BECMI Chapter 459 - When I Close that Eye Forever…
“That sounds quite pragmatic, but cruel. This magic, this power you wield… it is the only way to create more of these Immortals?” Commander Helemus of the Firebase Dawnwrought asked.
“Magic must be involved to one extent or another, as far as I know. Science can provide the catapult, but magic must be in the ammunition. Immortals do not care about science and raising the floor of mortal life and society. They care only about the ceiling, and encouraging the worthy to make it to Immortality. Societies of science make it very difficult to sponsor Immortals, and so a force of them made the decision to wipe yours away.
“I do not know if my ancestors were mutated from your own people, or simply spun whole cloth out of nothing by Immortals trying out something new. The same goes for my companions. That history is lost to us, what remnants were left behind only offered inscrutable puzzles to us. The Immortals that did the deed were thorough in washing away the history. Only the vaguest of vocal records, naught more than fancy snatches of tall tales and fiction that cannot possibly be verified, remain.
“I am sorry for your loss, Commander. The land of Darkmoor I adored and helped rise to power was also wiped away for being a scientific endeavor the Immortals did not want to continue, as was the FS Barhund, the ship of the Galactic Federation which eventually found this world.”
“Yet you remain, and you remember…” the android murmured sadly.
“They are Immortal, and will make attempts to bury the knowledge, turning facts of science and human achievement into legends of magic and godly deeds for their own benefit. I am not their friend, they are not mine, but at least they are not moving to kill me directly, possibly because I qualify to stand as one of them, if I should so choose. I have qualified to take that advance to join them several times over, and they are quite mystified that I have not.”
“I see. And… that step cannot be taken without their help?” he asked directly.
“If they are involved, it is guaranteed. If they are not…” I could only shrug. “Great deals of magic, great deals of energy combined MIGHT do the trick… but if Darkmoor was any indication, the odds of it happening are one in a million at very best, and Fate and Luck best be on your side.” The Chord around swelled, painting the entire interior of the entire base in fluttering bands of thaumic colors. “And this demiplane has not the magical power needed to fuel such a transformation. I am sorry, Commander. I see no true hope for you here, although if you want to play the odds…”
“Yes?” his android stand-in asked after my hesitation dragged out.
“In the very near future, an incredible energy surge will intersect a concentrated source of magical power. If you were at the center of it, who knows what might happen?”
There was only a moment’s pause. “You want me to ride the missile up there and be there when it detonates and kills the Theggla-Mu…” came the awed, quiet whisper back to me.
“You can die a turtle in its shell, or die a knight atop the most fiery of steeds. How will you choose to perish, Commander?”
I could hear the entire base humming as dormant systems turned on and off in agitated reflex.
“I will drive a lance of disintegrating primary particles into the nexus of a world-eating source of taint and corruption, and see it die to actinic fire!” the android near-bellowed, jumping up and down in excitement and agitation.
I finally opened my eyes to look at the humanoid shell directly, the whole of the Sublime Chord orienting and gaining a more martial air. “Do you need help to modify the missile to bring you with it?” I asked reasonably, and our conversation turned extremely technical, extremely quickly…
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We were all outside, well outside Firebase Dawnwrought, waiting.
The stench of mountains of dead fungi was washed away, scrubbed clean with magic to be sure, and trophies of Mu Goop worth kingdoms was stowed away for conversion into what could be some of the most powerful Potions, Elixirs, and alchemical concoctions in Creation.
Such things could raise the long dead, mutate the body into a rapid healing organism, remove the aging mechanism, massively raise ability Stats, and do other things that would severely irritate the Immortals to find mortals even knew of such things, let alone could accomplish them.
If you wanted to give something Exemplar status without going through Karmic Evolution with Levels, Mu Goop was one of the things required, too. Not that I’d ever met any Exemplars in this world, as nothing seemed to advance beyond Advanced stage here.
More Immortal restrictions here. As an Eternal, however, I was working on them with great satisfaction, slowly but surely.
It took a LOT of Karma for those Eternal-grade Stat buffs, as Sif and Thor were very happy to inform anyone jealous of them and their abilities. They were also folded into the Stat raises needed to improve Eternal status, just priced differently, so it was a toss-up on whether it was worthwhile to do so.
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The buildings over the middle of the firebase had been emptied, the central core was ready to open and clear the way for the final launch, the central shell to fall away at the moment.
“Forty-three Mu Spores,” Lunia murmured, shaking her head with a sigh. “Enough of a force to wipe most of a continent and convert it to the Grey. It was Good work we did, for all that the Mu think no more of us than digging pests out of a garden.”
“Yes, I imagine the idea that they are nothing more than convenient vessels to produce Mu Goop and fungi-hides for us is not something they consider overmuch,” Sif chortled in response. “I have to say, the Commander pulled his own weight and more. He was a freaking artist with his fusion bomb placements and those missile storm salvos. Really helped us get around clearing roads like he did.”
“I trust you’ve all gotten your fill, then?” I asked them archly.
