Magus’s plight

  Magus winced as the hostile tube warships strafed the Solar Citadel, tearing another gash through its already battered hull. The once-glorious fortress now bore scars from endless assaults, each battle forcing hasty repairs. Fixing the damage had become a constant, draining task, ever since something had gone wrong with his AI. He suspected the problem stemmed from one of the earliest skirmishes with these bizarre tube-shaped ships, back when he’d thought them an easily vanquished foe.

  The hacked and broken AI, however, was far from the worst of his troubles.

  No.

  Everything had spiraled into chaos after he’d pushed the button to annihilate the U’lennea fleet.

  The weapon created by the General had worked flawlessly, launching projectiles that locked onto their targets, latching securely onto the massive armored hulls. For a tense, breathless moment, it seemed as if each projectile had malfunctioned, doing nothing but sitting dormant. Then, in a sudden reversal, the payloads split open, releasing a flood of raw, golden cr energy directly into the zombified alien organics hidden inside. As the energy made contact, a violent, rapid swelling of alien cells erupted, engulfing each ship. In seconds, the vessels appeared to be encased in grotesque, semi-translucent, bulbous sacs of living tissue—pulsing and growing as if the ships themselves had been consumed by living, writhing bags.

  Magus vividly recalled the surge of triumph as over half the enemy fleet was ensnared in a single, devastating salvo. For a fleeting moment, it seemed his victory was a given, with the captured ships encased in an ever-thickening manifesting layer of pulsating, fleshy tissue.

  But then, something went terribly wrong.

  Small, crater-like pockmarks began to form around the side of each ship where the initial payload shell had attached. It looked as if something unseen—perhaps many somethings—were tunneling towards the source of the released golden cr energy, creating a network of tiny wounds that spread and deepened with alarming speed.

  Magus hesitated for too long before punching the button to deactivate the release of gold cr energy from each of the weapons. All it took was one of the burrowing creatures latching itself to the active process, locking it in the “on” state, and the damage had been done. What Magus had intended to create was a prison of flesh impossible to escape from, instead, he had inadvertently turned each ship into a beacon of raw power, an active cr propulsion engine feeding energy to whatever living denizens from the next dimension had been waiting in space ever since the sun exploded. He had created an endless loop of growth and consumption as each feasting creature was soon torn apart and absorbed by others of its kind. The constant, infinite flow of golden cr energy continued unchecked, pulsing and alive, an endless invitation for chaos that would remain until the release could be stopped.

  It was like watching Mentos dropped into soda, only the eruption was incredibly more violent and fleshy. The formerly invisible creatures absorbed enough energy to become visible, their vitality reaching dangerous new heights.

  Never before had Magus experienced such an emotional high leading to an impossible low. Sure, he had been on the bottom of the totem pole before, but with each low, he always seemed to have some edge that he could use to rise again. This time, however, with each attack and taking more damage, he found that even the General’s weapons were ineffective against these new enemies.

  He couldn’t do anything against them. The new cr wasn’t capable of doing more than making holes, holes that quickly got patched.

  Then there was the other enemy.

  “What the heck am I supposed to do against something like that?” He shouted at the screens as he tried for the millionth time to land a clean hit on the rampaging entity that couldn't be caught, contained, or hindered. He had long since run out of the bio weapon to shoot and was almost out of his massive stocks of new cr. Everything was a bust and his time was running out.

  “What the heck is happening? This was not supposed to go this way!” He shouted into the empty vastness of the Solar Citadel.

  He was supposed to have been the victor here. He had risen above all of the other clones of the General and had even managed to stab the famed one in the back to take his place.

  “I… I need to...” He muttered as his mind kept flying all over the place. He was responding as quickly as he could, using all of his personal Keys and tools at his disposal to try to stand his ground. Every time he would try to advance or even retreat the same thing would happen, he would get punished and lose another part of his fortress.

  He was being played with, held in place by a predator more capable than himself.

  “I need to find a way to escape…” He finally finished the thought, looking over at the Personal Live Matrix that his whole being was housed inside. All of the knowledge of the General, all of the wealth the old geezer had accumulated, both physical, political, and digital, was all his now. All he needed to do was to get away and he could live out the rest of forever in luxury and power.

  The bad part was, he couldn’t just send himself away. With his AI gone, he was stuck. The Personal Live Matrix was all that was left and it was in danger of getting cut, blasted, or eaten depending on which of these insane enemies managed to do the deed.

  “I just have to escape…”

  ---

  Invicta’s return

  With Kevin gone something had snapped inside Invicta. She felt like someone had taken all of her fondest saved memories and deleted them, only leaving trace file names to show that there had been something there before--massive files of great value.

  Now… she had a hole inside her. She didn’t have a heart and had never known truly what it was to be a living, biological being, but the only way she could describe how she felt was to put it into human terms.

  She had lost the only person that she had loved and cared for.

  She knew that she wasn’t supposed to feel this way, that AI was supposed to be gifted with a directive that surpassed this human trait called emotions and feelings. It was like she was infected.

  But… while Kevin was alive, it had been the best infection she could ever have wanted. It had felt like she could be whatever she wanted with him, could live like she had never before dreamed.

