God King Doom in a few years, so like multiversal level. The default strat was something like Von Neumann swarms into Jupiter Brains into Galactic Conquest and so on. Presumably at some point he just turns his gathered resources into an ascension engine to attain godhood.
Which is to say, you gotta scale up pretty fast to you can gank him before he's got preptime because you almost certainly scale slower than him when he's actually trying.
So basically a Commander SI. A
slow Commander SI. I can do this.
Also, he might or might not have to deal with heroes breaking his stuff if he stays home and techs up! Granted this is basically one big Apocryphal proc, so that's not going to delay him for
super long, but.
Apocalypse Canceller
[+] Violet [2 Copper]
[+] Green [2 Copper]
[+] Gold [1 Platinum]
[+] Red [1 Jade]
[+] Step Up [1 Platinum]
[+] One [1 Copper]
[+] Three [3 Copper]
[+] Ten Thousand [1 Jade]
[+] Sigil: Ten Thousand [1 Platinum]
[+] Plate [2 Platinum]
[-] Tarnish: Hunted [+2 Platinum]
[-] Blight: The Madman [+1 Jade]
The most difficult thing about writing this build is that the resulting mind is really,
really beyond mine, and will be at least until I shed this mortal chrysalis. The good thing about it, is that I know the shape of several projects it will focus on.
The first is the
Lathe of Heaven. The name itself is a hint as to its' working; the following is a blueprint.
The Engine
A fully recursive improvement loop, embedded in a thing's fundamental nature - or in other words, in its'
essence. Emperor Red can handle this, so on to the next step.
The Blade
The direction of the Engine's improvement must not (only) be to improve output-per-unit-invested, but to
decrease required investment to reach a level of output. Furthermore, this aspect
must apply to the Engine's own self-improvement. If both of these are done, finite input will eventually provide infinite output.
The Gears
Infinite output must not be the end. Thus, an advancement paradigm capable of giving
meaning to transfinite power is required. The obvious form would be Precedence - the ability to defeat other infinities, and infinity-like zeros. By structuring this Precedence so that one might view it as discrete, measurable, even
finite, one recreates the Infinite Singularity Husk - and in so doing,
another paradigm which the Engine may transcend.
(More gears would be desirable, but this is probably the point at which the Accursed was ambushed.)
Optimizing This
The Lathe is a fairly solid piece of work, but it's not optimized for short-term growth. What I most need are
axial advantages - means to act which Apocalypse can't contest. His superscience is really broad, unfortunately, so ISH Tiers may in fact be my best option. Still, ISH2 Dimensionality isn't a bad target to aim for.
The second project I'm going to call
Golden Tomorrow - basically, figuring out how to mimic a Commander SI with the available magics. Gold seems like a reasonable skeleton for this, but I don't think it's doable with the Broker's wares alone. I need to go full Von Neumann swarm, faster than Doctor Apocalypse can. So what are the necessary components?
*Sigiled Ten Thousand should solve the control problem handily, so long as I can scale my senses well enough. Seven would help a lot with this, allowing mining by Elementalism, but by my read of its' size/mass limit it wouldn't scale fast enough to keep up. Sword has a similar problem; it's just too bottlenecked.
-A good mining-focused magic is a high priority, for obvious reasons.
-Even higher priority, though, is a good
fabrication magic - I worry that Gold doesn't get transcendental sharpness or durability on its' own, and I'm not certain it can let me mindlink to its' golems by itself, either. Red can probably solve both of those, but Red is terribly dangerous to rely on in this timeframe.
-Also, transmutations, sculpting, and cleaning magics are all good for boosting the
value of mineral wealth - a seam of gold isn't as valuable as an equal weight in minted coins, which themselves probably aren't as valuable as a well-made art piece of the stuff, let alone a complicated magical device. This is probably critical to letting my army grow faster than the percentage needed to guard my wealth does.
-Given this, transport beyond the Moonlit Realm is a
really high priority, not so much to avoid the Hunt as to acquire more magic. Ordinalism would be
so powerful with Ten Thousand, and doubly so with Step Up. (Even if, as seems likely, it
doesn't let me treat every thread as a different Ordinal Mage.) Surely there are ways, in this universe-sized Thing-That-Voyages, to access it and/or other strongly mental magics? Like that place Typhonmiele was - possibly? - threatening, in the main quest? My Rank isn't active, though, which basically requires me to find transport.
--I could try to find a Republic Killteam. I expect they'd be
very interested in a bearer of the Emperor Red, especially if it means I can buff people the way I think it can. And if I could buy an hour or so of Armament-time and access to a really good planeshifting magic, I
suspect that'd be enough to gank the Doctor - he's in the realm of starbuster himself, but an Armament with its' Shroud up is a comfortable universe-buster. Honestly, Ascended Doctor Apocalypse might still be beatable with the right Armament(s). Good news!
And, of course, the other critical one: staying
sane. I can probably fork off enough personas that at least
one group doesn't go mad from Color influence, but possibly I should drop Violet and Green in favor of Resilient and Last Laugh. I don't
like it, but it
would double my uptime at the cost of both the Wisdom buff and the speed boost, and Last Laugh might be my best bet at being dropped off somewhere I could buy an Armament's support. The speed boost is probably the one that hurts the most, honestly. I like the idea of endlessly superhuman Wisdom, but I'm not actually sure what it would mean in practical terms.
Hey
@Rihaku, which one does the Curse Broker think has a better chance of success? What does 'a place of relative safety' mean, in context of The Madman?
Contingencies
Doctor Apocalypse might stop losing in his home universe as soon as I take the Blight, meaning I have eleven and a half years before he starts actively hunting me, but he starts scaling right away. Worst semi-credible scenario, he eats all his universe's Titans (I spent the afternoon checking out the rest of his Quest), bootstraps that into the equivalent of Zang Kong Type V, and becomes an opponent
very loosely on par with the Ur-Mother's Greater Aspect.
Well.
I'm reading the Lesser Aspect as somewhere in the Rank 10-11 range, and the Greater Aspect as ~2 Ranks higher than that. The pantheon-eater beasts were probably more-or-less on par with Foremost, going by the description of Augustine's superattack,
Ereadhir are Rank 10, that gives us a very rough baseline. The Lesser Aspect didn't die
quite as quickly as the Berserkers - hey, I'd forgotten that they look like RWBY villains - but it still died fairly quickly, so I'm guessing it wasn't... hm. Actually, the Forebear's techniques were Praxis-based. She might have been
much stronger. Still, probably not overwhelmingly so.
Anyway, Zang Kong might still be able to protect me. Nameless or Suizhen would be better, but since I'm not sure which iteration of the universe I'm dealing with, and I'm already being pessimistic, I'm going to presume he's the best option available.
(The Forebear, if he's still around, might be very interested in my Lathe of Heaven design. He might be even better, provided I can catch him somewhere safeish. But that doesn't seem likely.)
Anyway, depending on a bunch of factors, but primarily on where the Curse Broker can drop me if I take Last Laugh, one of these two builds might still be survivable. Possibly both, honestly. Endless Wisdom is very, very powerful.
No worries, sometimes I don't react to fanworks with speculative contents so as to avoid confirming or denying certain things, or even giving the impression thereof!
I wonder if you'll react to this one, then?
