Alucroas

The Family Biz [Open To Apply]

He was on a journey. A personal quest to rediscover a long lost sibling who had been stolen from him by a mad demon. The same demon responsible for driving him into an equally insane trinity of myth, flesh, and steel – of primordial beast, artificial monster, and an accident born from the clash between a noble patriarch and a gluttonous experiment. A distinct lack of meaning for the third’s existence permeated every aspect of his soul, rendering his mind stagnant, and actions worthless. Consequently, the third piece of the abominable amalgam comprising Taluge had his nihilism resolved through the hellish merging of bodies, minds, and souls.

Through him, the way to reclamation of familial unity would be realized, just as the one who was sought had led Tage through the frozen labyrinth of purpose, melting the sealed exit and allowing him to emerge into the stellar warmth of spiritual companionship.

Presently, the consolidated form of the Raging Singularity soared on shadow-tinted platinum wings, propelled by yellow plasma emissions streaming from the tips as well as the soles of his feet, knuckles dragging and skipping across the astral sea whilst the burning propellant vaporized the surreal waters in their wake. Within the rising steam trail, a surge of animated scenes floated up; creatures warring, sadists torturing, inhuman youths frollicking through a combination of differing lands, spun and woven into each other in a manner too abstract for the mind to comprehend. An uncountable number, both simple and complex sprouted, blossomed, and withered into ocean mist, blown away and scattered unto nothingness – reflected in the twin hexagonal shape of a scarlet left, and sapphire right pair of eyes, pupils still and motionless on a draconic face whose serrated lids did not blink. None of it meant anything to him – a raspy, metallic exhale passed through barely opened jaws, everything appearing as mundane as blowing leafs in a damp forest.

A twitch of impatience made him snort, the scent of mundanity leaving him directionless, agitated, and irritable. His frustration amplified his desire, made his mind snuff out all irrelevant details like a blizzard blowing out all the smaller insignificant flames, letting only the brightest infernos survive the storm of longing.

Then it appeared like a bloodstained hurricane.

Nine and a half foot horns released a maroon plume from their tips, billowing everywhere and nowhere, drifting toward the cyclone and being vacuously sucked into the swirling clouds, blending into a liquid mix of decadence and impending doom. It reeked of foulness, triggered thoughts of his damnation, and attracted his wrath like a tower attracting lightning; he would strike out at it until the place was either fried to a crisp, or the difference was so insubstantial as to be non-existent.

Traveling into the storm, his emotions came to a boil, and no amount of magic would be able to hold him together, and thus…

–
A three-sided star rose over a lavender horizon. Its rays illuminated a frozen ocean, the cracks of which hid an infinity of nanoscopic organisms, compacted together into clumps of sleeping maroon. The first face of the stellar mass shone sapphire, assaulting the ice with repeated thunderbolts, gradually penetrating deeper and deeper through the stillness, several of them colliding and repulsing each other, which lead to seismic tremors and a full scale collapse of the glacier.

The crimson face rotated into position, blowing noxious coronal mass onto the broken land, melting away the glaze, causing the ice to fragment more and more until the cracking became splashing and sloshing. More fire was coughed out, hitting the water like globs of molten snot, hissing its surface, evaporating the whole of the ocean into a cloud of scalding steam that only incensed the swelling fury.

Finally, the last face – a mass of platinum, wrapped in shadowy coronal loops turned to view the destruction, but unlike the others, it did not seek to add to the carnage. Instead, a spread of electrical bass thrummed through the sky and plume, followed by high-pitched bytes like fingers racing over a control board. From the depths, a pile of maroon, nanoscopic beings stacked atop each other, constructing a spire that assembled itself in an ascending path toward the star, puncturing it at the point of high noon, and emitted an explosive revving sound, like a chainsaw cord that had been pulled by the hands of a giant.

A nuclear pulse shot pain, agony, and despair into the star, inducing a critical fission reaction that led to structural failure, and ultimately a break in the psyche. The three faces split, the spire's peaks branching out in equivalent directions, their tips expanding into hooks which secreted an amber substance, crystallizing along the arms and snagging the three stars in place. Originally, the crystalline material had been used to produce gaps in genome sequences, wherein new coding could be inserted to act as adhesive to bond foreign strands together – in this soulscape it held a metaphoric function, an abstraction of physical reality reverse engineered into spiritual glue. The strange matter branched upwards, surrounding the stars, and holding them in place, roots feeding on their mass, drinking an infinitesimal, but nonetheless sufficient to ensure their continued stability.

In the aftermath of this controlled mayhem, three draconic drones emerged from the clouds, each bearing a tricloptic set of enlarged eyes, all projecting bright spotlights of colors corresponding to the division of once singular radiant mass, whose ghost was a small, transparent sphere. An indefinite surveillance period was enacted, manifesting as constant orbiting rotations, made all the more necessary by the jagged rifts in the east and west of this domain, through which stellar mass was slowly sucked through…

–

Gray clouds, as dark as the perpetual midnight enshrouding Aeternus swirled into a descending vortex, its tail grazing the edges of a six-story red and white pagoda. Its pull tore half the floor off, and with it several prospective targets of jikininki, their victims falling to the streets in heaps of broken bones and shattered skulls. Ordering the oni guards to investigate the commotion, several units of red and blue-skinned demons brandished iron kanabo clubs and leaped into the tornado to bludgeon the intruder into submission.

On ground level, flanked by rows of gargoyles leaping from their perches, the tornado fizzled out just as quickly as it had arrived, leaving the massive metal dragon hovering in place, the jagged crimson and sapphire scars running from tricep to the mid-section of his forearms flashing a silent blare of spiritual alarm. A few of the stone demons charged Taluge, only for the beast to suddenly spin himself, accompanied by a loud revving sound shaking the glass of gambling window as thousands of micro-blades along his tail harmonized a counter-frequency to their brimstone flesh, producing a sharp embering ring as they were bisected and fell to the streets in shattered chunks of scattered rock. A mad growl quickly turned into a shouting screech as a permeable field of maroon enveloped his form, the deafening cry echoing for miles, its shockwave thoroughly disrupting traffic as it made tires pop, lights flicker on and off, and made the heads of lesser demons burst like blood-filled balloons.

