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DODGE THE WHEEL
- Thread starter BrunofanofK
- Start date
- Crossover
IRON GODS 3
- Location
- Brazil
In the end, I moved on from Torch, there simply wasn't much more it could offer me that it hadn't already. Most significant of all, forcing Logic to show her hand.
There is a second reason for her to call me 'brother'. Like me, she can be considered one of Rher's buds. Her virtue technique, so to speak, is the ability to connect people Skynet-style. She can't manipulate space like Rher could but I think she gained more than she lost from said trade.
Especially when she can rely on me to pick up her slack! Honestly, some things never change.
After securing the place I used Rher's smother mystery to establish a link with Logic through the power relay as a medium. As soon as I did so the girl simply took over the habitat ship. It was as worrying as it was relieving. Unlike Unity she doesn't seem to be capable of forcibly taking over or enslaving people, her influence goes as far as people are willing to tolerate it. The problem is that she can read minds and be so goddam persuasive she can easily cajole people to do her binding… kind of like me.
If I had to assert her godly mystery through a cultivator of virtue's lens then Logic's virtue would be simplicitas (lucidity). Even if her acts might seem pushy the truth was that I had set up things for her. As I wanted those facilities to be used for good having part of her acting there just made sense. It was a foregone conclusion so she didn't bother asking permission when she could so easily get forgiveness. She can, in a matter of instants, assert with authority the boundaries people live by and how hard she can push them. This allowed her to eat her cake and have it too with little fear of reprisal.
It kind of reminds me of Socrates' warning about wielding public virtues closely tied to the concept of Ethos around Greek cultivators. Regardless, at least I knew what to expect from her going forward. I have yet to see how she behaves when denied what she wants but new opportunities are sure to come by eventually. While there is nothing more democratic than gang rape, I can't let cynicism and fear impair my judgment. Logic can do a lot of good for the people of Numeria, she might be the hope of this land.
Fortunately, it seems my rotten luck seems to be winding down. I successfully tracked down Cassandra's trail and found the site of her last standing. An android foundry and biolab called Aurora, home of mutant androids and rogue gearmen. After securing the place, putting down the rabid inhabitants, and repairing the facilitates so it no longer tainted the water with biohazards, I tried to extract intel from the gearmen. Something easy to do with Bluetooth connection once they no longer could attack me.
They turned out to be Unity's pawns, waiting for orders that would never come after pursuing Cassandra beyond Unity's Wi-Fi and successfully executing her. Cassandra's trail ended as a bust, her last known location turning out to be a dead end. Worse, there is no body left. While androids look biological, they don't rot.
Someone took her body. The only saving grace was that it clearly hadn't been Unity. I reached a dead end, tough. It was time for me to go back to Scrapwall empty-handed.
Luckily, my good Samaritan bug bite set my course straight. The people of a nearby were having trouble with a local tribe of hill giants, terrible brutes little smarter than beasts and just as beholden to their hunger. Apparently, they unearthed a rather dangerous robot while scavenging for food, forcing them to abandon their camp in the woods. This caused them to come closer to the village than usual, sack the communal reservoirs of grains, and even feast on their would-be defenders.
When I tried to establish communication, they tried to eat me as well. No question about it, they were too ravenous, din minded, and brutish to coexist with anyone but each other. I put them down and sent their souls in the path of a more enlightened reincarnation. I also took down the warden robot, which kind of reminds me of Robocop 2, more a thank with raptor legs and pincer weapons for arms.
That is when I stumbled on a wizard tower shrouded in perpetual smoke while pursuing the source of a never-ending smoke stream. That is when it dawned on me. This was an honest-to-god wizard tower. It's almost easy to forget Magic dominates most of Golarion and the most enthusiastic explorers of super-science found in Numeria are foreign-born arcane scholars.
It was not only a wizard tower but a genuine steampunk wizard tower!
Its traps were a chaotic patchwork of engineering, magic, and super-science glued together with duct tape. The place was a hazard for both invaders and residents, an opinion almost instantly validated when I got accosted by the ghost of the old wizard who lived here as the self-proclaimed master of the Choking Tower.
I didn't dare take conclusions based on a single encounter but between the undead alien tribe and now a crazy wizard, my theory had merit. It seems like the gods of these lands had a preference for punishing mortals by cursing them with liminal existence as undead instead of polymorphing them into monsters.
Regardless, the end result was the same. The old man was tethered to this tower. Even if his ethereal body were to be dispersed, his curse would recompose him in due time. Only by unraveling and breaking his curse could his soul be freed… or a little bit of heart flame to break the laws of nature and free his soul without any preamble.
I probably went to the shit list of whatever god did this but if I was afraid of divine retribution I would have never become a hero in the first place.
And I got a reward for my good deed! As I touched his soul with my influence his final moment flooded into me as a knee-jerk reaction due to Rher's influence in my foundation. He was the person that recuperated Cassandra's body! As an exiled member of the Technical League, he had great knowledge of nanites and an obsession with swarms, he used it to create a machine capable of interrogating a dead brain.
Alas, Cassandra had the last laugh. She prepared a final contingency in case Unity tried to interrogate her body, a swarm of killer robots. The old wizard was killed via peak irony, disintegrated by the object of his fascination. I guess nobody gets to become undead through random violence or fulminating heart failure.
Merlin over here managed to ask six questions before they both were broken down into fruit punch. The most important one was about how she recorded all she knew about Unity into something she called a Compact AI Core using a neurocam and that she hid it in a place called the Scar of the Spider.
After that, I took it upon myself to clean up the tower, plus taking everything of value not nailed down. Oh, the irony! The most precious device in the Choking Tower turned out to be the smoke furnace responsible for its name. A unique device mixing magic and high tech, probably the first of its kind.
Maybe instead of Merlin I should have called him Saruman, studying his notes and spell book revealed it to be the product of the conjuration school, a portal to the Plane of Fire. It powers the entire tower and although its yield is low compared to the nuclear reactors I have seen, it has no risk of exploding and it is easier to reproduce. While my rhetoric and mastery over the concept of Motion are sophisticated enough for me to create and synthesize all rare components and sky metals needed for me to reproduce numerian technology without the need for previous infrastructure, I am the exception rather than the rule.
While I estimate Socrates, Aristotle, or Archimedes would be more than qualified to unravel the secrets of Divinity star fleet on their own if given the chance and enough time, they are the cream of the sophic realm. The fact I had to resort to them speaks to how monumental a feat the Smoke Furnace is. I have doubts how much of it could be replicated outside realms without access to a Fire Plane of their own but I imagine I could retrofit the concept to any ley line or place of power.
A shame to have to leave it behind.
They are called spiders because the annihilators have great mobility and climbing skills, and when those fail, they can resort to booster jest for short burst of up to one minute of flight. These things are more dangerous than an adult dragon and just as big, the symbol of scientific provoked strife.
There is probably some hidden foundry from a crashed ship there popping them in regular intervals. Not that I cared at this point, after traveling two hundred miles through Numeria I can say with authority this place sucks! Seriously, I just got assaulted by a swarm of radioactive zombies, resident evil style! They were runners too. A mob of human-sized locusts.
Now I reached Spider Valley just to find the place overtaken by Dominion of Black abominations. I just found the remnants of an unlucky Cimmerian tribe that strawed too close and got the wrong kind of attention. The plasma lance scarred the landscape, but worst of all, those who were immobilized or surrendered got their brains surgically removed. The image of men, women, and children without their cranium domes hits too close to home.
Playtime is over, time to break out the rain gun rifle. My pistols can't even scratch their Glaucite frame. Even a modern anti-tank shell would do little more than dent it. If it could touch it in the first place. After a certain point, a robot becomes expensive enough to warrant the installation of a force field capable of blocking solids and liquids, but not gases or light. This combo makes annihilators far more durable than even their prominent size and intimidating frame would indicate.
Fortunately, while rail guns can even turn scraps into serviceable ammunition, it is possible to augment their performance by using certain sky metals as ammo. [Inubrix] is said to be able to pass through iron and steel as though it were capable of phasing in and out of reality. Nearly as soft as lead, it is the softest solid skymetal. Alas, Glaucite's atomic composition makes it the heaviest and densest substance known to man, being capable of denying Inubrix's unique qualities.
It's ironic that the annihilator's perfect defense would have such an exclusive flaw.
I abandon the motorcycle in favor of a stealth approach. The thing weighs 120 tons, I would need to be blind to lose its trail. After about two hours of careful prowling, I found my mark. The annihilator was openly acting as a guard dog to a cave entrance Located at the northernmost extent of the Scar of the Spider.
What caused me alarm was how the entrance was infested with giant fungi. At night they glowed with luminescent light. I was getting a really ominous feeling from it.
Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
While I was too far away to get a peek at the annihilator's internal workings, I had acquired a rough blueprint of it from Hellion. Good enough for me to know where its power core was placed. It was a shame to dispose of it but I had a job to do.
I invoked the laws of nature and my new well of mythical might to augment the rain gun's power and aimed. I fired. The recoil was powerful enough to break the collarbone of a captain of the civic realm, before the bullet had even reached its target I was already moving. Taking cover over a stone incline and firing again, invoking my mythical power once more to swiftly move away from said compromised position.
Just in time as well, because no sooner I moved from there the place was blown apart by a blue plasma bean. Combat-oriented robots are implacable enemies, their program interprets most actions as signs of hostility and responds in kind.
It scanned the valley frantically in search of enemies while also raining down suppressing fire against my first location. I was fast enough that its AI though itself attacked by more than one opponent. It knew to recognize a rail gun rifle as a weapon incapable of such a quickly repeated fire. These advanced firearms have a range increment of 200 feet, automatically reload, and never misfire. An annihilator's core can process scrap metal into new ammunition, effectively giving the annihilator infinite ammunition with these weapons.
I successfully fooled it. It seems like my upgraded raven mantle pulled through. The liquid darkness I acquired from the Heartless One showed itself rather pliable, making it easy to work with. It was easy to have it behave like high-tech armor even if I only had small samples to work with.
It now mimics higher-quality carbon skin reinforced with carbon allotypes nanotubes and the heightened sheen of the fabric hints at its expensive construction. More than that, personal shielding tech has managed to keep up with armament. While examining the vestiges of space suits and HIV gear I found hits of slots for modular tech capable of customizable upgrading. So, while I traveled, I used my spare time to devise ways to adapt what I saw from scientific wonders in my favor.
The first things I came up with were means to camouflage myself, dampening unusual sensors, and means of detection based on what I saw from observer robots. And from the way the annihilator decided to attack everything that moved in a frenzy, it seems to be working.
Besides that, I managed to install a medical interface based on the gearmen, this medical upgrade stimulates your metabolism and natural healing capabilities with nanites. Adaptable defense, inspired by Crysis, grants me an ever-shifting adaptive defense module that responds to outside stimuli protecting me from acid, cold, electricity, fire, or sonic. From what I saw in the ruined spacesuits I put together a slicker HEV (hazard environment vestment) upgrade to protect from radiation, disease, poisonous gas, and similar environmental dangers.
All in all, this was an amazing glow-up. If it wasn't for the fact all civilian clothes it can shift into only come in different shades of black, I would wear them forever.
