Spencer stood at the door and knocked. A single, brusque, rough knock that made it shudder in its frame. Clearly he was in no mood for idleness, as indicated by the way he kept glancing over his shoulder and murmuring a countdown beneath his breath. That, and he was pretty sure he smelled a dead animal under the rickety stairs he just came down.

“Randall, open up!”

Nothing. Not a peep from the other side.

He tapped his foot and contemplated breaking in. That contemplation lasted about a tenth of a second, then he shouldered his way through. The door splintered like balsa and he fell through to the other side in a confetti of glue and dust. He coughed, picked himself up off the floor, and suddenly it dawned on him what smelled. In here, it was worse. Way worse. Slumped on the couch was Randall, a needle clutched in his fist and a trail of black ooze gushing from his pupil where he had tried—and failed—to properly inject himself with the narcotic. It was probably a morbid side-effect of the seismic activity ravaging downtown.

He wiped the sweat off his brow and glanced around the room. Aside from the corpse and his own reckless entrance, it appeared undisturbed. Which was perfect. He strode over to the locker, flung it open, and pulled out his utility belt and a microsatchel that contained a host of other things within its interior dimensional folds. He didn’t just come here to grab his shit, though; there was a larger purpose, in a phrase, saving his ass. He snatched a key chain off the corpse of his fellow ne’er-do-well, practically bounced to the opposite side of the pad, and began opening the large metal door. Finally, it was open, the interior lit by the glow of faint red lights and reflective strips on the floor that ushered him inward. Automatically, the door shut behind him with a subtle sigh. Slews of panels decorated the walls, but there was one in particular that interested him. The one that would put an end to this shit-show and guarantee he could make it to the other side of the red haze that prevented anything from reasonably getting in or out of Allure City. Spencer didn’t hesitate. He just pushed the hell out of that big red button. It had the desired result, but it also knocked him the fuck out.



Urggpphtttuuuhk.

Spencer pushed himself away from the puddle of vomit on the warm metal floor. It was horrendous, the fang-ringed nematocysts tearing away his clothes and dragging him deeper into a gullet of death; the stench and the darkness that led nowhere but recurring everlasting agony. Yet, finally, he knew the name of his assailant, and he shouted it to the pinprick of light that eluded his countenance.

“I know your name, Aracite! I’ll know it and I’ll kill you! I’ll—just die, already! Die! DIE! DIE!”

He choked out more vomit, rolled onto his back, and flung his forearm over his mouth. He wasn’t inside that thing. It was a dream; a nightmare he well knew, for it haunted him incessantly. Without it, he might not be an alcoholic. Well, okay, he probably still would be, but perhaps not one quite so thoroughly dedicated to the cause of debauch.

Still, he was rank; he stunk like the inside of that torrid nightmare. His flesh was simultaneously hot and clammy, his breath labored, and his pupils dilated. Yet, more importantly, finally he remembered something. A flash as Rhiannon and Keefe intervened in the explosion’s aftermath. The beast was blown apart as it retreated into its weird dimensional abode, but the explosion abated, suspended in the midst of its destructive parlay between expanses. Detached flesh reflected light that did not move, paralysis encapsulated his soundless screams, and then without explanation everything seemed to reverse. Somehow, in that instant, he felt Aracite's fears and felt its weaknesses. Crazy though it might be, he was sure he knew how to destroy it.

He and his armaments were spat out, or, more accurately, flung through the space between spaces to find refuge in waking.

There is no way that was real, Spencer thought, not that he believed it for a moment, then he lurched forward and belched.

He shook his head, tried to clear his mind, but regretted it. Despite his headache, he was still able to observe the time. It would be another couple hours before the city’s forcefield could be reactivated in the aftermath of the sabotage. The city’s defense grid was overwhelmed by an extraordinary amount of energy. It gave him time, enough to get the hell out of dodge.

So proudly he’d say his name. Odis Lyndon Gallagher. His name was clearly not one that rolled off the tongue. Lauded for his very much exaggerated war story (which detailed him singlehandedly fending off a vicious horde of a cataclysm), Odis rode this false story as far as the tides could take him. Unfortunately, this “hero” of the people was primarily geared towards fake sincerity and ersatz glory. He gained a representative position and aimed even further like the opportunist he was.

Entering the very establishment Apollo resided in, his walk carried a frivolous bop causing his striped polyester tie to swing vigorously outside his navy tailored suit. There wasn’t much to see, though some guards held thoughts questioning his acumen. Riding the main elevator several floors up, he rested his briefcase on the flush carpet. Before the doors opened there would be several times where he’d brush his shoulders off and pop his collar in sequence.

Bizarre.

Even the two guards accompanying him shook their heads in disgust.

His smug expression remained with him as several men left the room once Apollo dismissed them. For a brief second he saw Apollo within the crack of closing door but something told the Odis to pause on his planned entry. It was the first time he showed any falter in confidence. Something wasn’t right. He could sense it, but to the bathroom he went thinking he could wiz away any form of internal trepidation. Perhaps he was just nervous, it was the first time he was meeting Apollo face to face after all.

“Excuse me boys, I’m going to take a quick pit stop.”

The guards gave a quick nod and waited in the hall as he entered. Surprisingly, the bathroom was rather large and held an interior that was surely designed through the combined effort of renowned architects and interior decorators.

“Impressive” Odis thought and after relieving himself he took a trip to the sink. He placed his prescriptive frames down on the counter and began talking to himself in the reflection of the gigantic mirror. “Relax Odis Lyndon Gallagher relax… You got this…”

After turning on the faucet he noticed there was a hesitation is water flow. He thought nothing of it but in actuality he should have questioned it. Before he could react his hands were suddenly covered in a metallic slime…

“…What… in the…”

Before he could finish the platinum ooze magnetized to his face, gorging violently down any pathway the sentient liquid could find. This included his mouth, nose and even his eyes. The horror, Odis could not even make out the tiniest squeal for help as it constricted his vocal cords, but he the conglomeration of property changing microorganisms did not seek to kill him. Well, that was both true and false.

At this very moment his brain was being partially consumed, meticulously rewired, filled and replaced by the downloaded conscious of another.

The last visions and thoughts of Odis Lyndon Gallagher would be that of the spinning mural plastered upon the arching ceiling which was only ironic to him because no other person in their right mind would compare him to Julius Caesar.

His body was lifeless for a minute or so and the two guards past their patience barged into the bathroom guns drawn with suspicion something was going on. The second the handle rattled Odis’ eyes pinballed from the back of his head and into a regular position. By then the remnants of Panident escaped down the drain and water was regularly flowing once more. What the two ops became witness to was a complete shift in the man’s demeanor.

After slowly getting up, he presumed slight shrugging position despite being at gunpoint. “I just slipped that’s all. I’ll be out in a moment.” They abided to his requests and waited once more outside. The second the door closed a crooked smile filled his face from ear to ear.

“Oh boy did that hurt.”

What is this body number eleven? He lost count. Ten whole times he had been killed and because of the abilities of Panident his entire conscious could be downloaded and formatted to any live person’s brain to be uploaded again and again.

The last thing he remembered was hearing “THEN I SHALL BURN IT ALL!” and just like that a building collapsed on him just as he was entering. It wasn’t just any other building also. It was Merse’s office. As troubling as that might have been to think about he had received enough of a briefing from Panident to pursue the plan with confidence, even if several things had already gone wrong.

With his hair no longer tame and slick he didn’t even bother to fix it as it fit his personality more. He looked in the mirror, stretching his neck in attempts to get used to the body he was in. Instead of putting on his glasses he left them there because he didn’t need them opposed to the previous owner of this body. Instead, he opted to take the suitcase and he walked towards the exit. Whoever this Odis fellow was Apollo had a meeting with, he was gone.

There was a saying that fit the individual occupying Odis’ body perfectly. In fact his nickname derived from it.

“You can kill all the roaches but they’ll always just show up again.”

Hello Apollo Amon, meet Prime's second in command Ferris Caldwell.

The distant setting sun bowed in worship to the Discorporate Tower. An edifice, whose heights pierced the cloud cover with ferocious defiance. The building was a testament to man’s ingenuity, might, and resourcefulness. Most specifically, it glorified one man: Apollo Amon, chairman of the United Council, and leader of Earth. A lofty title deserved lofty engineering, and the Discorporate building was the culmination of the planet’s architecture. This building stood tall and strong, and the people took confidence and comfort in its presence--it was indelible, and withstanding the bombing strengthened this claim. It was also a symbol of the affluent, the famous, and the influential. Not everyone was allowed through the ground floor’s golden gates. For entry required august personage.

Odis Lyndon Gallagher had likely worked weeks, months, or even years to gain free entry into the building. It probably took him much longer to get an audience with the Apollo Amon. However, the man who bursted from the bathroom and into the president’s grand lobby was not suitable to meet with the president--it was questionable if Odis would ever be worthy to meet with Amon.

The antechamber leading to Apollo’s office was nearly as grandiose. A massive set of double doors depicting Auguste Rodin’s most famous work, was parted ever-so-slightly. A beam of light lined down the marble floor of the lobby, shining with heavenly radiance. Though the door depicted the inferno could be construed as a barrier, its insurmountability was maximized by a woman of much smaller stature. The woman instantly sidestepped in front of Odis exuding an aire of nonconfrontational professionalism. Her perfect smile revealed perfect teeth on the perfect face of a perfect woman.

“I’m sorry,” she interjected, her voice stern, but soft and pleasing to the ear. “You must be Mr. Gallagher.”

She regarded him as if they had known each other forever, with courtesy that belied her professional detachment from a man who had a million collars popped.

“It seems you did not receive our notice,” she said with faux-contrition,” unfortunately due to extenuating international circumstances, all of Mr. Amon’s appointments have been postponed.”

It was as if the door, itself, agreed to her rejection of Fearis, as it silently shifted to a close, and with it, the light of Odis’s life’s work.

“His earliest convenience would be two months from this Thursday. If that won't work with your schedule then you can go down the 90th floor for scheduling. Again, we apologize.” She said, with one arm extended towards the elevators.



A cool spasm rippled across his skin and numbed his limbs with icy dread. The silence of space aided his attempts to contemplate. His head throbbed with every word Apollo said to him, he couldn’t handle the information that was conveyed to him, there were just too many things that didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense, and yet, it all happened.

He felt different. He wanted to escape and it was almost instinctive how he flew through the atmosphere. Even from so far above, he could still see every detail of the planet below. The untouched forests, and the vast cities, the rebuilding in South America, and the chaos in Europe. He turned his attention to the Discorporate Tower and could hear Apollo’s secretary talking to someone. He comprehended everything, every crooked drug deal outside of Apollo’s safe zone in South America felt like it was happening in front of him, every business deal of the Zaibatsus that ruled over much of asia he was a fly on the wall for, and every bullet fired and civilian killed he was a witness to in Spain. He could feel Gennosuke urging him to go to Spain; save those people and stop the bloodshed. He could also feel Forge tugging him in a different direction: why do you care about these people, just leave them to their fate.

Allying with Forge, not out of apathy, but out of a numb sensation that followed over processing. He couldn’t bring himself to care about Apollo’s mission, Spain, or anything occurring down on the planet, far, far below him. Not when he saw what he saw. Max was anything but human to begin with--now, more than ever. The military conditioned him, special forces tempered his nerves, and his promotion to the Mobius Operatives had reinforced his temperament. Nothing prepared him for what he saw in that room. Nothing would ever prepare him for it. There were no words to describe what he experienced. It had driven him here, to the brink of insanity, and all these voices were nudging him towards the vast metaphorical chasm before him.



New Roswell.

The white coated technician sat at his desk--the core of his duties covered in automation. His eyes jerk as they change focus between matrices and variates. Electron levels remained normal, a minimal influence of tachyon emissions in and around Discorporate towers, abberant quantum particle functions were non existent. Then, suddenly nearly every one of his screens exploded in a series of warnings, ecstatic data, and errors.

It certainly surprised the technician, but the real emergency responder was automated. Apollo was already in New Roswell. He tapped at his headset and addressed the rest of the emergency-warp team.

“We have a Class A at the Discorporate Tower and…” He glossed over the intercontinental displays, “Hemisphere Alpha, Region: Delta, Sigma, Omega, Alpha. All locations are under aberrant influence.”

The fingers of this particular technician and thousands of others just like him fanned over the interface. “Emergency protocols are enacted, portals closed, recommend dispatching multiple teams throughout Hemisphere Alpha for those that slipped through the cracks.”



“Have a--”

Before the secretary could finish her sentence, the hinges of the office doors flung open, and the otherworldly howls rang through the foyer like screams in a torture chamber. It was proven that she was too perfect, as a multi-limbed demon with awkward sacroiliac locomotion contorted through, gripping her by the torso and sundered her in half spilling violet nanofluid on the spotless marble floors. Its face flowered out as it shrieked at Odis, and soon he too was overswept with a high tide of demons.

The demon’s blackened bodies scrawled and squirmed over the ceiling, walls, and floor encroaching upon the businessmen more like a virulent fungus than a collective army. Their arms and tendrils were appendages all to a conglomerate being of lust, gluttony, anger, and violence. As the secretaries body was dismembered and fed the gorging flesh-blob, it did not sate their appetite or slow their advance by any stretch of the meaning. They sought to devour Panident’s new host.

This phenomenon was perpetrated by one most heinous, certainly a criminal of caliber of Merse Granstrum. Apollo was immediately transported to safety with emergency teleportation technologies and in the wake of its effects the gift was immediately shunted by a sudden tachyon emission into the atmosphere. The temperamental teleportation aftershock of New Roswell’s powerful reactors causing a malign reaction with the overwhelming magic of the weapon.



There was no one there to receive the sheathed silver sword, or the disclaimer that came with it. No one except semi sentient demons who were far more interested in ripping Fearis, and everyone else in the building, to pieces. Instead, the weapon was shunted by a tachyon disruption that whisked Apollo to safety. Though powerful enough to survive the temporal anomaly, its destination sent it shooting like a railgun through the atmosphere and into earthen orbit, where its velocity would surely break the planet's gravitational hold and send it into its everlasting peregrination. After blinking through the building, it shunted upwards, screaming like a subsonic jet. This weapon sheathed became flying death—a ricocheted bullet. As it tore through the planet’s atmosphere, it glowed red, like an inverse comet, but the friction didn’t even begin to mar its surface. It cut through the atmosphere, and its trajectory intersected with a brooding humanoid.

It was moving impossibly fast—faster than Max’s canister rifle rounds. He didn’t even know it was coming, but without knowing or even understanding the threat something else guided his hand and without looking at the Sword of Sal’chazzar, his arm snapped out gripping around the burning-hot scabbard. Thought it retained the heat of molten metal, its scorching surface did not burn his flesh. A silvery liquid coated his skin, wrapping around the sheath of the blade. He turned his head to regard the weapon looking upon it with only minimal interest.



The slime-coat protected the prehensile appendage from Merse’s corrosive fog. Anathema had fought enough creatures with this kind of capability in his lifetime to anticipate this. Just like that, the fight was over. In the back of Jacknathema’s head Anathema salivated for the kill, the mantis shrimp punches would puncture Merse’s body, sundering him, but someone else interfered. A reverberated crack signified the tension snapping between his crustacean appendages, and his tongue sundered from unforeseen projectiles. Jacknathema’s eyes darted around wildly and unsynchronized as they scanned for the source they soon found rocketing from debris.

Jack’s weakness got the better of the compartmentalized creature, and recognition flickered through his face as, for a moment, he took his attention off Merse and looked upon Thomas. He could not even manage a breathless gasp as he watched the Operative fly towards him. A single thought was all he could manage: Seriously…?

This blast from the past packed a punch that split his ribcage and tore apart the front of his body. His face, instinctively began to reknit, even as agron’s mineral-melding particulate attempted to impede him. The flow of progress continued, in every imaginable venue that could be considered. If it meant that he had to resort to a cartilage based super-compact fatty structure in place of a skeletal system, that would be what it was.

Blades of bones pierced into Jacknathema’s exposed core, fusing together with his own skeletal mass, even as cartilage began to block their efficacy. For an instant, Jack was actively defenseless--even as most of his words were drowned out, a few managed to pierce the veil of fury.

“THOMAS” The first hit came breaking three sets of lower ribs and puncturing his diaphragm to the point where he could barely speak.

“WHAT ARE YOU” The second hit one of his arms meagerly flickered in the way, deflecting the punch to his chest as opposed to his face, it shattered his ribcage open like a cooked clam, exposing layers of musculature that pulsed with his pumping heart.

“DOING” The third strike was delivered directly to his face he could feel his cheekbone break and part of the jagged shards that would compose the rest of his skull puncture into his brain, but that wouldn’t stop Anathema’s regeneration and reactive adaptation.

“ITS ME” This punch struck against his shoulder, only marginally grazing him. His body’s natural defenses began to overcome the assault. How he could still speak after the fourth hit was miraculous. But the bones reknit, layers of cartilage covered over his rib cage structure and enforced his chest cavity, the musculature swelled and hardened, closing, and Agron’s minute essence-driven particles began to crystalize on the outside of his flesh as a blocked-off carapace, barred from entry.

“JACK” The fifth hit was like a strike against solid stone. Thomas’s enhanced knuckles cracked against the aegis that was Jacknathema’s body. Anathema’s hatred poured into the quasi-Val’garan monstrosity, and with one of his once-broken arms he reached up, clasping around Thomas’s jaw, his arm flexing with herculean strength, as his hulking hands gripped around half of the operative’s skull.

“GET OFF.” He said, and with that his counter attack came. He pushed off the ground with his own tide of rage, spiking Thomas into the ground, skull first. Anathema insidiously began to supplant memories of Jessica Lynn into Jack’s mind--specifically her last moments as a living human.

Thomas murdered her.

That was all that was needed. With a shadowed face, Jacknathema shattered his teeth into jagged shards, his eyes bulging and bloodshot, and the muscles of his shoulders and back growing instantaneously, at a rate that began a cycle of shredded flesh and renewed hide. Thomas was still mobile enough to avoid Jack’s first strike--and luckily so. A wrecking ball fist that was the size of the human’s torso impacted the ground, fissuring the pavement underneath. The shockwaves sent by the strike shook loose the foundations of some of the nearby structures, and deeper in the ground sundered a gas line that belched for noxious aerosol into the area around them, once again clouding the two in a hazy cloud of extremely flammable material.

Jacknathema had already been burned once in this encounter--he would be fine surviving an explosion, but Thomas might not be so lucky if someone were to capitalize on the opportunity.

“YOU KILLED HER.” He roared thick, viscous spittle showering down as he raised his arms, the mapwork chords of veins surfacing as he let go of the operative’s face and raised his arms in furious protest to the sky. Then he delivered a series of thunderous hammerfists down atop the human that would likely rearrange his anatomy.



The smell of manure wafted alongside the lazy trot of Phillipe Duboi le Bougeouis’s donkey. The decrescendo of clopping hooves against cracked asphalt announced his arrival to the military perimeter. He licked his dry, chapped lips as he looked upon a buffet. He smelled gourmet appetizers in little scents none other could pick up. The grainy, dry aroma of some of the soldier’s rations didn’t escape his senses.

The fact that he made the journey from el Castillo Gordo without devouring his ride spoke to his determination. This clearly manifested in beads of sweat that trickled down his temples. He pulled a kerchief from his pocket, dabbed his upper lip, wiped his brow, and then consumed the cloth. As he swung off the mule, who huffed what almost sounded like a sigh of relief. He trekked his way into camp like he was supposed to be there.