His metallic scales peeled off, hundreds of thousands of wires retracting out of a secondary black layer, eliciting a pained shriek as several gallons of acidic green blood were tossed in random directions. Streetlamps melted, the faces of gamblers and their dealers alike dissolved, doorways collapsing as a strange combination of havoc and excitement ensued as many assumed this to be the start of a demonic parade festival, though others were not so stupid as they fled the scene. By the time the onis hit the ground, a cloud of acidic mist had risen to greet them, their corroding bodies shredded apart as shards of cybernetic steel cut them apart in a whirlwind of ascending shrapnel.

The rising shrapnel menace was quick to reassemble itself, tearing chunks out of minkas, converting wood and paper into a platinum skeleton, that was layered with off-white flesh, and finished with a shadowy rendition of synthetic umbral metal, forming the scaled armor of a distinctly bipedal form that was twenty-four feet tall, and quite broad. Yellow plasma emissions kept Tage aloft, scarlett optical units situated between serrated eyelids darting to and fro and search of a safe place to take perch as the second stage of the demerging process initiated itself.

Settling atop a smoke stack puffing the cremated remains of souls used to restore Aeternus’ power, the Offspring observed the revealed form of Alucroas, his biomass dramatically reduced, excess biomass used to sustain his previous form dissolving a crater into the street. A seam spread along his back, jaws split open horizontally, revealing a second mouth connected to a blackened skull, its lengthy neck functioning as the musculature of a gruesome tongue that hissed a deep, meaty, brazen hiss as it threatened everyone and everything that could hear it. The muscles on his rear and fore inflated, flexing with violent determination as it appeared the one was in fact made of multiple fused pairs, tearing and stripping apart, ending as one rib-cage literally slid free from another, connected only by loosely hanging ligaments and sparking ligaments magnetizing themselves to their original bodies.

Flexing his arms inwards, the seam along Alucroas’ back split wider, like he was tearing a shirt, when in reality it was Zucroas – the first half of the abomination flinging both sides of his back and wings to either side like a torn blanket. Excess vertebrae, neck muscle situated within the split jaws deteriorated and fell, bone pairs separating as the body of the second bipedal component of the monstrous amalgam stood up for a moment and dropped back to all fours. His black skin gradually whitened, scales shrinking down to a size unnoticeable without the aid of microscopic instruments. The fast detachment of separating spines emitted a disturbing sound, vertebrae unzipping, muscle and all wetly stripped and peeled away from each other, with the bottom tail slapping the pavement like so many fools who had used suicide as a futile means of escape from their deals.

The creature that was now more or less standing atop Zucroas pathetically tried to leap as his muscles and bones pulled themselves together, giving the drake enough time for his back to seal itself shut. Somehow it was enough, the physiological and anatomical structures of the two solidifying neatly into place, with Zucroas already raising back up into a full-standing position, the slender, almost feline form of Aludon with his sharply pointed snout, blood-red eyes, and lengthy tail that ended in a sharply curved bone leaping off. Acting on pure whim, Aludon immediately sprinted off, carelessly, and quite recklessly crashing through the window of a lounge where a demoness was just relaxing for a drink. Neither malice, nor aggression characterized his statuesque stop in movement, genuine curiosity born from an inexperience in interacting with beings outside of his trio, and it was very apparent in his wide-eyed stare.

As Tage watched on, his only concern being the safety of his companions, he watched Zucroas with caution as already, the drake was tapping into their shared existential ley-lines, the scarlet aura coated in a thick energy solvent. He felt the flow of souls rushing through the dragon’s nearly pure-white body, the blue and red scars of the dead snapping and crackling in an emission of wrathful sound that almost sounded like knocking on wood, and breaking of bark. His jaw opened wide, tiny human hands compressing into a blue, plasmic light, screaming and wailing pouring from his mouth as he unleashed a beam of pure anguish in the form of a super-condensed stream of souls flowing out as lightning, and aimed at what little remained of the pagoda.

Icy Enmity: Battle in Oerelle's Halls - Alucroas vs Longinus

A faint blue light crackled and streaked across the frozen sky, appearing to shine ever brighter as its draconic source flew closer and closer to the strange architecture. Sensing his destination was near, lightning built at the back of his folding wings, and was compressed into a tight space that was infused with a soft, red underglow as the beast tilted into a vicious nosedive, all of the accumulated energy blasting out behind him in a purplish explosion of heat.

Moving at close to sub-sonic speeds, Zucroas blazed a burning trail through the forest, melting the snow off branches, vaporizing the ice along the ground, and leaving a linear steam plume behind as he zipped toward the thing that had aroused his spirit. The cold air was no hindrance to his sharply pointed snout – as a creature that was not of the natural world, as a dragon whose breath was made of the second strongest force in the universe, he could smell spiritual foulness like a hound sniffing the bloodtrail of a corpse that had been dragged into the woods, and the critters flowing through his blood ensured he felt the threat pulse through every cell in his body.

Such was the gift his new brother had given him.

Round eyes as deep as the ocean dilated wide to take in the palace, big, black pupils a stark contrast to his nearly pure white skin, with scales too smooth and flat to be seen without raising them. Twenty-foot wings folded downward like an umbrella to catch the wind, and a flexible tail, the latter swinging forward and the former opening up to slow him down just enough so that his momentum would land him on the vines. His long muscular arms reached out, the jagged crimson scar on his left, and the sapphire one on his right showing briefly as he used his claws to slice through the thorns in a violent, fast-paced ascent to the entrance, nostrils still flaring as the scent of danger intensified with each pull.

