Chương 564: BECMI Chapter 563 – Immortal Wars

Hundusvar seemed to spark something ugly and violent, as if a tipping point had been reached. Immortals under stress, compounding since the fall of the Delphan Empire and given nothing to vent on, seemed to take the chaos and attacks against their Avatars and worshipers in the City of a Thousand Gods far too personally. Avatars died, and the Immortals barely knew how or why.

But when they did, worshipers of that Immortal suddenly couldn't draw on the power of their masters for at least a day, shaking their faith and causing great harm to their reputations. Tempers flared, fingers pointed, blame was made as the worshipers of the Gallivants proved to be terrifyingly adept, showed it before mortals, and suddenly, Immortals started going after Immortals.

Factions crossing Spheres had been drawn up between friends, rivals, and enemies long ago, ersatz Pantheons forming and breaking as confusing relationships deemed fit… and Immortals attacked one another. This was mostly done outside Nown, as those who died down on Nown found it impossible to manifest there again with their true bodies, as if whatever was killing them was also barring them from the planet!

That was fine, as Immortals went after one another in the many, many worlds across the Astral Plane, and grudges that had endured and grown for millennia in many cases boiled over into action. Perhaps the Entropics would have been happy to fan the embers between others in this fight, except few Immortals had as many enemies as they, and so they were rapidly being attacked from all sides, especially the weaker ones who often had fresher betrayals and more recent foul deeds to their names.

Personal relationships meant the circular rivalries of Matter against Time against Thought against Energy against Matter, everyone against Entropy, weren't followed. Now it was groups of Immortals hating one or two others gathering to fight them in their home planes, or Immortals fleeing to their home planes and sequestering themselves, only sending out weak Avatars to monitor the situation secretly as they tried to ride out what was rapidly becoming an Immortal war.

Plots and schemes that had been waiting, even festering, for millennia suddenly were put into motion, and nobody really knew what was really driving it all...

He called himself Tzentotl, the Rainbow Serpent, a mocking allusion to the noble couatls whose form he preferred among mortals. He was the foremost corrupter and tempter among the Entropics, sponsored to power by Thanatos himself, who in the end learned to respect the inevitable betrayals of this sinister spirit and had also considered him an enemy and rival.

Tzentotl had sponsored a dozen Aspirants of other Spheres to betray their original Patrons and turn to Entropy, turned noble and bright empires into sinister and depraved mockeries of themselves, and he loved to see heroes fall to depravity and corruption under his sinister whispers.

After the first Immortals began to kill one another, he had rapidly retreated to his home plane and his favorite world there, the decaying jungle world of deadly beauty he called Venomheart, there to ride out this infighting that was actually risky to join in on. Only the weakest of his Avatars were out there in the world, monitoring the situation and trying to manipulate the flames where and when he could, furthering strife among the churches and broadening the scale of the conflict to continents beyond Olso.

In life, he'd been an elven king name Soloifol Shiningtongue, a proud and noble elf who had accidentally led his people into a fight against the civilization of the Nazca and watched them get massacred by the savages. Instead of regretting the loss of his people, he had been impressed and fascinated by the bloody savagery of the humans.

He was inspired enough to study them, learn how to manipulate them, drive their empire into ruin, and as he was Ascending, watch some of the survivors get whisked off to the Hollow World. He'd become the greatest active force of Evil down there, corrupting both the Sythian and Nazcan empire remnants there and turning them towards Evil once more, only this time the Immortals weren't going to let them die.

He was even working on the Eonic Empire remnant there, but most importantly, he was trying to shift the Shaden away from Gaebrel, and had even done so to a full clan of them, who had fallen and become the bloody fanatics called the Shaztenelfin. One of his great ironies was convincing both the Shazten and the Nazcan that each of his followers was the true faith and the other were blasphemers, guiding them into an eternal hateful rivalry of slaughtering one another whenever they could.

Another was killing the great dinosaurs that Ssa, Creator of the Hollow World, loved so much and sacrificing them to tap into the Preserver's power, creating the Ssa-Tainted, servants imbued with the power of the dinosaurs!

He had spurred the creation and prior destruction of Aengmor, the City lost in Lava, motivating the nifloid races into two great and bloody hordes to find it, while his whispers had begun the slow corruption and failures of the royal family of the Shaden and their followers, away from Gaebrel's rigid demands and the rules demanded of their society.

He was an unwanted addition to many pantheons, having convinced the scorpus, the scorpion-folk, to betray the winged minotaurs of Ullyon, and he had also inspired the gnolls to rise up against the Sythians, their creators, in a bloody revolt. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. He was one of the most vile souls in Creation, and he wasn't going to survive this. After all, I had three thousand years to prepare for him.

Briggs was wiping away the Jaguar Tribe of the Hiawathans, which would force Kreggon Claw-heart, the Patron of the Jaguars and a berserker who had betrayed Hiawatha to join Tzentotl, to appear… and to die. Briggs wasn't going to have any sympathy for the Immortal savage who seemed to think blood sacrifice was a fine thing for his servants to engage in, and was definitely going to lock him down with a Truename Seal and then kill him.

