Novel Full Chapter 5398: THE Defiler II
Chapter 5398: THE Defiler II
"I’m bringing a great many of them here, because here, in this destroyed Citadel, are some of the Gilded Ones responsible for producing those Ordnances. The ones who set them off. The ones who followed the chains of command. Basically everyone who had a hand in it. I’ll spare you, because of your sister, which is more mercy than you’ve earned. But you get to watch. You get to watch these Bounded Lifeforms, the ones your kind turned into mindless zombies, backed by a little of my Intent, devour the Gilded Ones who stood so very far above them. The ones responsible for what they became." His smile sharpened. "You... get to watch."
CRACK!
More of Dietrich’s neck bones gave as the infernal being lifted him higher, holding him up like a beast strung for display, forcing his gaze toward the ruin below!
And the slaughter began.
The Existential Acedia Dredges descended.
They came in waves, the silver-lit ocean of them crashing down upon the few million stripped Gilded Ones, and they carried power that was not their own, lent to them, an Intent riding underneath their mindless hunger and making the weak into something that could tear the strong apart.
They fell upon the hollowed Gilded Ones and they did not kill cleanly. They devoured!Dietrich watched a Superbius he had known for ages vanish under a dozen Dredges, watched the silver hands tear into the being and pull it apart even as the mouths closed on the pieces, watched a proud existence become a thing screaming and unmade and eaten in the same moment.
WAA!
It spread across the dead Citadel in every direction. Gilded Ones who had ruled, who had signed off on the deaths of quintillions as an acceptable cost, who had looked at the lower Observable Existence with its countless Living Existences and its Fold Dwellers and found the calculation reasonable, were dragged down into the silver tide and ripped open and consumed by the very beings their Ordnances had hollowed. The stripped ones could not fight. They had nothing left to fight with. They had been reduced to the Second Scale and the Dredges had been lifted past their station, and so the ones who had been titanrs to these Bounded Lifeforms a short while ago were torn into wet ruin and swallowed by the hundreds of thousands.
Blood that shone like ruined gold ran through the rubble. Limbs and fragments of foundation scattered and were snatched up and devoured. The screaming rose into a single sound that was not really a sound anymore, and underneath it the silent silver Dredges kept feeding, mindless, endless, a sea with no bottom eating an empire that had thought itself the top of existence.
Dietrich watched all of it, forced to, his eyes bleeding crimson-gold tears down his face, and beside him THE Defiler spoke, almost gentle, while a civilization was eaten alive below them.
"There’s a thing I’ve been turning over," THE Defiler said, watching the carnage with the calm of a man watching nothing. "About violence. About the beings who only ever know how to deal it outward, who build their whole existence on doing harm to things beneath them and never once imagine the harm turning around. Those beings don’t understand anything, you see. They can’t. They’ve never been on the other side of it. You can explain suffering to a being like that for a thousand years and it will nod and learn nothing, because the lesson doesn’t live in the words. It lives in the experience." He tilted his head.
"So the only thing that teaches them, the only thing, is the same violence done back. It’s not vengeance as its moreso...pedagogy. It’s the single language they were ever capable of learning, and they chose it themselves, and now they’re being taught fluently."
HUUM!
"If it weren’t for your sister," THE Defiler continued, "I think I might have simply wiped out every Gilded One on this entire Observable Existence. All of them. The whole rotten weaving, scoured clean." He sounded almost surprised at himself.
"And I genuinely don’t think I was capable of that before...look at what you fuckers can make people do. I used to be a being with limits I didn’t choose. But people change. Identity is paramount, and identity grows, and a being who lives fully by his identity becomes capable of things his smaller self would have flinched from. That’s all this is. Me, living by my identity. By my Intent. It’s a unique thing, really, to feel yourself become exactly who you are and discover what that makes possible. You wouldn’t understand it. You’ve never been anything but what was installed in you."
Dietrich roared.
He roared and he wept and the curses tore out of him broken around his ruined throat, calling THE Defiler every vile thing his hatred could reach for, a demon, a monster, a defiler, the cruelest thing that had ever crawled through existence, and below him the slaughter rolled on, the Gilded Ones dying by the hundreds of thousands, the sea of billions of Dredges swallowing the few millions whole, and Dietrich could see no end to it, could see no survivors, expected none!
And then, as he roared and cried out, at that very moment.
HUUM!
Far above, Dietrich felt it. The eruption of a terrifying Pride, vast and cold and proud, and he knew that signature, knew it in his bones, a Gilded One, and not one of THE Triassic Scale!
A Gilded One of THE Mesozoic Scale!
OH!
A genuinely powerful Ealdor Gilded One, at THE Fifth Scale, had finally come! Joy and euphoria surged through Dietrich’s broken body, drowning out the pain and the bleeding and the horror, and he roared up at the heights with everything he had left!
"KILL HIM!" Dietrich screamed. "Kill him, great Ealdor! Kill him! He is right here! He is the one responsible for all of it! He is right HERE!"
WAA!
Above the dead Citadel, the Ealdor Gilded One of THE Fifth Scale descended, eyes burning with cold ancient power, every line of him radiating the weight of a being that stood at a tier the slaughter below could not touch. And behind him came a female Custodes at the Fourth Scale, and around her shone a sharp Intent of the third rarity, her power heavy and ready, a Titan-grade Custos guarding a Mesozoic master.
And the Mesozoic Scale Gilded One let his aura blare.
BOOM!
The skies of THE Braneworld changed color. They went pure gold, saturated with his Intent, an Intent of the fourth rarity, an Olympian, reorganizing the heavens into his law. It had to be the fourth rarity. It had to be! Nothing less could turn the very sky gold!
Dietrich roared with hateful, weeping laughter, hanging in THE Defiler’s grip, triumphant at last!
"You’re dead!" he bellowed. "You’re dead! You’re DEAD!"
...!
And at that moment, Dietrich saw THE Defiler rise.
He saw the Infiltrator lift slightly into the air, unbothered, and from him an Intent began to build, and Dietrich’s laughter died in his ruined throat, because the Intent gathering around THE Defiler felt grander than the one the Mesozoic Scale Ealdor had unleashed. Grander than a Fifth Scale being. Grander than the gold sky.
There was no way. There was no way, right?
The fucker defiling his sister could not possibly be such a fearsome enemy. He was a Luxuria. He was an infiltrator, a defiler, a thing that had snuck into their ranks. He could not actually stand above a Mesozoic Scale Ealdor. He could not!
And THE Defiler looked up at the Fifth Scale Gilded One and his Titan-rarity Custos, and he smiled.
"It might still be a little early for this," THE Defiler said, almost to himself. "I’ve barely begun walking my Second Scale. But I want to see. I’ve been curious." His blue eyes lifted to the descending Ealdor. "Let me see what Vakochev’s Fifth Scale is truly made of."
BOOM!
What the fuck did that even mean?!
As the words left him, space above him was cut.
A terrifying blade descended out of the severed air, and THE Defiler reached up and grasped it, and Dietrich saw the weapon for only an instant, a split-blade of cerulean fire with a nine-pointed star at its hilt, an aura screaming off it that exceeded everything.
SQUELCH!
Dietrich’s eyes exploded.
His sockets went hollow, the burning finally taking them, the crimson-gold bursting out of him as his vision ended, and he cried out, falling back into the dark, the curse tearing through his mind one final time as everything he had become collapsed into blindness.
Who. Who the fuck was this guy?!