The Darkness of space, still as it always was, speckled with pin pricks of red, white, and yellow painted a stagnant image. One had to wait hundreds of millions of years for something new to happen, for a change to occur, trapped within the eternally slow passage of eons. Beyond space, however, in the gaps between reason and time, where once there was true nothingness, a network of gray roots, covered in azure moss, and teeming with vibrant, everlasting life, a gargantuan ran across the branching paths that were threaded between universes.

Its simian gait, carried on thick, furry knuckles, covered in a light-distorting slime brought the barrel-chested beast to an incline, prompting its middle-arms to reach down and drive its charcoal, ursine claws into bark. A lesser creature would have dislocated its arms at the elbow from such a sudden stop, but Barrusom’s burly, extraversal strength simply made him lurch forward, tugging the whole structure as he leaned on his forelegs and kept himself from falling over with his rear, his lupine tail flapping in the hot breeze.

His upper-face, in contrast to the rest of his brutish body appeared as though it were concealed under a heavy, iron mask bearing a lustrous sheen that hinted at a starless cosmos. Six holes spread across the forehead, where light was lacking everywhere else, Barrusom’s eyes held an entire galaxy’s worth of swallowed photons, divided into thousands of ravenous searchlights. His long maw hung and jutted at a downward angle, four lateral incisors at the anterior corners of his mouth caged a central row of slicers, molars becoming ever-more visible as his jaw lowered in salivating thirst at the undulating, translucent swamp-waters, churning a thirst-quenching mix of blood and milk.

Possessing zero impulse control, the beast yanked his claws free, kicked off his rear feet, and used his fore like a fulcrum to fling himself forward, tucking his wild form into a bouncing somersault. Every rolling impact pushed and bent the branches, all springing back into place, only to have their integrity tested again and again as Barrusom recklessly rolled down. The end of his descent was the protrusion of his mid-claws against the bark, forcing him into a sudden ascent, cannonballing through the air, mouth agape with an extended tongue compressed into the shape of a hollow tube.

Impacting the waters, devastation reigned supreme for several seconds as he drove a hole through the nutrient-rich surface, producing a veritable tunnel, rapidly collapsing as the water rushed to fill it in. A colossal ring tsunamied outward, assaulting the mangrovian lower half of the Amalgam’s rootsystem, the network’s bottom section becoming more and more exposed as Barrusom’s tongue sucked down trillions of gallons of mother’s creamy crimson carnage.

Several massive bubbles floated up to the surface, a sign of Barrusom’s belch from a belly filled with not nearly enough substance. He was no baby bear after all, and could not satisfy his appetite on something as banal as drinking from an ocean-sized bottle; thus, he bellowed in a manner that combined fury and belligerence, forelimbs raising and slashing as his impulsive urge to consume led him to brazenly tear several rifts in the Outerverse that he would use to bring himself to the biggest buffet of all.

–

A bulge in the boring star-spangled canvas appeared, the slashed-up blackness of space rose up, and burst as a horrifying cosmic blister as Barrusom – the Ravager Of Cosms blitzed and barreled across space on a thoroughly unrestrained rampage. His behemoth-clawed feet pounded, and punctured and stomped the cosmic carpet, apergetic energy building up in the footprints he left behind, generating mammoth aftershocks as they sprung back to normal; consequently the darkly dotted dotted blanket of the universe undulated up and down like ocean waves, disrupting nebulas, disturbing planetary atmospheres, and destroying every semblance of peace and tranquility left, as even the local stars felt their nuclear processes becoming discombobulated.

The calm, boring state of the universe had been viciously damned, and as the telescopic peepholes on the doors of a hundred thousand civilizations were broken down, not a one of them would be so lucky as to find a cute little teddy bear looking to borrow some honey.

Instead, they would see only Barrusom, ready, and unwaiting to raze and rip open their bowels.

One of those pin pricks was blue. Slowly, it grew.

Exeter flew through space at ludicrous speeds. Light, like animals, was limited to its own nature; But Lumanaru simply surpassed the natural speed limit of light, just as sapient beings routinely surpassed their own alleged limits. She had been accelerating for only a few moments -- quite literally since the minute the cosmic disturbance was detected.

With her arms crossed, she stood on the pommel of her sword, its black blade camouflaged in the galactic background while its white hilt, complete with navy-blue accents, matched her pelvic curtain and the twin curtains over her chest that merged into one collar around her neck whence dark shoulder pads spawned. The sword rose through space -- lack of true "up" and "down" notwithstanding -- a most dangerous one-occupant elevator that felt like standing on a wobbling high-gravity planetoid. She was looking "up" with grim determination.

She was to subdue and capture this extradimensional beast. Dead or alive. That was the order.

She wasn't so sure that the "dead or alive" part was referencing only the beast she would hunt. There was more than one reason the Star Council sent her out here, of all people.

But no time to think about that. Already, she had crossed the entire galaxy. She entered within a lightminute of the creature and telekinetically slowed and halted. This far, yet this close, Barrusom's image lagged behind where he actually was; She could roughly feel his true location. She matched her speed with the galaxy itself to determine his relative speed.

