happening, and that really annoyed them.
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Quivvuival was the third system spit out of the Abyss by a Reality Storm, with the usual drastic consequences to the existence of Warp creatures, demons, their magic and power, and the like.
No humans or Elvar came in to assault that system singing of vengeance and grim irony, but war nonetheless exploded over it in all its barbarian splendor.
The drow were at least as unscrupulous as the Warped, and uncommonly motivated to action. There was a siren call being sung by the great Madame of their people...
Break Twenty and be free of the Warp...
Ji Na, Femme Fatale and perfectly able to hang with the Drow, was helping Madame Lolith with the dreadfully tedious task of commanding multiple drow fleets, deployment, striking here and there. A few of the recalcitrant captains had to be knifed here and there to bring everyone into alignment, get the Warped blown out of the skies... and then it was time for the ground games.
Twenty.
Drow hellbent on Leveling the only way they truly could descended on Quivvuival for combat, all of them sporting new Finishing Weapons, be it blades or guns, for making sure demons died forever, and the vivic flames of dying demons might just be able to cleanse their souls.
Battlefields covered with unwhite flames and drow inhaling them like heady vapors soon extended across the twisted landscapes of the Warped world, and did nothing but get more intense over time.
It was a glorious spectacle. It was brutally bloody, fantastically gory, marvelously inefficient, incredibly stupid, and amazingly fun to watch.
Ji Na was very put out that she couldn’t join the festivities, but those fortress-cities still had to be slowly disassembled, and so she contented herself with directing the pounding at all their weak points while drow assassins stole inside and took out projectors, power cores, and most self-important people before opening the whole thing up to the fantastic carnival of blood and slaughter going on outside... which happily emigrated inside to bring the show to the appreciative masses within.