Chapter 372 - Watch Me 360 No-Scope This Nuke Bro

Hello! Very early from one perspective, very late from another. Timezones are funny this way. I considered making this a multi-chapter fight, but I think we gotta pick up the pace on this arc- can't be doing ten+ chapters of battle shit for every city in the Fallen Kingdom, even if there's only a few!

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The chosen of Death are few. Those who can understand that Death is not the End are few, and those who can see what is left behind after the former are rarer still. Those who can reach out and touch it, vanishingly few. Of those, only the ones that manage to master it reach the higher ranks of the Church.

This, among many things, is one of the reasons why the Fallen Kingdom originally fell. It is also, however, one of the core reasons why they remain.

The gist of this assessment is simple. There are myriad factors that go into the conclusion reached through the Division of Divination’s work on this project, ranging from practical to esoteric, but ultimately, the end result is direct and simple to describe.

We are better off with the Fallen Kingdom where it is. To try to annihilate them would be more expensive than any potential gain. When you have to unmake your enemy at the fundamental level, lest it decide to get back up and re-enact its own oblivion on you, the price of victory costs an extraordinary cut of lives, material, and manpower.

There are very few of them. They don’t band together, they don’t seek to attack us, and they actively contribute to the destabilization of the eastern stretch of the fourth ring. We should encourage this state of affairs.

-Divinatory Assessment of the viability of an assault and wholesale elimination of the Demonic Cultivators and Necromancers of the self-titled “Fallen Kingdom”. Marked for re-review due to circumstantial evidence of policy changes, indicated by the ongoing Nation-Class event, the Breach at the Wall. 

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The first artillery cannon goes easily. She only has to sacrifice most of her prosthetic, use the accumulated Echo-stuff of every one the undead mechanics operating the device, a fifty-foot seven-ringed sequence of sigils and interlinked arrays that almost backfired twice, and another shot from her rifle of Pain to get it to blow up violently enough to partially disintegrate her. No big deal.

The second one is considerably less friendly. 

She appears from out of the ground beneath the cannon’s support pylons, the machine remaining upright on intangible platforms of ghost-flesh rather than falling down like it fucking should, and, forewarned by the destruction of the first cannon, the engineers all open their torsos and invert their limbs to act as smaller gun platforms in turn. Six of them have a shot on her, tearing into the earth around her, and she forms a series of sigils in her flesh, the worms writhing into formation to harden her flesh and absorb local energy to support the feat. Ten-foot titans of metal and corpse-flesh disconnect from the artillery cannon, opening up to reveal dozens of their own weapons and opening fire, tearing through the earth around her even as she dives back under.

Annoying bastards. Can’t even sit still and get blown up properly.

She sends the worms out into the dirt around her, forming another array. The earth above is decimated by the incoming fire, excavating her in just a few more seconds- and then she’s moved, the array clicking into effect and re-summoning her anchors to a point above the artillery cannons.

For all her newfound skill, both durability and attack power are sorely lacking in her current setup. She can absolutely irradiate the hell out of a mortal with pure, concentrated Death, but against others like her, or beings with any true strength, her power lies in her newfound grasp of… improvisational runework, so to speak, and what she can create from herself. Hex hounds, Blacksteel, corpse-constructs… things like the Rifle. 

That doesn’t mean she has no options, though.

Her Blacksteel prosthetic spasms, a spike of the supernatural metal shooting out. She infuses it with her understanding of the Dao of Pain, her Intent to harm, and watches as it flies, as she chooses her target and executes the act.

The corpse-mech-engineer-thing furthest away explodes, the crack of a metal-on-metal echoing into its body and the resulting spasm forcing it to literally tear itself to shreds. The explosion releases a fresh mist of pale blood and Echo-stuff, which Raika grabs with her will and a flexing of the worms inside her. As the mechanical abominations beneath her turn to fire, she takes the Death she just caused, pumps it full of the ghost-flesh all around, and launches it as a dozen projectiles below. 

