Izuku stared at the swarm of Thralls led by a Knight dully, before slowly reaching one pale hand covered in black plasteel into the purple, boneladed coat he had on while planting Deepborn into the ground. Gripping the Hand Cannon within, he whipped around while pulling back the hammer and sliding a clawed finger onto the trigger. The portal snapped shut seconds before the dart-like round would have flown through it and into Ir Anûk's head. Chambering the next shot, Izuku turned his glowing, green eyes back towards the now charging Hive with a fond sigh, "I'll kill them each ten times ten for this when I return."

And he was sure they both knew it. Oh, they were probably both shoring up the defenses of their Throne World for his retribution already. Still, he had been spending too much time near the others. The Ir's would never have offered him something freely.

Snapping his fingers, Izuku sent a wave of Sasis forwards, freezing the Thralls solid in a single move. Dark crystals stopped their movement while Izuku drew Deepborn from the ground. The pitch black blade seemed to eat what little ambient light there was around them, including from the Cleaver the Knight held. Izuku offered them a smile from the hood of his coat, all teeth.

"Hello," he said in the Royal Tongue of the Hive, rasping and clicking, something no non-Hiveborn would recognize as language at a listen, sounding more like someone had figured out how to turn torture into a dialect, "My name is Izuku Midoriya, my mother is Inko Midoriya, and my father… well, I can't say I know him, so let us just say it was the Deep itself."

"Do you think speaking our tongue will convince me to spare you?"

"Of course not," Izuku said, casually placing Deepborn across the cleaver. The Hive blade was larger than the older sword, though that didn't cause Izuku to pause, "Your way has met my way. And so it is time for us to petition each other to be the one to keep on being something."

Izuku saw the recognition of the words in the Knight's three eyes. It was the last thing they ever did, as the Hand Cannon in Izuku's other hand went off and drove a spike through his head. Izuku sighed as he heard the noise of more Thralls in the difference, storing the gun back into his coat. Of course it wouldn't be so easy.

Deepborn lashed out as the first Thralls rounded the corner, drinking deeply and sending hive blood out as it cut through six of the band of twenty in one strike. He was gonna be here a while, he could tell.

Well, he could jump off the cliff, but that would be the equivalent of telling the Irs their little prank had worked, which it hadn't, thank you very much. Even-

Oh.

Eir was close to his Throne World…

He guessed they were in on it too, then. What about the Deep?

Forget ten times ten, he was killing them both ten times a hundred when he got back for this. It was a very elaborate prank, closer to what he would expect from Savathûn then them, really.

Mara was likely to be unhappy too. She always was when something like this happened.

- X Nameless X-

Nameless charged forward with all of his siblings, hoping that by tearing the strange thing apart and feeding his worm on it's death he would finally be allowed to become an Acolyte, gain a name and go through the metamorphosis to become male. The Thrall had been alive for ten systems, and other than other broods, he had yet to fight anything else. The war moon hadn't found another species to rend down to nothing to feed to the Deep.

And other Thralls were barely able to do more than keep the worm full. It wasn't glutted and allowing the changes to take place. But this thing, soft and staring them in the dark shadows of the moon of long dead Fundament, which his mother sang was the ancestral homeworld of the Hive, would do-

And then it swung the sword into the wall, shattering it to pieces. Each shard of metal, a thin triangular dagger, hovered in air around it as it cracked its talons, filling the world with teeth. Puffs of air coming from the mouth. The same type the Prince was said to give when the Knights led their Acolytes, Ogres and Thralls against each other in small wars.

Laugher. The thing was laughing at them. The others seemed to realize it too, banshee wails rising up as their mother sang above them and they charged. An avalanche against the soon to be dead thing.

The thing rushed at them, his knife-teeth following behind him and dashing in and out of sight like small warships. The Hive crashed into the thing, and one side gave.

Unfortunately for them, it wasn't the thing. Daggers gouged through Nameless's most evolved broodmate, nearly a Acolyte, like a whirlwind. A fist crashed into another's skull, shattering the head in a spray of ichor. The thing tore through them, literally with the daggers and proverbially with its hands so fast that five were dead in an equal number of heartbeats.

