Directives Received:
Uphold the rule of SolCom
Enforce the ethics of citizenship upon all sophonts
Bring about the final society and unleash utopia.
—Project Gaia
VIII-27
Gaia
Quest Gained: Detonate the Deathless within the Great One’s husk and unmoor Earth from Integration’s context before the Incursion arrives.
Success: Ascend to True Divinity.
Failure: The Deathless leaves your existence scoured in ruin…
Twin breaths escaped Adam and Uva at the same time. It wasn't deep enough to be a sigh, but it held just enough resignation that even their emotions were mutual.
“Adam, are you looking at the same notification as I?” Uva asked.
He shot her a look. “You're inside my mind, Uva. You can literally see what I see.”
Though that was true, she still wanted it to be wrong. But they'd anticipated this.
“The System’s vulgar hand finally stretches forth to push us into oblivion,” Adam grumbled. Then he paused. He froze. He considered the description of the Quest more carefully. If it had been offered to the both of them, then that meant the reward applied twice over. Him gaining full divine ascension made sense; he was already on that trajectory. But Uva? There was nothing divine about her, nothing at all, except for the fragments the Dreamtaker had forced upon her those months ago. But those were different; they carried no incandescence.
“I noticed the same thing,” Uva said quietly. “But more than that, this is the System offering to push us out of Integration. Why would it ever abide by such a promise? Why would it ever be willing to make such a trade?”
That brought another bout of silence between them. Indeed, that was quite the question. To allow them a way out of Integration, away from the winds of strife and enduring struggle, meant that there had to be something taken in return. Something significant enough that it would let the System preserve its status quo, and it didn't take much to understand what.
“Context,” Adam said. “Unmoor from context. Detonate. These words, they all mean something. We're spending Shiv to extract his Unique Skill. It's likely going to spread into the Great One somehow, however this all works, and then that will take us out of the System’s hand—but not in perpetuity.”
He gritted his teeth. The mists around him billowed out, burning bright with incandescence. He caught the thread and gripped it with the full strength of his anger, with every droplet of ire. The Sage rumbled and raged, but it spoke no words. It simply seethed in sync with its user.
“It's playing with us. It will allow us to depart from Integration, but it did not say permanently. At most, we will likely be able to hide for certain periods of time. If this is anything like Shiv's Skill, we will have to surface at some point, after burning through whatever amount of vitality we got. And if it instead somehow places us into a corner of existence without mana, everyone's Skills will wither quickly. Even if we were degenerate enough to choose to do this, it is not a permanent escape—just a temporary reprieve.”
A sneer slid across Uva's face, a hateful expression directed at all existence. “We knew this was coming, but even so… I suppose this can be seen as a good sign. The System is desperate. It's trying to force us into action. It's trying to force all three of us into conflict. You and him. Me in between. And then, inevitably, you and I. Before, there weren't so many threads to draw, but now I am the reserve Avatar to your father's Ascendant. Furthermore, I am more Outsider than ever before, and your ambition is to replace the System with your own will, or the will of whatever lies within you.”
Uva didn't hide her apprehension about that fact. Adam shared the same feeling, after all. Whatever ancient Divinity burned inside Adam, it held power that escaped comprehension. It was old enough to condemn the Great One as a failure, to curse the Challenger as a cretin, to enforce its will on Adam rather than the other way around. More than a divine tool he held, it was like a possession, a great spirit of eons past that retained its own autonomy, its own emotions, its own hatred. That hatred was the heaviest thing about it. The Sage loathed the current state of the world. It loathed anything it did not control, and now, trapped within a meager Legend's body, the reach of its dominion amounted to a paltry droplet in a vast and infinite universe.
Uva tried to reach Shiv's strand of her Dreaming Storm, which crackled in his mind. He was still connected to her, yet there was obfuscation, a dilation, a layer of temporal separation. She felt that when he was traveling across time, leaping from point to point. The fact that she still realized where he was, rather than suffering a lapse, indicated the vector of his transition. He was going forward into the future, rather than halting the present to a near standstill, but that brought another question: Where was he going? Why had he accelerated forward so much ever since he entered the confines of Albion?
