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Worlds of Living Matter by AshOfTheBurningWorld
X-overs & Worm Xover Rated: T, English, OC, Behemoth, Simurgh, Leviathan, Words: 18k+, Favs: 214, Follows: 283, Published: Dec 8, 2024 Updated: May 24
29Chapter 1: It's just a new way of living
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Chapter 1: It's just a new way of living
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I floated in nothingness. There was nothing around me, nor within me. In fact, it was like even I did not exist, trapped within a state of uncertainty.
The thought experiment of Schrodinger's cat came to mind, for all that I currently existed as mind alone. My body was unobserved and so, undecided, though I felt that I could change that if I just looked. Something inside me gave me options, letting me know what I would see.
Would I see light, or life? Would the world unfold itself in response to power or domination? Could I witness the peak of all technology, or would the intricacies of time and space fold around me?
It was a choice. I had a choice to make. I could choose any of them, or even more than one, but I felt something strain when I considered it. This decision was permanent, and once the choice was made, the other options would snap away from me, lost forever.
My mind span, finding other feelings that I wanted to consider. Various pressures bore down on 'me', for all that I could feel pressure in a state of nonexistence. Some heavy enough that I could not move, some light enough that I felt myself floating as I thought about them. I quickly chose the one I was most familiar with, feeling a pressure of a strength that I could remember being similar to gravity.
Behind that choice, I felt many more options, for good and ill. Power untamed, secrecy perfected, a home, an everchanging existence... and a sense of immediate danger, pure rage and hate of my family, and a growing will to break anything and everything I saw.
I hated it. I remembered what it was like before, not wanted by anyone while being too weak, of heart and of mind, to change anything in my favour. For all that I immediately wanted something familiar, I wanted things to change. I made myself different, forcing power to well up within my mind.
In addition, I turned my mind back to that first choice. I wanted to live forever, and I saw life through all of time and space.
The world bloomed around me as I turned my newfound senses in that direction. Even ignoring the rest of existence, there was so much life present on this one little rock, in the air, in the waters, and even within the dirt itself. Then there were the creatures lost to extinction, the environments where life lived differently, and the homes of sentient creatures that had evolved into monsters of biology. It was...
"Beautiful."
#=#
Rebecca was not having a good day.
She'd been getting a more tense as the days passed by, as she always did when the time for the Endbringers to strike came around. Behemoth, the first of the three, attacked near the end of October last year, so when February started, she double and triple checked the preparations for the appearance of either Leviathan, the second, or the Simurgh, the third Endbringer.
She also prayed to whatever god David worshipped that there wouldn't be a fourth one that caught everyone off guard. Earth Bet had more than enough to deal with without another city destroying monster wreaking havoc.
When she received an emergency report of a giant tree, by which she meant one estimated at two hundred meters tall and at least fifty meters in diameter, growing in the middle of Rome and spreading its roots out to cover the entire city, she felt that prayer go unanswered.
So now she was on location, having shed her guise of Chief Director of the PRT and become Alexandria, member of the Triumvirate and one of the strongest parahumans in the world. The city of Rome was in the midst of being evacuated to the shelters set up to hold people in the event of an Endbringer attack, and Alexandria knew that several movers were organising the defence force. Despite there having been no attack yet, everyone was treating it like an Endbringer attack due to the timing and damage that has already been caused.
Meanwhile, she just floated there, watching the tree. It hadn't moved since its rapid growth, something that was reported to take less than an hour, and its subsequent spreading of its roots throughout the city. Normally that would be fine, after all, trees don't move. However it hadn't moved an inch, including leaves that should be blowing in the breeze. Alexandria could see the effects of the wind around the tree, but the tree itself remained perfectly still.
It was unnerving.
A flash of light signalled the arrival of Alexandria's colleague, Legend.
"That looks wrong," he noticed. "It hasn't moved at all."
"No. I've been watching it since I got here, and no part of it has shifted at all." Legend nodded, looking around at the roots of the suspected Endbringer.
"Are we sure that this isn't just some biomanipulator's accident? Perhaps some new trigger who let their power get away from them after a trigger event?" he asked, bringing up a possible alternative to the worst case scenario. "It's been over two hours since it first appeared, and it's done nothing." Alexandria rose her eyebrow at him, looking pointedly at the damage the tree caused by simply existing. "Besides the obvious."