This ruse was ill-played. Security was tight around the perimeter camp, the roads had been blocked off and soldiers stood, armed and vigilant. As he approached one such officer thrust his palm out in warning when the count was within earshot. “Stop,” the guard commanded, “this area is restricted.”

Phillipe chewed his upper lip and driveled a weak response: “But I’m hungry.”

“I said leave. NOW.” The soldier said as he slashed at the air with his extended arm.

The soldier’s compatriot leveled his fully automatic on the slobbering count, who was still slowly advancing. “Final warning,” the guard shouted, “do not advance any further or you will be shot!”

Loathe as they were to put down a civilian, the strangely dressed simpleton continued towards them, with no heed to their warnings. The large man’s hands were outstretched to either side of him, palms facing the guards, like two open shooting targets. The two began to frantically yell at him to stop, until their guns railed off drowning out all conversation, and peppering the man with slugs.

Banana clips emptied on their rifles, and much to their dismay and surprise, the rotund individual still stood, unmarred by the high caliber fire. Before the smoke even cleared from their muzzles, but not before their hearts skipped a beat, a wide gleam split across Count Bougeouis’ face. A beaming smile that peeled his lips back like some sort of mummified corpse, and pulled the fat of his jowls tightly around the frame of his face. He was all reddened gums and yellowed teeth in a mirthless grin that was more threatening than it was anything else.

The two quickly ejected their clips, and jammed another into the bottom of the guns, just as the count lurched forward into a wolf like lunge, jaw unhinged, and cackling madly to the tune of their screams.

THUMP

THUMP

THUMP

CRASH

SHATTER

It sounded like a one-man stampede slamming against street pavement, heavy impacts smashing through glass and steel, leaving nothing but totaled buildings in its wake. It saw like a black and gold blur swinging its arms out, backhanding pedestrian vehicles with a fist as hard and compact as folded iron, smacking them to the side as he cleared a path toward his destination. Silently, and without expression of any kind save for gritted golden teeth, the bald man in the black suit and tie bolted like a marathon runner, his dark shades flecked with dust from the destruction he caused on his path to Granstrum.

Goldman, like Thomas, had quickly ascertained the identity of Allure City's leader via depictions of his feline face spray-painted on the ghetto neighborhoods resembling eastern Europe projects, posters of him plastered on the walls of parks benches those of a shady park in south central Los Angeles. He caught a holographic, pixelated neko-image projected from a pagoda amid countless other information ads designed to attract and persuade people into opening up their wallets.

His face didn't show it, just like it didn't show anything without him willing it; such was the nature of being a man made of solid gold. Goldman did know however, that Merse was bad for business. He and his brother Eddy had associates down in Spain's southern border-- associates who paid the men handsomely to supply them with weapons that were smuggled across the Mediterranean Sea, into Africa's wastes so that could be used in future conflicts over radioactive soil.

All that profit, all that hard work had been crushed in a matter of seconds, and it wasn’t as if the brothers had simply gotten those weapons for free and handed them over to the Spanish. They had to be bought at a high price due to the nature of false identification chips being such a bitch to manufacture. This raised the overall cost to astronomical proportions.

Merse would have to pay for his crime against the White Syndicate with his life.

Goldman’s expression changed, his brows scrunching together as he let out a voiceless scream, golden bolts of lightning showering off his frame. Due to his sheer weight, Goldman could not run very fast, but as the voltage coursing through him increased, so too did his speed accelerate, the intervals between his bullish stampede shortening into a rapid-fire dash of pot-holed pavement. The sight of his golden body transformed into a golden blur as he raced toward the commotion, upending everything in his path. The Golden Boy was on a mission Jacknathema and the Mobius Operative, both of whom he’d kill should either of them impede his path toward Granstrum.

THUMP
THUMP
THUMP
THUMP
THUMP
THUMP
THUMP
THUMP
THUMP
THUMP
THUMP
THUMP
THUMP
THUMP
THUMP
THUMP
THUMP....................................................................................

The alien was either blind or stupid. In Eddy’s opinion it was probably both. He watched with paltry satisfaction as the undead horde dogpiled Sciac, fangs slamming down atop the creature’s hunchbacked neck, ripping and tearing and swallowing viscera down their starving gullets only to choke and vomit as the oils coating its skin revealed a swarm of bacteria lurking within its blackened depths, acting in defense of its wretched form. Its eyes scanned frantically about, having clearly overestimated itself and underestimated both the humans of Earth as well as its demons.

Ravenous as a pack of hyenas, the horde forced the bacterias back down their throats, rupturing their esophagus and stomach which caused the swarm to mix with their cursed blood, given to them by their master. While supernatural in form, vampirism spread itself like a virus, using the crimson river as its carrier, and like a virus it hijacked other cells, and used them to reproduce en masse. Slowly, but surely, Sciac was being converted into one of the undead, but he would not be turned into just any undead. He would be magnificent, monstrously magnificent in both size and destructive power.

Like his brother Goldman, Eddy had good reason for wanting to punish Mr. Granstrum. But Eddy was a businessman. Goldman, though intelligent, was far more proficient at combat than he was at talking negotiations or making deals with prospective partners. He much preferred to beat and pulverize things, which was fine, as it made him an excellent enforcer.

Stabbing his cane into the pavement, Eddy spread his dark magic down through the earth itself, tainting the roots that occupied the soil and summoned them with a rupturing explosion of dirt and asphalt. Ordinarily the tips of the roots were used for drinking up water, but empowered by the Vampire’s malevolent blight their tips hardened, the rough, lumpish texture smoothing out to form a highly flexible skewer vine. Shooting forth with serpentine speed, Sciac’s body stiffened as it was infiltrated by a network of cursed roots pumping foul magic up through his veins.

The man in ivory nodded with malice in his eyes as he watched the lanky beast swell to colossal proportions, its bones cracking, muscle and ligaments tearing apart in an endless cycle of destruction and reformation. Its taloned feet sliced through the ground as its knees gave way under the splintering of its shins, causing it to lean forward into an office building, residents of the lobby fleeing in terror as Sciac desperately tried to support himself, only support beams to give way and collapse, crushing all inside.

In the midst of its growth, its countless eyes caught sight of Eddy, and for a moment he wanted to charge the Vampire, only for his malicious cravings to be suppressed and reprogrammed. Sciac’s legs expanded along with his arms and rib-cage, limbs pushing through pavement, across the street and into another much larger building, this one a tall skyscraper. Glass shattered as the building imploded from having its central pillars taken out, creating a massive plume of dust and debris.

A shrill scream burst from the jaws of Sciac as he stood over four hundred feet in the air, blood-red oil, symbolic of its assimilation and transformation into a vampiric monstrosity poured off its skin, triggering an animalistic feeding frenzy within the horde that suddenly ceased being slow and sluggish and commenced a rapacious rampage of hunger.

Without warning, he released his blade from the street and flung it at Sciac’s forehead and leaped, landing gracefully atop the corrupted alien’s skull.

Eddy shouted in a thick, Romanian accent, his voice projected as a massive loudspeaker from “I HAVE A PROPOSITION FOR YOU. SURRENDER TO OUR WHITE SYNDICATE EMPIRE, OR I DESTROY YOUR WORTHLESS CITY AND EVERY CITIZEN WITHIN IT, ONE SKYSCRAPER AT A TIME!”

***

Arthur’s eyes widened when he heard the sounds of panicked gunfire, accompanied by General Heinzmann cursing under his breath. Had Merse decided to retaliate for the attack on Allure City by the White Syndicate? Instead what he saw was far more disgusting: his soldiers were being eaten by some ravenous relic of French medieval history. Too awestruck for words, Heinzmann panicked as the obese knight came treading toward him, straight into the tent where the Cannibal was being held prisoner.

“Gott in Himmel!” Arthur thoughtlessly claimed, “what is that awful stench!?”

Phillipe’s foul odor was so rancid, especially to a man who had literally been turned into a pig demon; it was so awful, he could hardly breathe. Not knowing his own strength, nor realizing that Agron’s presence had completely vanished from his handcuffs in favor of more pressing conflict, Arthur shattered the handcuffs and stumbled his way straight out of the tent.

Amid the sound of crushing bone and wet gurgly lip smacking that came with Heinzmann’s corpse being hideously consumed came Arthur’s loud screaming voice.

“Hey dicker Arsch! Ich bekomme, dass Sie hungrig sind, aber es gibt eine enorme Staatsgröße-Stadt, die Spanien RICHTIGES FUCKING NEXT TO US ersetzt hat! Warum nimmst du nicht deinen Whale Knight Ass da drüben und stinkst stattdessen DIESEN Platz, EH!?”

***

Consumed by his own fury, the Herald’s words blew apart like ashes in a sea of blood-red flames both figuratively and literally. Thomas hated the Val’gara, hating them almost as much as he hated the bastard that killed his parents. Agron resonated with this hatred, absorbed the negative electrical impulses coursing through the Operative’s nerves and used it as fuel for the Red Aura. And yet, despite the back and forth screaming between the two combatants, he did recall the monster’s last words before it commenced its second attack.

The only words to this day, still struck a guilty chord within Thomas’ mind.

YOU

KILLED

HER!

Sensing the sudden rush of shock and grief that befell him, Agron claimed full control of the lieutenant’s body, manipulating him like a puppet. Jamming Thomas’ elbow bones into the fissure created by Jacknathema, the Shape-Shifter disintegrated an opening and pulled Thomas through the aperture, closing up just as quickly as it opened. This was only the beginning however, it could feel the Val’gara tunneling after him, but that wasn’t the only problem. Surrounded by dirt, there was little room to breathe, and when Agron perforated the soil to make room for air to get in, it felt Thomas choke on the toxic gas being released by the ruptured pipe.

Siphoning the gas away via spontaneously formed vacuum tunnels, once the Operative was able to breathe again, it commenced compressing that which it had removed into large pockets, and placed them in Jacknathema’s path. A crescendo of explosions rocked Allure City on a subterranean level that would serve to temporarily impede the Val’garan’s progress, triggered by Agron’s ability to manipulate its temperature at any point upon its body, the chaos manifesting itself as flame-geysers shooting up through the cracks of the damaged city.

Meanwhile, another aspect of Agron’s essence had spread to the source of the gas leak, and whereas Thomas would have heroically sealed it in an attempt to prevent more lives from being lost, the monster certainly did seal it the leak while cutting off a section that was roughly half a block long and aimed it at Jacknathema. Its tip extended into a studded spear that was as hard and sharp as corundum crystal, crafted side-mounted exhaust pipes that were separate from the rest of the gas in a matter of seconds, and ignited it like a rocket

The Val’garan was skewered before it even had a chance to see what came after him, steel tendrils sprouting around him in a metal embrace that restrained him just long enough for Thomas to take aim with his USP.

“DON’T YOU FUCKING TALK TO ME ABOUT MURDER!”.

BANG

“One step at a time,” Spencer affirmed, took a deep breath, and threw open the vault door. Death’s pungence assailed him, a rancid bouquet that crept along his flesh, blurred his vision, and raced down his olfactory nerve where it scrunched his nose. Time, ever the merciless tyrant, cleared his senses to receive the nigh-limitless possibilities of sensory revulsion. The room stank worse than his sweat-drenched, vomit-stained, urine-soaked self. He shifted his weight, suddenly self-consciousness, resisted the urge to heave, and contemplated whether more substantial evidence of how hard he partied was caked in his crack.

Instinctively, his eyes drifted toward his former friend.

Not quite the welcome distraction he sought.

“What was his name? Wilco? Raphael? Randall? Yeah. Yeah. Randall.”—Spencer rambled, barely cognizant of his vocalizing his musings. At some level, though, he knew why words were necessary. That sojourn into realm of abstract dread, memories real or imagined, impressed on him the need to openly acknowledge reality.

Not all reality was worth reflection, he concluded. Like the corpse in the room. Still, Randall deserved a moment of silence, although he intended to make it brief. Not because he was apathetic—he did eventually remember his friend’s name. That, he concluded, was the fault of substance abuse. Even now, the world felt increasingly like molasses. Rather, because none would be helped if he, too, were reduced to a hot mess that steadily seeped toward oblivion. Pragmatic, he shared the moment with an assessment of the room for valuables. Nothing. Everything he required was in his satchel.

Ah, his satchel! Why did it hang from his hip instead of that hook on the wall? Allure City, death trap and menagerie without compare. Escape. He reached in, found his communicator, plugged it into his ear, and without another thought darted out of the basement apartment. With the door flung wide open, any neighbors who survived to abandon the perceived safety of their homes might regret their second chance.

“Spencer Tras requesting immediate tele-evac,” he breathlessly managed before a pressure wave knocked him flat. Ears ringing, he clung to the sidewalk at the top of the concrete stairs, amazed the bottom didn’t embrace him and a broken neck. Still dazed, he peered through the expanding cloud of dust toward the epicenter of the blast.

“IMMEDIATE EVAC,” he screamed.

<< Acknowledged, >> a voice intoned calmly, << Relay commencing >>

A flash of white light pierced the clouds, struck where was sprawled, and in the blink of an eye he was gone.



“Blegck! Eww. When we’re finished, drag our guest into the watercloset and scrub him til he’s spotless,” Czes demurred to a synthetic assistant whose plastic expression analog inexplicably twisted in horror.

As usual, Czes was a dapper in his cashmere ivy cap, rich brown jacket, diamond checkered vest, straight slacks, and blutchers—attire utterly anachronistic within the streamlined modernity of his well-lit surroundings. In spite of the bleak events, there was something in the scene before him—a chaotic, idiotic, laissez-fair canvas—that led to a lightening of his mood. Bemused, however inappropriately, he repressed an inappropriate smile his brown eyes couldn’t quite mask and added, after a poignant pause,

“Burn the clothing. Every scrap.”

Composed, he fixed a faux frown on his face and appraised his new arrival. The oaf sat on the floor, his impish face lit with the look of disassociated bewilderment that too often accompanied teleportation. He blinked, he rolled his eyes, and absently observed how the large disc of glass in the ceiling shimmered from the heat of the transporter array’s energy pulse. It was amazing how the beam pierced half a mile of ocean.

The distraction wasn’t working.

Hands shoved into his pockets, he opened his mouth to speak, paused again, and finally spoke, “Spencer, my name is Czes Schäfer. You’re safely aboard my private yacht, the Kithless. I’d like to extend my pleasure at finally making your acquaintance. However, before we formalize our introductions, uh, strip. You’re filthy. Utterly vile. Throw your clothing into the incinerator. Also, report. We need to know what is going on.”

As he awaited a reply, Czes grimaced, lifted a kerchief to his nose, turned, and initiated the procession toward cleanliness.







Verification arrived earlier, but things were hectic in the Tel Aviv office. An alien encroachment displaced the whole Iberian Peninsula and its fifty million souls while the resultant seismic activity threatened another half billion. The media went crazy, puppet leaders raved furiously, and nuclear strikes were authorized without hesitation. By an order of magnitude, the event was the greatest modern publicized tragedy in Earth-F67X’s history. In spite of that, chaos gave way to protocol at the numerous field offices of Mobius Corps and after a second, third, and eventually a ninth urgent notice someone was assigned to assess the Jadis breach.

<< Outstation Vega 5.8, codename Jadis, has gone silent. >> read the communique.



Cold, dark, silent:

Some exploit those words glibly, as when describing an empty room on a winter night from the comfort of an atmosphere-rich planet luxuriating in the circumstellar habitable zone. Yet light a match and feel warmth, glance out a window and bask in starlight, or sigh to end the silence. Indubitably, the words, like the theatrical sophists who spew them, become meaningless and their power is dispelled.

On Jadis, the words possessed visceral meaning. There was insufficient atmosphere to conduct sound; no magnetosphere, tidal force, or molten core to generate heat; no light sufficient to penetrate the shadow of the gas giant and surrounding dust cloud in which the ice world lurks. It is utterly cold, despairingly dark, and unyieldingly silent.

Given the failure of facility designated Outstation Vega 5.8, the bleakness could not be overstated. A black site located on a planet known as Jadis, it was deemed impenetrable to assault. Yet its blast shields were rent and automated security protocols corrupt. Instead of air, near-vacuum permeated the depressurized subterranean lair. Undeniably, this was the culmination of collusion—treachery and intrusion combined in an operation intended to rob what rightfully belonged to Mobius Corps.

Nobody alive remained. Frozen bodies littered the halls; frosted-over glass vats, which held clones infused with Tristan Singh’s DNA, were bolted to the walls of a laboratory’s storage unit that seemed to stretch on forever; and a partially awakened replica lay in a state of lifelessness on a gurney in the revitalization room.

In the darkness of that isolated chamber, an orange ember materialized and illuminated a forgotten gold link. Indistinct, it blossomed and intimated origins in the negative space of shadows. Therein danced an opium-fueled vision, where bloody eddies mixed with fire and broke against a basalt cliff. Stretching onward as far as the mind could contemplate, the noxious tide thirstily rolled over the upraised faces of the eternally damned. Drowning, burning, screaming, choking, the violent in life were condigned every moment of misery. No relief came, nor would it come. Atop the cliff loomed a silhouette—half horse, half man—armed with a fork with which it cast back into agony the undeserving seekers of a gentler fate. Its head turned slowly, a halo of tentacles whirling in the background like hair wild in the wind, and the creature stepped from wall to room. There, its massive form, stooped over the ice-preserved corpse, was barely contained. Further defined, it was clear the semi-equine physique was a pretext composed of ooze-slick segments that grasped at and slithered around another like a menagerie of woke intestines. A claw, or a mouth, or crushed gravel embedded in the translucent membrane—it was unclear—swept down, plucked the bangle off the floor, and plunged it into Tristan’s chest.



Tristan practically leapt off the thin rubber mattress. Red emergency lights flickered in his periphery and he heard the distant buzz of backup generators. It was all very disorienting. Still, his training kicked in, he closed his eyes, slowed his breathing, and assessed his situation. No non-ambient noises, so he was clearly alone. He heard the ducts rumble as the air pushed through; felt it pass over him, crisp and cool. He had to be underground. His heart slowed down to a reasonable pace. Satisfied, he opened his eyes, let them adjust to the dimness, and tried to stand. Restraints. Leather straps around his wrists and ankles. With a swift jerk, he wrenched his left arm free. Another arm tore through the leather like it was made of lint. He freed his legs. Finally, he stood.

‘Earth,’ he thought.

The trek home was long overdue.

The gag-inducing anatomy of the Anathema was unruly. The smell of the abomination’s constricting tongue was enough to trigger the information broker’s gastroesophageal reflexes. Remnants of speckled trout, hair and stomach acids erupted from Merse’s throat in a clumped concoction of orange vomit and drool. Just like that, his upper attire was soiled. Disgusting.

The usually computing mind of Merse simply lacked focus. Despite errors, Merse’s kit of abilities had as much utility as the Herald. Instinctively activated by his aura, Merse’s fur became so slick that every mantis punch slid off to the side on contact. Their speed and strength had no impact whatsoever considering the coating elements of each property were unable to mix. As the situation progressed, he focused less on why and towards how? He was prepared to deal entirely with EarthF67x domestically but several obvious factors now inhibited his ability to do so. For a moment they would have to make do without him.

