Chương 69: Chapter 24: System Crash

Cato-Ascen was one of the last.

Cato-Heimdall had severed himself from the System with prejudice after the last flood of deities, in the low hundreds, had been secured. That left less than a hundred versions of Cato across the remaining Inner Worlds, all of whom knew that they couldn't fully commit against the worlds, but couldn't withdraw either, needing to save as many as possible but also needing to make sure the True Core stayed as it was.

The weapons were fired, the target was locked. The end had been laid on rails, a fact of the universe, and the sole thing he had to do, that he could do, was make sure that all the preparation hadn't been for naught. He could exercise the few tricks that he had learned that delayed the ascension – judicious use of jamming and the occasional orbital bombardment seeming to at least make the process more difficult – but that was it.

There was nothing else save hoping he had made the right choices, and that they were enough.

He couldn't fully sever worlds anymore. After the severing of Heimdall the way dungeons were accessed had been changed. All of them were manually administered - a divine class gatekeeping who could enter – which meant that the Big Bad Bug Bombs were out and he no longer had a reasonable way to take out the biggest, most important dungeons. Or even a good way to take out the lesser ones; Raine and Leese Ascen had been down to the surface just once, and hadn't been inside the System for subjective decades.

Neither of them were interested in the work necessary to rank up, not that it was even possible on Ascen. All the Copper areas were strictly controlled by the Clans, and while The Phage could even incubate new bodies, doing so without support was pointless. There weren't even that many Coppers around anymore, making Chill Out pointless.

"Do you think we can actually win this?" Raine asked, looking at the statistical feeds that covered the war room, a virtual construct that was considerably stripped down from what it used to be. Raine and Leese weren't even part of the war effort, as they'd long planned out contingencies and strategies and had left most of the actual execution to algorithms and virtual intelligences.

"Against the Core?" Cato sighed.

"I hope so. But this world? Probably not." With the Phage rendered essentially useless, there was only so much they could do without escalating to a full surface bombardment, and that wasn't something he was willing to do. There were hundreds of thousands of people down there, and Cato couldn't get to them at all so he had to make some hard choices.

Ascen was one of the worlds that connected directly to the Core and the War-Worlds there, and Cato did not dare give it up and so lose a line on his final target. In a sense, he didn't want to win, but he also couldn't afford to let the System force him away. For the hundreds of individuals outside of the System – taking into account all the digital inhabitants that had ended up in Ascen – the best Cato could do was to ensure that the transmitter was up and running.

There was more than enough mass to keep things going if worse came to worst and the System stole the local star, but there weren't many people around who wanted to go a-wandering with rogue planets. Even if digital life didn't need a star, it was a psychological anchor that couldn't be replaced.

Even if his attacks weren't sufficient to actually destroy the System, he had enough information from deities and Interfaces to know that his efforts were draining essence. He knew it wasn't that much, in the grand scheme of things, but hopefully it was enough to delay the assimilation of worlds into the Core. In the best case scenario, his efforts would prevent Ascen from being absorbed until the Nicoll-Dyson Beams actually arrived, while not being so harmful that the gods abandoned the world entirely.

In a way, his fight was keep the line to the System open as long as possible, to prevent Misse from branching off somewhere new that he couldn't reach.

"In fact, it's probably better that we don't," he said after a while, though the uncertainty turned in his stomach as he watched the tactical display.

"So long as it looks like they're winning and pushing us away, even at significant cost, I can hope they won't do anything drastic. It's horrible to think, but after we've come all this way and freed so many worlds, we can still lose the campaign.""You think they would move the Core?" Leese asked. Like Raine, she was present by remote, her physical body back on one of the habitats. She was actually knitting, attempting to put together some form of tail-stocking, by the look of it.

"I don't know if they could, but it wouldn't surprise me," Cato said, leaning back in his chair and rubbing at his eyes, even if he couldn't technically strain them.

"Though I'm worried about them opening another frontier and then making it independent of the Core. The System clearly went from running on automatic to guided ever since Misse took power, and that means I can't rely on anything we knew."