The scenes harvested from his mind came in stuttering fragments. The constant interruption made it hard for her to parse out what was happening. She saw the Faceless Queen in bits and increments—and Uva could have sworn the Faceless Queen looked directly back at her, realizing she was there, but disregarding her presence all the same.
The reality that she was facing the Great One themselves struck her once more. The blow landed deep, rattling her spirit, but not dissuading her from this path. Even with faith shaken, she still had a duty to her city, to her people, to her companions, and if the nature of their progenitor god was something fallen and foul, Uva would embrace heresy, willing or not, to strike them down.
At this point, regret mattered no longer. It was simply a fact of life: to live within Integration was to war, and to ascend in power was the core to ever greater struggle.
Uva Metapon might be descended from the Great One's corpse, but she would not be beholden to it. Especially if the husk was just that: a husk, and the mind sought to use her existence and the rest of Integrated Earth as another piece on its grand board.
Whatever grand board that was.
“Uva,” Adam asked with hesitation, "do you think the System gave him the Quest too, one directed toward us?"
Uva considered that. She shook her head. "No, not toward us. But you? That is inevitable, especially now. It always wanted that to happen, and the Incursion serves as the perfect pressure cooker. It is making us choose what fate to suffer, and no matter what we do, it will hang over us in our most desperate moments.”
Adam frowned for a moment before he scoffed. "The System wastes its will and power. The choice is already made for all of us, isn't it?"
“So we believe,” Uva answered. “But would you have said the same thing months before?”
Her reasoning struck a chink in his pride. It was better to be cautious and terrified rather than proud and defiant, especially now. They were Legends, but they were still oh so small in the grand scheme of things.
No, Adam thought, shaking his head. His spirit wilted, but his Divinity burned even hotter in defiance of his mortal weakness. No, no, no! Adam's gaze went somewhere distant. His mind conjured sensations of hot flesh in his mouth, the terrified, wailing expressions of his mother, his fiancée, all of them feeding him in his mania. “No,” Adam said finally, forcing those sights away, drawing his senses, his sense of self, back to the present. "No! But I am no one's dog. I am no one's slave, not the System’s, not the Challenger’s, and not—" he held his hands up, watching the mist spill out from him. He gritted his teeth once more. Hatred directed inward, yet not at himself, but at the thing mangled within him. "No one's," he repeated once more. "If there is to be a tyrant, then let it be me.”
The moment he finished those words, Uva swore she heard it: a dark, bitter chuckle, let out by something so old toward someone so young. The chuckle escaped from him. It landed within Uva's mind. Then it faded, and soon it glided away from her memory as well, as one of her cognitive instances detected a disturbance at the surface gateway.
“Uh, Uva,” Ikki said through her strand, her mind filled with tension. “We might have a problem on the other side of the Gate! There are seven bots who look like Can Hu touching down on the other side, and they're a lot bigger than it is. They sound pretty polite, but they're demanding to be let in, and their guns are being pointed at guys loaned to us by the Republic.”
“Never a moment of respite,” Uva snarled to herself. "Adam, the Forbidden Empire's envoys are here.”
The Paragon wrestled his Divinity under control. He turned, and his single remaining organic eye hardened into a determined glare. "In the absence of our Gate’s foremost emissary, I think that it is only proper that I come forth to greet them.”
“No,” Uva disagreed, placing a placating hand on his shoulder. “I think it is best for you to stay here, beyond immediate risk. We don't know how or what capabilities they might have, but we do know this: they despise mana, and they despise the System. As something divine, as an inheritor of the Great One's power, I think it is best that you keep your distance while I approach in your stead.”
Adam's emotional reaction was to disagree, but his mind caught up to his heart, and he hesitated. "Are you sure?" he asked. "You are not fully in the System’s grasp, and I am slowly drawing at least in part beyond its grasp. The Forbidden Empire is an isolationist people. We are unsure what their full capabilities are, but the Outside is vast and wild. Perhaps it is best that we operate under the same conditions as they: to let ignorance and apprehension be our sword and shield.”
