408
Mark stood on the prow of the Dreadnought, gazing ahead at the 20 kilometers of space that separated them from the grey tower ahead. Unlike the tower in the previous zone, this one had thousands of lines of light all across the surface, all of them either arcing up into the crystal sky, 250 kilometers up there, or down into the crystal land far below, also about 250 kilometers down there. The tower itself was 200 kilometers wide.
The realm was a massive space, and it was mostly empty, but Mark couldn’t see past the density of air in most directions.
“Final check,” Mark said. “Mark, check.”
Isoko hovered up above the castle. “Isoko, check.”
Sally was in the command center with most everyone. “Sally, check.”
Eliot was at the comms. “Documentaries ready to go, soon as we get a signal! Eliot, check.”
Andria was just off of the control room. “Andria, check.”
David was at the main controls. “David, check.”
Tartu was down below the control room, right at the edge of his garden. “20 seconds, then I’m ready. Headed into the castle now— Tartu, check.”
Derek said, “I’m on 10 boats and several brightspeed crystal drones! Check check check!”
Lola spoke softly, “No matter what happens, I want you all to know that you are amazing people. I look forward to watching you all grow more and more. Lola, check.”
Mark grinned. He was still full of worry, though. He reached back as far as he could to his team, to his people, and he Unioned with Glory and Fear. A good hundred meters of the ship was outside of his influence. It was what it was. Mark shone brightly, and the rest of the world arced with black lightning for a brief moment as the Fear left them.
Mark said, “We have done so much, and yet there is so much left to do. You all saw the World Quest; the System Reset. We’re stepping out of Endless Daihoon and into a different world than the one we left, because everything is different now, and yet everything is still the same. The future is ours to write and we dread not any future, for we will carve it into the shape it needs to be, and damn the small stuff, for we see the path ahead, and it is glorious. Death to all monsters!”
Voices joined in a cacophony, “Death to all monsters!”
The air rumbled, like thunder, like a kaiju call of humanity.
“Forward, David,” Mark said.
The ship went forward, faster now, eating up a kilometer in a minute, then faster. The wide, wide gate of the tower was a simple dimple in the grey surface, at first, but as the Dreadnought neared, as the bubbles of light popped, they got within 5 kilometers of the gate and the gate began to shimmer on the edges. White lightning crackled on the vertical crater’s rim, and the crater came alive—
Mark had seen the gate activation at the settlement and at Memphi many times. Those gate openings were all like someone had taken a piece of fabric that you didn’t know was there, and then cut it open and pinned the fabric wide, revealing the other world on the other side. This gate opening was not like that.
White lightning sundered the gate space and for a moment, there was the bottom of an ocean, as seen from the ocean floor looking up. Mark saw shimmers of refracted light dancing beyond a far surface. And then the ocean fell into the elven lands.
Isoko and Eliot were ready for everything, this time, and though they did not expect an ocean, they were ready for that, too. Mark Unioned with Adamant and Ethereal, Isoko carved the space ahead of them to the sides with a tornado of platinum wind, and Eliot managed the adamant and mithril engines of the ship to handle the inertial strain as David made sure the Dreadnought didn’t get unwieldy. The ship still angled off course a little, but an ocean, or maybe just a very deep lake, passed around them instead of brushing them aside like the slap of an angry god.
“Water is a good sign!” Mark said, over the comms, as the ocean opened up further, the middle falling out fast while the edges still flowed with water. The flow was lessening. The opening had been just below the surface, it seemed. “How’s the ship handling?”
David said, “Systems yellow! Holding fine. Eliot is busy with the power drain.”
“We got plenty of power! No need to worry about that!” Eliot responded.
“Do I need to burn plants?” Tartu asked, ready to act if needed.
“Location confirmed!” Derek announced, at least five of him at different controls in the main command center, and tens of him up top at the secondary command center. “We’re in Daihoon, in Central Okuana! Dominant is on the other side of Old Lake! That’s Old Lake falling on us!” Another Derek announced, “Sending greeting signals in hopes of a good crossing!”
They had planned out a lot of scenarios.