But no time to waste. While making note of his speed, Exeter lifted one foot off her sword, then the other, letting it fly up into her grasp. She had to grab it with a rising hand, pulling upwards, to get it to stop rising; Every movement backwards, slow but steady like her breaths, aided by being practically embedded in the universe where others merely shuffled atop its surface.

If she was embedded in it, she thought, then this beast was a fossorial predator.

She held her sword in a forward guard directly towards Barrusom, as still as she could make it, though it swayed and rolled in her hands yet. She squeezed with even pressure to further steady it. The moment Barrusom was within such distance that it would take him half a second to reach her, she would yank the sword towards herself -- instantly impelling it, and herself, forwards -- then simply let go to launch it into him, center-mass. Then she would activate her anklets to skate away; The galaxy's rotation curved her technically straight path to her left and out of harm's way. Within a second, she sped up to a thousand miles per hour, just to be sure he couldn't back-tag her.

The Ravager paid attention only to that which served, or impeded its capacity for lulling the unrelenting whining of its cells, crying out to have their empty spaces filled. Its belly bubbled with discomfort, thoroughly agitated by the boiling sensation building inside its stomach. A stuffy feeling spread through its veins, congesting arteries, and made Barrusom roar through the continuum of space-time itself, emitting a vibrating force that made the darkness rattle and fuzz with static energy.

Amidst the chaos of its whining, Barrusom slowed its charge, the shockwaves following its footprints springing back into place moved at a speed fast enough to pass beneath its feet, lifting the beast up like a surfer and adding to his feeling of unease. Space vibrated again, and produced a different sound, akin to a deep groan as the waters it drank earlier rose and fell, touching the ursim's esophagus, as he slid down the waves backside back. It was making the Ravager very nauseous, and there were many more waves yet to endure thanks to its mindless charging.

Numerous times did the shock-waves lift and drop Barrusom, and numerous times would Exeter find her ability to acquire a stable image of her target blocked by light-distorting waves. Furthermore, each time Barrusom’s six-eyed vision cone happened to catch her in its radius, streams of photons would go flowing around her, dimming the cosmos behind her down to pitch blackness, whilst blinding her anterior sight of the reckless monster, whose eyes were light-sucking vacuums with a gravitational pull on par with singularities. Fortunately for the warrior, this feature of Barrusom applied only to photons, leaving her body technically safe from the pull, but still woefully unprepared for the space-time waves that were about to lift her up just the same as their creator.

Still swerving uncontrollably, Barrusom's perception of the cosmos blurred, its constantly changing direction, even as it slid down the wave causing an undulating bend in the river of light rushing down the pathway to its eyes. Finally, the sensory madness became too much, and without pause or restraint, the beast’s stomach contracted hard enough to squeeze its contents up its esophagus, and expelled them through its siphon tongue with enough pressurized force to bisect a moon. Ontop of having extreme cutting power, this substance was highly corrosive to many things, space itself among them. This was not merely due to being mixed with Barrusom's stomach acids, however–the very swamp he drank from was a primordial ocean, born from the first creatures feeding upon the fruits that grew along the Amalgam’s many branches.

If Exeter, or her sword survived what was literally nothing more than the result of an upset stomach, she would see the great root system’s tips breaching through the dissolved continuum, as well as Barrusom, which whose size had actually increased in direct proportion to what it just puked out. Meanwhile, the darkness of space along the rift transmogrified to a fertile, quickly solidifying sludge, along which the Amalgam grew. Like the other things born of the Outerverse, it too, held a name - Ebrias.

Exeter narrowed her eyes -- not that doing so clarified his image, but something about the way he moved didn't make sense. He slowed, only to spring forwards by unknown means. Her first thought was that he also possessed telekinetic manners of locomotion. If he did, it wasn't the same type that she possessed. She couldn't discern any "push" on his atoms, regardless. Surely there would be, however?

Narrowed eyes then widened to compensate for everything dimming. She guessed that the creature was trying to blind her before gunning for the kill. She felt a tinge of superiority that she could still tell exactly where it was extrasensorily.

Then her path changed. Blinded as she was, she couldn't place how, but it just felt off. First his movement, now hers; Discrepancies were piling up. Matter didn't move like this, in this sloshing sense that disoriented her -- more accurately, dislocated her. It felt like distances between herself and other objects were shrinking and growing arbitrarily.

Speaking of matter-
She sensed the climbing liquid in his stomach, throat, mouth -- the buildup to a cannonlike surge of hurled cookies -- and instantly knew that she couldn't endure it, not at the piercing PSI it'd launch at. She telekinetically curved her sword far out of harm's way as she snatched one of six white walnut-sized sphere from her belt and, skipping any button presses and costly countdowns, simply held it out in an open palm, turned her body to protect the other spheres and a bag holding a few high-tech nets, and crushed it with her mind.

Instant flash. A supernova erupted from it. The blast launched her back, though bathing her in radiation of all types from the entire spectrum.

