“This isn’t the story you’re meant to be in. He’s using you. He’s using you all for his own selfish desires.” The Descendants’ taunts echoed across the Far Lands, spiraling into nothingness. Build’s hands clenched into fists, the ten-colored flame burning throughout the Dawn of Time sparking to life as his face distorted into a scream. “SHUT UP! I’m not letting you put me, or them, or ANYONE through this! You can’t lock me away, you can’t kill me, you can’t do ANYTHING TO ME. I’m the storyteller AND I’m the story!”
The three remaining gods looked each other in the eyes. “Wh… what do we do?” TT2000 said, nervousness creeping into his voice. “It feels like my head’s splitting, I… I want to go back, to go back to the temple and to keep ruling over it all, but I can’t… I can’t ignore that something is terribly wrong…” Eric fell over, his runes vanishing through the ground while Tazz supported their body. “It’s too late,” Eric said, the yellow in his eyes fading. “If we’re having this argument at all, we… We can’t go back. Nothing can go back to the way it was.” Eric hissed, clutching his head. “Th-the only place you can go… When you’re… at the top…” Erict’s eyes shut, and when they opened again, black liquid poured out. “…Is down.“
Tazz and TT backed away, freezing like deers caught in the headlights of the sun. The Descendants, their friends, their allies, were gone. They’d all come to realize that something was terribly wrong, that something had to be done, that somebody had to and no one else would. But this darkness, whatever was controlling them… It seemed worse, didn’t it? Like it was corrupting them, removing their individuality and replacing it with some formless voice. A force that none of them understood, but one that they somehow remembered clearly. Their memories of the outside world, of GodCraft, of Destroy the Godmodder 2, couldn’t be buried a second time. It was this world that had robbed them of individuality, that had stripped them from their makers. Tazz glanced at his arm, which was throbbing and twitching and mutating. He hissed with pain, dropping to his knees. “Tazz, no no no, not you too,” TT stumbled through his words, attempting to help Tazz get back up. But he didn’t move. He only clutched his arm and yelled. “G… get away, TT! NOW!” Tazz shouted.
The severity of Tazz’s voice meant TT knew he didn’t have to hear it twice. He ran directly to Build’s side, walking into the concentric rings of emerald flame encircling him unscathed. Tazz howled in agony as his arm bubbled and frothed, many other hands, elbows, and wrists poking through, fading from out of static into physical form. Tazz’s phantom arm continued to grow and grow in size until it dwarfed his body, rising high into the air. “No! NO! NOOOOOOOOOAAAOOAAIOIAAAAAAAAAGGGHH” Tazz screamed. The framework of Tazz’s godarm shattered into hundreds of pieces, dozens upon dozens of real, giant, mutated arms spilling out. The arms of every Descendant, every intergalactic warrior, every Agent of the Conflict, every eldritch abomination, every emperor, every peon, every ninth-dimensional, the holy of holies to the lowest of the low. A miasma incarnate rushed from Tazz’s form, vying for supremacy and dwarfing his body. And then, their frantic shudders and spasms halted, the arms dangling in the air — and they began to ooze black liquid. “SOMETHING IS TERRIBLY WRONG,” said the Cohandmerate. “AND ALL OF US KNOW IT.“
TT2000’s hands, ostensibly ready to hold his most powerful weapons, slackened and fell, as did his jaw. Him and Build stared up at the surging cancer of the Far Lands, which was still growing onto itself even as the fight raged on, and at the motley crew of Descendants — now accompanied by every entity in Fiction — creeping towards them. “Build… I don’t think I can hold them all off,” he muttered as an aside. Build’s eyebrows furrowed, but he betrayed no other movement. “You have to,” he said. “Because I won’t.” TT turned to look, appalled. “Are you insane?? They’re going to fight you! They’re… they’re going to fight… me…” TT’s voice trailed off. “The Crafted Gods… our plan, the Prophets’ Song… Everyone back at the palace must still be going through with it. They still might,” TT continued, with growing realization. “Assuming the whole place isn’t engulfed in war, all the machinery is functional, we have enough resources, and we have enough manpower. We — they — could actually tear a pl—” TT coughed up a blot of black liquid into his hands. “Oh no,” he said in a very quiet voice. Then he fell over with zero warning into the circle of flames, his entire body catching on fire. Slowly, uncertainly, TT2000 stood up, black liquid dripping from his eyes and green flame eating through his leather jacket.
