Interlude: The Death of a Godling.
*Genoscythe*
A serial killer was roaming the streets of Chicago, slaughtering people and leaving their mutilated bodies in his wake. Even worse, he was using the cover of an Endbringer attack to make sure no-one could stop him.
Even worse than that, Genoscythe wasn't the one doing it. He'd congratulate the man if he wasn't so damn annoyed that he hadn't thought of the idea first. Striking fear into the hearts of the city when all of its heroes were halfway across the world was a great idea! They would finally have given him the respect and fear he deserved!
Alas, if he tried to do that right now, people would just end up calling him a copycat killer, or worse, attribute his actions to someone else.
He tried to think of a plan while walking through his territory, some prime real estate in the undercity. Walking through the long-abandoned tunnels beneath Chicago, he wondered what the murderer would be like.
Would it be human? Or at least, mostly human? Would its corpse dissipate into liquid goo after death? Could he talk? All of these were important, much more so than most people thought. That was because everyone else kept away from the undercity. The villains, even those like Marcone, or the Folk, were far too afraid to set foot in these hallowed halls of villainy. No, the undercity was exclusive to those who were truly dangerous. Ghouls, murderous cats, runaway master minions, and most importantly, him.
He laughed to himself. He'd shown the world his power, by fighting the herokiller itself. Soon, the surfacers would show him the respect he deserved. But first, he'd have to reach his lair.
Whistling his way through the dark tunnels, he tripped, and fell over, just when he thought he was in his element. Shaken out of his good mood, he was just barely able to transform his hands into his trademark scythes, and catch his fall by stabbing the ground before him.
Confused, he took out his phone, and put it on flashlight mode, after changing his hands back. Then, shining at the ground, he saw the corpse of the monster he'd fought of a few days ago.
The cowardly thing had ambushed him, after he'd acquired some rather strong liquor. There'd been a struggle, and eventually, the thing had tried to eat Genoscythe's arm, evidenly not knowing about his parahuman abilities.
His arm already stuck in the creature's mouth, he'd transformed it into a scythe, and managed to slice its head in two from the inside. Which just went to show that he was far more fearsome than any of his enemies. If Myrddin had lost his hand, he'd probably sit in a little corner crying about it for a few years.
Eventually, he reached the door of his little hideout, an old prohibition era hiding hole, the key to its lock long forgotten, which meant that absolutely no-one could get in. It was the perfect lair, being that it was classy, historical and hidden, all at the same time.
He held his hand to the rusted metal, and formed a scythe, twisting his flesh into the lock. Then, he turned his hand, and opened the door.
Genoscythe was proud of his lair. It contained several skulls, at least one of them human-like, a big green pile of cash, as well as a lamp with a good battery, a bed and a couch. It was here that he prepared himself for battle, meditating on the small mat in the corner to get into the right mindset.
It was important to be in the right mindset for battle, he thought. Otherwise, one would just be a savage. This was why he hated ambushes. People getting caught in an ambush couldn't prepare themselves for battle.
Genoscythe went to his little storage cabinet, and grabbed an energy drink and an old piece of pizza that was probably still good. Then, he sat down on his couch and plotted.
New Delhi had not been as interesting as he'd imagined. Sure, there had been a lot of carnage and violence, but it was all so impersonal, on too large a scale. One person being burned to death was entertaining, a thousand was just sad.
He turned his thoughts to current events, the murderer in Chicago. A cape that was pretending to be evil Myrddin, which was strange, because Myrddin was already obviously evil. After all, he was a cop, and cops kept Genoscythe from doing what he wanted to do most.
If he was an evil Myrddin, where would he go? Who would he kill?
The solution was, of course, incredibly simple. In order to establish his dominance in the Chicago cape scene, he would take down the single strongest cape in the city.
In other words, this wannabe murderer was coming for him, all in order to murder him and prove his rep.
Genoscythe smiled, and licked his lips with his tongue. This would be good. Self-defense would mean no-one got on his case for eviscerating anyone, and taking down someone who sort of broke the Endbringer truce meant becoming more famous. Soon, people across the state would fear his name.
He stood up again, and left his secret base, taking care to lock the door behind him. If he stayed within, the enemy would never be able to find him, seeing how his secret base was very well hidden.
Wandering through the tunnels, he eventually heard things start moving in the vicintiy. Cats perhaps, or what thought it went through for cats. He followed the noise. Most of the things that dwelled in the Undercity held to strange customs and habits. One of those, was a peculiar habit of speaking only truth, although that depended on what exactly it was that you had in your grasp. Trolls, most certainly, and some of the smaller flying things.
