The first seconds of the battle went by on experience-based instinct as Dana arranged the fallback defense while the Paladins annihilated their outer skirmisher line. Richard’s former not-Natural-Supported-quality Supported formed the first line of fallback defense. They now wielded enchanted weapons, what Richard called the EW group. Behind them massed the more ragged and less trained Nerd army.
Unfortunately, the EW group never properly engaged the Paladins before they too fled in unbridled terror. Neither Dana nor Richard had taught them any battle tactics on how to fight individual enemies in the Paladins’ power range. The Paladins wielded significantly more individual power than Dubuque’s former religiously-supported Grade One Supported, but still far less than a Territorial God.
Confounding everything, the Paladins worked in groups of three, often combining three on one against their hapless opponents. They shot short-range glowing streamers of divine energy at their opponents, energies rending asunder flesh and enchantments but leaving their victims’ clothes intact. No, there wouldn’t be any atrocities today, no blasted condos, hotels or marinas.
Richard transported himself to in front of one group of three Paladins and set to. “Get your people in a single group, Lydia,” Dana called. “Morris, groups of twenty! Concentrate everyone in your group on a single Paladin. Pretend they’re a Practical or Ideological God. You’ve got the range on them.”
Morris served as the EW commander. He did as Dana said and gathered the fled EW troops back into a more coherent mob.
“Nerds! Get back here and form up properly!” Bob’s group did as Dana asked, their squad commanders hectoring their so-called troops into some semblance of order. She followed the progress of the Paladins as best as possible, trying to integrate their movement in her mind, to get some form of insight into their battle doctrine. She realized the Paladins’ movement patterns betrayed their hesitations, inching their way into this battle instead of charging pell-mell down their throats.
Richard flew back, his body, his actual God body, showing silver. Dana hadn’t expected any such thing, and looked back at the results of Richard’s fight with the three Paladins. Richard had destroyed the three Paladins, but she caught a willpower linkage between the fallen Paladins and the distant Divine projections. There, three new Paladins staggered to their feet.
“We can’t win this!” Dana said, relaying this to the four Gods. Battle resurrections! How soon would those newly raised Paladins be ready for combat? This could be a complete disaster. “We’re in too different a fight, Orlando. We need a new battle doctrine. We need to get out of here and give ourselves some time to think this through.”
“No,” Richard said, his words soft in her ear despite his physical distance. “We’ve got them outpowered by a nine to five ratio if you put in the force multipliers, and they have to come to us, through my fixed protections, which makes this even better.”
“We won’t keep the force multipliers if they keep coming back to life.”
“Their resurrections can’t be unlimited.”
“Dubuque’s put something on us interfering with my magic,” Dana said. She felt fatigued and she had barely started.
“There’s some form of willpower magic tuned to this area,” Richard said. “An attempt to deny it’s Columbia and my territory. A pain, but their trick isn’t sapping away too much of my strength.”
Yet. Progress had been right that the enemy would weaken Richard’s home territory advantage.
“We need to get out of here while we still can!” The EW group concentrated on one Paladin. Finally, after far too many shots, they took the Paladin down.
“Not yet. I’m sure I can fight off their grab at my territory, and I still think we can win this.” Richard, his body reformed and healed, vanished.
“Dana!” Lydia. An aching need to join in a joint spell drew Dana’s attention. Dana threw in her power. A Paladin exploded. Another exploded. A third. A fourth. A fifth.
Lydia’s spell fell apart, the Natural Supported exhausted.
“Dana, we need a recovery minute,” Lydia said. “This interference is bad.”
“Take the time,” Dana said. Nine Paladins down, total, out of thirty-three. They had done well. She focused herself into her Mission and took out some of her enchantments, various toys Richard had given her as gifts. She floated them around her and barked out intricate battle orders, setting up a delayed barrage to combine nearly thirty seconds of Nerd attacks into a single moment. This should be enough to take down a Paladin.
