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91.94% The Power of Ten: Sama Rantha / Chapter 491: Far Future Ch. 201– Paint it White

Chapter 491: Far Future Ch. 201– Paint it White

An hour had passed. The white in the atmosphere was starting to fade.

I was sitting on a Disk in midair, watching as the city below crumbled like sand castles falling to time. Massive craters were opening in the ground as durasteel fractured and fell, eroding superstructures collapsed, and the works of man tumbled down, one after another. Impossibly strong materials shattered like brittle glass and clay, and the ground for miles around was crunching, crushing, and settling as the corrupted material was cleansed and collapsed, and the weight of ages did the rest of the job.

Well, the Mekkers won't have to clean up the planet, I thought with a smile. I wonder how much money I saved them.

"Yeah, I know you're awake." The fool on the other Disk slowly opened his eyes. "I also got rid of the seven kill-switches in you. They even figured out to put a suicide-urge inside your Helix. Your bosses are pretty damn good."

Completely nude, the Assassin slowly sat up on the Disk. We were a few hundred yards above the ground, out of the collapse paths of anything tall, while the booming and rumbling of a kiloplex dying and returning to the dust echoed around us. We were just above the dust clouds, actually.

"Feel insane?" I asked, as he stared at the gloomy yet grand scene below, pretty poetic in its own way. The constant peals couldn't stop my voice, of course.

"No. I can feel... I can feel... something great and powerful... that is not the Warp..." He put his hands to his chest, and his Helices spun out.

The flames and smoke of his Helices were brighter and more tangible then ever, sampling the world without first being filtered through his bodyglove.

"That is The Land." He looked at me curiously. "Us normal folks don't know what it is, only the Brothers of the Void know that... Brother Firesword. Fate, luck, destiny, the will of the universe, of life itself, the unconscious drive of existence... it's what vivus feeds, maybe Creation itself. There's a lot of people who claim to be able to sense it, but only the Brotherhood of the Void actually can.

"It'll never talk to you, but you won't have any problem interpreting what it wants, if past experience is anything."

He took a deep breath, and something lit up inside his dark eyes. "It is... angry..." He lifted his head towards the sky, looking in a specific direction.

"The Land loves her Brothers," I agreed, glancing up there. "Having them enslaved and corrupted by mortal wills... well, the Land isn't going to be too happy about that." I smiled slightly. "On the realistic side, you can be very, very sure your masters have been hunted by Void Brothers before, and they are ready for you. It's a job you should probably leave to someone else, while you get about doing what you really need to."

He lowered his eyes to me. "Leave freeing my Brothers... to you?"

"What's the Land say?"

He inhaled deeply again, and closed his eyes as his Helices swirled and danced in unfettered freedom.

"That... seems like a very good idea," he breathed out after a full minute.

"The Land is pretty merciless," I informed him. "I know you want to do the job yourself, but the Land wants the job done, full stop. Everything else is secondary."

"I... see." He looked at the slowly crumbling grandeur about him. "The others?"

"I had to haul their unconscious carcasses to their skimmer and fly it out of there before it all came crumbling down. They're probably conscious and wondering how they got fifty miles thataway on autopilot about now."

He quirked a half-smile. "You are too heroic."

"And don't I Throne-damned know it," I grinned. "Of course, I did just slaughter over a billion Warped, denied their souls to the Warp, turned all the power they invested here into a Veil-sealing dead zone the Warp won't be able to intrude in for centuries, and blamed the whole thing on the Mechanists. I can indulge in meaninglessly nice shit every now and then."

"I... see." He considered everything from that angle as he watched a blok a half-mile away begin to shudder and crumble. Slowly and grandly, two thousand feet of reinforced durasteel and plascrete began to slough away, joining the rest of the falling artificial forest. "You... cost the Warp a great deal here..."

"That is by far the best part of my job," I grinned even wider.

He looked at my double canines, the smearing pattern my Curse. "What... is that?" he had to ask.