"And we can't do anything about that change either," Raine agreed glumly, looking at the countdown clock at the top of the tactical display.

"Except wait and hope. Do you think you can tie them up until the end?"

"Possibly. If we keep bleeding them, maybe, and Ascen is low on the priority list. We might be the last ones out at this rate." While he could delay the ascension, once it passed a certain point the process was irreversible. The System expanded too rapidly, and the mechanism that consumed an entire star was far too large-scale to even try and disrupt, so the preemptive drain was their best strategy.

"Start dropping leaflets again," Leese suggested, looking over the wargaming probabilities. Propaganda had been far less effective than he'd thought, possibly because of the [Crusade] and its basic effect on psychology, but that had been before the collapse of the frontier and the inexorable approach of the Nicoll-Dyson beams.

He didn't dare state what was about to happen. For all that he wanted to save everyone, even the gods of the Core, he also couldn't warn them what was coming. There was the chance they would figure out some counter to it, or even some way to alter the True Core's movement through space relative to the weapons. But he could, and would, try to persuade people away who would listen. For everyone else, he would have to accept their choice.

"Subtlety is gone," Cato agreed.

"And if it saves just one more person, it'll be worth it." He turned to his control center and started issuing the orders. One of the many manufactories floating half a million miles from Ascen's surface altered the output of one small portion, catalyzing carbon and hydrogen into polymers and binding in dye molecules.

Bright plastic sheets with words and pictures were packed into dispersal cartons by the million, ready to rain down on the world below. Coilgun launchers aimed and fired the packages, sending them on suborbital trajectories, the small lozenge-shaped projectiles flying through a war zone. Cato watched them go, falling into the chaos surrounding the planet.

In the quarter-million-mile diameter bubble of System space, Azoths and even the occasional Alum now protected the planet from millions of tons of incoming war material. In one place, a System-compatible sphere full of warframes hurled itself through the void, bursting apart when an Azoth got near and using biological Orion drives to propel themselves through the vacuum.

The warframes swarmed the water user, only to be shredded by the Azoth's Domain — and keeping him preoccupied long enough for an antimatter round to detonate against him.

In another place, a projectile puffed into a cloud of rapidly-moving System-jamming fluff, expanding out to cover a few dozen miles and traveling at several thousand miles per hour. The static disrupted essence enough to impair sensory Skills and annoy Azoths — and obscure the firing of a particle beam, the stream of hyper-accelerated atoms cutting across the sphere of combat. Dust and debris flashed to plasma along the weapon's path, cutting a bar of blinding light across half a million miles of space.

Everywhere, the fruits of Project Cringe assaulted any Azoth that got near with light and sound. Screeching and howling appeared in the void, the altered reality of the System violating one of the oldest tenants about the nature of space. Light patterns and colors induced blind spots, sensory overload, and hallucinations in ways that pried open small edge cases in basic biology, bewildering or disorienting even the most powerful System inhabitants.

Clouds of volatile particles drifted in stretched and unstable orbits, pockets of stench waiting for the right species to come across it.

Any one of those things would have been almost irrelevant, just an annoyance at best. Working in concert, Cato was able to steadily bleed the System forces even as they wrecked everything he was sending down. By now he had an entire database of the Azoths that were defending Ascen, and there were many, many entries that he had killed several times. Though with the extra lives that the highest ranks had, and presumably the ability for Misse to allot extras, none of the kills he scored were permanent.

For every million tons of war materiel that Cato sent toward the surface, maybe one ton at most made it through the defenders. It wasn't just the space around Ascen that was swarming with high-rank fighters, but the ground as well. The cities had their own defenses, bubbles of energy similar to the dome the paladin Bismuth all the way back on Sydea had invoked. Those domes protected the cities not just from Cato's assault, but from the horrific Kessler syndrome that months and years of fighting had produced.

Much of the mass involved in the combat de-orbited eventually, filling Ascen's skies with nonstop meteor showers.