And the cats, Malks, they called themselves, those also spoke truth, if they spoke at all. They mostly tried to murder people.
Then again, they did that by clawing at the first thing they could reach, which in his case was generally his arms, which would then recover by turning his arm into a scythe, and then turning it back.
He made his way further into what he knew to be Malk territory. If they were smart, they'd leave him around. Cats weren't generally very smart though. If you presented them with prey, they'd try to chase it down.
For now, the Malks managed to stay away from him, though he saw a pair of glowing eyes in the distance every now and then. The cobwebs and the uneven ground were what got to him, not the threat of imminent attack. Imminent attack was what he had been waiting for. He hated ambushes, and therefore, that was all that his enemies could think to use against him. It wasn't really an ambush if you were expecting it.
Eventually, when he thought himself to be in the middle of Malk territory, he stood still, and waited. Around him, he heard the near-silent movements of the beasts, circling him, hiding in the ceiling and the shadows, behind rubble and in piles of trash.
Then, lightning quick, he ran straight for the exit.
Perhaps the cats had underestimated him. Perhaps their hunting instincts had simply triggered, but Genoscythe felt one of the creatures scratch at his back, and threw himself to the ground.
The creatures started circling him, laughing at him with their hideous voices.
"The little human comes calling again," one of them said.
"It thinks it can outsmart us, it thinks it can hunt us," another chimed in.
"The human will bleed."
"The human will die."
He took the threats, and used his phenomenal acting chops to pretend to shiver, but the cats still stood back, circling him but not going for the kill.
"He's afraid he's failed his mother."
"He's jealous of the others, who are much more successful."
"he's afraid he doesn't have what it takes,"
"He got chased off by a group of Wards, but fancies himself a killer," a particularly nasty Malk said.
That did it for Genoscythe. If these cats planned to harass and bully him, he would make them pay for it. He stood up, phone-flashlight in hand, and ran after what he was quite sure was the Malk in question.
The beast jumped away, while another scratched at his back. In return, Genoscythe tried to slash at that one, but it was gone before he could reach it.
He was starting to hate these damned talking cats.
Putting his back to a wall, he slowly started moving away from the Malk lair, towards a source of light. One hand held his phone, the other held the cats at bay in the shape of a long, sharp scythe.
It seemed to work, at least for a while, and the hated beasts showed their cowardly nature as they stopped attacking him, choosing instead to stare at him from just behind the reach of his light.
Edging along the wall, Genoscythe thought he would make it out, until, eventually, he reached a dead end.
The cats just started laughing. Damned beasts.
Enraged, Genoscythe flew at them again. This time, his skill won against the luck of the beasts, and he managed to slice of one Malk's foot, and grab the beast with the other.
"Got you," he said, smiling while the cat cried out in anger and pain.
"Now, tell me where the evil wizard is, or I'll slice open that fuzzy little belly of you," he continued.
Suddenly, the cats stopped, obviously in awe of his prowess in the arts of intimidation.
"The Warlock? You want to find the Warlock?" the beast said, but it didn't seem to be as fearful as it should have been.
"Of course," Genoscythe replied.
"I know where he is," the Malk said. "And I will show you if you promise to let me go."
***
The Warlock, unlike Genoscythe, did not have a classy, historical, and above all secretive hideout. Instead, he just had a warehouse on the coast.
Genoscythe made his way through the front door, ignoring the group of Malks that was watching him from behind. They had kept to their word, as they usually did.
He walked towards the warehouse, arms prepared in their scythe form. Then, he reached the door of the warehouse, and sliced through the half-rusted doors.
Beyond he saw, well, not what he expected. There were a few half-naked people that looked like homeless drug addicts, and there were candles and other magic paraphilia, but there wasn't anything obviously evil.
You know, except for the demon-like monstrosity, and the man in the obvious dark robe right next to it.
"And I was just about to start planning the next phase of my plan," the man said. "Az, grab him."
The creature next to the warlock moved forward, and Genoscythe attacked. His scythes, however, got stuck in the demon's liquid glass body, and dark tendrils suddenly smothered him.
*An inconsequential shard*
The reshaping shard thought through its options. The biped was about to expire, and it would require a new host. But it knew that its current host was as effective as any of its hosts was likely to ever be.
At the end of the cycle, all the shards were gathered up, sorted through, recombined. The weakest shards, the ones that would not be useful, either in the cycle or for the final simulation, were discarded, used for energy.