In the back of her mind rang a reminder of the results that letting the lower wavelengths flow through her would entail-
She opened herself up to the greens and blues of this white void of plasma. It was destroying her outstretched arm and body, no question, but just as quickly it was showering her in the light needed to stave off and repair the damage via regeneration and come out stronger for it. Even if the plasma didn't burn or blow away the acid, it would help her to survive it, like a cosmic version of Emergen-C. Exeter had given herself a boon.

Barrusom, on the other hand, had gotten a ball of hellfire the size of Denver, Iowa to deal with -- and by all (current) accounts he was trespassing on this perilous property.

To her shock, when she reached out with her connection to matter to find the beast again amid the blinding blast, Barrusom now seemed larger than before. And... something, in the acid's wake, was emerging from nothing.

In the wake of its vomiting, Barrusom felt emptier than it had, even starting off, belching little more than bad breath vapors into the cold void of space. Instead of marveling at the sparkling glow of its crystallizing burp gas, its six-eyed gaze caught a much more appealing spark, though the size of its flame was barely akin to combustion motes and embers compared to what the beast had reached in evacuating his stomach contents. Before it had puked, Barrusom was close to the size of the Atlantic Ocean – now, the reach of its middle limbs was long enough to grip the heartland of the United States, and Central Europe simultaneously, with its feet gripping the head of South America, and the throat of Africa.

Shaking off the discomfort, Barrusom's fur was flung wildly to and fro, flinging humongous globs with sizes on par with the great lakes off its body. Each time the beast entered a universe, it did so by slashing through the contuum's guts, inadvertently bathing itself in sticky dark matter, the glue of that held matter together. Consequently, when the supernova reached Barrusom, the fire, and all the radioactive heat emanating from it was enveloped in a cloud that neither fed nor extinguished the fire, merely holding it in place.

Feeling a tad confused, and aggressively impatient, the Ravager rose up on its hindlegs, then slammed its front paws against the spatial fabric, generating a black tsunami which eclipsed all the previous ones it had clumsily rode in on. Stepping forward onto the colossal footprints it pounded into place, Barrusom waited for the inevitable return to a state of normality, though its effects on the monster's position were going to be anything but.

Waiting slightly longer than it wanted to, Barrusom began to growl with impatience before being suddenly launched like it was sitting atop a coiled spring, dragging the captured flames with it via the protective coating on its fur. The sensation mildly shocked the creature, causing it to let out a brief, albeit deep yelp considering the sudden change in its vocal pitch. Tucking in its limbs, rather than bounce across branches like it had done before drinking, the ursim spun like a cannonball with its eyes causing a most disturbing visual effect on nearby light sources, pulling their rays towards its face like streamers following the beast's “flaming” rotations, photons twisted into a thoroughly contorted distortion at the cause's epicenter; flinging more dark matter off its “flaming” body, Barrusom narrowly caught up with the shockwave it had released, and was fast-approaching the wave’s crest.

The need to feed was growing evermore maddening in Barrusom’s mind now. Soon it would land upon, and ride the wave it created to an appetizing planet, star, asteroid belt…anything would do right now after throwing up. Its relentless urges were exemplified in the destructive expansion of the rift as the wave pulled and stretched on space, letting more and more of the root system into the universe, the branches quickly becoming visible in conjunction with the continual conversion of space-time into rapidly hardening sludge.

In the midst of the growing chaos, a swarm of mustard pawed feet, bearing a hybrid structure akin to that of a canine insect characterizing the rest of their segmented armor, wandered along the moss-covered Amalgam. Elliptical mouths parted, revealing probing tongues covered in emerald studs tasting for food, whilst sharp diamond-shaped nostrils waited for signs of death and detritus to enter through. A pair of icy blue eyes scanned the area for a sign of direction, tails ending in a cluster of protruding thorns swishing back and forth.

No larger than German shepherds, the Corpas pack, Foragers of Cosms had arrived, not to aid Barrusom, but to follow the path of carnage the beast so often left behind in its wake, and feed on its gifts. Like the Ravager, they too were very hungry, but in a much more basic, non-insanity inducing way, which nevertheless lit the first spark of extraversal enlightenment. Barrusom was not the inhabitant of a strange dimension--its home was a verse all its own, threaded between other cosms, and presenting an ecosystem which appeared to display its traits more through the Amalgam’s invasive, logos-consuming tendencies.

How much of this Exeter would be able to piece together was unknown, nor was it entirely clear if Barrusom had fully perceived her during its less than stellar charge. How much danger the Lumanarun was in could not be answered with certainty: the tidal wave, though far stronger than the previous one, would merely move her around again, and though the swarm of insectile dogs did not function on a primarily predatory mindset, killing to survive was hardly out of the question. Would she meet their searching stares and become an early-game forage snack, would she spot them first and thin their population which numbered in the tens of thousands, or would Barrusom finally figure out that there was something deliberately trying to keep his paws off the cosmos’ many beehives and go berserk.

An ant can hardly say that the ground is changing when it walks upon playing cards being rearranged.