"Residual Curse-mark. I'm a Hagchild. I could get rid of it, but it's too useful, so I keep it around. Since its original intent was to punish Evil souls, it's drawn to them like wolves to sheep. It's how I knew to follow the trail of sigils. There just had to be something juicy at the end of all that, and let me tell you, it is thrumming most happily right now."

"And how are you resisting my Helices?" They swirled my way, but couldn't break my Null outside my Vajra at all.

"My Null is stronger than your Void." He stared at me. "Three types of Forsaken... well, four, technically. Nulls, the common type, what most people are if Awakened. Sources, the Kings Among Men and Queens Among Women, who lead the Nulls. Vortexes, the female Voids, who hunt corruption... and the Voids, who guide the way in service to the Land."

He kind of stared at me, and I just arched an eyebrow back.

"You have met free Voids..."

"Yes."

"And... they are established. They have... an order?"

"Nothing as formal as an assassin's organization. But they do help one another in their various jobs."

His eyes fell to his Helices. "You called me Brother Firesword."

"You have Smoke and Fire Helices. Those are the signs of the Fire and the Sword. As I understand it, you're the generalist of the Void Brothers. You take on all the problems and help the other Brothers out, while being opposed to use of corrupt energies in general. You and Brother Shadowknife tend to be the most active of the Brothers."

"Shadowknife?" he had to ask.

"Their Helices are Time and Space. They are the guardians of the Veil. Things from other planes, time travelers, things from Outside Creation, dimensional instability... they hunt them down and clean up the problems, the shadows upon Creation. They are despised by some very, very powerful entities." I had to inhale proudly. "This universe hasn't had any for at least ten millennia. It probably wouldn't be such a shithole if they had been here." I slid my eyes back to him. "History lesson for me. Did the Emperor set up the Assassins?"

His face stiffened, and he looked elsewhere again. "So I was told..."

I grimaced. "Fuck. The Emperor is responsible for suborning the Void Brothers? No wonder this place is so crapsack. The best weapons against the Warp, cuffed and shackled..."

The most powerful psion to ever live had struck at the Void Brotherhood as they were born, and was probably simply too powerful and essential to be snuffed in return. Give it a few hundred years, and likely most of the 'real' Voids had died off to ever-increasing dangers, while the Emperor conscripted those meant to replace them.

"I can feel... that there is so much to do..." His eyes were a little round, as if he was gazing at a wall of work that extended out into infinity.

"And that's why you have Sources and Nulls around. Delegate. You're the hands of the only thing vast enough to counter what has been done and is going to be done. There's key stuff only you can do, because only you are sensitive enough to the Land. But the Big Stuff... well, the Land has Nulls and Sources for a damn reason, you know?" I gestured at the stuff coming around. "We can do stuff, just point the way. You Brothers aren't really supposed to be engaging in mass slaughter all the time... you are supposed to be working the tipping points, removing the key elements of the enemy to shift things one way or another as the big forces ripple one way and the other.

"You've been used as a chess piece, when in fact, you're supposed to be the ones playing the game."

He looked over the crumbling cityscape, seeing and feeling things moving with every falling brick and shattering window. "We are the hands of the Land..."

"Oh, would you like to speak with some of your other Brothers? Experience gives insights, and they are rediscovering the heritage you've been denied. Brothers... are the favored children of the Land. Being an assassin is a small part of what they are and can be."

"I can do that? How?"

"I put a Mark on your hand." He turned his hands over, and there it was, on his left hand. His Helices swirled through it, but it was inert. "Touch it to this here matching Master Mark on my waist, and there'll be some changes."

He looked at his hand, and this time I let this Helices sweep through my Null, feel my Vajra, and his face changed as he did so.

"You... that's magic..."

"And?"

"It's pure, untainted by the Warp..."

"Just like you can do."

He grimaced again, like a stab of pain in his soul at how he'd been used, and denied so much. He leaned the Disk sideways, and scooted over, reaching out with the back of his hand to place it against my Waist.

