506 Monsters Above Monsters

His weapon, it follows us across the blood, across our souls, across our connections. It follows us. I felt it. It was diluted, but I felt it in the wounds she struck. I suffered less, but still, they won't heal. They won't heal!

Her core was shattered. He hit her, and her core was shattered, and there's nothing left. She tried to regenerate, but there's nothing left. He broke her. I felt her break. I felt myself break. We all broke… We broke in a chain. Nothing we could do, nothing we could do…

Do not seek him out. Let this go. For the sake of the First Blood, let this go. Please, please make me die. Break my core. Break my core before my wounds flow down, before my life withers away. Break my core, break my core, please. I can't take the pain anymore. Break my core, break my core, so I no longer dream of him…

So that his wrath no longer imprints upon my blood… my soul… my Embraced… My kin…

—Second Generation Elder Hannes Gangrel of Line Gangrel on the Semper Paragon during the First War of the Five Faiths (Hannes Gangrel’s Lineage core was destroyed two days later—not in time to save the rest of Line Gangrel)

506

Monsters Above Monsters

Across Gate Piety, the orcs were cheering. Both the defenders and the attackers were drowned in a rising fervor the likes of which they hadn't experienced in centuries or more.

From the surface gateway, the first wave of the attackers’ true vanguard came forth—and found themselves shedding their blood and toil along the edge of a Legendary blade. Delivering death with every stroke and inflicting more than pain but also the pleasure of the highest battle, countless orcs among their mass had faced the Giantsbane in lifetimes before. Today, they tested themselves once more, but in the time it took for them to climb back to the height of Master and Hero, she was a cemented Legend, and made Legend twice over by her armor and the weapon she wielded.

She struck beyond space, her skill magnified by the nullification of distance and position. She parried and hewed with the same blow, Rusty elongating and breaking into impossible shapes. His edge curved around Jessica to parry and stab, extending in a spiraling pattern through throat after throat, orcs falling apart as if they had flung themselves into a moving buzz saw.

More came pressing in from behind, their mages casting spell after spell, fusing mana to create siege-level magics that could have blown holes in meter-thick plates of adamantine. Yet before Jessica's prowess and against her inertia, magic was little more than a suggestion. As the aegis she wore, her cuts only grew faster, though flaming wheels beneath her feet blazed brighter, and she gave no ground, even as the gateway itself was slowly plugged by a rising mountain of gray corpses.

And as the first thousand orcs belonging to the surface gateway Orchestra fell in battle, the memories of its members were carried along a chain back over in the Tutorial, passed through the grand central network that connected them all. That information flowed back to their Grand Maestro, the Breaker, who observed their proceedings and commanded the forces with the lightest of touches. His thoughts arrived, his pure suggestions, but now his mind went blank, not from impotence but rather interest and fascination. He nearly cast himself through the portal right then and there to engage in a bit of foreplay with one of Earth's finest warriors, but as much as he wanted to indulge, they still had an entire Category 6 Gate to capture, and so a bit of pragmatism was exerted.

The Slipgate realigned its frequency, and soon they attuned their Tutorial-side connection to the Abyssal gateway in a sudden flanking action that would circumvent Hawgrave’s presence, only for them to run into a second surprise: another Legend bursting through the gateway before it could close.

But the arrival of this new adversary came after a brief delay. They had outside assets outside the Abyssal gateway, waiting to detonate a chain of mana bombs and disrupt the well-wrought trenches and long-built defenses in the form of Piety’s Mage Towers and elemental summons. Most of their units there were not orcs—as the Prodigal Ones who chose the Tyrant over the Challenger would root them out in little time. Instead, they used Corcusa's contractors, the Pathbearers she'd personally recruited from the Compact, and her fellow vampires of the First Blood. They lay in wait with their own forces in accord, and they were to surge in as another army—another arm to the grand pincer in motion.

Well, that was the way it should have unfolded, if not for the unannounced arrival of an entire Descenders' Union warhost.

