A stop off in the Warehouse and some quality time with Washu and Guinevere later, I was looking over the Jump Document for Darksiders. I'd been hesitant to go there since it was basically an "abandon all hope" scenario, but a little work on the entry portal should enable me to drop in a little early. I wanted the End Jump over and done with so my Planeswalker Spark could fully mature, and it was this or Dragon Ball. I didn't like Dragon Ball, so apocalypse-in-progress it was. At least that would be interesting. The document itself was enlightening, indicating that Heaven and Hell were starting the end times early because of some plot by Hell that involved framing the Horseman War for starting things early. Good times. The portal opened, I messed with it, Washu wished me luck with a sly grin, and I stepped through.
I found myself standing on a crowded street, an ominous feeling in the air. I'd heard of this game but never played it so the huge New York style traffic jam was unexpected but at least indicated I'd arrived early as intended. My clothing (mostly the leather bracers) got a couple of odd looks, but people were distracted enough by the news screens showing a hail of large previously undetected meteors falling toward Earth to care. According to the report the impacts would begin within an hour [1], and I knew there was no way the evacuations called for were going to happen in so little time. Traffic was probably bad before the evacuations were announced, and it was absolute gridlock now. I knew this place was going to turn into a battleground between Heaven and Hell, so why not do a little armageddon-proofing while I waited?
My first priority was obviously going to be to protect as many people as possible. While I didn't have a way of stopping the oncoming disaster without knowing the full plot of the game and more time, I could probably get people out of the way in the time I had. The small alternate dimensions created with the Instant Dungeon / Genesis skill had been a way to keep supernatural threats from harming innocents in The Gamer, and they would do so again now. This would just be a little bigger than the work I usually did.
I took shelter in a coffee shop restroom, then released the restraints on my physical form and went full-on energy mode. The first time I'd done this my consciousness had easily and quite naturally filled a fairly large Instant Dungeon. I wanted to do so much more than that I wasn't even sure it was possible, but I was going to try regardless. My form spread, holy energy washing over first the city itself, then the state, the continent, and eventually the planet and the space immediately around it.
The strain on my mind of seeing and experiencing everything on the surface of the Earth was off-loaded to multiple threads of thought in a hierarchy to let me process things at the highest level without losing details, then every single one of those base level threads pushed to create an alternate dimension copy of the planet itself. It took a few minutes as opposed to the near-instant formation I was used to and pushed my mental ability to the limit despite parallel processing, but it worked. Every unempowered creature on the face of the planet was subtly pushed into the copy dimension where they would be unaffected by the activities of the empowered beings that were coming.
On the original Earth services ground to a halt and things started to break down immediately. Vehicles crashed with nobody guiding them and other processes started going off the rails soon after. Devoting a multitude of threads to maintaining and altering both the New Earth in its pocket dimension and the Battleground Earth I'd started on took only a few seconds, and I dedicated them to working on the barriers of New Earth first. I could already feel demonic forces bubbling up below the surface of Battleground Earth, but I wanted to make sure they couldn't escape and minimize the chance they would detect New Earth.
Using my knowledge of portals, teleportation, and wards allowed me to effectively lock down the area magically but there was no guarantee the would be enough. Establishing some discrete but powerful mystical energy generators and hiding them with their own defenses in a dimension nested under both New Earth and Battleground Earth allowed me to pull a similar trick to what I'd done in Bastion and later Elysium, giving the entire planet both a constant source of power that would only be available to me and a degree of responsiveness to my wishes. Using that power I sealed the path to New Earth with both magic and my divine will, then altered the space inside and the barriers of the place to fine-tune the emulated effects of the sun, moon, planets, and stars. There may have also been a few satellites that I missed and had to manually copy over to New Earth, but that didn't really bother me. Disrupting services for an hour or so was better than allowing the end war to start in the middle of everything.