Growing ever more anxious, Zucroas wings flapped furiously, turning his scaling into aggressive leaps, viciously gouging plant flesh as he eagerly, violently rushed up to a massive horizontal split in the cliff-face. The ceiling was spaced a generous fifty feet from the floor, though narrowing considerably at the staircase leading up to the entrance. Zucroas threw himself over the edge, claws raking, and heels cracking the brittle ledge, his attention focused solely on the entrance that he instantly ran toward and up, even going so far as to grab the steps with his claws, and bounding his way into the atrium.

Upon finally making it in, the drake felt his spine tingle, muscles tense, like there was an entity trying its absolute best to fill him with dread and despair for having had the gall to step right into its jaws. What was Zucroas’ reaction to this? His claws on hands and feet alike clenched, neck craned and head swung, tail raised, and altogether at once, made all his joints crack, slammed his tail back down hard enough to break the ground he stood on. As his head finished its swing, Zucroas lurched forward, opened his mouth to a deadly width, and hissed a deep, nasty, meaty hiss, fangs and molars glistening with spilling drool, greeting the supernatural threat with vicious, primal savagery.

Icy Enmity: Battle in Oerelle's Halls - Alucroas vs Longinus

Whoops, wrong part to throw my post in

The Darkness, Eliminating An Eldritch Enemy

The pair’s journey had taken them over a large cluster of grassy knolls, gaps steeped in oppressive darkness, like the sky was made of many giant, but slander hands pressing deep crevices into the terrain. All of them featured a peculiar, and more importantly treacherous pattern, far unlike the lands Jack and Marco had grown accustomed to traversing-- namely, that the knoll groups presented the most danger just after passing the start of a new cluster, wherein adjacent entryways had a tendency of intersecting along various parallel paths.

Reaching the end of their most recent hike, Marco folded the flaps of his overcoat above his waist, procured an 8inch navaja from his pocket and slid it between the cuts he had poked through the corners of his coat’s fabric. He gave the knife of a firm squeeze, closing and infusing it with just enough foul lumos to keep the makeshift knot from loosening.

“A skirt to surpass Mado Queer!” Jack exclaimed in a loud, meaty voice.

“CALLATE ESTUPIDO!” Marco snapped back, squeezing the knife hard enough to shut the blade almost completely, if not for the thickness of his coat’s fabric.

Sighing, Marco decided (at his own peril) to have the Mad Man remind him what they were doing here.

He knew never to expect clear answers out of his friend, nor could he count on him to be anything more than cryptically obtuse, but this time his pal with the black suit vest, charcoal slacks, and finely polished leather shoes, spoke with ominous clarity.

“A…” Polo’s eyes near rolled back as Black’s voice dropped in-depth, whilst climbing in false, high-pitched sarcasm… ”puppet.”

Marco’s tiredness faded as trepidation consumed his stark white face, slowly looking down at Jack, whose own expression was just as colorless, like a man who had lost his soul. He hated dealing with puppets. They were gargantuan sky beasts, servant hunters to a much greater predator--not quite as old as time itself, but old enough to make the two adventurers appear infantile by comparison. The mere thought of having to fight one of those things brought a sag to his broad shoulders.

Yet they couldn’t remain in this place for much longer. Jack Black and Marco Polo could both sense the voracious desire of those bastards between the knolls. They wanted them both, like a bad man needs a gang of thugs.

Groaning quietly, the Spaniard bowed, slamming his forehead against Jack’s modest-sized skull, neither of them so much as flinching from the impact. Marco’s pitch, feline stare met his most trusted man’s cartoonishly wide roof holes, the latter whistling in mischievous approval, the twin arches that framed the sides of his skull flaring slightly--the short, fair hair of the disgustingly tall, and newly resolved primadonna spiked and fell gently back down to to the peak of his brows.

A grating squeal screeched its way out of the pseudo-labyrinth that was the second half of the abyssal knolls, as if some umbral monster, dwelling in the atramentous first section had become aware of the pair’s fresh set of balls.

Broad grins stretched across the pair’s alabaster faces as they turned to face the inevitable confrontation with the beasts that were now the whole damn network. Up until this point, Jack and Marco went over the gaps by leaping, only ever utilizing the entrance when they had to, hence the precautions taken by the Spaniard with his jacket to avoid all the grab and trip hazards of that wretched maze. Jack never truly looked down on him for it-- he was his friend after all, and making fun of this prideful dude meister never, ever failed to entertain.

But now they both had something to make fun of, now they both had a weakness to exploit.

Jack laughed and screamed hysterically on bolting feet, zigzagging his way passed the intersecting thumb and index walls, covered in vines, and whose thorns pistoned out in an attempt to impale the Mad Man. A strange, black wheel with a wide split in the center manifested before Jack, connected to his own index finger by a long string of darkness that he was quick to allow himself to be reeled in by. Shielded from the death-trap, his audacious defiance of the murderous environment rapidly accelerated into an axiomatic onslaught of absurdly agile turns and wall-riding via the mindlessly simplistic shape of a child’s juiced up yo-yo.

A trail of destruction, both human and inhuman, angelic and demonic, earthly, and alien littered the pathway. He ran over generals of armies from planets unheard of, simple tellers of strange food-based currency that could make a honey badger’s white blood cells commit suicide, six-eyed normies, dodecahedron professors who pushed political agendas. Not everything he ran over, sliced up, or scared badly enough for it to leave a brown trail for his wheel of carnage to pick up, and cut a septic infection into was a super sentient, down on their luck shmuck though. Or at least, they weren’t anymore.

Following a parallel cluster, Marco, still butthurt from his amigo’s earlier jab, undid his coat’s folds, turned it inside out, and ran his essence of sickly yellow lumos along what appeared to be hundreds of blades lining what was now the coat’s exterior. In his right hand, the navaja slit the throats of antennae-eyed rip-off merchants, gutted the abdomens of arachnid seductresses, blinded precognitive schemers. With his left hand, he pinned the reaching roots using the power of a kingly legion, each encrusted in hand-sized diamonds, slung from his favorite deck of playing cards.

