Universe's End

5. Rushing to wait

“What do you mean you think it was someone you know?”

“I don’t know,” Rory frowned. “Which is weird. Why did that feel familiar?”

“None of what you’re saying is making sense,” Allison huffed.

“Alright, in fairness, how often does what I say make sense to you?” Rory questioned, raising his eyebrows at the woman.

“That’s… entirely fair,” Allison frowned, grumbling. “But also, not the point.”

“Yeah, I get that, but it doesn’t change that I don’t know either. I’m utterly stumped as to why it felt like I just felt something so stupidly familiar, like walking straight into an old photo of your childhood home.”

“Where did it come from?”

“I already said-”

“No, I mean directionally,” Allison interrupted as she clarified.

“Well… nowhere? Everywhere? It was like I felt a flux of energy, like a bubble popping, and for a moment I could sense almost like this throughline, a vague awareness of something being right there.”

“Yeah, lost me again,” Allison sighed. “Alright, bounce your thoughts off of me.”

“You sure?” Rory asked.

“Not like I’ll get any more lost.”

“A fair point,” Rory snorted. “Alright, if I had to place a guess… Information decay, or rather, as reverberations occur, information that is stored within the fabric of this existence radiates outward like a shockwave. Those reverberations would likely only be caused by a ‘siphon’ occurring, information being yanked outward, like how water rushes to fill a hole. This information being yanked would most likely be-”

“People being drawn into Aelia, into our reality,” Allison said.

“Hey, look at that, you are learning.”

“And you’re a smart-ass.”

“I am what I am,” Rory said, hands on his hips, playing it up for a moment before shaking his head. “So, the general idea is simply that a wave was completed, people were drawn outward, and as that information was plucked from here, the resulting response from the rest of this reality to ‘fill in’ the hole caused an energetic enough event that I was able to discern some of the trapped information. Why it felt familiar, still entirely clueless. Just that we must have been in the area within a certain proximity or whatever of some drawn information.”

“Which may be our ticket out of here,” Allison said, a kernel of hope in her voice.

“That’s the hope, yeah.” Rory nodded.

“So… now what?”

“A really good question,” Rory said. “No idea. Theories are just that, theories. I don’t exactly have equipment to test with, not that I’d even know where to start. This place doesn’t play nice with just about anything.”

The two looked at each other for a moment before Allison sighed, shoulders sagging.

“Back to waiting?”

“Back to waiting.”

“I’m tired of waitinggggggg,” Eric groaned. “Can these assholes hurry up already, or are they going to pull some bullshit cliché big damn hero moment and wait until we sad saps are oh so sadly on the verge of being overwhelmed, and BOOM, they appear?”

“That feels perhaps a bit less generous than is warranted,” Tom said.

“Nah, he’s got a point; that’s exactly up Rory’s alley. He loves that bullshit theatrics,” Zoey added.

The three remaining Founders were seated around a table, eating their lunch as they considered the current state of things. They’d just finished repelling yet another wave of monsters, tens of thousands of monsters, led by alpha variant lieutenants and three territory alpha generals. Such numbers would have crushed any settlement on Aelia, outside of Ehkorrus, and yet it had been dealt with the same as the wave before that.

Overwhelming firepower.

It was as simple as isolating the territory alphas, after which Eric would shadow-step the three of them right on top of the unfortunate sap, before, in Eric’s words, ‘jumping their punk asses back to the ball sack of the First.’”

Once all the territory alphas were dealt with, there really wasn’t much any of the remaining monsters could do as darkness swept out; the stronghold was designed not just to facilitate each of their abilities, such as Eric’s Night Fall, but also to empower them. Once the battlefield was clad in darkness, a frozen anti-wind that swept stillness through the ranks seemed to steal away the very life force from the monsters unfortunate enough to lack the strength of mantle to resist now that there weren’t territory alphas to act as buffers against the mass area denial attack.

Hell, even if they managed to survive long enough to hit their base directly, all Zoey had to do was place herself at the core of the stronghold, where she could ‘share’ her durability with their defenses.

They’d become a tick burrowed into the flank of the First that couldn’t be removed, but neither could they advance; the sheer discrepancy between their defensive position and their offensive options was rather stark.

Taken from NovelPhoenix, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Thus, the daily bitching session around a plate of steaming monster, courtesy of Eric, who was a shockingly good cook.

“I fail to see why we would need such saving in the first place,” Tom countered with the same old argument that had been trotted out at least a billion times by now. “We can’t push outward further than we have; they can’t push us inward. A total stall. Maybe with a few hundred years our personal skills would advance to the point that the three of us could begin to carve back out alone, but I’d rather not spend several hundred years doing this.”

“How long are our current lifespans anyways?” Eric pondered out loud. “Gotta be a few hundred at least. Thousands?”

“How the hell would any of us have any way of knowing?” Zoey said. “People dying of old age who are past tier like five is already not something that was a thing; the time scales simply haven’t passed to that point. The best guess we have is on those who had late ascensions and gained proportionally lesser extensions.”

“You sound like Mr. Architect,” Eric said as he pointed a spoon at her head. “Very technical.”

“We’ve been over this; I’m not an airhead,” Zoey grumbled.

“Oh, I know, but we’ve had most conversations a hundred times by now; it feels like,” Eric snorted. “Thirty years of status quo does that.”

“We all have cabin fever,” Tom said, stating the obvious.

“I’m tired of this shit.” Eric finally stood up. “Fuck it, we’re forcing a shift.”

