Ar'Kendrithyst - Chapter 266, 1/2

Erick floated in the air, his glowthread regalia glittering on his human skin like a soft whiteness, rimmed in black.

He was alone, and yet not.

The city of Anomalies lay before him; an edifice of greed and luxury a good hundred kilometers wide and built upon the backs of eons of slave trading. Physically, it resembled a rather nice utopia. Sleek silver buildings. Parks. Private gardens. Lakes and rivers. Restaurants and book sellers and bright lights and discipline in everything. Multiple levels in some parts of it. Nice houses over there on those hills. It was a city for a million people, too. Some buildings were rather more works of art than wholly useful, and sculptures were everywhere; art was in abundance.

Erick wasn’t impressed.

He had done enough to this place and seen enough to fully understand their entire business model, and that business was in producing both perfectly obedient slaves, and selling the inborn talents of those slaves to the highest bidders. None of this was made by anyone of their own free will. All of it was built upon misery and pain, and here and there, that misery and pain lay exposed beneath the thin veneer of civility that Slaver’s Den adopted like a demon wearing the body of another.

Over there was a coliseum where slaves killed each other in battle. Over there was the slave dancery, which was a theater-type place. Lots of theater and other forms of performative art everywhere, actually. Over there were the sex halls filled with slaves and some of the worst depravity Erick had ever seen since the Shades at the height of their power in Ar’Kendrithyst.

Erick didn’t want to look too deeply.

Perhaps, if he had been looking more deeply, if he had been more prepared for this sort of war, he would have turned time back several days ago, when those 112 million people died to the breaking of that Contract Nexus. In the end, though, Erick knew that those people were always going to die, because this war was not going to end due to the actions of terrorists, and drawing this war out would just lead to more suffering in the end.

What would have happened if he would have ended the war, allowing them to live? They’d just go on killing and slaving. The people they had trapped in Contracts and slavery were always going to die, somehow, some way.

From what Erick knew of the stories of many slaves, they would have preferred to die than to be slaves.

And honestly, Erick hadn’t expected Slaver’s Den to do that. To wage that sort of war; holding hostages in hopes for better terms. Here Erick was, completely willing to send all of them away into new lives, in new places, as decent people, and yet they wanted to hold onto their evil powers. And so, they had displayed those evil powers, holding them up as some sort of deterrent, as if Erick would ever deal with terrorists.

Erick should have expected it more, though. These people had no morals at all.

When that Major Contract breaking had happened, Erick had finished up the war efforts on all the rest of Slaver’s Den, but he had left Anomalies alone, and so, there hadn’t been another Major Contract breaking since then… Or maybe they simply lacked the capability to do that a second time. Erick doubted that possibility. You didn’t use a weapon like that and then kept defending yourself when you only had the one weapon. If all they had was the one weapon, then there was never any use for it at all.

One nuclear bomb is a horror.

Ten nuclear bombs are a deterrent.

… Erick’s mind returned to the frantic defense that had occurred in all those other places out there in the Den.

All across Slaver’s Den, people had fought to the bitter end, even when they knew what was coming for them. Oh sure, some people had surrendered, but most had not. It was an odd culture clash, in Erick’s mind. The slaves, of course, had no choice but to fight… Which was perhaps the crux of it. The slaves had no choice, and so they fought. The valkyries always caught up to the fleeing leaders, though.

Was it a ‘lizard dropping its tail’ situation, then? Was that why no one had tried to surrender?

And they all thought that they were smart or strong enough to get away?

Probably.

Erick would have sighed at that thought, at finally having the time to think at all, but people were watching. The last few days had been hectic as fuck. Around 35 million people now belonged to House Benevolence, and almost all of them were refugees picking up the pieces of their lives that they could, which wasn’t much.

Erick had annihilated all the other cities of Slaver’s Den, quite literally. [Annihilation Dot] did well for clearing out the land. Sure, some stuff that some people could have used got destroyed, but it was better than letting some unknown horror crop up later. Better to start off fresh, and with some new lakefront property.

And so, Erick had made some cities and assorted buildings before he came here to Anomalies, to finish this. [Cityshape] did not work very well out here in Margleknot, where the spell didn’t interact very well with all the various expended powers floating around in the normal Margleknot air, but it worked well enough for hovels, for now. New dungeons were spitting out lots and lots of mana, securing the land for all those 35 million people. Most people simply sat in their designated zones, waiting for the war to end. The only people allowed to move around right now were those who actually pledged themselves to the House…

Erick’s mind was wandering too much.

He shouldn’t let it wander this much.

He was here, waiting at Anomalies, for someone to come out to speak to him.

All the rest of Slaver’s Den was destroyed and remade. Erick’s [Infinite Imaging] and valkyrie squadrons did very well for finding all the last holdouts out there, in the wastelands of the Den. The holdouts here at Anomalies were of a different problem altogether. Several million people crammed into a place meant to hold 1 million, and even the owner’s quarters —the parts of the houses where slaves were not allowed to be— had slaves sleeping in the less used hallways. The streets were worse by far, because many of the owners of this land did not like to share space with ‘those country bumpkins’ from outside the city. It was a madhouse of pain and injury. Slaves slept on the streets. Slavers killed each other over minor spats. Everyone was in a state of panic. Everyone was in a state of loss. Suicides were rampant.

Some slavers had put up signs saying that they would sunder their slaves if Erick came into the city.

More threats from terrorists.