As he unleashed hell, the threads of his jacket unwove with the firing of his knives, embedding into the bloodstained walls along his path of slaughter. He knew what was waiting for them at the end of the knolls, as did Jack, who had deliberately let himself get punched in the face by a very muscular ogre that had to move about sideways in order to not get stuck.

Jack’s head shot up like a pez dispenser, yo-yo shrinking back to normal size, but not before being flung over the ogre’s head, deploying a circular saw made of energized will, and pulled it back through brute’s occipital lobe, splitting his head in two. Unlike a pez dispenser, but far more useful than the ogre’s split skull, Jack’s head enlarged to three times its normal size, making it just under the size of two basketballs, and began tauntingly repeating a phrase that, to modern generations might just be prehistoric. To those pathetic wretches who couldn’t even succeed at being life-hacking scumbags, and sought to assimilate whoever so happened to enter their un-humble abode of corruption, it was a foreshadowing of their final failure: to escape the hellish escalation about to be wrought by two men who had learned to harness the whimsical chaos that permeated the Darkness.

“NUH UH UH!”

A violent downswing, head encased in a sheen of dark energy, Jack’s face hammered the knolls, releasing tremendous explosions that upended dirt, ripped apart roots, and crushed the spines of all who were in the way. A carnivorous mastodon with stumpy feet, that once used its thick, but not quite long enough trunk to beg apes to hand it fruit, instead used its extendable teeth to skewer and eat them right before receiving its “meal” felt the pez dispenser that was Jack break its skull, bite off its tusks, and launch them at exit ways like miniature warheads. Like the other oversized freak, he also had a purpose, enabling the Mad Man’s bizarre method of delivering justice to victims that would likely never see or hear of their uncanny avengers.

“NUH UH UH!”

Mayhem. Monsters. Carnage. Demons. Panic. Liars. Misfortune. Thieves. Oblivion. Predators.

All of them.

“NUH UH UH!”

He swung everywhere. He hit everything. Nothing survived. Nothing was allowed to escape, and the nothingness that comprised the worth of the countless dead souls of the knolls would come together to make one last stand.

Spilled blood and mashed bone, crushed flesh, and scattered shit, flowed to the sealed exit, soaked through the soil and started to congeal into an unholy mass. The clouds parted, revealing a castle that, while appearing up close, used a maleficent force to non-locally project and cast its magic through a bolt of arcane lightning, empowering the mass to transform itself into an abomination capable of withstanding the duo’s relentless killing spree.

Eight elephantine legs burst from the side, venom soaked tusks protruded from the front, curving like meathooks set to stab deep, narrow pits into the earth. Spiked shoulder pads grew over its knees, silken spinners growing atop sprouted trunks emitting a seducing sound, meant to lure their killers into a fatal embrace before tying them up. A final pair of fleshy arms grew from the monstrosity’s rear, wielding two giant clubs wrapped in thorns that ended in root tips meant for sucking the life out of whatever it could manage to impale.

“NUH UH UH!” Jack shouted with a vibrato capable of shattering that abomination’s big dumbo ears had it been smart enough to grow any.

“You did not say the magic word!” Marco shouted in plain English.

Enraged, the monstrosity fired its tusks at the pair, only for Jack to launch two spheres of condensed darkness from his mouth, engulfing and incinerating ivory projectiles before blowing up its two front legs, fissuring the ground as it fell forward. His taunt came once again. Marco raged back at the beast, the buttons of his white dress shirt resembling coins for just a moment as he furiously tugged on the threads of his overcoat, pulling the terrain he had hooked his knives into up and overhead in the shape of a colossal, diamond strewn dome.

“NUH UH UH UH, CABRON!”

“They didn’t rub their magic wand enough!”

Struggling already, Jack and Marco delighted in the creature’s futile acts. Did those worms think for even a moment they could defeat the psychotic best friends!? The difference was never a matter of strength or power, it was of conviction, of desire: a lowly desire for wealth, for influence, for status, authority, and a million slave wives to pass on their lineage could never hope to kill them. These beings wanted to preserve themselves, their livings, and all it would ever lead to was maybe a slightly larger knoll, for the Darkness, despite all its whimsical glory, knew from their past collective failings, that it would all eventually fail once again-- infighting, greed, power mongers, warmongers, harbingers of chaos and discord.

It all fell apart so easily, because it had all been built and established on weak morals, held together with glue that could be dissolved with a baby’s toothless saliva.

The nameless abomination hurled its clubs at Jack, and this time Marco yanked hard enough to rip his knives free, shredding the weapons to wood chips with a flurry of daggers. Then it tried to charge on its four remaining legs, trunks emitting spineless words for the weak, that for a moment, might have reached the ears of a lesser region, but those miscreants were few and far between, for the wall of diamonds caught and reflected the sound using the dome an orpheum sound echoer.

This counter-strategy led to the monster’s undoing as it heard its own message of “JOIN THE KNOLL, BUT FIRST PAY THE TOLL!” being driven back into its own ears. Stupid as it was, easily seduced as it was, the moronic colossus actually started begging to join its killers, believing them to be their ticket to the big leagues. The absurdity of how fast it was all happening would have astonished Jack and Marco, had they not seen acts like this play out a million times over. Normally they wouldn’t even bother giving these jerks the time of day, but knowing that they had to face a puppet spurred their need to seek and destroy it, and if engaging a cluster of nobodies in a fight meant achieving that goal faster then so be it.

“LET US JOIN THE KNOLL!” It cried again, web spinnerettes attempting to entangle and pull the duo closer, who only kept repeating their phrase of “NUH UH UH!” back at the imbeciles, who just couldn’t seem to get it through their head.