This thought occurred to her when she was inexplicably moving away from Barrusom -- not because of the blast, for its center was gaining distance on her as well. No, Barrusom had reeled his arms back as if to attack, but just before they hit, they lost momentum, and in tandem did she gain momentum. Only then had she put two and two together:

He was creating shockwaves in the very fabric of the universe.

Barrusom and the explosion fell away from her point of view. She checked for her belt and found that, on the left side, its metal-cloth alloy had melded with her left hip, like a road succumbing to wind-mailed sand. That same side's shoulder pad and the breast curtain below had evaporated; That side of her face and chest, and her shoulder, were smattered in grayish specks and streaks of their materials. But the belt and its items were safe.

She'd thought the apparent shockwaves only a gravitational effect on light. Now it was clear to her that, by being so embedded in the universe as to be connected to matter, she had a blindspot -- in each wave, matter curved with spacetime. It was an illusion affecting only her. She was, and had been unwittingly, flying on a wave of spacetime curvature -- the very same that had been detected by techies across the galaxy and for which she was sent to neutralize the beast. How did I not realize this sooner?

Regardless, Barrusom was now catching up. With the supernova absorbed into his coat, the sight of a flaming blackhole tumbling her way unsettled her. She was caught in a wave of unknown size and shape like a fly in the maze of a cobweb. How to deduce the extent of this shockwave...

Like a scientist, she figured, I should do some experimenting. Even as the living planetoid hurtled towards her, she splayed her limbs out as though bathing in a sensory deprivation chamber -- the sense of the proportions and nature of this shockwave was certainly counted as a deprived sense -- and closed her eyes, concentrating on the one source of matter she could trust to be stable: The center of the galaxy. Using her telekinesis, she attempted to accelerate herself up, then down, then left and right, followed by slowing and then increasing her incongruous backwards movement. It only took about four seconds. The feedback was instantaneous, and thus so were the results. She had a rough idea of its shape, size, and the fact that she was "sliding" along the wave a la a surfer riding a tsunami.

Like an apocalypse, Barrusom approached. His flesh was a shore she did not want to land on. She sped herself up and penetrated the "surface" of this wave, sinking away and ahead from its influence. From there, she zoomed the opposite direction.

She felt a presence growing. A cosmic affluence that registered as an invasion, whether witting or otherwise; Upon the sludge made in the acid's wake were many creatures. Were they growing from it? Were they utilizing Barrusom the way a police or military unit uses canines to sniff out explosives? Were they truly using him as a vector for an invasion? Did he even take notice of their presence?

She hadn't the time to seek or reason her way into answers to these questions. Barrusom was heading for a planet near the core of this system, the closest world there was. She wasn't sure if there were sapient lifeforms on it, but waiting for the potential cosmic cries of millions being extinguished didn't appeal to her at all.

Her sword Disconception was still out there. She curved Disconception and took it on a long-way-round trip to Barrusom. Meanwhile, she fell back into and through the shockwave. Once past its push and pull, she accelerated freely towards the legion.

E=mc². That equation was taught as-is to many students across many galaxies. The speed of light would not, after all, be amended any time soon.

But Exeter wasn't bound by that universal speed limit one bit. For her, c was a variable that increased with experience and power, yet was not so much an increasing limit as it was a flexible power ramp; A measure of limitlessness. And, even when not traveling FTL, the altered equation held true. She stuck her leg out, bracing her rotation so she wouldn't "trip" over the warriors, then dipped her foot into the chitinous waters. She was blurring by so fast that their exoskeletons splashed outwards, thanks in part to that alteration in equation which had also helped her to power through the waves with ease. In her own wake did she leave two rows of viscera diverging. A hundred or more would be slain by the time she reached the beginning of this other-verse takeover -- and she was raring for round two.

Having been itself accelerating this whole time ever since it left her hand, Disconception was now on its way to puncture Barrusom like a ballista bolt, and it was halfway to him, chasing him down as he headed towards that distant planet, ideally before he could reach it. It was traveling at nearly the speed of light. Like many katanas used by superhuman warriors, it boasted obscene durability; It would not squash itself against his hide like a mosquito. But would it do any more damage to him than a mosquito would to a human?

Exeter thought so.

The sight of gory destruction flowed into Barrusom's eyes, its brain processing the floating trail of death as a beckoning cosmic snack bell. Redirecting its path without a thought to where it had been going previously, the Ravager drove its claws through the continuum, gouging and slashing several more rifts open as it violently changed course on a racing path to feast. Considering It had not been far away to begin with, travel time was extremely minimal, the creature extending its siphon tongue with no regard for anything other than sucking up the mess Exeter created for him.

Unbeknownst to Baurrsom as it chewed, crunched, and even created more bodies after being unsatisfied with the amount it was given, in its turning and small hopping motions to lap up the creatures like an anteater, the creature finally took notice of the effects its footprints had on space. Namely the way they explosively bent and expanded the rift, wherein a new portion of the Amalgam’s branches were coming through. Consequently, Disconception found its momentum disrupted several times, with the rootsystem itself actively directing its growth along a path of interception, having like Barrusom, been given a chance to suck on the blood of dead Corpas pack members, and deduced a strange cause of death via the odd alteration of their flesh. It wanted to understand this phenomenon and copy the properties onto its own logographic parchment, wherein the laws of its own cosmos would be swiftly updated once more. Several splinters erupted from impact, the blade inevitably causing less and less damage until was alas snared in place, and luckily for Exeter, she would have been able to feel the absence of destructive intent being imposed on the blade: rather, if she could read minds, or sense intent, it was curiosity that she would first pick up on.