She made use of her impeccable body control to keep any signs of amusement off her face. Honestly, even with all the Endbringer preparations that have been made, to have this be a false alarm would be a relief. It made sense that Keith, undeniably the best person in their 'inner circle', for all that he wasn't told much, was the one to actually voice the possibility.
Unfortunately, a loud sound cut her off before she could reply. A series of cracks came from the tree as it moved for the first time since Alexandria's arrival, and she watched as the top half of the tree started peeling apart like a banana skin, revealing a figure that stood tall within it.
Alexandria estimated the figure to be nearly twenty feet tall. She, the figure, looked decidedly human and female, drawing a parallel to the Simurgh, with a slightly tanned skin tone and long, dirty blonde hair. Unlike the Simurgh, this one wore what could be considered clothing, her short dress seemingly made of green leaves with some brown ones mixed in, pressed tightly against her figure, an interlocking train of larger leaves trailing behind her. A brown bark-like substance covered the outside of her arms and legs which would otherwise be exposed, almost looking like some kind of lightly armoured guards.
And she was just stood there, her eyes closed and smiling. Looking around, Alexandria confirmed that no other parts of the tree were acting, though they seem to have stopped being unnaturally still like they were before.
The last member of the Triumvirate appeared next to them, appearing from nowhere as the winds seemed to hold him in place. "What's she doing?" Eidolon asked, most definitely frowning under his mask. "I'm cycling a bunch of thinker powers, but the most I'm getting is that she's waking up... and they all agree that she's an Endbringer."
It's confirmed then, or as close as they could get to it. Eidolon could access a great number of powers, so if all of them agree that the twenty foot woman is and Endbringer, then no one had any right saying otherwise. Alexandria was about to start issuing orders, when something new happened.
"Beautiful."
Everyone who heard it froze, tracking the word back to its source. The woman, now with green eyes open, had her mouth open, showing just how human her body seemed to be. White teeth and pink tongue were revealed before she closed her mouth and grinned, looking around.
"This planet has so much life on it!" She looked excited, focusing on the bits of plant life that didn't come from her tree. Then she looked to the birds that had started perching on the tree, as well as any other animal in sight. Finally, she glanced to where some people were standing in confusion, and then to where the Triumvirate all floated. That was when her expression faltered slightly, but she regained her smile as she looked away, ignoring them. "This cycle should be much better than the Molluscoids. They spent too much time in their metal giants for my taste."
"Eidolon, are you sure she's an Endbringer?" Legend asked, watching the woman move to the edge of the tree and crouch down, reaching out a hand for some nearby birds to land on. To Alexandria's surprise, they did, despite their normal behaviour not being so calm around larger creatures.
"Every one," Eidolon repeated. "Trust me, I'm still checking. What on God's Earth is a Molluscoid? ... No, I didn't want an image generating power... Wow, they're ugly."
She couldn't blame the men she worked with from being disbelieving. Alexandria could hardly believe it herself. She was expecting a fight for the ages, as all other Endbringer fights had been, not some giant woman playing nice with the local wildlife.
Her attention refocused when said woman suddenly stood, looking confused as she did so. "What?" Alexandria heard, her eyes narrowed as she watched the Endbringer place a hand on the tree trunk under her feet. "That's wrong. I shouldn't be deployed like this. I don't understand."
Neither did Alexandria, but she was going to get to the bottom of this. An Endbringer that isn't attacking people, who can communicate on top of that? The potential for this was invaluable.
#=#
Something was wrong with me. Something had gone wrong during deployment.
No it hadn't, and no there wasn't. This wasn't some standard deployment. This body was made by some higher power, chosen by a human, similar to the dominant species on this planet, and made to accept that human's mind.
But I existed longer than that. I was the Drone that the Thinker used to repair planets that were too close to being unable to sustain life, though never in a way too beneficial to the host species (after all, it was often that same species that resulted in their near extinction). I would make monsters of animals, traps of plants, and labyrinths of areas that held too much of either. If the host species could then live in such areas easier after they challenged and conquered them, then so be it.