She took a moment to analyze the EW seat-of-the-pants tactics, and decided twenty to one on the Paladins was overkill and allowed the Paladins to get in too close. Thirteen EW troopers against a single Paladin would be enough. She gave the order and watched.
Paladins fought and got blasted apart. Alerted to the danger, her people kept their distance from the Paladins, even when the Paladins showed the ability to teleport several hundred feet. Still, the partial ring of Paladins inexorably approached, though smaller in number every passing second.
This battle happened so quickly! The old-fashioned and now defunct Supported had been powerful, especially in numbers, but their abilities worked slowly relative to this battle. Only the Telepaths worked faster, but they often exhausted themselves long before they ran out of enemies. Of their combatants, S’up did the best, speeding from one Paladin group to another, leaving carnage behind him and taking far too much damage.
Dana wished she had a few Telepaths with her now. They would be good in a fast battle like this.
A quick count showed only nine of the original thirty-three Paladins still functional; Progress and her dive-through-the-electronics Nerd squad kept appearing and reinforcing any of the Nerd groups that got in trouble. The Paladins kept dying. However, all the fallen Paladins appeared to be in some stage of resurrection or in a post-resurrection state. Worse, six of the fallen Paladins had already recovered enough to fly back toward the battlefield.
Three Paladin groups converged on S’up, trying to corral him. “Effing mobs!” he said. “You can’t zerg me!” S’up’s glow took an order of magnitude jump, what he and Bob called a limit break. He charged one of the three Paladin groups head on, waving his oversized sword and screaming bloody murder.
Dubuque’s battlefield resurrection trick didn’t show any signs of letting up, and on their side of the fight, the dead stayed dead. Attrition would do them in even if they did have the Paladins overpowered. On the tricked-up iPhone Dana watched as one of the EW squads scattered, broken apart by the first Paladin range attack used in this battle, a quickly repeating burst of narrow-beam rainbow helixes. Three Paladins gave chase to the scattered EW squad, one per EW squad member, and ran them down. The first Paladin to run down his prey stuck two hands worth of fingers into the squad member and pulled. The EW soldier came apart like a paper bag of gummy worms.
“You’ve been served!” S’up said, over his shoulder, as he quickly limped back, flashing red, toward their side’s battle line. S’up’s ‘limit break’ trick didn’t last long. However, he had destroying two of the three Paladins he had charged, but he had run himself out of lives in the process and needed to retreat. He was out of the fight, at least for a few minutes, until Bob took the time to reboot him.
Dana analyzed the situation. Bleak, yes, but then she saw something. She could win this fight! She would have to do this fast, before Progress wore out the usefulness of her ability to dive through electronics. They had to slow down the Paladin resurrection process, and Dana knew a way. “To me, Lydia, focus on me.” She stealthed up and flew toward the projections of the enemy Gods. When she got about half way, she gathered the combined might of the Natural Supported and used her own Nerd computer array to fashion a Rapture disruption spell tuned to mess up the ability of the projections to do at-range pre-resurrection retrieval of the fallen Paladins. Powered by the Natural Supported coterie, her spell would rival anything from the three enemy divine projections. Dana trig
gered the massive spell, a sigh of the world rumbling through her unnatural senses as an overgrown bowling ball rolling into enemy projections and scattering their willpower resurrection-presets like bowling pins.
The Paladin’s resurrections stopped.
“Richard,” she said, her voice reduced to a weak whisper. Her warning alarms dinged – she had, for the first time, overheated her heat dissipation tricks as a Natural Supported. “What I’ve done won’t hold for long. Can you do something to get rid of those projections?”
“I’ll work…” Richard interrupted himself with a barked loud order that bypassed Dana’s brain and went directly into her willpower. “Dana! Get the fuck out of there!”
Without an instant of hesitation, Dana fled back toward their lines in full stealth mode. However, before she had flown a quarter of the way back, six resurrected Paladins teleported in around her, attacked, and pinned her down. They had teleported in from farther away than they had earlier revealed.