And it wasn't just any warhost. Carried by one of its frontmost members was a great standard that dragged a long flag in its wake, its make flame rather than fabric, and it imprinted an image in the air: a dragon biting down on the neck of a unicorn. The coloring of the artwork was peculiar as well, the shading done using the ancient, near-lost utensil known as a crayon.

On the surface, the aesthetic looked childish, but the Breaker assumed that there was a greater meaning to it. Perhaps it was meant to mock one's enemies through artistic ineptitude, and further rumor had it that it was a part of the Dragon-Knights' traditions, for their forebears found great substance and strength in the artistic potential of the crayon.

In the end, who was the Breaker to judge? He too found himself fascinated with some of old Earth's traditions—but more importantly, he found himself interested in the dragon at the head of the warhost.

Carrying a flamethrower with a bayonet attached to it in one hand and a grand pole axe of calamitous design in the other, he was over half again as large as the greatest of his fellows, the shadow his form cast over the world extending for kilometers. Yet juxtaposed against the shade he cast was the resplendence and meticulousness of his armor when it came to sheen and design. The Breaker couldn't identify the material used to fashion the Lance leader’s plating. There was some metal in it, but probably a great deal more crystal as well. It was an odd alloy, perhaps entirely unique, given to this specific Pathbearer by the allowance of the System. It also carried every spectrum of magic across all known attunements and then some. The Breaker spotted a hint of Chromamancy—the lore of Color Manipulation—known to only a few intelligent races across Integration.

The Legendary Dragon-Knight's chestplate was at once a historical mural and a means of protection. A sprawl of magically tuned filigree presented countless battles unfolding, knights both human and draconic facing Primal Dragons, cutting them low before moving on to faster hordes, greater threats, graver beasts, monsters still. This was a depiction of monsters above masters, of the individuals who faced monsters and claimed their power for their own. And that story continued across the rest of the titan’s armaments. The chainmail extending down from his helmet was not chainmail at all, but rather links of scale harvested from defeated draconic enemies. Using the awareness of their frontline observers, the Breaker sensed that each scale was different, unique, individual. Each one had been taken as a war prize. And considering that the chainmail ran across the Knight's entire body, that amounted to hundreds of thousands of slain foes.

“By the Oldest Blood, it's him, it's HIM!” A whimper of purest dread escaped the mind of a Legendary vampire in their network. He knew who was to come, and through him, the orcs gained a measure of their enemy and a portent of promised pleasure. Here was Caine Hauser, named Semper-Paragon, absolute leader of the Descenders Union. Here was a killer purer than all other killers, ancient and blooded, perhaps only a few years junior to the great Valor Thann.

The Compact and First Blood saboteurs set off the mana bombs prematurely, trying to create a chain of explosions to delay the arrival of the dragons. The warhost extended across the wilderness along the obsidian road, but they numbered only 128. This was a diplomatic envoy sent by the Dragon-Knights, not a proper military detachment. What's more, the Breaker guessed this was a surprise visit—for neither their intelligence nor any intercepted correspondence passed between Tall Ben and Marikos’ retainer Scribes indicated the Semper-Paragon’s arrival.

“Oh, yeah, it’s about to get real nasty,” the Breaker whispered. A vivacious viciousness boiled inside the Grand Maestro, and he turned away from being the man behind the curtain and stepped forth on the stage to take part in the play. “Brother dogs, it's time for us to get out there—yeah! It's time for us to get rid of the bloodiest and sicker than the illest, and see how many of our Legends it takes to match a Dragon-Knight!”

A chorus of excited cheers erupted through the collective Orchestras. Rather than warriors going to their deaths, they were like children offered free passes to the fair. And as if their excitement couldn't get any higher, they burst through the ceiling as if it were made of glass, and the mana bombs exploded but refused to spread. A chain of color enveloped the path leading in through the Abyssal gateway. Yet the explosions were held in stasis, as if the magic itself was too petrified to move in the presence of the Semper-Paragon.

There was a pressure exerted by him, something that pushed against magic. His very arrival brought with it a weight where the enchantments he layered upon his armor magnified his dreadful aura. It suppressed all casters, all magics, all attunements, tuned skills, and more, until the very shields themselves were quavering and quailing, pressed down to the ground.