But I digress, what is important is that my ploy worked. Between the critical damage and the annihilator's over-the-top desperate reaction formed a perfect combination to drive the annihilator's core into critical failure. It overheated, forcing the metallic scorpion to slow down, giving me the opening I needed to finish the job.
My third shot drove it over the edge and the annihilator exploded, rocketing the entire vicinity.
Well, there goes the element of surprise. Not that it matters. The thoughts irradiating from inside the cave in response to my stunt align with the alien mindset of horrors of the Dominion of Black. I sincerely hate how handy Rher's blessing always seems to turn out to be.
I don't need to hesitate.
Considering they holed themselves in a cave, Blitzkrieg's charge by suicide drones would be the best answer. I construct a swarm of observer robots carrying white phosphorus bombs inside their bodies. An insurance I took after examining the strange fungi and diseases found in Numeria. I certainly ran into enough labs to supply me with those homemade bombs.
I observed the assault through the neural link. The place looked like another planet and yet I recognized its denizens despite their foreign shapes. Mi-go, also known as the Fungi from Yuggoth. They certainly seem to live up to their reputation as a scientifically and technologically advanced race, having a particularly sophisticated grasp of surgical techniques and neuroscience.
They indeed were the ones who harvested the brains of the tribals and now arranged them in jars for strange purposes.
Now let's see how they deal with fire. A little bit of rhetoric to assist in things can turn an already volatile process into a true calamity as all the surrounding oxygen is sucked at once, causing fire suction followed by implosion.
And just like that the world was made a better place. And nothing of value was lost. For a race of supposedly higher beings, they certainly die easily and why the hell were they studying Numerian technology?
Regardless, it will take some days for the fire to go down. There are good odds some mi-go were not present when I attacked. I will have to camp here for a while. It's a good thing I have the old wizard spell book to distract me now that my armor upgrading project is finished and done with. Once the place cools down I can look for what remains and use a badge-mole to dig through the ruble.
Although a mi-go's shape might suggest an arthropod, especially with its long, insect-like limbs and diaphanous wings, the creature is in fact a highly evolved form of extraterrestrial fungus. Mi-go communicates via a combination of clicking of pincers and subtle shifts in the coloration of their bulbous heads—other creatures can learn this language, but without similar biologies (or the ability to mimic these noises and colors with illusions) can only hope to "listen" to a mi-go.
Telepathy for the win. Interrogating them wasn't that difficult. While their intellect might be impressive from a biological standpoint, they lag well behind me even in my time as a philosopher. Even the horrors of Shub-Niggurath they willingly shared with me in an attempt to scar my mind found no purchase. Getting nothing but a snort of derision at the childish plot. The Old Gods' universal sign represents unilateral dynamic of power due to their a priori existence. Rher is a jealous god, he left very little for Shub-Niggurath to make an impression.
Not that it was an entire waste of time, mi-go see very little difference between the cold hard facts of science and the intensely interpretative complexities of faith. I can at least adapt it somewhat to my own mysteries but my hope to develop the means to breathe in space was dashed. Our biologies were simply too different.
At least I got some intel about Dominion of Black. Apparently, these mi-gos were slaves turned freedom fighters who came here hunting down Dominion of Black. This doesn't make us friends by any means, no matter how much they pleaded otherwise, conniving little bastards. At least I got a lead.
On a brighter note, I found great success using the old wizard's spell book as inspiration for expanding my founding mysteries. My version of clairvoyance leverages Rher's peeping tom tendencies so it works best using moonlight as a medium, particularly during the full moon, but is serviceable enough during the day for me to scout the valley.
Dionysus seems to have an affinity for necromancy and illusion while Rher favors conjuration and divination. I can't believe I lived this long without [shadow evocation] as I so heavily favored [shadow conjuration]! Now that I think of it, I rarely use darkness to rob my enemies of their senses like Bakkahos does, heavily favoring for ravaging my enemies with entropy. This is a good chance for me to examine my strategy.
I had the perfect target as well. Located at the southernmost extent of the Scar of the Spider, but not quite opposite the fungal caves colonized by the mi-go, lies a blighted section of swampland and a number of fissures in the cliff all. This was the lair of a Colour Out of Space, a mobile radiance that glows unlike any seen in nature.
Alas, its incorporeal nature does very little to protect it against my hands of pneuma. I even felt experimental enough to see what would happen if I painted it with Rher's green moonlight. Moon-scorch one, alien zero. Magical cancerous light that hates for the win.
Another noteworthy encounter was a mad and mutilated wretch I found living here. Fortunately for him, I have upgraded my healing abilities to the point I can restore even soul damage and I am very familiar with madness. He turned out to be a powerful druid who once came here in an attempt to restore the natural balance of the place. Dionysus is a god of primeval wilds so I had a lot to gain from his tutelage.
Despite frowning upon my use of technological devices, Mad Paeytr was grateful enough for my service and assistance to tutor me. In fact he saw this as his chance to return the favor and set my course straight. It helped a lot most of his lessons were practical in application as we waged a two-man war against the abominations blighting Spider Valley.
From vampiric tentacle trees to a break out of radioactive Cordyceps brain infection fungi taking over the local population of giant ogre spiders. Even the eventual undead held down by his grudges and regrets.
Eventually, Mad Paeytr and I parted ways when we found a group of penitent pilgrimages. A small trope of androids convinced that they themselves are affronts to nature and opted for self-imposed exile in the hopes of achieving some sort of awakening and learn how to shed their artificiality and join the truly living. The no longer so mad and old-looking man still had a fundamentally good heart, it didn't take much convincing on my part to cajole him into taking these lost souls under his wing. Meyasa's tragic end and even Cassandra's own cautionary tale left a long-lasting bitter aftertaste. I will do whatever I can to give them a real shot at happiness.
We parted on good terms and I even gave him one of my colonies of virtuous bees as a parting gift. I rarely use them for combat nowadays in favor of harvesting honey to ferment my brews. My 'special' mad honey showed itself, especially comforting for the old druid in moments where the nightmare of old memories is too much for Paetytr to tolerate. Numeria might never be the same as before the rain of stars but it can be home again.
I found the source of the annihilator robots. A combined military and production facility reclaimed and maintained by a rogue reclamation robot sent by Unity five centuries ago to aid in the tracking and capture of its wayward oracle, Cassandra. Binox was nearly destroyed in that original confrontation with Cassandra, and even though it survived and repaired itself, it suffered significant degradation to its programming, which it did not realize needed repair. This damage has given it the robotic equivalent of delusions of grandeur. It sees itself as being on a mission to slowly convert the natural world into one of order and machinery, a personality resulting from a tiny "infection" of Unity itself.
He also suffers from short memory loss; this is the third time we have had this same conversation. I sincerely wouldn't bother with it. The robot itself is mostly harmless, the problem is the annihilation robots it keeps building and then forgetting about. Effectively setting them loose on Numeria.
Luckily for me, I salvaged a 'robotjack' from the Mi-go's base, a strange, rod-like device that can be used to usurp control of an otherwise functional robot. Perfect against Binox's royal guard, two heavily damaged annihilators it keeps forgetting to repair.
A simple sleight of hand while using my body as cover and Binox was peppered into Swiss cheese. After that I pulled my sword and tried its new zero-edge against their Glaucite frame, cutting them down to scraps. Despite the damaged conditions these three ruined robots are still the most valuable items found here as they are beyond the knowledge Hellion once held.
Reclamation robots, or "reclamators," are masters of salvage and construction. These robots were originally designed to build structures and repair all manner of technology with speed and precision. Construction of these robots was difficult and time-consuming, but they often repaid those spent resources swiftly with their ability to rebuild and repair other robots or technological items. Their truly remarkable programming surprised even those who originally developed them, as these machines can salvage items thought to be far beyond hope of repair.
After studying [shadow evocation] I successfully managed to reproduce a serviceable version of the high-tech grenades found in Numeria. From there it was easy to project weapons. With it, I can now fully arm my shadow androids. I started by making kamikaze observer robots but I am ready to progress further.
I have a hot date with the local base of the Dominion of Black and I intend to make an impression.
I hope to successfully repair Binox and reboot him to 'factory settings', learning from it what I couldn't from Hellion. My rhetoric is refined enough I can repair any non-magical device with my bare hands, no matter how complex it is. This is not work intended for a human to do but I have more than enough hands and attention to review each piece one by one.
My ivory neural link turned out surprisingly useful here. One of the artifacts I recently acquired from an undead gunslinger, a length of crystal about the size of a human thumb that's adorned at one end by a metal cap fitted with prongs and plugs, turned out to be a futuristic pen drive. Their purpose was to store and transport the staggeringly complex amount of information required to program and enhance artificial intelligence.
The one I have allowed an AI to understand and experience feelings of compassion, love, and associated emotions. But more than that, it granted me the blueprint of Divinity's AI codes, allowing me to reverse engineer the technology. All for the cheap price of one year of my life I would have to spend studying it the slow way. Hell, I can even use what I learned to create pseudo-autonomous barriers and magical devices!
Just as an experiment I imprinted a copy of my own consciousness into the sword that shares my name and purpose. I already found a few [neurocams] in my travel, the device capable of making a duplicate of a creature's mind, copying and storing all the knowledge, memories, and personality of a living creature. Since I used one hundred dark brains as components for the creation of the sword Zagreus, I felt confident in my capacity to bridge any gaps with magic.
While I was at it, I also used its three main slots (brain, heart, guts) as pseudo-chakras to transfer the energy tainting my respective chakras using the insight about the souls I got from undoing Mahito's work. Surprisingly, giving up my hardened heart was more difficult than the essence of the six eyes I acquired from Gojo, but considering the amount of resources I am committing to my sword, this is my best way to ensure it isn't damaged, overloaded, or destroyed. It is expensive but now the sword Zagreus truly is an equal to the Conqueror's King's Curse.
This is your Christmas present! Happy holidays!
And we keep on exploring more of Numeria. It certainly is a place full of opportunities. Despite being mostly fooling around, Golarian is such a wacky place it is easy to find things from drastically different settings in one place.
By the way, yes, Zagreus uses his chakras as equipment slots to grant himself power from different creatures. One of the perks of Mahito's idle transfiguration. He used this to outsource the combo he used to mimic King's Curse to his sword.
There is a second reason for her to call me 'brother'. Like me, she can be considered one of Rher's buds. Her virtue technique, so to speak, is the ability to connect people Skynet-style. She can't manipulate space like Rher could but I think she gained more than she lost from said trade.
Especially when she can rely on me to pick up her slack! Honestly, some things never change.
After securing the place I used Rher's smother mystery to establish a link with Logic through the power relay as a medium. As soon as I did so the girl simply took over the habitat ship. It was as worrying as it was relieving. Unlike Unity she doesn't seem to be capable of forcibly taking over or enslaving people, her influence goes as far as people are willing to tolerate it. The problem is that she can read minds and be so goddam persuasive she can easily cajole people to do her binding… kind of like me.
If I had to assert her godly mystery through a cultivator of virtue's lens then Logic's virtue would be simplicitas (lucidity). Even if her acts might seem pushy the truth was that I had set up things for her. As I wanted those facilities to be used for good having part of her acting there just made sense. It was a foregone conclusion so she didn't bother asking permission when she could so easily get forgiveness. She can, in a matter of instants, assert with authority the boundaries people live by and how hard she can push them. This allowed her to eat her cake and have it too with little fear of reprisal.