All the chaos, the sheer mass of biomatter and the raw energy of antimatter and particle beams, was not some blitzkrieg assault. It was what Cato's manufactories could sustain for days, weeks, and years on end. He could escalate further, but it was a delicate dance — too much further and either his weaponry or the Azoths themselves would run the risk of glassing the surface.

Particle beams and antimatter rounds directly impacting the surface would wreck things, System or not, and he didn't want to either kill people or prompt Misse to cut off Ascen. The very worst thing that could happen was to have Ascen be doomed by absorption into the True Core.

At the same time, he needed to keep up enough pressure to make people want to switch sides, and see Cato as enough of a threat to consider his victory possible. A tricky balance, especially since he couldn't measure the temperament of the other side, but all the sims agreed a little bit of extra propaganda wouldn't hurt. They also agreed that very few people would take the opportunity, but even one would be worth it.

It actually took weeks for Cato to get leaflets into one of the cities. One lucky shot, a stealthy insertion, and the projectile detonated against the dome. The small bits of plastic, being entirely harmless, fluttered down through the air. Whether anyone would read them was something he could not control — and at that distance, even he had trouble discerning the subtleties of the reaction.

Each had instructions for lower-rank people to escape — ones that ran the risk of revealing the true scope of The Phage and FungusNet, but it was too late for that to matter. For Bismuths and above, he had instructions for requesting a digitization pod while out in space, a simple light-flash code. Of course, the enemy could use these instructions to lure him out — but it wasn't actually a problem.

Losing some portions of FungusNet or a few thousand digitization pods was not a setback, and if anything that kind of finesse would give him more chances to put even more materiel on the surface.

Depressingly few people took the opportunity – the majority of contacts were, in fact, solely there to destroy his infrastructure – but at least there were some. Singlets or couples trickling in once every few days, debriefed and then settled into one of the server clusters by the outer planets. As time counted inexorably down, months and years slipping away forever, Cato didn't even control the fighting himself, as the automated combat algorithms could handle everything.

Now and then, one of the other Catos reported their planet being ascended into the core, forcing a reassessment of the timetables, and stretching their strategy to the breaking point. Each world that vanished meant another population dead — and less ability to bleed essence, pushing toward a snowball effect that would result in the Core standing alone, with the ability to do anything out of Cato's sight and without his pressure.

It got to the point where Cato didn't want to know what was happening, the looming tension grinding down on him, but his combat system still pinged him for the occasional unusual event.

Like, three years into it, the arrival of a very particular Alum.

The version of Cato in mostly-stasis near the planet interrupted the reconciliation stream from the outer planets, cutting off a conversation with one of the younger postbiological in a nice little café on one of the habitats, and scrambled to the feeds. His spy satellites brought up a picture of a familiar face, a human with golden skin and a heroic physique. Morvan had arrived.

Cato's cousin signaled with some Skill, generating a winking point of light aimed out into the void, and Cato signaled back, launching one of the digitization pods into System space — though he had little hope that Morvan actually wanted to leave. Morvan's expression as he flew out into the cluttered battle-space outside the atmosphere was very clearly set in a rictus of fury, teeth gritted and eyes narrowed. But Cato had to try.

Morvan still had one of the pocket System-space projectors, as he left the boundary and went into open void rather than wait for the digitization pod to reach the edge. Whatever Alum Skills Morvan had served to blink from one position to another, appearing inside the pod without traveling the intervening space. He took just a moment to appraise the interior before turning to glare at Cato's frame. There was always one in a digitization pod, but never before had Cato been so nervous about the guest.

"Well?" Morvan demanded.

"I'm not sure what you want me to say, Morvan," Cato replied, genuinely confused by the conversational opening.

"I've always wanted to take everyone out of the System, and I haven't been shy that I intend to destroy it. I want to salvage as much as I can, of course, but—"

"What happened with Kiersten? Where is she?" Morvan interrupted, and some clarity dawned. It had, of course, been years since Kiersten had decided to leave the System — but Cato had interviewed enough Alums to know that was irrelevant. Many Alums spent decades at a time out in dungeons or combat zones, as there was no need to keep track of time for immortals that didn't need to eat or sleep.

