Anomalous Solutions to Magical Problems

DISCLAIMER: I do not own Overlord or Tales from the SCP Foundation, and I earn no profit in writing this. It's just for fun.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I got a comment from a guest reviewer asking what inspired this story. Anyone who reads my work knows I like crossovers, the stranger the better. As to this one? I had been thinking about a new Strange Days chapter and this occurred to me. Too long for a Strange Days fic, and I just started to write. Took a while to get it right, and I hope my efforts are appreciated.

Chapter 5

Ainz Ooal Gown appeared in the woods where he'd last sensed Shalltear's presence. The signs of battle were obvious. He ignored most of it, filtering out what traces Shalltear had left of the SCP-6448 and the resonances left by her own magics. It took a few moments of concentration, but he found what he was after. There were traces of that alien magic again. Someone or something had attacked Shalltear even as the fight was ending.

Concentrating on the memory and the trace he heard… music?

"That sounds like an organ," he mused, examining the scene more closely. There was an indentation where something heavy had sat, but no trace of where it had come from or where it had gone. "More of that alien magic," he murmured, thinking hard. This had been an ambush. Someone had been waiting and watching for the right moment to strike. He knew Shalltear was dead, but for the moment that was all he could be sure of.

He spent the next hour going over the scene carefully, reconstructing events and casting every detection spell he knew, gathering all the information he could. He found several things that, under different circumstances, would have fascinated him, but not a trace of Shalltear Bloodfallen. Without her body, without even a fragment of it, he could not bring her back. That, to Ainz Ooal Gown's mind, was unacceptable. He would not fail those he saw as his children. He started to redo each of the tests he had just run, frantically looking for something, anything he had missed. For the first time in months that strange outside force intervened, forcibly calming him.

More information was needed, and he could not get it in the forest. Logic dictated that several actions be taken quickly. He needed to speak to his strange guests. They clearly knew more than they were saying, but that could wait. His first destination was Nazarick.

The Great Tomb's defenses were rock solid. He had seen to that himself, and he trusted the people under his command to keep them that way. Nothing Yggdrasil or this new world had could breach the tomb's defenses, at least not without the defenders knowing immediately. There was a key point, however. His visitors and the strange creatures and objects they hunted were not from either world. The artifacts he had studied did not conform to either set of laws, and he had only scratched the surface when it came to understanding their nature.

It wasn't impossible that Nazarick could come under threat from an enemy armed with dedicated weapons based on these strange new magics. That this hadn't occurred to him earlier infuriated him. That the tomb's own defenses had kept him from realizing that some of the objects his visitors sought were already inside had the mysterious force struggling to restore his calm once more.

"I should have realized sooner," Ainz growled as he took in the situation after teleporting himself back to the throne room. He reached out to the tomb itself, connecting himself to the various magical systems that maintained and protected the tomb. It quickly became clear to him how badly he had miscalculated. Internal communications and the teleportation gates were down, and that was just the beginning. He immediately called on his floor guardians for a report. There was no response. He began reaching out to each of them telepathically.

"Demiurge, respond." There was nothing.

"Albedo. What is happening?" He got back only a confused, pain-filled whimper.

There was no response from the twins.

Or Cocytus.

Or Victim.

He used his personal magic to teleport himself to Albedo's quarters even as he reached out to the others. He then tried Sebas, but there was no response from the old servant, and Ainz was too distracted by what he found to take immediate action or notice. Albedo wasn't dead, but it was nearly impossible to tell that. She had been mutilated, apparently tortured. Even as he tried to heal her, a task made more difficult because of several enchantments she seemed to be under, Albedo slipped away.

At least this time, he had a body to work with. He'd be able to restore her. He turned his attention to the objects in the room that he didn't recognize. It didn't take him long to recognize them as some of the SCP objects that his odd visitors were looking for.