As convenient as it would be for Earthf67x, Merse was not the head of the chicken. They were more like a clump of worms. Living amongst Allure were many supernatural beings and species who were no strangers to conflict. Amidst the chaos, an individual was already planning its assimilation into this foreign society. Just a few blocks from Merse’s office, a brunette woman in a classic yellow day dress and cloche hat enjoyed a cup a coffee with who appeared to be a run of the mill paperboy. “Howard” she spoke. “I think its time we leave. The waitress ran out. I don’t think they care too much about the tab.”

“You’re right!” he nodded, before rushing to the door. If anyone was watching, they might have realized something was off. The calmness of their mannerisms when faced with citywide destruction was simply uncanny. Did they not fear death? Despite being very pale, she was considered the paradigm of beauty for period her style emulated. Her turquoise eyes were as stunning as they were rare. Quickly accompanying her was a taxi. Speeding around the cobblestone streets in a controlled dash, the car drifted perfectly into the corner she was at. The driver was large toadman wearing nothing but a tie and shirtless collar. It was questionable how he originally got into the car in the first place, but nevertheless, he was here.

Casually the two entered the back of the taxicab and without any words the driver took off, blasting his feet through the floor, propelling the car Flintstone style down the block. He soon leaped, wrapping his arms around the bottom of the open windows, bringing the car with him hundreds of feet into the air. Landing on the top of a building, this was the first stop. From there they could oversee the aftermath of the relocation efforts. Fire, explosions, the streets of Allure was a war zone. Sighing heavily, the woman put two and two together when she spotted the detective bombay clashing in the street. Only he could be the author of such unintentional chaos.

“Howard you stay out here and take the briefcase out the back. Give it to our friend.”

“Will do.”

There wasn’t much time to sightsee, as the toad hopscotched from roof to roof, transporting her to her destination in just over two minutes. Half of the commute was spent scaling a massive building similar in design to the Burj Khalifa. This building titled “De Haute Taille,” however, stood three times its size.

Once the car was high enough, the lady opened the door and jumped out, floating down into an open atrium Mary Poppins style. She quickly folded her umbrella after landing and walked into the production set readied for her. Here the mystery woman’s identity would be on full display. Her name was Margaret Iedereen.

“I'm not sure if there are other inhabitable planets in this star system. A planetary level signal should suffice. How’s my hair? Good? Ok, I’m ready for recording.”

The tower Margaret hosted her broadcast was built mainly to manipulate and send out frequencies of any magnitude on the intergalactic level. Considering it was now on earth, any technology within its planetary range was susceptible to influence. No harm was intended by the Sui generis powered engine, a fourth of the building was composed of. They could return to their normal scheduled programming later. She simply needed to get out a message and so she used one of Allure's, many resources to do so.

“Three, two, one. Aaaaand…. we’re live.”

"Well, hello” she greeted.

Approximately 70% of the media devices and all mobile projected the image of the woman. Some even turned themselves on and raised the volume to get the message out loud and clear.

“This might be a little strange but it isn't as bizarre in light of the other things going on!...hmmm, that was a bit sour in taste. Let me get point. I go by the name Margaret but you all can refer to me as Ms.Iedereen. I am here to run a little program of sorts in efforts to explain a bit of what’s going on. As you know, a foreign territory has suddenly appeared on your planet. I'm currently checking with my sponsors to find out exactly where but I suppose that's not too important. What's important is, we were unknowingly warped here so technically we mean no harm. So what's next you ask? I'll show you!”

Immediately, numerous shots of the chaos on Allure were played before her audience, including a detailed shot of Anathema running amok. The other shots documented the exchanges of the military and operatives in their exchange with the skilled inhabitants of Allure. Bound to draw attention were the shots of the endlessly growing army of platinum warriors, forming out of liquids from every sewage opening in the city. Being relatively impervious to most forms of damage, many of the soldiers were swarmed and immobilized after being swept by controlled tsunamis of platinum ooze. This was to solely to stop them from doing harm. Panident’s presence was all over the city, and eventually, a fog would overtake it in its entirety through the emission of “steam” from every inch of the ground. Suddenly, it began to become an overcast day.

“As you can see, a lot of unnecessary battles are being fought, but your soldiers are being spared when they can. With communication from your leadership, the conflict can end before moving into outer regions. Conflict is simply bad for business. At your command, we’ll simply give up. Yes, its that simple.”

As much as she championed for peace, this woman had far from clean hands. Her movements were suspiciously efficient, her engagements with others almost seemed choreographed, she was always protected. Her cult-like following worked like ants in devotion to their queen. You couldn’t pinpoint who was under her command. It was just wise to never bad mouth her. Information always got back to her. Unnatural forces were definitely afoot.

“I have influence over much of Allure but I'm afraid they won't listen to me and stand down if this attack on this beautiful city continues.”

If only Earth’s inhabitants knew exactly what she just hinted at. Not only was 30% of Allure’s population under her command, but they were practically apart of her. The retaliation of Allure's forces only equaled Earths for the time being simply because the majority of their moves were entirely choreographed by a single mind, calculating from every angle, encounter and using that foresight how to counter every move. Foul actions were definitely in play off-screen with the transmission of her body fluids strategically placed into many soldiers during engagements with the inhabitants she controlled. Her following was growing. If anyone was to survive this debacle it was her. Assimilation was in phase one.

“At the bottom of your screen, there's a 14 digit number you can call. luckily for you, intergalactic roaming charges aren't in effect! Go ahead. Try it. Very important people only, of course. I’ll answer personally…"

“Zip.” And just like that, a commercial for Prime Industries began playing.

-

Many of Prime’s resources couldn’t be disposed of with raw destruction. Many of the most valuable were hidden or laid with or within individuals. This much commotion was bound to draw many out and before the pair of brothers leading the assault, one appeared. Eddy’s message via loudspeaker began to phase out halfway through. The sound became muffled until it was virtually nonexistent. Crouched on the top of a brownstone, about a hundred feet away from a samurai with studio headphones on could be seen in possession of a drawn sword. At the precise moment he sheathed his weapon the megaphone lost its ability to project entirely.

“We heard you.” He calmly spoke. Despite his position, his voice was quite clear. Tired of the chaos, the samurai had just gotten finished with a bout right before this and here potentially was another. “I don’t think anyone one would be opposed to that. This isn’t exactly an attack or assault. I assure you, if anyone had a choice, no one would choose to come to a place with such a shitty welcoming party. Say I was able to get in contact with the people in charge, would this really be the end of it? Is it that easy? Man, I want out. Plus, I’m pretty sure you don’t want to fight those guys.”

Those guys Claine referred to were the endless army of platinum soldiers marching in from each side of the avenue. The cloud of debris from the skyscraper had concealed their movements. “Just so you know, I have nothing to do with those guys. I don’t really fuck with the ops either, you feel me?” Awaiting Eddy’s response, he simply raised a brow. What would happen if Goldman got to Merse first”

-

“Merse snap out of it! Merse!”

The annoying voice rang through his skull. Looking to his left the information broker, recognized the boy beside him. Howard had a tendency to show up during ridiculous circumstances. in the past, Merse wondered how he survived half of the time, but he learned it was rather pointless to do so. His arrival meant a certain individual was trying to get in contact with him. It was clear he had something for him too with the huge briefcase the boy was held. With the sight of gigantic pieces of debris incoming, Merse dragged the young boy to the roof of five-story condominium overseeing Thomas and Anathema. From there he could see a man of what appeared to be solid gold running straight towards him. It was far from the craziest thing he’s seen today. He shrugged it off temporarily as he was quite the distance away and held his hand out to the boy. “I take it Ms.Hivemind isn’t too thrilled.”

“She’s livid,” Howard replied. “She wanted me to relay this message. In the future, the next time you decide to do something, don’t. But for now, we need an ace in the hole in case things can’t be smoothed over. Take this.”

A devilish grin filled Merse's face. Here was something he didn’t know was under his nose the whole time. Here was a Generis battery right in front of him. How Iedereen managed to hide it and potentially others intrigued him. An investigation of that would be launched later but for now, he focused on the item gifted to him. Quickly Merse lifted the face of his watch, placing the coin-shaped battery snug in its compartment.

“This speed up things doesn’t it.” Clapping his hands in a cross, a sea of neon purple magic runes accelerated towards the completion of a gigantic magic circle around the area the Herald and Thomas’ destruction caused. Originally the plan was to activate its effect on the ground on a much smaller scale via his placed talisman, but Merse was going for overkill. “Anyone who isn’t that damn monstrosity, I advise you to run. If you want to see what the core of the earth looks like. Stay around.”

Jack’s life was tragic. Its too bad Merse didn’t care about any of that.

-

Concurrently another tragedy took place. The tragedy that was Odis Lyndon Gallagher's life. His skin crawled, rooted with disgust other than his internal guilt. As another man occupied his body, he only thought, tormented by the imprudent actions of Fearis. As the secretary began her tirade, Odis pleaded how this must have been a mistake but it went unheard. Instead, the android was met with a much more vulgar retort.

"You fucking kidding me?" Fearis short temperament was on full display once again. As his anger increased, his tone took on a form comparable to that of a Joe Pesci. "You tell Apollo to open these doors before I kick these shits the hell op-!" No more was needed to be said.

The supernatural BDSM dungeon that was Apollo Amon's office bombarded Fearis with an explosion of howls and screams. Splashes of nanofluids dosed his forming burns and in return, stung further. The wellbeing of the secretary regardless of her being organic or not was a second thought. It was clear Apollo was no longer here, and in his place were beings that could only be described as malicious.

From the outside, revelation became that of reality. The burning tower, hells minions, it was safe to say everyone inside was doomed. The torrent of basilisks proceeded to run amok, thrashing Fearis all the way to the end of the hall in a violent scuffle that left him overwhelmed.

Being a mere human, he struggled and the microorganisms quickly rushed to his aid. His pores exfoliated and a proliferation of platinum like ooze seeped from every extremity, dosing everything that came in contact with Fearis in it. At this point, it was clear physical harm was futile. The battered Fearis, laid cocooned in an oval shell that became tougher with each growing second, aiding his wounds. Once it reached a particular level of hardness, the protective shell let forward a concussive blast that caused the upper half of the skyscraper to completely collapse on itself, burying much of the demons and Fearis in a pile of steel and debris. He was safe, as the multiplying microorganisms protected the frame of Odis.

Forever multitasking, the tachyonic emissions from earlier only placed the microorganism of Panident on high alert. Currently, they were pinpointing the coordinance of the structure in space. To its surprise, it became aware of something much more intriguing just drifting in orbit. Though suppressed, it was something it sensed before. Something it encountered before. Xelas.

Philippe finished his meal, unmindful of the viscera that oozed down the rolling meadow that were his chins. The taste of command always had the most distinctive flavor, the confidence tenderized the meat and seasoned it like ground cumin and coriander to poultry. He savored it as he sucked back juices into the back of his throat, and smacked on them like one would a fine wine.

The knight’s eyes rolled back into his head with pure ecstasy as he groaned, “Magnificent, truly spectacular.”

“Hey dicker Arsch! Ich bekomme, dass Sie hungrig sind, aber es gibt eine enorme Staatsgröße-Stadt, die Spanien RICHTIGES FUCKING NEXT TO US ersetzt hat! Warum nimmst du nicht deinen Whale Knight Ass da drüben und stinkst stattdessen DIESEN Platz, EH!?”

The fat man stopped eating for a brief moment, stunned that someone would dare interrupt a gentleman’s feast. Someone was furiously screaming at him in an angry language. He didn’t understand what was being said to him, but also didn’t really care. He turned as far as his neck would allow to view the shouting figure of Arthur. Anger boiled within Philippe's voluminous gut like pasta roiling in a heated pot. A sacred principle of dinner had been violated! Where was this man’s etiquette? Instinctually he lashed back out at the german. In his anger he didn’t even realize he switched back to his native tongue.

“Tu ne vois pas que je profite d'un repas, paysan?!” He shrieked, his jowls wagged like the mediterranean tide, and spittle flew like a sea mist spray.

“Votre présence ici est une insulte pour tous. Va-t'en en train de japper Chihuahua!” Count Bourgeois flicked his wrist, shooing off Arthur dismissively with his ham-sized hands.



New Roswell

“Corruption seeks to worm its way into our communion.” The shaky, semi synthesized voice reverberated.

Inside the cold, dim room sat a slight man in an unimpressive brown-leather upholstered chair. The flooring was cold slate that seemed to dance with wisps of frost, even though the rooms only denizen was barefoot and bare chested. He looked ahead with synthetic gray implants, unseeing, but all-seeing. There were no screens in the room, but his sight took him far deeper than nearly any of New Roswell’s technicians had access to.

The apparatus above his shifted. An orrery of surgical and engineering implements above shifted with his thoughts. Countless fine-tuned precise mechanisms shifted in the nexus of a honeycombed hive that formed the ceiling of this room. The gray slates shifted as he looked about.

“Upload data drive: Apostle Paul.” The shaky voice commanded, and immediately the apparatus above unfolded into a flower of various power tools, soldering arms, and forecepts. They whirred and sparked as they disassembled the back on the man’s cranium, dismounting what appeared to be part of a synthetic brain from the inside of his skull. The entire process was remarkably quick, right down from the machine instantly reaching into one of the numerous honeycomb and pulling out an oblong, gray pack which it seamlessly slid into the base of the man’s skull with a spark and a click.

The thin man’s eyes shifted and he exhaled as he sensed the beginnings of a broadcast. His synapses flared and with the speed of a thought the supercomputer that was his modular brain redirected what was assuredly supposed to be a mass-broadcast message from Ms Iedereen. He waited patiently listening to her entire message, all the while analyzing the presence of another microorganism ever present through Allure, and attempting to spread through other areas--notedly the Capital, as well.

In a breach of character, the prosthetic riddled individual reached out to Ms. Iedereen directly in her broadcasting studio. He displayed himself mechanical brain and all on whatever screens and cameras were present in her studio.

“Welcome, Ms. Iedereen, that was a lovely speech,” he commended with a childlike innocence. His guffaw revealed an ichor filled mouth of blackened gums and grayed teeth, “it’s so nice to meet you.”

As he spoke to to Iedereen, he began to isolate instances of Panident. Spain was overrun with the creature, all he could do was contain it with accessible electromagnetic frequencies. However, the instance of Panident in the Capital City he would smite with righteous fury. He bombarded the top of the tower with lethal levels of gamma radiation, warped in using his sophisticated mastery of warp technology to drop the energy spikes directly where the tachyon emissions lingered. Secondly he would surge the area with an electromagnetic pulse. The first would nearly dissolve Odis, the second purging Panident’s presence.

He looked directly at her, canting and raising his head as if he were looking at cautiously at a cornered creature inside a cage, “I hope you realize how much trouble you all are in,” he taunted trembling with a nervous excitement. The black ichor began to trickle down his pale, hairless chin.



With a deafening bang, one of the second most devastating terrorist attacks took place in Capital City. An explosion occurred that was powerful enough to destroy half of the Discorporate Tower, a monument that soared to the sky and pierced the clouds. The kind of force that caused this would cause quakes on the foundation. The steel that was a part of the structure melted under the intense heat, and the glass shattered, the concrete pulverized, but the main structure of carbon nanotube still stood. This didn’t stop the floors of the tower to collapse in the upper half, killing everyone on these levels that hadn’t yet been reached by demons.

New Roswell didn’t turn a blind eye to this. A prismatic sheen flickered through the area where Odis was and suddenly the tachyons warped in intense, mutated radiation that bounced off the carbon nanotubes, instantly heating up the interior like the inside of a half-mile pressure cooker. From the outsiders perspective, half of the tower became a glowing edifice of plasma, sterilizing everything within. Soon the interior rivaled the temperature of the sun, though always remaining controlled destruction.

The second wave was the spontaneous crackling of violet energy that surged through the open floors of the containment zone. The surge that followed would overload Panident’s processing ability, shutting him down and leaving him vulnerable to the fusion-level temperatures that incinerated everything within the containment zone.



Jack worked hard to keep Anathema in check, but with every wound he endured he could feel a piece of him sift away. While he had not, perhaps could not, suffer a mortal wound, Anathema let him feel the pain of every wound; regardless of his body’s reaction, the psychological damage was mounting. He powered through the explosions left in Agron’s wake. Shaking them off as he chased with reckless abandon, snarling and baying like a vengeful hellhound. His howl was cut short when a gas pipe the length of several street blocks skewered through his diaphragm, twisting about him in a cage of metal. Before the ex-Val’gara could react, a gunshot ignited the pipe from the inside, causing it to explode in a violent gas-based explosion.

Luckily for Jacknathema, his reactive adaptation had heat-treated his body, as well as inured him to concussive force from the pounding he took before. Previous adaptations kept him from losing all his vitals instantly, but the trauma of watching ones flesh boil shouldn’t have been understated. The pike carried with it a blessing. A pathway had cleared between him and Thomas. He inhaled, every orifice glowing like a white-hot conductor, and expelled a pillar of flame, belching forth directly at Thomas. This beam of superheated material instantly diffused the surrounding bedrock in molten magma that not only surrounded the Mobius Operative, but that would threaten to incinerate him if a direct hit from the beam didn’t.

Before he could fully reorganize and knit his insides from the massive explosion, the matter around both he and Thomas disintegrated. Another thing that Anathema had garnered an immunity to, was being completely obliterated, erased from existence, or otherwise wholly annihilated by some matter displacement ability. This was an ability that Anathema’s body had generated to combat psychocorrosion. The Q-cells were still present even in Jacknathema, and while all the matter around the ex-herald vanished, the creature, itself, remained. The same could not be necessarily said, however, for Thomas.

If Thomas survived either of the previous two assaults, then what followed could be the final nail in the coffin. Straightening himself in divebomb, he would collide with Thomas, his descent sped up by Merse’s gravity-shifting ability. What loose unburnt, unarmored flesh on his face flapped with the breakneck speeds at which he plummeted. When he hit Thomas, he jammed his the bones of his forearms into the torso of Thomas grinding them against the skeleton of the ex-cop, even as bone fused to bone. He gritted his teeth as he grabbed the operative’s torso and roared at him,

“I’M A MURDERER, YOU’RE A MURDERER. I GUESS THIS IS WHERE WE ATONE.” And with that, Jack’s eyes shifted downwards, to the awaiting mantle of the planet, and the kamikaze dive that would take them both there.

Verily, the flames of Violence devoured the influence of the Vesuvian Virus. Consequently, the animal mind, once trapped in the moment, expanded through the visceral fog of survival and obedience to true sapience. Increasingly, memories poured in, including those from the ages prior to his enslavement to Idea. More and more the boiling river ate away at who he wasn’t and exposed who he was, less monster and more demon.

Within the charnel house of sutured limbs and battered flesh, Nessus reanimated within its mind epics that preceded its enslavement to Idea. Genuine remnants were reclaimed ages hence in the specters of the loyal wolfhound, the innocent belle, the trench of worms, and the morphic virus, but withheld was the catalyst of sadistic incipience that the other components decidedly lacked—the polluted ingredient that twisted honor, poisoned righteousness, and distorted beauty equally explained its otherworldly athanasia and further mythic aspects.

Idea had plucked a demon from flames of hell and watched as the Vesuvian Virus interleaved the fallen codex of the supernatural with the hallowed grist of life. Pure and impure, equally enslaved, distorted, and deprived of identity, exalted to heaven and damned to the inferno.