Even with what amounted to unlimited copies of myself and my power, some things had to go in order and wait on others. I'd taken at least forty five minutes getting the planet and its occupants safely tucked away and provided with the appropriate level of heat and light, creating an extra power source for myself in both New Earth and Battleground, then making sure everything was in order with gravity and other forces. Locking things down and warding had started after the power source was finished and was an ongoing effort parallel to the rest. Fires burned out of control over the entirety of Battleground. People on New Earth were confused, but a lot calmer than I'd expected. Feeling the rush of holy energy cover the globe and seeing the descending projectiles (as well as the moon, stars, and a few satellites) vanish from the sky had done a bit to offset panic and replace it with confusion.
I wondered idly if any of the major players had noticed me yet, and decided it was almost a certainty that they had. I'd entered this world in a way and time slightly inconsistent with the Jump Document despite using it as a guideline. Moving the entire human and animal populations of Earth into another realm, copying the rest of life on Earth during the creation of said realm, locking that realm away with the power of a god, and possibly stealing the weapon of one of the four Horsemen (Death's scythe wasn't that impressive in person) had most likely been noticed by someone. It was possible the major players were ignorant given that I'd left the original Earth and unsouled life behind, but… well, hopefully the incoming armies either wouldn't notice or wouldn't care until I'd had a chance to "reason" with them.
A quick review of my own condition was in order before the game started, as it were. My presence was spread out over both New Earth and Battleground Earth, I had both saturated with holy power, a whole lot of idle threads were placing magical traps and other defenses on Battleground and the border between there and New Earth, and I had a scythe that could theoretically kill anything. I'd taken the Celestial Technology and Maker's Prodigy perks with the Hunted drawback for the Charred Council, Heaven, and Hell in addition to Endgame Gambit. It hadn't specified I couldn't gain extra points for being an immediate target after all, and I kind of enjoyed the numbers game of the Jump Chain. I sighed a little at that. With my powers the way they were it was quickly becoming redundant, and would probably just function as a convenient guide to further Jumps as opposed to a way to gain abilities and loot.
There were the challenges, at least. Those would allow me to indulge in a few more Jumps without the perk/drawback system being completely useless. I'd gain an Old Spark after this, too. That would greatly increase my understanding of the multiverse and ease travel in addition to enhancing my abilities and providing a way to remotely extract excess energy from lands I'd claimed. I doubted I'd need to do that on a regular basis, but I wasn't going to turn it down. Further mastery of spellcasting and shapeshifting would come with practice, and I'd get a lot of that here if my foes were as tough as I feared.
My introspection complete, I looked to the sky. Returning to my Builder body on the Battleground Earth but leaving the extra threads incorporeal I started up the combat-related abilities I didn't keep active at all times and tested them for readiness. There were hundreds of millions of supernatural presences hidden among the approaching meteors, and since I had some time I started working on a custom version of my railgun conjuration. A bit of nullification to pierce supernatural resistances and prevent regeneration, a lot of holy smite, and a heap of virtual mass generated by warping space made the usual tungsten rods a lot more deadly. Adding adamantine, blessed silver, and cold iron studs to the runed projectiles ensured they would be deadly to anything with those specific "allergies." I now had a spell that conjured temporary projectiles weighing several tens of tons each that nullified supernatural abilities on contact and released a high level burst of energy to smite the unholy whenever they met such. Using said spell in conjunction with my ridiculously powerful telekinesis and a host of sensory abilities, I lined up a shot on the closest meteor and let fly.
The explosion was spectacular, and those targets that followed allowed me to tone down the force to slightly less relativistic speeds between bouts of flash blindness. There were still streaks of light and extremely loud claps of thunder left in the wake of each projectile as they destroyed or violently displaced the air around them, but at least my healing ability was adapting a little more quickly now. By the time close combat began I would most likely be immune to both flash blindness and deafness. The electric charge, heat, physical shockwaves, radiation, and metal vapor I was producing already didn't bother me beyond making it necessary employ both flight and chakra techniques to avoid being knocked around.
My extra threads, having mostly completed their work in securing New Earth and its borders, opened fire on the incoming threats as they entered the outer edges of the atmosphere. With a virtually infinite number of incorporeal defenders, the entire thing was over before any of the fireballs reached the ground landed. I blinked in surprise, then leaned backward to avoid the sword strike of a gigantic figure in a red hood. The reflexive railgun blast scattered my attacker over the landscape and caused yet another flash and bang as the projectile continued over the horizon. Slowing time for myself and going over my memory of the event again didn't change much. A gigantic humanoid with glowing eyes in Warcraft-style red and gold armor, ridiculous sword and all, had appeared and swung said glowing sword at me. My precognition had seen it coming and prepared a projectile, then vaporized the idiot just after he appeared.