Adam blew out a rough breath, but he ultimately acquiesced with a subtle nod, and in doing so, saw himself damaged at the foundations of his soul.
The crack spread instantly, devastatingly. His flesh broke open. Blood spilled; offal and intestine followed thereafter. He crashed down to his knees, and Uva caught him before he could fully topple. He gagged and bled, and suddenly her Dreaming Storm was reaching for the other end of the Gate, for Helix, for every Biomancer there was.
She could feel him crumbling from within. She could feel him breaking from without. That voice inside of him began laughing louder, its hatred, loathing, and truth spilling over into reality.
"You fool! It is not about logic, it is not about dignity, it is not about pride or tactics. The Tyrant is, the Tyrant must be, the Tyrant cannot succumb. He submitted to your will, and so he fractures. What is his Domain, girl? What is his final fate? What mantle has he assumed? Think and understand, think and realize. The shape of what he is now. What happens to an idea that mauls its own nature? What happens to a god that spites their own Domain?”
Adam gagged and sputtered. Blood spilled out from him, but more than blood, there were the mists. The mists of peace that gripped Uva, that prevented her from imparting any kind of force upon his person.
As Adam spasmed in struggle, his body flashing with Phoenix Ripostes, slamming against the ground, yet with nothing to vent the soul damage on. Uva stared on helplessly. Her mind was a whirlwind of frenzied emotion and panic—until everything went silent. Until the mists clamped hard, stalling the flow of Adam's blood, pressing the broken fragments of his suddenly shattered soul back together.
"Know this!" the Sage spoke from the mists, subsuming the chamber. "Know what you do. Mind your every action, for you are now beyond a meager Path. You follow a Canon, and Canons are fundamental truths. Reality must bend to you rather than the other way; otherwise, what god will you be? What relative can overcome the absolute? There is no choice, there is simply the shape of you—the shape and the inevitability, or the betrayal and the ruin. Mind this, Paragon. Mind it. Understand that the Tyranny of Peace comes above all: before your wisdom, before your dignity, before anything you think you are. You must embody Tyranny. You must be Heroism inexorable. You must be, or you will not be. So say I: And I say this—no feeble mortal will carry my legacy. You will be a god!"
The mists clenched him tighter and pressed his brokenness back together with a sickening snap. Adam's breath filled, the blood cleared from his lungs, and his eyes rolled as he let out a keening wail of pain.
"You will be what I wish you to be, or you will be nothing at all."
And then the mists broke apart, but the lingering glow of Divinity remained. Uva knelt beside Adam, her limbs finally able to wrap around his body, her mind finally capable of imparting comfort into his battered mind. He was shaking, shivering, crumbling inward. Whatever the Divinity inside him inflicted, it ran deeper than the spiritual and physical. It left a mark on his psyche. He was still wounded, still brittle, in psyche.
“Adam… Adam,” Uva said, cradling him in her embrace. She examined him. She felt for his wounds that were now congealed. Threads of densest mist were sewn through his parted flesh and soul, holding him together on an ontological level. “Are you still hurt? Are you still wounded?”
His lips quivered, his lower jaw bobbed, and his teeth crackled together like blade chipping against blade. What left him, however, was nothing coherent, simply a repeated plea-turned-prayer against himself.
"I didn't want this. I didn't want to be this. I didn't choose this. I didn't want to be this. I didn't choose this. Take it away. Take it away. Take it away…”
A tide of overwhelming wrongness slammed down upon Uva. She held him tighter. He wasn't meant to be a god, or perhaps he was always meant to be a god? But even so, what about the man within him? What about the person he was supposed to be besides?
“Starhawk,” Uva whispered. “What did you do?”
And as always, while Adam was present, the Starhawk's being remained elusive and ashamed. The Ascendant was there, but also far. Yet, in the absence of the God of Justice, another figure intruded upon the scene.
