Chương 530: BECMI Chapter 529 – That’s a Null on That

"Then the Carnifex were released upon Nown. Their goal is simple: to kill and feast upon all creatures that live here, solidifying their positions as the apex of lifeforms.

"They largely succeeded." And then I showed them what had become of Nown. Razed cities. Hills of bones. Twisted legions of undead. Crawling hordes of mutant things. Forests razed to clutching sands hungry for blood. Deserts razed to glass. Lakes and seas disgorging horrible bloated things onto the shores. Jungles eaten from the inside out and replaced with alien ecologies. Things never born on this world flapping through its skies, floating across its lands, scuttling through its depths.

Ground wrenched and torn open, cities fallen and harbors bare and empty, or realms drowned over clawing seas. Mountains were pulverized, plains ripped apart into canyons with unnatural peaks clawing at the sky. Volcanoes billowed where once pastoral lands had dominated, and many-legged creatures scuttled across open lands in hordes, looking for things to eat.

Out in the seas, vast horrors with too many eyes and tentacles were glimpsed at the distance, some of them the size of skyships, while other horrors as large or larger than dragons drifted through skies with unnaturally thick and heavy clouds and vistas of unnatural hues… and landscapes squirming as if they were alive.

"The Carnifex… did all of this," I said into their shocked faces.

"Their elders are as powerful as the greatest of your wizards and priests, and they have absolutely no scruples or hesitation in employing the most extreme of methods to overcome their foes, and that specifically includes the Brightmoor Empire."

"These are your enemies." Holos of the four Castes in various forms of gear rose above me.

"Warriors, Stealth operators they call Tricksters; the Clerics called Voices who make deals with any unclean Entities who will further their causes, and the Magi, who lead the race.

"At physical adulthood, a Carnifex is an Eighteen on its path. This process would normally take about forty years, but the Carnifex take advantage of age equaling power, and force-grow their young in biotic fluid, similar to how Clones are made." An image popped up of one such chamber in a Creche, showing hundreds of Carnifex in various stages of development inside chambers filled with amber fluids, connecting organic tubes of sorts.

"This reduces the aging to merely six months required, and then perhaps a year of training at most to take their places as members of Carnifex society. This process is how they've been able to keep up with their losses over their years, and why the war has dragged on as long as it has. As long as the Carnifex have undiscovered Creches, they can make more of themselves and rapidly get back into the fight.

"For those of you unfamiliar with the spiritual grading system, this means a Carnifex who is a physical adult is ready to become an Archmage, and ALL Carnifex can master some aspects of powerful Arcane magic with ease, the average Intellectual ability among them being equal to the best of natural human geniuses." I let that sink into them. Wizardry here was very forgiving, of course, but even Delphans knew that genius meant talent, and all Carnifex were geniuses!

"As an example of the thoroughness and skill of the Carnifex, Empress Sif, if you will?" I asked the air. Three screams cut the air, at first human, rapidly devolving into something completely not human. Three of the Delphans, two men, one woman, were thrust into the air, impaled upon blue-black Blades edged in Gold and Silver, and as they were their human guises melted around them, limbs growing, skin scaling over, heads distorting as hair faded away.

The nearest Delphans shrieked in terror and horror, particularly the husband and children of the woman who had just turned out to be an inhuman thing! The fourth of the revealed armored figures in black took her hand out from behind the head of a girl of no more than six summers, the golden claws coming out of her fingers clasping something dark and foul, while the blue-haired child collapsed like a puppet with her strings cut.

Sif's crimson hair wound up about the dark spirit like a living thing as the kicking and twitching of the other infiltrators stopped, dark blood pouring down upon the ground, white mists streaming out their chests and chasing down the flow of blood. She said nothing as she wrapped the spirit up like a ball of yarn and then dropped it, whisking it up under her long locks and out of sight.

"Three Carnifex Tricksters, gifted with a magic that allows them to take on the identity and tap the memories of something they consume and transform into. The transformation is also permanent unless specifically broken… and normally, would not even change in death," I informed the aghast crowd coolly, unmoved by the show.

"But we have Forsaken, and not even the best magicks endure under the Null Strikes of the Forsaken." Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. The Armor of the men concealed who they were, but was definitely not the same kind of technological Armor that the soldiers who had rescued them were mostly using. It was quite plain that this was a more elite group, whose ability was their own, and not from their armor.

The fact they could lift the nine-foot corpses under their own power and keep them there was testament enough as to their ability.

"Your mother is gone, and we cannot return her, as is your brother, and your lover," I informed the shocked relatives of the slain identities.

"The magic the Carnifex use to consume identities shreds the mind and soul of the victim, and they cannot be restored.