It kind of reminds me of Socrates' warning about wielding public virtues closely tied to the concept of Ethos around Greek cultivators. Regardless, at least I knew what to expect from her going forward. I have yet to see how she behaves when denied what she wants but new opportunities are sure to come by eventually. While there is nothing more democratic than gang rape, I can't let cynicism and fear impair my judgment. Logic can do a lot of good for the people of Numeria, she might be the hope of this land.
Being blinded by hope suits us much better after all.
I can do without the sarcasm as well. While she would be close to unstoppable in a modern society Golarian is too primitive for her to flourish.
If you say so.
Regardless, Hellion believed that Cassandra knew much of Unity: its defenses, its weaknesses, and ways it could be combated. Before mounting its assault on Silver Mount, Hellion wanted desperately to track down Cassandra, for according to its information, she fled Silver Mount after betraying Unity and took with her a device of irreplaceable value.
Fortunately, it seems my rotten luck seems to be winding down. I successfully tracked down Cassandra's trail and found the site of her last standing. An android foundry and biolab called Aurora, home of mutant androids and rogue gearmen. After securing the place, putting down the rabid inhabitants, and repairing the facilitates so it no longer tainted the water with biohazards, I tried to extract intel from the gearmen. Something easy to do with Bluetooth connection once they no longer could attack me.
They turned out to be Unity's pawns, waiting for orders that would never come after pursuing Cassandra beyond Unity's Wi-Fi and successfully executing her. Cassandra's trail ended as a bust, her last known location turning out to be a dead end. Worse, there is no body left. While androids look biological, they don't rot.
Someone took her body. The only saving grace was that it clearly hadn't been Unity. I reached a dead end, tough. It was time for me to go back to Scrapwall empty-handed.
Luckily, my good Samaritan bug bite set my course straight. The people of a nearby were having trouble with a local tribe of hill giants, terrible brutes little smarter than beasts and just as beholden to their hunger. Apparently, they unearthed a rather dangerous robot while scavenging for food, forcing them to abandon their camp in the woods. This caused them to come closer to the village than usual, sack the communal reservoirs of grains, and even feast on their would-be defenders.
When I tried to establish communication, they tried to eat me as well. No question about it, they were too ravenous, din minded, and brutish to coexist with anyone but each other. I put them down and sent their souls in the path of a more enlightened reincarnation. I also took down the warden robot, which kind of reminds me of Robocop 2, more a thank with raptor legs and pincer weapons for arms.
That is when I stumbled on a wizard tower shrouded in perpetual smoke while pursuing the source of a never-ending smoke stream. That is when it dawned on me. This was an honest-to-god wizard tower. It's almost easy to forget Magic dominates most of Golarion and the most enthusiastic explorers of super-science found in Numeria are foreign-born arcane scholars.
It was not only a wizard tower but a genuine steampunk wizard tower!
Its traps were a chaotic patchwork of engineering, magic, and super-science glued together with duct tape. The place was a hazard for both invaders and residents, an opinion almost instantly validated when I got accosted by the ghost of the old wizard who lived here as the self-proclaimed master of the Choking Tower.
I didn't dare take conclusions based on a single encounter but between the undead alien tribe and now a crazy wizard, my theory had merit. It seems like the gods of these lands had a preference for punishing mortals by cursing them with liminal existence as undead instead of polymorphing them into monsters.
Regardless, the end result was the same. The old man was tethered to this tower. Even if his ethereal body were to be dispersed, his curse would recompose him in due time. Only by unraveling and breaking his curse could his soul be freed… or a little bit of heart flame to break the laws of nature and free his soul without any preamble.
I probably went to the shit list of whatever god did this but if I was afraid of divine retribution I would have never become a hero in the first place.
And I got a reward for my good deed! As I touched his soul with my influence his final moment flooded into me as a knee-jerk reaction due to Rher's influence in my foundation. He was the person that recuperated Cassandra's body! As an exiled member of the Technical League, he had great knowledge of nanites and an obsession with swarms, he used it to create a machine capable of interrogating a dead brain.
Alas, Cassandra had the last laugh. She prepared a final contingency in case Unity tried to interrogate her body, a swarm of killer robots. The old wizard was killed via peak irony, disintegrated by the object of his fascination. I guess nobody gets to become undead through random violence or fulminating heart failure.
Merlin over here managed to ask six questions before they both were broken down into fruit punch. The most important one was about how she recorded all she knew about Unity into something she called a Compact AI Core using a neurocam and that she hid it in a place called the Scar of the Spider.
After that, I took it upon myself to clean up the tower, plus taking everything of value not nailed down. Oh, the irony! The most precious device in the Choking Tower turned out to be the smoke furnace responsible for its name. A unique device mixing magic and high tech, probably the first of its kind.
Maybe instead of Merlin I should have called him Saruman, studying his notes and spell book revealed it to be the product of the conjuration school, a portal to the Plane of Fire. It powers the entire tower and although its yield is low compared to the nuclear reactors I have seen, it has no risk of exploding and it is easier to reproduce. While my rhetoric and mastery over the concept of Motion are sophisticated enough for me to create and synthesize all rare components and sky metals needed for me to reproduce numerian technology without the need for previous infrastructure, I am the exception rather than the rule.
While I estimate Socrates, Aristotle, or Archimedes would be more than qualified to unravel the secrets of Divinity star fleet on their own if given the chance and enough time, they are the cream of the sophic realm. The fact I had to resort to them speaks to how monumental a feat the Smoke Furnace is. I have doubts how much of it could be replicated outside realms without access to a Fire Plane of their own but I imagine I could retrofit the concept to any ley line or place of power.
A shame to have to leave it behind.
-//-
The scar of the spider is a narrow gorge-like veil in the southwestern fell vales of Numeria just north of one of its few big rivers. Generally avoided by everyone, this valley of gray stone is so named because of its local populations of annihilation robots that stalk this territory. Enormous and formidable scorpion-like killing machines bearing chain gun turrets for maws and a plasma lance for a sting. I made the math and those things can actually seriously hurt me if I am off guard.
They are called spiders because the annihilators have great mobility and climbing skills, and when those fail, they can resort to booster jest for short burst of up to one minute of flight. These things are more dangerous than an adult dragon and just as big, the symbol of scientific provoked strife.
There is probably some hidden foundry from a crashed ship there popping them in regular intervals. Not that I cared at this point, after traveling two hundred miles through Numeria I can say with authority this place sucks! Seriously, I just got assaulted by a swarm of radioactive zombies, resident evil style! They were runners too. A mob of human-sized locusts.
Now I reached Spider Valley just to find the place overtaken by Dominion of Black abominations. I just found the remnants of an unlucky Cimmerian tribe that strawed too close and got the wrong kind of attention. The plasma lance scarred the landscape, but worst of all, those who were immobilized or surrendered got their brains surgically removed. The image of men, women, and children without their cranium domes hits too close to home.
Playtime is over, time to break out the rain gun rifle. My pistols can't even scratch their Glaucite frame. Even a modern anti-tank shell would do little more than dent it. If it could touch it in the first place. After a certain point, a robot becomes expensive enough to warrant the installation of a force field capable of blocking solids and liquids, but not gases or light. This combo makes annihilators far more durable than even their prominent size and intimidating frame would indicate.
Fortunately, while rail guns can even turn scraps into serviceable ammunition, it is possible to augment their performance by using certain sky metals as ammo. [Inubrix] is said to be able to pass through iron and steel as though it were capable of phasing in and out of reality. Nearly as soft as lead, it is the softest solid skymetal. Alas, Glaucite's atomic composition makes it the heaviest and densest substance known to man, being capable of denying Inubrix's unique qualities.
It's ironic that the annihilator's perfect defense would have such an exclusive flaw.
I abandon the motorcycle in favor of a stealth approach. The thing weighs 120 tons, I would need to be blind to lose its trail. After about two hours of careful prowling, I found my mark. The annihilator was openly acting as a guard dog to a cave entrance Located at the northernmost extent of the Scar of the Spider.
What caused me alarm was how the entrance was infested with giant fungi. At night they glowed with luminescent light. I was getting a really ominous feeling from it.
Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
While I was too far away to get a peek at the annihilator's internal workings, I had acquired a rough blueprint of it from Hellion. Good enough for me to know where its power core was placed. It was a shame to dispose of it but I had a job to do.
I invoked the laws of nature and my new well of mythical might to augment the rain gun's power and aimed. I fired. The recoil was powerful enough to break the collarbone of a captain of the civic realm, before the bullet had even reached its target I was already moving. Taking cover over a stone incline and firing again, invoking my mythical power once more to swiftly move away from said compromised position.
Just in time as well, because no sooner I moved from there the place was blown apart by a blue plasma bean. Combat-oriented robots are implacable enemies, their program interprets most actions as signs of hostility and responds in kind.
It scanned the valley frantically in search of enemies while also raining down suppressing fire against my first location. I was fast enough that its AI though itself attacked by more than one opponent. It knew to recognize a rail gun rifle as a weapon incapable of such a quickly repeated fire. These advanced firearms have a range increment of 200 feet, automatically reload, and never misfire. An annihilator's core can process scrap metal into new ammunition, effectively giving the annihilator infinite ammunition with these weapons.
I successfully fooled it. It seems like my upgraded raven mantle pulled through. The liquid darkness I acquired from the Heartless One showed itself rather pliable, making it easy to work with. It was easy to have it behave like high-tech armor even if I only had small samples to work with.
It now mimics higher-quality carbon skin reinforced with carbon allotypes nanotubes and the heightened sheen of the fabric hints at its expensive construction. More than that, personal shielding tech has managed to keep up with armament. While examining the vestiges of space suits and HIV gear I found hits of slots for modular tech capable of customizable upgrading. So, while I traveled, I used my spare time to devise ways to adapt what I saw from scientific wonders in my favor.
The first things I came up with were means to camouflage myself, dampening unusual sensors, and means of detection based on what I saw from observer robots. And from the way the annihilator decided to attack everything that moved in a frenzy, it seems to be working.
Besides that, I managed to install a medical interface based on the gearmen, this medical upgrade stimulates your metabolism and natural healing capabilities with nanites. Adaptable defense, inspired by Crysis, grants me an ever-shifting adaptive defense module that responds to outside stimuli protecting me from acid, cold, electricity, fire, or sonic. From what I saw in the ruined spacesuits I put together a slicker HEV (hazard environment vestment) upgrade to protect from radiation, disease, poisonous gas, and similar environmental dangers.
All in all, this was an amazing glow-up. If it wasn't for the fact all civilian clothes it can shift into only come in different shades of black, I would wear them forever.
But I digress, what is important is that my ploy worked. Between the critical damage and the annihilator's over-the-top desperate reaction formed a perfect combination to drive the annihilator's core into critical failure. It overheated, forcing the metallic scorpion to slow down, giving me the opening I needed to finish the job.
My third shot drove it over the edge and the annihilator exploded, rocketing the entire vicinity.
Well, there goes the element of surprise. Not that it matters. The thoughts irradiating from inside the cave in response to my stunt align with the alien mindset of horrors of the Dominion of Black. I sincerely hate how handy Rher's blessing always seems to turn out to be.