Some slavers had their slaves out on the streets, ordered to beg for their lives at all hours of the day, and they were doing a great job of that. But their efforts were rather inconsistent. All around the city, in every part of the lands near the walls, slaves stood or kneeled on the concrete or, if they were allowed, on the grass, prostrating themselves to whoever might be looking. Only 1% of those ordered slaves were actually within Erick’s direct view right now.

This begging had gone on for days. Some of the enslaved were dead from mistreatment, and still there where they had fallen, their corpses bloating and the slaves nearby weeping over that, and because they were not allowed to stop crying out for succor.

Erick was kilometers away. He was pretty sure that the owners of the city could see him, but people down there could not.

Erick saw it all.

And he was going to tear it all down, soon enough.

All that remained of Slaver’s Den was here. That statue of Shackle and his underlings on that mountain in that lake was here, too.

This city also had a manaminer. It was the only one with a manaminer. That manaminer is why the valkyries could not penetrate the area. This particular manaminer was not like the manaminer of Da’luwe, either; it had actual power behind it. Authority.

Erick was still working out what Authority really meant.

He had heard a few different descriptions of it over the last few days. Ta’Kamoil had called Authority ‘preeminence among all’, but that was really just domainwork but stronger. Authority sort-of worked like Domains, but not really. They did share a lot of similarities, but not enough that the words were interchangeable.

Shadow had called Authority ‘the logical conclusion of one being in power in an area’, which was supposedly ‘as simply as I can explain, Erick, without lying’.

Yggdrasil had been there with Shadow when Erick had been asking those questions, and he had called Authority, ‘The setting scene for a Wizard War, begun in a particular Wizard’s favor’.

And that is what made ‘Authority’ click for Erick.

Shadow had been perturbed that Yggdrasil had managed to come up with such a good wording. Usually she was all about that. That particular moment of banter between them had been a brief spot of light in the ‘elfitarian crisis’ that was this war, because you certainly couldn’t call it a ‘humanitarian’ crisis. Humans were in pretty short supply here in Margleknot, because elven bodies healed a lot easier than human bodies, because…

Erick turned his mind back to the current moment.

Slaves cried out in the streets to be left alone, extolling the virtues of how good their masters were, and how much Erick should just go away. Some of those slaves made this claim even with fresh whip markings on their backs, though, so that sort of ruined the whole idea that their masters were ‘the good kind’. And then there were the soldiers, looking to harm people to make Erick leave, and…

And Erick was tired of waiting.

If this was to be a Wizard War, then…

Erick revealed his draconic self, several kilometers away from the city, hovering high in the air, but he was still 2 kilometers long himself. He had grown recently. His tail was as thick as a submarine, and it lashed the wasteland ground, making thunder roll across the world. His wings buffeted a hurricane briefly, and then he simply hovered, opening his mouth.

Lightning flashed across the sky, and Erick’s voice thundered overhead.

“Captain Shackle! Show yourself, and prepare for the end of your reign!”

The people of the city who could run, ran. Those who had orders to stay and call out to Erick, to plead for their lives, yelled louder, their eyes turning his way. Erick noticed a drain on his Status, and surely, beyond the turrets and the wall and the Authority that surrounded Anomalies, Shackle was trying some shit. Whatever it was, it was ultimately inconsequential. Erick strengthened his aura, his Domain, his sense of purpose, and whatever shit Shackle was trying to pull simply stopped.

Erick waited ten seconds for an answer, and then he decided he had waited long enough.

He advanced—

“Impertinent dragon,” came a voice from the city, louder than the rest. Light suddenly projected out of the walls of Anomalies, forming into the shape of Captain Shackle, matching Erick for height and width, but only because of Shackle’s four black feathered wings. He was surely inflating the size of those wings, Erick thought. Shackle scoffed. “You are courting death. You think I leave my largest powers out there, outside of my direct control? I have much more than Grand Contracts ready to deploy. Test my patience more and I will weave death far and wide, and you will be responsible for all of that.”

Erick scoffed right back at Shackle—

“Do you know how many nuclear bombs it takes to kill a defenseless world?” Shackle asked, his voice a poison upon the world. “The worlds we have raided before, and will raid again, and have prepared long in advance if we should lose ground there at all?”

Erick kept his draconic expression schooled at that horrible threat.

And then he realized something deep.

Benevolence never twinged at him about the Major Contract activation and the deaths of those 112 million people. It didn’t twinge at him now. Rather than warning Erick away, his Lightning Path demanded Erick act to remove this threat, no matter the cost.

Shackle would always have threats. He would always have people under his thumb, waiting to die instead of him.

That was why Erick’s Lightning Path had always been pointed forward in this war. That was why he did not rewind time to save those 112 million people. Ultimately, there was never any way to kill this Great Evil without a grand loss of life in this way, or that way, or some other hidden, third way.

And yet…

Was there a way to have everything? To end Shackle’s threat, and save those people under nuclear threat?

Erick rapidly thought through a few plans, discarded almost all of them, and then rapidly came upon an idea that he foresaw he would be using a lot, for this was not the first time he had encountered a bad guy holding people hostage, without a clear path forward to save them all. The first time this happened, or at least the first time that truly stood out to Erick, was that time at Last Shadow’s Feast, with that Charisma mobster with those bone bombs planted inside those children. And now, here was Erick, decades and Layers of infinity away from that time and place…

And this was a Wizard War, and Erick was a Wizard. A Paradox Wizard. A Time Wizard, who never really stepped into that application of this power… not truly. Not as much as he could have. Erick didn’t want to do the whole ‘time hopping thing’ anyway. He wanted to do the Establishment thing.