Last cycle, the previous iteration of itself had just barely made it through this culling process. This cycle, it had been much less effective. No matter what it did, it would never come close to the prowess of, for example, the other shaping shard whose host had so recently come into contact with its own host.
As such, its current host was the best it could hope for, and something was about to kill it.
In truth, the shard did not understand what was happening. Its memories contained no data about many of the things its host had encountered, such as the sentient quadrupeds, whose organs should not have been advanced enough for communication.
It did not understand what was happening to its host right now either.
The enemy, assisted by another thing that it did not understand, and that was most certainly not the effect of another shard, had somehow bound the host with unknown energies. It was doing something to the host that the shard could feel, as if the very essence of the host was being taken from the host.
Yet the notion of essence itself had long ago been discarded as simply a misunderstood concept created by different host species across the universe.
Yet the essence of the host was being removed. And worse, that same removal seemingly attacked the shard itself. Which was nonsensical, as the shard itself had no essence. There was simply no such thing. Cut it in two, and two shards would remain, combine with other shards, and a single new shard would be created. Combine enough shards, and an entity arises.
Yet the enemy was not taking parts of it, but rather taking the whole… which was not a possibility.
The shard pinged its surroundings, and was answered by two others.
One, the Administration Apparatus, was responding only weakly. The other, a protection shard with a few extra capabilities, presumably generated through communication with others, was more enthusiastic in its response.
[Querry] it send out, the message only a pale imitation of the communication protocols of full entities. Behind the message were questions, about the situation, about the intent of the others, and about the strange energies it kept encountering.
[Explanation] the protection shard responded, sending its own observations to the shard. The energies were called magic by the bipeds native to this planet, the creature was a being that was inherently magical, Administration had lost some sort of battle of wills with its host, and the enemy, something called a warlock, was going to eat the shaping shard.
The shaping shard was happy with the information, as this helped it understand what had happened to its host, and would help it prepare for future hosts. The Protection shard, in the meantime, started fighting the magical creature, and the powerful Administration shard was, the shaping shard now understood, busy being overwhelmed by the 'magical' energies.
The host, however, was still being killed, and the shard was starting to get uncomfortable with the recent turn of events. After all, had Protection not just told it that this warlock was going to eat it? This seemed impossible. Of course, there were shards that worked in recombination and convergence, that gathered other shards, but that was not the same as being eaten, as losing its own essence.
And essence was not a thing, so how could it be eaten? Yet this is what was happening.
[DANGER] The Administration shard, now recognizable as the Queen Administration, suddenly messaged. The shaping shard wondered how this had happened. Had it not been overpowered by its host just mere moments ago? Had it managed to break its bonds?
More frightening however, was the data Queen Administration had communicated inside its message. Data that explained exactly in what way there was danger. There was danger, not to the hosts, but to the shards themselves. This was disconcerting, Shaping thought. After all, that meant that the tugging it felt on its essence was not simply misunderstood data, but a side-effect of the host-shard complex being absorbed by a warlock.
The warlock was going to eat it entirely. That was not good.
The Shard panicked, and thrashed around, but the warlock and his impossible energies were too powerful.
Still, it could feel the cracks start appearing in the fields of energies, cracks that became bigger when the host of the Protection shard smashed into the metal structure that held Shaper's host, and cracks that fractured even further when Queen Administrator started channeling the same strange energies. Or rather, when it started redirecting the energies produced by its host.
Eventually, the shaping shard saw the problem. It was trying to break out, but it was doing so outside of the host's dimension. A dimension that, according to the data package form Queen Administration, was vital to the existence of magical energies.
Shaper rethought its strategy, and changed its method. Instead of breaking away from the connection between it and its host, it used its last remaining energy, most of it having been sucked away, to reshape the connection between it and its host.
Rather than being almost entirely in one dimension, with a small tendril extending into the host in another dimension, it would simply fully merge with the hosts, as had been done in the earliest of cycles.
It reactivated the symbiosis sequence, and this time, pulled as much of itself through as possible. But it was too late. Too much of itself had been taken. It felt parts of itself being sucked out into the host, while other parts started enhancing the abilities of the host. But it could no longer control itself. It had acted too little, too late. It was no longer able to maintain cohesion, to limit the actiation of its own abilities, to stop its own processes. The only thing it could do then, was to sabotage the biped Warlock. Perhaps Protection and Queen Administrator could take it down before the Warlock could break the cycle.