"The child here will need powerful magical care to return to sanity. Her soul was wrapped around that of the Carnifex possessing her, protecting it against detection, and also exposing her to the deepest portions of a powerful, voracious mind that would drive most of you directly insane to experience. She has been violated on every level, and even if we wipe all memory of what has been done to her, she will not be the same soul she was," I told her horrified family firmly.

Sif gestured, and two women in white clothing faded into visibility, a Disk of polished steel unfolding between them, which accepted the comatose body of the girl. The mother made to accompany her daughter, and Sif just raised a hand, stopping her in her tracks as the magic of the world seemed to get very, very heavy.

"Stay. Listen," Sif ordered her directly, but every Delphan there heard the words, quashing any thought of leaving. Under Sif's Aura, the woman could only cave meekly. I waited politely as the three dead Carnifex, their long and supple bodies still jutting out of torn human clothing, were walked down to the stage and hurled up to either side of me, sprawling out in full view of the entire audience.

"Delphans, you come from a magical society whose spellcasters have reached the apex, but that does not protect the least among you at all.

"Consider this: the Carnifex either knew you were coming, or responded so swiftly to your appearance they might as well have known. Using Morphing magic, they blended in with the creatures attacking your ships, both on land and in the sky." I pointed at the family of the man who'd been dressed as a soldier, who nodded in shock as they realized that.

"In the middle of the fighting, they killed, consumed, and replaced the dead, took their places, and not a one of you was aware of it. As a back-up plan, a junior Magi among them did the soul-wrap of your least protected, fully content to operate for years in silence, waiting for the opportunity to foment disaster upon us.

"If you had chosen to return, she would have gone right along with you, back to Meandral… and from there opened a Gate by which the Carnifex would have fled this world, where we are poised, prepared, and experienced at fighting them, back to yours… which is anything but prepared for them.

"They would find a distant skyland, brood there and raise their numbers for a hundred years, and then they would begin the process of stripping the Skyworlds of all life. Without knowing what you face and the collective will to defy them, your homelands would follow the fate of ours." I slowly lifted a finger into the faces staring at me.

"One. Carnifex. That would be all it takes." Their collective swallows were obvious, and that included all the High, Grand, and Overcasters seated up in front. They'd had no idea, couldn't even conceive of the fact they'd been infiltrated so rapidly, and had no awareness of it!

"Because of this, you cannot be allowed to go home. You will be tracked, and the Carnifex will know where to go, if they don't simply go along with you. There is no method you can take to return that they cannot duplicate, follow, or track back along. None. They are as powerful as the most powerful of you, and have no moral inhibitions to doing whatever it takes in pursuit of their goals.

"You will not lead this disaster back to your homeworld. The only way the Carnifex will be allowed to escape this world of Nown is if all of us die fighting them here." The icy cold declaration sank right into the bones with utmost finality and absolute defiance of everything the Carnifex stood for and wanted to happen.

"One thousand years." The globe of Nown swirled up again. The image of life was replaced by zones of colors, and then the black began to spread, driving back the hues and shades, covering the lands in writhing ink and most diseased purples and browns, staining the entire world, until all was driven back to the green lands of the Brightmoor Empire, and the golden island of Heaven's Reach. Slowly, the green began to expand, leveraging out in areas of paler shades, being pushed back, continuing the assault.

Blots of gold exploded around the globe, vanished quickly as counter-attacks wiped Creches but were not claimed. Fern-green circles were bitten out of the corrupted areas, each such reflected in monstrosities and mutant things slaughtered, burned, the land festering and destroyed, lives spent and magic wielded in pursuit of survival across the centuries as the War had ground on… and the green light slowly grew over all of Oslo and eventually claimed it, terminating in the very Wall to the south of them now.

"Five hundred more years to reclaim Erto." On the continent to the east, fern-green bit in around the northwestern corner, sank in, and didn't let go despite floods of ink and rot slamming up against it. Slowly, it began to advance, and as before, the cost was paid in mountains of corpses and a ravaged landscape unsuitable for anything human to live upon.

Bite by bite, it advanced across the entire broken continent, and terminated at the lands nearest the small southern continent beneath it, which had only occasional bursts of color exploding upon it and fading. And now, yellow gathered towards Gold at their position here, on the Great Southern Wall.

"And now we push into Swahib." Without hesitation, I showed the horrifying living landscapes, with the shroom territories and the cellulouse jungles only part of what had been brought in to stop us.

"This is not a fight we have a choice in. Either we push and push and push, or we get pushed back and overwhelmed.

"There is no stopping this fight until it is done, and this fight has been going on for nearly two THOUSAND years.

"You are here now, and to save yourselves and your homeland, you will be joining this fight."