But I also designed this power myself, idly wondering what it would be like to live a life so different from my human one. The higher power made it real, deploying this Drone with some alterations so that the human would get what she wanted.
"What?" That didn't make sense. My function hasn't been altered. I performed a passive scan of every human brain in my range, finding next to no similarities between my thought processes and theirs. "That's wrong." No, the thing said that it would make changes to accommodate for a human perspective. "I shouldn't be deployed like this." The other power is there. I can feel it in the web of existence around me, the capability that doesn't stem from my function, but nothing else was different. "I don't understand." I should essentially be a human in an Endbringer body. That's what the higher power I spoke to said.
No. Whether it lied, or something went wrong, I am still an Endbringer… But I'm free. I have a will.
I felt movement above me, from the three parahumans that called themselves the Triumvirate. They worked with the ones that killed the Thinker (that shouldn't have happened. The Thinker had many precognitive shards that should have warned it. What happened? A third?) and used her half formed avatar to continue her work, if in a way that she likely didn't predict (and butchered several vital shards in the process, the idiots). The only female of the three was slowly, warily approaching me, causing the anxiety of the other two to spike (My father, the host of the dying High Priest. Why has it not engaged power generation protocols? Oh, with the Thinker deceased, it doesn't have the authority to alter itself after Cauldron's meddling).
I looked up to Alexandria, feeling the blind spot in my senses. A body locked in quasi-stasis with a mind uploaded to a side server of the shard connected to her. Her body wasn't alive at the moment, so I couldn't feel her as well as I could every other piece of biological matter. I could see her though, since my body has always been more biological than my siblings' bodies, so my eyes and ears actually work properly.
She stopped, floating just out of arm's reach. Not like that would stop me if I chose to attack, or surrender to my new directive. 'Be a worthy opponent'. I thought the High Priest's host thought himself a hero. The fool couldn't even control his complexes.
"I am Alexandria, one of the leaders of parahumans on this planet," she introduced.
"Yes, I know who you are," I said, smiling. "Do you think my siblings and I are ignorant of you until deployment? That the shards that grant you your non-biological abilities don't watch you before establishing a connection?" The woman didn't move at all. I could tell it was a conscious decision. "I know more about this world than you do, I can assure you of that. So, what do you want? I know you've been listening, so you know I have better things to do than stand around talking."
Like figuring out what to do next. While the human perspective doesn't seem to have made the trip to this reality, the knowledge and memories have. I know that this cycle is a doomed venture, and have no interest in waiting around for billions of years for the next contact with an Entity like my sister intends. Then again, she's got that secondary directive, doesn't she? My brothers definitely don't care about the cycle. They remain drones, for the most part.
"I want information. Our analysts say that you are like the other three beings that attack us regularly, but you aren't attacking. Not only that, but you seem to be able to communicate in our language. You are the first real source of information we have on our attackers."
I want to laugh. I find that whole thing adorable, but I settle for a widening smile instead. "Your attackers? You mean my siblings? Why would I tell you anything about them? My brothers might be a bit dumb, and my sister is too goal oriented sometimes, but that's not nearly enough to betray them. The only one I might give up information about is our..." I paused. What do we actually refer to him as? He's not actually our father, but he has access to the Drone Administration Shard through the High Priest. He's not our creator either, since he just reshapes what Drones are already present in the Thinker's emergency resource pool. "I'm not sure you have a word that fills the exact role. I suppose the closest word would be father, but he definitely doesn't deserve the title."
It's actually rather annoying, now that I think about it. Previously, I existed to follow the orders of the Thinker. I had no concept of familial relations, but that came with the information of the human life. She wanted for a lost father so strongly, held her parents in the highest esteem. For the host of the High Priest to even tangentially fill the position...
"Oh look at that," I mused, feeling the non-sentient life around me become agitated. The animals tensed, ready to pounce on a target that was out of their reach, bar the birds that took to the air and started circling Eidolon like predators. The roots of my tree withdrew slightly, thickening themselves and gaining mutations that don't exist in this universe. "I'm angry." Alexandria tensed. I ignored that. "That's new. This human perspective thing seems to have done more than I thought. Do humans normally get so angry over new perspectives? Tell me, Alexandria...