The worms were no more.

The girl’s name was Claar.

Her dog’s name wasn’t Nessus.

Oddly, he finally recognized her influence, although it was there all the while. Her body long dead, Claar’s soul ascended to bliss. He hated her for that, her escape from the eternal torment all spiritual beings deserved. He recalled how she would not, at first, countenance that to which her soul, by astra, was tethered, for the evil and twisted nature of the Val’Gara exceeded her capacity to reconcile. Yet, as time wore on, she learned pity and sought to inspire dignity in the multiparte being. Now, her powers awakened by the passage of millennia and with Tristan as her host, she refused to let his beauty be tortured and annihilated. While she could not cleanse him of it, she nevertheless pitted her will against that of the Vesuvian Virus and reined in its morphic influence.

He would not be converted, nor consumed, nor controlled.

Still, it was a strange thing and, in a way, she was thankful that the virus, in its action to enslave, made possible her communion to the world of the living.



Minutes stretched into hours as Tristan wandered the forlorn corridors of Jadis. The emergency lights soaked everything in sinister scarlet hue, from the cold corpses on the floor to each inadvertent glance at his warped visage in the mylar-draped walls. Variations of crimson and maroon lurched in the shadows, but it was his own, indistinct and constrained to his periphery, that eventually became the most unsettling and alien. It conjured into his mind incarnations of the horsemen of the apocalypse, or gorgons, or a hydra.

With an effort, he consigned the nightmares to the place of unthought thoughts and concentrated on the task at hand. Frustrated at nearly every turn, his compass nevertheless expanded with every access card, severed hand, and plucked cornea taken from the dead. Each impasse and backtrack was a misstep in his race against time, he felt; if not limited by the site’s remaining fuel then by the stench intensifying in the halls as the bodies steadily thawed. Soon the place would reek strongly of death and present the added risk of airborne disease.

He stalked the facility with the silence and analytical eye of a trained assassin. Over time, he built up a rapport with his surroundings, much like he would have in encountering an acquaintance not seen in years. Which is to say, things were the same but markedly different. As was typical with a black site, no ownership was implied. Even so, amongst the various laboratories he found vials of bio-force and cartons of adrenal enhancers.

This facility has to be Mobius Corps, he thought, but I shouldn’t prejudge. Things are the same, sure, but different in small yet meaningful ways. More advanced, almost. And why is my clearance not recognized? Perhaps it is a simulation—training? Enemy espionage. In time …

Finally, he worked his way to the armory.

There they were, a row of inky black frames lined up against the wall. Super suits, Tristan recognized instantly. Four, all told. Intrigued, he stepped closer. These weren’t the cutting-edge T-22 he wore on Xenophore, but far more advanced models. In comparison, his seemed like a relic. If this is an enemy simulation, they know too much, he deduced, this could be a trap—they could be trying to mine my mind for intel. It seemed like ages that he stood there and gazed at the super suits in a mixture of awe and indecision. If this is real, these assets will be invaluable. He tapped his foot once, twice, and a third time. Fuck it.

A minutes later, he stood a good two feet taller, black carbon nono-weave within black–whatever. He had no clue what this new model was made out of, but movement within was as natural as without. In a word, he felt like even more of a badass.

> Hud initialized.

The tactical overlay changed his perception dramatically. Again, it was similar to that of his T-22, just … better. Faster, simpler, less cluttered were descriptions of the user experience that all jumped to mind.

I wonder what model this suit is, briefly slipped through his cerebrum. Tristan was shocked when an answer synchronized to his primary auditory cortex and directly, inaudibly to anyone else, interjected:

> Hello, Tristan. This suit’s model number is Prototype U-9, codename Tethys.

For a moment, he was speechless. A number of questions flickered through his mind, most too indistinct to qualify as conscious thought. Still, one managed to bubble up to the surface more or less intact: Why Tethys?

> According to my development notes, I am named for one of the least-known titans, which fit the project profile of secrecy and strength.

In retrospect, although an interesting tidbit, he really didn’t need to know any of that. What Tristan needed was to get home. To get home, he needed to know what assets were at his disposal and possess an overview of this unit’s capabilities.

In anticipation of his half-formed question, a list began scrolling in front of his left-eye.

> Adaptive Camouflage
> Physiological Enhancements
> Med-Scan
> Gravity Repulsion
> Ballistic Shielding
> Psionic Shielding
> …

It went on and on until he started to forget some of what it could do. Instead, he focused on what would help him address his more immediate concerns. He found out from Tethys where he was, when he was, and began to formulate a plan on the best way to get back to Earth-F67X. He also discovered there were peculiarities in his psionic and physiological profiles, but they did not pose an imminent threat to his well-being. He decided to dismiss that for later. The situation was already taking its toll. What she wouldn’t—and presumably couldn’t—answer was how he came to be on Jadis in the first place.

Protected from his environment, he took his time stocking up on armaments and eventually made his way to the blasted-out hanger. It just took the thought of What happened here? for Tethys to play back in vivid halographic detail the events from mere hours before. The image of Reschelle being whisked away both infuriated and awakened in him a memory. He saw her hovering above him in the room in which he first found himself on Jadis, passion, determination, and frustration burning in her evergreen eyes. Also, a touch of disappointment.

So angelic …

At first, he tried to use the beacon to teleport himself home. That required a special access code, which he didn’t have. Worse, he knew if he tried to hack it the firewall would leave him hanging in space as a bunch of inarticulate particles spread out across light years. Meanwhile, all but one of the ships in the hanger were too damaged for flight or life support, and even that required repairs. Nothing that between himself and Tethys couldn’t be addressed.

An hour into his work, something within him flared and recoiled. In the back of his mind, he felt, rather than heard, a clarion call—it screamed and beckoned and while it ensued seemed as if a piece of his essence were being siphoned away, only to violently lurch back in refusal. It wasn’t him, although it certainly felt that way; instead, something intangible vaguely intertwined with his will. In that brief moment of separation, he became certain of his own death. In the next, it was gone.

> Anti-psionic countermeasures activated. Connection request interrupted.

Tristan shook his head to clear away the fog and murmured, “What’s wrong with me?”

> Analysis confirms your life force is maintained by two external proxies. Thus, full metaphysical defense protocols jeopardize your vitality. In lieu of that, I’ve been actively scanning anomalies. A psionic frequency attempted to access your primary proxy by hacking your side of the connection. I have added that signature to my firewall.

Tristan was dumbfounded—proxies, hacking his soul or whatever the heck was implied by Tethys’ analysis. Those were questions for later, of which he was accumulating a great deal. Instead, he queried, Were you able to isolate its source?

> It explicitly identified itself as The Will of Idea.



Modesty wasn’t one of Spencer’s vices. He stripped as he walked along next to Czes, leaving a trail of dirt and debris for the artificial assistant to pick up—socks holier than the Pope, underwear able to stand on its own power, torn jeans, stained t-shirt, and sweaty brown footprints. Although Czes looked like a child, Spencer suspected there was far more to him than met the eye. That said, the extent of the immortal’s business empire and strategic influence were even more closely-guarded secrets.

“Gosh, thanks for getting me out of the shit. A few minutes more and I would’ve been taken out by an explosion, or flying car, or something. Who knows when monsters are fighting? Anyway, where are we, exactly?”

“It doesn’t matter where we are,” Czes replied, his tone and affect unaltered as he took the nearby stairs down a deck, turned a corner, and opened a door to the water closet. “What is important is quickly getting to our destination. Get in.”

“Where might that be?” Spencer pressed, leaning against the door frame. The pristine white metal was cold, and when he pulled away he left a smudge. Chastised by the chill, he marched forward. Automatically, the sprayers activated. A second later, the pool of black water was draining away between his feet. The artificial assistant behind him, holding his rags, conjured up a look to display just how unimpressed it was.

Meanwhile, Czes’ face was a mask. Hands folded placidly behind his back, he observed Spencer with a critical eye. A few scars and bruises on his lanky, but muscular form, to be sure, but the operative was otherwise fully intact. More than could be said of most spies his age. Which was—he forgot. Fifty or sixty in his years, maybe. Then again, people from Careo Fas didn’t age in the same way as they did on Earth-F67X. It was possible Spencer was still the late twenty-something his physique indicated.

“Tamarin, an autonomous floating city in the Indian Ocean. Coordinates vary. It is currently the prime capital of the South-West Asia Group, although that honor shifts amongst the four capital cities of the group every new year.”

Spencer paused from washing his hair. He wasn’t aware of any business Czes might have in the SWAG, but there was a lot he didn’t know. Not that he cared much about where they were going, he was just nosy, a good trait for an information broker. In response, he shrugged his shoulders and quipped, “Four, huh? Monkey, baboon, and ape?”

“Mandrill, Vervet, and Rhesus, actually. You know this, or should. It was included in your intelligence updates. Now, what happened on Fortis—and how did Allure City end up here? After that is out of the way, describe each of these so-called monsters you observed prior to extraction.”

A few minutes later, Czes enjoyed a bit of sherry up on deck. Spencer was below, presumably selecting something respectable to wear. Czes had his doubts on that point, but it wasn’t a natter of much importance—worst case scenario, a few snobs would be offended. Tamarin, meanwhile, gleamed on the horizon a few kilometers away. It looked to be in far better condition than Allure City, embroiled in severe conflict. He saw the broadcasts and contemplated reaching out to Margaret Iedereen directly, but concluded that would be a waste of political currency; particularly after he observed the response from New Roswell.

He glanced down at the screen of his monitor and adjusted an earbud.

On Czes’ behalf, Lionel Duperie busily addressed a panel of world leaders, mainly from Europe and the SWAG, assembled in the aftermath of the Iberian upheaval. Self-important people preferred the distinguished and exceptionally normal middle-age spokesperson to the child trillionaire. Behind the Comte Foundation spokesperson and the logos of its charitable arms, giant screens portrayed mundane scenes of life in Allure City recently acquired from Spencer’s recording apparatus. Everyday people, only alien in physical appearance and no different than any of Earth-F67X’s citizens in their emotional response to the fear and danger of their present circumstances. Lionel impressed the truth that these people, millions in number, played no part in the turmoil. In contrast, that they were victims and still in very real danger. Not just internally, but externally—from the potential response of Earth’s government to vengeance-seeking vigilantes.

In other news, Czes noticed that his public relations team already responded to what the media speculated was a terrorist attack on Discorporate Headquarters. He stood in solidarity with his friend Apollo Amon against the act of violence. An appropriate response to an unthinkable event.

Mobius Base Outside of Allure City

“Tu ne vois pas que je profite d'un repas, paysan?!” He shrieked, his jowls wagged like the mediterranean tide, and spittle flew like a sea mist spray.

“Votre présence ici est une insulte pour tous. Va-t'en en train de japper Chihuahua!” Count Bourgeois flicked his wrist, shooing off Arthur dismissively with his ham-sized hands.

The veins in Arthur's eyes filled to blood-shot crimson, his windpipe swelling in a banal attempt at barricading his lungs from further infiltration against the genuinely disturbing smell. Every syllable the glutton spat at him felt like a stink-bullet that was aimed directly up his nostrils, set to drill its way up through his nasal cavity and bury itself inside his brain, putrefying it to the point that it dissolved and transformed his skull into a toxic soup bowl that not even plague rats would drink from.

It was the worst kind of decadence. The Gluttons of Hell reeked less than Philippe!

He inhaled, about sling another flurry of insults at Philippe when--

Unable to continue his train of thought, Arthur began to gag uncontrollably, and that uncontrollable gagging escalated led a violent coughing fit. "Ahagh! Ahagh, ahagh, ahagh... hagh...!" Breathing in had doomed him to a disorienting dose of Philippe's malodorous emissions. He had to get it out of his system, somehow, anyhow! Scrambling his failing brain for an answer, Arthur thought: Water... He needed WATER! The Cannibal desperately scanned his surroundings. First he looked over to Allure City, thinking he could find a street-fountain or outdoor vendor selling bottled water, only to realize it was at least several miles from the Mobius camp. Furthermore, he was low on energy, and hadn't gotten the chance to consume a single good meal since getting out of Gluttony--no thanks to Philippe charging into the tent like an obese grizzly bear, chowing down on Heinzmann and all the other soldiers, and effectively jacking all the food in the refrigerator. Lastly, the billowing plume of smoke and fire rising up through the clouds did not bode well for his quest within the city.

"Ahagh! Ahagh, ahagh!-hagh!-HAAAAAAAAGH!" Tears welled up in his eyes as he looked over to the nearby ocean and briefly considered drinking the water. The salt in the air stung his nostrils, and burned his already irritated tear-ducts, and it was precisely that sensation which alerted Arthur to how dumb that plan was. If he drank the sea-water he'd dehydrate himself, becoming that much thirstier, and the last thing he needed right now was to suffer another hallucination like the one that bastard golem had given him.

It was at this point, when all hope for a stench-cleansing refreshment drink seemed lost, that Arthur turned around and saw the light lying just beyond the base's perimeter fence. A fat Frenchman with a curly mustache, dressed in a black-striped shirt, long dark pants, and leather shoes manned a vending stand which served reporters, tourists, and residential locals looking to get a glimpse at that which had replaced their neighbor to the southwest. The vendor had a particularly satisfied look on his face, clearly proud of himself for being able to take advantage of the atrocity wrought by Merse Granstrum, nodding with wholehearted agreement to the message being broadcast by Margaret through the radio on the edge of his stand.

Despite being over two-hundred feet away from the fence, Arthur's supernatural hearing enabled him to hear all of Margaret's words. Not that he cared, though. The only thing concerning the Cannibal was purging his nose, mouth, and stomach of Philippe's deadly odor.

"Wasser..." Arthur groaned haggardly, stumbling across the base like a victim of one of Mobius' top interrogators.

Progressing back passed the tent where that damnable count was surely feeding on something--probably one of the K9s who had rushed into the tent to aid their masters, Arthur instantly clenched his nose between his thumb and index as tight as he could without breaking it, terrified of what another whiff from Philippe might do to him.

"AHAG...EEEEEHUUUHNNNNGGG!" Out came another cough, this one making him honk like a goose with a bass violin stuffed halfway down its throat.

HONK HONK HONK!

Exhausted, but nearing the fence, Arthur's coughing fits somehow paid off. The Frenchman both heard and saw his distress, and was twirling his mustache with predatory greed. He knew that if he could serve this desperate man, who stood on the right side of the fence, surely full of information about Allure City, that he would have all the reporters trampling each other to get to his cart. Like the self-proclaimed genius he thought himself to be, he devised that he would feed this one man for free all day, in exchange for him keeping silent about any Intel he may have possessed.

And the cost for an interview with the hungry man demanded a purchase from his stand!

"Je suis un génie!" The Frenchman proclaimed quietly.

Fast as lightning, the Frenchman practically blinked in front of the fence, and in doing so nearly made Arthur, who was merely three feet from the fence at this point, flinch and stumble backwards.

"Bon après-midi monsieur!" came the thick accent, cracking ever-so-slightly at the end, "Prendre soin d'une aquafina? Bratwurst et souerkraut?"

While relieved at the sight of food and drink, Arthur couldn't help but arc a brow at the vendor, whose demoniacal grin nearly rivaled Philippe's smell in its disturbing nature. The way his cheeks were raised to make the bags on his eyes rest upwards, his teeth glinting like they had just been brushed with white polish... For a moment, he wondered if he didn't remember the man standing in line before King Minos... I'm not still in Hell am I? With help from the delectable scent of sauerkraut, he snapped his mind out the delirium, shoved the thought out of his conscience, and stepped forward to grab the fence in a prying position.

Tearing the wires apart like poorly sewn sheet fabric, Arthur stepped forward, causing the Frenchman as well as the rest of the crowd of onlookers to leap back, but not too far back for Frenchy. "Oh mon! Un client affamé en effet!"

Gleeful as all hell, the man quickly overcame his fear, stepping forward again to present the man his meal. A brief delay in service occurred when the Frenchman noticed just how much farther the crowd had leaped away from Arthur than he had, to which his neck head seemed to unrealistically twist and stretch around, a scowl marking his expression whilst taking a very deep breath.

"Si vulgaire!" The Frenchman shouted scornfully, "Est-ce ainsi que vous traitez un homme qui a toutes les informations dont vous rêvez?"

Though the majority of the crowd remained stiff with terror, a few particularly parasitic reporters did step forth and brave the hungry customer alongside the Frenchman, emboldened by the tongue-lashing he had given them.

Nodding like a satisfied parent, the Frenchman turned his head back to its normal position, emitting a string of pops along the way.

"Mes excuses les plus sincères, monsieur," he said with a humble bow, extending his arms out serve his customer, ignoring the massive explosion sounding in the background not fifty feet away in favor of his ticket to riches... "Amusez-vous."

"Vielen Dank." Arthur replied gratefully, almost thankful for the delay in service as it enabled him to catch finally catch his breath.

Reaching out to take his hard-earned drink, the Cannibal also ignored the loud creaking sound which only seemed to get louder and louder, until he was reluctantly forced to look up with the bottle held between his lips. His face darkened with dread, shoulders dropping to a sag as a colossal shadow cast over the crowd and the French savior before him. Realizing what was about to happen within a matter of nanoseconds, Arthur began to scream frantically, realizing one drink wasn't enough. "NEEEEEEEEEEEEEIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN!" All the while the Frenchman also screamed frantically, not because he was about to lose his life to a falling skyscraper, shaken loose from its foundation and was so tall that, in its descent it fell over the border separating France from Allure City.

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON!"

Ignoring the two men's pleas of denial, Arthur who was standing few inches out of the skyscraper's path of descent, instead had his bottle of aquafina sliced in half by a splinter of support beam, depriving him of half his drink that went spilling onto his sweater and pants. A pico-second later, and the onlookers, reporters, the Frenchman, and his vending stand were all crushed, creating an explosion of blood, gore, shards of bone, bratwurst, sauerkrat, aquafina, twirly mustache hair, mic and camera lens, blowing against his face with a fine helping of dust.

"AHAGH!"

"SCHEISSE!" The Cannibal bitched with vocally strained fury. "SCHEISSE, SCHEISSE, SCHEISSE!"

This was the worst day of his life. The absolute worst. He hadn't gotten enough fucking water. He didn't even get to savor a single bite of the goddamn hot dog before Frenchy went splat. The only way he was going to get water now as if he walked back over to that tent where Stinky sat stuffing his fatass.

“Ugh… Ich mochte zuruck in die Holle gehen….” Came the words of a defeated man dragging himself back to the tent, following the scent of blood, horrifying body odor, and… food!?

Hesitating whilst looking dreadfully at the plume, Arthur knew, deep down in his putrefying lungs, gut, and stomach, deep down he knew that his journey was not over yet, that he had but one more trial to endure. He could practically see the darkness of Philippe’s stench swirling around the tent like an evil vortex of doom, threatening to swallow him whole if he got too close, just like those poor soldiers had been ravenously consumed minutes earlier.

Poor bastards, Arthur thought, they had to smell his insides.

Coughing his way through dust and stench, blood and cracked pavement, Arthur somehow made it back inside the tent, where an unfazed Philippe sat gorging on treats from General Heinzmann’s personal mini-fridge. The Cannibal nearly gagged when he took in the mixed scent of food and hellish body odor, falling forward only to catch himself on the Count’s shoulder, where he unleashed yet another violent fit, saliva churning about in his throat as he struggled onward. Pushing off the French fuck, Arthur slammed against a shelf housing a Mobius Corp gas mask, almost toppling the thing over as he struggled to grab the thing and pull it over his face.