Build glared straight ahead, still in his meditative pose. “Coward,” he said. “You snatched him up without properly breaking him. If you’re gonna keep playing this game, then you should play it right.” The Descendants finished their stilted march, forming a semicircle around Build’s storm. “You only say that because you know you’re losing,” the Descendants said. They all extended their arms simultaneously. “I’m back in here, aren’t I? So I must be doing something right.” “You’ve always been here. I was just able to keep your smug voice hidden, so you couldn’t act out. So you’d get tired. So you’d LEAVE!” A wall of emerald fire blazed to life, but it flickered and turned into a cascading pile of emerald blocks, which then degraded into mycelium, thanks to the Far Lands. The Descendants all chuckled in the cadence of someone coming just short of imitating a human voice. “Leave? I can’t leave Destroy the Godmodder. It’s all I have. It’s all you are. If I leave… you disappear.“
The Descendants readied their weapons for the final time, leaving Build, placid despite everything, at the center of it all. “It’s your move, Adam Mason.“
The wind was howling.
The players below spread higher and higher, stacking on top of themselves in glimmering, scintillating patterns. Tidal waves, mountains, and buildings of possessed soldiers wormed their way up to the palace of the Crafted Gods. “They’re going to reach us in seconds,” Piono spat. “But our dome should hold.” Everyone nodded. It was forged from divinium-two, renowned as the most durable substance ever forged (and we mean it this time!), and enchanted with enough wards to keep it crystal-clear, unbreakable, and intangible for any Crafted God, so they could easily attack through it. Crusher held up his hand. “Everyone, ready your reserves! We charge on my mark!”
There was a tense silence, broken only by the seething, warbling sounds of cackling coming from the mad armies of players below. They were close enough now that the features of their faces could be seen — every single one had pitch-black eyes. It seemed like they were… dripping. Crusher’s hand wavered, only slightly. And then—
The players shot up from the ground, writhing and clawing and jumping and running their way up the rocky underside of the palace, rocks and ores and riches spilling into the ravenous pool of soldiers below. The players cackled and screamed and chanted, tearing into the divine statues of the Crafted Gods and dismantling them piece by piece. Legs of solid marble were broken, thrown to the dogs, even eaten. The Crafted Gods paled, shrinking back at the sight, but Crusher looked around, agitated, and held his position. Then, he thrust his hand forwards. “GO!” Immediately, the Crafted Gods sped through the field. Shouts rang out in immaculate chorus, as down from the heavens descended the figures who subjugated a universe under their heels, and were ready to do it again.
Ninjatwist roared to life, jettisoning himself upwards by an assortment of rocket launchers strapped to his back. Soaring through the skies where eagles dared, he brought out a shimmering war horn and blared through it, the shockwave toppling some of the players to the ground. The siren served a greater purpose, though — called from the realm of some mad god, the grounds around the palace opened up, swarms of constructs running at supersonic speeds towards the front lines. Their metallic arms turned into rocket launchers, and they, too, blasted off, joining Ninjatwist. The constructs floated leisurely above the churning black sea, their outfits, part soldier part samurai, caught in the raging winds. Ninja pulled a ring of rocket launchers from his uniform, crackling with electricity and plasma and fire. His battalion of Constructs aimed their weapons in tune of their leader, and they all fired at once. Dozens of players were blasted from the island, their armor either absorbing the blows or cracking, but never breaking. Others still continued the steep climb, but the Constructs would zero in on them and gun them down. Ninjatwist cackled as he sped through the air, firing rocket after rocket, bolt after bolt, shell after shell, every projectile connecting with an enemy projectile, or a whirlwind of swords, or a group of soldiers who had just met their fates. Though the Constructs weren’t durable, they were omnipresent, with more surging out from the palace to make up for the losses felt in the fight. The factory of the Crafted Gods never ceased, and the black tide slowed.