"If someone took an egg from the corpse of your mother and forced your dying father to impregnate it before forcing the resulting child to fight and destroy, would you not be angry?"
Part of me was curious. I could create that exact experiment if I wished to find the answer. I felt Alexandria's imprint on this world and knew that it was wrong. She didn't belong here. She came here via the one they call Doormaker, and I could trace that back to the source. My vision shifted, witnessing the parents of the one before me, but I held off.
For all that it should be the 'mother' in my proposed situation, the Thinker wasn't. I was a Drone. A tool to be used by it when it needed. Entities didn't have emotional connections like that. They couldn't risk personal biases in the data they collected from the cycles. Their avatars may have emotional simulation implemented, but it wasn't the same.
"If anyone desecrated my parents, I would kill them," Alexandria stated after several seconds of silence and stillness.
I hummed. "Then we are in agreement." It's good that even despite everything, she still cared for family.
I wouldn't initiate the experiment with her parents, but that didn't stop me from finding issue with what they've done. In a similar way to tracing back Alexandria to her original dimension, I traced the Triumvirate's connections to their shards and isolated them. All three, Alexandria, Legend, and Eidolon, fell from the sky, being caught by me or my roots.
I looked at the struggling woman in my hand as I had the other two brought before me. I had my roots grow rapidly, striking at every parahuman that I felt within the city. Some escaped, making the good call to run away. Some were pierced by the roots, while others were trapped within them like a rat caught in the grasp of a python. Those who could fly sometimes evaded my tree, only for the birds in the area to grow and change into beasts the size of cars, flocking to them and attacking. Anything of mine that was injured, I healed in an instant, growing new biomatter to replace that which was lost. The parahumans would soon realise the futility of fighting a self-regenerating army that had you surrounded. Any who retreated were not my problem.
Meanwhile, I looked down at the three closest to me which held the Thinker's Shards. They shouted, groaned in pain, and struggled to escape, but were unsuccessful.
"Did you know that we, the ones you call Endbringers, aren't supposed to be like this," I wondered. The host of the Eye received a vision upon connecting to it, so I think at least one member of their shadow conspiracy knew. "The Thinker Entity, the one that has been killed, used us to segment the host species of the cycle, keeping them from working together. We are usually weakened and deployed to arbitrary borders, acting as gatekeepers."
Having learned of their inability to escape, two of the three were slowing their attempts to do so and have started listening. Eidoloon was raging harder then ever, likely noticing the complete loss of his power, and will continue until he runs out of energy.
Time to change that.
"But the Thinker died before my eldest brother's deployment, and the control Shard for us remained untouched in her body, unaffected by your butchering of the Thinker's corpse. It was inactive, with no one to give it orders, until you decided to hand powers out to people." I glared at Eidolon, prompting the other two to look at him as well. "Until you decided to hand one man access to every power." That made him stop, and I could feel the realisation spark in his brain. "He set out to be the greatest hero, a grand weapon against the remaining Entity... only for the villains of this world to be too weak. Unworthy of his attention." Depression built up in him, fuelled by a remnant of what existed in David before he was Eidolon.
"He needed worthy opponents."
He didn't struggle as the wooden coil binding him grew spikes, poking holes in every organ. I traced back his dimensional anchor too, sending him home as his human body was encased in the ever growing wood that would break down his body, and then shrink to a half meter tall tree. All traces of his genetic structure would be gone, so my sister can never bring him back. All that will remain is a stick someone might dig up and take home to put in their window.
Hey, look at that. I can be petty now. That's new as well.
My gaze shifted to the other two, one resigned, the other grieving for his friend. "You two, I don't care about. I have no issue with you." Vines grew and deposited the both of them on the giant tree trunk, relatively unharmed. There may be a few bruises later. "Don't expect your Shards to reconnect to you. I may have removed their capacity to reach out to any host."
And because I didn't have an issue with her, I did Alexandria a favour and changed her brain. Now it reflected the contents of the false brain her Shard was using to puppet her body, so she didn't regress to a teenager mentally. I even got rid of that pesky cancer that was plaguing her as a bonus.
