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.
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