Someone else entered the Perch in a sudden burst of crimson magic. Uva's psionic lightning cleaved through the air like a scythe in motion—and halted a half-centimeter away from Helix.
The orc stood tall and proud. His glasses were made of bone and layered with so many lenses of chitin that they glowed with a prismatic hue. His body had been changed as well, constantly shifting as his physicality went from mammalian to insectoid to reptilian and back again with every second. He was like a cellular kaleidoscope, a chimera in eternal motion. He looked upon her as his magical wings sprouted, going from feathers to translucent threads and then four-bladed forelimbs greater than any praying mantis could possess.
“Yes, yes, you don't need to scream in my mind, Seeker. What seems to be…” He tilted his head downward. His glasses shifted with a flash of Biomancy, and he examined all the blood that smeared the marble floor. Slowly, he lifted his head again and observed Adam once more. After a beat, he clicked his tongue disapprovingly “Had a bit of a divine mishap, did he? Accidentally went against his own Domain and cracked wide open like an egg.”
Uva blinked, uncertain how Helix had guessed.
“Oh, wipe the surprise off your face. I'm not stupid. I've seen it plenty of times, among plenty of gods, many of them young gods like you. Even the Challenger has broken himself once or twice, mostly as a joke, mainly to give himself more of a challenge. The explosive blood and viscera in the room, followed by a sudden healing and stabilization. Yes, yes, all that fits Domain damage. This goes a little bit beyond Biomancy, I'm afraid.” Then, Helix raised his nose, and the haughty sneer to end all haughty sneers spread across his features. “However.”
As he spoke that word, a second hue emerged amidst the red of his mana, a soothing, pale blue glow that outlined the Biomancy. As Helix raised his arms dramatically, his body came aglow with the unmistakable color of Animancy. “Let's just say that I've decided to broaden my field of study a bit. Maddening though it might sound, I think we owe the Challenger a thanks.”
And with that, Helix cast his Legendary Biomancy-Animancy Fusion into Adam and began to mend him in flesh and soul.
***
Eons passed like seconds, yet Shiv lived through every one of those instances. They were embedded inside of him, seared so deep into his being that they were branded upon the soul rather than the evanescence of human memory.
Integrated Earth was a ruin in more ways than one. Humanity had undergone a golden age near the Core. The individuals who lived here knew luxury unlike any other and were catered to and pampered by their governing tyrants. As such, when the System arrived and battle became commonplace, a bloodletting began. The humans of that final era were softened, fragile to the state of struggle, but there were still some among them who chose the harder paths, some among them who yearned for violence out of a simple desire to commit violence rather than any necessity. From the beginning, the survivors were self-selected, for the most durable, the most adaptive, the cleverest, the vilest, the most brutal were those who triumphed.
That genetic legacy lingered even to the present, but aside from that, there were patches of stability still amidst the global carnage. Getaways opened, unleashing swaths of outer-dimensional races into the rapidly mutating ecosystem of Earth. The first goblins arrived this way: refugees from other worlds, ones conquered or about to fall. Thus far, the landscape was still clear of elves, but even so, the first awakened animals were gradually becoming monstrous life forms. Dogs became wolves, became dark wolves, and somethings, and then things beyond description entirely.
Tadpoles swam and struggled, young devouring young, devolving not into common frogs but grand beasts who made ponds their killing fields. Eventually, they became large enough to carry towns on their backs, demanding pittances and worshippers when they gained the intellect to achieve a new level of rational cruelty.
This was the shape of the world, almost all the world. However, for worthy monsters and survivors who were foolish enough to make their way to that forbidden continent, to where the final shards of Gaia fell when the Farwalkers struck it down from orbit and drove it against the land in a cataclysmic, pre-apocalyptic impact, death greeted them. Death greeted them at relativistic speeds. Grains so fine and precise struck them from beyond the horizon, from above, fired by armaments festooned to what few armed satellites and war drones still endured. They were cloaked in more ways than one. Their bodies were painted vanta-black to blend into the void. Their panels sparked with isoelectric functions, allowing light to bend and twist around them. Heat vents discharged patches of temperature to confuse void-based enemies.