I don't need to hesitate.
Considering they holed themselves in a cave, Blitzkrieg's charge by suicide drones would be the best answer. I construct a swarm of observer robots carrying white phosphorus bombs inside their bodies. An insurance I took after examining the strange fungi and diseases found in Numeria. I certainly ran into enough labs to supply me with those homemade bombs.
I observed the assault through the neural link. The place looked like another planet and yet I recognized its denizens despite their foreign shapes. Mi-go, also known as the Fungi from Yuggoth. They certainly seem to live up to their reputation as a scientifically and technologically advanced race, having a particularly sophisticated grasp of surgical techniques and neuroscience.
They indeed were the ones who harvested the brains of the tribals and now arranged them in jars for strange purposes.
Now let's see how they deal with fire. A little bit of rhetoric to assist in things can turn an already volatile process into a true calamity as all the surrounding oxygen is sucked at once, causing fire suction followed by implosion.
And just like that the world was made a better place. And nothing of value was lost. For a race of supposedly higher beings, they certainly die easily and why the hell were they studying Numerian technology?
Regardless, it will take some days for the fire to go down. There are good odds some mi-go were not present when I attacked. I will have to camp here for a while. It's a good thing I have the old wizard spell book to distract me now that my armor upgrading project is finished and done with. Once the place cools down I can look for what remains and use a badge-mole to dig through the ruble.
-//-
I was right to take my time and camp there. A few more Mi-go eventually showed themselves, loitering around the ruins in search of survivors or resources. Good thing they are cosmic abominations with callous disregard for all life forms save their own kind. it's been some years since the last time I dissected someone.
Although a mi-go's shape might suggest an arthropod, especially with its long, insect-like limbs and diaphanous wings, the creature is in fact a highly evolved form of extraterrestrial fungus. Mi-go communicates via a combination of clicking of pincers and subtle shifts in the coloration of their bulbous heads—other creatures can learn this language, but without similar biologies (or the ability to mimic these noises and colors with illusions) can only hope to "listen" to a mi-go.
Telepathy for the win. Interrogating them wasn't that difficult. While their intellect might be impressive from a biological standpoint, they lag well behind me even in my time as a philosopher. Even the horrors of Shub-Niggurath they willingly shared with me in an attempt to scar my mind found no purchase. Getting nothing but a snort of derision at the childish plot. The Old Gods' universal sign represents unilateral dynamic of power due to their a priori existence. Rher is a jealous god, he left very little for Shub-Niggurath to make an impression.
Not that it was an entire waste of time, mi-go see very little difference between the cold hard facts of science and the intensely interpretative complexities of faith. I can at least adapt it somewhat to my own mysteries but my hope to develop the means to breathe in space was dashed. Our biologies were simply too different.
At least I got some intel about Dominion of Black. Apparently, these mi-gos were slaves turned freedom fighters who came here hunting down Dominion of Black. This doesn't make us friends by any means, no matter how much they pleaded otherwise, conniving little bastards. At least I got a lead.
On a brighter note, I found great success using the old wizard's spell book as inspiration for expanding my founding mysteries. My version of clairvoyance leverages Rher's peeping tom tendencies so it works best using moonlight as a medium, particularly during the full moon, but is serviceable enough during the day for me to scout the valley.
Dionysus seems to have an affinity for necromancy and illusion while Rher favors conjuration and divination. I can't believe I lived this long without [shadow evocation] as I so heavily favored [shadow conjuration]! Now that I think of it, I rarely use darkness to rob my enemies of their senses like Bakkahos does, heavily favoring for ravaging my enemies with entropy. This is a good chance for me to examine my strategy.
I had the perfect target as well. Located at the southernmost extent of the Scar of the Spider, but not quite opposite the fungal caves colonized by the mi-go, lies a blighted section of swampland and a number of fissures in the cliff all. This was the lair of a Colour Out of Space, a mobile radiance that glows unlike any seen in nature.
Alas, its incorporeal nature does very little to protect it against my hands of pneuma. I even felt experimental enough to see what would happen if I painted it with Rher's green moonlight. Moon-scorch one, alien zero. Magical cancerous light that hates for the win.
Another noteworthy encounter was a mad and mutilated wretch I found living here. Fortunately for him, I have upgraded my healing abilities to the point I can restore even soul damage and I am very familiar with madness. He turned out to be a powerful druid who once came here in an attempt to restore the natural balance of the place. Dionysus is a god of primeval wilds so I had a lot to gain from his tutelage.
Despite frowning upon my use of technological devices, Mad Paeytr was grateful enough for my service and assistance to tutor me. In fact he saw this as his chance to return the favor and set my course straight. It helped a lot most of his lessons were practical in application as we waged a two-man war against the abominations blighting Spider Valley.
From vampiric tentacle trees to a break out of radioactive Cordyceps brain infection fungi taking over the local population of giant ogre spiders. Even the eventual undead held down by his grudges and regrets.
Eventually, Mad Paeytr and I parted ways when we found a group of penitent pilgrimages. A small trope of androids convinced that they themselves are affronts to nature and opted for self-imposed exile in the hopes of achieving some sort of awakening and learn how to shed their artificiality and join the truly living. The no longer so mad and old-looking man still had a fundamentally good heart, it didn't take much convincing on my part to cajole him into taking these lost souls under his wing. Meyasa's tragic end and even Cassandra's own cautionary tale left a long-lasting bitter aftertaste. I will do whatever I can to give them a real shot at happiness.
We parted on good terms and I even gave him one of my colonies of virtuous bees as a parting gift. I rarely use them for combat nowadays in favor of harvesting honey to ferment my brews. My 'special' mad honey showed itself, especially comforting for the old druid in moments where the nightmare of old memories is too much for Paetytr to tolerate. Numeria might never be the same as before the rain of stars but it can be home again.
-//-
"You stand in the presence of the Reconstructed One, Binox the Mighty, Binox the Builder. The One born of the Master Unity, who has forged One's own realm and seeks to expand the realm to be all realms. Binox demands your obeisance. Having damaged Binox's creations, you must be volunteered as replacements. Binox will disassemble half of you in payment for your insolence, but rebuild you and allow you to serve. What say you, little thing of gristle and bone? Which will of you pay the price for Binox's mercy?"
I found the source of the annihilator robots. A combined military and production facility reclaimed and maintained by a rogue reclamation robot sent by Unity five centuries ago to aid in the tracking and capture of its wayward oracle, Cassandra. Binox was nearly destroyed in that original confrontation with Cassandra, and even though it survived and repaired itself, it suffered significant degradation to its programming, which it did not realize needed repair. This damage has given it the robotic equivalent of delusions of grandeur. It sees itself as being on a mission to slowly convert the natural world into one of order and machinery, a personality resulting from a tiny "infection" of Unity itself.
He also suffers from short memory loss; this is the third time we have had this same conversation. I sincerely wouldn't bother with it. The robot itself is mostly harmless, the problem is the annihilation robots it keeps building and then forgetting about. Effectively setting them loose on Numeria.
Luckily for me, I salvaged a 'robotjack' from the Mi-go's base, a strange, rod-like device that can be used to usurp control of an otherwise functional robot. Perfect against Binox's royal guard, two heavily damaged annihilators it keeps forgetting to repair.
A simple sleight of hand while using my body as cover and Binox was peppered into Swiss cheese. After that I pulled my sword and tried its new zero-edge against their Glaucite frame, cutting them down to scraps. Despite the damaged conditions these three ruined robots are still the most valuable items found here as they are beyond the knowledge Hellion once held.
Reclamation robots, or "reclamators," are masters of salvage and construction. These robots were originally designed to build structures and repair all manner of technology with speed and precision. Construction of these robots was difficult and time-consuming, but they often repaid those spent resources swiftly with their ability to rebuild and repair other robots or technological items. Their truly remarkable programming surprised even those who originally developed them, as these machines can salvage items thought to be far beyond hope of repair.
After studying [shadow evocation] I successfully managed to reproduce a serviceable version of the high-tech grenades found in Numeria. From there it was easy to project weapons. With it, I can now fully arm my shadow androids. I started by making kamikaze observer robots but I am ready to progress further.
I have a hot date with the local base of the Dominion of Black and I intend to make an impression.
I hope to successfully repair Binox and reboot him to 'factory settings', learning from it what I couldn't from Hellion. My rhetoric is refined enough I can repair any non-magical device with my bare hands, no matter how complex it is. This is not work intended for a human to do but I have more than enough hands and attention to review each piece one by one.
My ivory neural link turned out surprisingly useful here. One of the artifacts I recently acquired from an undead gunslinger, a length of crystal about the size of a human thumb that's adorned at one end by a metal cap fitted with prongs and plugs, turned out to be a futuristic pen drive. Their purpose was to store and transport the staggeringly complex amount of information required to program and enhance artificial intelligence.
The one I have allowed an AI to understand and experience feelings of compassion, love, and associated emotions. But more than that, it granted me the blueprint of Divinity's AI codes, allowing me to reverse engineer the technology. All for the cheap price of one year of my life I would have to spend studying it the slow way. Hell, I can even use what I learned to create pseudo-autonomous barriers and magical devices!
Just as an experiment I imprinted a copy of my own consciousness into the sword that shares my name and purpose. I already found a few [neurocams] in my travel, the device capable of making a duplicate of a creature's mind, copying and storing all the knowledge, memories, and personality of a living creature. Since I used one hundred dark brains as components for the creation of the sword Zagreus, I felt confident in my capacity to bridge any gaps with magic.
While I was at it, I also used its three main slots (brain, heart, guts) as pseudo-chakras to transfer the energy tainting my respective chakras using the insight about the souls I got from undoing Mahito's work. Surprisingly, giving up my hardened heart was more difficult than the essence of the six eyes I acquired from Gojo, but considering the amount of resources I am committing to my sword, this is my best way to ensure it isn't damaged, overloaded, or destroyed. It is expensive but now the sword Zagreus truly is an equal to the Conqueror's King's Curse.
-//-
[AUTHOR'S ROOM]
This is your Christmas present! Happy holidays!
And we keep on exploring more of Numeria. It certainly is a place full of opportunities. Despite being mostly fooling around, Golarian is such a wacky place it is easy to find things from drastically different settings in one place.
By the way, yes, Zagreus uses his chakras as equipment slots to grant himself power from different creatures. One of the perks of Mahito's idle transfiguration. He used this to outsource the combo he used to mimic King's Curse to his sword.
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- Brazil
40k is on the list but Zagreus is too overleved for bloodborne, even if the Moon presence would make an amazing first labor! But who knows? I am also counting fanfictions as an option. Do you know a good bloodborne fanfiction that would fit? Everything I find is only Worm.
I'm hoping this was a grammar mistake ,please ?
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- washington
I mean its slightly correct if you think about it.
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- Brazil
If you take democracy to its extreme and logical conclusion, any choice made by a larger collective is just, even if the minority has to suffer. Yes, it is disgusting and why we don't have democracies like that and keep checks and balances such as the separation of powers (executive, legislative and judiciary).
Nuclear reactors do not explode, this is a common misconception. At most, they can melt due to an overly active reaction exceeding the capabilities of the heat sink.