Turning around, Arthur gave Philippe a heaving sideways glance, wondering how the overweight Count couldn’t smell his own hazardous odor. It seemed he was too busy chowing down to really care, let alone notice the Cannibal’s bewildering gaze. Deciding it was best to wave it off, Arthur moved over to the refrigerator, acquiring a carton of milk along with some of Heinzmann’s favorite gourmet chocolate chip cookies and sat down directly across from Philippe.

Lifting the mask very carefully so as only to expose his mouth, Arthur bit into his cookie, staring cautiously at Philippe and back down at his snack protectively.

“Guten Tag.”

Allure City

Eddie’s reply came rather short. “It is an attack on my business, Samurai!” The hulking alien backhanded a skyscraper behind him on the vampire’s mental command, shattering the glass and crushing the inhabitants inside. “Are you going to reimburse me for my losses?” The Allure citizens whose bodies had been transformed to servants of the dead growled with a dreadful hunger that could not be abated.

Unwilling to await his response, as he knew the Warrior was just hurling veiled threats at him, and not quite expecting either him or Merse to pay him what they owed, Eddie commenced his assault on the army below. It began with the roots he had spawned earlier, drinking up sewer water which was toxified by the spreading of tainted energy throughout them, spraying the metallic soldiers in a deluge of highly corrosive water that crackled with blightful energy. Meanwhile, the much larger roots rose like a great thousand-digit hand and slammed itself down atop the warriors, crushing some whilst smearing itself across the streets, crashing through the beams of yet more buildings, and causing just that much more destruction.

Throughout his wretched act of wanton carnage, Eddie kept his vampiric gaze fixed on Claine, and an eerie aura began to emanate from them, one capable of bringing even the strongest of men and women under his control.

***

The Golden boy was very close to Granstrum now. His golden body could feel the electricity in the air, his fist slamming into a support beam of the building Merse was standing on, and whom he so conveniently decided to ignore running straight at him. Goldman went on a rampage, golden knuckles caving in the skulls of every employee who got in his way, or just so happened to be in his line of sight, splattering the walls with blood and bone fragments as the roof collapsed ontop of him. This was all fine and good for Goldman though, for he just powered through the destruction as he always did, exploding out through one of the windows.

Landing in the streets, Goldman drove his fingers through the pavement, curling them around a manhole cover and tearing it free, meanwhile using a strong electromagnetic current to uproot another manhole cover at the opposite end of the street. Without a moment’s pause or hesitation Goldman spun the covers in both hands, charging them with lining whilst sharpening their edges. Then he flung the two destructo discs up through the building at curving angles, one threatening to cut Merse off at the point right above his knees, while the other was aimed at his torso, both attacks aimed to chop the Catman down to size.

Lastly, if that attack didn’t work, well let’s just say Goldman’s body could hold a massive charge, and right now he was being pulled via magnetic attraction, set on a crash course Merse at an angle that would set him to emerge through the building directly below his feet, the whole of his body compacted tightly to give him the striking force of a golden cannon ball.

***

Thomas watched in a combination of shock and adrenaline-suppressed horror as Jacknathema survived both the heat and concussive force behind the colossal pipe-bomb explosion. This thing was proving itself to be one helluva monster, but just like the Dreadnaught that had attacked Monterrey, this mutant abomination would also perish. Remembering his time inside the whale, and recalling the devastating aftermath that left the entire Sahara Desert a radioactive wasteland, Thomas contacted Alice through his psi-emitter.

“Summerson!” Came the first contact. The lieutenant and Agron’s minds were in perfect synchronization with each other, so when Merse activated his magical matter-deletion spell, the purple energy powering the circle rushed directly into the earth spirit’s runes, a surge of ethereal blue flames representing its will to live flared out from within, shielding them both from the threat of annihilation while containing the energy powering that threat. “I need you to call in an anti-matter strike on my exact location!” Without the slightest degree of hesitation, Thomas separated his right hand from his USP and reached for his riot baton, firing the gun with at Jacknathema several times on direct subconscious orders from Agron, trusting the golem not to lead him astray. Thus when the Val’gara belched fire at Thomas, so too did he unleash a concentrated barrage of Merse’s magic, eradicating the flames in his path whilst slinging the baton he had just grabbed down toward the planet’s core.

“What, are you cra--!” Alice screamed, flabbergasted, only to be cut off by Thomas.

“Just shut the fuck up and do it!” He snapped angrily he felt the core temperature around him suddenly sky-rocket, only to suddenly, and seemingly inexplicably plummet back down to survivable levels. When Thomas flung his baton, containing Agron’s essence, the Earthen shape-shifter not only expanded the area around the Operative, lessening his exposure to the deadly heat, but it slowed the movement of molecules to such a degree that it induced a chill. Like a swollen vein losing its supply of oxygen, the tunnel leading to Earth’s core paled to an icy blue as the vaporized moisture contained within the earth condensed and precipitated along the walls, forming a crystalline outline.

“Lastly,” He was cut off by his own roar of pain as Jacknathema impaled him through the rib-cages, their bones fusing together as he listened to the ex-Herald’s wrathful shouting, rage starting to overwhelm his own mind. “USE THE PSI-EMITTER SATELLITES TO REINFORCE BOTH MINE” the Red Aura, Agron’s offensive spiritual essence flooded the entirety of his exoskeleton, invading Jacknathema’s body where it held him in a vice-grip, taking advantage of the gravity well to ensure its grip remained solid, “AND THIS MOTHERFUCKER’S SOULS!” He was practically frothing at the mouth, eyes rolling into the back of his skull as the strain of Agron’s runes containing Merse’s magic and the physical pain of being skewered melted into a volatile cocktail of agony, the Operative slamming his head furiously against Jacknathema’s own, cracking both their reinforced skulls wide open. The blow he delivered was not just a physical one though, not by a longshot, given that this was a spiritually based attack, it very much served to give the monster an extreme migraine, whilst the vice-grip Agron held on Jacknathema’s body tightened as it spread its essence farther out, increasing the strength of its Red Aura. This had a secondary effect of straining Jacknathema’s q-cells, or at least restricting their ability to adapt to the follow-up headbutt containing Merse’s matter-destroying magic, literally oversaturating them by way of an overbearing assault. Without realizing it, Thomas Balvice was pushing the boundaries of Anathema’s reactive adaptation, but it came at a cost, for he was also pushing the boundaries of Agron’s ability to withstand a power made to destroy matter by tightly syncing their minds together.

The satellites hovering over Allure City aligned together in a triangular formation. “Alice I want you to get out of Allure City now CALL IN A BEACON, DO WHATEVER YOU HAVE TO DO, BUT GET OUT!”

“YOU’RE RIGHT!” Thomas roared back, frothy spit hurling against Jacknathema’s face. “WE ARE GOING TO ATONE FOR OUR SINS! BOTH OF US!”

In that instance, a beam of invisible psionic energy penetrated the atmosphere at the speed of light, the electromagnetic phenomenon causing the clouds in the sky to briefly darken as a faint outline of transparent cobalt breached the earth. With both Thomas and Jacknathema nearing their physical limitations, and with the latter so hellbent on consuming the Operative in its fiery wrath, it seemed only natural albeit eerily so that his resolve would seem to multiply tenfold. Such was the consequences of the psi-emitter reinforcing the Val’gara’s willpower, the same effect occurring within Thomas’ head, infecting their very souls with the raw, unbridled desire to dominate each other, and so it would be that the sui generis of what made the two combatants was preserved.

Twenty years ago, the Red Technocracy dropped anti-matter bombs on Dreadnaught in a desperate attempt at wiping the beast out, and most of North Africa now paid the price; living in a hideous state of genetic mutation spurred by both cancer as well as the Vesuvian Virus. Tribal warfare was fueled, using weapons man was never meant to possess, let alone by bushmen of all people. To drop a bomb yielding this amount of destructive force was not just to invite a radioactive fallout, it was to invite a political one, but goddamnit if Thomas wasn’t willing to be placed in prison or potentially even executed if it meant he could take out the Val’gara scum. Fortunately, Mobius Corps had developed irradiation technology that could clean scrub away the radioactive fallout in a matter of hours, possibly even minutes if they reacted quickly enough. Now that weapon was to be used again, called in by the ex-cop turned black ops agent and international criminal investigator.

Despite his hatred of the creature before him, something in the back of his mind told him to listen to its words, to do what he was best at, and that was to investigate and uncover the truth behind them. Thus when the anti-matter capsule was launched from an orbital rail-gun via satellite, exploded through the atmosphere in a storm of fire, breached the electro-psionically charged clouds, and powered through the noxious plume of smoke, dust, ash, and soot that Thomas failed to fear for his life.

Thomas was going to a better place.

Jack and Anathema were both going to go to a better place.

They were all going to a better place of closure.

The capsule opened as entered several miles into the planet’s core, catching up with the Thomas and Jacknathema, triggering a chain reaction of protons, neutrons, electrons, positrons, neutrinos, atoms, molecules, cells, and more matter that was considered to be more tangible like the dirt sitting atop Allure City’s bedrock. The grass which grew from that dirt and the skyscrapers which sat atop the pavement that had been laid over all of it. Everything erupted in an explosion which annihilated everything in its path, Thomas made sure that the Val’garan would be unable to resist it, at least on a physical scale, not by overpowering him, but by narrowing his the adaptive range of his q-cells, forcing them to divide their attention. Using the psi-emitters to empower Jacknathema’s will served hyper-focus his aggression on Thomas and Thomas only, distracting him from the threat looming above.

Goldman got flung for miles by the resulting shock-wave, Eddie who was farther out felt the fabric of matter itself disintegrating and annihilating from a distance. Who knew what would possibly happen to Merse who was right before the blast.

In the meantime however, Thomas, Agron, Jack, and Anathema, whose bodies were completely obliterated now dwelt in a plane beyond the physical. Gradually an ocean of light coalesced around the four souls, the light bending and refracting until a room with a one-way mirror framed by the bones of a human skeleton sat behind Thomas who was now seated in a chair across from Jacknathema, his hands cuffed to the underside of a table made of the very same material. The whole room was like one big skeletal interrogation room with two clocks on the walls above each person's head, the clock itself having metacarpals in place of standard hour and minute hands.

Presently, the clock showed 11:55pm, and Thomas knew that he was short on time. This stunt he had just pulled would not hold up for long. Somehow, without seeing how he had resisted the process of creation and destruction, he knew this beast would break free, for its anger, its rage, was not all that dissimilar from Thomas’ own, thus making him an insurmountable threat.

“It’s time you and I have ourselves a talk.” Thomas said bluntly and directly.

“Who the hell are you, and WHY do you keep calling me a murderer!?”

Truthfully, Thomas didn’t fully understand why he was even asking these questions, but he was determined to uncover the answer.All he knew that was this thing knew something about him, something very secret, something only he should know.

The microorganisms that occupied Odis’ body were not processors in the literal sense. It proved to be more biological and even metaphorical if anything. With his new body capable of seamless change in matter, Odis Lyndon Gallagher came to a boil, quickly exploding into a vapor after being subjected to the blistering heat and gamma radiation. The remnants naturally progressed from its gaseous state to one that was electrically conductive and with the aid of the environment, morphed into one of plasma comparable to solar wind. A coronal loop spawned around the tower as the charged particles began to escape, engulfing the entire architectural structure.

From anywhere in the capital, a pillar of light could be seen. Just looking at the spectacle caused eye damage similar to an eclipse with the potential for more. An onslaught of heat followed the light once the loop became unstable, blitzing out into the capital torching first responders and discouraging seconds. Further most, the bulk of the coronal mass ejection that Panident became was sent into the sky, punching a hole in the atmosphere with its intense stream of hyper-charged plasma and electromagnetic radiation. Immediately this affected EarthF67x’s magnetosphere and neutered several of New Roswell’s defenses systems in its radius. With a mind of its own, the continental storm sized coronal, Panident, ascended into space, with part of its essence transferring into photons. Where it was going was not clear, but to Earth’s gain, this aggravated strand of the creature appeared to be leaving for the time being.

Though this could be seen as a victory, EarthF67x lost something it valued greatly; their confidentiality. Within every particle of Panident's widespread existence, was the functionality of technopathic recollection. Whether it is phones, monitors, computers and beyond, their essence registered to The Cosmic Datasphere in a manner that seemed ethereal. Resorting technological items and accessing lines of data linked to them was a reality. In the very near future, this intel would come into to play when ushering for peace.

De Haute Taille

Information began to pour in on the teleprompter in front of Margaret Iedereen via Panident; almost more than she could analyze. It could not have been more convenient considering the first lines of communication between her and the native planet were mere seconds away. Excited; what she expected to see couldn’t have been further from reality. A shriek of disgust slipped out her mouth but she recovered smoothly.

It took every fiber of her being to ignore his revolting appearance but she humored his blatant mockery with an ecstatic greeting.

“Hello, Sir!”

Stroking her chin, she actually took her time with her response for once.

“Trouble? No…No…No….No-no-no-no-nooo…” She spoke with a cracked smile. “Like I mentioned before, we have no idea how we got here. Actually, where are we?”

Her spiel continued whether she got a response or not.

“Since we are here, I can undoubtedly ensure reparations for any inconveniences caused. They’ll be paid out at your government’s whim in resources that I’m sure could even be used to prevent things like this in the future. If it isn’t clear by now, we surrender. Though we were never on assault in the first place.-”

The longer her erratic monologue continued, the less it seemed that it would actually end. Only the gale-esque winds from a massive sized explosion flooding through the window would get her to stop. When it raised the frill of her skirt, her expression became that of a cartoon character hit by lightning. Without even looking at the window, she clearly saw the widespread ruin of the sudden antimatter explosion from hundreds of viewpoints. Still, she briefly turned to see it from the highest view Allure could offer.

Margaret then took a deep breath before averting her gaze back to the display. She placed the back of her right hand on her forehead, showing signs of lightheadedness. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head and she fell dramatically to the hardwood floor with one hand in the air. Luckily for Allure, her “faint” for the most part, was simply for the sake of being dramatic and could she still comply. The New Roswell representative could not have been thrilled to see this, however.

Trying to gain composure, Margaret attempted to ready herself for whatever the operative was about to say but a large thump caught her attention. Propped up against the window like an insect on a windshield was the reason for all of this mayhem, Merse Granstrum. In obvious pain, he began to slowly moved his left hand to tap on the window. Even with everything that was currently taking place, he held a slight grin.

A neon outline illuminated the window and it fell in. When it did, the information broker rolled just to the left of Margaret, lying on his stomach. He could see the unfamiliar individual on the display and surprising had little to say.

“She’s going to list resources…” he barely mustered to mumble.

“Now if you excuse me. I going to take a much-needed cat nap.” Merse’s forehead then caromed off the floor like a drunk on a bar counter. Going with it, his associate began to yell out things in attempt to cease fire.

“We have unlimited energy! Programmable matter! A bottomless well of information in regards to the trillions of trillions of species and civilizations in the galaxy!”

Seeing Merse in this state concerned her, but it was clear he somehow found a way to affect the explosion for the better. Clearly not enough, but the tower barely felt anything, though neighborhood-wide destruction was ever-present.

His original idea was to drive Thomas Balvice, Anathema and now Goldman into the pressure well of the Earth’s mantle considering they all conveniently fell in. That he accomplished, but his animal intuition foretold additional danger. Merse just managed to reverse a portion explosion onto itself the instant he sensed it was coming. The humanoid feline attempted to implode the blade but did not have enough time. He ended up creating a condensed, but perhaps, much more powerful blast, with the result being the three individuals taking on even more of the brunt of the force. Anything within the hole was likely to dissipate without the aid of supreme metaphysic or magical abilties. Additionally, anything that managed to survive was buried by an implosion of infalling land.

Had Merse not been on a rooftop during its inception, he may have been among them. The only reason his manipulation proved to be successful was because it was still within the circumference of his runic circle. His last-second leap hurled him far opposite of the event, but he like everyone else in this section of Allure, became conscious to the sheer output of the blast. Destruction held no discrimination and everything that wasn’t magically enforced was blown to smithereens. All traces of Panident on the surface that were being monitored got swept away in a colossal stream of wind and dust. Caught in its flow were Eddie and Claine with the latter of the two opting to spear his counterpart into the flow of liquid as several buildings collapsed onto them.

“Get down!!!"

In many ways this was the best option to ensure their safety, though flows of electromagnetism began to affect it via satellite, turning the river a solid black…

One moment, Tristan was occupied with the repair of a spacecraft. Small, cheap, unimpressive, yet far more evolved than even the more advanced prototypes he heretofore encountered. Once its navigation was active, he loaded the star charts, synced them with his power armor, and plotted a course for Earth. It would take days to reach, but in that span he hoped to mentally recondition via meditation for what he anticipated to be a culture shock. What followed was a blur. Alarms sounded in his helmet, perhaps in his head. Cracks traced along the contours of the reinforced concrete hangar bay doors. A dozen spacecraft rattled around him. Cracks blossomed into fissures. Chunks of debris crashed to the deck and reincarnated as translucent walls of dust. His ship wasn’t nearly ready; neither was Tethys, who frenetically alternated enemy alerts and friendly hails.

He dropped to a knee behind the ship and reached for a gauss cannon. With no idea what was coming, his position and weapon provided little comfort, but at least there was something between him and the swiftly eroding entrance.

Tone down the noise and provide a brief verbal sitrep, he thought.

> Mobius signatures detected in armory. Jadis non-response triggered reconnaissance.

Why the alerts? They are friendlies.

> I am friendly. You are an unknown and a potential threat. Additionally—

The bay doors burst inward. Re-bar and pellets of concrete ricocheted off the walls. Tethys’ passive countermeasures protected him from kinetic intrusions and, with her ad-hoc memory maps and spectral overlays, he was able to peer through what was otherwise an opaque barrier of debris. Already rattled by the violent intrusion, he was further horrified by what he saw. There, he beheld a blotch darker than the space behind it with a malignant penumbra that bled hungrily over the halos of the benighted stars that outlined its inarticulate mass.

Tristan recoiled against the wall and, by instinct, retreated into the shadows. He wanted to hide, but doubted his precaution was sufficient. Eventually, a coherent thought crescendoed over the volatile drum of his heart:

. . Not of Earth. Not Mobius! What is that thing?

> Signature unrecognized. Encounter novel. Based on preliminary indicators, you are friendly. I am unknown, but not considered a threat; merely an accessory.

Similarities?

> Meta-psionic aura presents a frequency close to the force sustaining your animation.

His mind almost shut down at how inconceivable the report was. How could something so undeniably sinister consider him an ally? Or … well, he didn’t want to consider that part. Tethys didn’t have an answer for that fragmentary thought. Still, his training kicked in and as he assessed what he knew he recognized two things and the first took a mere moment to confirm.

Likelihood of hostilities between Mobius recon team and this entity if I hang around?

> 100%

Odds of all our team making it home alive?

> Insufficient data to calculate probabilities for that outcome.

Not worth the risk. Sometimes you can just sense power, and this thing is a lot stronger than anything I’ve seen here—yourself included, no offense. Anything I’ve seen ever other than maybe on Xenophore where a mad god made an entire enemy fleet disappear. I have to do something.