At the speed of thought she contorts around return fire, summons a shield of azalea flowers that erases the larger projectiles coming for her, and tracks each projectile as it impacts against a different cybernetic corpse. Each one that’s hit spasms hard enough to tear their flesh from their steel, crumple their more delicate infrastructure, and in turn cook off the ammunition in their hampers, exploding out in gorey messes that paint the cannon they once manned. The few that remain last less than another second as she repeats the feat again, taking these Deaths, empowering them with what powered the engineers and is now left bleeding out into the world, and sending it out to repeat itself amongst those that remain.

By the time she lands from her teleportation, the field is a mess of broken metal and shredded flesh, too pale and malformed to be natural, painting the space around the impossible cannon.

Each of the seven original weapons of war that arrived is unique, but they each have similar features. Laden with enough spellcraft and arrays to make her teeth ache, each and every one stands as an obelisk against the world, gun-barrels the size of buildings emerging from out of nests of complex pistons, gears, and burning factories of off-white Flame. Their bases are made of a mix of massive metallic support structures and grave sites, labyrinthine mini-graveyards made of stone markers and complex little shrines to those departed. Some of these mini-graveyards actually climb up the massive struts and structures that define the different cannons, cooling towers festooned with markers of death as much as another cannon’s anchor-points might be.

They’re a mix of horrifying brutality, mechanical ingenuity, and a near-graceful approach to death, standing like alien temples of onyx and steel in the soft fields surrounding Godsfall. They’re beautiful, in a haunting, world-ending sort of way. 

The second one dies harder than the first, but it does die.

Taking the destruction of the first cannon, she manifests it again in the second, compensating for the differences in circumstance and wardings by deploying another series of formations. The worms have only gotten more efficient- as a hive, the life and unlife inside her have started to accept the patterns she’s enacting, grooving familiar with basic runes and shapes. It’s not enough that she doesn’t have to think about it, but it is enough that some basic constructs and spell-patterns come almost instinctually, following her intent and Intent as she pits her existence against the world.

The Death which blooms in azalea-flowered form ties into the dozens of quick-forming circles, formations and runes that spawn at her will, unmaking the cannon’s defenses and drinking deep of its fuel. 

Which is Raika’s cue to leave.

A repeat of her previous array has her anchors teleport away again, corpse-flesh reforming around the needles as she manifests a half-mile away. Not very far, all things told, but considering her limitations, it’s not bad. It actually puts her most of the way away from the blast radius. 

Most. 

The machine collapses inward for a moment before the amount of power and Destruction contained within it finish escaping, exploding outwards hard enough to unmake the artillery piece at the fundamental level. Steel and grave-markers and enchanted onyx-clad materials vaporise into sand and then are launched with enough force to unmake a city district, a mushroom cloud of devastation and Death spawning from the blast and reaching to the sky. The world is flooded with the un-white colors of Echo-stuff, visible even to conventional senses at this density, as the materials and energies powering the weapon are unleashed in the most chaotic fashion possible.

It liquifies the front of her body, tears sand-shards of Blacksteel from her enough to turn her prosthetic near-skeletal, and makes her anchors ache at the force launched against her.

She drinks in deep, deadened nerves singing of agony and oblivion. She forces herself to remain still anyways. 

It’s just pain. She’s gotten good at dealing with Pain. After so many years of suffering so very much of it, the atomizing force that carves off the front of her body feels familiar enough to barely require any effort to resist. 

She inhales as much of the Death in the air as she can, taking in the abstract energy and the Qi bound to it and altered by it that’s blasting out from the detonation. It’s hard to get a grasp on- most of it dissipates our into nothing or flies away, going to the End it ultimately is always an echo of, but there’s so much of it that she almost doesn’t need to try to absorb it. By the time the blast has turned from incinerate-y to agonizing burn-y, she’s recouped more energy than she lost in the exchange- more Death to feed to her internal garden of azaleas, more Qi to power her existence and abilities, more Echo-stuff to convert to flesh and use for other effects. 