He knew that Kierstan had left Morvan on a sour note, so it was entirely possible Morvan had just been out killing things to work out frustration for the last however many years.

"Kiersten is on Ikent," Cato replied, not at all worried about passing on that information. Ikent was over a hundred thousand light-years away; very, very far out of the reach of anyone. The System might be able to target Ikent again, but Cato suspected Misse had no desire to take old territory, and had simply written it off.

"But she did leave a message for you."

"She's on Ikent," Morvan repeated, scowl deepening.

"Does she even know that? Or does she think she's back on Earth, or maybe still exploring the System? Or is it even her anymore? Maybe you've gone in and changed her so she's less likely to argue with you."

"I would never do that," Cato ground out, one fist clenched as his cousin accused him of one of the most heinous crimes in existence.

"If anything, the System has done that — but you don't care." He took a breath and tried to put Morvan's insult out of his mind.

"I can assure you, Kiersten is fine. Before we lost contact with the frontier, she was living in an Ikent habitat."

"Her, or just a simulacrum of her?" Morvan shook his head slowly.

"We all know that Alums can't live outside the System."

"You know the philosophies of digitization as well as I do," Cato said, having no desire to get into an argument that was, ultimately, irreconcilable.

"If she decided to leave, that answers what she thinks of it, and isn't that all that matters?"

"People can be wrong," Morvan said darkly.

"I don't want to hear from her. How could I trust anything from you? I know you could fake any message you wanted, with or without her help. You are a plague, cousin, as much of a destroyer as you accuse the System of being."

"I don't want to be," Cato sighed.

"But I have seen that the System will never stop expanding, and Misse shows it can be controlled by those within it. Not that she is interested in diplomacy with me, but even if she agreed to cease expansion — how long would it last? I can't just let something like it exist; something designed to kill civilization and replace it with an eternal hell."

"Better to serve in this hell than reign in your heaven," Morvan scoffed, which actually surprised Cato. He hadn't thought that Morvan had remembered any of that early education, and then squashed the part of him that was surprised. No matter how poorly he thought of those who had adopted the System, they weren't stupid.

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"Morvan, the System is coming to an end," Cato said at length.

"Maybe what normal technology and virtual worlds offer aren't perfect for you, but there are plenty of ex-System people who are enjoying themselves. You could even have something very much like the System, save for the expansion. I just don't want you to die."

"Me?" Morvan shook his head.

"You may have been able to get everywhere else, but you're not in the Core — and you can't get to the Core, or else you would have already. True Deity Misse will simply start from scratch, somewhere you can't get at us."

"The Core…" Cato sighed.

"No, I have a way to deal with it. Not a way I like, but the only one I could think of."

"You may think so, but you aren't facing the same System as before. We will remove you from our worlds and form a new reality without you." Morvan pointed a finger at him, and despite himself Cato flinched.

"Anything you plan, we will stop."

"Morvan," Cato said slowly.

"It's far too late to stop. I set it in motion years ago. Please, leave the System. I don't want you to die."

"Your fakery won't beat reality," Morvan snarled drawing himself up and sneering down at Cato.

"But even if you do manage to kill me, at least I'll die as the real me." He spread his arms wide, then vanished in a burst of light.

Misse had to wonder if Cato knew he was only fueling his own defeat.

"It is shameful that the frontier failed if this is all Cato can bring to bear," Muar remarked, an enormous wall of scry-views showing the fighting on the remaining Inner Worlds. The two of them sat in Misse's Estate, taking a break from the ongoing political wrangling — all of it was, of course, going Misse's way. A few judicious allocations of essence here and there, along with the most discontent of the gods having left of their own accord years ago, meant that there were far fewer to make trouble.

"There is that, but we also know more now," Misse said, half-agreeing.