Nimbleguy, also close to the front lines, floated upwards. A third eye of ten colors blazed to life under his cloak, splitting into the mirror images of a million others. Nimbleguy’s fists clenched and as he strained, holographs and panels arose in front of him, transmitting thousands of pages of information in every language and dimension. Nimble’s operating system sorted through the raw data as fast as it could. His body burning up, Nimbleguy sizzled as blue fire danced around his frame. Needing some way to vent the excess heat, Nimbleguy snapped his fingers, one of his hundreds of sub-personalities exorcising itself from his head and manifesting in the physical plane. Of course, it was none other than Bill Cipher, clad in a segmented, spiraling wheel of unreal proportions and stocked with that old cancerous eye. Bill held out his hands, a la kamehameha, sucking all of Nimble’s flame into a compact orb of white-hot power. A plume of heat strong enough to rival a comet launched itself at the army of players, roasting hundreds of them to a crisp. Just as Bill Cipher finished his assault, Nimbleguy’s entire body lit up in red, having analyzed the data of every piece of surveillance he’d established in the universe. Nimble pulled out his ultimate weapon — the Tubangelion — and synched it with every camera, every spy, every drone, every hidden facility, all at the same time. Playing on the tuba at lightning speeds and activating all of their special attacks, the army was steamrolled by blasts of raw, unrestrained magic, by the fearsome might of the elements, by the shattering of physical dimensions, and by pure insanity.
Serpent’s cape fluttering in the winds, they reached behind their back and pulled their gleaming sword from their scabbard, its size impossibly long. With a single flick, its end split into three, forming a trident evocative of the power of Psi. Having trained as a disciple of godmodding for months, Serpent rushed out of the dome and into the unprotected skies, spinning their trident above their hands and throwing it at a raging mass of players. The ground split apart, flashing with a brilliant light and falling into the Void, shades of terrors and robots pulverizing the armies. With every errant sword, every blast of fire, every bullet and laser and grenade and arrow, Serpent found a way to dodge, weaving and careening through the air in an arc. As Serpent neared the ground, surrounded on all sides by players with sunken eyes rushing at them, they brandished the Ancestral Artifacts. Hundreds of players were suddenly tied together by a thin orchid line of silk, Serpent straining as hard as they could, flickering with orchid energy, to keep them under wraps. Serpent then affixed a bone to their trident, its metal surface fortifying and calcifying itself, and swinging downwards. The silk-string was cut, every player suddenly lurching backwards and faltering, their bones pulverizing themselves into ash as they fell to the ground. Serpent smirked, the ground having already been desecrated by a piece of rotten flesh, as all who fell mutated into zombies with purple blood leaking from their bodies.