She goes for the third cannon, aiming a teleport in its direction- 

The world turns to white noise around her, and the sharp tang of Pain that actually matters.

Raika’s senses vanish, overwhelmed entirely by the force that’s landed directly on top of her. Her corpse-flesh vaporises, her Blacksteel shattering and flying off, and she actually senses damage to her anchors, the needle that hold her existence to the material world straining. They don’t shatter, but several of them chip, begin to warp, begin to melt or corrode. It takes a massive effort to keep them together, to make sure they stay close enough to each other for her to reconstitute-

And then the second blast hits. 

The world turns to Devastation and Detonation as Mortaria’s forces carpet-bomb the area she’s in, turning everything for kilometers around into a series of yawning craters. 

Again, again, again-

A landscape of azalea flowers blooms on the battlefield, petals of perfect pitch-black juxtaposed with white stems, and vice versa. The next detonation to hit is partially negated, several flowers growing to match it and becoming unmade as the Death they represent is spent- each one looks like the curve of a bomb exploding, impact and heat and detonation shaping the pattern of their petals, and they are spent to bring that Death to bear against itself here. 

At the center of the garden, Raika reforms herself, absorbing the surprisingly small amount of energy left behind by each blast. It aches, hurts to absorb in a way that the rest of the Death she’s been drinking doesn’t. More to it than Qi and Death, or maybe some unique pattern or spellcraft or-

Doesn’t matter. The next three blasts still hit, but she burns through chunks of her garden to endure each time. Death against Death- the conceptual energies negate each other, at least in part, and more the closer they are in nature, but the leftover something in the blasts still gets through, just without its anchor now. She moves, manifesting the Echoes of the worms that just died inside her and spending Echo-stuff to remake them more physically. They move at her command, reforming the arrays that were barely even relevant to the bomb-blasts, then adding more, and more, and more.

The sloppy craftsmanship ensures that it will be minutes, if not seconds, before the spellwork collapses, but for a few moments, Raika’s durability skyrockets, runes for density, force, force-negation and both heat and impact absorption overlapping and interlocking with each other. She feels the strain, feels how they make her anchors ache, but they ache a fuckload less than getting bombed again. 

The next blast hits, and she turns, tracking where it came from- there.

Fuck the angle- the moment she casts her senses in that direction, the thing attacking her becomes impossible not to see. 

Her garden of Death vanishes as she teleports, going out to her maximum range of a half-mile- and then immediately does it again, and again, and again, over and over. The strain of it partially unmakes some of her other arrays, causes enough friction that parts of her begin to destabilize- but it puts her just ahead of the next blast when it hits. 

Ten seconds. Twenty. In that time, she teleports dozens of times, throwing herself vaguely in the direction of the source of the blasts, towards the thing at their source, and the landscape around and behind her turns to glass under the heat of the bombing. 

One last teleport-

A blast at a completely different arc comes at her, fired at a railgun’s angle rather than a falling bomb- but she’s ready for it this time. Down a limb, her anchors bombed hard enough to start to glow from the heat, she shapes the life-unlife inside of her into another shape. 

She teleports straight up, the world beneath her turning to light and heat and shrapnel and the un-sound of something so loud it can’t be heard, only felt. The blast washes over her, more arrays collapsing at the force of it- but they do their job, blunting the harm until it only burns her rather than unmakes her. Instantly she remakes what was lost, burning through energy to force the over-complicated, barely functional series of spells back into work, feeling the strain they place on her and ignoring it for now. 

As the mushroom cloud of the explosion paints the sky (and her) in shades of smoke and darkness, she shapes another spell, and teleports to where that last shot came from.

Before her is a fucking titan.