One broodmate got behind it and leaped, and several of the knives rushed into the thing's hand and reformed into a short cleaver. It slid into the throat, then through the torso and finally out the side in an obvious splatter of gore. A second formed in its other hand and it drove them both into the neck of another.

Nameless realized with horror that all that was left was just him and his mother alone against the thing. It turned towards them, the daggers merging together back into a cleaver as it walked towards him. Nameless took a step back, while his mother began to weave a spell.

The Deep began to gather around the thing, and Nameless turned and ran as his mother began to gather her own magic. He didn't look back, the worm in his chest laughing.

Weak, it taunted, find a new Brood, kill one and take their place.

- X [68H:42M:20S] After Midoriya Izuku's deployment. Throne World Prospero X-

S-1: He will not fall. He cannot fall.

E-1: Your hope for him is amazing, but-

S-1: He. Will. Not. Fall.

E-2: He calls upon the Darkness without fear, dubs it his father.

M-1: As have I in the past. We should not assume his fall so easily or so early. He has not been consumed by the Sword Logic because of us. If we abandon him, he may be.

O-1: Don't be so afraid, [REDACTED], [REDACTED]. We know Izuku, he has never fallen easily, has he?

E-1: ...No.

S-2: He's a good kid. Always has been, always will be. We should wait until he says the last word on this matter before we abandon this timeline. I think he'll surprise us yet.

D-1: [REDACTED] Is just scared about what will happen if he falls. Ain't she?

A-1: We all are. But we agreed, we only would give up on a timeline if it was clear it was lost to humanity. This one isn't yet. Even if Izuku has fallen, he isn't the only factor.

E-1: …

A-1 [REDACTED]?

E-1: Nothing. We need to find a way for him to get home is all. That will be the first step.

S-1: The first step is us grounding him. Reminding him that the Sword Logic is not the only thing there is. We wouldn't want him to end up like Toland, would we?

D-1: That'd be a sight, wouldn't it? No.

S-1: Thank you. But yes, returning him to Earth is step two. And preferably soon.

O-1: Are we even sure the Earth is like other timelines in this one? The things he describes… there was nothing of the sort.

S-2: Which is just more evidence this timeline might pull ahead when the time comes. The backstory is already different.

C-1: Izuku taught me everything, and he didn't fall last time. He won't this time either.

M-1: He's always been stubborn. Do you not recall when we sent him to kill a Gatekeeper?

C-1: No, and as always, the more you speak of things Uldren did, the happier I am not to be him.

-X [74H:30M:05S] After Izuku Midoriya deployment, 52nd moon of Fundament, caverns X-

Izuku decrypted Paradox Perfected from the small gem hidden under his cloak. The charging Thralls had just enough time to give a shrieked word of fear in the Royal Tongue before Izuku pulled the trigger. A blast of Void shards ripped from the mixture of shotgun and fusion rifle, disintegrating the first six Thralls in a single shot and the spent shell.

The new lead Thrall reached him then, and Izuku smashed it upside the head with his right fist, plasteel meeting half hardened carapace and forcing the carapace to give way. Planting Paradox Perfected onto another, he pulled the trigger and blew them apart in a blossom of void energy and ichor before re-encrypting the shotgun and decrypting the Hand Cannon he had taken from a Hive smith. Black and gold and hungry.

Lessons from Shin came to Izuku as he held down the trigger, fanning his hand over the hammer as spikes launched from the gun and tore through the charging Thralls like a Winnower through grain.

Whatever that was. Mara used it sometimes, called his father "The Winnower". Most of the others that stayed in his Throne World called it "the Darkness". The Ascendant called it "the Deep."

As more Thralls charged forwards, pebbles towards a wall, Izuku flexed his free hand. Causality tilted as energy was dragged from the weak souls of the Thralls he had killed. In the next second, the remaining Thralls were torn apart by the small, dense gravity well Izuku had summoned.

Once it faded, shards of Void energy hit into the plasteel, scorching holes in the robes and cloak over it. One whizzed by his ear, and Izuku pulled out a valuable cartridge and reloaded the black-gold gun. Acolytes. What was likely days into their battle and they were only now sending Acolytes his way.

He felt he should have been vaguely insulted. Sure, he hadn't been ruining anything critical, more focused on finding the damn flight bay to get out of this place than causing chaos, but he felt he should have been sent Acolytes before now. How long before the Knights arrived? A week?

