Chapter Sixty-Four (Holy Terra)
Fuuka's head snapped unnaturally to the side, a maniacal grin splitting her face as rows of teeth emerged past her sunken cheeks. "Phyrexia hungers for what was once hers. What Volrath crafted and which you stole."
I grabbed hold of the spine-spear, and bent the metal as it dripped with dark oil and filth. My teeth bared, fangs grew as my hide thickened in retaliation. "The Hive adapts. The Hive evolves." I growled. "We are free."
Fuuka's laugh came out twisted and metallic, buzzing like a saw and filled with static. "You are slaves of the flesh," Fuuka's eyes glowed a dark, unsettling golden color as her irises turned a vibrant shade of green. "Slaves to the weakness of a mortal coil."
I smiled as I snapped the spine in half, before slamming my right bone-encrusted fist through the side of Fuuka's deformed face, sending her to crash against the Golden Throne's stairs as I took deep breaths, pushing out the spear from my stomach as I groaned from the ravaging pain that rippled throughout my entire body.
I screamed, and the droplets of dark liquid sprayed out from within my frame as the rest of my scales tightened and reinforced themselves. "You are only as strong as the metals you find," I snarled, "We are ever-growing, you rotting tin cans!"
"We evolve better than you will ever grow," Fuuka spoke as she rose from the crater formed from her impact with the Golden Throne. Most of her flesh now ripped off to reveal metal, swarming and throbbing around like a living heartbeat. Wicked claws and spines grew from her skeletal-like limbs of ashen metallic bones, and her first step down the stairs was done not with a human leg, but with a three pronged stalk-like limb. "We have had countless centuries to perform feats the likes of which you will never rival."
I stared at the way the lower limbs of the compleated Fuuka moved, and within seconds my own lower body became a flawless copy of it. I smiled and then extended a hand in a mocking gesture. "And I have done things the likes of which you who chose metal over flesh will never be able to do," I whispered back as a tendril of flesh sang joyously a hymn of destruction, the vibrations making the entirety of Fuuka's skeleton rattle as she lunged forth, a newly minted spear made of bones in her hands.
I dodged the blow by stepping to the side, the spindly legs replaced with a Sliver's strong muscled tail as I moved by her side, flanking her as I dug into her metallic ribs with my tendrils, thrusting her on the ground and pushing my entire weight on her. The satisfying sound of ribs snapping neatly in half was accompanied by the innards exploding outwardly in an explosion of putrid gases and viscous gelatin-like substances which melted my claws all the way to their bones.
The gelatin hanged on, hastily devouring my flesh like a flesh-eating bacteria starved for bloody meat. I bared my teeth and screamed as fire burst from my veins, the cells multiplying under the strain as a vaccine pulsed into existence and halted the bacteria dead on its tracks, new claws forming within seconds.
"You coward..." Fuuka choked out from the ground where she lay bleeding poisons and diseases, "Come to us. Return to us. Or we will take everything away from you."
"Then come to me," I answered in turn. "Come to me, and I will wait for you. Or are you scared, Yawgmoth? Well? I summon you! Come and be destroyed! But you are scared," I laughed. "You are so scared, you would rather send pitiful insects to battle me, the Tyrant! Well!? Answer me Yawgmoth! Answer me! How much do you shake at night, thinking about my incoming arrival?"
Fuuka's eyes burned, a cruel smile settling on her countless teeth. "I await you, Tyr-"
Psionic impulses slammed into Fuuka's head as the connection the great God of Phyrexia had crafted to speak through her created a link between the two. Fuuka's screams became his, his pain became hers, and in the middle of the bridge and the connection I roared as my eyes glowed, countless brains and weaves locking together with my own mind as I pushed through what had at first been a tenuous connection, and now became a highway into Yawgmoth's most inner desires.
He fought back.
Fuuka's body began to lurch and spasm, her tattered mind merely a battleground for the likes of Yawgmoth and I. This was cruelty beyond the imaginable, this was something that no well-meaning man would ever do. It was fortuitous that I was not a good man.
Lashes of Blue Mana ripped at the dark cloud-like entity within Fuuka's mindscape, burning geysers of crimson fire slammed against the tendrils as White searing lights burst and burned the deadly looking gas cloud. Dark pitch-black rays left the form of the God of Phyrexia, countered by a shield made of Fuuka's closest memories. She lost her memories of singing, of dancing and of breathing.
She lost the ability to see, and the knowledge of what a haiku was. She no longer could rhyme. She lost the knowledge of her tongue, and what little English she knew. She lost precious memories and bad memories in equal amount as the landscape grew scarred and charred as two powerful entities battled within her mind. A common mistake was to think the Slivers good only as creatures of war. They were that, of course, but they were also much more.
They were natural talents in the realm of Psionics, and telepathy was to them no different than breathing.
The Soul link that Yawgmoth had crafted through Fuuka's soul to witness my actions and taunt me into being was now being used to pull him in. We lashed at one another, and yet neither dared to traverse the invisible line that separated us across the Planes.
"You have toyed with the strength of our creation long enough," Yawgmoth hissed through pulses of dark Mana, constricting chains rushing forth as they tried to dig deep into the manifestation of my own thoughts. "Now return what you stole."