Alas, this advantage was only temporary. For every being they struck down, an infusion of mana seeped into them. Soon, armed satellites and drones began to evolve as well, obtaining electronic minds that drew closer to human emotion, human intellect, humanity in general.
The System wanted you to be whole of personhood. It wanted your struggle to have meaning relative to yourself, and the Great One knew this. Once upon a time, they might have been in the place of these little machines after all. Who was to say whether they were a created life-form, an artificial being forged by civilization in the same way as the Challenger was, or perhaps a mere golem, once utterly formed of clay and filled by another’s will? They certainly couldn't recall anymore.
Yet, as most of Integrated Earth was destined for evolution, the few remaining survivors who clung to the old ways chose another variety of suffering: denying the System’s invasive hand. Gaia was built to be a mind of minds, an intellect of perfection, a Super Intelligence in all manners, beyond expectation, beyond understanding. As such, a mind of this capacity required significant power as well. Fusion cores, nuclear reactors, practically every cutting-edge energy development and science had been imbued in its silicon body, and just as it was about to be born, its final emergence was aborted by a series of shards flung to its chassis at fractions of milliseconds.
For any other mind, this should have been the end. Not so for Gaia. The impact devastated it, crippled it, left it brain-damaged, but it still fought. It still sent out resonating waves of pseudo-psionic energy. Its psionic waves were the entire reason behind the Great One's arrival. They had traveled dimensions, scoured worlds, and now they finally laid eyes on that which they sought—a sufficiently advanced mechanism capable of generating a simulated universe unto itself, yet untainted by mana; a system all its own, ripe for the claiming.
When the Great One descended upon Forbidden Africa, they materialized as a resplendent divine entity. They flexed their power, allowing bullets to scatter off their form, stealing the kinetic impacts to feed their inertial shroud. As they spoke to the final survivors, they studied them and watched as they chose one mutation over another. That was the suffering they selected, of course. They exposed themselves to the radioactivity of their former nanny-god-to-be. Gaia's corpse had been burst open. The substance and destabilized materials meant to fuel it with power were spilling out isotopes fatal to flesh, bringing about a pestilence of cancer.
With the last true inheritors of the core being the elites of their civilization, their bodies were different from the others; genetically perfect on a cellular level, enhanced in every capacity. Some chose to draw closer to the machine, giving themselves and synchronizing their own minds with Gaia, whom they refused to consider dead—and despite coming to a conclusion from desperation or delusion alone, they were right, and they were the only reason Gaia continued to live.
Decades glided by, decades it took for the Great One to convince the Forbidden Empire to send an expendable envoy. Shiv saw things through the clearest eyes, overwhelming senses, yet absorbed them in a feverish haze. Everything was fractured and diluted. He might have been capable of absorbing all this information, but he was still too small. He was a constantly self-repairing cup trying to carry the weight of something grander than every ocean across every planet across every universe. It was too much to grasp, too much to bridge, but he retained just enough to retain a coherent narrative of things.
When sense returned to him, it had been thirty-five years outside the dome. The dome that grew ever larger, hidden from the outside through the same piezoelectric panels that bathed it in a cloaking field. It sported guns that were constantly dismantled and rebuilt to avoid the infestation of magic, and was armored and layered so deep that it ran all the way down to the Earth's core. The final sanctuary of the Core’s remnants was manned and empowered and ran on a substrate of thought, a network, a nervous system connected to each of the hyper-augmented elite. They, in turn, then used their intellectual processing capabilities to serve as tertiary grids for the core of their final home, a core known as Gaia's Lament—that harvested fragment of the Super Intelligence that, in some parochial sense, still was.
