With a scythe made of materialized nothingness, I carved open the chest of some manner of dark insectoid deity. Caustic ichor splashed over me. Melting my armor. Burning my skin. Corroding the world around me. The insectoid-deity bellowed voicelessly, its voice stolen away after its lungs, and most of its other inner-organs, had been erased. Then I retrieved my scythe from its torso and lopped off the dark god’s head.
With a body that was presently mortal, in only the most technical sense, I strode into the stars and waged war with the immortal powers that insisted on going against the paradigms and laws we’d set in place. It was something that needed to be done, because it seems we’d barely been in charge for a full millennia and we already had people undermining our rule and pushing the multiverses under our care into depravity and ruin.
Planets collapsed. Realms crumbled into nothing. Stars were blown out like candles. Galaxies were swept away, and in some cases, entire universes simply ceased to be leaving only a few stray glowing particles behind. Another vast armada of gods, demons, spirits, Seelie fae, dark entities, immortal Empty-Harvester warriors, and magic-tech constructs swept through the 122 Multiverses of the Empty-Bell Complex. The Angels alongside the Empty-Society.
The demons fought with them too. There was also an army of gods, demi-gods, and transcendental mortals eager to earn some karma and cosmic merit. A great “spring cleaning” was taking place. It seemed that the Empty-Society had been a bit too lenient and loose when it was taking over the first time around. So, they were being a little more exacting this time.
Not only were the multiverses being reviewed to see if any new malefactors had risen up since the Empty-Society took over, but the systems we’d set in place were also being reviewed as well, and adjusted to reduce the number of abominable offenses taking place under our watch. Apparently, telling people not to be dicks, and hoping they’d make a good faith effort to follow that simple maxim wasn’t enough. So a lot of people would need to die, and a lot more would need to have “don’t be dick” spelled out for them, in even bigger, even brighter, fiery, all-consuming, neon letters.
You’d think that this would jeopardize the operation to try and catch the Dark Song Orchestra with their pants down, but actually, that was still kind of fine. First off, after a strategic meeting with the Empty-Society’s other leaders we decided that probably didn’t matter. It’d be terrible to die of an intestinal infection, while we were waiting to fight off a flu. Second, this was just a minor pivot in strategy.
The plan before was to wait for the DSO to move and then spring our forces, now, the slightly firmer hold we had over the 122 multiverses would make us an intractable more difficult target for the DSO to hit. Apparently, we were too optimistic in hoping that we could take over a place, and the native powers would behave themselves and cease the abusive practices set in place by the Dark Bell Collective.
We didn’t have the Division and the House’s clout and repute yet, so we’d need to defend our rule in a more in-your-face manner. We were being a little less selective about the necks we stood, and looping off more than a few necks while we were at it. Yet it was probably for the best, because unsurprisingly a fair number of these duplicitous m-fers were secretly waiting to flip sides and join the DSO as soon as it seemed fitting to do so.
The Empty-Society wasn’t going to wax completely tyrannical. After all, what’s the point of winning if you end up just as bad as your enemies? Yet, in the face of the current situation and the data that had been revealed to me thanks to the Court of Autumn’s malfeasance, it seemed an “audit” was now in order. Thus the 122 multiverses of the Empty-Bell Complex were boiling over. We were firming up our foundations to avoid trouble in the future. We weren’t unreasonable. Those who still held loyalty for, and longed for the Dark Bell Collective and DSO, could either leave in peace, or lie in pieces. It was as simple as that.
If we did our job properly this time. Then even if problems arose in the future, it’d be harder for our enemies to hide from us, and it’d make it much less likely for us to be targeted by cosmic factions looking for easy prey. It’d make it much more likely that our inevitable clash with the DSO would end in our favor, even without the House and the Division’s aid.
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I might make it sound like the whole process of cleaning up the literal and figurative corruption that we’d discovered in the Empty-Bell Complex was a lengthy process, but the clean-up process actually ended pretty quickly. We were done in a mere century. We had the fact that we were already overlords over the entire Empty-Bell Complex. It was less a war, and more a series of extensive police actions, and unlike mortal powers we saw no need to pussy around trying to compromise with those whose ultimate aim was our undoing, and the continued exploitation of the multiverses.
We didn’t do more than needed to. Those who needed to die,... died. Those who needed to be removed from power were removed from power. And believe it or not, those who could be left off with warnings, or chased away, got some lenience. Mercy wasn’t weakness, often it was good politics, because people were less likely to fight to the last man when they thought there was a way out.
A large number of power systems and hierarchies were reordered to make sure that everyone was properly on the up and up. There would be no more leaving the sheep to the wolves. There would be no more getting tricked by wolves in wool coats. Then like the sea receding after a storm, we pulled back again.
The Division of Cosmic Artifice’s “at arm’s reach”-methodology of governing over territory was still our ideal. We weren’t some petty totalitarian government so terrified of our constituents that we wanted to spend the rest of forever officiously trying to control every aspect of our subjects’ conduct and thinking. We were just trying to root out the few bad apples we’d failed to catch before things turned rotten in a way that couldn’t be remedied.
Now, I was currently in bed eating ice-cream, while watching tv.
“Hm…Reality television? Couldn’t we watch something more enlightening?” said a voice at my side.
“Nhn…Sure,” I grunted, because I hadn’t really been paying attention to what was going on onscreen anyway.
As you can see, I wasn’t alone in bed. It wasn’t Jack, or Kal. Unbelievably, it was Ellison. She lay beside me, the covers pulled up to cover her breasts, while occasionally snatching the marshmallows from the sundae I was eating. I mean…I’m pretty sure I just spent two-thirds of a chapter discussing how I thought she was the one would-be paramour that I probably wouldn’t end up with. Yet, here we were. I’m not even sure how it happened either. It just sort of happened, almost seeming to defy logic, but making enough sense that I wasn’t freaking out about it.
I wasn’t sure if the sex meant that we were definitely going to be a thing in the long run, but we were definitely a thing now. Maybe it was the romance of cutting your way through 10,000 worlds to slay millions of immortal malefactors that brought us together. Alternatively, maybe I was an easier lay than I thought, which was fine, I guess. The key thing that I had been watching, and would be watching for in the future, was whether I could trust her, and whether she could trust me. Mutual respect, and mutual trust would be the key to our relationship, since a lot of other things had been made clear during that last hundred years of fighting side by side.