This affected more than merely the mana-paths. The Mage Towers creaked and bent. The spells that burned at their apex flattened into the base of their structures. Dimensionals were sent spiking straight down into the ground; the weakest of them were pressed prone, while the strongest were still forced to supplicate on their knees. The dragon horn-bearers played their accompaniment, blaring tunes as steel clashed against steel, as weapon met weapon, and the lesser Knights roared. The announcers bellowed the name of their Semper-Paragon. On the ground, Tall Ben scurried forth, even his magical aura dragged behind him. His Aegis of Assimilation was forced to bow its heads, as if it the mana hydra had gained too much weight and couldn't do anything more than snake across the ground in mimicry of their lesser, mundane ancestors.

But before the Breaker could get too carried away, a chiding voice descended upon his mind and swept out from him to greet all the other orcs involved in the siege. “Dear Breaker, as fun as it might be for you to fight the greatest of the Descenders, I must remind you that we still have to concern ourselves with priorities—priorities such as my Holy War, the collapse and subjugation of Gate Piety, and the delicious torments we are to inflict upon the other Paragon involved in this struggle.”

The Challenger's reminder elicited boos across the Grand Orchestra, and even more dismay erupted throughout the Tutorial. The orcs were walking to war, and now they were being told to moderate.

But moderate they did, for the Challenger was the finest of them, the highest of them, their Semper-Paragon, so to speak.

And he was right: They needed to have a bit of focus, or there would be repercussions—brutal repercussions that few might enjoy. The Challenger expressed displeasure through abstinence rather than plain pain. Any orc who dared trespass now, after the gentlest of reminders, would only find himself reincarnated in a pit with nothing to do other than starve over and over again: sensory and pleasure deprivation extended across eons.

It was a lesson all orcs learned at some point—a lesson that most orcs couldn't bear to learn more than once. Not the Culturist, and certainly not the Breaker.

Especially not the Breaker.

And so, with reluctance, he issued another command to shift the dimensional frequency and tether the Tutorial Slipgate to the Abyssal gateway instead.

At once, static mana filled with disrupted patterns, and a new dimensional bridge formed, usurping the connection that had been there before. But even the gateway was subservient to the Semper-Paragon's presence. The changes that should have taken a second were drawn out, for the orcs struggled not only to rewrite the spell patterns and more, but also to stabilize in the presence of the approaching Semper-Paragon, who noticed what was happening and crossed the remaining distance of five kilometers between him and the gateway within a fraction of a second. He did so without delivering any excess friction in the air, without setting the atmosphere ablaze or leprosing the lesser Pathbearers caught in his wake. Instead, all the force he wielded remained entombed within his form—flowing across his body, out along his wings, lighting his personal scales with a prismatic glow amplified by his Magical Resistance—lit with platinum brilliance that hinted at the presence of Narrativium; debt-based indestructibility.

The NovelPhoenix site carries the chapter from its author, whereas this reproduction was made without approval.

To the Breaker’s relief—and the war effort’s detriment—the Semper-Paragon made it through, and his personal criers were dragged over by the excess velocity displaced in his wake. He erupted through the Abyssal gateway faster than lightning, with the mass of a mountain, with his blue-red poleaxe held high. But even as he distended the dimensional threshold at the center of the gateway, his tail flicked out—and the Semper-Paragon’s personal gravity reached out across the Umbral Wilderness and wrenched a good mass of hidden saboteurs out from where they lurked.

Pathbearers of the First Blood and Compact turned to ash as they were accelerated far beyond what their Toughness could bear. Mercenaries were smeared across mud and soil until there was nothing separating them from the mangled earth. The strongest amongst them survived the kidnapping—though not without harm. The Legendary vampire who'd spotted the Semper-Paragon first let out a howl of purest agony as his torso was flayed open, as the wind friction denuded his limbs and dismantled his joints.

He struck the Semper-Paragon’s whipping tail rib-first, which cracked his Lineage Core and caused him to sputter and bleed. Worse still, it left the vampire’s natural regeneration compromised.