> No offense taken, Tristan. Be careful, it isn’t just your ass on the line.

The unusually human quip from the artificial intelligence was something he would have to examine later. He stood up and stepped out from behind the half-repaired ship. It looked worse than when he started and wasn’t going anywhere after its recent role as a damage buffer. He had a team to save, or try to. If this thing was his friend, then maybe it was here for him. It was a possibility. The only way to find out was to throw himself at it and let fate lead where it may.

It was inaccurate to say darkness enveloped Tristan, but all his power armor’s ranged sensors dimmed when he lunged into the superfluidic mass. The last thing he saw was an oily polyp blossom outward, its surface briefly aglow in a genuflection of cyan brilliance, then numerous tenebrous petals enclosed around him. In that moment, he and Tethys lost sense of space and place. In lieu of astrometrics, night vision, and spectral analysis, his artificial intelligence provided a slew of biometric data; with that came a warning that flashed red and angry on the holographic superdisplay of his HUD.

VAL’GARA

VAL’GARA

VAL’GARA

“Now you tell me?!” Tristan incredulously bellowed, “I sacrificed myself for nothing! It’s going to kill me and then go on to kill everyone else on this base!”

> Attempted incursion of the Vesuvian Virus into my nanofilter matrix on physical contact with the entity was, and remains, the first and only decipherable indicator. Before that, your guess was as a good as mine. In a word, poor. Countermeasures won’t last long, so it is fortunate you are already inoculated against the virus.

What’s that suppose to mean?

> You are, and have been, infected. I wasn’t sure before, but the signatures match. More importantly, you haven’t suffered any subsequent psychological or physiological mutations.

Tristan was stunned, but in his current state didn’t feel as though he possessed the capacity to react. Even so, he knew this was what he was trained to confront. Well, not the part about being infected and likely doomed to become a monstrosity—rather, how to fight against odds impossible. He needed to calm down and come up with a plan, but what? He was still alive. Perhaps Tethys was responsible for that, but there remained the possibility his enemy deigned to manipulate him. He couldn’t allow himself to become an enemy asset.

Ultimately, he he needed more information.

<< Sssso >>

It was like an annoying buzz in his ear or the whisper of a ghost, if such existed. He didn’t appreciate the distraction, but maybe it was a clue. Tristan wanted to know, so he asked, What was that?

> The entity is overpowering my efforts to block its psionic messaging. It is likewise pursuing more aggressive and physical avenues in order to remove me as a barrier.

I’d prefer you stay intact. So it wants to talk? Try letting it have enough interaction that it doesn’t treat you like a wall to be broken through—he recalled the concrete bunker doors being reduced to rubble mere moments earlier and cringed. What’s the worst that can happen, eh? I’ll lose my mind and become a lunatic mass-murderer sooner rather than later?

> Standing down.

<< SOUNDER. >>

No longer a whisper. No longer vague. Another voice in his head, but now it boomed. No, more than that; it nearly crushed his psyche. To think his power armor actively filtered the lion’s share of the otherwise intolerable psionic impulse. He tried to frame a response. It voiced the phrase in a way that was insistent and rife with expectation, as if it sought to call to someone or guide him somewhere.

“Uh, hi. I’m Tristan. Just trying to get back home to Earth.”

<< SOUNDER. >>

He almost blacked out.

“I, eh, don’t understand. What is ‘Sounder’?”

It then uttered what he assuredly believed to be both a name and an unholy rite. The very enunciation delved in and reordered the foundation of his otherworldly beliefs. Twenty-seven staccato syllables tore through him, beyond him, and plumbed places deeper than he, but still he felt from that chasm rise the tormented chorus of those scorched by Hellfire; brutal, yet melodic, as heavy in grief and sorrow as in desire. The canto of the damned crescendoed and Tristan, in its wake, was violated, his cheeks flushed and loins turgid. Inexplicable and insatiable lust lashed the primal places of his being where mind and spirit mated. Like a spoiled sacrament polluted by every vice imaginable, he felt himself, unwillingly, partake, and came.

At the apex of his harrowing orgasm, his physical eyes rolled back and his mind’s eye, for the first time, opened.

It beheld a universe splayed out.

Suddenly, he was a conqueror who surveyed domain after felled domain and knew, intrinsically, he saw the product of his efforts. He set the villages on fire, crushed cities to rubble, and reveled in the gyre of carrion and taste of soot in the wind. He saw the City of Dis with its fiery towers, the dreamscape bathed hues unimaginable, the ephemeral realm of the psions, the weird green light of Sal’Chazzar specked with silhouettes of a dead civilization’s fleet, the eternal bioluminescent rains of Urum, a million worlds conquered, and ultimately he saw Earth. It wasn’t his, yet. Perspiration gathered on his brow. Of course it was his. In his chest, his heart beat heavy. He belonged to it. Then, between the beats, someplace deep inside him—deeper than any place could exist—an answer came.

A dare defiant, it impugned the credibility of that which called its name and challenged it to succeed where others failed. It, within him, made Tristan more than he was, more than he understood or could possibly have comprehended. Electromagnetic fire poured through him—or perhaps from him. His mind flayed and was flayed by an equally violent psionic tumult. As a conduit, he could merely feel—while trying desperately not to feel—and watch the rapid, confused scroll of the datafeed within his HUD.

Tristan shut his eyes as the intensity became too much.

Finally, it stopped.

He thought, perhaps, he blacked out, although it could only have been for a moment.

He opened his eyes again and all was quiet—still. Space loomed large around his drifting frame. Stars winked in the distance. And there, in the corner of his vision, he saw Earth.

> Tristan, please acknowledge.

I’m here, Tethys. Is that really—what happened?

> A struggle for dominance. Temporary armistice. Yes, that’s Earth. Recommendation: avoid. Further decision-tree analysis required. Self-reconstruction ongoing. We are not alone. Massive power signatures present, both on Earth and in adjacent space. Your symbiote, present; origins assessed as demonic, infected with the Vesuvian Virus. Val’Gara entity, present.

That thing is still here?

> It is right behind you, Tristan.

You said other massive power signatures?

> Yes, one nearby linked to ops signature.

Open comm to that channel.

> Comm opened.

<< Tristan Singh here. To whom am I addressing? >>

<< Bullshit. Tristan is dead. >> the voice came over his comm crystal clear.

More than that, it was strangely familiar.

<< For a while, no doubt. Say, you aren’t—uh. Callsign ‘Lionheart’; right? >>

A transient series of soft yellow discs illumined the decks of The Kithless and, while obscurity dimmed their antecedents, led Spencer to his second interview. Down a steep stair, around a corner, and he found himself in a gallery with large paintings bolted to the walls. They were crass, irreverent, and made mockery of Earth’s moral institutions. In one, a woman reclined on a surgical bed, a pristine blue sheet spread over her engorged belly; a bible, carefully opened to Psalm 139, verse 13, propped against her swollen breasts; and between her thighs lurched a filthy, hirsute demon that eagerly plucked the limbs of a fetus from her womb and flung them into a bucket filled to the brim with offal. Another featured a televangelist who gestured wildly toward a presentation on the evils of homosexuality and the wisdom of Leviticus 18:22—even as he coerced fellatio from young boys shackled to his pulpit, their faces tear streaked and sallow. All featured themes of hypocrisy, like an Iman and a Pujari who congratulated another on the executions of their wives whom earlier they conspired to rape as a pretext for getting rid of them; in the background, their underage daughters awaited in wedding attire. Many contained eerily life-like impressions of demons, their faces twisted in equal parts menace and agony as they watched him, all superimposed with cryptic wards.

Spencer cringed, as he was almost sure the Satanic heralds’ eyes traced his path and tongues flicked hungrily in his direction. It all seemed a bit much. Still, he ambled forward, studied a few more works, but quickly tired of the morbid theme. Fortunately, he was at his destination, for a doorway opened in the hall and the lights that led him ceased.

Within, Czes sat behind an easel, brush in hand, and contemplated a canvas. It wasn’t blank; rather, it was prepared, a wash of gray and gold formed vague shapes that would ultimately provide depth, in the manner of Plage de Canetto and other Italian masters, for the final composition. It was his distraction while his spokesperson, Lionel, addressed the assembly in Tamarin. He decided to not risk a venture into the city just yet, so The Kithless sulked just beyond the harbor.

Spencer, barefoot and shirtless, but at least now adorned in beach bum khaki shorts, slouched against the frame of the studio door.

Without looking up, Czes began to speak,

“Art is, and has for thousands of years been, a social critique, particularly along the intersection of faith and governance. In The Divine Comedy, Popes Nicolas III, Boniface, and sundry other figures, rulers of their world, are condemned to Hell on account of their political corruption; similarly, Modena damned all non-Catholics in his fresco The Inferno. Both examples of hate framed as art. Meanwhile, Zdzisław Beksiński’s Embrace is a reaction to hate, an exposure to souls devastated by the institutionalized evil of the Third Reich. All three are fundamentally political. They shape our recollection of history.”

Spencer snorted. “Maybe for nerds. I look at art because there are moments in this crazy life where if I don’t I’ll go mad, not to become upset over things I can’t change.”

“A surface observation of art’s necessesary function in the direction of introspection. It provokes within us that which we would not draw out of our souls of our own volition.”

“Nah. I want to be happy.”

“No, you don’t want to be happy; you want to empathize. To be somewhere. To truly know somebody. You want to feel something specific, particularly when you are too numb or overwhelmed to feel. Here,” Czes stood up, walked over to his nearby stacks, withdrew a book, and flipped it open on a table. He gestured for Spencer to come over and pointed to an image of a statue of a young girl, shy and sad, the weight of a massive stone she struggled to carry crushing her to the ground.

“This is a reproduction of Rodin’s Fallen Caryatid Carrying Her Stone, superior to the original in my opinion.”

“Now I want her to be happy.”

“It is inevitable art will be used as an instrument to foment hate—Tribalism, Racism, Nationalism, Specism; pretenses on which to justify the desecration and devaluation of life. Based on your report, it is inevitable Earth’s government will bend Allure City to its will. My question is, what should we try to make the people of Earth feel toward toward their new neighbors—at least the ones who are under the yoke of informants and enforcers like Merse Grandstrum and Margaret Iedereen?”

“Feel? Most of the assholes in Allure are spies, bullies, or in the pay of such. Privacy is owned by those with wealth, pull, or cunning. It is the ones who are just minding their own business and trying to make a life that deserve any feeling,” Spencer quipped.

Not one to waste too much time sober, he emptied a decanter of deep brown liquid into a crystal chalice too dainty for his tastes but adequate to the situation. He drank deeply, doing his best to feign apathy. Despite that, the last part of what Czes said caught his attention. He stopped a moment, his bottom lip pushed out a bit as he entered his thinking pose. After a while, he huffed, and the pressure of his exhale tossed a stray lock of hair from his brow.

He thought of the vendors struggling to make a living in the agora, the corpse of his friend stinking up a cheap basement apartment—what was his name? Raymond. Rengar. Oh yeah, Randall. He thought of the Platinum Warriors, the propaganda, the third of the city that were a single entity who informed on those who just wanted to live their lives in relative comfort.

Czes patiently tapped his foot, head cocked to the side and hands folded behind his back.

“Does she know?” Spencer finally asked, glancing down at the depiction of the caryatid.

“Know what?” Czes inquired.

“That she can just drop her stone.”

“Interesting,” Czes replied. “Thank you, Spencer. That will be all.”

He then touched an earpiece and said, “Yes, Lionel? In your presentation, focus on the how the people of Allure need to be free of the tyranny of propaganda and suspicion. Focus on how choice, for them, is an illusion fashioned by those in power; one they recognize, but can’t do anything about. If given a chance, we believe they would rise up against their oppressors—the very savages who slaughtered over a hundred million citizens of Earth on the Iberian Peninsula. If we truly want good neighbors, they must allow us to help them cast off and crush the machine of false chaos that presumes to govern them by manipulation rather than representation.”

He touched his earpiece again and the line went silent. Spencer, at that point, was gone; still, Czes made a mental note to have him dropped off in Tamarin where he would doubtlessly enjoy the night life.

Czes listened again, finally ascertained he was alone, and turned. Through a secret passage, he passed, its entrance disguised by a floor-to-ceiling original of Rassouli’s Shores of Heaven. Behind him, the masterpiece fell back into place. Darkness enveloped him. Small, chill, and almost featureless, the room was solid basalt and adorned only by a shelf on the wall opposite him and an occult engraving that dominated the floor. There was no light for his eyes to adjust to, but he knew from memory where each element was placed. With rehearsed and steady ritual, he pulled a small flint knife out of his vest pocket and set it in the middle of the magic circle. Carefully he stripped and set his attire, neatly folded, on the bench. The stone floor send the chill of expectation up his spine as he sat naked before the blade, yet, without hesitation, he lifted it in both hands and slashed it across his jugular.

Blood spurted from the wound, cascaded down his chest, and coursed through the channels of the magic circle hewn underneath his hunched-over frame. Geometries repeated ad naseum, squares overlapped squares, and circles spiraled in an ouroboros that spat ancient glyphs and mystic psalms. Into the eye, the ox, the virgin, and the axe, his blood poured and, with each quart, cast the chamber in an otherworldly carmine glow. In spite of his injury, he gurgled the names of select symbols and, as they answered their light pierced his vitae so fiercly their mirrors reflected as stars on the dark vault overhead.

Suddenly, he was elsewhere; a place he dubbed Spiritus Infra Terrarum. It was not the spirit world, but a plane below where the shades of souls wandered with features dimmed and animus bared. They could not see, for their vision was focused purely on the spirit world above; hidden from view, but sensed as the blind know night from day. As always, he did not have long for, already, he felt his blood defy the ordinary course of nature, recoil from the stone, and ascend in minute droplets all too eager to again flow through a wound that would only seal when his strength failed and his blade fell.

Through the shade realm, which by weird properties mimicked or mocked—whichever interpretation one preferred—the world of the real, he sojourned and at last came to Allure City. It, alien and uniform, was easy to find. There, in sharp contrast to the variegated images Spencer supplied, he saw an absence of diversity that intermingled merely drudgery and control. It was the former he sought to incite and the latter to dismay. Particularly the latter that were too similar, too singular, too much copies of the same. The mouthpiece that promised peace on Earth’s airwaves before being auspiciously silenced. Into that corrupt unity, he spoke a prahelikā of division that manifested as a vermin swarm on which danced the carriers of an astral plague that would flow from soul to mind and lay waste to the whole that was many.

The amount of interest Philippe Dubois gave to the events of the frenchman, Arthur, and the toppling building outside was about the same amount of interest he showed in the “health courtier’s” presentation. He paused for a moment chewing, as a backdrop of screams in both french and german provided a soothing dinner serenade for him. Chuckling to himself, he remembered that advisor. Oh, what an example he set! Count Dubois wasn’t ignorant to the fact of someone else entering the tent, but he already knew who it was, the litany of foreign swearing and screaming gave him away.

“Le fils prodigue revient.” He thought to himself.

Even now he could sense Steinbrook’s melodrama from here. He was not interested in being friends with this man, but watching him suffer did bring bourgeois some amusement. Just what was he so upset about? Of course Count Philippe Dubois le Bourgeois did not shower, at least not recently, the natural oils of his skin accumulated preventing any odor from occuring! At least, this is what his physician had told him, long ago. He departed the realm of sycophants on a mule, and sat feasting many miles away. As Arthur lifted his mask to eat, Philippe sensed a moment of vulnerability.

“Imprégnez-vous des odeurs et des arômes de notre fête!” He shouted, “Ce masque ne perturbe pas vos sens?!”

While shouting at Arthur he ripped the man’s protective mask from his head with an explosiveness one might consider would be of a man his size in pure muscle. His mouth opened jaw unhinged and crushed down on the apparatus with a cracking of glass, and crunching of plastic.

Through a full, half-chewing mouth he poked at the german, “Ici laisse moi t'aider.” Leaning over on one cheek, Philippe blew the tent open.



With every thundering resonance of Thomas’s skull colliding with Jacknathema, the half-herald could see the caving of the operative’s skull. He was literally killing himself on a spiritual attack--because the physical one was worthless. Jacknathema had adapted too far for the physical blows to even faze him. But the physical blows were never the intention, just the outlet of Thomas’s one and only overpowering emotion that he lived, died, and abided by--rage. Jacknathema had fury of his own, but Thomas’s assault would not end how he thought it would.

With the psi-emitter reinforcing both of their will powers, it was soon apparent that there were two different, conflicting wills within Jacknathema. Jack’s was the fury and Anathema’s was survival. Naught could happen but separation, and with it, Anathema returned to the tomb he was buried in. When the bomb dropped it was preceded by a number of things: by a triangulation of satellites far into the exosphere, by gross misconduct of agents who had no respect for the world in which they lived, and by a misappropriation of resources in what was a hectic power vacuum left by Heinzemann’s death.

The bomb threaded through the aperture created by Merse and contacted the two falling into the mantle--a direct nuclear hit. Like a charge of potent subterranean explosions, it sent rippling shockwaves through the bedrock beneath. The worldwave expanded outward as if the crust were a carpet and the might of this charge, though relatively low in radiation, rippled the pavement surface and buildings that stood in its way, snapping them loose like a doormat beaten out of dirt. Jack and Thomas both perished that day.

Anathema was the ground in which they tread.

With Goldman being flung up, and the burrow collapsing in on itself, a moment of silence was all that was left behind. It was just as it had been when Merse dropped a city on Jack. Anathema’s spirit, bound to Jack, sought to reconstitute with whatever was available, molding the clay of earth to flesh. The radiation was bad deep in the earth, so he sought existing life closer to the surface, where the minerals blocked some of the harmful rays, and allowed for life to exist, even in its most minute of form. Anathema’s spirit, his astral body, corroborated nematodes, microbes, and other microorganisms at an astounding rate. It repeated the process of reinventing itself, losing some of its adaptations to an entirely new body, but Anathema persisted where Thomas had not.

A minute passed, two minutes, and finally a palm ripped from the ground like a ghoul from the grave. Anathema, fully Val’garan, pulled himself from Thomas and Jack’s tomb. He pulled aspects of himself from beneath Allure city, and from the astral plane, protecting himself from the forced passing.

Agron, Thomas, and Jack, however, all found themselves in a poorly designed interrogation chamber. Jack, now resembling the same slim, unassuming scientist from Moss Landing, stared back at the investigator. The biologist hadn’t aged a day since the attack, even though it was nearly thirty years ago. In fact, he wore the same out-of-style white button up, gray slacks, and black belt with loafers. Though looking harried and scuffed up, he almost appeared as if he had just escaped from the assault on Monterey, right down to the perspiration which slicked his short dark hair.

“You really don’t recognize me?” He stated with barely contained, tremulous fury.

Though his body remained the same, his mind had been broken, over and over again, and it wasn’t until the psion girl released him from his prison did he have the means to communicate in such a manner. Gone was the meek, shy, middle-class man from California, and though Thomas shouldn’t have been the full brunt of Jack’s fury, he still was. Thomas was the authority. Thomas was supposed to protect Jessica. Thomas was supposed to protect Jack. Thomas was supposed to protect everyone. Thomas failed. Not only did Thomas fail, but he BETRAYED his goal when he killed Jessica. Jack hated Thomas for his betrayal, because in his irrational train of thought, Thomas was the reason Jack became a Val’gara in the first place. Jack struggled to convey this into words.