That was a little confusing. Had he or hadn't he swung the sword? Did it matter? Something unholy started to emerge from the ground and met the same fate. A bunch of souls and the first guy's ridiculous sword and armor remained as loot, which I threw in my inventory out of habit. I looked around owlishly, noting the incoming loot (mostly souls and equipment) falling to the ground and being picked up by my other threads. Since when were souls loot, anyway? I'd used soulstones before, but whole souls? Speaking of...there was a strong tug coming from my inventory, much like the summoning I'd experienced before. A little bit of investigation revealed that the man in the gaudy cosplay armor had actually been the Rider War, and his soul was being summoned but couldn't go anywhere since it was in my possession.
Well, that could be fun. I left the extra bits of my consciousness behind and followed the pull through a dimensional barrier and into another plane, appearing in a cavern of molten rock with three weird stone faces and lots of fire. They started yelling at me in both anger and confusion, so I hit them with multi-ton conjured projectiles moving at a good fraction of the speed of light. The resulting explosions reduced most of the cavern to its constituent atoms, and the souls possessing the faces were violently expelled only to be caught in the grip of my holy energy. Since it seemed to be the thing to do here, I threw them in my inventory and started wandering around. Some goth guy in a mask showed up, and this time I actually paid attention to the name hovering above his head: Death. As much fun as killing him with his own scythe would be (I didn't see one on him), I exploded him the same way I'd done War and the rock faces that were the Charred Council. His soul went in my inventory with the others, and I moved on.
It wasn't long before a gun-toting lunatic by the name of Strife and an idiot with a whip by the name of Fury showed up. They received the same treatment, and I was actually starting to feel a little disappointed. Why was everything around here so...squishy? Maybe I'd gone overboard on the projectiles and nullifying their supernatural abilities was making them ridiculously vulnerable to raw physical trauma. I decided to run a scan on the next few things that popped up as I wandered the cavernous space that remained. There were spirits of some sort in the magma that lit the place, but they didn't seem willing to attack me so I left them alone for now. I could always throw an overpowered exorcism their way before I left.
A few more lackeys showed up, and scans revealed that even though they were hybrids of angels and demons they were just about as vulnerable to physical damage as they were to holy attacks, but most of their defense was supernatural in nature as opposed to biological. That explained why they disintegrated when hit with my railgun technique, at least. With the nullification and optional smite in addition to being hit by what was essentially a micro-nuke they were just overwhelmed. I shrugged, thinking that in the end it didn't really matter. In order to meet the goal for this Jump I had to basically wipe out the Charred Council (done), the Four Horsemen (done), and the forces of Heaven and Hell. It'd only been a couple of hours and I'd almost done….all of that. I could practically automate the rest with wards and idle threads, really.
Maybe it was time to finish this. I gathered a ridiculous amount of energy for first a wide-area exorcism/smite combination, then a similarly ridiculous amount of energy for a sort of reverse-genesis effect to collapse the dimension/demi-plane behind me when I left. Anything that didn't get cleared out by the first would be killed by the second and picked up by the nearest incarnation of Death. I set off both in quick succession before stepping back in the direction of Battleground Earth to watch the fireworks. The destruction of an entire (small) plane of existence isn't something you get to watch everyday, after all. There were places where the anti-genesis effect could be improved, too. Washu offered some critiques, which was actually the first time she'd spoken to me since I arrived in Darksiders.
Following the path back to Battleground Earth was relatively easy, given that I'd followed a summoning through it already. I could feel the Spark Washu talked about growing inside me already, probably as a result of practicing both inter-dimensional travel and gathering energy from the lands I'd empowered. If I had to guess I'd say the closest equivalent to what I was doing was a super-charged Rampant Growth across wide areas that would normally count as multiple lands.