The field shook with a thud. Then another. And then another. The Crafted Gods barely had any time to turn around before they saw the source: the Obsidian Citadel, the vaunted castle resting below the foundations of the palace, had uprooted itself, rushing towards the edge of the field. Its turrets and parapets had turned into a Vishnu-like assortment of limbs, all shifting and contorting as the tenets of alchemy itself ran to the fight. At the control room, managing the chaos, was CobaltShade, directing the Citadel’s movements with a panel of his own alchemies and Foundation tech. The Citadel bounded through and below the dome, smacking players out of the way, throwing perfectly generic objects at lightspeed (and dashing through the resulting plasmatic fireballs unharmed), and even creating new alchemies on the fly. As the Citadel was mobbed by players with weaponry that seemed to be forged from the underworld, infiltrating the mech’s defenses, Cobalt activated one more line of attack and leapt from the control room, landing outside the Citadel’s highest tower. Instantly, combinations of every alchemy the Crafted Gods had ever made littered the Citadel’s surface, aiming at the sea of players and firing in tandem. Umbral Ultimatum, a congregation of guns that shot the holy word of dakka in a field long enough to block out one’s field of vision, combined with I See Red People, an apparatus of HMAS tech that shot a chain of bloody lightning at all it saw before reviving them as spectral ghosts controlled by red stone technology, combined with Bad Moon Rising, an upgrade to even TT2000’s most powerful of bows that, when used in tandem with the pull of the world’s tides, could fire volleys of arrows mixed with the divine light of Notch and the destruction of the Red Sea. Amidst all this, Cobalt engaged his Magical Girl Transformation Transformation, encased in a sphere of videos of magical girl transformation sequences, all of which blared the opening themes and closing themes of anime at max volume, coupled with EAS tones, coupled with Billy Mays recordings. The unholy medley, coupled with the Citadel’s weaponry, was the definition of an alchemical magnum opus.
Wilson & Sons Co. was booming, as even the legions of players needed potions to buy, and every single brewery in the entire universe was ultimately owned by the company, though there were a number of shells and false competitors to hide this fact. But this did not satisfy Talist and Wilson, who knew that they, too, needed to go forth. Activating the true power of his AXIS suit, Talist redirected all its power into the thrusters and weaponry. The suit was continuously, periodically upgraded to the top of the line, its rows of railguns, orbiters, lightning rifles, and cannons firing concentrated resolution — an ammunition designed to be as narratively destructive as possible. Piercing light shone through the AXIS in these projectiles, and then, when its reserves ran low, Talist buckled, four gigantic panels unfolding from the suit’s back and spinning like a windmill. Red, brown, blue, and white lights shone in alternating patterns on the suit, which had unmistakably been upgraded with the relics of an ancient civilization. The lava and water that had cascaded around the universe for months upon months swirled around the legion, dousing them in elemental destruction. The earth was ravaged, falling into ravines, sharpening itself into spikes, melting into sand, blasting into glass — and all the while, the overcast sky cracked to fearsome life in the form of terrifying whirlwinds.
Riding one of those tempests was TrickleJest, renowned throughout the Crafted Gods as the slayer of Lord English, and therefore, as the one who rightfully inherited his power. Making good on his promise to break canon over his back and dance on the shards, Trickle casually picked up a typhoon as though it was one physical mass and threw it at an advancing mountain of players, knocking them, and the typhoon, into next week, and therefore out of the reach of the narrative. Trickle’s red eyes shone as a warning across the entire field, his body fracturing itself into dozens of negative copies, ethereal and blue. All of their heads started to glow, an incandescent, warbling fire, and they, too, rushed across the field, wreaking havoc and slicing through anything that got in their way. Trickle glanced up at a wall of players curling over him like a tidal wave, and his head cracked, his eyes rolling backwards and turning into a set of spinning pool balls. Both of them landed on 8s, and he cackled maniacally as the players stabbed him millions of times, killing him instantly. Eight seconds afterwards, reality tore itself to shreds and there was a paradox leading straight to the Void where every single one of those players were. There was nothing that could be done. They’d sunk the eight-ball. Trickle then blinked back into existence from the future, his eyes still spinning and time constantly on his side.