“I call you a murderer because it’s what you are,” Jack said standing up and slamming his hands on the table, “you killed Jessica and you killed me!”

“You killed everyone in that city when you brought us here. You dropped a bomb on everyone to kill what you thought was a single Val’gara. You were wrong. For the first time in ever, I was in control, and you murdered the world because you’re some shit-head jock who thinks that if he’s not the center of goddamn existence then existence isn’t worth having!”

As Jack raged, a subtle blue aura began to whisp about his body, tongues and tendrils of barely perceptible mist licked the outline of his frame, like a near-invisible frame. He jammed a finger towards Thomas and Agron, collectively,

“Well guess-fucking what, Thomas. YOU’RE not worth happening, and the world would be better of if you never existed to begin with!”



Odis was a curious creature indeed, with form-shifting abilities the Operative had never seen before. His strategy was ineffective. Odis, or Panident, shifted himself into a plasma matter state, but what he didn’t count on is that the architecture of the Discorporate building was specifically meant to endure radiative emissions of this nature. Panident would win the battle of attrition, but a siege this was not.

As Odis attempted to radiate through the carbon nanotube, they shuttered and polarized, bouncing him within its walls, convecting him in the fusion process within. Instead of searing light and burning pain, the citizens of Capital city witnessed, on a crystal clear day, a blackening of the upper portion of the tower. The zenith of the edifice shifted as if it were a negative, and seemed to swallow light around it while emitting none, but visible by its distinct lack thereof. A protective measure that not only saved many lives, but also secured data from Panident’s insidious corruption.

Little did the Operative know that the end result would be the same. Only those who had been paying attention would notice the instantaneous shift in light and dark. Calculating approximate time before critical mass was achieved while simultaneously enacting New Roswell’s quantum entanglement warp technology a complex procedure for many, but was a simple and dismissive as an entry-level technician closing a pop-up for the operative.

“Goodbye,” the biocomputer thought to himself.

And the upper third of the tower vanished. Somewhere, several hundred light years away, a new star would be born.

--Payload AF138 Detonated -2.966309 x 40.069665

The operative regarded this literal earth-shattering news with casual disinterest, even while Iedereen fainted. His immediate response was to restrict all satellite access. The Allure official then, true to the information broker’s prediction, started listing all the resources he was sure Apollo would be happy to exploit. He neither had use for such things, nor the authority to negotiate such terms. He smacked his lips and made a watery sipping sound as he responded to her groveling.

“We’ll start with your scapegoat,” and as if on cue, the building lost power.



New orders. Directive: Merse. Spencer is no longer a concern, we have visual on Merse. District Alpha, Coordinates 3232 encryption key beta. You are clear to proceed we want target ALIVE. Over.

A bit late to the party, Sarge thought to himself.

“Boys, new directive.” Sarge projected, “We got a bead on Merse, coordinates uploaded, they want him kickin’.”

A mental sigh of disgust came from lanky Dex, “They’re the ones that gave us Overkill permission, and now they take it away?”

“Things change.” Sarge grimaced under his mask as the group closed in on the studio. He didn’t have to give Dex the order for him to put a lock on the “grid.” Dex already had his backpack off a few feet away from the building and was ready to send bio-pulses feeding through the building. This would knock out the power, probably not for long, but long enough.

Sarge scaled up near the top and gave Sweat a closed fist signal. Sweat’s burly form emotionlessly watched Sarge from behind his mask, timing with his superior through a series of three hand signals, and upon the last one they smashed in with an unsolicited invasion upon an unsuspected neighbor. Sarge dove forward, coming to a half roll while his auto-rifle was out, trained on Margaret, meanwhile Sweat, with speed that belied his bulky frame, was already upon the injured half-conscious Merse, gripping him in a sleeper and activating his beacon.

What Margaret probably saw was a blur of confusion as the operatives carried out a single fluid motion. Upon their breach, the power to the building blacked out, punctuated with a curt goodbye from the Tech Operative. As soon as the beacon was ignited, Dex, Sarge, Sweat, and Merse were all teleported to a secure location, leaving a very befuddled Ms. Iedereen.



A team of five waited in the stark, clinical room. The muted fluorescent lighting paired well with their hospital teals and bleached white attire. They waited with all the anticipation of a close sporting event, staring at an empty landing. A trio of three women shuffled up near the awaiting medical team. By comparison their pinstriped slacks and button-downs seemed ostentatious to the faceless slates that accompanied them in the room. In each of the three women’s arms they held a box containing all the paraphernalia they would need to hopefully keep their guest pristine and presentable.

The entire room held their breath, all hearing news of what had happened in Spain. Alert procedures were in effect. One of the women, a well-coiffed individual glanced down at the cross hatched quadrants of the landing, then back up to the blank wall behind it. Everyone simultaneously felt the tingle at the back of their necks that would throw them into a silent near-panic that heralded the arrival of their VIP. They shuffled with their boxes, automated machinery pulling out brushes and assisting them with their routines.

The teleportation channels were never great for keeping a pristine appearance. When Apollo apparated into the room with a flash of light and a pop, he immediately forged briskly forward through the care of his attendants who did their best to keep up with him. He looked for someone important--more important, rather. A uniformed soldier stood just outside the door as the medical team slunk back into the room.

“You’d better have something good.” Apollo demanded tersely, as one of the make up artists touched up the tachyon frays to his hair, brushed his attire without impeding his movement. Consummate professionals, but nothing less could be expected.

The Colonel didn’t miss a beat, “We do,” he replied, unflinchingly, as he shifted the dossier in his arms, “sector 32a. It’s a class 12 entity from Soran space.”

Apollo didn’t deign him with a response. The Colonel continued, metering his time. He had about twelve seconds to finish his report before they entered the briefing room and his clearance capped out.

“It calls itself ‘God’, but it’s anything but. We’ve appropriated it ‘Armstrong’ due to its nature, an interdimensional titan that we’ve been studying to improve our teleportation technology.”

Apollo glared at him, sidelong, “ I know what a Class 12 is.”

The composed Colonel could feel heat on the back of his neck, and his features flushed. “Yes, well, it attacked Soran, and another entity we have not yet identified repelled the titan, we believe the unknown is responsible for the assault on your office.”

“Dig deeper, Colonel,” Apollo commanded as a team of soldiers flung open a pair of double doors into a ready room filled with important military figures, dignitaries, and other high-ranking officials.

The doors shut behind him and he pushed his palms onto the granite surface of the countertop. “Gentlemen,” he grimaced, “tell me what the fuck is going on out there.”

A dignitary with a ghostly combover cleared his throat and bore the burden of the eye of sauron. The official was known for his canny ability to throw military commanders under the bus and not mince words.

“Since you arrived we’ve had another security breach.” He rolled an accusing glare at the dour bulldog faced General that sat across from him, who immediately took the reigns of the conversation.

“General Heinzemann is KIA. In the confusion a rogue agent--”

“Rogue agent?” Apollo clenched is teeth.

“Yes, Agent Alice authorized a C21 orbital drop in Allure.”

Apollo’s bloodshot eyes widened, staring through the general. “...what. She dropped an antimatter nuke… on… EARTH?”

“At the beck of Balvice, our transmissions show.”

The president exhaled sharply through his nostrils as he stared at the patterns in the stonework, shaking his head with near imperceptibility. “Our best soldiers, panicking like novices.”

His disappointment blossomed as he looked up from his hunched position, sweeping his gaze over all of them as he shook his head, this time his disapproval far more noticeable. “You have contact with the landmass’s leadership. You will forge the terms of their surrender.”

He turned and as he began to storm out of the room he yelled over his shoulder, “And get me Thomas and Alice we have much to reconcile for.”



The S.3451 cluster had long since been an active cluster, and from an observable distance a quasar erupted for millenia past its rose-ringed perimeter, disrupting the ivory center mass that hid the presence of the supermassive black hole that caused its rampage. This explosion traveled for millions upon millions of light years, observable to no one. Its overwhelming burst of 1040 watts of energy raged through the still silence of space, a blinding beacon of luminosity that sailed through an ocean of black

Just as the galactic engine changed civilizations, shattering some and uplifting others, just as it changed worlds, as it changed ecosystems, and life, so too did it change space, itself. Entering into a supermassive black hole on the other side of the universe this beam changed the properties of the collapsed star, and caused an eruption at the heart of S.3451 far to the other side of the universe. The unobservable nucleus of the universe soon expanded to a white hole, pouring space and defying conventional physics with mysterious mysticism.

This limb of the galactic engine transcended the scope of the mechanism. Now, a universal engine, the beam shot from the supermassive white whole and piggybacked off the nearby erupting sister celestial body, APM 04158. The beam moved with quantum celerity, traversing the entire distance of the constant stream of connected photons to their culmination--the center of reality, the nexus of all things, the Fault. Though the photons dispersed through the Faults chaotic energies and overwhelming entropy, the beam did not, it adapted, changed, and reconstituted as it was meant to. The beam radiated out into a wave, expanding for any exit that was possible, and there was but one. Tracing along residual energies and wiped-out vortices that had expelled a prisoner whose psychic malign to this day flavored the void, the wave burst through a rift that emitted the wave into real space.

The galactic wave washed forward immediately into a nebula of ice crystals that honed it, bouncing it about and heating the cloud up until cornflower blue flashes of light erupted from its hazing guts like a storm buried in an ominous cloud cover. The beam emerged from the cloud, a honed ray, razor-thin and moving with that previous quantum celerity, riding photons of other long-dead stars, until it reached its final destination. A homely aquamarine planet dusted with clouds of white… The planet Earth.

As the beam projected down through the planet's atmosphere, passing by the post-exosphere nanite prison that encompassed Panident, it rocked F67X’s technological infrastructure. The satellite array went down, for but a moment before automation rebooted it, and even the connected New Roswell Operative could feel the power it ushered forth. The beam lasered down into the center of Allure City, and though its diameter only encompassed a few blocks, its impact would leave a mark on Allure and the rest of Earth for years to come.

The city quaked as the ray blasted down into the center, disseminating concrete, exploding outwards into surrounding buildings, and at its epicenter a figure who bore the full evolutive brunt of Ua’s design. Far below the city the planet’s tectonic plates shifted, and a tsunami the scale F67X had never seen.

The navy wave that emerged from the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea was less a tidal wave and more a massive swell. As the african and eurasian plates ground, the Azores-Gibraltar Transform Fault suddenly crushed upwards into a full scale mountain range,that consumed the Strait of Gibraltar, and much of the Alboran Sea. What part of the swell managed to push into Africa would luckily be received by the uninhabitable zone and the Glasslands.

When the barrier re established itself, the remainder of the wave crept up its side like an amoeba swallowing bacteria. This would push New Roswell’s technology past capacity, and though the field diverted the flow of water back towards the mountain range, when it failed, the rains would bless Africa with great havoc that couldn’t be stopped by a hundred men or more.

While Africa would persevere, the Iberian peninsula was a far smaller landmass Portugal, Allure City, France, and Italy were in great danger.



If Max didn’t have enough to think about during his time within himself (his mission, and the strange sword that randomly shot through the stratosphere nearly impaling him) fate decided to throw another twist his direction. He didn’t recognize the comm the guest connected to him through, but he recognized the name. He picture his trainer frowning at him from New Roswell, the woman having a lecture chambered, hammer cocked on voice modulators and encryption hackers. But logic was ever the enemy of his instincts. Sadly his gut won out more than it should.

You’re kidding me. He thought with surprise, more that Tristan was alive, and less by the misnomer. Tristan never could get his codename right.

“Operative 2232, Callsign Mobius. Yes, Singh, this is Lionheart.” A million questions flooded into his head, and out through his commlink. “What happened? How did you get here?” He gave a palpable pause, maybe ever enough time for Tristan to respond, but cut him off, “I’m detecting another presence accompanying you… and--”

One of the orbiting satellites also had input in their conversation. The two of them could likely detect the power spike just moments before it fired, authorization codes spilling through their network in the second largest breach of Op security in the history of the organization. A beryl glow accreted around the spires numerous bristling awns, and crackles of bioforce and electricity skipped to the apex. Less than a second later a stream of the same blue pined down towards the planet somewhere on the iberian peninsula.

Max had caught the authorization codes, and if Tristan was on the Mobius network--as his communication with Lionheart suggested, so did he. Alice, and if Alice was involved with the nuke’s launch, so was Balvice.

Thomas, you idiot. He snarled.

“We’ll have to table this conversation, Singh. Damage control. Could use your help.”

Max shot down towards the planet at a speed only the most powerful of F67X’s machines could muster. The fact alone that he flew probably wasn’t enough to surprise the other Operative, but the speed at which he did was enough to convince any witnesses there was something decidedly different about Max. As he passed through the sundered cloud cover he had less than a second to view the chaos of the surrounding city. Anarchy reigned supreme as the the combined european military, ghost ops own forces, and other fast-acting contractors spilled in filling the streets with blood and violence. Xelas kicked his brain into overgear, and he comprehended the individual operations occurring.

He didn’t care. From orbit Max cleared the comparably small hole Merse created in the ground, and that Jacknathema and Thomas had swan dove into. As arcane markings burned into the flesh of his temples, his eyes glowed red, and with that he could see the residual energies Thomas left over when Alice tampered with his psi-disruptor. He and the other entity were tightly intertwined, and time wasn’t really on Max’s side. It would have to do. As he plummeted towards the mantle, he reached out and saw these energies coalescing into a rift. Xelas honed in on Thomas and Thomas alone’s essence. When Max breached the rift he was able to veritably chokeslam Thomas from whatever spirit world he inhabited to the material plane, cutting his interview short.

Spindly legs of silver shot out from Max’s back and pools of silver covered his flesh as the temperature became unbearable. These multi-jointed spider legs slammed into the sides of the burrow, even as the silver sheen boiled from the planets heat. ANITA surged with too many different warnings for Max to count, and Xelas didn’t play well with the AI as far as interpreting her desires to the operative. The legs bowed and bent like an elastic slingshot before they snapped the composite being and spirit-Thomas up and out of the hole.

As Max cleared the pit’s edge he slung Thomas forth, with the strength to send the wisp blocks of distance away were he a physical thing. Xelas doubled down on his desire to protect and save and coated this ghost in a silver exterior, giving its trajectory very corporeal consequences as it smashed through building after building. This cocoon of Xelas would nearly impact Goldman, (and even its wake sent a wave of debris towards the metal man that threatened to shred him apart.) Regardless of the the humanoid of precious metal’s response. The cocoon came to a stop, and after a few moments fragmented with a very real, fleshly body encapsulated within.

Back at ground zero Max landed upon palm, knee, and foot. Then took the half-second of downtime to survey the chaos of his surroundings. He shook his head, disgusted, but took a small chunk of solace in the fact that he thought he might of saved Balvice, at least.

“Crisis averted.” He exhaled.

In his adrenaline spiked rush, Max had ignored ANITA, an issue which had frequently caused himself problems in the past. He also didn’t hear the warnings of Gennosuke, nor the swearing of Forge, or the urgings of Xelas. He’d tunnel visioned, and by the time he realized what had happened it was too late. This branch of the galactic engine had met its mark.

In the center of Allure city.

The fat, smelly bastard, reached out at Arthur with his greasy, grubby fingers. Within that moment, time slowed down in Arthur's mind, producing the same gradual, screeching violin crescendo that heralds the death of another victim in a slasher film, rising and intensifying, accompanied by the sonorous roar of a tuba all building up in his skull. Finally climaxing, a panic-inducing explosion of fear gripped the cannibal as he felt the monster's hands gaining in on his face.

And then it came off... His only source of protection, his only shield, the warden keeping his newborn faculties of demonic power in check...

Devoured by this obese, disgusting slob of a Frenchman.

Arthur gasped for half a second, and in the next, he swallowed that gasp and roared it back out in a furious lunge that drove the fingers of his right hand into Philippe's mouth, hooking onto the roof his mouth and yanked. The Frenchman bit down hard, hard enough to sever the flesh and bones of any normal man. But Arthur was no normal man. He wasn't even a man at all. He was a monster! A demon! And with that monstrous demonic might, Arthur turned and flung Philippe over the table, and into the refrigerator behind him, crushing it with the man's blubbery impact.

"VOUS" Arthur shouted, his veins swelling as he was filled with an animalistic fury that turned his skin fiery orange, hooves bursting through his shoes as his pants tore and the threads of his sweater came undone, "STINK!"

The cannibal inhaled through his mouth, choking, coughing and squealing with rage as his nose became round and cylindrical, jaws bulging with muscle, while his trapezius rose and stretched his collar until it split, the fabric falling over his chest and back, revealing two spike-covered blocks on his shoulders that resembled hammers more than spaulders, each connected to thick, metal staffs wrapped around rapidly growing biceps and triceps.

Arthur leaped back, ridding himself of his shredded pants, whilst sliding his hands beneath the savage's loincloth that was his sweater to gain a grip on two out of six weaponized, chain-handled kitchen utensils sheathed in his apron. Baring the brunt of Philippe's malevolent odor, Arthur pulled out the twin butcher's knives in an inverted grip, slicing away the primitive garments of his waist before flicking his wrists, and severing off the sleeves covering his forearms. Before the cloth had a chance to hit the ground, Arthur had sheathed the knives in favor of his frosted meat chain-cleavers, twirling them around his form in cold, whistling loops via the chains which, as it turned out were wrapped around his forearms and not connected to his metal apron as the rising Philippe might have guessed.

Putting his left hoof before his right, the Boar of War made his declaration to Bourgeois.

"Kommen Sie! EIN BLOATED SKUNK IST WAS SIE SIND..." bellowed the Cannibal Connoiseur, driving the cleaver down in a violent arc that would flash-freeze Philippe solid on impact, "UND DAS SKUNK ABENDESSEN IST WAS SIE SEIN!"

--

Goldman's golden ego was enormous. It had to be that way, or he would lose what drove him. Lose what both literally and figuratively moved him. Presently, he had to put his golden ego aside, for as he plummeted down the hole created by Merse, he caught an unmaginably bright light rushing up through the gravity well, and knew he had to get out fast. There was only one way out of this catastrophe, and he knew it wouldn't save him completely. In fact, it was to be a race against time, in the hopes that Eddie would be able to sense him coming.

Removing the two revolvers from his holsters, the Golden Boy unleashed an endless barrage of rapidly expanding metal gears, that were designed with the sole and explicit purpose of seeking out technology to infect and overtake. The gears were relentless in their pursuit, technopathically attractive, and capable of slicing through any substance they came across due to their flat surfaces and the vibrations they gave off breaking up any obstacles in their path. All the technology was presently above him, some of it spread out around him, with the strongest and most importantly, living piece of technology being closest to the edge of Allure City, where his brother Eddie had been located, and thus the gears went straight after to that location.

To Panident's location. Goldman didn't know this, but he did know where Eddie was, and also he knew that any place was better than this place. He just had to hope that Eddie would be able to sense his presence when it arrived.

Golden lightning surged throughout Goldman's form, and with the golden attraction that the gears shared with his golden lightning, Goldman was pulled along the path of the gears like one big, man-sized magnet of pure 24 carat gold. While the majority of radioactive energy was funneled through the tower, a very large and substantial portion of it broke through the tunnel, the shock-wave of the blast alone shattering Goldman's backside whilst leaving his front relatively in-tact, albeit considerably cracked. The faster he went, however, the more his body began to waver, quake, quiver, shatter, and scatter, leaving a trail of electrically charged gold that was annihilated through positronic impact.