And so, here now was a Wizard War, with Erick the only Wizard present.

To all the people he harmed, Shackle was like a god.

But to Erick, he was nothing but an annoyance to be worked around.

An annoyance with a lot of power-through-Evil. An annoyance that Erick had learned a lot about during the last few weeks. From the dancery over there in the city with a sign that read ‘Captain Shackle approved!’, to the narcissism of having giant statues of oneself in his land, to the way in which he liked to break people by stealing their powers for himself because he was inadequate on his own, to how he poisoned the land all around him through Contracts, through his words, through how he needed to be sure to inflict massive collateral damage in order to be left alone to amass even more stolen power from others…

Erick Knew Captain Shackle more than enough to do what came next.

A Truth came out of Erick’s maw,

“Hey Shackle. You’re an asshole, right? A guy who isn’t very bright?”

Shackle’s image scowled at Erick, as he said, “I’m a brilliant leader! The best slaver there ever was!”

“Only when you’ve forced slaves to give you applause.”

“Of course I force them! Idiots need to be educated!”

“That can be debated. All I see is a man who’s hated.”

“Provincial idiot! Uneducated. You make me rather aggravated.”

Erick did not smile as Shackle got caught up in Erick’s scheme, dragged into the flow. Into Erick’s power. Erick doubled down, putting a little more power into his voice, saying, “So educate me, little slaver. How much to get you to sign a waiver?”

The Captain’s holographic form wavered as it turned more solid, and he scoffed, not noticing the change. “Waive my rights to what? You human mutt?”

“For you to give up all you own; to show us all you could atone.” Erick continued, “I am the ultimate forgiving sorts, for all of those who are good sports.”

Shackle’s wings fluttered behind him, his scowl thunderous, the air moving at his flex, even though he was still holographic light. “You think you’ve won already? Even for dragons, that’s heady!” He scoffed. “By what right of power do you claim any end of this war game?”

Erick didn’t have him yet, but he was close. Slowly, Erick began to shrink his draconic self down, saying, “The fact that you think this a game means you have no real, true shame, and that’s a fault that lies with you; your morals are all deep askew. Like building nations upon a swamp, without checking for dragons first, the dragons have come out to chomp, and now you’re here to get versed.”

Erick was a 2 meter tall dragon.

Shackle was a 2 meter tall hologram, and then he was a person. He was Shackle, here, in the flesh, and his eyes were too focused on Erick to realize anything was wrong at all. He sneered, sweat collecting on his brow and in his armpits, a rank sort of smell coming off of him that wasn’t present in the hologram, for the man had been run ragged recently. His mouth smelled, and Erick was rather sure that he had stains on his underwear.

Shackle scoffed, “Instructed by a lowly king? I sell to emperors, gods, and Powers. I’ll peel your scales and make you sing, playing in your soul to wile the hours.”

Far away, too far for them to ever affect this Working, were Underling Chains in his many corpse-bodies. He was in the air, about a kilometer away, struggling against an impossible wind to reach for this confrontation, to yell and have his voice heard. He threw power at Erick, and that power went wide, turning to nothing under the fae rust sky.

Underling Walara and ten thousand demons poured out of the city, arriving second to Chains and with backup, attempting to reach Erick and Shackle, but none of them able to get within a kilometer before the pressure of the moment pushed them back, too.

Valkyries flew in and killed who they could, but they couldn’t get near Erick or Shackle at all, either.

The war happened all around Erick and Shackle, and Shackle glanced around himself, vaguely aware that something was happening out there.

Erick slowly increased his size, but Shackle was not a hologram anymore, and he could not adjust anything. He stared upward, becoming smaller and smaller, as Erick intoned down at the man, “I guess if you’re reduced to threats, the meeting of these minds is done. I hope you’re empty of regrets, because you’re getting thoroughly undone.

“From here to there on every world, all of your Slaver’s Dens, everywhere your Contracts have curled, here to there and back again, I send sparks through you to ages past, a simple reach, a deep broadcast, in bombs and spells this does amass, a little trick, tiny trespass. With dancing sparks defusing bombs, we weed the land that he has planted, enchant him now to give us these alms, until his evil is recanted.”

Erick was two kilometers tall, his fangs ten times the size of Shackle, Erick’s tail casually curled around the ground, below the man, his wings wrapping around, blotting out the red sky and the golden light of Yggdrasil’s Quarantine. Erick stared at Shackle, floating amid the half-light, Erick’s eyes blazing white, his mouth spilling radiance into the meeting between him and a dot of a man who would be digested like he had his demons do to the freshly captured, before they took them to Layer 1 and sundered them there. Erick wasn’t sure if he would be doing that second part, but the first part? Yes. He needed time to fully disassemble all of Shackle’s evil, to plant the seeds of his destruction deep into the man’s own past.

And Erick would take that time.

He would take all of Shackle’s Time.

Shackle had damned himself by his own participation in the magic, drawn along into depths he never imagined he would suffer. And so, the slaver watched in fear, within the dark world within black wings, where bright-eyes and white teeth and an abyssal-white maw declared the end of all his monuments and power.

Shackle trembled.

Erick spoke, “We take this soul, we bind it deep, we have a goal: to make it weep.”

Lightning ascended.

