Chapter 373 - Comprehension And The Violence It Brings

A little late but we back. I changed my mind- I feel like a quick victory only doubles down on my "villain problem", i.e. my lack of in-your-face active antagonists. So I did this instead!

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Peace is found only in the grave. Rest is found only in the grave. Sleep is found only in the grave.

We are not in the grave. We may pass through it, rise from it, build it and fill it in turn, but it is not us any longer.

We choose to continue. We choose to suffer existence for our own sakes. 

Embrace Death. The rest, leave behind.

-Parable from the Sermon In The Dig, Godsfall, 634 Post-Revelation

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The plan was always simple. There were a few things that came off as obvious from the moment that she started thinking through the ways that things would have to go to get what she needs, and the battle so far has only proved them further.

Thing the first: the Bishops all know each other.

Thing the second: they all, in their minds, have bigger shit going on.

Thing the third, which can be used only once before it is no longer in anyone’s head because she’s beaten it out of them: they don’t think she’s all that.  

It’s not hard to see why, in their defense. Less than a year ago, she arrived as someone with barely any understanding of Death or spellcraft, and she lost the powers she did have practically on arrival. In every interaction with the assorted groups of the Fallen Kingdom outside of Godsfall, she’s highlighted her position as an outsider, played up the apparent ignorance of the Church’s customs, and acted like an arrogant idiot in the same meeting where she spat in the face of their biggest hitter and threatened the whole clergy at once. Add to that how entirely overlooked she’s been in favor of Jin, their “Blessed Mortal” (and she’s still not totally sure what that means), and it’s only made it easier to play up the idea of herself as a bumbling asshole, too arrogant for her own good, building on the very reasonable thought that there’s no way she’d be able to do or understand much yet.

Then again, kind of their own fault for falling for it so hard. And for being reasonable. Idiots. 

Having lost her status as a posthuman Replicator doesn’t mean she’s lost the perspective it gave, or the assorted skills. Less than a year as a necromancer and she’s managed to cobble together a functional kit, capable of taking on a variety of challenges and offload a lot of the risks of messiness and inexperience with violent payoffs, one way or another. Working directly with so many other Bishops in their outlier-city and training with her very own mad genius and weirdly intuitive magic superkid hasn’t let her catch up, but catching up and getting close enough to trip somebody and hit them with a bat are two different things.

So an expeditionary force, launched quickly enough to crush a reckless, rushed, self-evidently underprepared little insult and challenge made by the youngest, least intelligent, least savvy, and most non-native of all possible Bishops? From a certain perspective, not that bad of a plan.

She smiles at the Bishop, clothing herself in drifting wisps of Echo-stuff as she keeps her rifle pointed dead-center on the mechanical titan’s mask. 

“So?” she asks. “What’s it gonna be? Surrender, or am I going to have to waste more time with you?”

The ten-legged gun-platform of a person (woman? Maybe. Hard to tell, and hardly that important) whirrs as it shifts, though Raika notes that none of the cannons turn to aim at her. Considering the amount of force that they can unleash, it’s not exactly disarming, but a good sign anyways.

From out of its chassis, a hissing voice of venting heat and shifting ammo-chains emerges, echoing through the crater. “You are… surprising.”

The hammer on the rifle goes click.

“You haven’t surrendered yet.”

Another shift, this time accompanied by a rattling sound. Even as they’ve spoken, in spite of the Dao of Pain and the amount of power infused with it, the bullet hole has started to shift closed, gears, pistons and other industrial parts slowly clicking into sequence to fill in the damage. It’s slow, nowhere near as instantaneous as it probably could be, but that’s the whole point- the Rifle Made Of Pain, in particular, isn’t made for killing things, it’s made for wounding, disrupting, slowing down enemies even outside her weight class. It doesn’t even seem to be an active process- the machinery of the undead armory just seems to be moving on its own. 

“It is my loss. Even should I secure victory here, my objective would be… unfulfilled. You were not the easily-crushed target that was demanded of this one.”

“So say it,” Raika hisses, eyes hard and her finger on the trigger. “Or I keep blowing chunks off until the bug gets here to take a bite.”

The cannons swivel slightly, the mask’s gunsmoke eyes hard against her own… and then the body of the machine sags, ever so slightly, ceasing some of its auto-repair functions.

“Very well. I surrender myself, and my forces, to the Clergy of Godsfall, under the expectation that I and that which I command be granted the rights owed to all prisoners of war. You have your victory, Bishop Rai Ka. Is there more you would demand, or may I see to my repair?”

She sighs, then brings another grin back up, letting the Rifle fall back onto her shoulder as she uncocks the hammer. “Please! Be my guest. This one wouldn’t dare to inconvenience a fellow member of the Clergy in removing the marks of resounding defeat.”