"We know how Cato works and how to counter him. More, we can make the changes we need to contest anything he does, and do so quickly." She deliberately pushed a bubble of influence outward to snare one of the artifice crafts they could see, the lights on it going out as the System showed its supremacy.

"We are only beset because it took us so long to reach this point."

With only Azoths and above fighting, and keeping those fights inside the bounds of the System's aegis, the destruction of Cato's seemingly endless forces was actually a net positive when it came to essence. Not an incredible income, not after the costs for resurrections were paid– and the changes to dungeons, but those were a pittance compared to everything else – but enough that the long, roiling combat only improved those who took part.

The fighting had managed to invigorate some Azoths to ascend, so she had actually slowed the investment of essence to encourage more Alums.

It had also become clear that Cato's ability to apply force to a single planet was limited. If he could have concentrated all the forces he'd used to take the entire frontier onto a single one of the Inner Worlds, it might have been an issue, but that had yet to happen. He seemed to have reach a certain limit of his assault. One that had yet to abate even years on, but the Azoths and Alums of her System were more than used to fighting for years at a time.

If anything, it was giving her ideas for new sorts of challenges, when she finished absorbing all the Inner Worlds and could start anew. The System had been stagnant for far too long, likely ever since the original True God or Gods had moved on, and that was why it had become weak enough for Cato to take over. It was inevitable that Misse would have to burn the dead wood, and Cato had just accelerated the process.

"I still worry about his claims that he has some method to actually assault the Core," Muar said, his tail flicking back and forth as he reclined next to her.

"More, it worries me that we have not seen it. Nor do any of the Ahrusk natives that remain know what it might be, and I interviewed them personally."

"While I would not like to underestimate our enemy, he has been entirely stymied by our changes and has not taken a single world since Heimdall," Misse pointed out.

"And half of our Inner Worlds have been taken into the Core. His window for action has come and gone, and I have had everyone sweep the Core's space for any of his artifice. In every other world, he has an entire constellation of stuff outside of the System's reach. Not so with the Core."

"Believing ourselves entirely beyond Cato's abilities is a poisonous dream," Muar said, tapping his claws against the armor on his legs.

"But I must admit that we have not seen anything that would truly threaten the Core. Even those distant lances of his are nothing when it comes to the Core's protections. It would require something unimaginably powerful to actually pose a threat."

Misse did not, generally, believe in fortuity. She was a [True Deity], the ruler of the System, and while the System was still greater than her it rarely operated by chance. Those who had earned a reward were granted such, and those who had earned enmity were granted that as well. But there was something in Muar's words that gave her a deep sense of foreboding.

It was not the first time they had discussed the final operations needed before the System could undergo its rebirth, but something about the conversation stuck with her. It stayed in her mind as she discussed policy with the elders of other clans, it ruined her mood as she went swimming with Muar, and it made her irritable as she sifted through the near-infinite complexities of her True Interface.

It grew as she considered the Core Worlds, and so she was watching through a scry-view when there was a blinding light and almost every alarm she had set went off at once.

The entire Core was on fire.

Calling it simple fire was underselling it; while Azoth-ranked materials and plants could resist the attack, the air itself had burst into glowing, white-hot plasma. It wasn't just one Core World or War-World, it was every single bit of every surface in the Core. It was as if each planet had been turned into a sun, the air billowing up and away from the surface. Even the True Core itself shone with a blinding reflection.

Muar appeared in her office, but Misse barely noticed. While it was true that higher-rank materials – and individuals – could withstand the assault, it was not done without effort. The essence cost to resist the phenomenon was obvious, the System's total essence stores actually dropping for the first time since she had severed the frontier.

Of course, the sudden attack induced chaos on all the worlds, especially those that had just recently been inducted, a flood of frantic questions coming in from priests and deities alike. Misse ignored them all as she searched for solutions, not even certain what the attack was. Manipulating several scry-views, she found there were several directions which showed nothing but a wall of light, so she delved into her Interface and put up massive light blocks around every world.

It still drained essence, but at least the assault was stopped. Only then did she turn to Muar.