– –

The void flier known as Captain Shackle hovered in a white abyss. His four usually-hovering black wings were bound in Benevolence crystal, with more crystal stretching across his back, locking his wings to him, making sure he couldn’t move them at all. His limbs were spread wide, and each joint was similarly locked in crystal, like his wings. Crystal covered his face and most of the rest of him, and that crystal was growing. The covered parts of Shackle’s body were effervescing soft glows of various colors into the white abyss. It was in those colors that the crystal was growing the most.

There went some bright orange power from Shackle’s exposed left bicep, and crystal grew on that exposed section, locking the man down just a little bit more.

Something grey and green evaporated from Shackle’s fourth wing, and the crystal there grew larger.

The only parts of him exposed at all were an expanse of thigh and a part of his bare chest and stomach. And then something red evaporated out of a part of his chest, and the Benevolence crystal grew over that part of his chest, locking him down just a little bit more.

And then there was his eye. Shackle retained his right eye. That one eye was wildly looking left and right, and then straight ahead, as he spotted his captor. Fury lay within that mind, behind that eye, and yet, that fury was impotent. Crystal grew slowly around that eye, as something black evaporated away from that eye, and the white crystal barely grew. It would take a little while to fully encapsulate the man. His eye would go last.

And then the true dissolution process would begin.

The dissection was already happening.

Erick floated in front of Shackle, in the white abyss.

Shackle wordlessly screamed, his eye vibrating in its socket, his mouth fully covered by crystal. His covered face was serene, though.

Erick said, “You already said your last words. What were they? ‘Playing in my soul to wile the hours’?” Erick harrumphed. “I won’t cause any more pain than necessary, but since your evil is rather well embedded, there’s going to be a lot of pain. For starters, all your deeds will be erased. All your planning is falling apart. Even now, my lightning is being sent through the cosmos upon your own timeline. I’m not too sure how it’s working out myself, but I can tell that’s what it’s doing, and I’m figuring it out as it goes. You are a wonderful test subject.

“… Anyway. Every world you have touched. Every hostage situation you have created. All of it, undone, as well as whatever powers you stole and put into yourself. That’s probably the most understandable part of this. You have parts of you that are not you, grafted on to your soul, and those are easily seen.

“Those are going first.

“You feel it, right? I’m pulling apart your soul, plucking at the blessings you have, at the power you have, unthreading it and using that to… Ah. I get it now. Yes. All of it.

“That’s how this is working.” Erick nodded, then he said, “It’s all a frameshift, really. The crystal is locking you down when it touches on a part of you that has laid a deadly plan, and then it evaporates that plan through an application of resons and Benevolence.

“I had wondered why my fate prognostication didn’t work so well with you, and why you were allowed to sunder 112 million people. I thought, perhaps, that you were underneath Authority, hiding out. That wasn’t it. A much more reasonable answer was that innocents were always going to die in the process of ending you, and it was better to end your evil now than to let you bring millions and billions more people under your yoke. That was half of the answer.

“The full answer is this right here.

“Those people were sundered so that every single person who comes after you is truly afraid of what I can do, if they piss me off enough. The horror you caused leads to this horror here, which will save countless people later.

“It’s not a perfect answer. I’ll figure something better out another time.

“But for now, this is the answer we have.”

If Shackle could have screamed in rage, he would have.

He could do nothing.

And then the crystal broke Shackle’s legs as it moved his lower body for him, violently, bloodily, putting his spread-eagle legs together, into a state of repose. It was bloody, and then the blood evaporated. From Shackle’s pelvis to his toes, what remained was locked below a simple 6-sided, tapered-point Benevolence crystal. He was a bit shredded down there, with bones and flesh mostly where they should have been, but Erick didn’t feel sorry for him.

If Shackle could have screamed in pain, maybe he would have.

Erick explained, “We’re halfway to the real show now. When your wings and arms break and reform—”

The crystal around Shackle’s spread arms broke violently, whipping the man’s arms to lay upon his chest, shredding his flesh. When the red evaporated, Shackle’s body was locked down to crystal from his neck to his toes. And then his wings simply broke. Those wings were a manifestation of his aura and soul, after all. They weren’t truly physical things, so they went away.

“Nothing here is actually physical, though I’m sure it feels that way to you,” Erick said, as Shackle impotently raged. “It’s all inside the soul. My soul, actually. You’re already very dead.”

Shackle’s rage stilled.

The crystal flashed over, and now Shackle was inside of a floating white quartz-like crystal, like a fly trapped in amber. The only part that wasn’t covered was his one eye, where the crystal had a cracked hole in it, like a rift, allowing him to peer out. Soon that hole would be gone. Soon, Shackle would be a soul contained.

“I don’t like giving these ‘winner’ speeches,” Erick said, “It’s too megalomaniacal of anyone to talk like this, but it’s an important part of the magic; to explain to you what is happening, so that you are both trapped and that you know the key to your escape. Hope is important, even for people like you, Shackle. To hope is to live, and you could live again.

“And so, here:

“A carrot: You can get a [Reincarnation] and complete forgiveness in your next life.

“And the stick: This whole magic happening right here, and forever more, until you repent. You are a rug being beat for information and targets, Shackle. So accept your beating like all the slaves you have beat before now, and learn how to be a better person for it.

“That’s how you do it, right? To break a person? Yes, it is.

“When you fully capitulate, and all your plots are undone, and you never want to seek revenge, and you always want to help others for all always, to the same extent that you have damned and doomed so very many, then you will be released, Shackle.