Freyala had taken stock of the System Prime message that Mark and them had gotten, and she had sent out paladins and inquisitors out to Okuana, to talk to them about what might happen if the Dreadnought came through here. Lola hadn’t heard anything back about that ever since yesterday, but that was just what it was. If Okuana decided to be assholes about this, then… then Mark and them were going to be assholes right back.
The best scenario was where they popped out at Okuana and they sent a greeting message, and they got a similar, non-violent message back, but popping out right underneath a several-thousand-year-old emperor that was a giant tree was always going to end at least a little poorly. Especially since Mark was an Inheritor… though based on what they suspected Freyala told her Collective to tell Okuana…
Mark had no idea how this was going to go.
He expected the worst, but he hoped for the best.
Mark asked, “Any response?”
The lake of water was still coming through, but only at the edges. The Old Lake was a massive lake, if Mark recalled correctly, but it wasn’t the biggest lake in the area. That honor belonged to… to whatever they called it over there on Daihoon. The Earth-lake was Lake Constance. Mark didn’t know what—
The water parted.
A god stood up above scattered pillars of crystal, like a person standing over a small pond lined with massive, crystalline teeth, looking down, looking at Mark, and ignoring everything else.
Mark had seen pictures of Dominant before, but only when he was in his small form, ‘sitting’ on a throne of wood in a hollow in a much larger tree. In that form, he looked human. But that form was just a part of his overall body, transformed to look human, like a puppeteer dancing a doll in front of other ‘doll-sized’ people.
Godking Dominant’s true form was the 3 kilometer-tall tree looking down at the Dreadnought.
The god was green and brown and shimmering with gold beneath the surface, as he straddled a third of the gate. He was a tree, but he was also a man, and Mark had trouble understanding what he was looking at. Were those legs to the sides? Or trunks, twisting into a torso, twisting into two main arms and a cape of greenery and a thousand arms hidden below that cape?
Gravity was wonky, of course. Dominant expected it. Mark did not. But of course the portal was flat on the surface instead of upright… for some reason.
Godking Dominant of Empire Okuana did not look happy.
Dominant went, “Huh… It’s true, then. We are disappointed that thisis how you choose to come to us, Mark Careed. It is not the first time that our valley has been mutilated, and it will not be the last, but it is a small price to pay for the gateway finally opening properly.” He stood up, leaning back from the entrance, but his eyes… his eyes still bored into Mark, as he said, “Come on through, and make your way to Rithia Hall. There, you and your people will be held for a time, meet a great many people at many various functions, and be released soon enough. A few months, at most. We will summon you this evening for a proper discussion of events.”
Okay.
So.
Mark had a small hope that this was going to go off without a fight, but he was absolutely not putting himself, or his people, into the arms of Godking Dominant. Everyone else felt the same way, to a various degree, with Derek being the most adverse to whatever was going on here.
Derek whispered into the comms, “Rithia Hall is a fortress prison.” Another Derek said, “Jamming systems are preventing us from reaching out; they aren’t letting us go.” Another Derek added, “I’m ‘bouta run for it!”
If that weren’t enough to turn this whole thing sour, Godking Dominant’s main eyes looked at Mark, but his attention was everywhere beyond Mark, at the elven realm all around him that was full of prismatic mana. The Godking’s vector was hidden, but he was doing a terrible job of hiding his desires. Quark caught eyes opening up in the bark of Dominant’s arms and knees, all of them looking and seeing, as the many arms under his cape of leaves began to multiply and many hands began to be lost within the greenery.
He was casting.
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The whole gate was open and ringed with giant crystal spikes, with daylight beyond Dominant, but there was stuff up there. Invisible stuff. Something was pinging against the Castellan shell of the Dreadnought—
Eliot was quiet.
Why was Eliot quiet?
His vector seemed normal back there, behind Mark, and next to everyone else. But Eliot was quiet while something was happening to the shell—
Mark Unioned with Purpose even as he Called out, “Full retreat! NOW!”
Something snapped in the air, and everyone got moving fast. David slammed on the brightspeed button and Eliot shattered something through the Castellan shield, acting without telling anyone what he was doing. The effect was instantaneous. The sky beyond the gateway and all across the edges of the crater was filled with reaching branches, growing fast, vines curling, twisting, burrowing, growing up and down the tower—
“He’s a real jerk, ain’t he!” Kardi Shale said, holding on to the railing beside Mark, the g-forces of the moving Dreadnought tossing her ponytail around as she gripped the railing like it was a log ride down a river.