You're telling, not showing. This chapter read like a biography. I really can't praise her, although I hope you understand that I'm not trying to demoralize you.
You're telling, not showing. This chapter read like a biography. I really can't praise her, although I hope you understand that I'm not trying to demoralize you.
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- Brazil
it is ironic, two wolves and one lamb vote to see what is for dinner. Remember we are dealing with a god from Fear and Hunger. Zagreus is honestly freaked and his mind wander to how thing could go wrong as Rher shows the ugly truth of humanity. It is a heavier topic but illustrates the point. Should I review for something lighter? What do you people think?
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- Brazil
Because Zagreus is a hero, he is way over-leveled for this adventure, there is a reason we call their adventure Epic. if I were to write like I did JJK then we would still be exploring Torch. Things will get more interesting once we hit Star Fall and start exploring Divinity since it is a super dungeon but for now, while some things are worth mentioning they are not really a fight.
About fusion reactors, I am literally following the rules of the Pathfinder tech guide which say they can explode so...
Why am I not surprised? Many fantasy worlds are full of similar misconceptions. It seems that the katana is considered the strongest type of weapon in the DND? Although in fact its characteristics are greatly exaggerated. Ninja movies have messed up people's minds, just look at the laws regarding ninja weapons in Canada. This also applies to everything related to radiation, people know that there are nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors, ignorantly attributing the property of the first to the second. In fact, nuclear power is pretty damn safe and environmentally friendly today.
No I think it was fine it's not like your going into explicit detail or anything it's just pointing something out from a shocking angle is all. Plus literally no one else has had an issue with it at all.
No need ,I just couldn't get the context with the rest of the para ,and it was a rather abrupt tone change (?,can't think of any other way to describe it )for me.
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- Brazil
... you are sort of right. While not perfect I could have added his worries about the underground malice Rher likes to unearth and reveal. Give some ideas about how things could go wrong.
IRON GODS 4
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- Brazil
According to mi-go intel, there are two main camps of the Dominion of Black in Spider Valley. One is their decomposing dropship their agents used to reach Golarion, yet now lays literally dying and mostly abandoned. The other is their new Hive hidden behind an illusory wall at the extreme west of the valley.
I used my now kamikaze observer robots to scout the dropship. It seems most of the species in Dominion of Black use telepathy which doubles as a sonar against nearby minds. One could say Rher opened my mind way too much for me to risk it but I digress. My main priority is the acquisition of intel.
The mi-go memory showed it to be a monstrous space whale but now only a giant pile of rotten flesh remains from it, tainting the riverbank with foul blood and ammonia. Most creatures avoid it save a huge sea serpent that devours magic, including my observers. A rare chance for me to break out my aquatic assets.
Ironically, its territoriality and hunger made it easy to lure it away so the bulk of my swarm could infiltrate without a problem. Once it was close enough, by which I mean in range, my two aquatic shikigami pounced.
Poisonous Anura is the unholy cross between a frog and an aquatic salamander like an axolotl. Bearing a long serpentine body with a pad-like tail and ten arms-like limbs capable of assisting both jumping, climbing and swimming, serving as an amphibian fighting force. It bears a fearsome yet bright-colored skin of a poisonous frog endowed with great flexibility and its mucus gives it extraordinary slipperiness protecting the Anura from physical trauma and containment. Despite looking otherwise, it is not actually toothless, bearing retractable mandibles with a venomous bite like a Komodo dragon.
While its breath weapon is fearsome crowd control, inducing a physical and spiritual autoimmune reaction as a person is trapped in a hallucination where they confront its shadow-self, what I used to catch said magical beast was its projectile tongue, much like a chameleon or frog.
While its rubber-like body allows Poisonous Anura allow it to swallow and capture prey many times its size while holding them in torpor for easy extraction, this eel's gluttony for magic is not to be underestimated.
That is why I had Kaleidoscope Logic Urchin snipe it with 'piercing wine' once it was extracted from the water and violently thrown in the stone reef. From there it converted the wine remaining inside its body like skewers, impaling it from the inside out… yet it failed somehow. Interesting.
Not that a bullet through its first spine bone couldn't solve. It was an unusual enough creature to merit vivisection yet my hands of pneuma quickly dispersed through contact with said beast. This forced me to get my hands dirty for once after a decade! This better be worth it.
The source of its power seems to be a crystalline growth along its digestive tract containing large deposits of magical energy. These nodes are responsible for the magical feedback that surrounds the beast, granting it its spell resistance, damage reduction against magic, dispelling bite capable of disrupting magic, and even the capability to digest magic considering the state of its meals. The foul aberrant flesh turned inert and mostly harmless.
Most extraordinary of all, despite its eel-like body and dragon head, its body information harvested by Valkyrie Vulture informs me this thing was once a crocodile native from this river! Did it mutate by eating the living ship? This is my first time seeing a virtuous beast evolving beyond its designed place in the natural order. I had been so focused on the visitors from the stars that I almost missed the natural wonders Golarian has to offer!
Here is where I receive the dividends from the recent upgrades to my sword. The winning combo based on cultivator Alexander's chosen weapon has turned Zagreus, the sword, into a Blackrazor. Its edge shines like a piece of night sky filled with stars and it can devour everything it can understand, even souls. Especially souls.
Thankfully said soul is not destroyed, the process is fundamentally a transient one, guided by my spiritualist knowledge acquired in my time as a grave keeper. It fundamentally works like a [soul extractor] & [soul healer], extracting all the soul karma and sin and releasing a pure yet small purified soul. This process not only imparts me with the vitality of my victim, restoring my body and soul, but also grants me a temporary boost of vitality, plus the long-term benefits all cultivators enjoy when devouring the bounty of the soul from others. A healing, temporary hit points, xp harvester combo!
And since we are one, body, mind, and soul, I can still benefit from the unique quintessence I sacrificed to it. It is more like I got three extra chakra slots! So harvesting this monster's quintessence and 'installing' it in my now empty stomach chakra was trivial, granting me its [Eldritch Encrustation] properties to my guts!
But I digress, this is a cleaning-up job. Rher's telepathy, the capacity to smother the gulf between minds allowed me to pick something interesting. Due to my cultivation, this power has grown to the point of allowing me to pick the presence of relatively powerful yet alien minds inside the ship. Compared to the mi-go cave, the place was almost desert but Dominion of Black agents are anathema to the natives, so leaving straddles leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
That is why once I take care of said aquatic nuisance, I summon [Valkyrie Vulture]. It is a giant bird with the shape of a king vulture with a negative color pallet. Standing 21 feet tall (6m) and having a wingspan four times that, this beast is a sight to behold even before a score of Einherjar warriors grows from its back to assist combat.
Mine summon takes to the sky with a swiftness that defies its size and starts to secret black mud from the fold between its feathers, littering the shore of the river bank with it. Out from the mud, two badger-moles emerged in each extremity while the cordon between them was filled with dragon bone warriors armed with spears and bows.
While the two earth-bending beasts start to raise a wall cutting the biological ship off from the river, I raise a mantle-type barrier over it since I am so close to Dominion of Black's new base.
Then it was just a matter of cutting a path for me. My new HEV upgrade to my mantle is really coming through here – Dominion's focus on biotechnology and biological warfare such as super diseases are what I am the most worried about. Its filter protects against inhaled and contact-based poisons and diseases, plus it was designed to close any tear or gouge through self-repair technology.
I can enter this place without fear, so I might as well do it with style. I already look like a supervillain from a comic book while in this high-tech gear and everyone knows the difference between them and any tug down the streets sums down to a single element – presentation.
There is nothing here that I care to preserve or spare, that is why I manifest Rher's poisonous turquoise light in one hand, then use it as a medium to manifest my mastery over motion granted by Zeno's Paradox, seamlessly combining the two while guided by Archimedes' [Golden Thread] and my lived experience. Gojo can complain about copyrights all he wants, I have been his primary victim over the last decade. I have earned this.
That is how I used limitless as inspiration to expand the mystery I inherited from the Trickster Moon god, manifesting my own version of Cursed Technique Lapse – Blue(ish). Rher's smothering power when applied to coordinates in space brings the conceptual impossibility of negative distance into reality. That is how Rher closed the distance between the both of us on the night we met face to face. I am just adapting it to create a pseudo-gravitational effect when reality rushes in to fill the emptiness.
I certainly have been hit by it enough times to know it inside and out. Gojo was more than happy to test the limits of my [Achille's Armor], basically using it (and me) as wet stone for his technique.
Now I use it to carve an opening for myself through rotting flesh. I even mimic his levitation trick by fixing my coordinates in space. It's far and away the inferior of true flight in both maneuverability and speed to the point I would never indulge in a true fight, but it is certainly useful as a quality of life and showboating perspective – the place is utterly disgusting, swimming neck deep in filth is not my idea of good time.
I made a beeline toward the most powerful mind inside the ship, and also the most tormented and fearful one. Unfortunately, I am familiar enough with both madness and death to see things for what they are – if there is a body then there is also a mind, the ship is in its death throes and as its end approaches it has fallen into some kind of religious fervor. It is worshiping entropy itself, finding comfort in the belief all life exists only to feed the grave, and it is as one decay that one can truly experience the truth of the universe.
But more interesting than that, it also curses its former masters for abandoning it. A seething shameful hatred. Something I can take advantage of.
I reach into my raging pool of mythical power to boost my captain virtue and with it enhance my force of personality, animal magnetism, and reasonability. This supernatural display of charisma makes me compelling to the point of absurdity! I have seen THE Orpheus with my own eyes and had my heart marked by his swan song. Yet now I don't feel like his lesser. While it's up in the air whether I am his equal in raw skill, I am certain I can match the Augur in comeliness.
I tear open a hole into its chamber and fly myself inside, "Death has come to finally claim you. Be ready to embrace oblivion." I proclaim through the voice of my soul to the creature. "You and the Dominion of Black for transgressing beyond their place!"
What I got in answer was a cocktail of existential dread mixed with jubilation. Then my vengeance shall be known. You, god of death, shall be the instrument of my murder! The shipmind called The-Stars-Whisper eagerly opened its mind to me, letting me pick through secrets from the Dominion of Black even the least of their agents would have gladly protected to the grave.
It even opened ruined flesh valves and several fluid-filled, blister-like chests, containing caches of equipment salvaged from other words. With my upgraded clairvoyance it was easy to peruse without moving. Most of it was 'trash' left behind by Dominion of Black agents but I still found a hidden gem – a new memory facet, a priceless technological artifact forgotten because it lacks a magical aura!
I was grateful enough to give the thing a swift and grad ending, "Domain Expansion: Monochrome Crucible!"
My new standing comes with an upgraded range to cover the entire ship and output capable of breaking it down into harmless fruit punch. This was the best way to quickly and thoroughly sterilize the place while also cleaning the dangerous foreign eldritch power and breaking down the radiation while also harnessing it for my purpose.
With the harvested vitality and power, I raise an army of one hundred dragon tooth warriors. This is the last day of the Dominion of Black in Golarion.
The 'captain' of said ship and highest rank member of Dominion of Black is an ascended brain collector called Dweller-In-Dark-Places. Its forces are not as big as they are supposed to be; probably due to the mi-gos.