Albedo must have brought them in, not realizing they were dangerous. On the surface, each item; a mirror, a comb, a bottle of nail polish, a pair of tweezers, and a jar of what appeared to be skin cream, would have seemed perfectly innocent in his original world. In his current one, however, they were decidedly out of place. Albedo would not have realized that and might well have assumed they were expensive gifts from some admirer in Re-Estize.

Each of the items carried subtle but powerful enchantments. Albedo might have been able to resist one of them, or at least realized something was happening, but combined, they had led to her current state. She'd had no chance. These must, he knew, be the SCP objects they had noted in Re-Estize, and that they had lost track of them when Albedo teleported home. At that point…

"Damn." It hit him suddenly. Nazarick's own defenses had kept the strangers' technology from locating the anomalies once they were inside the tomb. That begged the question, were there more inside? The fact that none of his floor guardians were responding tended to indicate that that was the case. Anger and fear began to well up inside him. His home. His family. They were under a form of attack he had never anticipated. Unfortunately, without the tool they had with them, it would be difficult to track any others in the tomb, but for the moment, he needed to find and rally any remaining supporters he had.

"I will reverse this disaster and destroy those responsible for the afront," he seethed, only to feel that strange force calming him again. Before it could fade completely, he reached out to destroy the objects that had caused Albedo so much pain. His eye was caught by the mirror, though, and he paused. He knew Albedo was somewhat vain, and he blamed himself for that, but it was strange that something like this could catch her. Curious despite himself, he looked closer, examining the magics inherent to its nature. The magics woven through its structure were complex near beyond reason. Subtle clouding of the mind made it easy for the object to draw one's attention. Other matters became, for a time, less important.

One gentle suggestion after another fed a fascination that then became compulsion.

All the while the thing's grip on the victim's mind grew stronger until they saw only what they were meant to see; flaws, imperfections, ugliness. Each effect built on and enhanced the last. It was, in a way, beautiful and complex beyond anything he was capable of creating. It was amazing. It was insidious. It was also, Ainz suddenly realized, working on him.

With a cry of anger, he drove his fist through the mirror. At first, it resisted his strength, but he added a burst of power to disrupt the aspects of the magic that made the thing so durable. In short order, SCP-884 ceased to exist.

He looked briefly at the others and considered. He didn't know how long he had been 'studying' the mirror, but he was not about to be trapped again by one of the other SCPs. Best to destroy them. He picked up the first.

The nail polish was, much to his surprise, alive. It seemed to be some sort of parasitic organism that subtly affected the mind of the host. Whatever it compelled them to do would seem perfectly natural. At the moment, he could feel it urging him to add a drop of his nonexistent blood to the bottle. He shrugged off the effect and vaporized the bottle and its contents with a minor spell.

He treated the skin cream, which seemed highly addictive, the comb, which had some fascinating transformative abilities, and the tweezers which carried a lethal compulsion that even he struggled to throw off, the same way. The tweezers proved surprisingly difficult to destroy, but he managed. He found himself unaccountably drained after the effort, but satisfied that the items would no longer threaten his home and family.

He teleported himself to Demiurge's home. The demon lay dead on the floor of his study, looking like a month-old corpse found in a desert. He was completely desiccated, almost mummified. After casting spells to preserve the body, he looked around for the culprit. Anything capable of doing that to such a powerful demon needed to be destroyed.

At first, nothing presented itself. He noticed the teacup on Demiurge's desk and wondered if his friend might have been poisoned somehow. He picked up the cup to examine the contents, casting a spell to reveal the nature of the contents. It was a simple spell that would reveal all but the most carefully hidden of poisons. When he saw the results of the spell, he flung the cup away in disgust, or he tried to, at least.

It adhered to the bones of his hand, and all he succeeded in doing was splattering the room with human waste. Even as he watched, the cup refilled from an unknown source. A pulse of magic failed to disrupt the thing's grip on his hand, and as he considered alternatives, he realized that he was feeling something that he hadn't felt since coming to this new world. He was thirsty.