What I found when I got back was a ton of loot and a bunch of threads that would have otherwise gotten bored breaking down pollutants and other waste with Builder powers. A lot of natural environments had already been restored to pristine conditions, and there were a few portals leading off to dimensions I'd already visited where more threads were apparently already doing the same. Absorbing the knowledge of how they'd created those portals was fascinating and involved several thousand carefully documented attempts along with a few dozen different ways of transporting myself with and without leaving a pre-made way back. There were a bunch of threads repairing places that had turned into gaping chasms and cooling down arbitrary hell-spawned lava, too.
Demons and similar hellspawn had decided it was just as epic to rise out of the ground as it was to fall from the sky, but all of them disintegrated in roughly the same way. Some were large enough to require multiple doses of barely-subluminal tungsten, but not many. I scratched at my stubble idly. Wait, I'd grown stubble? I usually didn't bother with excess body hair on my forms anymore, but it looked like I'd subconsciously started adding it to my male forms again for aesthetics. It didn't matter.
'Washu, am I done here?' I asked my benefactor/mother figure.
'Basically, yeah. You could stick around and mop up the remaining forces if you wanted to actually invade Heaven and/or Hell, but they're pretty much terrified of you now. You finished the objectives for the Jump you were so worried about in…three hours and seven minutes, if I count the time it took you to ask me. If you stick around the local Builder equivalents will make contact and teach you as per the Maker's Prodigy perk, but you could just leave an avatar behind for that,' she replied enthusiastically. 'I want to get you into some interesting universes, mister! You still haven't visited my home multiverse, the Buffy-verse, Sailor Moon, Star Trek, Star Wars, or any of the comic/movie-verses you wanted to mess around with. Also, I really think you should try Worm. Think of the fans, Wren!'
'...what fans? What are you talking about, Washu? ...Washu?'
'I may have said too much, but you'll probably understand the explanation right away. You know how authors pick up on what's happening in other universes and write it as fiction?'
I stopped gathering loot and looked around warily. How much had they seen? How accurate was it? I really hoped it wasn't porn. It was unlikely given how little I'd done to merit the genre, but not impossible. By the great Flying Spaghetti Monster, there might be fanfiction! Or fanart! I wasn't sure whether to feel honored or horrified. No. I was a boring do-gooder in literal god-mode at this point. If anyone was relating what I was doing they'd lose their audience pretty quickly. I slumped in relief, and went back over the list of places I'd wanted to visit. They were all viable options, but I'd probably want to send avatars rather than my main presence. Worship from the current Earth was already flowing in and empowering me that much more for stopping the apocalypse since the local god apparently wasn't in at the moment. It'd probably switch over to them as soon as they got back.
I opened a portal back to my Elysium with a sigh, leaving a good number of threads behind to manage the place until whoever normally took care of it got back. I'd need to turn the souls I'd collected over to the actual multi-dimensional Death, since there wasn't anything I wanted from them. After that Washu had a bunch of tutoring and family bonding lined up. Ember, Konatsu, and Ukyo still hadn't died in the Naruto universe, but Guinevere and Washu were good company. Come to think of it, weren't they all technically hybrid Senju-Uzumaki now? It was probably going to be a few centuries before I saw them if they didn't get fed up and leave on their own. I'd send them an avatar to keep them company and myself up to date, and it could take them back to Elysium if they decided they were done.
My return was punctuated by a tackle-hug from a widely-grinning Guinevere and the feeling of the Planeswalker Spark inside of me flaring up and partially merging with my divine aura. Washu smiled proudly at me, Death showed up to take the extra souls off my hands, and we had a little celebration since I'd completed an End Jump, even though Washu's experiment had ended already. She was still gathering data of course, but that was just Washu being Washu. Death actually took a piece of cake with him and invited me to visit the afterlife of my home world whenever I wanted, which involved a great deal of cuddling previous pets and chatting with friends and relatives that hadn't been around when I was taken for the Jump Chain. Aah, sweet catharsis. My avatar back home proved to be the one writing about me, which was both cool and awkward. Did that make me a narcissist? I was pretty sure that was narcissistic. At least it wasn't pornographic.