She’s not totally sure if the hissing and clanking of the Bishop of Mortaria means begrudging acceptance of her wit or that they’ve taken serious insult about it. They may empower their words with Intent, but ironically, most of them don’t really seem to use that much of it in their moment-to-moment actions. Dead things, as it turns out, are hard to read, even when they’re moving. 

The humming that’s been approaching since the start of their conversation finally reaches a high enough pitch to make the dirt shake and tremble, bits of debris rattling and falling down the lip of the crater as her Gu approaches. Its wings are visible first- rising towards the heavens in a cloud of fractal shapes, there are dozens of wings, halfway between those of a moth and those of a dragonfly, beating fast enough to appear as strange hazes in the air. She’s pretty sure the only reason they’re visible at all is because they’re actively bumping into each other, growing as an uncontrolled mass of random expansion rather than anything really harmonious- still, they keep the body at their center aloft. 

Cresting over the hillside their conflict’s created, the main body of the Gu looks like a pale dot at the center of the semi-visible aurora, staring down with a mouth much too wide for its body and eyes much too alien to be insectile. It’s grown. What was once a grublike central body has expanded to look more like a tick, bloated far in excess of its original body mass, and the distressingly human mouth at its front drools a constant stream of spit and Echo-stuff. 

It hovers there, its body approaching the center of the crater, the semi-visible aurora of its chaotic wing-mass covering the sky above entirely in a haze as it drools down into the crater.

Raika doesn’t point her gun at the thing. She doesn’t let the instinctual, pre-biology fear of being Consumed by the thing above her appear on the surface, nor does she let her annoyance at the thought of having to murder the damn thing come through. 

“Bug! Go fetch my arm! If you find it, you can have a piece as a snack.”

It hesitates, semi-intelligent eyes roiling in their sockets by the dozens… but it does shift, gradually pulling itself away and across the battlefield.

“Kids, right? They grow up so fast. Puberty is a nightmare.”

“That… thing. It is your child?”

She opens her mouth to protest- then pauses, thinks. “Admittedly, I’ve seen enough to know that’s a possibility. Not in the traditional sense, no. I made it, though. Put in in a jar full of bugs and my Death and some guts, put a bunch of barely functional scriptwork on it, buried it in the dirt, and now I’ve got a fucked-up bug following me around.”

The Detonation-engine shaped like a person rises, multi-limbed branches of mechanisms and artillery rumbling and making strange metallic echoes as they shift. The mask, partially filled in by the metallic pieces interlocking behind it, is focused on Raika, entirely, as if dedicating all of its attention to her.

“Oh come on, I can’t be the first one who figured it out. Maybe not the bug-jar thing, that’s more an old scary story they would tell kids back where I came from, but something that eats Death can’t be new.”

“Our purview is mastery of Death, and that which comes for it and births from it. There have been other… things like your abomination, but none so organic. None so… blindingly chaotic. Batteries, reliquaries, rituals which consume Death and create something more alive are known, but only ever to provide yet greater Death-energies later on. This is dangerous.”

Raika smiles, hearing the buzzing drone of the Gu heading back. “I’m dangerous,” she says, letting Intent and True-speak fill her words to match the Bishop’s.

“Yes. I see that now. I see why the Giant takes interest in you. I see why you have been allowed to do what you have done.”

She pauses at that, tilting her head. “Allowed? That’s an interesting choice of words.”

“You are the bastard experiment of a mad city,” hisses the venting air of the impossible cleric, echoing out from between slats of steel and armor plating. “They are not the first city to fall to Stillness, and may perhaps have been the last. Those who fall to Stasis are only a step closer to the End in turn. Their role was always to spend themselves when the time came, that the Fallen Kingdom could be reborn through the Death of the world and the inversion of its End, a sacrifice on the pyre to bring about the true corpse-world that is yet to come.

“They demonstrate the greatest of flaws- to Die in truth, rather than as a means to an end. In their fear of it, they have gambled on a mad abomination of a ‘Bishop’, and risk themselves to hold to the Blessed Mortal.”

The humming grows louder, until the too-human and too-alien corpse of the Gu moth is above again. The colors of the sky above ripple and change in the haze of its wings, the droning and crackling of its chaotic beating filling the air. 

From above, a piece of shrapnel falls, Blacksteel shaped into a prosthetic now reduced to ball joints and the illusion of bone. She frowns up at the Gu, though it doesn’t seem to mind- she can hear the crunching of the rest of the arm in its maw even now.

With a flex of will, the prosthetic hums and launches itself back to her, reattaching into the shoulder. Its existence is somewhere between the rest of her corpse and an anchor-point for her Self- more durable and potent than regular corpse-flesh, but harder to replace. She can feel budding little shards starting to sprout and splinter now that it’s reconnected, though- it’ll “heal” sooner than later.