The white noise of that much force, over and over, made it hard to see anything, but they’ve been visible practically from the horizon. Unveiled, launching the full force of their Death and technique onto the world, the Bishop of Mortaria (whatever her name is, Raika didn’t bother to find out) feels as bright as staring another bomb head on, as loud as feeling the thunder-crack of detonation inside one’s lungs. Almost as large as one of the artillery cannons, they look like a spider and gun-platform at once, larger than a building and made entirely of machines and weaponry. 

The only indication of humanity, or anything even close, lies in a single mask, placed in what looks like a grave-marker at its center. Pale, shaped like a cherubic figure, the mask swivels eyes like the gunflash of weapons fire on her. She’s pretty sure she can feel at least a little surprise in there.

The Bishop doesn’t hesitate. New weapon-mounts swivel, the overwhelming sun of Death that is their presence flooding towards Raika, the incoming Detonation loud enough to make her perception of reality vibrate in anticipation-

Raika’s in a lot of pain. Like, a lot. There’s a few city-destroying blast’s worth of Qi and force and heat currently burning through a very poorly designed series of arrays inside her body. 

Her remaining hand comes up, holding a Rifle.

It is Made of Pain, and Made To Share it. 

Left soaking in the crater of the first Detonation, just as she’s soaked in the violence of the following several. Born from her Pain, of her Pain, intrinsically tied to her understanding of Dao, from materials birthed from her own being. The gun is as much a ritual as it is a physical implement, maybe more, and as Li Shu taught her-

The core of spellcraft is simple. Arrays, Craft, formations, runes- it’s all the same.

As Above, So Below. 

A Truth that isn’t hers, but is still… True. Magic is fun like that.

She pulls the trigger.

A bullet born from the agony and force and flame and Death in a dozen Detonations fires in the instant before the Bishop can react, can put up defenses for a gun that wasn’t there a moment ago. 

They fire anyways. She’s not fast enough to stop someone in the midst of expressing their most fundamental self from doing so, for to do so is in many ways inherent.

The world goes white.

The battlefield echoes with the sound of the largest explosion yet. The ground shakes, the grasses of the fields beneath their war are flattened for kilometers around, and the world is reshaped to fit a gaping, burning crater in itself. 

Two more of the cannons, kilometers away, are partially collapsed, their systems devastated, their Echo-stuff and more esoteric energies leaking from them. Engineers, infantry, and most of the local landscape are all unmade down to the tiniest pieces, though several Death-Engines have been survived, lying half-buried in the ash and shrapnel. 

Raika gets up, rebuilding the last of herself back from what was left. She definitely felt an anchor-needle crack again, but the arrays did their job- still vaporized, but the force was minimized enough that it wasn’t as bad as the first time she was hit.

The other Bishop isn’t quite so well-off. 

There is a bomb in the crater.

It is a bomb in the way that a sun is a fire. It is a bomb the size of a mountain, a hundred-hundred-hundred bombs all wrapped around each other like interlocking pieces of a puzzle, an impossible mechanism of shape that is and can only ever be a bomb. Its shadow is the shadow of obliteration it casts, and the black of its silhouette is a moon on a world on a collision course with a world ripe for oblivion.

The bomb has a hole in it. The bomb’s system has misfired. The internal mechanisms of the bomb have been compromised by something like a gunshot, which has left it gored through in a perfect circle, massive sections of its impossible pattern left stuttering or still.

The bomb is a titan, with a single pale mask on a single grave which marks the core of a platform of weapons to wipe out a battlefield. 

The hole is a gunshot, going right through the bottom of the titan’s cannon-panoply and up into a little crescent cut out of the mask.

Raika smiles. She feels the weight of her existence on the world and the agony of the gun in her hands. She looks down at the figure before her, already recovering, compensating for the damage- but still very much damaged.

“Surrender, and I won’t shoot you again.”

Distantly, she hears the sound of something with too many wings beating much too fast, slowly getting louder. 

She smiles wider, hungrier, too many teeth and too sharp for something human. 

“Surrender quick, and maybe I won’t let my bug eat you either.”