For me, success is measured by culling this evil by its roots while failure means leaving survivors. That is more complicated than it seems as teleportation magic is relatively accessible for entities in their bracket of power. Fortunately, that is also something I have access to and intimate knowledge of. I simply never had to face such a problem before; preventing Gojo from teleporting around would have been nice but such a barrier would also prevent me from doing the same, creating golden gates using my hands of intention as a medium.
The people of Golarion on the other hand have tackled said problem epochs ago. Dimensional Anchor – a spell of the fourth circle, a kind of curse that covers its victim with a shimmering emerald field that completely blocks extradimensional travel. The name of its original creator has been lost to history but it seems incredibly popular for that wizard to go so out of his field of interest to collect it.
Adapting said spell into a mantle barrier took some time and I had to make use of anchoring nails to make it stable but it was worth it. With it, all preparations have been fulfilled.
Mi-go intelligence informed me the physical entrance to the hive is obscured by a permanent image. With the assistance of dog-sized badger-moles, I was able to verify there are no hidden entrances or escape routes through echolocation. I could not risk them digging too deep due to the aliens' biotechnology. Dominion hives are living things, the walls encrusted with strange green crocodile skin that allows them to survey their domain, and the doors look like tightly sealed fleshy puckers when closed.
A fulminating surprise attack is my best bet. That is why I had them map the place which was easy due to the need to accommodate giant monsters. Teleportation is an interesting thing, there is a consistency involved despite how apart some worlds should be. The natural progression from mist step, dimensional door, and teleportation circle, to teleport is something even I, a cultivator of virtue, and Gojo, a jujutsu sorcerer, share in common with these spell casters. Sure, there are a lot of small quicks and peculiarities that set us apart yet the philosopher in me can only see this as hints of a universal destination reached through different starting points.
Food for thought, but unfortunately also something I will have to explore in deep latter as I have to focus the entirety of my concentration on calculating how to teleport the two annihilators inside two different rooms I have never been to or seen at the same time. I made judicious use of golden thread and mythical power to throw odds in my favor but this is still a big gambit.
I didn't scry the place for fear of alerting the aberrations inside. Dweller-In-Dark-Places is a sorcerer and if there is something my tenure as a player in jujutsu society cloak and dagger politic is that you underestimate your opponent at your own peril. Maybe it is because Rher is a peeping tom but he hates to be scrutinized himself, hiding in plain sight and keeping his secrets to himself. This is how I learned the moon god's power can occlude one's presence from remote viewing kind of spells. There are good odds Dweller-In-Dark-Places has taken similar contingencies to ward its home base.
Fortunately, my preparations were not in vain and I successfully managed to place the two annihilators inside the biggest rooms, dubbed M8 and M13. Each is accompanied by a platoon of eight gearmen armed with all spare weapons I found and repurposed; that reclamator robot was worth his weight in gold!
I then activated my upgraded mantle, blocking all teleport, and lifted the veil concealing my approaching army into an illusion. Dragon tooth warriors march in lockstep inside the infernal hive with the fearlessness of the dead. Its strange green slime and putrid air are no obstacle to their unliving vessels. Their collective entropic aura created by the resonance of the death essence causes the abominable biotechnology to wither and decay as they march.
The first point of resistance was met right at point M1, the answer to my army invasion was a searing plasma bean vaporizing everything it touched. It seems the mi-go were not the only ones helping themselves with Binox stray creations. Since robots, aside from Hellion and maybe Unity, have no true minds, souls, or hearts, so I have no means to detect them as I would a living thing. The plasma spear killed over a dozen of my soldiers before the rest pressed themselves against the walls with impeccable drills.
The assault ceased yet the tenebrous soldiers held their position, giving the men at the rear a clean line of fire for a volley of countermarch using futuristic rochet launchers instead of muskets. Cheap, powerful, and efficient while being as good as a fireball. The kinetic energy from the five shots easily overwhelmed the force field of the annihilator, rocking it against the far wall of the entrance chamber.
The bone dragon tooth warriors marched with precision and calculated certainty that matched its robot adversary, circling it to deny it a second clean shot. The chthonic hoplites advanced with implacable surefooted aggression, throwing their lives away to secure the footing of their comrade. Literally in some cases. Armed with zero-edge glaives with collapsible handles capable of stretching into spears, they cut through the glaucite carapace of the annihilator, stabbing and slashing. Their arm guard unfurled like a flower into large shields allowing them to enter phalanx formation at the drop of a hat to block the cascade of machine gun from the iron scorpion as it struggles to pierce through the same glaucite armor. Even being torn apart did not prevent them from attacking, unbothered by pain or dismemberment.
Is it any wonder their brother-in-arms did not even deign to slow down their advance inside the hive while the fight still raged on? The dragon tooth warriors are my ultimate chimera, the fruit of my intelligent design as I tinkered with soul and body information distilled into the ultimate foot soldier. After that, it is just a matter of copy and paste. Once the initial cost of manifestation is paid for, they generate their own cursed energy like Panda. More than a match to even the most gifted among citizens, even young philosophers would struggle against a single one and their power grows exponentially with their number. They are the reason Gojo acknowledges me as the greatest cursed corpse user in jujutsu history.
My greatest limitation is that I don't dare to summon more than I can subjugate into servitude. If their number grows too big, they could break free from my reigns. At least I will have my work cut out if I ever reach the tyrant realm. This serves as a master class practical lesson on subjugation with my life on the line. I could deploy up to one hundred of them comfortably, and while I could go further, it required more of my undivided focus. Currently, I am deploying up to six hundred with similar strains.
The sound of marching feet echoed unerring through the alien world of the Dominion of Black. From chambers bearing strange tentacle machines serving as incubators to living alien weapons carrying dangerous diseases, disposal chambers comprised of immense detached stomach-feeding power stations made of living nerves harvesting the nightmares of living brains from natives.
Wherever they went they made a point to kill, destroy, and vandalize everything they could. The army of the dead every action made their point clear – there was no place for these creatures in the natural order. They hunted down the intellect devourers, quadruped brains capable of hijacking and puppeteering bodies of living creatures once they had eaten their brain, with tireless zeal. Putting their unfortunate vessels down and crushing the parasite inside like the bugs they were. They killed crab-like monsters the size of a war horse bearing blisters holding brains; the devolved form of Dweller-In-Dark-Places.
They even fought post-mortal lifeforms from beyond the mortal plane that aligned with the Dominion of Black macabre goals. Humanoids clad in chains from head to toe wielding fear and pain as their only virtue.
Regardless of the opposition they face or how many fell, they keep their funeral procession through the living cave, bringing silence wherever they pass.
Until they connect with their mechanical comrade, driving their spears to the back of their assailant just as they were focused on crushing the entrenched robots.
Eventually, the big bad boss shows himself, Dweller-In-Dark-Places. He was just as ugly as I had seen from the shipmind's memory. An enormous crustacea-like being, the hive was clearly designed with his bulking frame in mind, being the size of a chunky van, a spiked turtle-like shell supported by four sets of armored stout limbs. It has no head but countless tentacles, two long and dexterous tentacles bearing toxic slime, and a long tail bearing a forked claw. Yet the most significant feature was the six semitransparent slots containing brains.
The deep lines of scorch tracks on its body and countless bleeding holes from bullets led me to think it fought the other platoon and won. A pyrrhic victory, they delivered just as much punishment as they got. How much came to be was made clear when the thing tried to blast my army with a powerful psychic vortex using its captive brains as RAM chips. Unfortunately for the brain collector, the dragon bone warriors have no minds of their own for as long as I hold them as thralls. Existing as remote extra limbs at my command.
According to The-Stars-Whisper, their species can command and accelerate the life circle over all diseases. The reason their kind often supervises the Dominion of the Black's surgical and genetic engineers on major projects.
Neither of which is any good against undead or robots. I give it to it; they would be a nightmare against most life forms on this planet but this was a bad match-up. Deprived of its two main weapons it has to fall back to sorcery and physical might. But even that is something I can take away from it. The-Stars-Whisper tattled to me that this alien loses all spell-casting ability once all stolen brains are destroyed.
My warriors charge in, cutting at its limbs, tentacles, and sting tail and firing at the gelatinous casing the brains are kept. It was not the most efficient method but I had more than enough force left to bury it in bodies. It fired disintegration rays but it was clear to see most of its repertory was useless against non-biological opponents. Eventually, it was cut down to size as a helpless crab in the cooking pot.
Its base was not doing better. The last opposition was Its right hand… officer? An intellect devourer sorcerer manning an exquisite and exotic young adult dragon has been put down as it tries to flee. It took a lot of effort since I wanted to avoid damaging the body as much as possible. The body itself has likely been preserved for years through magic. Nothing that a good lobotomization couldn't solve, its original brain had been eaten anyway.
Now it was my turn to harvest. The brain collectors evolve after have absorbed a critical mass of thoughts and memories from an unknown number of sapient brains. A byproduct of this is strange all-encompassing knowledge as they don't die from old age. Knowledge about the galaxy, the planes beyond, scientific and arcane secrets!
And after I am done with it, I can harvest its quintessence. I am sure it will be a perfect match for my crown chakra. At least until I find a mind flayer's elder brain or something similar.
The walls of this room are made of cut stone polished to a mirror-like sheen. On one side of the room sits a low platform of dark brown metal supporting a one-inch-thick pad of yellow glass. The floor is etched with a tentacle-like symbol. A bulky, organic machine sits on this symbol, its numerous branch-like arms extending forth to attach to a framework of chitin and bone. This frame itself contains a small object: a sheet of semi-translucent blue material, ten inches wide and twenty inches long in a frame of black and coppery metal. The image of a beautiful woman, her face contorted into an expression of agony, is visible within the blue sheet, her mouth gaping in a silent scream.
This is a compact AI core, a one-of-a-kind artifact made in Divinity's home civilization, capable of housing the staggering amount of data needed to store artificial intelligence without compromising or degrading its core programming. The Dominion fossil golem is made of petrified remains of brain collectors who serve as its warden and torturer. The brain collectors want it to reveal its secrets so they can adapt it to fill blank vet-grown brains with information and personality.
I don't know what makes it special compared to a neurocam, but I don't care either and crush the attacking golem with my Susanoo skeleton made of my manifested carrion intent, grinding it into powder with a single punch that rocks the room.
"Are you ok?"
"I know you not, but I recognize you as akin to what I once was: a person. I am Casandra, a prisoner here, most dreadfully inconvenienced until now by these worshipers of Emptiness. You have done more than rescue a prisoner though, friends, you have enabled your own survival. Silver Mount harbors a monstrous force. It must be stopped before it can escape, and with your aid and my advice, we can achieve this goal. We must achieve it. I worshiped Unity once, but now it must be destroyed."
"I know. That is why I came here. It is time to face Unity and you are the person who knows it and the inside of Silver Mount the most. It is time to end this, once and for all."
So yeah. When you put all your specs into anti-sapiens and pigeonhole yourself out of a fight. I had mentioned them before but this was my first chance to use the dragon tooth warriors, Zagreus counter against Roman cultivators. Zagreus also got the chance to flex more of his powers from Rher side of the equation.