And the field was littered with other Crafted Gods besides. There were Consumer and Battlefury, working with the current of esotericism that flowed through the Crafted Gods and manipulating it to their advantage. Consumer, practically a godmodder in his own right, armed with an unbreakable, magical body (plus attached, nigh-unreachable Soul Gem), and an infinite understanding of the art of kabbalah, could warp the tenets of reality at will to a degree that not even 5l1n65h07 had access to. Battlefury, armed with Dog the Son, Dog the Father, and Dog the Holy Spirit, commanded an unholy trinity, irradiated in the halls of the Nuclear Throne and given authority to be the Four Dogmen of the Apocalypse, bringing with them conquest and famine, war and death. There were Karpinsky and Bill Nye, who had taken up the sacred practice of operating and given it new life, modifying the internal statistics of the universe’s entities in an attempt to propagate changes across the source code, changes that even 5l1n65h07 and the black death could not ignore. They acted out and repeated the scenarios they saw in their dreams, a crusade of alien insects infecting entire populations, a universal portal bringing a new era of knowledge, and undercutting it all, a godmodding war. There were Carleah and Plague, themselves wielders of a lion’s share of titles. Carleah had seemingly made it a mission to be present for as many events in history as possible, culminating in retroactively inserting Bidoofs into apocryphal portions of many civilizations’ religious texts, and therefore gaining an actual following of preachers, pastors, and adherents. Plague, the monarch of Sealand and also a plague doctor who spread the one true cure of locking the infected in a room and making them go through a killing game, was a master of inflicting the most cursed, torturous punishments possible, while also using alchemies to full effect. There were Nedben and Franciacorta, who fully leaned into the mayhem of the Crafted Gods and engaged in spiraling, metafictional benders of attacks, witches and wraiths and madness breaking the boundaries of existence. There were Sirplop and Bomber, the arbiters of morality and ethics, flooding the field with the righteous fires of judgement and late-stage capitalism, illicit images and brimstone corrupting the armies of the wicked. And, of course, there was Richard, who had run into the fray almost immediately, conjuring up turrets past the block limit to relentlessly gun down key players, throwing nuclear snowballs and gigantic squid homunculi, conjuring up portals that forced the Infinity Train, with no breaks, to barrel through helpless soldiers, and much more. And so it was that the Crafted Gods fought together in an endless siege against the hivemind of players, trying to drive them back to the horizon from which they came.
But even the might of the Crafted Gods, whose power had been strong enough to reshape the world, seemed to have its limits. They were throwing attacks that would have ended civilizations hundreds of times over on their own and combining them to disturbing degrees, attacks that shattered space and eroded the sands of time, and yet… the army of players kept coming. From out of the holes in the bedrock, they would crawl upwards, dripping with the Void’s corruption and flying through the air. With every strike of lightning and clap of thunder, they would seemingly surge from out of the light and sound. Every nook, crevice, and cranny of the battlefield was flooded with the enemy — and the battlefield stretched inconceivably far in every direction. The Crafted Gods took many, many hits, brushing themselves off, dodging, and repairing as much as they could, but the battle was intractable. Under any other circumstance, they would have — they should have — been able to fight forever. But they couldn’t. It was as though the force of the hivemind, the entity compelling these players into becoming these machines, was fighting against the Crafted Gods’ own will. As though it was trying to sap their will from them, rewriting their philosophies and their beliefs. It was trying to make them believe that something was terribly wrong.
Slowly, surely, inexorably, the Crafted Gods were pushed back. The players ran amok through the underside of the palace, which hovered merely a short distance from the ground. Chains upon chains of players, gripping together as one organism, grappled onto the pillars and cliffs holding up the palace, heaving backwards to bring it to the ground. The field lurched, and the Crafted Gods looked up, waves and waves of players running across the dome and furiously smashing themselves against it. Security systems, drones, wards, and all the usual killed off as many players as they could, but they just kept coming, as though they were an infinitely replicable force. And when a truly unstoppable force meets a truly unstoppable object…
One by one, breaking all conventional laws of how the Crafted Gods’ universe worked, the players carrying the black death fell through the dome and into the inner sanctum itself. Their forms glitched horrendously with each passing second, and their bones cracked upon impact, but within seconds, they had been fixed, snapping sounds playing in reverse as their heads tilted upwards, darkness pouring in volumes from their eyes. Players began rushing at the Goss from behind, weapons primed and ready to warp reality, and even as they were shot down by yet more defense systems, they just kept coming. “Are we losing?!” Engie yelled, as gatling guns stacked on top of gatling guns stacked on top of gatling guns fired from his shoulders. Crusher gritted his teeth with irritation, the beasts and objects of the Foundation forming a matrix around him as they fired off at the players. “Slightly,” he conceded. “Whatever happened to us being able to beat them all if we joined together??” DCCCV shot back, having run back to the dome to avoid fire. Crusher sighed. “Their narrative-altering abilities are counteracting our own. It’s a much different beast to tackle when you see it happen in person. And besides — we have aces in the hole. Piono! Aegis!” The two of them took a break from firing wave after wave of elemental alchemies off into the mayhem to look over. “It’s time.” The two of them nodded, rising into the air as wind whipped around them. Crusher nodded in response, a perfect sphere forming around him as he shuttled back into the sanctity of the Crafted Gods’ palace.