Magic hissed, Karma dumped, the Mark lit up.

He blinked, looked at the door in the side of his mind, walked up, and pushed it open.

I /glanced over at him. -Good morning, Brother.-

His jaw slowly dropped. He looked around at the mindscape, back at me, and a score of other doors opened up, and out walked some presences both completely new and totally familiar.

-Brother Firesword,- My Queen /said for all of them, stepping forwards, his Mind and Spirit Helices swirling about him. -Welcome to the Markspace for the Void Brothers. We have a great deal to talk about.-

------

"Why are we taking a transport off-world?" the new Brother Firesword asked, as I clicked bars and switches of the private shuttle buried in the private hanger of a noble family whose members had probably been impaled on the crumbled gate outside.

"Normally I'd Riftcut my way offworld, but this place has just received a freaking massive infusion of vivic energy, and the Veil is like adamant. The Warp isn't the only thing not getting through here. So, we have to get offworld, and we have to do it in a manner where you aren't seen, so they can think you are dead after failing to kill me."

"Since you didn't leave me with the others you obviously rescued..." he nodded.

"So, we're going to go up in space beyond the world's magnetosphere, Riftcut our way out of here, and the transport wagon one of my girls is aboard can tractor it in and get a free ship for nothing."

"Clever. And then, where are we going?"

"You need to Level. So, someplace you can do that. Then, you're going to go hunting Assassins for recruitment."

"Will I be able to find them?"

"You know how you can always track one another because of the purity you leave behind?" He had that look of being amazed that I knew that once again. "Well, the Land always knows where you are, which means it can always lead you to one of your own. You just never knew it because that suit stopped the empathy.

"It would be very accurate to say... you cannot hide from one another."


Chapter 492: Far Future Ch. 202 – Tell Me About Myself

-Mom!-

-Morning, squirt. What you bugging the ExLite at the top of the stack with today?-

-You are so full of yourself. Duh, I made Ten.- As if /messaging me direct in Markspace wasn't proof that she at least was past the Resonance stage.

-Cool! Sorry, I am currently up to my armpits in oozes, and the shoggoths don't like me very much at the moment. Can you Riftcut yet?- Said as colony organisms in assorted colors squirmed, writhed, died, and melted all around me.

Grumblegrumblegrumble. -I just made Rantha/10, you think I had time to spare to put that much time into Meter's higher powers?- I could /hear her rolling her eyes across the galaxy.

-No, actually, but two uses a day is the requirement for using Gloom. You are going to be needing to be using that all that time, so you need to work on it, pronto tonto, Ronnie.-

She caught my tone, and grumbled some more. -This huge monster quest you have me working towards is a total pain in the ass, Mom. Can't you tell me more about it?-

-Nope, I wanted you focused first on making Ten and getting to the atomic cockroach stage. Your long-term Talent is all R&D tech-based, so we have to keep you from getting distracted. I know you want to go swimming into all the tech out there, but it's not time yet.- Pseudopods coming from all directions, flaming into goo and ash and vapor...

Grumblegrumble! -So, okay, I have to get Meter stacked up. He's perfectly cool with that. What all while that's going on?-

-Now that you're a Ten, you need to focus on advancing your Expert Levels up, breaking Ten.-

-Expert?- She mentally /goggled at me. -You want me to prioritize Expert over Melee?-

-My darling, I'm hoping you can burn Expert all the way to Seventeen, and pass me along the way.-

She paused on hearing that. Expert was an NPC Class, and so took half the Karma to improve that a PC Class did. It was definitely not a combat Class. Doing something like that would make her among the least competent in combat of all the Ranthas, especially those that were getting post-Ten.

-Okay, you want to exploit my Talent, Born Researcher, to open up tech trees as fast as possible.- It was a reasonable deduction, as the +4 to Knowledge Skills for researching technology doubled at Ten to +8, which trumped my broad +5 bonus.