By the time the ursim finished eating, and the Corpas finished finding spots to hide, Barrusom had already taken off again. It was only a matter of moments before the pack reemerged, this time being markedly more careful not to remain too close by. Some of them acted on a different impulse, and instead went to go sniff the sword that had been caught up in the branches, eager to acquire a scent on the thing that randomly appeared to slaughter them. In the meantime, the Amalgam network only continued to expand in complexity, roots gradually extending to colossal branches, each apergetic explosion following Barrusom's path aiding in the endeavor of endless growth.

Meanwhile, at least as it stood now, Exeter seemed to be the one causing the most death.

Exeter was no expert in currency conversions, but she did know that loopholes could be found which might cause drastic changes in value.

Disconception, true to its name, did not behave as expected. Outerversal matter shot out to slow it down and take a hold on it. This would have succeeded perfectly on any other weapon.

But it never slowed down. With its negative mass dealing in inverse ways to matter, the root system actually increased its speed just the same way as it interacted with Exeter's hands opposite to how a normal sword would. The many roots sucked it in and it only wormed its way out faster and faster. Soon, the system had inadvertently bestowed upon it the tremendous speed she was looking for, which she then used as a diving board to give it one last push towards Barrusom, at an angle to avoid hitting any celestial bodies.

Naturally, her disconnection from that harrowing speed limit extended to her telekinetic abilities.

It did not, however, continually extend to objects upon letting go of them, physically or telekinetically. What was, at one moment, unproblematically flying at nigh-lightspeed with a linear energy-to-speed proportion... was now flying at the same speed but with the speed limit looming over it. Necessarily, an object hoping to reach lightspeed under normal conditions had to expend exponentially more energy to achieve an incremental increase in speed.

All this to say, at the moment that blade met flesh, it necessarily had nearly infinite energy behind it. Hence, a conversion and drastic relative value change.

Whatever toughness his tissue, Barrusom would find that it only imparted that much more power onto the blade. Disconception instantly flashed through his entire torso. It wasn't a mosquito bite; It would be a bullet wound, through and through. How big the "caliber" of this unstoppable force would depend on how immovable, and therefore inversely un-rupturable, his organs would act -- and heavens forbid it hits any bone, if he had any.

Whatever the case, she wouldn't stop with that. Halfway through Barrusom, she'd push it to the edge, nudge it to straddle the speed limit, and then let its negative-mass properties do the rest. Being a priestess of spacetime meant studying spacetime secrets that most would think to be science-fiction. Apparently, she'd snoozed in the class about unworldly spacetime-bending shockwaves... More realistically, they were a secret the Star Council hadn't discovered yet.

One thing she did know (and was told never to employ) was that an object's negative mass, if already at exactly the speed of light, would allow it to gain unholy acceleration that would rip causality a new one.

In the event Disconception got to this point, ripples in time would fly out, rubber-banding would occur, and a second self-same Disconception would appear and repeat what the first will have already accomplished.
Rinse
and
repeat
Her bullets would then be firing out of a time-machinegun (horrible pun intended).

The beast continued its charge, bothered only by its own hunger, fueling its savage determination to find a meal. Then, something extraordinarily odd happened: the radioactive fire contained within the dark matter orbiting Barrusom's body inversely sent the local temperature of space plummeting to a level that would make anything that passed through the inferno exceptionally brittle. Furthermore, dark matter was the glue that held the cosmos together, and was directly responsible for the bonding of elementary particles, atoms, molecules, and all things present within the cosmos. Without it, there would be no planets, no stars, no galaxies rich with things for the Ravager Of Cosms to feed on.

Disconception, in its last moments, inverted the properties that allowed dark matter to hold everything together, including the sword's own mass. Had Barrusom not flung a substantial portion of the sticky stuff off its fur, the blade’s effects on its flesh would have caused the ursim to dissolve and crumble apart. Instead there was distance, albeit a small distance, yet still enough to prevent it from getting its body directly involved with the matter-destruction process that Disconception had wrought forth. The end result was the blade ushering its own anti-climactic deconstruction, molecular disassembly, and particulate dissemination, by forcing dark matter to behave in a manner that caused it to pull its existence apart instead of together.

Infinitesimally small fragments of metallic dust, themselves soon to be nothing, touched the upper-layers of Barrusom's sticky fur. It felt a slight weight differential, followed by an irritating itch that made the Ravager growl and turn around, responding as though something had just touched it. Surveying the area with its eyes, Barrusom bore witness only to that which it had seen countless times already, but as a precaution against further interference, decided in its primitive thinking to do something about being bothered.

