Chapter 35: Nightmare on the Battlefield
Perspective: Destiny
Destiny smirked as her icy javelin pierced the eye of a newly materialised enderman, sending him tumbling down the stairs of their makeshift fortification on the crater's Eastern edge. The crater was littered with half-charred corpses and fresher ones kept joining them.
Around them the builders kept reinforcing and expanding their defenses, four or so of them. One had even started work on a full-fledged tower at the corner of the barricade.
Destiny glanced at the far side of the crater, and through the still-dissipating smoke she saw Rose standing atop her barricades. There was an arrow in her hip, but the assassin refused treatment for the moment. Instead, she barked orders and rained knives on their enemies. Had Destiny been there, she would have given Rose far more than her two cents for stupidly risking blood loss and infection, but Destiny wasn't there so she just had to focus on her front.
A giant in gleaming armour appeared near the fledgling tower, a great mace in hand. A shriveled little end-creature clung to either leg, evidently the giant's means of getting there. No sooner than he had arrived, the giant swung down at the builder and missed, cleaving a great chunk out of the wall.
Destiny reacted instinctively and channeled heat into the giant's helmet. As the warmth flowed out of her, she fought the urge to shiver, and her target began to wail in agony and tore off the helmet. An earth mage ran up beside Destiny and stomped his foot. A pillar of stone shot upwards and slammed into the spine of the giant, who promptly collapsed and was teleported away by his two End-born chauffeurs. The builder returned to work.
Destiny clapped her earth-mage on the shoulder.
"Good work, Indril," she said. "You'd best get up there and guard Alice until the tower's set up and we can start smelting replacement armour and weapons."
She heard nothing and looked around for her trainee. He was nowhere to be seen, until Destiny lowered her gaze and found him lying flat on his back. He had a hole in his chest a mile wide.
At that moment, a figure became visible. Its skin was like smoke - light passed through it, but with difficulty. Talons stretched from its fingers, and in its left hand these talons had wrapped around a lacerated heart. Yellow eyes and teeth glowed in its face as it sat on one of the fortification's steps. Freak was back.
"Hello, Destiny," he sneered. "I've come to talk- Ah!"
Freak only just managed to become intangible as Destiny showered the place where he sat with razor sharp icicles. The icicles had pierced the carved stone and become embedded, fixed there like spikes driven into the ground to secure a tent or fasten a rope. Destiny panted from the effort, and from the memory of their last encounter. Her side throbbed as she remembered the sting of his talons.
"Show yourself!" Destiny screamed, summoning a fireball in one hand and crystalizing a sword out of ice in the other. "I'm not afraid of you!"
She scanned the scene, ready to leap into action the second another one of her soldiers fell. Freak might be hard to hit in this form, but he couldn't be invulnerable.
"Real heroic of you, trying to kill someone who's come to negotiate!" Freak snapped from behind.
He stood on the lip of the fortification, wagging his finger somewhere. His curling lips were caught somewhere between an urge to laugh and genuine irritation. Destiny hurled the fireball and he sidestepped it.
"You're really starting to irk me, Dez," Freak seethed through gritted teeth.
He became intangible again as Destiny leapt up and hacked at him with the sword.
"I don't care!" Destiny spat.
"Now, listen here!" Freak materialised from behind and shunted her off the ledge. "If you're not going to play nice, there are other ways of making you listen!"
"General!" her troops called as she fell, but she was deaf to them.
She had one objective: kill this phantom douche.
Sadly, this resolve and most of her breath was knocked out of her as she struck the ground.
Freak resurfaced, leaning against a rock. The smoke in the air appeared to pass through him. Destiny pulled herself up.
"Are you going to listen politely, or am I just going to have to start talking at you, praying you'll listen?"
As if in answer to his question, Destiny thrust the sword at his head. It shattered against the rock. Destiny looked around frantically, summoning two new blades and carrying out several defensive swipes to ensure Freak didn't try anything. She hit nothing.
"You know, David would have listened," Freak chuckled from the mouth of a nearby cave.