“Well, considering they’re letting me beat the shit out of you all, I’d say it’s a solid trade-off. Finding the crazy ones is how I make most of my friends these days, really.” 

Her gaze turns back to the Bishop, in all its mechanical glory. “I appreciate the insight. Insult my allies again, and I’ll have to take offense. Good manners and all.”

A hammer cocks back somewhere inside the Bishop’s body, which Raika thinks is sort of like a snort.

“There is no need for insult. They are known to me. We have met and battled and healed and worked alongside each other for centuries. Their final Deaths would have been noble, honorable, but your presence galvanizing them is not a sin. Ill-timed, perhaps, but such is the workings of Fate.”

“Good. I think-”

“But you have made clear to me that your presence cannot be allowed to further endanger our progress. The Church stands ready to confront the End- stomping you out will only serve to bring us back to wholeness. A schism in the clergy will only harm us at this juncture.”

Raika tilts her head. The energy had already been shifting from the moment the Gu arrived, and now, as it hovers over them, it’s only gotten more marked.

“Well, I could use a demolitions expert on the right side of history. But I don’t think that’s what you’re hinting at, is it?”

A chuckle of guns being loaded. 

“No.”

The Rifle comes back down to aim at the gun-Death before her.

The Gu launches itself down like a descending shroud over a grave, too-human mouth open and gnawing and drooling at the air.

Worms and the ghosts of worms writhe into sequence, awakening arrays and formations that scream of overwhelming power and deeply lacking equilibrium.

None of it’s quite fast enough.

[Dead Shadows Etched In Stone]

The world ends. 

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A hundred kilometers away, Seo En-Hyun stops in the midst of tearing apart a Death-engine, one of his sets of arms dissipating from its carapace to move into a shield. There is an instant where the world turns white, blinding and impossible, where shadows vanish from the sheer brightness and both metal and flesh become translucent rather than opaque.

 A moment later, the horizon is painted in shades of black, white, and inhuman Red, tinting the world like a malformed sunset made monochrome and bloody. From those colors, on the far edge of the battlefield, grows a tower of smoke, its peak expanding in circles like ripples of smoke, like a mushroom expanding exponentially into space.

Three more sets of arms, each wielding enough Wraithfire to burn armies, each holding a different hand sign or symbol or icon, come up to join the first. From them, an array of luminescent shielding rises, a denial, an outright refusal of harm extending like a radiant set of sunbeams, glowing out from the undead colossus.

The shockwave hits just as they finish the sequence, and the world in a mass ahead of him becomes nothing but ash and shrapnel. 

He stands.

It impacts against everything, pyrocaustic force devastating the world, unmaking the trenchlines and the machinery and the corpses of war, turning them to more superheated and superpowered ash that tears meters from the ground itself to join the storm.

He stands.

The wave reaches him, and Devastation birthed from Detonation ring like bells, like waterfall-echoes, like endless thunder, against the frontline of the conflict for Godsfall.

He burns.

Behind him, a cone of stability is spared the brunt of the harm.

To either side of it, the world is burnt down to stone, through dirt and grave alike.

He stands.

He moves forward into the waste.

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The far side of the battlefield is unmade. Oblivion comes in an impossible heat, born of Comprehension of some of the most violent and all-consuming forms of annihilation, and it takes everything that the city has to withstand it. From deep within the Cathedral, Glorianna weaves thousands of spell-patterns, arrays and runes interlinking like chains that spiral into wider chains that spiral into webs that connect to the magics built deeper than stone in the church’s walls. 

The avenues and architecture of the city, designed to mirror the God that once fell upon its hills and was buried eternal, respond as if alive, haunted by the specter of old reformations to reality put in place millennia ago. Black coffins where what once were people and now are citizens glow with arcane forces as they channel the arcana of the world, its “Qi”, into patterns of suppression, defense, endurance, and weaponized Stasis, entropy doing its part to fight against the encroaching tide of harm. Beneath her, one of the last living members of Godsfall bleeds her power into its workings, the skin of her attendant flowing as vellum for new spellworks to layer themselves overtop of the old and modulate functions as needed. 

The city was designed to handle worse. All of the Fallen Kingdom’s city-states have been, the work undertaken in varying forms since the great change brought about by the Revelation. The city is designed to be a part of the war for existence itself.

The shockwave of a horizon painted bloody and ashen hits the city and bends. Like an ocean against a stone, it hits and builds and writhes and searches for an entry point, splashes away and across- but unlike an ocean, the force of its velocity is too much. It carves over the sky above the city, the arrays and protections built in managing to contain the damage but not the ash falling down, hot enough to burn marks into the buildings it touches. 