She couldn’t flee, so she counterattacked. One triad of Paladins fell immediately. The Natural Supported squad took down another Paladin, but no more. They had exhausted themselves.
“Dana! The Paladins get a strength boost from being resurrected,” Richard said, whispering in her ear from far away. “They also pick up an immunity boost to what killed them!” He transported in from far back, his teleportation range far greater than the Paladins. Six more resurrected Paladins teleported in a moment later, all six ganging up on Richard before he reached her, obscuring him from her sight. “Get out!”
Shit! Dana had never learned to teleport, a trick far beyond her ability to control the willpower. The Paladins learned by failing. They would need some method of countering the Paladin trick, which would take time to develop. She readied a dozen EW tricks she hadn’t seen anyone use on the Paladins, praying these new unseen tricks would keep the Paladins off her and open up a hole large enough for her to fly through and resume her flight back to safety.
She detonated her new tricks. Three Paladins shrugged off most of them, closed on her and engaged her hand to hand. Panic ran through Dana as the Paladins closed, her mind and muscles seemingly rubber and unwilling to move. Working through the panic Dana focused her Natural Supported capabilities on enhancing her body integrity as she nerd-blasted a Paladin at zero range with enchantment-disruption magic.
The Paladin fell apart, but the other two Paladins skittered around her defenses and overwhelmed her protections in a fast second, their fists and fingers ripping into her body and detonating now-unstoppable willpower attacks through her before she even had a chance to give herself over to panic and terror. Her body flew apart and her neck cracked. Then nothing.
The world dimmed, pain fled, and a beautiful tunnel of light opened overhead. She slipped into the light, gladly, in wonder, and was gone.
Part 3
Gods No More
“The European decline in violence was spearheaded by a decline in elite violence. … When asked, ‘How did your ancestor become a Lord?’ he replied sternly, ‘With the battle-ax, sir, with the battle-ax.’” – Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature
“If you do something just because you can – then it’s wrong.”
41. (John)
Inside the mirror gamme they found a bank of fog, which John banished with a curt one-word spell. These days, his spells came far more naturally to him, but his magical strength hadn’t grown; his thousand years of practice with his one spell had long since given him as much magical power as possible. His confidence and stamina had grown, though, as he had mastered the many disparate varieties of magic. Only now did he understand how he could, if given time, grow into one of those multi-decade experienced wizard magicians he had vanquished, the ones who seemingly wielded thousands of spells at once without even wiggling a long bushy eyebrow.
Beyond the fog churned a lake of insects, which he knew represented the mirror and the mirror’s magical function. They didn’t have the right number of heads and legs to be insects, and the ancillary mouths and eyes on their limbs made them unearthly. The insectoids often appeared inside the gamme John entered.
John stood on the featureless shore and looked over the churning lake. The world of the mirror surrounded him in gray. Gray shore, gray sky, gray insects. No color at all relieved the grim monotony. “My analysis shows a feeding frenzy will work.”
“As you will, despite my aesthetic objections,” Cunning said. Cunning was John’s most common companion when necessity required him to enter a gamme to defeat it. As fat as John, and as devious. John held out his hand; Cunning summoned a spell-knife, cut his own hand, and bled Fallen Angel ichor into John’s. It shattered the gray with a shocking red. John corralled the ichor with another spell, and then guided the glowing bright red substance over to the lake of insects. Slowly he divided the ichor into tiny bits of chum, and once divided spread it upon the ‘water’.
When he did this before the insectoids went mad with hunger, first eating the essence of Fallen Angel, then each other. When the ichor fell among them this time, they consumed it. Sedately. Then nothing. The world of the mirror returned to its blank gray.
“Wait,” Cunning said. “These are Quethrui, not B’naat.”
John ignored Cunning’s technical terms, as he had no need to learn the intricate fifteen thousand word tech-language of the Fallen Angels to do his job.
He waited, not using any more of the ichor as chum.