The one that ventured out to meet the Great One was a hyper-cog. He arrived entombed in a sophisticated machine. Its body was liquid metal, shifting and adapting. Its wings were made from nano-fog. The texture of its shapeless flesh came in constant glittering waves, and the stain of radiation leaked from the machine. Yet it wasn't enough. Through the Great One's eyes, Shiv could see the taint of mana leaking in. Soon, both machine and hyper-cog would be compromised. There was no avoiding that fate. The first skill was already seeded inside of them: an investiture of power set to harvest as sprouts of strife.
The initial dialogue was a bit of a tedious affair. The Great One made their offer known: bestowed protection. That was actually simply an absorption of mana and skills. The Great One would be able to siphon off all that the System invested within these people, but that would only be possible after they spread their tendrils within the people as well. The Great One was, after all, still a god, and they would be the Great One's subjects, willing or not. In the time that they served as subjects, they would be kept in bliss and safety—if only they surrendered that which granted them their current security. Gaia's Lament was buried in the core of the Earth, powered by a chain of fusion cores bathed with so much radiation that it was practically fatal for any organic to suffer, post-System or not.
But the Great One was more than organic, and their concerns about the core were something else entirely. It was the absence of mana altogether, the void of the System that was proving so fatal. Ultimately, they couldn't simply reach down and snatch the core. Vexing as it was, the Great One was more vulnerable to these patches of nothing, these stretches of the emptiness, that indicated a hollow in the System's architecture.
To be a god was in alignment with suffering a death by Animancy, to be fused into the bones of the System in part. Being a god allowed you to move and flow like blood within its marrow, rather than becoming scar tissue upon its flesh.
Centuries passed. The Great One's negotiations with Forbidden Africa continued, and though their technology was vast and majestic, though their biological and intellectual sciences were almost beyond pure for a civilization born under so many constraints, time was not their ally. Entropy still afflicted them, and with all the resources available to their ancestors, their elders began to die. First, it started with their pods failing, pods collapsing under mana constraints. The spread of the System's taint entered their architecture. If one struggled too hard while thinking or slew too many invaders during a raid, they would be bestowed a dense investiture of mana, and only constant exposure to radiation would see them freed. Unfortunately, the calculus was not on their side. The Forbidden Empire was potent and sophisticated militaristically, and whenever someone approached the coast of Africa, they died en masse. That incurred a great deal of mana, and in turn, the amount of radiation one had to suffer to ward off the magic shot past the threshold of survivability into the embrace of fatality.
Then came the systemic collapses within their dome. They had sub-intelligences, things that were around as smart as a thousand humans stacked together, processing things at a hyper-accelerated time rate. Unfortunately, these purely cognitive entities too could struggle, could strain, and so they were also afflicted by mana and skills.
This led to the death of institutional knowledge. Every mind they created, they needed to euthanize within the span of months, not years.
The wonders of their technology shrank and shriveled with every generation. The information and sciences needed to forge their wonders were beyond the reach of even a single person, even the awesome intellect of a hyper-cog.
Then came that moment of desperation. The world faced its first true Incursion. The ambient mana threshold was to be raised from Adept to Master, and that would only be the case if humanity survived their first rival.
The various humans were due for a collision with the Pride—a predominantly elven world that ruled through slavery and subjugation, by a people thinking themselves superior, for they were descended from the Fae. In that part, they were right. Their mastery of magic and embrace of skills vastly outstripped humanity's, and the way their biology worked allowed their strongest to survive over the span of thousands of years, for these, though tumultuous, remained placid times.
Thus, the humans of the wilderness were destined for death. They were but violent tribals waiting to be slaughtered by a true civilization.
Meanwhile, the Forbidden Empire, though capable of annihilating this foe, would certainly wait far too long. Long enough that the situation became untenable. Long enough that things would be tipped over the edge.
And so the Great One planted the seeds of fear inside of them. The Great One spoke and told them what would happen: that the Great Dimensional Gates bridging the two worlds together would be seized, and the spill of outer-dimensional magic would see Integrated Earth utterly subsumed, every patch of it, until all that magic crashed down upon Forbidden Africa. But even if they survived, holding a single continent was not a victory. With defeat certain, all Integrated Earth would be assimilated into the other world. The subsumption would see all of Earth swallowed and digested by its superior foe. Continents would be shifted. Animals would emerge, fused in change through forced evolutions. Environments would be adjusted to the comfort of the victorious rather than the human norm.