The perfect stillness of a glorious corpse is broken by her hand clicking its fingerbones against the throne she sits upon.

This is not how things are done.

There is war. They entered this arrangement expecting war, though modified to better fit their needs. Games, with which things might be proven or disproven.

Except that they go to war slowly. They’re careful about it.

Every Bishop has centuries, if not millennia, of Death built up inside of them. Whole generations come and go in the time it takes for them to change or enact greater works, even the most active amongst them, and the expectation must be that others will fight with that in mind. They are all, together as a Church, preparing for a wider conflict against the End. Beyond that is the fact that they know each other- while the instigator of the chaos might be the newcomer and outsider to the party, the Church and its clergy are intimately familiar. They fight with the expectation that she’s going to fight them in measured, reasonable ways, that they won’t do things they’re likely to regret this close to the End- and to assume otherwise might have them drastically overextend and waste years’ worth of accumulated power. 

This is not how things are done.

There are steps she must take to rectify things.

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His wife will almost certainly be out making a mistake about all this.

That is the first thought that comes to Lu Karai’s mind as he watches the fading heat of the detonation wash over his city. And it is his city- before anyone else came for it, he was here. Before any but the pilgrims and missionaries knew of the grave-site of a god, he was here, and it was by his works that the city prospered, that what might have been a source of power for others became a player in its own right.

He takes one of the golden coins out from his eyes, lifting it to the light that has replaced the evening sun. He watches how the brilliance of it gleams against the coin, how that light magnifies certain properties and diminishes others, how it draws the eye.

He has vision. He always has. It’s what allowed him to become what he is. It is what has granted him the ability to take what he has taken from the world, and hold onto it past the point of a heartbeat, of rotten muscle and ruined organs, of sickness and ruin. It is what has kept him the Bishop of a failing city, partner to one of the most short-sighted and glorious spellcrafters in the Fallen Kingdom, allied to its most famous brute- and now, wielding its most chaotic new member.

He should have expected this from the Bishop Anaya. He knew she would cause troubles, yes, but Mortaria was, ideally, to be a problem for further down the line. 

Not to be. It seemed that his vision was met by another’s. 

Well. If the chaos-bringer dies, then he can just abandon the city. Take the boy, circle back for Glorianna after she’s had a chance to cool off, renegotiate terms as needed with the rest of the Church. Mortaria will protest, as always, but the power-hungry industrialists of the clergy will have to make do with second place, as always- such is the fate of the ill-prepared single-minded. 

And if she lives, then she’ll have learned a lesson, and negotiations will come along much easier (with a few distinct exceptions) for the rest of this little game. 

Either way- the one with money on both sides of the table is the only one who can reliably come out ahead. A prayer of a different form, but a valuable one.

Sinking into the shadows, Bishop Lu Karai, He of Golden Bone and Blessed Worth, turns to head towards where he last marked the little witch and the boy. Best to keep an eye from close up, after all.

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She lost two needles. Three more are warped to the point of feeling destabilized.

She regains vision moments after losing it, wrapped in meters-thick gauze of the Gu’s wings. Whether the fucker came back to its senses or simply got too close, she’s not sure, but it’s gone back down nearly to the size it was at when she unleashed it, emptied of its meal for the sake of survival. The remains of the “silk” it wove from out of Echo-stuff and its own wings, loaded with enough Qi to qualify as a natural treasure in and of itself, lies sizzling all around her. 

Her corpse isn’t regenerating fully. She’s pretty sure her skull is exposed in the front, alongside her sternum and most of her musculature. There are only a few worms left, most of them actively cooking inside their own skins inside her.

Her eyes find the center of the war without even needing to look.

The ten-legged automaton is cracked open like an eggshell, shattered like a partially-buried bomb casing. Inside it, the mechanisms go down, down, down forever, deeper than is possible, an infinity of gears and pistons and all the machinery required to create, store, and launch the weapons of war by which it defines itself. It’s like a fractal, getting more detailed the longer one looks, but it’s not that it’s in smaller pieces, it’s that looking into it requires looking through distance.

And at the center of it, sizzling in the open air, dripping molten metal like wax that orbits itself in glowing droplets of power, is the Bishop.

Feminine in shape, androgynous in form, porcelain impossibility oozes black-tinted light that burns the world. What was once a crater is now an open field as the ever-emanating waves of Detonation wash out from her, so constant that they become a field of pure destruction in a radius all around. 

The mask has cracked and fallen away, and behind it is a whirlpool of reagents and burning bodies and casings and rocket fuels and the glow of a sun that is a perpetual and eternal orb of Death by Detonation.

“Behold the Death that is mine. For the sake of peace, I shall make it yours.”