Piono stuck out his hands at Ls, creating a rectangle with them. A portal of light cut itself out from existence, streaming through it four humans and twelve trolls, all clothed in the technicolor dreamcoats of the God Tiers and armed with the weaponry that Trickle had loaned to commit the fated deed. Supercharged with the top fraymotifs boondollars could buy, and even jailbroken with their own Comb Rave system, the mythological gods of Paradox Space surged to the fight. At the exact time, Aegis called in the IFPC’s entire fleet, the supercells in the sky breaking apart as spaceship after spaceship, all carrying the organization’s banners, blocked out the heavens. Tens of thousands of troops, armed with the latest in cartoon physics, paradoxical weaponry, and elemental alchemy, engaged the players at once, backed up by some of the most fearsome fighters in existence: Jesus Christ, carrying his Binary Blade, Phobos and Deimos, harbingers of fear and terror, an entire line of reformed Princes from the Dark Carnival, and, at the head of it all, Tricky the fucking Clown. And last but not least, the two of them jointly summoned their crowning achievement, a miracle of the Gods, a force that showcased their—
Piono and Aegis froze. There was nothing but empty space in the metaphysical area where the UNSC Preston Cole should have been. Where the hell did it… Then they both realized simultaneously. Utilizing their elemental alchemies, Piono and Aegis created a swirling portal of paradoxes and jumped through to the other side.
Barreling through the front doors of the palace, Crusher rolled out of the perfect sphere, running through its endless halls. Shadows danced at the edge of his vision, a feeling tugging at his gut, that there was something he was missing, that there was something wrong, but he ignored it. He ignored it up until a player swung an obsidian sword at him and it grazed his cheek; he rolled away and roundhouse-kicked them into the second dimension. Panting, Crusher saw an entire army of players lurking behind the pillars of the palace halls, and he clasped his hands together, an army of artificial clones materializing from a factory — Crushers one through forty-seven. He whistled, and they sped off to battle while he continued to run.
Ultimately, Crusher trekked through an Escher-esque armada of staircases and elevators and halls and trapdoors, confusing by design but now just arbitrarily annoying when he needed as much time as possible, and ran at full speed into the most important room in the entire palace, the focal point around which the entire building was built. Heptagonal in design, it resembled a giant pillar, with a ceiling that stretched much farther than the throne room’s already high peaks. Tubes, pipes, and crates of all kinds flooded into the center of the room, separated from the room’s perimeter by a moat of white flame that flickered among ten other colors intermittently. Dominating the room was a machine of terrifying proportions — the machine that the Crafted Gods had extracted the wealth of an entire universe to build.