But the horrors were not over. Not for that poor fool—and not for the miserable saps connected to him.

As Caine Hauser came to an abrupt, unnatural halt in the air, all the force flowing into him caused his prismatic scales to brighten, amplified the gravity field he exerted upon the world, and thus the force that should have shed itself upon the world as uncontrolled destruction was recycled as another resource for the Semper-Paragon to spend.

“The economy of war distilled into a dragon,” Eyemuncher-11022 said, laughing at the absurdity they were witness to.

The rest of the Grand Orchestra was inclined to agree.

The Breaker teleported to the Tutorial-side gateway in haste—and the rest of his hounds joined him. These were Legends being scrambled together to deal with Jessica Hawgrave. All of them Legendary Skirmishers dedicated to ambush, disengagement, overwhelming force, stealth, and illusion. They would grind her down in due time, but before that, they would be the Breaker's supporting troupe when it came to slaying this lizard.

But thousands of lesser orcs were already massed against the Gate—and the itch inside the Breaker shuddered with impatient rage. He wanted to smash his way through his brethren, to crush them for existing at all. He wanted this fight more than a drowning man wanted another breath, more than a solitary widower yearned for comfort and affection.

“Breaker,” the Challenger said again. His voice was still gentle. The implication was not. The God of Strife stood painted by dying stars and rusted clouds, weeping blood and tar from the sky. A downpour of pre-war pungence baptized the orcs and livened their moods as they stood prepared; the Breaker was not to steal this opportunity from his fellows. This was not to be his feast alone.

The Breaker acknowledged the Challenger’s words by punching himself in the face.

He did so over and over, harder with each blow, and as he pummeled himself, his body swelled, his muscles ballooning to comical proportions. His bones snapped and extended. The already massive orc rose in height and stature as he drank power from pain, his adamantine armor painted to resemble an orc warping and breaking as it failed to contain his expanding mass.

Era Change: Jingoist > The Big Mad One

Heavy strings rumbled in the air, the notes accompanied by bolts of Necromantic lightning that left corrosive scars across the flesh of existence. The thunder that followed became a drum, and trash began to rain down from the sky—debris the size of buildings built just below the atmosphere, waiting for the Breaker to call upon them. He was gonna get his trash brawl, and it was going to be a riotous, Gate-breaking wrecker of a fight. The pylons were ready, and his fists were clenched.

Soon, it would be time to smash.

The vocals kicked in then—the Announcer loudly began to scream about how the Breaker was the best of orcs, and how all the other orcs might as well be goblin infants because of how much smaller, weaker, and uglier they were. Then the Chorus kicked in, and some of the other orcs sang along as the lyrics were practically burned into their ears. The words were a melange of slurs and curses stolen from ten thousand dead worlds, but rather than saying anything profound, the details mainly focused on mocking the Culturist—and specifically his goofy owl get-up. That, and how the way his dead wife died was funny, and how she had really ugly teeth.

Can’t really remember why I made those lyrics, came one of the Breaker’s stray thoughts. And so, as the lesser orcs went across to die at the hands of Caine Hauser, the Breaker kept hyping himself up more and more. His time would come. It would. He just needed to be patient. Real patient. Wonder how Maria’s doing? Been a while since I—

And it was then that he realized he couldn’t reach her at all. He pursed his lips. Well. She was either dead, or had accelerated so far across time that the dilation made her unreachable. Not surprising; the Deathless was a pretty direct problem to deal with in the same way a Tarrasque or three were direct problems. The kid might’ve pulled another surprise out of his ass again. Hells, he might have evolved some other bullshit in the time it took another Pathbearer to gain an Initiate Skill. Whatever the case, he wasn’t here, and neither was she—so that just meant the two canceled each other out at the least.

Not a bad trade. Harbinger for Harbinger. But you really should get a better Math Skill, Deathless. Because we’re the ones with the numbers, and you really can’t afford for your Gate to be the ones paying for the attrition, can you?