The skin on Jack’s face disintegrated its way up the entirety of his face, incinerating his hair, and leaving naught but a plain, bald head that appeared to be made of dark-gray onyx with a vague, sandpaper texture. Transparent smoke wafted off his cranium, teeth white as snow bared in an emotionless stare that made him ditch the taunt he and Marco had been repeating for a full five minutes now. His hysterical laughter took on a smooth, velvety gutteralness, his real voice a far more masculine thing than the post-pubescent mockery of a clever and affable late teen male, eyes downcast on the worthless being he and Marco were about to reduce to cinders.

“WHY!” It pleaded, its voice almost sounding innocent despite how malicious it had proved itself to be.

“Because that thing in the sky,” Jack said, looking up, “deserves to die.”

“Just like you, puto.” Marco complimented.

Marco’s blades aligned together in front of Jack, assuming a broad cone formation, spinning so quickly as to blur the blades into a drill that glistened and sparkled what little light managed to pierce the clouds. The ashen shadows rising off Jack’s head flowed into the cone, imbuing them with the aspect of darkness that made the Mad Man unique among the various inhabitants roaming this strange universe: deterioration, not too unlike Marco’s aspect of denigration that sought to weaken through disparaging ridicule, a trait as of late unseen, and likely the very reason he had reacted so loudly to Jack’s meaningless insult.

Regardless of who they were, and what their abilities represented, what this thing was, and what it represented were being slowly eradicated as the darkness wielded by the two travelers perforated its physical essence with a hundred skewering stabs. Flesh and bone received narrow, diamond holes, quickly filling up with atomizing dust that spread and aged the lethargic chimera to crumbling particles, which themselves decayed the nothingness they were born of, lived as, and died as.

The remnants of their petty existences weren't even fit to float on the wind, for their toxic stench might have choked the life out of a more promising villain.

Once it was all over, Jack emerged, back to his good old funny self, the mask he used to filter his true nature through and served as his face resumed its cartoonish facade. Marco turned his overcoat outside in, the legion of diamond-encrusted kings returned to their master’s playing cards, and he could finally walk without having to worry about his friend’s stupid little jabs.

The castle in the sky disappeared, the clouds closed up, and as the light began to fade, and the Darkness returned to its normal state, the two pals could see marshlands dotted with enormous pines, and two figures waiting in a meadow.

The Darkness, Eliminating An Eldritch Enemy

The pair’s journey had taken them over a large cluster of grassy knolls, gaps steeped in oppressive darkness, like the sky was made of many giant, but slander hands pressing deep crevices into the terrain. All of them featured a peculiar, and more importantly treacherous pattern, far unlike the lands Jack and Marco had grown accustomed to traversing-- namely, that the knoll groups presented the most danger just after passing the start of a new cluster, wherein adjacent entryways had a tendency of intersecting along various parallel paths.

Reaching the end of their most recent hike, Marco folded the flaps of his overcoat above his waist, procured an 8inch navaja from his pocket and slid it between the cuts he had poked through the corners of his coat’s fabric. He gave the knife of a firm squeeze, closing and infusing it with just enough foul lumos to keep the makeshift knot from loosening.

“A skirt to surpass Mado Queer!” Jack exclaimed in a loud, meaty voice.

“CALLATE ESTUPIDO!” Marco snapped back, squeezing the knife hard enough to shut the blade almost completely, if not for the thickness of his coat’s fabric.

Sighing, Marco decided (at his own peril) to have the Mad Man remind him what they were doing here.

He knew never to expect clear answers out of his friend, nor could he count on him to be anything more than cryptically obtuse, but this time his pal with the black suit vest, charcoal slacks, and finely polished leather shoes, spoke with ominous clarity.

“A…” Polo’s eyes near rolled back as Black’s voice dropped in-depth, whilst climbing in false, high-pitched sarcasm… ”puppet.”

Marco’s tiredness faded as trepidation consumed his stark white face, slowly looking down at Jack, whose own expression was just as colorless, like a man who had lost his soul. He hated dealing with puppets. They were gargantuan sky beasts, servant hunters to a much greater predator--not quite as old as time itself, but old enough to make the two adventurers appear infantile by comparison. The mere thought of having to fight one of those things brought a sag to his broad shoulders.

Yet they couldn’t remain in this place for much longer. Jack Black and Marco Polo could both sense the voracious desire of those bastards between the knolls. They wanted them both like a bad man needs a gang of thugs.

Groaning quietly, the Spaniard bowed, slamming his forehead against Jack’s modest-sized skull, neither of them so much as flinching from the impact. Marco’s pitch, feline stare met his most trusted man’s cartoonishly wide roof holes, the latter whistling in mischievous approval, the twin arches that framed the sides of his skull flaring slightly--the short, fair hair of the disgustingly tall, and newly resolved primadonna spiked and fell gently back down to to the peak of his brows.

A grating squeal screeched its way out of the pseudo-labyrinth that was the second half of the abyssal knolls, as if some umbral monster, dwelling in the atramentous first section had become aware of the pair’s fresh set of balls.

Broad grins stretched across the pair’s alabaster faces as they turned to face the inevitable confrontation with the beasts that were now the whole damn network. Up until this point, Jack and Marco went over the gaps by leaping, only ever utilizing the entrance when they had to, hence the precautions taken by the Spaniard with his jacket to avoid all the grab and trip hazards of that wretched maze. Jack never truly looked down on him for it-- he was his friend after all, and making fun of this prideful dude meister never, ever failed to entertain.

But now they both had something to make fun of, now they both had a weakness to exploit.

Jack laughed and screamed hysterically on bolting feet, zigzagging his way passed the intersecting thumb and index walls, covered in vines, and whose thorns pistoned out in an attempt to impale the Mad Man. A strange, black wheel with a wide split in the center manifested before Jack, connected to his own index finger by a long string of darkness that he was quick to allow himself to be reeled in by. Shielded from the death-trap, his audacious defiance of the murderous environment rapidly accelerated into an axiomatic onslaught of absurdly agile turns and wall-riding via the mindlessly simplistic shape of a child’s juiced up yo-yo.