Rearing its forelimbs up again, Barrusom mercilessly bashed the continuum of space again and again, backing up with each imprint it left so as not to be standing in place when the inevitable shockwave erupted. Then, driving its claws through the fabric itself, the monster deliberately ruptured the membrane separating the ocean of blood and milk from this universe. Space exploded yet again, carrying tidal shockwaves filled to the brim with the very same acidic content Barrusom had vomited up mere minutes ago, their corrosive effects so damaging to the continuum waves that soon, there would be no continuum lifting Exeter up, down, or wherever her sense of direction told her. Soon, there would be only waves of space-time dissolving red and white acid that would inundate and decimate all but the Amalgam, and those creatures whose habitats were the Outerverse itself.

Satisfied with what it had accomplished, the beast turned tail and blitzed toward its meal, fed up with not being able to gorge itself. Unfortunately, for it though, something else was also starting to get fed up–namely, with what the Ravager was doing: damaging the universe in such a way was bound to produce impurities, and throw off the collective multiversal equilibrium via interverseborne, pathogenic release, and thus – interfere with their natural lifecycles. In other words, universes would grow sick and die before their time, and that was extremely inconvenient for a different beast's feeding cycle.

A single eye appeared as a holographic, sphere-shaped crimson ocular, from which eight transparent tentacles spanning 7/8ths of this verse's total AU pressed against the star-speckled backdrop of space, and observed the chaos through a single black slit.

It was the Executioner…

Another secret she knew, but had forgotten in the heat of the moment, was the interaction between dark matter and negative-mass objects. Namely, an alchemy that could and did aerosolize her sword.

The colossus that was Barrusom then turned to face her, and her eyes widened.

"Oh. Well damn."

She wouldn't disregard that dark matter's properties further. But she wouldn't disregard her sword, either, not even in its current state as a gas. She promptly dispersed the dark matter surrounding and penetrating the sword's molecules, making way for lifting Disconception off Barrusom's fur. She coalesced it into a basketball-sized sphere, and although it wouldn't stick together anymore as it had before due to its reversed gravity, she could still move it as one pseudo-solid object far away from Barrusom. That pesky negative-mass feedback loop also allowed it to accelerate fast enough that as it hurtled towards the forgotten snack of a planet, Barrusom's backwards movement wouldn't catch up to it.

She guessed that he was making large waves, using the inertia loss in his arms to gauge how powerful they could be. Swing after swing, and then swipe after swipe -- spangling stars giving way to red and white like his puke from before. So that must've been his breakfast. She couldn't help but be impressed that a creature like him managed to make such a clever attack as this.

With the acid waves heading her way, she decided to do another experiment. Activating her anklets for extra speed, she started skating far off to the side outside the reach of the waves; A safe evasive curve while using her telekinesis to attempt to swerve this acid in the other direction. Surely, despite its extra-versal origins, she should be able to manipulate it like any matter -- but she preferred not to put all her eggs in one basket, especially after failures like her time-machinegun setup. The skating, she expected to put her well out of harm's way; Whether or not she could manipulate this acid would not impact her chances at surviving it, which currently looked to be 100%.

While her experiment went underway and the waves were passing her by, she got a strange feeling like something was looking over her shoulder... no, looking over the universe's shoulder, encompassing it. Observing. Maybe it, too, was watching an experiment of its own.

Now she had the shivers of existential dread, a feeling she as a Lumanar didn't know she could have.

Adding onto that dread was the spreading rend in space, a domino effect that translated Barrusom's clever attack into a deadly plague hellbent on unraveling the universe. Something of this scale and urgency no doubt would send many priests and priestesses of spacetime into prayer to reinforce every corner, nook, and cranny of the galaxy against this threat and to contain the breach. That left Exeter to stop him from nullifying those efforts with further space-breaking.

The nets were too small to do anything.
Her sword was a stress ball of fluid.
She had five nova grenades. Firecrackers -- against Barrusom's skin.

She had an option, if it came down to it.

The longer the Executioner observed the transpiring chaos, the more the holographic image of its crimson eye and tentacles appeared to increase in size, its black slit oscillating first in the direction of the rampaging Ravager, then to the Lumanaru. It repeated this action only once, followed by a cycling of different ocular colors in the form of purple, green, and gray, culminating in the creation of two facsimiles sliding off the original body like neatly conformed sheets of paper.

Unlike Barrusom, who slashed open a rift in the continuum, the Amalgam that entered through it, and the flood of cosmic acid which corroded it away, the facsimiles employed a far less destructive, albeit nonetheless unsettling means of inserting themselves into the universe. They simply phased through it, producing only the faintest of ripples as their passage occurred in a manner that was similar to osmosis. Floating as gelatinous, eight-limbed blobs in the vacuum, the green and purple-eyed pair rapidly collapsed their forms inwards, dimensional folding condensing and compressing their unknowable flesh. As the pair shrunk, their limbs formed sharply jointed bends, the ends pulled and stretched back until only a sharp, piercing tip remained, enabling them to skitter and run across the continuum.