-Half right. Also, you are now authorized to begin your Curseline. They'll all have the same Talent you do, so they are going to form the new hard core of our R&D division. They have the same Overquest you do... make damn sure they get to Six, and get to Ten Rantha for the Stats, and Ten Expert, driving Expert as hard and fast as they can.-

Her nose was wrinkling. -Okay, you want us to have the Ranks to know the tech and take over all the design work. I get that. Why can't I do a dive into my prior incarnation?-

-When I tell you, you're going to swear at me for a couple minutes. Then you're going to go think about things for a while, come back, swear at me more, and tell me I should not have allowed you to do the souldive at all. To be perfectly frank... perfectly, utterly frank... you shouldn't do the souldive until you're a Fifteen.-

We couldn't lie to one another. When I said I was serious, I was, and since we all had the same foundation, her judgement on the issue would pretty much be the same as mine.

-Mom, that's sounds goddamn ominous. Do I really want to know who I was?-

-I think it's a case of pressure. We have this damn superquest to tear down the Warp Gods, and you've got probably the second biggest side quest underneath it, fluttering off in weird directions.-

-Second biggest?- Stratospheric Wisdom and Intellect scores digested that. -Daaaaaamn, Mom.- She hesitated. -So, should I wait for Seventeen?-

-That would be ideal,- I /confirmed. I could hear her take a deep breath.

-That's gonna take a damn long time, Mom.-

-HAH! For the smartest woman in the galaxy? I don't think so. You'll beat me to Fifteen, and once you're the one cracking the tech instead of just refining what I've done, your Karma is going to juice like nitro to the brain. Five years to Seventeen, tops.-

-Mithar.- Blinkblink. -That'll make me one of the highest Level people in the whole damn Galaxy, won't it?-

-Yep. And as an NPC, you'll just keep slipping under the eyes of those who style themselves movers and shakers...-

She /laughed despite herself. There was no way a Rantha could not be noticed, with our insane Charisma. -Okay, I'll get things set up, and start feeding Meter down that path. When I can Riftcut twice, I'll meet up with you in person, and you can tell me what this is all about.-

-Confirmed!- I /agreed readily, and our conversation was done.

Jirosmer IV didn't have a human population anymore, at least that I could discover. They had all been eaten by a mass ooze invasion, devoured, and converted into more oozes.

Coming in from outsystem was an Elder Things colony ship, on its way to settle this largely water-dominated world. The oozes were still vulnerable to ultraviolet light, so they couldn't wipe all the biological life off the world without some help, and only a couple varieties of them, particularly the shoggoths, were intelligent.

The shoggoths preferred sentient prey, anyways. It spurred their own psionic and intellectual development, and so they instinctively went for the sentient species. Of course, the Great Race could and would reduce them to fertilizer with a mass signal from orbit, and either herd the shoggoths into a carrier for the next world-wipe, or extinguish them.

Me, I was thanklessly preparing some fusion surprises for them when they landed on this planet where they'd wiped out over two billion humans, and would doubtless render down the cities and structures to dust and recycle them into cities of their own.

The Indolence Virus, acquired via the drow, would help accelerate the race's decline into stupidity and lethargy, and when humanity finally came back to do unto them, they might even have forgotten how their own technology worked...

--------

Time passes...

Spidey Base One was our main operating base in the Glooms. Because it was in the Underweb, see...

It was located off in one of the capillary tunnels, with no fixed Portal to the mortal world for a hundred miles in any direction. This particular location was tied to the shadows of a mountain range of a close-orbit moon of a gas giant, prone to lightning storms and such, and we were buried deep down in a valley, and a cavern we'd cleared out of the stone so even some insane nitwit flying overhead wouldn't be able to see anything.

That didn't keep out the natives, of course, shadows being what they are, but since nobody walking around here was less than a Ten, and Bane/Shadows was a thing to acquire, the native incorps, umbrals, shadowborn, gloombloods, and other creatures of Gloom that decided to investigate here ended up being Karma for individuals interested in fine-tuning their sensory skills, keeping up with their Naming Karma, and providing the Gloom hereabouts with extra munchies.