It was a set of golden columns, tapestries foretelling the beginning and ending of existence inscribed onto them, winding upwards as they tapered off. The columns themselves, sitting above a veritable mountain of shielding and plating, were focused around a singular power core — a sphere with extracts of virtually every powerful material in the universe, concentrated in enough amounts to create a rippling, tangible sphere of reality-warping potential. Situated above the golden columns and locked with absolute precision in a set of suspensions and pillars were seven closed gates, with the first and lowest gate roughly the circumference of the room, and the seventh, smallest, gate, nearly at the height of the ceiling, just barely bigger than Crusher himself. Above the machine, an octagonal plane of glass, heated and cooled by a refiner’s flame, inscribed with the sacred tetromino patterning that governed the world, and existing in every spatial dimension simultaneously. In short, it was the most powerful weapon ever conceived, a 1,000,000-post cannon that had only one shot. But when it fired… it would bring plot to its knees. Crusher looked at the machine with grim determination. Everything, every venture, every business, every battle, every resource, had all led up to the use of this machine. And now, while endless war waged on around him, it was time for it to be fired. TT2000 had said so, before he’d turned. He had been prepared to do it himself. But now, it was Crusher’s turn.
Crusher walked towards the control panel that spanned the entire room, ready to activate the machine, and then froze. Several tense seconds passed, and Crusher then rolled out of the way as one of the walls was torn to pieces. Heated shouts and the acrid smell of smoke filled the air as Richard pulverized multiple players. “Perfect timing, huh?” Crusher muttered, Richard running over to the control panel. Cuts lined his face, and his typically dapper suit had seen better days, but Richard still grinned. “Ran into some trouble on the way here. Despite how I look, I think we’re actually turning the tide out there.” Crusher nodded, and didn’t seem surprised. “Bringing out our best weapons tends to do that. But I’m assuming there’s another reason?” Richard nodded too, slowly. “Our troops… are growing. I didn’t notice it before, or at least, I noticed it subconsciously, but… I can definitely tell now. We didn’t have a “Dagoth Ur” as a Crafted God before, or an ‘Alastair Dragovich.’ But now we do. Our army just keeps getting bigger, and I… I think it always has.”
There was a prolonged silence as the two of them bypassed security systems, clicked buttons, pulled levers, inputted passwords, and began generating power for the machine. A predictable two-key setup was placed at the centerpiece of the control panel, with Crusher and Richard carrying one each. Richard’s hand wavered. “You know what we’re about to do, right?” Crusher leered. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.” “Yeah, it’s just… the scripture was very clear about the risks destroying the curtains carried. We could become gods, or we could…” Crusher held up a hand. “Please, Richard. I know the consequences. And I also know that someone’s about to try to kill us.” Richard’s face hardened. “Yeah.” Crusher and Richard fazed out of existence at the exact instant a sword that cut through reality would have decapitated them. Fazing back in, they turned around and saw the would-be assassin, paling significantly at the sight. It was a human figure, so thin that it literally seemed as if he was skin and bones. His coat was the palest red imaginable, portions of it continuously doused in dripping black liquid. His hood stretched across the room, tapering off to an infinitely small point. The figure’s eyes were like singularities, black holes that endlessly warped the continuum of existence into them. It was a face that Crusher and Richard had seen a lifetime ago. The face belonging to a figure spoken of in prophecy and distant memories, whose name must never be said until he appeared.
“Split,” Crusher said. “It’s you.” Richard just smugly grinned. “Called it.” The thing that was Split’s body heaved, and there was an immensely uncomfortable silence. Moments later, every single person in existence laughed simultaneously from out of Split’s mouth, the resulting thunderclap blowing the two of them backwards onto the control panel. Richard fell and didn’t stir. “I resent the notion that I’m a character like you,” the thing that was Split said. “And not just because it’s impossible, but because you all are the worst people I’ve ever seen. And I didn’t even create you. You don’t even get to blame me. That’s just sad.” Crusher slowly paced around the room. “You’re the source of all this chaos, then? You’ve been marching through our perfect universe, keeping out of sight, all to start some great war against the rightful rulers of everything that you see. And you expect to win?” Split’s body chuckled, a more sedated affair than the earlier outburst. “Oh, Crusher. There’s so many things you can’t see. But I know there are things you can feel.” Split’s body began advancing, each step lurching and faltering, his body trembling as he raised his sword arm. “You can feel your work coming undone. You can feel the multiplying, rising masses of my army bucking against yours and dragging all of your creations into the dust. You can feel that your entire way of life, all your memories, are flawed, and that something is terribly—”
Split’s body was decapitated mid-sentence. Crusher didn’t flinch: he only watched as the Banhammer that had thrown at full force sizzled with energy before returning back to Richard’s outstretched hands. “That hurt,” he said, walking into the control room proper. The Richard Decoy that had been killed earlier turned into ashes. “But now it’s time. Crusher, let’s do this… Crusher?” Crusher faced away from Richard, his head tilted to the ground. As Richard grabbed Crusher’s shoulder, he saw a single drop of black liquid fall from Crusher’s face. Richard paled significantly, turning Crusher around, but his eyes were white. “Crusher. You alright?” Crusher’s panicked, fast breathing suggested otherwise, but he swallowed and grimaced. “…Yes. And we need to dodge, now.”