The green eyed creature ceased its size reduction at almost 1.5x the ursim’s own, and immediately began to chase after the beast in a manner that was blatantly hostile. For every apergetic explosion that was about to ripple and stir the fabric of space-time with its disruptive shockwaves - Aracite the Executioner Of Cosms, was there to plug up the eruption, absorbing the burst into its own freshly hardened skin, its cells drinking in the cosmo-seismic energy. Repeatedly, it did this, albeit with an oddly reduced effectiveness the closer it got to Barrusom, that was still enough to put the eruptions on a precisely timed delay.

As Aracite came within striking range of its nemesis, it saw Barrusom, visibly aware of the uts presence by its raised fur and slowly crescendoing growl. The bear spun around, dragging its claws across the continuum to bring itself to a destructive, space-slashing stop, aiming for an overhead swipe with its mid-limbs, only for the cephalopod to suddenly expel the absorbed energy, and go arching overhead, straight for the very planet Barrusom sought to feed on. Determinedly, the beast drove its tongue into the gash it just made, and sucked up as much of the acidic blood milk sitting inside the Outerverse as it could, shrinking its size in the process, then yanked the siphon appendage free in a fashion that was just as viscerally repulsive.

Roaring with fury, Barrusom charged after Aracite, extending its tongue under its neck, passed its belly, and even beyond the length of its rising tail. In an act of seemingly counter-intuitive insanity, the ursim took its mid-paws and smacked its own stomach as hard as it could, almost mocking the Executioner’s own actions, until the intent behind the masochistic belly beating became abundantly and disgustingly clear:

It made itself throw up.

On purpose.

A jet of red and white vomit streamed from the siphon tube that was Barrusom’s tongue, its explosive force greatly exceeding what it had released earlier, a clear indication of how much the ravenous Ravager Of Cosms had managed to gulp down in one mad guzzle. The sheer force of its puke ray, whose direction was set to dissolve and tear open another rift to the Outerverse, from which more Amalgam roots would breach, and even more Corpas to ride its emergence, was ultimately set to strike at Exeter and as well as Aracite's other copy, sent Barrusom blasting across the void with its vomit-rocket force.

Long before the beam could reach its predestined mark, and the Ravager could reach its rival, having apparently disappeared, there was the planet’s ice moon. The only thing between it, and its scrumptious meal, which it instantly became single-mindedly fixated on devouring again. As Barrusom got closer and closer to the frigid rock, it caught sight of the edges of a vicious sandstorm rotating at speeds great enough to breach the planet's atmosphere. Its eagerness to finally feed did not allow the ursim room to analyze the out of place phenomenon, however, instead retracting its tongue into its mouth, and tucking its fully regrown form into a somersaulting cannonball.

For a mere microsecond, it seemed as though the moon would be sturdy enough to survive the impact, but just as certain as the Ravager's hunger was to overwhelm all its other drives, so too did its impact with the frozen satellite send cracks fissuring across its surface. Before the moon could even start to split in two, the other side bulged, ruptured, and erupted skywards, launching a spray of frosted asteroids hurtling at the cold desert planet. In the midst of the spray, Barrusom emerged out of the hole it created, upper and middle arms unfolding in a debris clearing spread, followed by a hard leap with its rear off rim, throwing the moon into a vertical spin.

One fourth of the way to its meal, the world lost its light to the beast’s starving gaze shrouding the world in endless night. Midway through the ursim’s final flight, transparent spikes resembling bent javelins disappeared onto the side of the world consumed by natural darkness. Three fourths of the way to its destination, green rays peered over the mountains Barrusom was set to pulverize, eliciting a faint snarl as the source of the illumination took spherical shape with eight menacing outlines aimed maliciously at its form.

–

The purple eyed facsimile made a near beeline to Exeter, hurling itself like a shuriken on a direct intercept path of the approaching vomit beam, dimensions folding until it collapsed down to the size of a kangal. On its way to the girl and the beam, this copy of Aracite sliced through the Amalgam, its branches having extended far enough for azure moss to be visible along its upper length. The copy captured the products of its arboreal destruction within its gelatinous body, grinding wood, and moss within its core in search of the bacterial agent known only as Dorn - the *Healer* Of Cosms.

–

The collision between Aracite and Barrusom sent the two of them whirling in a fixed position, caught between the planet and its damaged moon. The ursim’s claws locked tight with six of the cephalopod’s spiked limbs, thrashing wildly against each other in a vicious grappling match. For every successful breaking of the other's grip, a missed swipe slashed open a rift, letting more roots in, only for their tips to be severed as another angry swing was taken, opening yet more rifts, increasing the speed at which the Amalgam spread. This boost in the root's invasive efficiency naturally allowed them to slither and grow their way around the warring giants, snaring limbs and threading a weave of an impediment of ll the while steadily impeding their movements as the root invasion became an increasingly troublesome presence.

Soon, the monsters were stuck, hardly able to move, as the branches grew between their limbs, their motions nearly ceased. Despite the pair's entangled predicament though, the Ravager did have an advantage: its tongue. Ramming the appendage through the nearest rift, Barrusom drank as much as it could, shrinking down and escaping the grip of Aracite, whose whole form bristled at what it knew was coming, spikes protruding all over its limbs, shredding branches, and giving it enough space to attempt to enclose them around its foe in a crushing, skewering death trap. Seeing the attack coming, the ursim retracted its tongue to the proper length, slapped its stomach with enough force to crack a neutron star, groaned for few seconds, and puked its vomitous jet in an upward dragging motion, size increasing and arms outreaching.