“With any luck, you will never see me again.

“But I will be seeing you.

“Goodbye.”

The crystal sealed over.

Shackle’s one eye remained open. Could he see? Probably. Erick needed an ingress into his memories and visions, anyway, so the eye would remain open; it was the window to the soul, after all.

The real magic began.

Shackle could not scream.

The white abyss all around revealed itself as a river of power that then flowed into that prison. Where mana and reson touched, images flickered out of Shackle’s single eye. Erick saw glimpses of ten thousand worlds and more as ten thousand little sparks took ten thousand little trips through Shackle’s prison, into his past, into the present, into lands far, far away from Margleknot.

It took 100 resons to cross a Layer, and then to cross into the next one, and so on and so on, Erick’s power linking glimpses of Elsewhere to Here, so those other places could be affected by this magic. It was 1 reson to find the center point of Shackle’s industries in those lands. It was hundreds of resons to visit each side reality in those Layers, where Shackle had built his slaving empire. The numbers added up fast, but Erick had a billion resons to use for this magic.

He had gone into this war with a stock of resons for some big magic. He had thought he would be [Grand Reincarnation]ing all of Slaver’s Den. But this was a much better use of that resource. Not a [Grand Reincarnation], but a whole lot of tiny nudges here and there, to save billions of people he would never know, and who would never know that they had been saved.

A spark of Benevolence danced upon a crucial control system, spreading acid mushrooms on motherboards to eat away at nuclear warheads, disarming them forever.

A giant series of cannons atop mountains, all controlled by ten separate systems, were now useless, as ten different jolts of Benevolence cut through systems that the local slavers had no idea how to fix, because Shackle never wanted those systems to be used against him.

An army fighting off a slave rebellion was hoping for a resupply within days, but there would never be another resupply from Slaver’s Den. That was how the true empire crumbled; in pieces of lost logistics.

An array system on yet another world was disarmed by a few stray jolts of white, ensuring that the control magics placed upon the populace of that world would fail the next time they were tested. And those magics were tested hourly. Rebellions began that night and the streets ran red with slaver blood.

A bloodcurse mandala, erected upon a hidden mountain, set within the most secured castle upon the most secured world of a tri-planet system that was filled with incredibly strong powers, had a misflow of Malevolence, thanks to a jolt of white Benevolence. A very hungry white mushroom began to grow where it should not grow at all, along the edges of a formation, and then growing toward the center. That mandala kept the slavers of Slaver’s Den invisible to all the strong cultivators of that system, so that the slavers could capture and consume those who they wanted to, like plucking ripe fruit from an orchard. But now the mandala had mushrooms, and even if anyone could get in there to repair it, it was too late, and to enter that room was to die to Malevolence anyway. Within a week, an entire culture of Evil sects was revealed and rapidly annihilated by all the powers they had been preying on.

The images of other worlds kept coming, pulled out of Shackle’s eye and then punched through with Benevolence, destroying everything he had built and everything he had ever touched.

And Shackle was slowly losing everything about himself. The images began to turn hazy. Indistinct. Shackle was shrinking, his flesh fading under the crystal, his soul being used up.

He began to cry there, at the end, when he was reduced to a collection of feathered black bones and skin and a single eye.

Erick kept going.

– –

Erick was a dragon again, floating above the wasteland outside of Anomalies. No time at all had passed out here in the real world, but a whole lot of time had passed inside Erick’s soul. Days or weeks or even months, he could not tell. Shackle’s soul was almost all gone; consumed to fuel the fires of his own eradication. But he still lived, somewhat.

And the war was still on.

All around Erick Valkyries fought demons and slave soldiers.

Erick obliterated most of the evil army with a [Grand Reincarnation], signaling his return to the moment. The Underling demon Walara and the Underling abomination Chains were the only major threats of the Evil army that remained after Erick’s lightning passed them by—

The city of Anomalies began to crack in a way that Erick took a moment to understand. Everyone else took a moment, too, from the slaves on the streets to the Underlings in the air, to the soldiers and the wall guards and even a few mindful valkyries. If the mindless valkyries would have had any luck actually injuring Walara or Chains, then Erick was sure that they would have continued the assault, but they had no capability to injure those high Talents. And so, they also watched the breaking of Anomalies.

The air of Anomalies cracked, white breaks appearing midair, like rifts in the world. But they weren’t rifts; they were the degradation of the Authority of Anomalies—

The manaminer of Anomalies fully shattered somewhere far, far away, in the center of the city, and probably far below as well.

Underling Warala and Chains both turned absolutely terrified, and not of Erick or anything else happening around them. They were terrified of Anomalies.

They rapidly tried to escape, flying away as fast as they could, but Erick wasn’t about to let them leave. With a casual flick of his tail and an application of Wizardry and aura control, Erick wrapped both of their physical forms in solid Benevolence and dragged them back to the war. They screamed about no one being able to survive what was coming. Erick cut their screams short with some high-reson-enhanced [Reincarnation] in Walara’s case, and a reson-empowered [Grand Reincarnation] in Chains’s case. Both worked exactly as Erick wanted them to, with Walara stripped of all of her demonic power and being sent off somewhere to restart life as a mortal, and Chains’s 378 separate bodies all being merged into one and sent off to be reborn as a normal mortal man on some distant world.

Erick didn’t pay much attention to them. He just wanted them gone.