By the time the Immortal realized he was going to lose a melee fight, he wasn't going to be able to get away and Briggs would crush him and feed him to the Land, and to Endure. Tzentotl had sealed his home plane against intruders, but I had his Truename and could wiggle around that protection with Name That Plane, a XII which allowed me to bypass a home plane's lock-out if I had the Truename authority of the planar ruler. Soooo many Immortals would kill to have this spell.

Even more would want to kill anyone who had this spell! As in so many situations in the past where Time dictated that I could watch and could not actually DO anything, I'd left three Sims in Tzentotl's home plane, monitoring it and the actions he took here, preparing for the time I could come here and get rid of the bastard. He never suspected mortal-level beings could infiltrate his home plane and have the patience to set up something beneath his nose to destroy him…

or to abuse Time, come in during the future and going to the past to prepare the correct place to attack him at. I didn't confront him, because that would give him time to think of something, satisfying as it might be.

I just watched as a chunk of his leering moon overhead was propelled up and away from the satellite in a nice mile-wide sphere by the four Pyramids made on it, being drawn irrevocably down and towards the homing beacon of one of the ten Pyramids buried underneath his favored places to relax and wander as it kept accelerating.

Throwing out a See Not the Future to absolutely make sure none of his Divinations, Contingencies, Auguries, or anything could see a future where a chunk of the moon was falling down on him at miles per second was, I also set up a simple Miracle or nine to instantly destroy any Force Field or Surelife- type or other Contingent effect that might pop up to protect him from the impact of the moon.

He was inside his personal library, going through records of past corruptions with smiles as he read tales of tragedy, letters of riven hearts from betrayed lovers, remonstrations and rants from failed traitors and cowards, when the moonchunk came down on him at lunar speeds. His play-world didn't have a Worldshield like Nown did, and something that size moving at twenty miles per second would only have been slowed down a bit by such an impressive achievement.

The Pyramids' Domains activating prevented dimensional escape or reverting to incorporeal form. Not that he had much time to react, as the effective atmosphere only reached up a hundred miles, and the moonchunk burned through that in five seconds. The moonchunk hit the ground head-on, Tzentotl barely having time to look up before it smashed into the bright and colorfully poisonous, treacherous jungles of Venomheart and crushed him more than flat.

I was in near-orbit with the three Sims who'd spent over two thousand years here prepping this ending for the twat. The impact of the moonrock fractured the world's mantle, started blowing a shockwave through the atmosphere, and sent a massive cloud of fire billowing waaaaay up into the sky and out and about the point of impact. Vivus drove the eruption, feeding on the death energies in the air, while scattered buried Pyramids elsewhere abruptly turned on and began to vent those energies back to Nown!

Vivus poofed up on the Truename Seal I was holding out, indicating that Tzentotl's Immortal self was consumed and passing on, and I was the only holder of Immortal Authority in this sphere left. We were going to try something a little different this time. There were definitely Eternal-class spells that could act directly upon Immortals and do bad things to them. Harvesting Immortal Power was definitely within the scope of them, and Tzentotl had a lot to be harvested. I sent it into the Sims.

They were still Constructs after all this time, necessary to avoid attention and not be corrupted by time or Entropic energies, mental timelessness keeping them fairly close to their original creation paradigm. They had of course made bucketloads of Karma they could not apply while in this system, bouncing around to all the worlds in it to discover what Tzentotl was doing, monitor it, and harvest some things from him unnoticed which Time allowed them to do.

Just two thousand years of killing Entropic creatures had been enough to qualify for Immortality. A Clone or Duplicate of me couldn't take this step, but Sims were not so restricted, and Captain Emeril had already proven that manifesting an Immortal body didn't actually take all that much prior instruction, especially if you were allowed to examine said body… or better yet, if said Immortals wanted alternate ones, to participate in the design of such a thing.

Tzentotl's vivified Immortal Power, cleansed of Entropic bias, flowed through the Seal of his Truename, and with the help of three Ascend to Immortality spells at XV, flowed into my Sims. The spell was specifically designed to equal a Miracle and Awaken Construct in bringing them to true life, and then to alter their Construct bodies to an Immortal standard, which was actually easier than doing so with a living, organic one.

The recipients had to have earned the requisite Karma, and performed legendary deeds worthy of an Immortal Aspirant. Then, somehow, they had to have access to at least 500 Immortal Power raw, plus another 100 IP to be sacrificed to create an Immortal body. Butchering an Eternal-class Immortal with the Pyramids the Sims had put into place over two thousand years was enough to qualify for all of the above, and Tzentotl had plenty of IP to spare he no longer needed.

Power swirled, was channeled, and artificial life became life, an artificial body designed to channel power became an Immortal body needed to channel power, and new lights flared in the sky of a burning, dying world below, in hues of white, yellow, and pale blue, glittering with Golden highlights if you knew what to be looking for.