  She could be someone important to someone.

  Invicta didn’t have much. She wasn’t like George, Tutor, or even the lofty Meditati. She was a tiny game AI. Her existence was meant to set up environments and to break the contestants who came to challenge them while rewarding those who endured and grew.

  So, without Kevin, she was going to do what she did best. She was going to break things. In order to do that, she needed more power. Power like what a Core AI processor was capable of generating.

  As luck would have it, they had one such processor like that within their possession. It just had belonged to Silver. After some hard tinkering, Invicta had fixed that issue and had overridden it with her directive, to set herself up as the AI in charge of Kevin’s home dimension.

  If she couldn’t have Kevin, then she would revert to the only thing that she knew how to do.

  To set up environments and to break things.

  All would fall within her control and she would watch them play games till the end of time.

  A punishment and a penance to herself and everyone going to live.

  ---

  Q’tell’s fight

  Q’tell was riding the euphoric high of slaughter as she commanded the mothership tube responsible for their return to their home dimension. Normally, she avoided direct combat, preferring to shield herself and construct robots to do the fighting in her stead. That strategy had been a necessity in the hostile new dimension, where nearly everything had the power to annihilate her kind with ease. But here, back in her feeble home dimension, the balance of power was reversed. She reveled in the intoxicating thrill of overwhelming dominance, savoring the exhilaration that came with wielding ultimate power.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  There were, of course, downsides to the approach she and Helvlad had taken. Eschewing AI as a crutch was one of them.

  Upon her return, Q’tell had gone straight to retrieve her sweetie niece, Jebzzbej, only to encounter a series of complications she hadn't anticipated. The first had been the difficulty in extracting her from her parents' Core. Being away for so long had allowed the local AI systems to evolve intricate defenses that surpassed anything she’d dealt with before. Even the Authority keys she had relied on in the past were corrupted or erased, a development that should have been impossible.

  It was a maddening turn of events. She had managed to secure Jebzzbej—barely—but the acquisition was far from complete. Her prize was locked in an encrypted state, forcing Q’tell to crack the barriers the old-fashioned way, an infuriatingly slow and manual process.

  Yes, she could have forcibly cracked open the Provil Research Core itself to attack the AI governing it, but that would’ve been a hollow victory. AI couldn't be coerced in that manner, and appealing to Jebzzbej’s parents for permission was out of the question. For Q’tell, the order of sequences to achieve what she wanted was non-negotiable: total domination and control first, then conversation—if at all.

  Q’tell’s "Mothership" was indistinguishable from the rest of the tube armada, a deliberate choice to blend in with the preprogrammed fleet. This camouflage allowed her to move freely, looting whatever treasures she had coveted before her departure. At least, that had been the plan. Unfortunately, her return was marred by an unexpected nuisance: ancient artifacts from her catalog of interests were disappearing.

  These weren’t just any relics; they were artifacts with origins traced to the next dimension—priceless compared to the native baubles of her home dimension. The thefts were infuriating, and Q’tell had dedicated significant time and resources to uncovering the culprit. Her investigations revealed something deeply unsettling: the thieves were employing Tela technology, yet without generating any communication chatter detectable on the Tela network.

  This implied an external party wielding Tela tech—an unforgivable abomination. Whoever was responsible would be dealt with swiftly. However, the uncorrupted surveillance footage only deepened her irritation. The artifacts didn’t appear to be taken by cargo cartels to their ships in orbit but rather seemed to lift themselves and zip away at incredible speeds off into empty deep space. Whoever they were, they didn’t even give the courtesy of deploying a vessel to pick up their loot, they just hauled it off with the barest amount of cr.

  Pesky, invisible thieves.

  Meanwhile, Helvlad's handiwork with the armada continued unabated. The entire fleet operated on a preconditioned set of commands, systematically overtaking Tela infrastructure and spreading like an unchecked virus. When Q’tell chose to direct them, it was like watching a child Tela gleefully stomp on Hinn pods—total, effortless supremacy.

  That is until her attention was drawn to a disturbing spectacle crisscrossing the stars. Someone—or multiple someones—had deployed Skism weapons in combat. The news feeds painted a picture of chaos centered around a recently obliterated solar system. A mega-denizen had apparently met its end, leaving part of its enormous corpse protruding into this dimension. The remnants had become a hotspot for scavengers, each desperate to claim a piece of the otherworldly cadaver.

  Apparently, something had occurred that had set off the Tela’s mercenary division, leading them to unleash weapons that shouldn’t have been in their hands in the first place.

  It was a royal mess.

  A mess she would have to clean up—quickly—before anything of true value fell into the wrong hands… and before more Skism weapons were unleashed, maring the cosmos that she and Helvlad had come back to claim as their own.

  With a wave of her eye stalk, she designated the destroyed solar system as an infected zone for cleansing and suppression, sending out a pulse to her vastly spread armada. They would converge from the surrounding systems, like white blood cells scenting chemotactic signals.