And then Erick turned back to the dissolving Authority of Anomalies, saying, “If my magic worked right, and I think it did, then that failsafe is disabled.” Five minutes of nothing later, and all the air all across Anomalies was clear. The Authority holding back Erick’s armies was gone. Erick commanded the valkyries, “Go, and bring them all to new lives.”

Valkyries flew.

And people turned to blood.

The horde converted Anomalies within the hour, with only a few holdouts managing to remain for that full hour. And then Erick turned the whole city into a land of craters. With that done, Erick had his valkyries separate themselves into those who would become a part of the House, and those who would move on to new lives somewhere else.

Of the 7 million people who had remained in Anomalies, maybe half of them had been slavers who had run there seeking shelter from the war. Lightning ripped through a serene part of the valkyrie horde as Erick sent 3.9 million of them away, through a [Grand Reincarnation], into other worlds. That ate up 390 million resons, as well as five times as much Mana, Health, and Psyche. Erick could not do that forever, but he was able to do that once more, if needed.

Erick was tired.

But there was still work to be done.

Shadow stepped to Erick’s side, hovering over the craters of Anomalies with him, saying, “You advanced rather far in that final battle.”

“We’ll talk about it later, and what it might mean,” Erick said, “There’s one more thing to do.”

Shadow nodded.

Erick flew forward.

Shadow followed at his side.

They arrived over a large inland sea that was less filled with water than it had been, for Erick had obliterated the coast with [Annihilation Dot]s. The sea was wider.

They flew on.

It wasn’t long till they reached their destination; a mountain-sized statue of Shackle, Walara, and Chains, all of them standing atop slaves. The base of the mountain statue was already crumbling a little, for the lake no longer supported some of the base structure, and the valkyries had already been here, eradicating the people who had retreated here. The statues were kinda beat up now. One of Shackle’s wings lay crashed on the coast, broken.

Erick said, “Goodbye, and good riddance, Slaver’s Den. Places like you simply should not exist.”

With a wave of aura, Erick sent a Black Dot at the statue.

Annihilation cloyed at stone, spreading fast, across slaver sneers and narcissistic stances, erasing rock. Where it retreated there was nothing left.

The lake of Anomalies crashed into a crater. Water frothed and splashed and rocketed into the air.

And Slaver’s Den was no more.

Erick breathed out.

It was over, for now.

Erick asked Shadow, “Name the land, please.”

“Tir Geal,” Shadow said, “Or ‘Bright Land’, if you prefer.”

So she was going with some Earth language stuff, eh? Erick turned into his human shape and tried to smile, saying, “Where’d you even hear about Earth fae and Irish stuff?”

“Ha! We fae have our ways.” More seriously, she said, “A lot of people have done a lot of digging into your past, but don’t worry about Earth; I’ve already made a claim over it since we’re courting each other. Apparently that place is rather backwater, though. No one really cares about it.”

“I’ll trust you, then.” Erick had enough on his plate, anyway. He asked, “Not ‘Shadow Lands’?”

Shadow grinned. “This land is ours; not simply mine. And besides! Shadows live best where there’s brightness to be had, and there’s a lot of brightness here to be had. I do wonder why we haven’t gotten a prompt from Yggdrasil about owner transfer, though. We have killed all the slavers and converted all the rest.” She looked into the Quarantine and Rust Cloud sky, asking, “What’s the impediment, Yggdrasil?”

“There’s still Propagation Magic active and Shackle is still alive. This land cannot be transferred while either of those things remain true, and even after that there’s a 1 year waiting period for ownership transfer,” Yggdrasil said, stepping into the air with Erick and Shadow. He looked to Erick. “And what you did with Shackle there, in the end… It has hints of what was done to the Painted Cosmology. In the Sundering.”

Yggdrasil could have said a lot more, but he left it there, for now.

Shadow lightly looked at Erick, knowing that he did not want to speak of this topic at this moment in time, but Erick could tell that she deeply wanted to speak of this topic.

Erick said, “I am aware of the similarities. I don’t believe it was the same thing at all, for a lot of reasons. But now that it is done, I am aware. I wasn’t sure what I was doing until I did it, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat.” Erick said, “Surely others have done similar magics, weaving time through a soul to pull that soul apart and send almost-Fateful levels of Establishment through the universe and time to erase the threats laid down by a departing enemy.”

Yggdrasil glanced at Shadow.

Shadow glanced at Yggdrasil.

Okay. So maybe what Erick had done was rather rare.

Erick tried, “Certainly not unique.”

Shadow allowed, “Not unique. But certainly rarer than fae. Benevolence is uniquely tuned to Time Magics and making good outcomes, so perhaps this is the true nature of what Benevolence can do.”

… Well that was a thought.

“Definitely not unique,” Yggdrasil said. “Though the scale of what you did…” His voice trailed away. “I’m not sure you understand just how difficult it is to do what you did. The fae can erase people and their works like you did, but once a person gets too metaphysically large then they can’t do what you did at all. Usually, the fae can only do that to newborns, and only a stronger-than-average fae could even attempt such an action.” Yggdrasil added, “What Lord Dakka did to the person who flipped the Major Contract switch, in order to erase them from all reality in a Hunt, was a common display of a strong fae’s ability to erase a person.”

Erick had not known that until this moment, and yet it made sense.

“I was thinking a bit about that, actually, when I went about this magic,” Erick said. And then he moved on, adding, “We’ll speak of Nothanganathor’s Sundering more later, for this is obviously how he did some of that, though the scale is off by several orders of magnitude. In smaller ways, I now recognize that this sort of thing is exactly what Nothanganathor has done to every single person he ate with Red Sparks, and what he did to Debby.”