"So this was his weapon. How did he do it?"

"I do not know," Muar said, examining the scry-views. There was little to be gained from them, as in almost every direction there was only light. It didn't blind them; they were gods, after all. But it didn't provide any answers, either. Shifting the perspective of the scry-view around to one of the few angles where the light didn't fill the view, all that could be discerned was the usual nothingness of the void without. That nothing existed in the directions of Cato's weapons for as far as they looked.

"It's certainly impressive," Misse had to concede with a growl.

"For scale, if nothing else. But it did no permanent damage. A lot of annoying damage, yes, but nothing crippling." The essence totals in the System continued to drop as all the air on all the planets and war-worlds was restored, but just a glance at her own planet showed that enormous swaths of the surface – anything and anyone that wasn't Azoth rank or above – had been scoured clean.

The personal nature of it infuriated her the most, the loss of trophies that had been thousands of years old and supposedly safe in the Core.

"…it's still going," Muar said after a moment, as they both ignored a larger and larger flood of messages.

"How long can such an attack last?" Then he shook his head, flicking his fingers and summoning a mortal from the War-Worlds, and one Misse recognized — one of the Ahruskians, Cato's cousin.

"What is this, how does it work, and how long does it last?" Muar asked, voice hard, without giving the mortal even time to look around. The Ahruskian blinked and scowled at Muar.

"What the hell? I was in the middle of—"

"This is important, Morvan," Muar said.

"Cato's final weapon." He pointed to the screens, and Morvan finally took in what was going on. The intense light, continually falling in on the Core in a relentless assault.

"I don't know," Morvan growled.

"Something like the particle lances but bigger and further away."

"What can be done about it?" Muar said, controlling his temper.

"It is something we must contest."

"You're the gods," Morvan sneered.

"You figure it out."

"Do you have nothing useful to say?" Misse broke in, very tired indeed of this particular mortal.

"All I know is my cousin has a lot of tricks and tools I never got into," Morvan said.

"I can guess, though, that this might be a beam that uses an entire star as fuel. But you're gods, so you should be able to fix it. And if not, what good are you?"

Misse didn't even hesitate. If this mortal had no useful knowledge, then there was no need to suffer his impertinence. She glanced at her interface, and removed this Morvan from existence. He didn't even have a chance to blink before he dissolved into dust and nothing.

"We'll merely have to wait," she concluded, while Muar frowned at where Morvan was and then looked back up at the scry-view.

"And see how long this lasts."

As it turned out, the answer was a very long time, indeed. The minutes turned into hours, as Misse and Muar went to deal with the fallout of the attack, delving into the System options and spending what they needed to in order to restore everyone who had been hurt or killed by Cato's attack. Alums could take care of themselves, but the mortal servants of gods were supposed to be immune, and it offended Misse's sensibilities that they'd been harmed.

After the initial rush, there was simply waiting and watching. Hours extended to days, and Misse's blocks cost, if anything, more over time, ticking up a tiny amount as if the assault were somehow getting worse.

"It's exactly like with the frontier," Misse said with disgust, weeks after the assault had begun.

"A long bleed, rather than a single overwhelming strike. Trying to drain us down until we are helpless."

"We need to find and destroy these weapons," Muar growled, though it wasn't like they hadn't tried. They had even sent Alums out with the portable Nexus crystals, searching for whatever artifice was projecting the impossible light. Even at the speeds Alums could move, they had not been able to find anything.

It was as if reality itself had been altered, creating columns of incomprehensible energy all about the Core. He hadn't believed Morvan about Cato leashing stars into a weapon, but if it was true then it might not be possible to find them.

"If we cannot, then we have to find a way to stop the bleeding. Perhaps we can move the Core?"

"I have been considering it," Misse said, taking some of the work she had been doing from her Interface and displaying it on one of the scry-views. Moving the True Core to one of the other worlds within their remit was an option, but the essence costs were staggering.