A trail of destruction, both human and inhuman, angelic and demonic, earthly, and alien littered the pathway. He ran over generals of armies from planets unheard of, simple tellers of strange food-based currency that could make a honey badger’s white blood cells commit suicide, six-eyed normies, dodecahedron professors who pushed political agendas. Not everything he ran over, sliced up, or scared badly enough for it to leave a brown trail for his wheel of carnage to pick up, and cut a septic infection into was a super sentient, down on their luck shmuck though. Or at least, they weren’t anymore.

Following a parallel cluster, Marco, still butthurt from his amigo’s earlier jab, undid his coat’s folds, turned it inside out, and ran his essence of sickly yellow lumos along what appeared to be hundreds of blades lining what was now the coat’s exterior. In his right hand, the navaja slit the throats of antennae-eyed rip-off merchants, gutted the abdomens of arachnid seductresses, blinded precognitive manipulators of future events. With his left hand, he pinned the reaching roots using the power of a kingly legion, each encrusted in hand-sized diamonds, slung from his favorite deck of playing cards.

As he unleashed hell, the threads of his jacket unwove with the firing of his knives, embedding into the bloodstained walls along his path of slaughter. He knew what was waiting for them at the end of the knolls, as did Jack, who had deliberately let himself get punched in the face by a very muscular ogre that had to move about sideways in order to not get stuck.

Jack’s head shot up like a pez dispenser, yo-yo shrinking back to normal size, but not before being flung over the ogre’s head, deploying a circular saw made of energized will, and pulled it back through brute’s occipital lobe, splitting his head in two. Unlike a pez dispenser, but far more useful than the ogre’s split skull, Jack’s head enlarged to three times its normal size, making it just under the size of two basketballs, and began tauntingly repeating a phrase that, to modern generations might just be prehistoric. To those pathetic wretches who couldn’t even succeed at being life-hacking scumbags, and sought to assimilate whoever so happened to enter their un-humble abode of corruption, it was a foreshadowing of their final failure: to escape the hellish escalation about to be wrought by two men who had learned to harness the whimsical chaos that permeated the Darkness.

“NUH UH UH!”

A violent downswing, head encased in a sheen of dark energy, Jack’s face hammered the knolls, releasing tremendous explosions that upended dirt, ripped apart roots, and crushed the spines of all who were in the way. A carnivorous mastodon with stumpy feet, that once used its thick, but not quite long enough trunk to beg apes to hand it fruit, instead used its extendable teeth to skewer and eat them right before receiving its “meal” felt the pez dispenser that was Jack break its skull, bite off its tusks, and launch them at exit ways like miniature warheads. Like the other oversized freak, he also had a purpose, enabling the Mad Man’s bizarre method of delivering justice to victims that would likely never see or hear of their uncanny avengers.

“NUH UH UH!”

Mayhem. Monsters. Carnage. Demons. Panic. Liars. Misfortune. Thieves. Oblivion. Predators.

All of them.

“NUH UH UH!”

He swung everywhere. He hit everything. Nothing survived. Nothing was allowed to escape, and the nothingness that comprised the worth of the countless dead souls of the knolls would come together to make one last stand.

Spilled blood and mashed bone, crushed flesh, and scattered shit, flowed to the sealed exit, soaked through the soil and started to congeal into an unholy mass. The clouds parted, revealing a castle that, while appearing up close, used a maleficent force to non-locally project and cast its magic through a bolt of arcane lightning, empowering the mass to transform itself into an abomination capable of withstanding the duo’s relentless killing spree.

Eight elephantine legs burst from the side, venom soaked tusks protruded from the front, curving like meathooks set to stab deep, narrow pits into the earth. Spiked shoulder pads grew over its knees, silken spinners growing atop sprouted trunks emitting a seducing sound, meant to lure their killers into a fatal embrace before tying them up. A final pair of fleshy arms grew from the monstrosity’s rear, wielding two giant clubs wrapped in thorns that ended in root tips meant for sucking the life out of whatever it could manage to impale.

“NUH UH UH!” Jack shouted with a vibrato capable of shattering that abomination’s big dumbo ears had it been smart enough to grow any.

“You did not say the magic word!” Marco shouted in plain English.

Enraged, the monstrosity fired its tusks at the pair, only for Jack to launch two spheres of condensed darkness from his mouth, engulfing and incinerating ivory projectiles before blowing up its two front legs, fissuring the ground as it fell forward. His taunt came once again. Marco raged back at the beast, the buttons of his white dress shirt resembling coins for just a moment as he furiously tugged on the threads of his overcoat, pulling the terrain he had hooked his knives into up and overhead in the shape of a colossal, diamond strewn dome.

“NUH UH UH UH, CABRON!”

“They didn’t rub their magic wand enough!”

Struggling already, Jack and Marco delighted in the creature’s futile acts. Did those worms think for even a moment they could defeat the psychotic best friends!? The difference was never a matter of strength or power, it was of conviction, of desire: a lowly desire for wealth, for influence, for status, authority, and a million slave wives to pass on their lineage could never hope. These beings wanted to preserve themselves, their livings, and all it would ever lead to was maybe a slightly larger knoll, for the Darkness, despite all its whimsical glory, knew from their past collective failings, that it would all eventually fail once again-- infighting, greed, power mongers, war mongers, harbingers of chaos and discord.

It all fell apart so easily, because it had all been built and established on weak morals, held together with glue that could be dissolved with a baby’s toothless saliva.

The nameless abomination hurled its clubs at Jack, and this time Marco yanked hard enough to rip his knives free, shredding the weapons to wood chips with a flurry of daggers. Then it tried to charge on its four remaining legs, trunks emitting spineless words for the weak, that for a moment, might have reached the ears of a lesser region, but those miscreants were few and far between, for the wall of diamonds caught and reflected the sound using the dome an orpheum sound echoer.