“How so?” Tom asked.

“By doing stupid shit and forcing the world to respond. Well, maybe not the world as in The First, but you get what I mean,” Eric clarified.

“And your idea?”

“We hunt down a Kaiser.”

“Yeah, alright, you’re an idiot,” Tom said, dropping pretenses. “Cabin fever might be putting it lightly.”

“Nah, think about it: we go after a Kaiser’s general first and see if we can elicit some response. Perhaps that reaction gives them, I don’t know, something to latch onto.”

“That’s stupid,” Tom added.

“Is it?” Zoey suddenly questioned. “I mean, okay, sure, it is a little stupid.”

“Hey, whose side are you on anyways?”

“But it’s not an idea without merit,” Zoey considered. “Also, honestly, I’m with Eric. This is getting tiresome. Since when the hell did we become helpless children who need someone holding our hand? We’re the damn Founders. We’re the ones who go and do the impossible and all that jazz.”

“Perhaps you are placing too much blind faith in what others say about us, rather than us as actual flesh-and-blood people,” Tom said carefully. “We are not figures pulled out of storybooks. We’re people. We can make mistakes; we can die. There were eight of us once.”

“And those who died were idiots,” Eric said callously. “The Voice got herself killed by a Bird. The Bird got himself killed by overdosing on Jesus-Juice and becoming delusional, and say what you will about Garfunk. It was incredibly fucking stupid to react the way he did toward the daughter of the Founder whose city you were currently within. I won’t be Allison who gets sentimental on the hamster; he was a good guy. I won’t argue otherwise, but he let his own vendetta get to his head.”

“He was overwhelmed by bane,” Zoey pointed out.

“Again, whose side are you on anyway?” Eric snorted. “Yes, at this point we’ve all been lectured on this concept of bane as an emotion, of how it literally is some sort of pseudo-self-cursing bullshit or whatever.” Eric suddenly whirled around, sticking a finger at Tom’s head. “The point is, yes, while we are flesh-and-blood, we aren’t infallible; those of us who did die were from being morons.”

“One could argue that what you two are suggesting is exactly that kind of idiocy is what got the others killed.”

“Do you want to sit around forever and wait, or not?” Eric finally put his foot down, literally and figuratively, as he stomped his foot on the table, hands on his hips. “Because I’m tired of waiting.”

Tom was silent for several seconds before sighing.

“Fine, if we die, it’s not my fault. Oh, but on one condition.”

“Yeah?”

“Take your dirty foot off the table, for goodness sake.”

“Damn rats,” The First groaned. “Oh, what are you three up to?”

As much as the First hated to admit it, he’d been effectively blocked off from advancing. Attempts at overwhelming the three Founders from Aelia had failed. With an upper cap on what he was allowed to throw at them at one time, he couldn’t find a way to defeat their defensive position, a final gift from the Architect before he’d gone and pissed off.

The First preferred to tell himself it was a final gift before he’d gone and died, but the confidence his elder sister placed in the two missing Founders made it impossible to let the thought be a soothing balm for more than a short period before the gnawing uncertainty returned.

Whatever the case, over the last few months he’d noticed something up with the three remaining Founders. What exactly that was, he had no way of knowing; he was blocked from seeing anything directly that occurred within their captured territory, unless he had monsters sent to get eyes on them. It was half the reason he even bothered sending waves of monsters at them at this point; he couldn’t afford to remain in the dark about what they were up to over the years, or give them a chance to get comfortable.

“Damn RATS!” The First shrieked once more. They were up to something, but what?

“That damn Phosphorus,” The First slammed a fist into the side of his inner sanctum. All that extra power he’d been given as a Kaiser, and for what? He couldn’t crush some gnats. If he’d at least gotten one confirmed kill, that would have been something, but if Aelia proved right- that her two leading Founders did return- the First would be in a very rough spot.

No, the real problem was the Eternal. Without the limitations it placed on both the First and his Kaisers, they could have easily crushed the Founders. But no, things had to be fair. The flip side of that was that without the Eternal, the First would have never had a fighting shot to begin with; his elder sister would have been slurping up the marrow of his world by now.

The thought made a shudder pass through the First, felt as a minor quake the world over. For as hungry as the rest of his siblings were, his elder sister was truly ravenous. Any time they were forced together, he could feel her hunger radiating from her; when she spoke to them, she saw morsels waiting to be snapped up. It was unnerving in a unique fashion. Oh sure, they all wanted to cannibalize one another, but she was the only one who genuinely could.

That damn Phosphorus.

That was the other problem: his Kaisers, for all their power, were utterly inexperienced in battle. They made stupid mistakes. At the end, Phosphorus had wizened up and realized it was best to end things swiftly, something that had nearly worked, but ‘nearly’ wasn’t nearly good enough.

But that understanding of the flow of battle only came after being in it for at least some time.

Is there any way I can circumvent that?

Anomalous energy could accelerate the growth of his world and his creations far beyond what should have been ordinarily possible. Still, it couldn’t magically stop his creations from doing stupid things.

Could I have my Kaisers sharpen themselves against one another?

It wasn’t a terrible idea… Except it was. He tried to reach out and send that message and instantly felt the ‘sting’ of the Eternal metaphorically slapping his hand away. Trying again would likely provoke an even stronger reaction.

“A waiting game then?” The First growled. “No, no, I’ll figure something out.”

No matter what, the First would figure out something to break this deadlock.

The question was what.