Time ran on, not that time here matched the passage of time in the outside world; given enough time, the insectoids who had eaten the ichor died. When they died, their companions sedately ate them. As time passed, they died as well. The speed of their deaths slowed and then ceased. John readied more ichor chum, but stopped when he saw an unexpected flash of color: a scry picture in the cleared area, a surreal picture of plants and occasional animals, none of which matched the form of plants and animals John knew.
“How is this possible?” John said. “The insectoids made the picture in the mirror, and we’re now too close to see. What is making this picture?”
“Your question is not significant, for you have not asked about what the picture shows,” Cunning said.
Even the best of the Fallen Angels needed strangling.
“Okay, I’ll ask first about what the picture shows, though I have a guess,” John said. “I believe this shows a piece of the mind of God Almighty, the world of the Angelic Hosts.”
“No. I am sorry, but your upbringing and experience do not easily lead you to the truth in this most esoteric matter. What you see is a place known of as the Gikindynous, a place having nothing to do with our Angelic Hosts,” Cunning said. “If Grover and Lara’s translation work with Glory is correct, and I judge it to be so, in your terms you are seeing another universe, one known of as the Perilous Land.”
This made no sense at all. “What do you mean?”
“Did you think God Almighty made only our world?”
“Certainly not,” John said. “God Almighty made the entire universe, and there can be nothing else.”
Cunning grunted. “Other universes exist, and they possess mildly to majorly different symvaseis – uh, natural laws of science. These other universes open easily to our magic at points where they lie close to each other. Because of us, creatures can seep through at such places. Yet another of our sins needing to be expunged.”
John bounced on his feet. This was evidence that Grover and Lara’s ravings might be real. He ran Cunning’s words through his mind and failed to understand. “So we’re seeing the Hell universe, as the Indigo name things?”
“Your guess lies far over the horizon from the truth,” Cunning said. “We do not share enough concepts in our shared languages for you to understand the import of the closest Megaolomelia. Ken did.” Cunning looked wistful for a moment.
If Ken could understand, well, this sounded like a clue to John. “And we mortals failed this ‘other universes’ test because we couldn’t pro
perly control magic.”
“You write on a sheet of paper a shadow of the reality beyond,” Cunning said. “The test, if passed, would have guided you from the beginning to a time far past the present.”
“Oh? How?” Utter nonsense, the usual for the Fallen Angels.
“Ken’s name for what we call a Megaolomelia is ‘containerverse’, a special universe that holds other universes. Once mastered, a section of the Perilous Land containerverse allows access to a myriad of universes. Each has its own natural laws and magic, and mastering those is the test. Hell, although dangerous and large from a single mortal’s perspective, is but a lesser universe, a mere grain of sand compared to a real universe.”
John paused in thought, watching the insectoids’ movements; as their numbers diminished, the more active they became. For most of his life John had believed that nothing more existed of God’s creation than Earth, the sun, the planets, Heaven and Hell. Cunning’s words matched those of Lara, Grover and Glory in horror. “Check me on this, then,” John said. “You’re saying the 99 Gods offer, as a test, a different set of universes to examine?”
“Not in the slightest. The 99 Gods offer this universe to you; their miracles are fully contained within the natural laws of this universe.”
“You mean the universe of Earth, not that of these insectoids?”
“Correct. They offer Earth’s universe via your mechanical contrivances, the same way the Ha-qodeshim offered the minds of Earth’s universe to the dolphins, which the mortal dolphins also failed. I expect your 99 Gods and you modern mortals will similarly fail.”
John’s mind spun. He didn’t grasp a tenth of what Cunning implied. “How did the Ha-qodeshim fail?”
“They failed to advance the individuality and intellect of the dolphins.”
“Well,” John said. Utter garbage. “I’m no scientist or natural philosopher, Cunning. Your words pass over my head. I’ll pass this along to the others. I’m sure they’ll understand this better.”
99 Gods: Odysseia Page 44