"If I did so, then suddenly the True Core is no longer a neutral space, the place where all the Clans meet. It'd be ours, and none of the other Clans would stand for it." In a way, the other Clans couldn't threaten her personally, but everything that she'd built, her family and her Clan, was still vulnerable.

"I think it'd be easier and more expedient to modify the True Core," she concluded, flipping to a different display.

"The drain depends on how many of the Core Worlds and War Worlds I shield." She left out the few remaining Inner Worlds, as they were not so affected.

"So the obvious solution is to reduce that number. The Core Worlds themselves might be taken into Estates, and thus persist in the Divine Realm itself, though it is costly. The War Worlds would have to be abandoned — at least for now."

"That would cut our essence generation almost in half," Muar observed, not arguing.

"And there is no telling how long this weapon of Cato's will last."

"Better to make the decision now while we still have enough essence to move the Core Worlds," Misse said, frowning.

"I hate to cede any ground to Cato, but we can easily manage it if all we have to do is protect the True Core. The Font is enough, and we can begin expanding to new pastures. Then simply retake the War Worlds when Cato exhausts his resources."

"Marus is lucky he is beyond our reach," Muar muttered.

"This could all have been avoided if he were paying attention." Then he flicked his tail, discarding it, and focused on the scry-views.

"I will implement a plan for world-estates," Muar offered, already starting to pull up the Interface's functions.

"If you would prefer to speak to the Clan leaders?"

"Yes," Misse agreed, leaving Muar to his work and standing, returning to her own world and her own Estate with a mere thought. The scars of the weapon were still visible here and there by the absence of certain things, though the deaths of anyone Azoth and below had already been rectified by resurrections. Even the Golds and Silver had been granted some clemency in that matter, though it had taken a lot of frantic digging in the True Interface.

Those who did not have rebirths ready had only the narrowest window for their resurrection.

She requested the presence of the Elders through the Interface, adjusting a portion of her garden into an appropriate venue with a few tweaks. Her father was the first to arrive, and she embraced him briefly as freshly-resurrected servants arrived with refreshments and music, though the latter was still off to her ear after their ordeal. Despite her ascension, Keppel still headed the Clan; she had to address the higher levels of the System, not control and corral the various Elns.

The others arrived soon after. Even Elder Lundt knew that it behooved him to follow her directives, lest she exclude his clan from whatever was to come. The nine elders of the Nine Great Clans settled themselves into the seats she had provided in the garden, waiting for Misse to explain. Though it took no great intelligence to realize it had something to do with the devastation that had occurred some weeks prior.

"Cato's final weapon has been revealed," Misse started, bringing up the System's own scry-views, the impossible light falling against the shadowy barriers she had created. The enormity of the Core was staggering from that perspective; the five War Worlds and their attendant suns and Core Worlds, the tremendous structure of the True Core at the center. The crown jewel of the System, under assault by their heretical foe.

"As terrible as it might be, it is also insufficient. He has failed at the final hurdle. All we need do is abandon the War Worlds for a time — a short time," Misse told them.

"The Core Worlds, your homes, will be brought into Estate spaces, and the mortals may be placed in others. The True Core can sustain us there as we move onto places less infected. Those remaining Inner Worlds will have to remain for now, but soon enough they will be incorporated as well."

"More of a retreat?" Elder Mishke asked, clearly disgruntled with the idea.

"We soon will have nowhere to retreat to."

"If there were anything left in Cato's quiver, I would be worried," Misse said.

"But he made it clear this is his final card. He believes it is enough to best us; it is not. If you are still worried, you can leave. Cato welcomes our outcasts, after all," she sneered, certain that Elder Mishke had no actual interest in leaving the System. He just wanted to make sure he was in a position to undermine her authority — perhaps not realizing such a thing was impossible.

"This is a time of renewal," Misse said, looking over the elders.

"We sever our ties to the corrupted old world, and build a better world for ourselves. Muar, if you please."

Muar appeared by her side, projecting the transition of the Core Worlds. Each individual world vanished as it was pulled into an enormous Estate space. The hundred-plus worlds moved from above the War Worlds to private dimensions inside Deity space, one after another in rapid succession. The population of the War Worlds followed, cities and outposts scooped up and placed inside their own, mortal-grade areas, the populations relocated.