Something told the Breaker he would see the Deathless again before this was over, and that had the orc wondering what might piss the boy off the most: Killing Mettabon—or killing the Paragon.

“Ah, whatever,” the Breaker growled. “I’ll just slaughter the both of them. Double the death, double the grudge, brother. And the grudge is coming. THE! GRUDGE! IS! COMING!”

His excitement was briefly interrupted as a resounding impact rattled through his bones. A tsunami of orcish viscera then splashed over him as the few thousand charging orc Adepts and Masters were liquefied in an instant.

The Breaker blinked as he realized he suffered a bit from the blow as well. A slight bruise spread across his entire body, and the lingering sting of a hostile skill began to fade. He turned his mind over to the grand Orchestra—and sniffled as he realized a good tenth of their weakest Psychomancers were done.

Memories pulsed through his mind, showing him the source of the attack…

***

Legend-Shadow Karletta Orphereus thrashed and screamed as he tried to pry himself free from the Semper-Paragon’s grasp. His Lineage Core was cracked—his mana was spilling out from inside him. Misshapen clumps of flesh and tissue bubbled out where his limbs used to be, filling his wounds with sprawls of spreading cancer. And while his body was left disfigured, his soul found itself choked. His mana fields shivered with impotence—and he was a High Hero of Biomancy and Necromancy. Few other than the greatest of Elders could match his power amongst the First Blood.

But the Line-Ender held him like a lion pinning a mouse.

Karletta tried to beg for mercy—but his trachea had dislodged itself mid-yank, and was lost in the muck somewhere. His attempts at Psychomancy were rendered impossible because his fields were clutched by the accused monster. The only things he could move were his partially regenerated eyes, and even then, it felt like he was fighting the weight of the world on his chest. And so, in delusion and desperation, he begged internally.

Please, Karletta wanted to say. I will surrender myself to you. I will give myself over to the Descenders Union and be a thrall to your magnificence and glory. Please. I will tell you of the Lineage Core. I will share with you my blood, if only you let me live. I haven’t had a chance to enjoy anything. I am incomplete of desire; I am incomplete of life. It was not enough. I have not savored enough. I haven’t done anything I wanted yet—it’s not enough—

“Parasite,” Caine Hauser greeted him, speaking with a softness of voice that befitted a gentle man and not a living nightmare. “You waited in ambush. Of me, perhaps? You knew of my arrival and intended to strike me down? What a courageous act of dishonor you have embarked upon. Have your like already forgotten what I taught you during the First War of the Faiths? Has my renown and valor bought me and my knights only mere centuries of fear?”

No! Karletta cried internally. No. It was far more. You are far more. I know what you are! I know what you can do! Please, do not—

But what mattered were Karletta’s thoughts? What worth was a single vampire Legend to the one who had eradicated an entire Bloodline? To one who was about to replicate a part of that act using Karletta as his effigy of contagious destruction.

Please! Karletta called out a final time.

Caine heard nothing. And even if he did, the pleas were worth nothing.

Light filled Karletta’s eyes as his vision stabilized fully. His Awareness expanded—just in time for him to behold the instrument of his ruin. The vampire beheld that weapon of cruel myth—Line-Ender; Grudge-Spreader; Orphan’s Mercy. He beheld, and he wept, for it was beautiful in make, and utterly unbefitting of its tyranny. The axehead on one end glistened blue, the hammer on the other burned crimson bright with vitality, and the spike at the top was rimmed with hues derived from space and time.

It struck Karletta how wrong it was to use the bonds of life to inflict such mass death, and he delivered the first selfless prayer in his life to the Great One and the System—asking to see only him sundered in the aftermath, and for all who knew him as friend and kin to be spared.

But however cruel Caine Hauser was, there was a monster above him even still. The System didn’t care. And so, when Caine flicked the vampire into the air with a whip of his tail and struck him from existence with a single swipe, Karletta felt his wounds, his death, his ruin cascade through his history and soul.