As Goldman continued to travel through the earth, all that remained were his arms connected to his shoulders, neck and skull, with only a small fraction of his collar and sternum still in-tact. What the gears did to Panident--whether they were overpowered by Panident's superior or inferior technology, Goldman cared little as he felt his essence suddenly latched onto by Eddie who was very much awake and alive despite being speared by Claine, sensing his brother's fading spirit shooting toward him, and preserved what little of it was left as he forced his way back up to the surface of the liquid metal river.

Miraculously, Eddie managed to emerge with Goldman's thoroughly radiated arms, neck, and somehow in-tact black sunglasses, and wondered at what could have caused such an enormous explosion.

--

Agron felt what Jack had said to Thomas. It heard all of it, knew all of it, and more importantly, Agron knew the truth of what had really happened to Jessica before she became the Val'garan Herald known as the Slut. It killed her, not Thomas. IT murdered the bitch who brought its host so much pain and confliction. IT absorbed Thomas' negative feelings into itself, and acted on its own behalf to protect Thomas from those who caused the lietenant any amount of misery.

The interrogation room glowed red as Agron's crimson jeweled eyes appeared in the one-way mirror, staring at Jack with flaming judgment.

Why did it feel so passionately about a human? Thomas was not the earth, nor was he the ground, or the metal, or the molten lava, nor the iron, alluminum, sodium, or potassium. He was calcium though. Some part of him was, to an extent, a part of the earth, a part of the planet, part of the minerals that made up the home of every Agronian ever to exist anywhere across the entirety of the multiverse.

When Jessica threatened Thomas with her sympathetic bullshit for criminals, she threatened Agron, and that was not something the Essence Within the Rock would tolerate. It did not like or enjoy the negative energy that ebbed at Thomas' soul, ebbed away at his passion for apprehending criminals, and for murdering the Val'gara, who in their previous campaign had managed to slaughter far more AMERICANS than Allure City trash. Agron knew that on some level, Thomas prioritized the lives of Earthlings over those of a foreign civilization that simply, randomly, and without warning, decided, on its own to scoop up Spain and all of its citizens off their rightful place, and drop them to God-knows-where.

Thomas had his loyalties, and Agron knew it.

AGRON had its loyalties, and its loyalties were to Thomas and Thomas alone. That was why when Dreadnaught first surfaced in the ocean, thirty long years ago, it gave Thomas just enough time to get to Jessica, so it could kill her, and rid Thomas of the emotional disease that was afflicting him so terribly.

Jack should have known better than to shoot his mouth off about things he couldn't possibly understand.

Thomas loved Jessica, but she caused him pain.

Agron loved Thomas, but Jessica caused Thomas pain.

Jessica caused Agron pain.

So Jessica must die.

Fragments of Agron's thoughts, fragments of its will, fragments of feelings, none of them whole, but all of them full and furious with magma hot anger poured from the mirror and surged into Jack, encapsulating the soul that was Theomen. The Red Aura bubbled and froth as it yanked Jack out of the rift that Max had violently pried open escaping with Jack in the opposite direction, through the Atlantic Ocean's floor.

One day, Agron would make it back to Thomas, but for now, it knew the Operative was safe. It could feel his spirit, but it had also felt the Galactic Engine's impact, and did not feel confident in trying to weather whatever storm it brought with it.

--

In the moments before he awakened from the strange cocoon, Thomas felt his body rapidly start to dissolve as it was teleported via beacon to the same building Apollo Ammon present occupied, as was Alice Summerson, the woman who, in the eyes of Mr.Ammon foolishly obeyed Thomas' orders.

As Apollo attempted to make his way tempestuously from the chamber, a hand smacked him collegiately on the back and a voice as familiar as it was unwanted cheerily prognosticated, “When this day is over, you’ll be able to take solace in the certainty that it was your absolute worst.” As if to exacerbate the point, a tanned limb extended past his periphery and gestured to a security monitor that, for whatever reason, displayed satellite footage of Earth from the perspective of Luna. Apollo was absolutely certain the owner of the arm and voice was stark naked, so he welcomed the excuse to look elsewhere. The screen appeared to show two Mobius-designated super suites adrift in space. Next to him, he heard, “That is the feed from satellite UAF-719. Delay is approximately eight seconds due to interference.”



‘Lionheart’ descended from orbit to Earth’s surface so forcefully, Tethys’ signal connection to Tristan’s coworker’s artificial intelligence unit—ANITA—lapsed. “You can count on me,” Tristan spoke into the lacuna, but as soon as he said the words they felt hackneyed and probably false. Momentarily, the connection was restored, but he didn’t repeat himself. He hoped, in retrospect, that his comment didn’t make it through the channel. Too much was probably different in the years since his departure for his show of support to mean much. Still, as he gazed down at the womb of humanity, a whorl of thin white over a great expanse of color, his heart ached, and he knew that despite that indescribable gap he could somehow elevate the phrase beyond empty idiom and make the thought actually count.

Tethys, can you summarize the ground situation or, better yet, patch me in to Ops mainline and get me an assignment?

> Patching now ...

<< Prototype U-9 model 934.c, identify. >>

> Pilot Tristan Singh recently from Jadis is requesting assignment. Uploading secure key now.

> GlzIGRpc3Rpbmd1aXN ...
> 4gb2Yga25vd2xlZGdlLZ ...
> ... BwbGVhc3VyZS4=

<< Secure key validated. Records indicate operative is— >>

Suddenly, comms and visuals decayed to violent static, their order dispersed into disarray as a branch of the Galactic Engine’s beam lanced through its multiversal prism and, on its way to the epicenter of Allure City, enveloped Tristan. While Tethys and his carbon nanofiber skin protected him from the beam’s more lethal qualities, it still penetrated deep into his system and caused his second black-out in as many days.



Behind Tristan, Tsathoskr lurked, a temporary fission of its primary mass that protruded midway through a spacial shunt. While the portal made possible the brevity of its passage from Jadis to Earth, it went beyond mere thoroughfare; it was sublime and subtle, an instrument of stealth that effectuated the undetected surveillance of great civilizations such as the Cizran Empire and Golden Technocracy—all one might expect of a Colossal Spawn’s thousands of years experience scouting systems and assessing their ripeness for harvest. Altogether, the phenomenon seemed a spec of indecipherable darkness, indistinguishable from the matte black of space and obscured from extraordinary detection measures by a field of probabilistically-induced anti-photons and quantum foam that fulminated chaos along the tunnel’s brim.

Suddenly, Tsathoskr lunged forth fully from the breach. In perfect synchronization, a thousand motes manifested in weird order that mimicked the constellations beyond. For a moment, they dilated, a brief twinkle in the void that betrayed their presence, then pierced the fabric of space and cleaved to their respective destinations beyond. All stilled, constrained by the same camouflage as their predecessor. Then Tsathoskr invariably and carefully blossomed into a multi-faceted chrysanthemum of black shards with a single aperture in its midst.

The horror’s metamorphosis resolved itself just as the beam of the Galactic Engine struck.



A nightmare played out on the dim canvass of Tristan’s unconscious mind. Every nerve was aflame, but the fire provided no light. Instead, his observation flickered like a strobe. He saw what he perceived to be his essence, an emerald mote adrift in a vast void and encoiled by two chains, one red and another white. Each trailed off in opposite directions while he swung haplessly in the middle. Then, a great torrent of astra flooded the scene. In its wake, arcs of energy danced throughout his translucent core and coursed along both chains. Steam rose from the red chain’s surface and made the scene rife with malevolent obscuras that hissed and howled in tormented torpor. Even as he recoiled, his mind’s-eye followed the electric dance downward in an effort to scry the agony’s source. Eventually, the steam burned away enough for him to observe its distant termination through a chitinous slit. It was on fire, steadily eviscerated by the cosmic energy until it morphed into a fiery maw.

To Tristan’s horror, he gazed into the very pit of Hell.

Not only did he recoil, but compelled himself to focus on the source of the white chain. Similar to the other, energy cascaded along its surface until it reached what appeared to be an impasse. However, neither smoke nor screams emanated from its surface. Instead, it was calm. Far away, he thought he saw it vanish into a radiant white keyhole. There, the energy twisted and writhed. Finally, he heard a click. The door flung wide and an incomprehensible force urged him onward. He felt the red chain snap and wither. He felt his heart palpitating and his body exploding. Yet, within, he felt peace and, strangely, an internal harmony and wholeness greater than at any point since awakening.



The beam’s transmundane energies coursed along the tether that bound Tristan to eternal damnation and opened within him a nine-dimensional vortex to Hell. Twisted to celestial radiation, it rained down on the place where time was lost and splashed into the Phlegathon’s bloody torrent like a rain of meteorites. Roused from his tormented slumber, Brobdingnag peered up, through the fiery hail, and to the pinprick of hope at the apex of its prison. Already, a host of evils ascended on crooked wing, Nessus amongst them. With titanic effort, the first Son sloughed off the coagulated vitae that ensnared it under the crimson tide, shook away the river’s burning flow, and likewise, with its slain brothers, ascended to freedom.

Brobdingnag’s great mass, encircled by a host of minions, easily eclipsed the sun as it appeared suddenly in orbit around Earth-F67X opposite and somewhat beyond the moon's ovalular trajectory.



While the bulk of the beam passed through the hole in Tsathoskr’s midst, the remainder refracted into space and, with ominous precision, onward toward the portals newly born. Many were conduits into what remained of Val’Gara space. Through them the beam, divided, traversed and achieved its manifold destinies in Glaceria, Gathix, the Collective, and the churning mass of bioforce at the system’s core that hung in Sal’Chazzar’s stead and preserved the dance of the god-star’s orphaned satellites. Last and largest of the celestial bodies, the pubescent star was the culmination of Tsathoskr’s eons of laboriously harvested and deposited bioforce. Struck by the beam, it awakened. Once awake, it spoke. What it said was heard everywhere. What fracatures of the beam that weren’t routed to Val’Gara space reached their targets in Caorthannach, Megalodon, Amphiprioninae, Thane, The Slut—all living Val’Gara Tsathoskr knew the locations of. All heard what the newly-awakened star said as, whence landed, the beam triggered the Herald’s psi-minds and, for a sufficient handful of moments, brought them into perfect synchrony.

Ever the prime directive persisted loudly and undeniably in their consciousness. Convert, Consume, Control, it proclaimed. It was never that which was missing. Rather, it was consensus on where and when it applied. The beam, tainted by its contact with Tsathoskr, overrode their presumption of self-determination. The portals were open. The lines between spaces blurred. Val’Gara space was Earth space and all of Idea’s children turned their attention to a long sought-after target:

Earth-F67X

Then something erupted from Earth into the Faultverse. Something that offered such an abundance of bioforce as to be irresistible.



> Tristan, I am glad to detect a stabilization in your neural activity. You are conscious.

He winced, tried to open his eyes, but the light was too bright. Instead, he thought the obvious. It was an instinctive thought, but one easily answered. Where am I? What happened?

> An unidentifiable energy changed your astral physiology. You are no longer a threat to Earth. As such, I was able to activate my internal beacon and teleport you to a secure medical center in Tel Aviv. Your vitals have checked out. Now get up, you already have your assignment. Opening a comm to General Millheiser now.

With the world in terror, Allure was the epicenter of it all. A mere branch of the galactic phenomenon punctured Spain's sky, spawning a limitless stalk of arcane energies emitting delphic rays. In some ways, the changes brought about were subtle; in others, more overt and less conspicuous. The one constant; the basic anatomy of every lifeform on this planet was altered.

Like most planets, EarthF67x's magnetosphere created a protective bubble that guarded the surface against different forms of space radiation. While this is mainly recognized as a veil of protection to solar storms, more underlying forms of cosmic radiation prevalent throughout all of the galaxy were affected.

Due to the impossibility of humans surviving in space without protection, The rays had no opportunity to realistically alter or influence human biology. Additionally, the energies were as such a low concentration, it would take generations for the effects to be noticeable. This all changed in a single instant once a single branch of the galactic engine punctured the sky, spawning a ludicrously powerful stalk right in the heart of what was once Madrid.

Many of its effects were unknown, but one ushered a new phenomenon upon human genetics. Polymorphisms, which are responsible for many of the normal differences between people such as eye color, hair color, and blood type, began to develop beyond their usual means. Within humans they began integrating the amplified energies of the engine, creating the potential for supernatural abilities within every lifeform on the planet and amplifying existing ones.

While many individuals were eliminated by the rays on the spot, it wouldn't take long for the more resilient to notice they were changing.

---

Deep Space

The relocation of the microorganism cluster was swift and precise. This did not mean it was eliminated but certainly out of sight out of mind was satisfactory in wake of current events.

The CNT prison was fortified in such a way it prolonged Panident's explosion of energy. Through a more subtle effect of its efforts, the carbon-carbon bonds of the nanotube weakened until it eventually had a tensile strength a mere fraction of a terapascal. Before it even got to half that point, it was free, but Panident found itself in a completely different star system dealing with a completely new crisis.

---

Slowly his eyes opened, feeling immeasurable fatigue. The reflection of light on the white walls made it hard for his eyes to adjust. Blurry vision plagued him as he detected movement in the room. Groggy and ineffective movement found his back caroming off the wall he previously perched his body against quickly after trying getting up. Detecting even more movement in the room, an individual could be made out opposite of him similarly attempting to gather himself.

"Who are you?"

When he spoke, the voice projected was not his own. The terrifying thoughts of his last moment of consciousness froze him in place.

"Quite a predicament we've found ourselves in, huh? Crazy that we actually survived that whole ordeal."

When the man opposite spoke to him, he was convinced this never-ending nightmare was just that, never-ending. When his eyes managed to adjust he realized he was looking in the mirror.

"No, No...NOOO. GET OUT MY HEAD!!!"

In a fit of rage, he stumbled forward, smashing his skull across his speculum opposer, shattering the wall, collapsing the entire dimensional space seemingly upon itself.

The next time he came to consciousness, his vision was red. He was restrained, a concoction of semi-dry blood and sweat clamping the corners of his eyes.

"Seismic activity is regular. Wake up, Fearis. We require your assistance."

"NO, I AM ODIS!"

---

Resurfacing from the body of liquid took longer than Eddie projected. The trek to the surface was strangely long. When his head managed to penetrate the surface, his eyes were subject to astonishment. He now treaded the waters of some massive laboratory tank. From its apex, he could see a lab of fantasy stretching for what seemed miles. Thousands of workers slaved in a trance-like state, operating like a colony of ants on various tasks. Not a single one paid attention to the vampire it seemed; all but one. On a platform adjacent to him stood a middle-aged man, arms folded and carrying an irritated expression.

The man reached out, dipping a wine glass into the liquid Eddie resurfaced from and took a sip. Smacking his tongue repeatedly, he gauged the taste. It was bitter.

"I was expecting Claine... Eddie Goldman, is it?"

Somewhere deep inside, Eddie would know who this man was, or at least who he appeared to be. Surely the Syndicate member recognized him as the great fraud of EarthF67x, but before he could say so, the man before him spoke bluntly. "Despite how famous this face might be on this xenophobic piece of shit planet, the answer is no, I am not oDiS LyNdOn GaLlAgHeR. I just no longer have a face of my own."

Fearis Caldwell was alive, but lacking a lot of his signature bravado. How could he? Being the only individual on board with the relocation "plan", he felt responsible. Frankly, he was more pissed off than anything, but in wake of Merse's disappearance he recognized flying off the rail, as it rarely did, would not help the situation. Allure's citizen's, though he revered many, did not deserve the havoc currently in motion.

Figuring he should explain before Eddie reacted like a corned fox, he cleared his throat to project over the blaring sirens.

"All things considered, you're pretty lucky you weren't ceaselessly absorbed in Panident's highly unstable mass. Rejoice, you're in De Haute Taille. If all were to fail, I assure you this would be the last remaining structure on this planet. This Skyscraper might as well be a fortress. You are safe."

As he continued to talk, he dipped his glass once again, taking another gulp shortly after.

Normally, someone in my position would plead for you to fight with us and not against us the sake of the planet, but as the capitalist I am, I think I see a potential partnership brewing. You're quite the smart man. My information tells me so. One half of the White Syndicate's leadership, correct? You'll be compensated astutely."

Fearis Caldwell offered Eddie a fake toast before he quaffed down the final bit of the murky solution, swishing it from side to side like mouthwash before swallowing. Vents drained the water until it was at Eddie's feet, and shortly after he opened the gates. The Allure native took several steps down. And he sized Eddie Goldman up with a questioning stare.

"You don't really care about the majority of inhabitants of this planet, do you? Doesn't matter to me either way."

After saying such, he demanded some gold be brought his way and sure enough in less than a minute a bundle almost as tall as he was brought to the red syndicate leader.

"I assume this is enough?"

It was almost as if Fearis was reading his mind. Without permission Goldman reconstituted himself. The limbs his brother carried magnetized to the element and began molding before their very eyes. Promptly, several workers approached the reshaping gold with a charcoal colored premium Italian wool suit and sunglasses. It was time for bussiness.

An enormous wall lowered behind Fearis, dwarfing him. Once the projection started their negotiations could begin.

---

Margaret Iedeeren was confused, dazed, hysterical, but that was just "Margaret". What about her other bodies present within the studio, Allure even? Several thousand of her forms were working amongst the chaos, doing her deeds, as some even scrambled into Europe like frenzied cockroaches. They were quite busy, stuck on a series of tasks in efforts of the preservation of Allure.

Through several studio viewpoints, she could see them grab Merse, even in the brief stint of darkness bestowed upon them. Just like that, he was gone, but that wasn't the worst of her problems. Various perspectives flooded her senses with the image of full-blown anarchy within the commonwealth; war-like carnage, a harmful beam's arrival from space, the outright obliteration of several of her out and about forms, incoming floods. This all caused her heart to palpitate at near heart attack frequency. It was too much. So much, she stung the tip of her tongue tasting the chamomile tea brought to her. Her lips thinned, but her flamboyant attitude was curbed, indicated by her blank stare of focus.

Little time passed before Margaret orchestrated her hive to temporarily switch Allure to a less conventional means of power; a battery, substituting crude chemical reactions for the infinite potential of transdimensional energy-entities, and the ambient power they ceaselessly discharged. This dimension they leeched from, unofficially titled The Sui Generis of Powers, gave Ms. Iedereen the horsepower to execute the endless chain of commands already in effect.

The remote operated tectonic plate system of Allure wedged all of its land and coastal borders at twenty-five hundredths of a degree from its center creating a "cone." By design, this introduced a controlled amount magma filling the gaps underneath before the magically propelled cooling systems immediately solidified the flow. This permanently fortified the elevation of lands with an edifice of molded basalt.

Distributed throughout Iberia were devastating tremors and shifts of land, but Allure would survive another day. Despite the havoc that ensued, it was the best card Margaret could play and the most cost-effective option. The devastation upon weaker installations of infrastructure was minor in comparison to what would have taken place. Had the massive swell been allowed to continue its rampage and swallow miles and miles of land from all sides, Allure would have been unrecognizable from itself not even a day before.

Only now could Margaret Iedereen plop her curvy posterior on an Oprah style couch to rest for a second, letting out a long sigh. From this day, Madrid would become an enormous basin. A landmark of this day of infamy.