Chapter 371 - All Quiet On The Eastern- Ayo What The Fuck Is That

Wrote this one entirely on my phone while on a fourteen hour flight. Can you tell? I think it still turned out pretty well. Truly my talent exists semi-independently of my comfort and tools. Muahahahaha! Also, love a chapter of Raika being a capital P Problem, lol.

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And so the First Among The Dead sat in its palace, covered in gold, silk and fragrant incenses, and took audience with those which sought to speak with it.

“How have you conquered Death?” asked the first of the supplicants, his fine robes torn to ribbons, stained by tears and blood and the effluvia of despair.

“I Have Not,” said the First Among The Dead.

“How do you live on after your End?” asked the second supplicant, his bowels torn open, the swords of his enemies cast deep within his flesh and unmaking his heart with every beat.

“I Do Not,” said the First Among The Dead.

“Please, wise master, stranger unto us, beloved of Death, who moves and shifts and thinks and knows as one who lives, but is not living- how may we be like you?” begged the third supplicant, who wore no robes, bore no iconography, and who looked upon the gilded corpse without fear.

“Die.”

- Ancient parable of the first communion with the Holiest of Holies, in the beginning of the apotheosis of the Church.

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It has been, insofar as the Bishop Anaya has experienced, a rather quaint little conflict. 

The expectation was always that it would be a swift battle, one of elimination- after all, Godsfall is one of the most static of the Kingdom’s cities, one of the most sedentary and accepting of their own Stillness. Their good fortune, receiving a lucky opportunity in the form of a Blessed Mortal, would obviously have revitalized them to some extent, but their armies, if any still remain, exist in the context of something buried, as all their city is. Mortaria, on the other hand, is and has always been the beating heart of the machinery of Undeath. Even before the Cold Sun and the apotheosis of the Church, Mortaria’s forges pumped heat and iron into molds, hammered tools into form, crafted the mechanisms by which industry could prevail over the overwhelming tides of the world’s failings. The history of gunpowder and smoke, of charcoal and steam, has been engraved into the holy shrines by hand for generations, blueprints and mechanisms and transformative thoughts all compiled in carved metals and soldered heat. It was Mortaria from which the first King of what now lies fallen rose, and in spite of the end of his eventual bloodline, no era of the civilization which now rules Undeath has lasted more than a decade without the support of the cold blue flames and bright black metals of it’s forges.

In comparison, a failed city-state focused on digging its own graves is hardly anything worth worrying over. Whatever cultural significance Godsfall once had, whatever allows its three Bishops to sustain their authority in the face of the Most Holy, is hardly relevant in the face of such a conflict. 

Obviously there are some limitations. A war of total annihilation would be out of the question, for one. To lose even a single Bishop in the lead-up to the Final Conflict, the true battle against the End, would be unforgivable, and too much damage to any of the forces brought to bear for the battle equally so. It’s one thing to know one’s culture is better than another’s, and something else entirely to underestimate the threat of a being which has conquered its own Death, or the harm they can provide, and to waste resources on something so pointless would be… well, a waste. 

Still, some insults must not be borne. For the sake of honor, of righteous understanding, of respect between peers, even if they are not the greatest among peers, some insults must be refuted. For an outsider, less than a century aged, barely competent excuse for a Bishop to wander in, laying claim to a Blessed Mortal, and insult the Holy See to its face? To decry it’s authority, to disrespect the culture on which they stand and have been elevated to, and to call forth the name of the most famous excommunicated member of the Church in millennia, and receive no true reply? Impermissible. Unallowable. A show of force is required.

And so- this expeditionary force. A deployment of mechanized undead, built with fresh vat-flesh and cold-pressed augmentics, powered by pressurized machinery running on Qi and Death. A few war-engines, a soecualty of Mortaria, designed for rapid-action deployment across the battlefield for maximum disruption. A selection of well-honored, centuries old artillery deployments, gleaming with the violence of time and empowered by the decay that has seeped into them and back out again. Enough to crush any outsider, and more than enough to educate a lesser city on the consequences of their disruptiveness.