The only way in or out was Riftcutting, and by now, there was a lot of it going on. There were several fields cleared around the place for incoming and outgoing traffic, as people hustled through ninety-second portals with practiced speed and precision, going through both sides of opened Rifts cut through the planes and connecting here to places across the galaxy to double the speed, and then just as often turning back around and waiting in ready lines for a new Rift to be cut open to send them to a new destination just after they got here.

Ranthas and Briggs from multiple Curselines were coming in and departing all the time for new worlds, while G&G personnel were being cleverly shifted between worlds and ships below the eyes of anyone watching. Sometimes they were being evacuated from disasters, which was never fun, but shit happened.

No permanents Portal was allowed to be constructed here, because Gloom would immediately react to it being used, and slowly swell the tunnel here into something larger. The drow paid attention to such changes, and someone would come investigate usage of the Portal. Rifts, flaring up for ninety seconds at a time and not drawing on the power of the Underweb at all, had no such problems.

A chorus of Hi, Mom's and Sage Sama's greeted me as I stepped through a Rift, waving it shut behind me as I stepped through, and let my breshkt disguise fade. Drow were probably searching the galaxy for me, getting into a tizzy with how many places I'd been seen. If they knew about Spidey Base One being under their noses, they'd probably die of a stroke in outrage.

"Hey, Mom." Now brown-haired, with white hair at her temples, olive-skinned, and brown-eyed, Ronnie Rantha looked remarkably plain among the wild colors of some of the Ranthas... but also older, for all that if you looked at her you'd swear she was a teenager going on fifty.

"Heya, Mrs. Fantastic." She promptly blushed, having been tagged with that quite early after her almost continual revisions, refinements, and upgrades of technology and the design and production work of them she kept submitting. Even the Engineering Talents could only roll their eyes at the constant flow of stuff coming out of her. Unlike Reed Richards, she focused first on what was useful, and then got into the esoteric and strange shit. "Ready to get really pissed at reality?"

She stared at me, but I definitely wasn't joking, and lying to one another was nigh on impossible for us Ranthas, the sisterhood bond was just too strong. She reached up to pinch the bridge of her nose, turned to walk with me, and sighed. "No. Tell me anyways."

"You're the reincarnation of the Janus III Tekron."

She blinked at me. Blinked again. "Wha." Blinked a few more times. "It... that... is that even possible?" she gawked at me, then looked down at her hands.

I made a sweeping motion and double-pointed at her. "I didn't call you Reed for a reason. Meet Mrs. Fantastic!"

"I... holy shit." Muscles on her face were twisting as she tried to go through the implications, and then the curses started spewing out of her mouth without stopping.

Being polyglots, we could curse in a lot of languages. With high Charisma and Intimidate, we were REALLY good at it, too.

It took her a few minutes to work through her denial of the situation. She turned around on her heel, waved over her head with her middle finger up. "I gotta think about this, Mom."

I waved at her knowingly. "I'll be talking with the hyn!" Who were delighted to run the place and give orders to all these oddly friendly people who were taller than they were, in the safest place they'd ever lived in. With the Shadowknives coming and going all the time, this place saw more Voids going through it then anywhere but Assassin Mountain.

And oddly enough, the location of the Assassin Mountain was one of the things that I wanted the Shadowknives to help me with. Even the Assassins themselves didn't know its location... but I imagined a dozen Void Brothers scattered across the galaxy could duodeculate the coordinates very accurately indeed...

At that point, said Assassin's Mountain was going to get a visit from a certain Hag. They were set up to deal with renegade Voids, but there was no such stuff in place for dealing with Nulls.

And most especially, Ranthas. I smiled to myself.

The Land was gonna owe me so much... but the Land couldn't even really see me, dammit. So unfair...


CREATORS' THOUGHTS
Aelryinth Aelryinth

Cause Reed Richards is the smartest person in the Marvel universe. I could have called her Lexa, but Luthor is a villain...

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