We are done with Spider Valley. But Unity has a really solid power base as the veiled master behind the technique league. Zagreus's motto is: hope for the best, but prepare. He won't simply march inside Divinity. Unity turned the place into a mega-dungeon!
I used my now kamikaze observer robots to scout the dropship. It seems most of the species in Dominion of Black use telepathy which doubles as a sonar against nearby minds. One could say Rher opened my mind way too much for me to risk it but I digress. My main priority is the acquisition of intel.
The mi-go memory showed it to be a monstrous space whale but now only a giant pile of rotten flesh remains from it, tainting the riverbank with foul blood and ammonia. Most creatures avoid it save a huge sea serpent that devours magic, including my observers. A rare chance for me to break out my aquatic assets.
Ironically, its territoriality and hunger made it easy to lure it away so the bulk of my swarm could infiltrate without a problem. Once it was close enough, by which I mean in range, my two aquatic shikigami pounced.
Poisonous Anura is the unholy cross between a frog and an aquatic salamander like an axolotl. Bearing a long serpentine body with a pad-like tail and ten arms-like limbs capable of assisting both jumping, climbing and swimming, serving as an amphibian fighting force. It bears a fearsome yet bright-colored skin of a poisonous frog endowed with great flexibility and its mucus gives it extraordinary slipperiness protecting the Anura from physical trauma and containment. Despite looking otherwise, it is not actually toothless, bearing retractable mandibles with a venomous bite like a Komodo dragon.
While its breath weapon is fearsome crowd control, inducing a physical and spiritual autoimmune reaction as a person is trapped in a hallucination where they confront its shadow-self, what I used to catch said magical beast was its projectile tongue, much like a chameleon or frog.
While its rubber-like body allows Poisonous Anura allow it to swallow and capture prey many times its size while holding them in torpor for easy extraction, this eel's gluttony for magic is not to be underestimated.
That is why I had Kaleidoscope Logic Urchin snipe it with 'piercing wine' once it was extracted from the water and violently thrown in the stone reef. From there it converted the wine remaining inside its body like skewers, impaling it from the inside out… yet it failed somehow. Interesting.
Not that a bullet through its first spine bone couldn't solve. It was an unusual enough creature to merit vivisection yet my hands of pneuma quickly dispersed through contact with said beast. This forced me to get my hands dirty for once after a decade! This better be worth it.
The source of its power seems to be a crystalline growth along its digestive tract containing large deposits of magical energy. These nodes are responsible for the magical feedback that surrounds the beast, granting it its spell resistance, damage reduction against magic, dispelling bite capable of disrupting magic, and even the capability to digest magic considering the state of its meals. The foul aberrant flesh turned inert and mostly harmless.
Most extraordinary of all, despite its eel-like body and dragon head, its body information harvested by Valkyrie Vulture informs me this thing was once a crocodile native from this river! Did it mutate by eating the living ship? This is my first time seeing a virtuous beast evolving beyond its designed place in the natural order. I had been so focused on the visitors from the stars that I almost missed the natural wonders Golarian has to offer!
Here is where I receive the dividends from the recent upgrades to my sword. The winning combo based on cultivator Alexander's chosen weapon has turned Zagreus, the sword, into a Blackrazor. Its edge shines like a piece of night sky filled with stars and it can devour everything it can understand, even souls. Especially souls.
Thankfully said soul is not destroyed, the process is fundamentally a transient one, guided by my spiritualist knowledge acquired in my time as a grave keeper. It fundamentally works like a [soul extractor] & [soul healer], extracting all the soul karma and sin and releasing a pure yet small purified soul. This process not only imparts me with the vitality of my victim, restoring my body and soul, but also grants me a temporary boost of vitality, plus the long-term benefits all cultivators enjoy when devouring the bounty of the soul from others. A healing, temporary hit points, xp harvester combo!
And since we are one, body, mind, and soul, I can still benefit from the unique quintessence I sacrificed to it. It is more like I got three extra chakra slots! So harvesting this monster's quintessence and 'installing' it in my now empty stomach chakra was trivial, granting me its [Eldritch Encrustation] properties to my guts!
But I digress, this is a cleaning-up job. Rher's telepathy, the capacity to smother the gulf between minds allowed me to pick something interesting. Due to my cultivation, this power has grown to the point of allowing me to pick the presence of relatively powerful yet alien minds inside the ship. Compared to the mi-go cave, the place was almost desert but Dominion of Black agents are anathema to the natives, so leaving straddles leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
That is why once I take care of said aquatic nuisance, I summon [Valkyrie Vulture]. It is a giant bird with the shape of a king vulture with a negative color pallet. Standing 21 feet tall (6m) and having a wingspan four times that, this beast is a sight to behold even before a score of Einherjar warriors grows from its back to assist combat.
Mine summon takes to the sky with a swiftness that defies its size and starts to secret black mud from the fold between its feathers, littering the shore of the river bank with it. Out from the mud, two badger-moles emerged in each extremity while the cordon between them was filled with dragon bone warriors armed with spears and bows.
While the two earth-bending beasts start to raise a wall cutting the biological ship off from the river, I raise a mantle-type barrier over it since I am so close to Dominion of Black's new base.
Then it was just a matter of cutting a path for me. My new HEV upgrade to my mantle is really coming through here – Dominion's focus on biotechnology and biological warfare such as super diseases are what I am the most worried about. Its filter protects against inhaled and contact-based poisons and diseases, plus it was designed to close any tear or gouge through self-repair technology.
I can enter this place without fear, so I might as well do it with style. I already look like a supervillain from a comic book while in this high-tech gear and everyone knows the difference between them and any tug down the streets sums down to a single element – presentation.
There is nothing here that I care to preserve or spare, that is why I manifest Rher's poisonous turquoise light in one hand, then use it as a medium to manifest my mastery over motion granted by Zeno's Paradox, seamlessly combining the two while guided by Archimedes' [Golden Thread] and my lived experience. Gojo can complain about copyrights all he wants, I have been his primary victim over the last decade. I have earned this.
That is how I used limitless as inspiration to expand the mystery I inherited from the Trickster Moon god, manifesting my own version of Cursed Technique Lapse – Blue(ish). Rher's smothering power when applied to coordinates in space brings the conceptual impossibility of negative distance into reality. That is how Rher closed the distance between the both of us on the night we met face to face. I am just adapting it to create a pseudo-gravitational effect when reality rushes in to fill the emptiness.
I certainly have been hit by it enough times to know it inside and out. Gojo was more than happy to test the limits of my [Achille's Armor], basically using it (and me) as wet stone for his technique.
Now I use it to carve an opening for myself through rotting flesh. I even mimic his levitation trick by fixing my coordinates in space. It's far and away the inferior of true flight in both maneuverability and speed to the point I would never indulge in a true fight, but it is certainly useful as a quality of life and showboating perspective – the place is utterly disgusting, swimming neck deep in filth is not my idea of good time.
I made a beeline toward the most powerful mind inside the ship, and also the most tormented and fearful one. Unfortunately, I am familiar enough with both madness and death to see things for what they are – if there is a body then there is also a mind, the ship is in its death throes and as its end approaches it has fallen into some kind of religious fervor. It is worshiping entropy itself, finding comfort in the belief all life exists only to feed the grave, and it is as one decay that one can truly experience the truth of the universe.
But more interesting than that, it also curses its former masters for abandoning it. A seething shameful hatred. Something I can take advantage of.
I reach into my raging pool of mythical power to boost my captain virtue and with it enhance my force of personality, animal magnetism, and reasonability. This supernatural display of charisma makes me compelling to the point of absurdity! I have seen THE Orpheus with my own eyes and had my heart marked by his swan song. Yet now I don't feel like his lesser. While it's up in the air whether I am his equal in raw skill, I am certain I can match the Augur in comeliness.
I tear open a hole into its chamber and fly myself inside, "Death has come to finally claim you. Be ready to embrace oblivion." I proclaim through the voice of my soul to the creature. "You and the Dominion of Black for transgressing beyond their place!"
What I got in answer was a cocktail of existential dread mixed with jubilation. Then my vengeance shall be known. You, god of death, shall be the instrument of my murder! The shipmind called The-Stars-Whisper eagerly opened its mind to me, letting me pick through secrets from the Dominion of Black even the least of their agents would have gladly protected to the grave.
It even opened ruined flesh valves and several fluid-filled, blister-like chests, containing caches of equipment salvaged from other words. With my upgraded clairvoyance it was easy to peruse without moving. Most of it was 'trash' left behind by Dominion of Black agents but I still found a hidden gem – a new memory facet, a priceless technological artifact forgotten because it lacks a magical aura!
I was grateful enough to give the thing a swift and grad ending, "Domain Expansion: Monochrome Crucible!"
My new standing comes with an upgraded range to cover the entire ship and output capable of breaking it down into harmless fruit punch. This was the best way to quickly and thoroughly sterilize the place while also cleaning the dangerous foreign eldritch power and breaking down the radiation while also harnessing it for my purpose.
With the harvested vitality and power, I raise an army of one hundred dragon tooth warriors. This is the last day of the Dominion of Black in Golarion.
-//-
A lot of things were brought to focus after my encounter with the dying dropship. Despite said vessel being indeed among the fleet that attacked divinity nine millennia ago, it actually only arrived in Golarion recently. As in, a few decades. Which is a short time on the cosmic scale.
The 'captain' of said ship and highest rank member of Dominion of Black is an ascended brain collector called Dweller-In-Dark-Places. Its forces are not as big as they are supposed to be; probably due to the mi-gos.
For me, success is measured by culling this evil by its roots while failure means leaving survivors. That is more complicated than it seems as teleportation magic is relatively accessible for entities in their bracket of power. Fortunately, that is also something I have access to and intimate knowledge of. I simply never had to face such a problem before; preventing Gojo from teleporting around would have been nice but such a barrier would also prevent me from doing the same, creating golden gates using my hands of intention as a medium.
The people of Golarion on the other hand have tackled said problem epochs ago. Dimensional Anchor – a spell of the fourth circle, a kind of curse that covers its victim with a shimmering emerald field that completely blocks extradimensional travel. The name of its original creator has been lost to history but it seems incredibly popular for that wizard to go so out of his field of interest to collect it.
Adapting said spell into a mantle barrier took some time and I had to make use of anchoring nails to make it stable but it was worth it. With it, all preparations have been fulfilled.
Mi-go intelligence informed me the physical entrance to the hive is obscured by a permanent image. With the assistance of dog-sized badger-moles, I was able to verify there are no hidden entrances or escape routes through echolocation. I could not risk them digging too deep due to the aliens' biotechnology. Dominion hives are living things, the walls encrusted with strange green crocodile skin that allows them to survey their domain, and the doors look like tightly sealed fleshy puckers when closed.
A fulminating surprise attack is my best bet. That is why I had them map the place which was easy due to the need to accommodate giant monsters. Teleportation is an interesting thing, there is a consistency involved despite how apart some worlds should be. The natural progression from mist step, dimensional door, and teleportation circle, to teleport is something even I, a cultivator of virtue, and Gojo, a jujutsu sorcerer, share in common with these spell casters. Sure, there are a lot of small quicks and peculiarities that set us apart yet the philosopher in me can only see this as hints of a universal destination reached through different starting points.