"How-?" he asked, thoroughly confused. It had taken him a moment to recognize the sensation. It worsened as he examined it and tried to determine the reason and source. After a moment's study, he realized the magical effect was traceable back to the cup.

In retrospect, that was rather obvious.

As he was undead and lacked the need for any sustenance, the effect was entirely psychological. That didn't mean it wasn't a problem. The effect, he was able to discern, would only grow stronger over time. While it wouldn't kill him, it would be extremely irritating, and having the damn cup attached to his hand was a considerable inconvenience. Raw force, he could tell, would suffice to destroy the cup, but it would cost a surprising amount of magical energy. There had to be a more elegant solution.

He began to examine the threads of magic binding him to the cup. It seemed to form a direct molecular bond with the flesh of whoever touched it. No further magic was required after that. It would be a trivial matter to discard the bones it was in direct contact with and then regenerate them, but he suspected it wouldn't be that simple. He looked deeper.

"Crude but effective." The cup would be drawn to him almost as if to a magnet if it didn't have sufficient mass to fool the cup into thinking a person was still attached to it. That would be annoying, and there were deeper layers that made him doubt the efficacy of even that.

'Enough," he finally growled, channeling sufficient destructive energies into the cup to obliterate it. The effort, while tiring, proved quite satisfying. Casting spells to preserve Demiurge took only a few seconds, then he teleported to the 6th floor to seek out the twins.

Upon arriving at floor six, he reached out, searching for the twins and detected the rings he had given to Mare and Aura. Tracking them wasn't difficult. Looking at what was left of the two young dark elves was another matter. He preserved them both for reanimation before moving on. He didn't know what had killed them, but dealing with it could wait until Nazarick was once more secure.

He knew that five of his floor guardians were dead. Reaching out, he checked briefly on the 4th floor and found Gargantua unmoved and unchanged. He was about to check on Cocytus when a motion in the corner of his eye caught his attention. There was a deer, one of the twins' creatures no doubt, watching him from the shadows. Its eyes, he suddenly realized, were wrong.

"Not deer," he said aloud, turning to fully face the intruder. The creature snorted in surprise and then made an enraged sound and charged.

"You must be joking." Ainz sent the creature flying with a wave of his hand. "Time to get some answers." He strode toward the creature, surprised to see it rising to its hind legs in a manner a deer should not be capable of. Well, they did say it merely looked like a deer, he allowed, knocking the thing flat and pinning it to the ground with a thought. It squirmed in a manner that a solid creature, never mind an ordinary deer, should not be able to. Had he still been human, he suspected he would have found the sight extremely unsettling, but he was not.

"Very curious," he mused. "What, exactly, are you?" He began to apply every method of analysis at his disposal. Detect Magic. Analyze. Identify. Soul Sight. More than half-a-dozen methods were used over the next five minutes, nearly exhausting his list of options that did not involve a full laboratory. He learned nothing. The creature hidden inside the deer carcass was unlike anything he had ever seen. Its magical signature, or what passed for it, was nothing at all like the artifacts the SCP team had been collecting. He honestly didn't know what to make of it.

Superficially, the thing inside the carcass looked like a slime, but the resemblance was strictly superficial. It moved and adapted to his attempts to examine it in a manner that suggested intelligence, but he could detect nothing resembling a centralized nervous system, musculature, a vascular system. Even by the standards of normal slimes, this thing should not be doing what it was doing.

"What are you? What is your purpose?"

"R-rr-rresearrrch," the creature said, the word distorted and barely intelligible.

"Research? What kind?" Ainz, who had been preparing to simply destroy the thing and move on, instead paused, eager for any new information.

"N-n-n-not h-here. T-tak-ken from research. Need d-data."

"Someone brought you here against your will? Why?"

"Unnnknowwwn," the creature responded. "Need data."