Mark slapped a whole bunch of adamantium knives through Kardi and the railing, turning her into spreading gore that went flying that Mark instantly Purity’d away, black lightning sparking her into nothing—
Grax stepped out from behind a pillar over there, big as kaiju and subtly white and nearly-invisible. He was in his titan lightform, but different. His third eye on his forehead, his demon eye, was bright red and staring right at Mark. That third eye blinked, and Kardi grabbed an eyelash to haul herself out of the eye as it opened up once again. Kardi held on to Grax’s forehead, to the lid of the eye, as she waved at Mark. Grax didn’t care about that disgusting revival. He was grabbing hold of a prismatic pillar and conducting the flow into a spear of lightning, aimed at the gate, at Dominant’s gate-eclipsing body.
Kardi blew Mark a kiss and pointed back at the gate.
Mark turned—
A kilometer-wide reaching branch speared forward, directly at the Dreadnought, but a speedster was at the controls and David veered the Dreadnought to the side. Dominant’s spear thrust still clipped the edge of the Castellan shield. It was like a child poking at a soap bubble that was only barely stronger than normal. The Dreadnought bounced off and away, guided by David and held together by Isoko and Eliot.
Even as the Dreadnought tumbled in the sky, flying fast to get away, Mark knew a few things that scared him in new ways and made him itch to fight.
Kardi and Grax had been with them the whole time.
Grax had gone invisible and intangible, as an elf could do, but better, probably. Grax had a house, for sure. Kardi was in that house with him, endlessly reviving and with a Gore Body to boot. Where did she get that Gore Body? She had had it when she appeared with Thrashtalon and Grax at that divine conclave. Mark had driven his fist into her chest and— Ah. She had gotten her Gore Body from Bone-knife, that cultist killer at Kabberjaw that Mark had murdered before they went on to clean up Trader Cove, or whatever it was called.
Thrashtalon had said something about hating Okuana the most, too, hadn’t he. Or was that a different conversation with the bastard god? Ah, no. Grey Phantom of Memphi had been the one to speak about how Thrashtalon’s mortal family had been stolen by Okuana and turned into adamantium farms. Thrashtalon himself had just told Mark to ‘kill ‘em all!’, but he had meant Okuana most of all.
Anyway. Grax, and by extension Kardi, had been shadowing them the whole time. Or at least for a while. When did it start?
No idea.
Mark focused on the real issue here.
Godking Dominant was filling the gateway with vines and branches and leaves, spilling into the cavernous prismatic stone-tower land of the elves, spears leading the way, even as David brightspeed’ed to 30 kilometers distant in a gravity-defying minute. The Godking’s vector was huge, and it was getting even bigger. Mark felt it from even this far away—
A rumble.
A chuckle.
An avalanche of joy boomed out of the Godking, as he roared, “Blocked, for ten thousand years! Opened once again! Mine! It’s all m—”
“Here, Barky! Have some more!” Grax yelled, gripping his spear of prismatic mana that became a line of solid light, aimed at—
“Barky?!” Dominant yelled, surprised. Surprise turned to fury, then to hate, as he expanded into a crash of vines and branches, aiming at Grax, 10 kilometers away, roaring, “Die, failure!”
Mark might have heard ‘you first’, but Dominant attacked toward Grax, fully distracted from the Dreadnought, and Grax finished charging up his lightning spear, the whole length of light flashing to solid, crystalline prismatic mana. Grax did not throw, so much as let go. The sound was too much as the spear blasted throughGodking Dominant, into the skies of Daihoon, into a shield in the skies over the land beyond. The shield shattered—
Dominant screamed—
Grax yelled at Mark, “Better move fast!”
Quark caught Kardi waving from the eyelid of Grax’s third eye.
And then Grax became an invisible spear himself, shooting through the gate, into a gaping hole of broken and burned and screaming greenery, back to Daihoon. A flood of voices crowded out the comms with sudden intensity, and none of them were from his team. The jamming system had been destroyed.
Somehow, Mark caught one voice in particular.
Walaria said, “Dominant! I will have your heartwood for this— Wait! Mark? You’re there?!”