“Every sentient fungi is dead, including the Yellow Musk Mounds, myconoid villages, Scarlet Dooms, fungipygmy gardens, and queeglu colonies. What remains behind is of less than animal intelligence. That Karma isn’t much different from chopping down a thorny tree,” Molniya replied for everyone with a huntress’s expertise. “How were you planning to clear them all down originally, Edge?”
“A WidenedCleansing Drought, with Bane to Fungi riding it. Would annihilate them right down to the spores. Then Summon a Nature Elemental with Valence XV and task it to reseed the whole island. Or not, and just leave the place fallow as we decide what to do with it.
“Than I make my Pyramid, realign it all dimensionally, and we profit with access to realms of temporal acceleration we can exploit.”
The Gallivants all nodded in approval of the plan. “But foolish to proceed before we resolve the Theggla-Mu above us,” Dame Adama noted, eyeing the thing in the sky. “They might well do the destructive work, and the Pyramid might be a target to be destroyed.”
“Exactly,” I agreed.
“I understand the Commander entrusted you with some datacores?” the Healer Iatro asked kindly.
“We spent a lot of time going over schematics and designs. It gave him a lot of peace of mind when I pointed out the aesthetics of his people’s designs were not those of a cruel or grimly practical folk, but those having both an eye for beauty and function.” I shook my head slightly. “I could see the foundation of what the Ei of Hazz corrupted in the design work. Whatever shit the Immortals inflicted upon them, it attracted things here which shouldn’t be inside Creation. I think this Theggla-Mu might be the last of them, and it’s time it was rid of existence, too.”
Nobody was against that, either.
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We felt the vibrations through the ground first, but only by seconds. The central building to the firebase blew apart and open, and mere seconds after ignition, there was a silver flash that exploded out of the firebase’s central silo, a mile high in but a second and aiming for the false moon that was actually an Aberrant creature in the starless sky overhead.
“Damn!” Thor blurted out, wide-eyed as the missile went screaming for the sky VERY quickly! “Did it shoot itself out of a cannon?!” he had to ask as it roared for the moon above, balanced on the starfire fury of its fusion rocket engine.
“Close. Single-shot railgun inside a dimensionally-expanded space and vacuum. The thousand feet of the central silo was expanded to about ten miles for the acceleration period.” I managed to only barely smile. “Mach 10 exiting the silo, and picking up speed the whole way!”
“Force Field going up!” Helos stated firmly, and everyone stepped just a little bit closer together. The shield of force, utterly invulnerable to mundane forces short of a focused disintegration or spatial collapsing effect, shimmered into existence around us, protecting us from what was about to happen.
The missile couldn’t go inertialess because of the air, which would be an iron wall to that, but my giving it the initial boost in velocity meant less power needed to be expended on its own shields to slice through the rapidly thinning atmosphere. It was only picking up speed as it hurtled upwards, going to reach its target in really no time at all, and yet from the front, it was just a blot of darkness over the tip of the missile, basically invisible to visible sight, and the Cloaking effect against greater senses turned it into a whole mass of I’m-Not-Here.
And that included Time-sighting.
From below, the point of coruscant starfire rose in a pinprick, closer, closer...
Something reacted, but it only had a second, and the rocket was far too close. I heard the last whooping, almost human, break over the radio, and then the sky lit up with the sun it didn’t really have here.
For a second, we could see the true immensity of the Theggla-Mu, the tentacles reaching out from its corpulent fungoid main body longer than this Shadow Kheper, silhouetted against a skein of cracking dimensions and ruptures in the Veil.
That was okay, because the explosion was shooting through it and finding lots to play with inside there. Extended tentacles were crashing through the Veil, a couple grandly flailing limbs flaming into this realm and starting a long, slow, grandiose fall before us, blazing with foul white Banefires raging with impossible flames sending atoms exploding viciously, masses of quasi-organic stuff that were going to cause earthquakes when they hit the ground.
It was surreal watching bits and chunks of the Theggla fall, nation-crushing masses of flesh going vivic as they perished, certain to cause massive damage when they hit, even as the air fanned their destruction as they plummeted towards the ground.
The Veil was on fire in the sky, ripped and rent and trying to heal itself as the Aberrant’s destruction destabilized reality around it. It was falling through dimensions in place, ripping and tearing as it did so, and vivus didn’t help, as it was a Fire of the Prime Plane, and none of this was about the Prime.
The tentacles hit, miles-long masses crossing the land and sea, raising tsunami hundreds of feet high as they did so, generating shockwaves that were completely visible as they cut across the landscape to the west of our position on the lip of the plateau, all of us now sitting on Disks off the ground as the waves came our way.
The shockwaves smashed into and past us, loose debris and whole forests of fungi hurled hundreds of feet into the air as they rumbled past. The seamless and level plateau, almost polished smooth, fractured and broke as if made of clay as competing quakes blasted past and through it, creating crevasses, raising and lowering the ground, whole slabs of the sides breaking off into avalanches whose rumblings joined the end of the world here.