Then, with one final instruction, Muar restricted the System's influence. The System itself warned that such a move was risky, requiring an extra authorization that Misse provided, but a moment later the System pulled back to the True Core. Essence drain stopped. The Font provided.

"See?" Misse smiled, waving at the scry-view.

"And now his weapon means nothing."

Around the War Worlds, physics resumed. A hundred suns found themselves practically touching, and gravity took hold. Misse found the dance of suns at most a distraction as she continued to speak to the Clans, until the System blared warnings at her and threw both her and Muar into fast-time, forcibly relocating them to the Font.

A glance showed that something was going on in the Core region, but it was impossible to tell anything. Through the scry-views, there was only a furious, fulminating white — yet the essence totals were dropping rapidly, even from the perspective of the fastest acceleration possible. In each fraction of a fraction of a second, they were losing the very lifeblood of the System. As if Cato's weapon had some hidden trigger, just waiting for her to react.

"We have to prune everything we can," Misse said, refusing to panic in the face of the sudden disaster."

Everything."

"Yes," Muar said, just that, the two of them frantically cutting off bits and pieces of what remained. The other Inner Worlds, left to fend for themselves, the Estates of less important gods. Misse set the gods to be resurrected later, when they could, and began ruthlessly cutting everything and everyone outside the True Core, watching the essence drop down and down and down.

Even Misse's world had to be cut, converted back into essence and fed into the Font as, outside, the scry-views showed some great black wall emerging from the light and sweeping past them. That darkness swallowed the light, surrounding them and shrinking the scry-view to nothing more than a distant point. A relief, until the System shrieked more alerts about an even worse situation, burning ever more essence to put them into faster time, beyond anything she'd seen before.

All the warnings blared at her to relocate the Core — but to get that essence, she had to remove what was left of the System.

She discarded the former Core Worlds, the clans. Her own father. Muar grimly cut away the estates that held mortals, lesser gods, his own possessions. Everything outside the True Core and its Font, yet the System still spent all its essence like water, the distorted surroundings too much for even the beyond-Deity rank artifice.

Misse reached out, taking Muar's hand, for there was nothing left to discard. The System consisted of nothing but themselves, the True Core, and the Font of essence. All she could do was watch as the Font ran dry. The last bit of essence vanished — and with it, the System.

A supernova bloomed at the heart of the System.

The System was creation that had been designed to circumvent reality, to defy it, to deny death and the ultimate end of the universe. Its architects had been in some way visionaries, in other ways cowards, and in all ways too powerful for their own good. Yet even their creations were not so perfect as to deny most potent phenomena in the universe; the detonation of a supernova or the formation of a singularity.

A black hole sprang into existence almost directly atop the True Core itself, the all-devouring gravity seizing the System's anchor and pulling it away from the universe forever, blocking it behind an impossible well of gravity and a veil that no ordinary physics could ever cross. What remained of the Core's worlds and works exploded outward as high energy dust, the seed of what would, in thousands of years, become a nebula.

The blast front expanded out across light-years, but every Cato even slightly near the Core had long been building protections against just such an eventuality. He'd always known it was inevitable, and even counted on it after seeing so many stars in orbit of the War Worlds. In worlds closer to the Core, that meant servers bunkered deep in protected facilities where layers of ablative shielding protected everything from the flush of radiation and the hammer-blow of near-lightspeed plasma.

Further away, worlds themselves were sheltered with massive umbrella-like structures, reducing the impact to massive auroras and brilliant nights.

The shockwave shredded the fragile mirrors of the Nicoll-Dyson swarms, destroying the largest weapons ever built by humanity — but their job was done, purpose fulfilled, as telescopes caught the destruction in the fractions of a second before they were themselves obliterated. All the various versions of Cato hunkered down to wait out the destruction of the System. The campaign was finished.

Systema Deletum Est.