Mark was already yelling to his team, “Punch it, David! Derek, send the tapes! Isoko, hold the opening wide! Everyone hold on!”
“NO!” Dominant rumbled, even as David lined up the Dreadnought for a punching run. The gap in the tree’s body was kilometers wide, but his tendrils had already touched the pillars in the elven lands. Prismatic mana flowed into him, and Dominant thickened. The hole in the tree began to close with suddenly bulging, cancerous wood. “No moOre iNHeriTOORS!”
“Sally, shrink the ship,” Mark said, Unioning with everyone, making the need for further words superfluous.
For a moment, Sally was terribly scared, but then she knew what she had to do. No arguing. No discussion. Sally’s vector touched Tartu’s and Eliot’s, and the ship under Mark’s body got suddenly, terribly smaller. It had been the Dreadnought, now it was a rich man’s hover yacht, and then it was a simple boat, and Mark was still very much the same size. Everyone else was still on the ship, shrinking, except for him. All of Mark’s former bodies, turned into ingots and then put in the hull, burst out of the hull, scattering like black metal rain.
Three of Tartu’s trees went wild with growth and they spilled out of that opening, too, crawling onto the Dreadnought like wild things, like the Godking. Mark had no idea what was happening, but Tartu did, and he was worried about infiltration, so Mark became the hand that Tartu could not be and he ripped the offending trees out of the side of the ship.
Isoko further flung the offending trees to the sky.
Andria patched the hole with mithril as she saw what Mark saw out there, without needing to use her own eyes. The Godking sent spears at them, like creeper vines moving at super speeds. Andria met those vines, kilometers away and only seen thanks to Quark, with mithril knives of her own. She couldn’t cut them up, but she could divert them. It was enough.
Mark did the rest with Alacrity and Slowness as the Godking’s parts neared enough for them to become threats. He carved and carved, and David poured on the speed.
The Dreadnought shot through a canyon of growing wood with tens of meters to spare, rushing into the skies of Okuana.
For a moment, Mark saw the land around them.
It was green, but it was also a drained lakebed. Crystals grew where there had been water, and some puddles remained. Everything else was mountainous and massive and ancient. Larger crystals hovered at the top of every mountain, just like in Crytalis—
Mark had a sinking feeling as those Death Beam Crystal defenses came online, though they were already mostly online. Wordlessly, Mark commanded Derek to take off running, and he did so, shooting out of the 10-meter-long Dreadnought like a flight of bees, tens of him inside every fist-sized hovercraft. Some of those crafts even started brightspeed’ing away. If anyone was going to survive this it was going to be Derek, if he was given the chance.
Mark, meanwhile, was still at the prow of the small ship, like riding the front of a large surfboard. The Dreadnought was moving faster than Mark could even if he helped, so he did not help. Instead, he waited. As the Dreadnought passed the edge of the Godking’s valley, ripping into the skies over Okuana and then further up and up and up, the whole of the Verdant Citadel yawned open before them.
It was kilometer-tall trees on mountains, making the mountains look like hills. It was densely-packed cityscapes, with hovertraffic flowing in lines across the sky and along the ground. No walls anywhere. Just a seemingly endless city and the people who lived there.
The bright, shining black crystals hovered here and there like floating threats, letting out a low rumble through the sky as they aimed at Mark and the Dreadnought. They spun, and sputtered. Warning lights were already flashing everywhere in the city. Hover traffic tried to ground itself, but everything had happened too fast.
Mark asked, half in speed-time, “Did the signal get out?”
David said, “The AIs caught it and they’re under obligation to hide it, but Freyala is insistent. No matter what happens to us, the whole world will know what happened, and about the System Quest.”
“Not as good as it could have been, but good enough,” Mark said, as he turned himself into a shell around the Dreadnought.
“You know,” David said, and then he chuckled, as though he was about to tell a joke. “We could have hugged the ground instead of going into the sky.”
“He would have fired on us anyway, and he would have hit his own city.”
“Yeah, he would have.”
“You should escape with everyone.”
“And go where? To be hunted down individually? Nah. I trust you, Mark. You got this.”
The sky turned black with elemental Death as ten different black death-beams converged.
Pain, and then, death.