***

That same moment, for seemingly no reason at all, twenty million Embraced downstream of Eighth–Generation Elder Karletta splattered apart where they stood all across the Abyss. The weakest of the Orphereus line died instantly. Adepts simply ceased to be. Approximately five percent of the Master-Tiers affected survived, but their cores were damaged, and their souls were fractured as a chain across all skills.

Upstream, and among the stronger Pathbearers of the line, lesser wounds took shape. Bruises and contusions manifested upon bodies. Magical Resistances were impacted—but otherwise unaffected. The blow, however, didn’t go unnoticed, and the cause never became a mystery.

Karletta’s death howls were loud enough to pass through the entire Bloodline after all.

So loud that Grandmother Orphereus herself shivered upon her throne.

“Again,” she whispered. “He’s struck us again. The treaty… is broken.”

***

In the upper levels of the Abyss, in a region called the Twilight Band, the wails of a young mother-to-be tore through her village. Her labor pain had lasted three days and three nights—but still the child refused to emerge. Her insides alternated between searing torment and a numb coldness. At several points, she begged them to cut her open—to save the child even if it meant her death.

Her beloved, the village guardian, refused. He demanded the Adept-Healer work harder—threatening the poor girl with violence, as if that would do anything. The mother-to-be wanted to offer an apology on the part of her calloused love, but words became whimpers and sobs as the pain started again, and she braced herself for another journey into hell.

But that journey never came. The pain burst inside her a final time like a popping bubble. And something else popped inside her as well. Something splattered out from between her legs, and what felt like a wave of heat flowed out of the mother. Her tears intensified; her cries were of relief, of hope, of—

She tasted the tang of blood on her tongue, and only then realized it was a mix of hot fluid clashing against her cold sweat. As she blinked, she realized her love was nowhere to be seen—that in his place was little more than a mess of sloppy, slick meat coating the floorboards, the walls, the ceiling.

And then, the healer began screaming—the girl staggering away, her body drenched in blood—so much blood.

Only then did the mother-to-be look down. Only then did she realize that which left her was not a whole child, but a gush of barely formed organs and tissues.

Again, she began screaming, and now there were two voices howling in shared madness—one, a healer who would soon be unjustly hanged for another’s deeds, and a mother-that-wasn’t, that wasn’t to be, for her love was cousin to the wrong victim, was the sole surviving kin to a vampire that had long died, and her babe-to-be was the same, and now wasn’t at all.

***

“Agh, ah, fuck!” The visions tore through Shiv, and he gasped and gagged. For a moment, there was no distance between him and all of Caine Hauser’s victims. All of them were one and the same, and that weapon—an atrocity. A horror. How could—

His terror and insanity subsided as he remembered what mattered: Gate Piety. The others. And now he was moving again. His body gleamed a golden shell; his Harbinger had reforged itself. No time to waste; no time. He’s here to help us. Can’t think about what just—

“Kelhaus,” Shiv sad. “Kelhaus. I’m ready. I’m healed. Let me go. I need to help them.”

Yet, there was a pensive look upon the Philosopher’s face. “Hm. But that is still only one.”

“What?”

A crack sounded—drawing both their attention. A hair-thin line was spreading across Corcusa’s cocoon.

The felling poleaxe, Shiv thought. She’s Line Orphereus. Corcusa got hit by the Line-Ender too… Godsdammit…

Now, Kelhaus smiled—as if enjoying the unexpected outcome. “Ah. But little matter. I leave this experience to you. I have intervened enough. The day remains undecided. The scales are yet to be balanced for either of you. I have overreached already. I see the System pushes back through the acts of another. What follows should be decided by you. Or by her.” Kelhaus paused. “In my bias, I would prefer victory to be yours. And so do not make this a contest of skill or strategy, philosopher. That is not what you possess. If you wish to survive till the second interventionist’s arrival, you must be more than animal. You should strive for higher perfection. In decision. In cruelty. In choice. In sacrifice. Let your heart fuel you, but only your mind should guide you. Lest you be led to the slaughter once more.”

“What? Kelhaus? What are you talking—” He knew the conversation was over the moment she superimposed her Harbinger over his—and as Corcusa’s prison shattered into spiraling fractals as she burst free.