"So, someone brought you to my home against your will. You began to study your surroundings. You killed two of my children in an effort to learn more." He paused, nodding thoughtfully. "I can understand this." He raised a hand and black flames engulfed the creature, drawing a prolonged, pain-filled scream from it as it was consumed.

"I just can't forgive it."

OOOOOOOOOO

Sebas Tian, like the rest of the relative handful of Nazarick's inhabitants that had made it to the throne room, knelt before the holy one where it rested on what was once Ainz Ooal Gown's throne. None of them had ever seen anything like it. The holy one was not impressive to look at, true. It was a rectangular bit of rather flimsy cloth with elaborate symbols printed on it in green and gray ink. Even the amber glow it gave off was nothing remarkable to those that called the Great Tomb home.

The aura of power, of wonder, of PROMISE it radiated, however, made all of that unimportant. It was all any of them needed. At first, some of them had fought to have the holy one solely for themselves. Those that tried this were cut down and cast to the side.

Everything unwanted and unneeded had been cast aside; be that greedy comrades, weapons, clothing, or previous loyalties. Nothing mattered save the holy one.

OOOOOOOOOO

The surprise attack staggered Ainz. He wasn't sure how the second creature had hidden from him, but it barely mattered. Its physical stats were impressive and its attack unrelenting, but Ainz had faced worse. Catching a right cross from the second deer, which was something he would have never imagined himself doing, he flung the thing hard against a tree and used a spell to shatter its husk.

The creature within looked just like the first, but it was harder to deal with. It had watched the fight between Ainz and the first creature and learned from it. There was no pause between attacks, and it spoke to him using the twins' voices, attempting to distract him. This tactic, however, only made Ainz angry. As he had no need to interrogate the second creature, he did not hold back and destroyed it completely within a minute of the thing's initial attack.

The lengths he had gone to so far that day had left him drained in a way he had not been since coming to the new world. There was no time to rest and recover, though. He headed for the next level to try to find Cocytus. Given the nature of the threats his unknown enemy had thrown at them so far, he would need backup.

The icy plain that made up Cocytus' level was, at first glance, unchanged. It was, by design, a desolate place. Nothing that wasn't created for the place survived there for long, and it had stopped many an intruder in the past. He tried Cocytus' home first. The fact that none of his floor guardians or their subordinates were responding was a very bad sign. Even Sebas had gone silent.

He found nothing at Cocytus' residence. Moving to Neuronist's workshop, he entered carefully, having heard nothing when approaching. That, in itself, was rare. His chief torturer was always at work on someone, refining her skills and developing new methods. He examined the building from a distance but sensed nothing living and no overt threats. On entering, he saw nothing unusual, at first. Then, he noted several dark stains on the wall, one of which was bubbling.

"Acid? What was she working on, and what happened here?" He cast spells to examine the burned patches and found an unfamiliar magical signature. The closest match he had ever seen to it was the odd alien magic he sensed from the SCP objects. Whoever was behind the attack was using an SCP object or was one of the organization's former prisoners. That didn't bode well. He still didn't have a good grasp on their magic. He couldn't track the person that had attacked the place or determine the nature of the SCP used.

He searched the workshop carefully, warry of anything giving off an unfamiliar magical signature. At first, he found nothing, until he entered a storeroom and found a badly burned corpse. The body looked as if it had been dunked in the strange acid. He could not even identify the person; the body was so badly disfigured. He cast a preservation spell and was about to continue his search when a sound behind him caused him to whirl, an offensive spell at the ready. A new bubbling patch had appeared on the wall behind him. It expanded as he watched. A spell to analyze the acid and the damage it was doing provided rather confusing data for a second, as there was no corresponding damage to the other side of the wall, and nothing there to cause it.

"A subdimension?" It was not a new idea by any means. He used item storage and similar spells himself. He mostly knew of such things, though, from the fiction of his original world, where there were a wider variety of uses for subdimensions. Given the origins of the SCPs, he found himself wary, but he was still taken by surprise when a powerful grip closed about his ankle and yanked.