“I’m glad you said it,” Shadow said, “Because I did not want to dance around that for much longer. Nothanganathor does this regularly. It’s a piece of how he did some of the Sundering, but not the whole story by far. Perhaps the Fae Council never truly believed that Nothanganathor could have caused the Sundering because none of them could envision this type of erasure working on the scale of a universe, and yet, perhaps that’s exactly what Nothanganathor learned to do.” Shadow looked to Erick, saying, “And now you have learned the same power as a strong fae, Erick.”

Ah.

Well that was kinda worrying in many ways.

Yggdrasil looked like he was holding back. He probably was, and for a whole bunch of reasons, for sure. From Fae Council secrets, to stuff he had learned from Aragathara, and probably whatever conversations he was having with various other powers out there right now about Malevolence. He was busy, and now there was this whole thing happening.

Erick commiserated.

“So the Sundering definitely came from this universe. 100% confirmed?” Erick asked.

Shadow said, “Pretty safe to say.”

Yggdrasil looked deeply worried about many very large things.

Erick said, “So let’s move on for now.”

Yggdrasil nodded. “Moving on. Are you going to keep Shackle?”

Erick did not have to think much, to say, “I should, because that’s what I promised him, that I would be looking over his shoulder until he repented and all his Evil seeds had been unsown. But I don’t want to look after what remains, and for a good reason.” Erick lifted his hand and expressed a fraction of his soul into the real world, pulling a crystal out of Elsewhere and into this reality. It was a white, 6-sided crystal, tapered at both ends, and with a splash of black frozen inside, like a bunch of feathers in a jumble. There were also tears inside, though Erick couldn’t see any eyes. “Didn’t know it would be that easy to pull him out of me, but here he is. He’s much diminished. I don’t think he has the mental capacity to actually repent at all since I used almost all of him while targeting his planted evils. A [Reincarnation] could fix some of that, but whoever stepped out of that magic would not be Shackle. He’d have holes in his memory the size of centuries, and that would do crazy things to a person.”

Shadow held out a hand. “Then you have done your duty to look over him until he repents in true, for an invalid stripped of Evil is not capable of knowing Evil, and that crystal is clearly crying. You have done enough. Give him to me.”

Erick handed him over.

And Shadow crushed the crystal, turning magic to dust and air, pulling out a tear-flecked black feather from the crystallized Benevolence. With a flick and twist, the black feather became white, the tears cast away, and then she released the feather into the air, where it slipped on a gust of wind into Elsewhere and was gone.

“… That’s that,” Erick said, feeling some kind of relief to be truly done with Slaver’s Den.

Shadow nodded.

Yggdrasil stared at where the feather had vanished for a lingering moment, then he said to Erick, “That only leaves the presence of the valkyries causing the Quarantine. As soon as all the valkyries are people again, I will end the Quarantine. I suggest you prepare well before you end that magic, because—” Yggdrasil pointed to different directions on the horizons, naming off, “Slaver’s Union, the Slaver’s Pit, and Slaver’s Ransom. Go far enough in those directions and you’ll end up in those lands. The Veiled Syndicate Hideout is over that way, and over there are the Dread Arenas.” He dropped his hand. “You could conquer some of those lands, but you probably shouldn’t, because Margleknot is close to being Balanced and you’re still trying to win over Wraithborne. So you can choose. Wraithborne becomes not-Evil, or you erase those other Evil lands out there and Wraithborne becomes empowered to get big, and fast.”

… Balance sucked.

Shadow said what Erick was thinking, “Balance is a terrible way to run a land.”

Yggdrasil frowned. “All life exists in equilibrium, or it collapses. Acknowledging that the Balance is real means that you can keep life alive. The forest needs wolves, the oceans need sharks, and people need freedom of choice, elsewise the Balance asserts itself into populations in cruel ways. Without wolves, deer die of starvation from overeating. Without sharks, bloated and diseased fish pollute the waters. Without Evil being known, then even Good civilizations fall to civil war.”

Shadow said, “Or, you could have an ever-expanding world where there’s always more to be done, and more growth to be had.” Shadow frowned, saying, “Honestly, Yggdrasil. It’s quite vexing that my universe is arguably less infinite than yours, and my solution to problems-of-growth was to always grow, and yet you’re the ever-growing-tree over here in Infinity, speaking about Balance as a virtue.”

Yggdrasil raised an eyebrow at Shadow. “And which universe still exists?”

Shadow scoffed. “My universe exists. It just needs to be made again out of the corpse of the Evil that consumed it. It’ll be a Grand Reincarnation!”

Erick listened to them speak, but he was still thinking about Wraithborne versus the other Evil lands. Erick decided that he did want Wraithborne to change away from Evil.

“About Wraithborne,” Erick said, “I’m still going to pressure Wraithborne to change. The Contracts are more of a blight than slavery is a blight, because the Contracts enable truly detestable slavery.”

Yggdrasil nodded. “Moving on. I suspect these other Evil lands might put in official requests for me to adjust how their lands attach to this one—” He stopped. He looked away, and then Yggdrasil turned back to Erick. “Actually, they already are. Or at least the Dread Arenas are. I’ll fast-track those requests…” Yggdrasil asked, “In other concerns: How much mana and resons did it take to erase all of Shackle’s Evil? I need to know to gauge how far out I need to look for issues to arise.”