This counter-strategy led to the monster’s undoing as it heard its own message of “JOIN THE KNOLL, BUT FIRST PAY THE TOLL!” being driven back into its own ears. Stupid as it was, easily seduced as it was, the moronic colossus actually started begging to join its killers, believing them to be their ticket to the big leagues. The absurdity of how fast it was all happening would have astonished Jack and Marco, had they not seen acts like this play out a million times over. Normally they wouldn’t even bother giving these jerks the time of day, but knowing that they had to face a puppet spurred their need to seek and destroy it, and if engaging a cluster of nobodies in a fight meant achieving that goal faster then so be it.

“LET US JOIN THE KNOLL!” It cried again, web spinnerettes attempting to entangle and pull the duo closer, who only kept repeating their phrase of “NUH UH UH!” back at the imbeciles, who just couldn’t seem to get it through their head.

The skin on Jack’s chin burned its way up the entirety of his face, incinerating his hair, and leaving naught but a plain bald man’s head that appeared to be made of black solidified ash shaped into a face. Transparent smoke trailed from his cranium, teeth white as snow bared in an emotionless stare that made him ditch the taunt he and Marco had been repeating for a full five minutes now. His hysterical laughter took on a smooth, velvety gutteralness, his real voice a far more masculine thing than the post-pubescent mockery of a clever and affable late teen male, eyes downcast on the worthless being he and Marco were about to reduce to cinders.

“WHY!” It pleaded, its voice almost sounding innocent despite how malicious it had proved itself to be.

“Because that thing in the sky,” Jack said, looking up, “deserves to die.”

“Just like you, puto.” Marco complimented.

Marco’s blades aligned together before Jack, gathering into the shape of a cone, spinning so quickly as to blur the blades into a drill that glistened and sparked with what little light that managed to make it through the clouds. The ashen shadows rising off Jack’s head flowed into the cone, imbuing them with the aspect of darkness that made the Mad Man unique among the various inhabitants roaming this strange universe: deterioration, not too unlike Marco’s aspect of denigration that sought to weaken through disparaging ridicule, likely the very reason he had reacted so loudly to Jack’s meaningless insult.

Regardless of who they were and what they represented, what this thing was, and what it represented were being slowly eradicated as the darkness within the two perforated its physical essence with a hundred stabs, hollowfying flesh and bone, whilst burning and atomizing them to the nothingness they were born, lived, and died as, not even fit to be scattered on the wind.

Not even fit to fall to the ground and stain the knoll that at one point, might have made someone a good and peaceful home.
Once it was all over, Jack emerged, back to his good old funny self, the mask he used to filter his true nature through and serve as his face resuming its cartoonish look over his face. Marco turned his overcoat outside in, the legion of diamond-encrusted kings returned to their master’s playing cards, and he could finally walk without having to worry about his friend’s stupid little jabs.

The castle in the sky disappeared, the clouds closed up, and as the light began to fade, and the Darkness resumed its normal state, the two pals could see marshlands dotted with enormous pines, and two figures waiting in a meadow.

Every Mutt has its Dog Day (F67X)

He was in a daze. Too much had happened in too short a time. Arthur, Allure, the Val’gara, Jessica, Jack. The only one missing was Agron, whose absence left a very particular void in the operative’s soul, like losing an animal companion--a very powerful animal companion. He wondered if the creature was still alive somewhere.

And then the president walked in. The last person he wanted to see.

A scowl nearly formed out of his melancholy as he briefly met Ammon’s stare, fully aware of the manipulative tones and mannerisms he used to feign friendship. He had interviewed enough criminals, captured enough psychopaths, and watched a little too much CNN to be fooled by this cheap display. Apollo had no friends. Only allies and enemies. If he was here for something, it was to either assign him another mission, or scorn him all the way to hell, and considering the style he used to decorate his office with, the latter seemed far more likely.

“We were informed of an alien invasion by Heinzmann. After that, we flew to Allure, and decided to investigate the city on our own. Then…

He hesitated for a moment as he felt his blood starting to boil. “The psi-emitter, Agron went crazy. I knew what was waiting. We knew what was waiting.”

That thing.

“I found it. Found one of them. It… it spoke like it knew who I was.” Thomas said, recalling in shock, and bewilderment by the recollection of the creature screaming at him to stop hurting it. “It mentioned my name, my dead girlfriend.

“It knew so much.”

Thomas grabbed his ribs, remembering the spot where the monster impaled him, and sent them both plummeting into the inferno. “I was hurt, but the pain didn’t matter. I wanted to kill it more than anything, just like the part of me that still wants to kill that thing for killing her.”

A deep breath was taken with closed eyes by Thomas, and then he began the end of his summary. “My skull was breaking, it wouldn’t stop surviving, and I brought death down on us both. I managed to trap it in an astral room. He shot accusations at me, spat hatred in my face, and the facade, just like the one you’re wearing in front of me, now finally came undone.

“Jack. Jessica. They’re alive.”

Unsolicited Invasion (Earth-F67X Chronicle)

Eddie's eyes widened as the screen lit up, his brother's newly reformed jaw cracking as it parted at the sight of what was shown. Nothing could prepare them for the shock that gripped them in the sky, for in that moment, the vampire’s cold, yellow eyes were drawn to the sensation of what felt like sweat sliding down his temple. It was actually just a last drop of lab water that had escaped between dead, white strands of the monster’s tightly kept hair, and yet that single drop was enough to induce a powerful feeling of recognition that drew his eyes back to the screen.

Through that screen, he recognized himself, the city of Allure, the planet called Earth, and most importantly, despite not truly knowing it, he comprehended all of those things, as well as their relative positions. He understood them. Why? Because he knew what it was like to be at the bottom. Eddie knew what it was like to be a weak, defenseless human, helpless against forces greater than his own, that had transformed him into an undead creature of the night. He knew how his position had changed since then, how he and Goldman had grown strong enough to stand up to those forces and destroy them.

Now he had to stand up to this.