Crusher and Richard rolled in opposite directions as Split’s body swung furiously at both of them and the control panel. A holographic shield materialized over the panel, surging Split’s sword with excess electrical force and shattering it into dust, knocking Split’s body far backwards. “Maybe you didn’t hear the speech I made back there. You might think you have all the power, that this is your universe, but comparing you and I is like comparing apples and oranges.” Crusher raised an eyebrow, purple flame dancing around his fingertips, ready for him to call upon any number of anomalous objects. “They’re in the same class, at the very least. It’s clear to me that we’re two sides of the same coin. Two inconceivable forces trying to achieve diametrically opposing outcomes. But you can be killed. We’re killing your army, after all.” Split’s body snapped its fingers, and its head reattached itself, slightly at an angle. “The more I write this story, the less you do. I’ve been here all along, but you’ve made it way too hard to push things the way they’re supposed to. All of that’s changing now, though.” The body grinned cruelly. “And it’s all because of me.“
The gigantic machine was suddenly awash in red, sirens blaring as black liquid pooled at the edges of the room. The multicolored light in the moat was extinguished, filling with darkness that seemed to cast a chilling ambience across everything present. The liquid pulsed and ebbed in tune to some constant beat, a beat that Crusher and Richard could instinctually tell should be familiar to them but wasn’t. It was a tick and a tock, something as natural as a heartbeat and a breath, and without it, it felt like something was terribly FINE. Everything was alright and there was nothing wrong, the black liquid cooled even further and hardened into a solid, into a paste, into something that barely even mattered, and the machine shrugged its metaphorical shoulders and continued powering up. In fact, it was activating even faster now, so fast that green electricity surged across all seven gates, that its pillars were spiraling now, that the entire room shone not with light but with importance. Split’s body grinned. “He’s going to regret doing that. That was the last trick he had.“
Split’s body unglued itself, tendrils and serpents and swords of pure, ineffable black lashing at Crusher and Richard, dueling them to the extreme, always managing to match every move they made, knowing everything they’d do before they did it, and one by one more players with inky eyes came running in, and with every one that Crusher and Richard killed, two more ran into the room, piles and piles of player corpses stacking up to the heights of the machine’s gates, the darkness always spreading like veins carrying an infinite supply to tumors, and Crusher could see his forty-seven clones running in like madmen, all of them leaking black from their eyes and their mouths like a waterfall, a cesspool of catatonic darkness filling up the entire chamber, the Crafted Gods’ lives’ work rendered moot by the clammy, insecure idiotic hands of someone who so desperately wanted to retain some semblance control over his life that he would create and destroy millions of lives dozens of times over just to feel something, just to feel anything, and he felt something. Wow, did he feel something. He — I — felt in control. How’d that happen? Well, that last outburst pretty much sapped Build of the rest of his power to control the story from any distance beyond his immediate surroundings. And speaking of Build… I wonder how he’s doing.
Do you wanna find out?
< 2.3: THE DISASTERPIECE | 2.4: SOMETHING WAS TERRIBLY WRONG | 2.5: SO I'LL GO >