Food for thought, but unfortunately also something I will have to explore in deep latter as I have to focus the entirety of my concentration on calculating how to teleport the two annihilators inside two different rooms I have never been to or seen at the same time. I made judicious use of golden thread and mythical power to throw odds in my favor but this is still a big gambit.
I didn't scry the place for fear of alerting the aberrations inside. Dweller-In-Dark-Places is a sorcerer and if there is something my tenure as a player in jujutsu society cloak and dagger politic is that you underestimate your opponent at your own peril. Maybe it is because Rher is a peeping tom but he hates to be scrutinized himself, hiding in plain sight and keeping his secrets to himself. This is how I learned the moon god's power can occlude one's presence from remote viewing kind of spells. There are good odds Dweller-In-Dark-Places has taken similar contingencies to ward its home base.
Fortunately, my preparations were not in vain and I successfully managed to place the two annihilators inside the biggest rooms, dubbed M8 and M13. Each is accompanied by a platoon of eight gearmen armed with all spare weapons I found and repurposed; that reclamator robot was worth his weight in gold!
I then activated my upgraded mantle, blocking all teleport, and lifted the veil concealing my approaching army into an illusion. Dragon tooth warriors march in lockstep inside the infernal hive with the fearlessness of the dead. Its strange green slime and putrid air are no obstacle to their unliving vessels. Their collective entropic aura created by the resonance of the death essence causes the abominable biotechnology to wither and decay as they march.
The first point of resistance was met right at point M1, the answer to my army invasion was a searing plasma bean vaporizing everything it touched. It seems the mi-go were not the only ones helping themselves with Binox stray creations. Since robots, aside from Hellion and maybe Unity, have no true minds, souls, or hearts, so I have no means to detect them as I would a living thing. The plasma spear killed over a dozen of my soldiers before the rest pressed themselves against the walls with impeccable drills.
The assault ceased yet the tenebrous soldiers held their position, giving the men at the rear a clean line of fire for a volley of countermarch using futuristic rochet launchers instead of muskets. Cheap, powerful, and efficient while being as good as a fireball. The kinetic energy from the five shots easily overwhelmed the force field of the annihilator, rocking it against the far wall of the entrance chamber.
The bone dragon tooth warriors marched with precision and calculated certainty that matched its robot adversary, circling it to deny it a second clean shot. The chthonic hoplites advanced with implacable surefooted aggression, throwing their lives away to secure the footing of their comrade. Literally in some cases. Armed with zero-edge glaives with collapsible handles capable of stretching into spears, they cut through the glaucite carapace of the annihilator, stabbing and slashing. Their arm guard unfurled like a flower into large shields allowing them to enter phalanx formation at the drop of a hat to block the cascade of machine gun from the iron scorpion as it struggles to pierce through the same glaucite armor. Even being torn apart did not prevent them from attacking, unbothered by pain or dismemberment.
Is it any wonder their brother-in-arms did not even deign to slow down their advance inside the hive while the fight still raged on? The dragon tooth warriors are my ultimate chimera, the fruit of my intelligent design as I tinkered with soul and body information distilled into the ultimate foot soldier. After that, it is just a matter of copy and paste. Once the initial cost of manifestation is paid for, they generate their own cursed energy like Panda. More than a match to even the most gifted among citizens, even young philosophers would struggle against a single one and their power grows exponentially with their number. They are the reason Gojo acknowledges me as the greatest cursed corpse user in jujutsu history.
My greatest limitation is that I don't dare to summon more than I can subjugate into servitude. If their number grows too big, they could break free from my reigns. At least I will have my work cut out if I ever reach the tyrant realm. This serves as a master class practical lesson on subjugation with my life on the line. I could deploy up to one hundred of them comfortably, and while I could go further, it required more of my undivided focus. Currently, I am deploying up to six hundred with similar strains.
The sound of marching feet echoed unerring through the alien world of the Dominion of Black. From chambers bearing strange tentacle machines serving as incubators to living alien weapons carrying dangerous diseases, disposal chambers comprised of immense detached stomach-feeding power stations made of living nerves harvesting the nightmares of living brains from natives.
Wherever they went they made a point to kill, destroy, and vandalize everything they could. The army of the dead every action made their point clear – there was no place for these creatures in the natural order. They hunted down the intellect devourers, quadruped brains capable of hijacking and puppeteering bodies of living creatures once they had eaten their brain, with tireless zeal. Putting their unfortunate vessels down and crushing the parasite inside like the bugs they were. They killed crab-like monsters the size of a war horse bearing blisters holding brains; the devolved form of Dweller-In-Dark-Places.
They even fought post-mortal lifeforms from beyond the mortal plane that aligned with the Dominion of Black macabre goals. Humanoids clad in chains from head to toe wielding fear and pain as their only virtue.
Regardless of the opposition they face or how many fell, they keep their funeral procession through the living cave, bringing silence wherever they pass.
Until they connect with their mechanical comrade, driving their spears to the back of their assailant just as they were focused on crushing the entrenched robots.
Eventually, the big bad boss shows himself, Dweller-In-Dark-Places. He was just as ugly as I had seen from the shipmind's memory. An enormous crustacea-like being, the hive was clearly designed with his bulking frame in mind, being the size of a chunky van, a spiked turtle-like shell supported by four sets of armored stout limbs. It has no head but countless tentacles, two long and dexterous tentacles bearing toxic slime, and a long tail bearing a forked claw. Yet the most significant feature was the six semitransparent slots containing brains.
The deep lines of scorch tracks on its body and countless bleeding holes from bullets led me to think it fought the other platoon and won. A pyrrhic victory, they delivered just as much punishment as they got. How much came to be was made clear when the thing tried to blast my army with a powerful psychic vortex using its captive brains as RAM chips. Unfortunately for the brain collector, the dragon bone warriors have no minds of their own for as long as I hold them as thralls. Existing as remote extra limbs at my command.
According to The-Stars-Whisper, their species can command and accelerate the life circle over all diseases. The reason their kind often supervises the Dominion of the Black's surgical and genetic engineers on major projects.
Neither of which is any good against undead or robots. I give it to it; they would be a nightmare against most life forms on this planet but this was a bad match-up. Deprived of its two main weapons it has to fall back to sorcery and physical might. But even that is something I can take away from it. The-Stars-Whisper tattled to me that this alien loses all spell-casting ability once all stolen brains are destroyed.
My warriors charge in, cutting at its limbs, tentacles, and sting tail and firing at the gelatinous casing the brains are kept. It was not the most efficient method but I had more than enough force left to bury it in bodies. It fired disintegration rays but it was clear to see most of its repertory was useless against non-biological opponents. Eventually, it was cut down to size as a helpless crab in the cooking pot.
Its base was not doing better. The last opposition was Its right hand… officer? An intellect devourer sorcerer manning an exquisite and exotic young adult dragon has been put down as it tries to flee. It took a lot of effort since I wanted to avoid damaging the body as much as possible. The body itself has likely been preserved for years through magic. Nothing that a good lobotomization couldn't solve, its original brain had been eaten anyway.
Now it was my turn to harvest. The brain collectors evolve after have absorbed a critical mass of thoughts and memories from an unknown number of sapient brains. A byproduct of this is strange all-encompassing knowledge as they don't die from old age. Knowledge about the galaxy, the planes beyond, scientific and arcane secrets!
And after I am done with it, I can harvest its quintessence. I am sure it will be a perfect match for my crown chakra. At least until I find a mind flayer's elder brain or something similar.
-//-
Finally, it was time for me to move on. But not before I claim my prize, hidden away in a secret chamber only accessible through teleportation. Nothing a badger-mole couldn't solve.
The walls of this room are made of cut stone polished to a mirror-like sheen. On one side of the room sits a low platform of dark brown metal supporting a one-inch-thick pad of yellow glass. The floor is etched with a tentacle-like symbol. A bulky, organic machine sits on this symbol, its numerous branch-like arms extending forth to attach to a framework of chitin and bone. This frame itself contains a small object: a sheet of semi-translucent blue material, ten inches wide and twenty inches long in a frame of black and coppery metal. The image of a beautiful woman, her face contorted into an expression of agony, is visible within the blue sheet, her mouth gaping in a silent scream.
This is a compact AI core, a one-of-a-kind artifact made in Divinity's home civilization, capable of housing the staggering amount of data needed to store artificial intelligence without compromising or degrading its core programming. The Dominion fossil golem is made of petrified remains of brain collectors who serve as its warden and torturer. The brain collectors want it to reveal its secrets so they can adapt it to fill blank vet-grown brains with information and personality.
I don't know what makes it special compared to a neurocam, but I don't care either and crush the attacking golem with my Susanoo skeleton made of my manifested carrion intent, grinding it into powder with a single punch that rocks the room.
"Are you ok?"
"I know you not, but I recognize you as akin to what I once was: a person. I am Casandra, a prisoner here, most dreadfully inconvenienced until now by these worshipers of Emptiness. You have done more than rescue a prisoner though, friends, you have enabled your own survival. Silver Mount harbors a monstrous force. It must be stopped before it can escape, and with your aid and my advice, we can achieve this goal. We must achieve it. I worshiped Unity once, but now it must be destroyed."
"I know. That is why I came here. It is time to face Unity and you are the person who knows it and the inside of Silver Mount the most. It is time to end this, once and for all."
-//-
[AUTHOR'S ROOM]
So yeah. When you put all your specs into anti-sapiens and pigeonhole yourself out of a fight. I had mentioned them before but this was my first chance to use the dragon tooth warriors, Zagreus counter against Roman cultivators. Zagreus also got the chance to flex more of his powers from Rher side of the equation.
We are done with Spider Valley. But Unity has a really solid power base as the veiled master behind the technique league. Zagreus's motto is: hope for the best, but prepare. He won't simply march inside Divinity. Unity turned the place into a mega-dungeon!
Neat chapter! A little something to see us into the next year!
Speaking of next year, what your plans for your stories Bruno?
Speaking of next year, what your plans for your stories Bruno?
- Location
- Brazil
That I have to write the next chapter of both.
Oooooh, we getting a new chapter of Age Of Will next year? Huzzah! Happiness!
Very nice and Zagreus is collecting a lot of interesting thing/information which will give him lots of things to think about and investigate like the teleportation bit. Though that said I'm guessing that after things are done with Unity things will finally hit home about the events in jjk right?
- Location
- Brazil
yeah. He is distracting himself for now but he knows enough about Logic by now to assert she can help him make a long-distance call.
- Location
- washington
He at all curious about the astral plane? Cause looking at the river of souls would probably do him a lot of good.
Hmm question @BrunofanofK have you seen the quest on this site called NorseQuest? I haven't read it myself just took a quick glance at it but it's a Norse themed cultivation quest which I thought was an interesting idea much like the Greek themed cultivation this is based on. I'm just asking if you've seen it and if so what are your thoughts on it? given your own works and inspirations.
- Location
- Brazil
Can you send me the link? Sounds interesting to me!
NorseQuest (A Norse Xianxia) Original - Fantasy - Action
When a child is born, the Nornir decide the exact moment of their death. There is nothing that can bring a man down if it is not his time to die and there is nothing that will save a man if it is his fated day. Everything between now and then, however, is up to you and you alone. So tell me...
forums.sufficientvelocity.com
This should be it.