The contact could not have been more immediate, for like a death ray that was comprised of enzymic matter instead of raw, concentrated energy, the focused pressure cleaved the Executioner's upper half in place of where the heart and left lung would be, flesh boiling and hissing as the Ravager's digestive fluids burned and steamed flesh. Enraged, Aracite found itself on the losing end of the opening round, for as Barrusom evacuated its stomach, so too did its size return, and with that came its strength as well. Namely the strength to perform a standing motion which allowed it to push its rivals limbs apart, forcing them open, and rendering Aracite’s nucleic eye vulnerable to a second attack, but therein lied very real, and very technical problem, that the ursim, in its extremely limited intellect, failed to account for.

The Ravager had six extremely powerful limbs.

But the Executioner possessed eight.

In an act of savage, but very much drivenly determined desperation, Aracite exploited the difference in limb count and shaped the tip of its top right tentacle into a spiked hammer, bringing it down like a whip. Barrusom didn't have time to so much as process the sudden impact, for the moment it was made, three of its six eyes were punctured and bleeding heavily fractionated rays of photonic energy, specifically the upper-right, middle-left, and bottom left eyes, the light superheating all that it touched. To add to the sheer viciousness, instead of simply letting go, the Executioner curved the spikes of its modified appendage into hooks, burying them in its nemesis’ sockets, and without mercy or delight, but simply raw, animalistic brutality, began to pry on the Ravager's mask. At the same time, its transparent flesh crystallized, funneling Barrusom's light through its own body, where it accumulated at the tips of the rest of its tentacles, all of which were cunningly aimed behind it.

Harder and harder did the Executioner pull, provoking a truly agonizing wail that made all of space vibrate and tremble. Exeter and the fast arriving facsimile would be able to feel it too, shaking their cells, and even the elemental molecules composing their organic tissue, and the dark matter which held it altogether. The Executioner had prepared for such a destructive contingency, hence its change in molecular structure allowing it to withstand the close range consequences of its actions.

Nearly finished inflicting its torturous punishment, Aracite gave one final tug, ruthlessly lifting off the damaged mask in segments corresponding to each punctured eye socket. Gooey strings of membranous tissue emitted multicolored, kaleidoscopic light, displaying incomprehensibly condensed versions of all the sights Barrusom’s eyes swallowed during its many rampages. Attached to those strands was a muscled and badly maimed complexion resembling a cross between a grizzly bear and a baboon, its tissues twitching as the Ravager temporarily succumbed to the pain. Then with one final rip, the Executioner removed what remained of the damaged segments and flung them to the wayside, rocket blasting all the energy it absorbed out its tips whilst the fractionated eye beams solidified into full blown pillars, each featuring their own heavily randomized collage of everything Barrusom had seen in its life, each scene taking physical form as it swept over the cosmos.

The trajectory of Aracite's path, pushed them through the ice moon’s debris field, then destructively through the two almost fully separated halves of the frosty giant, back along the path of the footprints, whose positions had subtly shifted as a consequence of the Barrusom’s wailing. It was upon reaching the first of the footprints that the Ravager began to reawakened, snarling at its foe, only to be struck by the might of its own apergetic stomping being explosively driven back into it. This simple detonation trick revealed just how intelligent and planning the Executioner could be, particularly when it came to dealing with its rival, evidenced again as it skillfully directed Barrusom into another repositioned footprint, sending the two blasting off in another direction, then another, and another, until it started to look like the two monsters were engaged in a game of cosmic pinball, with their destination precalculatedly aimed for them to arrive back where Exeter and the facsimile were about to arrive.

–

The facsimile skidded to a halt mere feet from Exeter, its eye shifting purple to red, to stone gray, and back to purple. It made no move to attack, nor protect itself from any hastily thrown together offense she might have chucked at it, though if she had been able to see the battle raging between its larger copy, and Barrusom, she would know that Aracite was not a creature to be taken lightly. Suffice to say, just as it was the case with this cosmos that was being so carelessly torn apart by the Ravager in its quest to feed, so too was it not yet her time to die, though in a few billion years, her Execution date would arrive in a manner just as swift and inevitable as her birth.

For now, so long as she didn't try to interfere with its cosmic rescue operation, it would leave her be.

Turning its slit away to focus on the battle, the facsimile positioned its tentacles like hoses, each one aimed at the numerous rifts produced by the Ravager’s chaotic nature and set to work spraying them down with Dorn’s concentrated essence. It would take time to complete the job, but as with all things, the rifts in the continuum were already starting to show signs of healing, for like peroxide poured onto an open wound, the edges of those portals began to bubble, and break Ebrias apart, initiating in its own microscopic war in stark contrast to the macrocosmic chaotic one that grew closer and closer in proximity to Exeter and the facsimile.