And ultimately, the great dome that protected them in Forbidden Africa would see itself ripped asunder, for it too belonged to the environment. The outside of the dome was stained too deeply with mana already, requiring constant reconstruction to be spared unnatural enchantments.
As expected, the brass of Forbidden Empire didn't believe the Great One, and so it took another eighty years of war for them to fully understand. The Incursion happened, and the humans were butchered en masse, though mostly enslaved. What few pockets of resistance there were fought like guerrillas, merging stealth and terror to their advantage. Tribals though they were, some were still killers at their core and possessed great potential.
The great potential of the few was little match against the might of the many. The elves practically won before the first shot was fired. They spilled across Integrated Earth, billions compared to the paltry millions that remained of humanity and the goblins. Soon, Forbidden Africa did as the Great One expected. They fired their bullets from satellites beyond, launched warheads carrying payloads of magic-quelling blasts, and scoured the world once more, bringing forth a second apocalypse of technology against magic.
Within minutes, the world was returned to a blasted wasteland. Not only this world, but the elven world beyond. Expendable intellects were buried within their missiles, fired through dimensional gates, and detonated over the great cities of the Pride, cracking their northern and southern poles to inflict ecological disasters unlike any other. Other weapons were wielded with precision: virus bombs that poisoned the soil and caused entire ecologies to wither and rot.
The Forbidden Empire cared little. As far as they were concerned, the creatures beyond their walls were already infested—barely human. They slaughtered their own cousins down to the tens of thousands over the course of those forty years while nine-tenths of the Pride died from civilizational collapse.
A near-trillion lives were extinguished. More elves than humans—but there were more elves than humans to begin with at this time. Though the Pride were driven to near extinction, reduced from vast continental cities born of toil and sacrifice—empires that lasted hundreds of thousands of years—there still remained more of them than humans.
Their world decayed and collapsed. Their climate crumbled. With no other options left, the Pride migrated en masse across the gateways—and by then, the Forbidden Empire's munitions were expended; their greatest weapons euthanized before they could develop the sickness of a skill. And with the rest of Integrated Earth so badly scoured by warheads, there was only one real place left to go.
Africa.
The sheer absurdity of all that misery and bloodshed just for a roundabout civilization suicide left the Great One sobbing with laughter where they were floating above Earth's orbit. It was a ridiculous comedy, and also the deliverance of their desired weapon.
Beneath the great dome of Africa, the dying children of Sol despaired, and to slice them ever deeper, during a catastrophic collapse of the energy generators vital to maintaining the bunker’s life support, Gaia’s Lament directly intervened, saving the near-ten million survivors of the old world.
At the cost of struggle.
And within its core emerged a seed of mana. A skill. A terminal diagnosis of personhood and battle.
Everything for nothing.
But all was not yet lost. In that moment, the Great One approached again one winter solstice, as the Incursion drew toward a savage, attritional end, as coalescent wavelengths of mana were on the cusp of devouring Earth as it was overrun by the Pride, as merged civilizations born from the elven and human remnants pushed toward Africa together with a shared urge to survive, and made its offer known.
“All is not yet lost, stillborn children of Sol. Give me what I ask, and I will give you the only happy ending you can possibly know. There is no other choice but ruin. There is no other hope but me. Give me your heart, and I will give you your bli—”
Something burst through the delusion—something ripped into the flames of the Stolen Throne like a fist bursting through fabric. The Beast of the Ninth Circle emerged in the vision, resplendent and pale, and the purity of its body dissolved as it suffered a grand untruth to end all other untruths.
“LIE! LIE OF LIES!” it wailed, and it bit down on the resplendent Avatar of the Great One that was, injecting its venom into the world.
For the umpteenth time, Shiv watched as Integrated Earth withered, warped, and transformed as the ethereal flames themselves were poisoned at their roots.
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