"It's called emancipation," I snarled back as spears of White Mana and shields of the same color formed to craft a defensive phalanx, burning away the rattling chains and pinning them down within Fuuka's mind, "something every living being desires the moment it tires of being a slave!"
His chains of ash and smoke broke free from the defensive phalanx born of White Mana, "Don't speak of freedom to the likes of me, Tyrant. You are nothing but a beast of burden for the dragon."
I chuckled as I watched the chains made of smoke and Black Mana reach for my limbs, and the moment they latched on and dragged me towards him, my smile grew tenfold.
He stopped. He stopped pulling, but it was too late.
"A simulacrum," Yawgmoth whispered.
"Deus. Vult!" The Simulacrum roared, shining brightly as it exploded, lashing out through the soul link and slamming the energies of a suicidal Spark past it as outside the compleated body of Fuuka twitched and shuddered one last time, the mouth open in gasps of pure agony as tears of dark oil leaked out from her eyes. Her body shone as I set a barrier around her, controlling the energies and guiding them through the only available passage, the one that the battling between myself and Yawgmoth had left open.
I took a deep breath as the energies whimpered to a halt.
Around me, the dark oil had meanwhile shifted targets, and was already in the process of devouring the Golden Throne, the ground and the unfortunate women who hadn't managed to make their escape in time.
I would have loved for this to be the end of Yawgmoth, but unfortunately it had merely been his mind's projection. I clenched my hands as my form mutated once more, standing up just in time to give a last glance at the disintegrating body of Fuuka, before turning sharply away to stare at the rest of the women currently trying their hardest to avoid the black oil, which moved like an ooze with a will of its own.
"Where's the exit of this place!?" Sylvanas Windrunner yelled as she deftly jumped past a puddle, avoiding being touched in the slightest. It could all just be for show though. Fuuka had ample time to infect them, and so...so they could not be saved.
I disappeared silently, letting myself rise above the planet's atmosphere as I extended a hand over my head and gripped with my fingers at the edges of this Plane with that of the Blind Eternities.
I clenched my hand, and pulled.
It was honestly easy, like pulling out a single thread of wool from a muffler made by your beloved grandmother and then throwing the thread into the fire and laughing as it burned. Yes, it was that easy. It was that normal to condemn countless trillions to death because there just wasn't another option. Given enough time, a single drop could become a tidal wave. Magical near-indestructible nanites would perhaps be a better description than calling that sort of thing black oil, but it would be a mouthful to pronounce, and sometimes you just don't have the time to do that.
The Plane collapsed within mere minutes, and as the Blind Eternities condemned it to oblivion and nothingness, I took a deep breath, and then closed my eyes.
When I opened them, I stood in front of a grave made of slick white marble, floating in the midst of an eternity of nothingness since the rest of the world, and the universe itself, had long since stopped existing. This grave had been preserved though, because it had been my will that made it possible.
"So, I did it again," I said with a sigh. "Condemned other people to die because I'm not dealing with Phyrexia or the Eldrazi personally. It was another draw."
I scratched the back of my neck. "I know you'd tell me to stop whimpering and do something about it, but you know...it's not that easy. As long as there's a clear cut big bad evil monster, everyone's going to go fight that. They're united as long as that lasts. The day the Eldrazi and Phyrexia are destroyed for good...my teacher will ask me to destroy the rabble one by one and claim their sparks before they turn their attentions to us. Right now, he's content enough to let them grind each other to death because that's what he feeds on, but...you know, if only you hadn't made me swear not to bring you back from the dead, then perhaps you'd have a bright solution at the ready just for this situation."
I scratched the side of my right cheek. "I'm kind of lost. A lot of people are suffering, but then again, isn't suffering just a part of life? I can cast myself as the big bad Tyrant and try to make them cooperate, to weed the evil ones from the good ones, but...but I'm just one Hive. I could use a hand, but either they hate me and join the rebellion...or they die. One way or another, they die. Who do you think taught the art of branding to that brat? It was my teacher, I'm sure of it. Just as much as I'm sure he knows that I would understand the implied message. He's telling me in his own ways to stop dallying around and crush my foes. I won't do it though, I'll just have to send more of them away faster." I grinned. "There are two new promising Planeswalker that would be a nice addition to those brats."
I laughed, and shook my head. "That said, please regard yourself," I passed a hand over the top of the marble memorial slab, the space dust gathering atop it routinely since it was the only dust in the entirety of this dead universe whose size couldn't be bigger than a closet.
"You shouldn't tickle the sleeping dragon," I whispered as I gave my back to the gravestone, "But plunge a sword through his heart."
I watched the nothingness over my head, and then smiled.
It was time.
"Bye, Tessa," I waved at her gravestone, and then disappeared.
If my calculations were correct, I would reappear on the eighteenth birthday of a certain Negi Springfield, latent Planeswalker.
...
That was the plan.
"In the name of the Moon, I'll punish you!" Sailor Moon's bright spinning circlet of glittering death somehow managed to slice through my lower midriff with relative ease as it also returned into her outstretched hand, her teenager's gaze filled with conviction.
It took me two seconds to graft back together both halves of my body.
It took me actually thirty seconds to understand what was going on.
Rather than defend Zendikar, some folks would rather try toppling the Tyrant.
We can't have that now, can we? No. No we can't.