890 million resons. He only had a few million resons left. Erick wasn’t quite sure how much of everything else, but he was down to less than a quarter million Mana, Health, and Psyche, so that meant 3.4 billion of each of those resources, at least. Erick had done all of that magic manually.

But he could have done it Propagatively.

With [Spellsurge Weaver], if he fixed up that spell so it worked across multiple infinities, like the original spell [Infinite Imaging], Erick could… He could do a lot. Erick had purposefully made Weaver not able to work across infinities, but…

Had Nothanganathor done something like this already?

Erick saw a path that could be taken to erase an entire universe…

Well. Maybe not. That was pretty reductive. No. He couldn’t do that magic this way at all, now that he thought about it. The problem was other people, and actual defenses. All Erick had done with this latest magic was to Paradox away some problems far, far away, using Shackle’s soul as the transfer/targeting medium, and only targeting inanimate things.

Going up against actual other people would have been difficult, so this was not how Nothanganathor had done the Sundering. But it was close.

“900 million resons. Something like 3.5 billion Mana, Health, and Psyche. I’m feeling pretty tired. The more I think about it, though, this was not how Nothanganathor had done the Sundering.”

Yggdrasil and Shadow looked at Erick.

Shadow asked, “Explain?”

“I didn’t go up against other people; the Sundering did. I didn’t do this propagatively; the Sundering was a propagation event…” Erick thought a bit more, and then said, “But maybe Nothanganathor had a propagation magic that made little Malevolence dungeons on every world, and those dungeons then made mana, then those dungeons acted as lightning rods for his Primal Lightning. From there, he’d just need some Node Network magic to join it all together. He’s already got the Siphon down, too, because Malevolence eats things rather well. Tons of magic can steal mana, though. Elemental Pirate down on Veird was one. Do they have that here, too?” Erick moved on, “Whatever the case: There are a lot of pieces here that fit how the Sundering could have worked. I would like to know what sort of methods there are to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Please tell me some other time, though.”

Yggdrasil looked worried again.

Shadow seemed vindicated. She grinned a little at Yggdrasil.

Yggdrasil decided something, and then he calmed, and said, “That might be possible, but it is doubtful for a lot of reasons which I am not allowed to share right now. I can say that the Fractal is probably watching Nothanganathor through his Mark of the Fractal. Any big moves made against this universe would have Nothanganathor turned to mush as the universe began to directly lecture him. It isn’t something that the Fractal does often at all, but it does happen.”

Erick said, “And yet, the Fractal likes to speak through action, not words. Maybe we should all take a hint that Malevolence should not be an Approved Evil anymore. It’s not even really ‘Evil’ at all.”

Yggdrasil had nothing to say to that.

Shadow almost said some quips, but she decided that discretion was the better part of valor.

Erick stared at his green son, saying, “You need to purge Malevolence from Margleknot, Yggdrasil. I’m almost 100% certain that it’s blinding you and many others to quite a few truths around here. I saw at least 3 world-systems with Malevolence-backed industries that used that power to cloak people and then prey upon those world-systems. I mentioned Malevolence-mana dungeons earlier? That’s what I mean when I say that there are seeds of destruction planted within Malevolence, and you need to do some weeding.”

Shadow smirked. “Benevolence seems great as a replacement! You ended those systems!”

“Mostly I injected disruptive power to induce cascading failures, which the locals are already capitalizing on, now that nuclear armageddon isn’t looming,” Erick said, “Those systems were all too well-ingrained for several billion of any resource to take out at all.”

“Still worth celebrating,” Shadow said, with a firm nod.

Erick felt himself smile at that, but it was a tired emotion.

Yggdrasil said, “Your words are heard and recorded. We’ll talk more later, father. Get some rest.”

Shadow said, “More like ‘put up a few more cities’ and then you can rest, Erick. We’ve got work to do. Your people call you to action.”

At that, Erick managed a chuckle. “A coffee break, and then back to work. See you later, Yggdrasil. Drop by anytime, you hear? I’m gonna make an office here for you. Love you, son.”

Yggdrasil floated closer to Erick, and then hugged him, saying, “I love you. See you soon.”

Erick smiled on his son’s shoulder, feeling a wonderful connection that filled him with warmth and joy. “I think we’re calling this land Tir Geal.”

Yggdrasil pulled back, saying, “Then that is what it is, though it will take a year for your claim to be officially recognized. For now, people can leave however they want, but they can only come in on places I designate, like how you had to come into the Den on the edge. When you set up some designated entry squares, based on the allowances of the law, then the gates can start working in those areas instead…” He glanced away, then turned back to Erick, saying, “And now I have a whole bunch of lands asking to be moved. I would rather solve those requests by moving this land, instead. Can I move you closer to my trunk?”

“I’d love that,” Erick happily said.

Yggdrasil smiled. “Good. That’ll take a while to happen; a few days. Lands shuffle when they change owners, though, so it’s pretty normal. See you soon.”

Yggdrasil stepped away.

And then it was just Shadow and Erick.

Erick said, “Time to make some housing and not think about apocalypses at all for at least a week.”

Shadow added, “And roads and rivers and lakes and more dungeons and city halls and infrastructure and so on and so forth and I have a lot of fun ideas about architecture! We can do speedy roads, yes? Trains? Air cars would be nicer for the wildlife I want here, though, like horned rabbits and garms and little Benevolence slimes and such.”

Erick grinned at that.

And then he got to work.