And then it all went wrong, of course. 

The Bishops of Godsfall aren’t cooperating. They’re… expending much more force than they should be. Burning through years of Death, overextending their strength, wasting their efforts to actively slow down Anaya’s victory. There’s no chance they can win, no need to properly retaliate- they brought this upon themselves, and no Bishop past their first few centuries doesn’t know how the game is played. It’s not to an extent that it would worry her, not yet, but it is enough to properly frustrate- and that’s before the newcomer started causing further complications.

The foremost among them being that she’s garbage. 

The spell craft and runic formations identified as belonging to the “Bishop” Rai Ka até rudimentary at best, often destabilizing under minimal contact, and the patterns of attack that have been noted seem nearly random. An occasional blitz against an unguarded front with nothing behind it, suicidal corpse-constructs launched against the frontlines- always an annoyance, never a real threat. 

Not until she isolated herself, facing down a Death Engine. She vanquished it, but she did só at a cost- time. Time where her location was known and her coordinates verified. 

It was expensive to power the artillery personally, but Bishop Anaya has tired of the cost of this pointless conflict. Better to wipe out the troublemaker, leave the city and the real Bishops intact, and move back on. With enough of a show of force, she might even find the leverage to demand access to the Blessed Mortal, gain further forward momentum from this venture- such a powerful blessing shouldn’t be left in the hands of those who do not deserve it, and who cannot (or will not) best utilize it. If an expenditure of a bit of Comprehension, Death, and Arcana are all it takes, it’s well worth.

And it worked, too. Total obliteration of the designated strike zone, complete and total annihilation of the designated target. Nothing could survive such a concentrated blast of Anaya’s Comprehension, not without some sort of sign. Now it’s only a matter of time until the eventual surrender, until things return to what they should be, with the addition of a renewed understanding of Mortaria’s place in the hierarchy of the Fallen Kingdom. 

Standing atop a Deathshead Launcher, Bishop Anaya shifts from out of the machine’s core, drawing her power out from inside of it where it flows like liquid onyx. Her Death is a bleak thing, and it makes a sound vaguely like screaming as it falls back into her, like a bomb falling from on high. Her first Death, the one which she has saddled and broken and used to drag herself out of mortality, was an explosive thing, an event of mountain-shattering proportions, which detonated loud enough to echo for weeks. It still bleeds from her if she’s not careful- the few scraps that remained of the original explosive, and some of the ash of her first body, are all that remained, and there is some issue of… accidental discharge, if she isn’t careful.

Like a river of black, brilliant and shining with sparks like starlight, she reforms herself into a static body, limbs reattaching in sequence to recompile her war-form. Each joint and socket detaches from where she has bonded herself to the blessed artillery cannon, rebuilding her ten-legged form into the mobile bombing platform she has crafted her existence into. The machine beneath her groans, the de-coupling only adding to its aged strain and the damage therein, even as, through her Death, it further transforms and gains new bits of metal and munition to power itself. 

The other batteries resume firing, the weight of her presence still empowering them even as she steps away. Here, at the back line of their assault, she can feel the thrum of the tanked tread-engines that have brought forth the heavy machinery of the battle, the ever-moving tread of metal on mud from the corpse infantry, the occasional screams and engine-cries of the other Death Engines on the battlefield. Through the pounding of guns and ancient machinery, she can feel the battlefield, her lichdom tied to the fundamental forces which now alter it. Every troop movement, every shelled position, position, every engine which screams and Devastates, all echo back within her. With the slightest echo of will, mechanisms and machinery made of spellwork bring her orders across the battlefield, feeding her and connecting her to every movement of every place under devastation.

She is this conflict’s maestro, its drumbeat, its screaming black heart that whispers of annihilation, and even as she spends herself here, she is fed in turn. A cycle of devastation, Death turning to more Death, as so many other cities and Bishops have failed to grasp.

Victory is in hand.

And then something goes wrong. Again. Because what else would be possible in such a miserable place?