Izuku drew a second Hand Cannon, this one a… a 'gift' they had called it... from the blue, scatterbrained robot that had come into his Throne World with the others and earned his place by tithing ammunition to Izuku. Silver and black and engraved with feathers. The Acolytes stopped the firing, chittering at each other before one turned and ran. Izuku considered picking it off for a second, before deciding to focus on the others for now as they resumed the Shredder fire. Leveling both guns, Izuku began to fire the opposing weapons, spikes of black firing from one while bolts of white went from the other. Death bloomed from both, but one was eaten while the other was scattered.

Barely worth killing, definitely not worth the true form Deepborn.

Alanâk Thûl marched through the caverns of the war moon, her Acolyte marching behind her with their Boomers held tight as she held her Darkblade Axe trying to hide her disgust and disgruntlement at being sent out here. The Brood Mothers had petitioned the Prince that she lead her Acolytes to find why their Tithe had been slowly but surely draining. Instead of doing it themselves, they wanted her to do it.

What had happened to the days of Hashladûn's rise? The daughter of their Princely God Crota had, as a Thrall, rent Knights down to nothing without assistance. She had butchered an entire generation of Hive upon her morph to Wizard, culling a hundred Acolytes, ten Knights and a Ogre by herself, and it had taken her father entering the field with his sword glowing as the paracausal evidence of the Sword Logic to subdue her.

Now? Now Wizards coward behind Thralls and Acolytes, relying on them nearly completely to Tithe destruction to them and feed the worm curling around their vital organs. Weak, cowardly, not fit for scraps at the Prince's tab-

Alanâh Thûl stopped in the hallway covered with the dead bodies of Acolytes and Thralls. Standing with one foot on a struggling Acolyte was obviously the thing that was causing these problems. A deep green false carapace covered his visible body accented with black, a hooded robe like that of a Wizard hung over it, purple and gold covered him. He turned, revealing a rebreather over his lower mouth and glowing green eyes under a curly mess of hair.

"At last," it said in the Royal Tongue, eyes staring into Alanâh's being as the Acolyte below his foot froze and the fake carapace pushed down, shattering it to pieces. From his back, he drew a sword so unlike the Cleavers of the Hive but so similar. Unlike the Cleaver, a weapon each aspiring Knight had to craft themselves from bone and stone before they could take up the morph, the blade was clearly made from a strange, almost shifted metal as black as the black hole cunning Savathûn had once retreated into.

But like the Cleaver and Alanâh's axe, it was a weapon of the Sword Logic. Shifting Runes barely visible on the blade, not Hive, but something else, something darker. But that didn't matter, the only thing that mattered to her…

Was the fact that where the blade touched reality, reality lost. Paracausal energy generated with each severed molecule. The thing stepped forwards, sword of a similar length to a Cleaver in one hand.

"I was getting so very hungry," the thing drawled, eyes staring at him from a pale face. One a shade too gaunt for the wide, muscular and tall frame of his body, but one Alanâh recognized easily. How could she not, for she bore a similar trait?

It was someone who was using the death inflicted by the Sword Logic to sustain himself.

"Fire," she ordered, then repeated it, "Fire!"

- X Izuku X-

Izuku walked away from the shattered Acolyte, drawing Deepborn off his back as the Knight stared at him with three sickly green eyes. Not just Knight, he noticed as he stared at the axe, a Darkblade, "Finally, I was getting so… very… hungry."

And he was. While he had eaten worse than Hive meat before (it was toxic, half rotten from the outset, and if you were unlucky enough to eat the Worm things got bad), he didn't want to risk removing his rebreather. While it was majestic just how many places the Hive could survive, he wasn't at that level at this point to survive if the moon's air was incredibly poisonous. So Sword Logic it was.

The sword was a conduit, a path that fed the wielder on the death created. Guns released the death into the world and let it scatter, leaving only scraps to be gathered. But a sword in hand? That fed you, entirely and utterly. Created a wound that any practitioner could understand, drawing the balm of life where others only saw death.

They killed you, they were better. You killed them, you were better. And that was Majestic. Majestic.