Destiny hurled one sword at him but knew it would not hit. She blinked and the phantom was gone. She sighed.
She looked up. The sounds of fighting were growing fainter, and she heard a horn. Tyron had relieved Steve and their united forces were now pushing back the enemy. One of her soldiers peaked over the edge. She gave him the thumbs-up, he acknowledged and returned to the conflict. She had an appointed second-in-command. They would hold in the five minutes this would take.
She entered the cave. No sign of Freak.
"Listen to what?" she asked warily. Nothing. "What would David have listened to, Freak?"
"Well," Freak's voice came from the darkness. "He'd have listened if I'd thought about it sooner, back when you were in the Tower. But enough about old wounds, you probably know what the Entity's plan is by now, otherwise you'd still have your leader."
"No actually, no idea about it," Destiny lied, not even trying to sound convincing. She scanned the dark: "How about you step out into the light there and I'll take some notes."
A cackle reverberated off the cave walls. "I'm good here, thanks. Saves you the energy of trying to hit me, you'll probably need it for what happens later. So, what I was saying is that once all those worlds are united things will get bad, and that's coming from someone who feasts on fear. The truth is, there isn't much fear in a tyranny the likes of which the Entity will construct, after a few years apathy and acceptance are all that's left."
Destiny planted her icy swords in the ground as a thought occurred. She began to rub her palms together. She felt the familiar chill.
"Sure, keep going."
Freak continued: "Point is, I'm not sure if I'm entirely on board with this plan anymore, purely based on…"
A ball of fire sparked into existence between her palms. She passed it between the two with a playful smirk.
"What are you doing?" Freak asked.
"Well, I'm not altogether sure what rules you operate on - how you appear for some people and disappear for others, that's all still a mystery to me," said Destiny. "But I do know that if I'm hearing you, you're around here somewhere. So, you're going to come out of the shadows or I'm going to find you myself. You've got until three and then I light this place up. One."
"Oh, by fear itself," grumbled Freak.
"Two," counted Destiny, raising the fireball and readying to slam it into the ground.
"You're making a mistake."
"Three."
She slammed it into the ground just as she saw Freak lunge at her. The clustered tongues of flame scattered and leapt everywhere, surprising even her in their force. Freak's talon-like thumb caught her between the eyes and drew blood. His eyes were narrow with hatred. She crystallised a sword and plunged forward. It stuck.
A great, barbed blade of ice unlike any she had ever summoned before sheared through Freak's smoke-like chest. He fell, dead.
As the phantom's corpse began to dissipate into smoke, she felt a strange satisfaction. Revenge was a worthwhile pursuit, it seemed. She turned and resolved to return to her forces. Then, her eyes widened.
The tongues of flame had not gone. They burned away at the cave's walls, eating them as easily as paper. They charred and crumpled in the heat, revealing an impenetrable blackness behind them. The floor gave way and she fell into the shadows.
"If you're now satisfied, I'll continue."
Suddenly, she landed in a heap on a glass platform, which unfolded and turned into a cage. Five strides by five strides. She lay in the centre, the wind knocked out of her. Freak patrolled the outside.
"As I was saying, joining the Entity sounded fun and honestly like a laid table of various flavors of fear, however I'm starting to think that if things continue this feast will be followed by a long famine. Don't misunderstand, I won't turn coat, that's a little too cliché." He paused dramatically. "But I do think you rebels could use a bit of a hand, especially with what's to come."
Destiny hauled herself to her feet and tried to summon something. Anything. An icy shard. A fireball. Nothing.
"We're in a constructed mindscape, something we phantoms have a knack for. My house, my rules."
Destiny heaved the anger from her lungs in a series of heavy breaths.
"What sort of hand?" she said in reluctant surrender.
"The alternative win condition kind, as one might put it. The Entity is afraid of what your white-haired mage did, there might be a weakness to exploit somewhere. Sadly, aside from my innate abilities, I am a stranger to magic... which is where you come in."
"Of course," she seethed. "You and your Tower friends kidnap me for my magic, now you want to use me for it. That tracks, I guess."