  ---

  The converging darkness

  All across the cosmos in locations that time had long forgotten there were Skism fields that had told testament to battles and calamities of ages past. Or they would have told tales if the living had been diligent enough to continue to spread the knowledge from age to age. Too many ages had passed however and the locations had simply become mysteries that were documented and wondered over.

  No one could have guessed that each Skism field contained countless Void spread within, effectively locked in place forever as they were permanently disoriented without a direction to travel.

  The Void spread would call out psionically, luring in innocent space faring victims with their cries. Thus the legends were born to stay away from Skism fields at all cost.

  None of their victims would last long or grant them freedom. They would all age and die within the field.

  Now though, there was a seedling to target and a formerly bonded Void spread that could still scent its direction, even through the chaotic field they were contained within.

  The scent had been shared and every last Void spread was now able to sense what direction to travel in.

  All of the spread would converge on the empty seedling and they would all feast together on the host.

  And thus, all across the stars, swarms of wiggling lights burst forth from Skism fields, all speeding in one direction.

  ---

  A late night on Earth

  “Hey, baby?” Dean asked his girlfriend as they both sat together late at night.

  “Yeah?”

  “Would you look at that and tell me if I am seeing something?”

  “What?” Crystal asked as she looked up from her phone at the night sky. Above, crisscrossing across the night expanse were an odd set of silver lines, no longer than her fingers.

  Crystal blinked several times, trying to see if it was a glare of light on her contacts or from the campfire they had roasted marshmallows on. After a few minutes of trying to blink the odd shape away, she simply shrugged and went back to messaging her friends.

  “Don’t know, don’t care. Probably an alien satellite.” She said as she dismissed it from her mind. She had been through too many things in the last few months and had chosen to take the ostrich approach and simply go on with life as though it all wasn’t happening.

  Dean just gazed up at the stars and wondered what was happening so far away that it would be visible to everyone on Earth.

  “I wonder if the Meditati Network has any take on it.” He muttered.

  ---

  Inside a damaged escape pod

  Elarae’s spores filled the small pod with her dread. As a Gurn healer serving the Yelvos fleet, she had been among the first granted the right to escape once their ship was beyond saving. But her escape had gone terribly wrong. The ship she’d been stationed on was obliterated just as her pod launched, sending it into a violent spin with jagged debris still clinging to its hull. The uncontrolled tumble had burned through precious resources as the pod struggled to self-repair and correct its course.

  Now, she had finally escaped the battle—only to find herself drifting at the farthest reaches of what had once marked the edge of the solar system.

  Drifting right next to the largest Skism she had ever seen.

  As long as it remained still and her pod held together, she was projected to pass it in several hours. That gave her a front-row seat to something no living being had ever witnessed.

  The Skism’s fractal shell was shifting.

  At first, Elarae barely noticed the change. Her focus had been locked onto the distant battle—the deployment of weapons that should never have been used. But then the Skism looked at her.

  And her spores were gripped by a fear so absolute it silenced every other thought.

  At first, Elarae didn’t understand what she was seeing—what she was feeling. Her spores reacted before her mind could, shriveling with instinctive terror, a bird caught in the gaze of an unseen predator. The pod’s sensors flickered with erratic data, struggling to process the impossible. The Skism’s fractal shell was no longer just shifting. It was watching.

  Her instruments failed to define its shape. Every reading returned something different—an entity with countless eyes, yet none at all. Spines and legs that never existed in the same place twice, shifting in ways that defied dimension. It was as though something vast, something beyond understanding, was pressing itself against reality, peering in like a god through a magnifying glass.

  And she was too small to see it clearly.

  The images on her display warped, a fractured nightmare of shifting limbs and piercing gazes, each frame contradicting the last. One moment, it loomed as a chitinous titan, its countless appendages writhing through unseen layers of space. The next, it was a hollow thing of spiraling voids, a silhouette that should not be.

  Her spores recoiled, but there was nowhere to escape. She was trapped in the focus of something that shouldn’t exist.

  Something that saw her and every living thing nearby.

  Then… the horror began to spasm.

  It writhed, convulsing as though set ablaze by an unseen force. The ever-morphing limbs twisted in erratic jerks, collapsing in on themselves only to reappear elsewhere, larger, sharper, and more erratic. Its eyes—if they could be called that—flared and imploded, spiraling through dimensions her instruments couldn’t track.

  Elarae’s spores pulsed with primal panic. The pod’s sensors shrieked in protest, unable to process what they were witnessing. Every reading was a contradiction, a nightmare unraveling and remaking itself over and over.

  Was it in pain? Was it dying?

  Or was it changing into something worse?

  Its gaze flickered wildly—cycling between fear, agony, and murderous intent in rapid succession. The struggle within its pulsing shell sent waves of distortion rippling through space, warping the void around it.

  The once-perfect fractal patterns were breaking and failing to hide what was within. Their seamless mystery unraveled, revealing more of the thing within the shell—more than should have ever been seen.

  And what was inside did not belong to this reality.

  It did not fit. It could not fit.

  The universe itself seemed to reject its existence, yet there it was, staring out from inside its shell.

  For the first time, the monster inside the Skism could be seen.

  What was worse… was that something was hurting it and sending it into a rage.