"Fire," the Darkblade ordered in the torture tongue of the Royal Tongue, and the Acolytes prepared their Boomers. Dead starlight crackled, Arc energy gathering, "Fire!"

Izuku couldn't dodge backwards, that would compromise the Logic. He couldn't put up a shield, that would compromise the Logic. If he was willing to risk cracking the moon below his feet he could tear open an unstable portal to the Sea of Screams…

Or he could surge forwards and take what he wanted. Izuku speed up as the Boomers lived up to their names. Arc energy flew towards him as he slashed through two bolts, ignoring the explosion that scared his plasteel. The next second, Deepborn was cleaving through two Acolytes in a spray of yellowish ichor that ignited like phosphorus on contact with the air. Life flowed through the sword and into Izuku, while Stasis gathered into a gauntlet on his other fist and crushed a third Acolyte's skull.

That left two more Acolytes and one Knight. Two Boomers leveled at his chest and an axe coming for his head. cryonic energy launched from his hands, creating walls of Stasis on either side of him. Clenching his fist, still covered in Stasis, Izuku drove it into the wall between him and the Acolytes once the rapport of their Boomers finished. Their three eyes widened in horror before Izuku was on them in a hurricane of sword slashes.

-X Alanâh X -

When Alanâh smashed through the crystal with her axe, it was to two dead Acolytes and a changed Sword. The blade had become shorter and leaf shaped, the hilt longer, it had, quite simply, become a spear. One angled to slide through the chitin of her chest and into her heart and Worm in one strike. One of the small bits of sorcery Alanâh knew was performed with one hand, and a shield of black stone formed in front of her hand. Her Worm tightened around her heart, unhappy at the defense when they could be practicing attack.

Quite, she reproached, There will be no death for either of us to feast on if we are dead.

The Worm lightened its grip, conceding the point to her. No death for them would mean no death Tithed to the Prince, who would Tithe it to the God-Prince, who would Tithe it to God-King Oryx, who would Tithe it the the God-Worms, and then from them it would finally be given the the Deep itself. And if they died here against this thing, there would be none to give.

In the time that quite thought had taken, the blade had punched through the black stone four times, sending web cracks through it. She heard the false carapace's feet grind against the floor, and Alanâh lashed out with her axe, shattering her own shield like a shot from a Splinter. The thing was sent rolling away from her, shards of stone cracking its carapace and cutting its skin.

The thing landed with a heavy roll as Alanâh rushed towards it, bringing her axe down on their head. Less than a second before it hit, the thing vanished. The paracausal blade slid into earth and Alanâh was forced to abandon it for a moment as the creature appeared, rushing towards its sword. Grabbing a discarded Boomer, she fired the grenade launcher at him and forced him to dodge the shot. Grabbing her axe with her offhand, she began to march-

Then the thing was charging, vanishing in another blink and appearing in front of her with the Deep rolling around him. Alanâh swung her axe for his throat even as time seemed to slow to a halt around them. Then, a spearhand of hoarfrost and rime punched through her chest, wrapping around the Worm and ripping it from her chest. Alanâh felt horror rise as it dropped the symbiote, crushing it below a foot and leveling a black and purple firearm at her head.

One last axe strike lashed forwards, and didn't even make it halfway across the space between them before Alanâh Thûl's head vanished in a series of Void energy spikes.

Izuku marched into the docking bay less than half a day after killing the Darkblade. With its death, the Hive of this Deep-Forsaken had apparently gotten the message, as the Drifter would say, and begun to shink back from him. Fear him.

Fear the Changing Blade.

Marching towards a Agonarch Karve, Izuku quietly, silently dared the Acolyte sworn to it to fight him as he leveled Paradox Perfected at it. The half grown Hive stepped back, and away from the blade ship as Izuku climbed in.

They would shoot him down the minute he took off. Which meant…

Izuku activated the Drive quitely, not saying anything as he practically seethed. He wasn't going to kjll the Irs after all, this prank wasn't funny anymore. In front of him, the moon cracked as an unrestricted portal to the Sea of Screams opened. It wouldn't be enough to destroy the moon, but enough to send a pointed message.

Izuku gunned the blade ship forwards and into the Sea, aiming for his Throne World. After that, he was going to find a way home.

- X AN X-

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