Returning his attention to the old man, Eddie spoke his demands with a refreshed aura about him.

"We want double.

"The first half is for repairs to our business, and the second will be for lost future gains that will come as a result of these repairs."

Goldman's jaw closed with another chain of cracks, followed by more as he slowly raised his head, tightening his tie with his golden fingers in the process. His moment of tidying himself up would have to wait, for as he reached with his right, golden index finger to adjust his sunglasses, he instead moved it back to his earpiece in response to a voice speaking through a cloud of supernatural static. The owner of the voice possessed a thick, west Texas accent, and spoke his words with full, unironic ease, betraying the complete urgency of the message he was conveying to the brothers.

"Leadahs of th --ite Sy--d-cate. It mig-- b- ti-e to consider --sten readyin’ the horse and carriage."

"..."

Goldman rotated his neck to face his brother, who heard everything that was said over the rapidly clearing link.

Eddie looked over at Caldwell, then back at his brother, whose partially scrunched brows and pursed lips reinforced the fact that this was not a call to be put on hold. “Excuse us.”

The Texan took the vampire’s request to the stranger on the other end as a sign to continue his address. "As Ah’m sure you are keenly aware, the wolves have come out of their dens, and they brought the whole damn pack with ‘em.”

“The seventh syndicate has yet to show itself, Jackson.”

“Right you are, Mr.Goldman, but from the way things stand now, we may not have a choice.”

"Don’t listen to that bullshit," came a different voice, the words tinged with a strain that came with being injured all over, "this requires that all seven syndicate leaders be present, or we’ll be devoured. So when I said six isn't enough, I meant SIX of you isn't enough."

"Heh heh, calm down, Pawn." Ron coolly interjected, "Ah’m sure they’ll get the message one way or another."

“N-NO!” the right hand of the Red Syndicate shouted with agonized warning. “It’s YOU, Ron who isn’t getting it. All seven demons HAVE to be satisfied. If we don’t satisfy all seven of them, they could turn on one of us, each other, or even worse...themselves.”

The ivory suited monster’s brow rose at the sudden introduction of new and dangerous information. “What exactly does he mean by six of us isn’t enough. You told us he said we needed seven, and while I am inclined to believe him due to what he is, WHY seven? What is the importance of it?”

“He means that if we wake up one of those things, and it ain’t satisfied with our the amount of evil we got festerin’ our hearts, it’ll punish us for wasting its time.”

“Not...entirely.” Pawn said more calmly, having managed to suppress some of the pain he was in. “It doesn’t capture the full scope of what could go wrong. They too will suffer for failing to bond with their prospective partners, or rather it’s what they will resort to doing if they realize they are lacking the ‘right stuff’, that will lead to the mission’s failure.”

“Then what is the full scope, Seraphim. Tell me, before this man decides not to reimburse me for my losses. Enlighten me nooow.” The end of his sentence came with snarling hiss. The vexing nature of the day’s numerous events had not been kind to a six-hundred-year-old creature of the night, whose only desire was to be left alone, so he could quietly run his syndicate.

“Listen, Goldy.” This time the shinobi spoke in a manner that sounded nearly relaxed. “Demons are not without feelings. What separates a human from a demon is that demons only truly resonate with one thing--the sin they were born from.

“What unites men with demons is their urge to bond with that which is most familiar to them, helping them to feel complete. Humans are willing to forego certain aspects of themselves, all for the sake of fitting in. Demons on the other hand are very bad at this--in fact, they’re terrible at it. Their nature is far closer to that of an animal--driven predominantly by primal instinct, yet still able to convey their feelings with lucidity due to being sentient.”

Eddie couldn’t help but roll his eyes at this. “I didn’t ask for a demonology lecture, Pawn. I want to know why they demand such a specific number.”

“There are seven deadly sins: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride...”

“Yes, yes...get to the point...” Eddie was now tapping his cane against the floor, exhaustion kicking in.

“A demon of envy will only be able to truly bond with a man who has envy in his heart, but that envy must be strong.” Pawn stated. “The same goes for all the others, but as I said there are only SEVEN deadly sins, not six, not five, not four - seven. If six people travel to Hell, and bond with six demons, the last remaining demon will do whatever it takes to create a bond.”

“Really now?” The ninja had the vampire uncharacteristically intrigued now. “Anything?”

“It may try to disguise itself as a different sin in order to match the evil most prominent in one of the syndicate leader’s hearts.”

“And?”

“And it would 100% backfire. We’re talking about the two of you forming a spiritual tether that will bind your souls together. To lie about who you are, to disguise your true self, this leads to an unstable tether and will invite pure chaos. This chaos will bury itself within the core of your being, and unlike a curse that corrupts a person gradually... this will make your soul explode--and I promise you--there won’t be any second chances.

“No resurrection.

“No reincarnation.

“Permanent. Karmic. Death.

“Your own personal omega.”

Eddie was at a loss for words. Before he could get halfway through clearing his throat, Ron said something which caught the Ivory Monster by surprise.

“Why don’t you go get somethin’ t’drink, boah. Ya sound parched.”

The Meatspin

If you're really that eager to fight then just attack someone in your intro. No one's gonna stop you.

The Meatspin

So has no one actually attacked yet? While I like meandering around writing about particulate matter and saying the words 'multiverse' and 'bose Einstein condensate' and other buzz words for God tier fights as much as the next guy, I'm only interested if any of that will actually happen. So far it's following the tell-tale pacing of God tier fights of old, which is to say a buncha' dudes trying to out-tryhard each other in the literary sense with 5 bajillion word posts of absolutely shit-nothing really happening :/.

@Gun

We have merely posted our intros, which is standard for any fight, small or large scale. There will be fighting, rest assured, as we very deliberately picked the Arena RolePlay as our sub-forum, specifically so people would know that this is a free for all brawl.

You should join the guild discord, so we can talk more directly.

Unsolicited Invasion (Earth-F67X Chronicle)

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.