Freak chuckled. "Naturally, I expected you not to agree right away. But you see, if the Entity were to vanish one day, the Tower would be decapitated, truly and permanently. We don't have a roguish commander to step in and take the lead, most of our armies are mercenaries or otherwise bound to loyalty in some manner. Born followers. Sure there are idealists like Forgelight, but he's a governor not a ruler, whatever he may think in private. With the strength gone out of the Tower you could find the ones truly responsible for your loss, you could find Glibby, find the Ender and finally get your revenge. You already showed me that revenge is something you enjoy greatly."
He paused, sighed and took on a greatly different manner. His cruel eyes softened, seeming to droop a little further from the skull. And the toothy smile softened.
"That said," he continued. "I didn't know David was lost until I got in here. Your mind, that is. He hadn't been mentioned in any reports in some time. I was under the assumption he was still alive - if injured. I… You have my condolences, however belated. He deserved a better death." A pause, a sad laugh. "I suppose humanity has rubbed off on me more than I thought."
Destiny scoured his face for signs of deceit. He was inscrutable. His eyebrows furrowed with concern looked awkward and tentative but the phantom didn't seem to use emotions other than gleeful sadism very often so that could explain it. The pause after the "I…" seemed to indicate careful attention to the words he was using, but that could mean anything.
She resolved not to acknowledge it and returned to business.
"What I don't get," Destiny pressed. "Is what you thought this was all about. What's changed?"
"I'll be honest with you," Freak laughed. "I didn't. The cards were off the table for so long, and so much delicious fear came my way. The ignorance of a happy, greedy eater overcame me. A world disappeared into Nexus here or there and I thought nothing of it."
Freak turned and an image of Nexus appeared. It was the clearing where David was buried. She saw the bundle of flowers she had laid against the sign which bore his name. Freak carried his own up and laid it beside the first.
"A sign for a tombstone," Freak muttered. "Like I said, he deserved better…"
He observed her over his shoulder a second then resumed his explanation.
"Then, it revealed its plan to merge all worlds," Freak pressed with some tension. "And at first I can only think, 'This is brilliant! The shock and terror of such an upheaval will be immense! Nations will clash, peoples will collide, and the Ender's armies will pillage and conquer as they see fit.' And of course, the Entity, ever the conservationist, would make sure she doesn't destroy anything in its entirety. It spends days and weeks fawning over obscure religious artefacts, collecting specimens. And all these things bring fear in and of themselves. Fear of Hell, fear of experimentation, fear of being at the mercy of something you never could have imagined et cetera…"
Destiny squinted past Freak. The flowers were rotting. The trees withering. She saw a strange grey hue in the horizon. Her cubic cage slowly drifted backwards.
"But it always gets bored," said Freak. "It never pays attention too long. It always sees a reason to tie up a loose end. It is Order, and it will flatten the world."
Freak turned and he had the face of the builder Destiny had helped defend from the giant. The glass cube blasted back into the darkness.
"Observe."
Destiny woke up. She was at the mouth of the cave. Freak was leaning against the wall, obviously burned. He gestured outside. Destiny followed, still dazed from dreaming.
The builder's body was the first she came across. Then another. Then another. They were a curious mixture of Tower and rebel soldiers. They lay scattered like broken toys, many terrible gashes on their bodies.
She lifted her eyes to the brick barricade her troops had erected. It was shattered. Not a stone lay upon a stone. And at the heart of it, she saw the bronze shell of the Entity, hacking apart what remained with its great obsidian sword.
It didn't care who it struck, attacking its own agents just as easily as skewering its enemies. A single strike would decapitate an obsidian-clad enderman and a fleeing Jackal in one.
And this was not the only manifestation. They were appearing throughout the ranks across the battlefield, killing with the same automatic indifference. It would not leave a thing standing upon this battlefield until it had achieved its objective.
A call for retreat sounded. Destiny spared one look at Freak before fleeing. Their eyes locked, and she felt a dreadful companionship with this phantom. What would become of any world under a creature like the Entity?
She ran to Rose's barricade, heart pounding, desperate to get anyone she could recover to safety.