In an instant, a hundred corpse-infantry vanishes. In another, that number doubles, and then increases further. No screaming detonation, no massive burst of spellwork or sudden advance of enemy forces- one instant they’re there, the next they’re gone, as if vanished from the map of her awareness. 

The thought screams in her mind, forever-loud, bringing with it a horror that feels out of place in her form. Daemon, her mind whispers, jumping to the worst possibility imaginable, even as she knows it can’t be, even as she knows it must’nt be. They would never unleash such a thing against their fellows, would never achieve such a thing at all. It is one thing to Die, a further, more monstrous thing to End, but tô have never been at all? To become nonexistence without even the grace of death? Sacrilege beyond sacrilege. Ruin above all. Beyond excommunication- they would be deemed Hereticus Extremys, hunted the ends of the earth and cast against the Cold Sun. They wouldn’t, not for this, not for nothing-

No. They haven’t. She senses it now, the impossible blending- their Deaths remain, but their steps do not, their machinery lest static and ruined. To her connection to the battlefield, they’ve vanished- to her Lich senses, deeper and wider than her Comprehension, they’ve been crushed into a singular orb of Death, something like a massive Wraith of some kind. And it keeps growing- she feels the way it changes the battlefield from the march of munitions and machinery into a chaotic melee, reeking of Hunger. More organic, more primal, more animalistic than her own grasp of Death, her own experiences with it, and it keeps on growing. 

Whatever it is, it keeps eating. She ties her gaze into one of the artillery shots heading in that direction, her Comprehension and the spellcraft that makes up her form working together to allow her to witness the battlefield from afar. She feels herself falling, seeing from out of the detonation-to-be as she travels, and-

It’s wings beat so fast that she can feel the humming in the air from kilometers away, each wingspan wide enough to cover a building like a tarp. She counts four, then six, then twenty membranous wings, spiraling out from a central body that is barely a hundredth the size of any of them, dripping Echoes like fluid or gore. Again and again, they beat, like a hurricane magnified by the impossible velocity with which the creature moves. It hovers over the battlefield, an open, too-human maw drinking in all every bit of Death it can reach. Pale vat-flesh liquifies and falls in streams of gore into its mouth, and severe ao Death Engines are actively retreating from its presence, lobbing attacks that occasionally damage its wings but do nothing to stop it from approaching them and inhaling. 

It’s a Death construct, true, but it’s too… alive. There’s something more organic than Echo-flesh about it, and she can’t sense spellcraft or any formations active inside of it. It’s not a ghost-thing or skeletal abomination, not like she’s been facing throughout the battle, and it doesn’t read like anything she’s familiar with in terms of runic script or more esoteric arrays. It’s one thing for there to be something new or unexpected, but from this place of Stillness? 

The bomb falls dead-center on the impossible beast, and she can hear in her core body the devastation of the blast, the way it collapses reality into a mess of flame and fury, of Destruction and Devastation. A whistling scream comes up from the creature, its wingbeats still humming, it’s strange nature still drinking in the world around it. 

What is that? Some experimental new weapon? Some strange new ritual they’ve uncovered? Something they’ve been building all this time? 

She “frowns”, so to speak (no face or mouth with which to perform the action traditionally). That complicates things. She’ll have to increase the shelling of the strange construct, which will allow more leeway for their trench-diggers to advance, which will force her to redirect infantry from the main advance to counter their forward push, which means she will have to rearrange battle lines to keep Bishop Seo En-Hyundai, the Ghost Giant, busy…

Manageable. And war is an ever-changing condition, one where variables shift all the time- there will be opportunities for her to turn things around just as drastically as this sudden emergence. Her victory remains. 

And yet… more time wasted. More resources wasted. And a failure to deliver the overwhelming victory required. 

Perhaps another demonstration of force is in order. Another violent lesson on her Comprehension of Devastation and Detonation. A few more proper assaults against them, closer to the city proper, should show her sincerity, and remind them of the costs that come with acting as they do.

And then one of the artillery cannons on her far flank explodes into shrapnel. It’s not like the day was going to get any better, now is it?