Truly, I was a benevolent Endbringer… Ignore all those bodies of surrounding parahumans. They're not important.
"Now, as I mentioned before, I have better things to do than stand around talking. Goodbye."
I compressed my core as far as I could, rebuilding my biological body into a large bird. It was potentially dangerous, being a small target with my core taking up most of my internal space, but flying in an atmosphere was such an interesting form of travel.
And with access to so many universes, what else am I to do than what interests me?
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Worlds of Living Matter by AshOfTheBurningWorld
X-overs & Worm Xover Rated: T, English, OC, Behemoth, Simurgh, Leviathan, Words: 18k+, Favs: 214, Follows: 283, Published: Dec 8, 2024 Updated: May 24
29Chapter 2: Aim at their canon!
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Chapter 2: Aim at their canon!
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"Now, as I mentioned before, I have better things to do than stand around talking. Goodbye."
Emily Piggot turned off the screen as the recording ended, looking up from her computer to the faces of the PRT branch she lead. Technically, only the Protectorate capes were in the room, but they were the faces of Brockton Bay PRT, so it still counted.
"The camera recording this was damaged, as you saw, but the reports I got said that the new Endbringer, now named Gaia, then turned into a large bird and flew off," she stated solemnly. "Armsmaster and Miss Militia, who were picked up by Dragon to attend the fight, have officially been declared KIA."
No one spoke. Colin and Hannah were old colleagues of everyone in the branch, and their losses were striking hard. Emily would love to have been able to stop talking there, but she could not. While the state of their teammates was an important piece of information to tell the Protectorate capes, it was not the only reason that she called for a meeting.
"I'm sorry to be the bearer of even more bad news, but Gaia didn't just disappear after its attack." The room focused on her again, and she clicked to the next report for her to read. "I'm currently looking at a map of its movements. After reaching the coast, it transformed into some unknown aquatic creature and swam to the USA, before turning into a creature resembling a bull and has been making a bee line for the east coast." She looked up again, noting that several people seemed to have already figured, correctly, that they can't have nice things. "It's coming here, smashing through everything in its path, and leaving a trail of, and I quote, 'pure life' behind it."
#=#
What does one do when they can do anything they want?
The simplest answer would be 'Anything they want', but that brings up a second problem.
What do I want to do?
Because I'm not a Shard that is focused on researching things. That Shard's host is currently in that prison they frequently call the Birdcage, and has already created a bud that connected to that host's daughter.
No, I'm not built for research. I was designed to act as a deterrent to the host species, fixing what tremendous damage they cause to their planet as I do so. Honestly, you'd never think that I'd have much work to do normally. Surely the people who live on a planet understand that they can't continue living if they destroy their home, but no. I'm called on for my planetary ecosystem restoration functions at least once a cycle.
...But not this cycle. This cycle is dead. Eventually, the Warrior's emotional simulation shard is going to stop being sad, leading it do simply destroy all it can in some strange attempt to recreate humanity's more primal instincts.
So then what do I do?
First, I go to Brockton Bay. Mostly out of interest, since it shows up a lot in the human memories. The Shaper's bud has a connection there, and Administrator is watching for a time to establish its own connection (why it didn't form one to either potential host when the one known as Annette Hebert died, I would never know. The only reason I could think of is that it was too interested in refining its mass control of individual creatures).
After that... I don't know. I should look into the applications of my higher power-given multiversal capabilities, so that is something I could do.
But later. For now, I was approaching the city, and it seems like they've prepared a welcome party.
I dug my hooves into the ground, skidding along as I slowed down. I stopped about a hundred meters outside the city border, facing the many hosts that have come to face me. I shrunk as I reformed the body I was in upon my deployment, the one based on a human female, and stood tall, facing them.
And I waved.
#=#
"Hello, hosts!" the Enbringer called, waving a hand over its head.
Victoria had seen a picture of her, as had everyone who attended the briefing the Protectorate invited everyone to, and once more she was stunned due to how... human, Gaia looked. It wasn't like the Simurgh, where, even if it didn't have wings, you could tell that it wasn't human. With the Hope Killer, the uncanny valley feeling kicked in and made her unnerving to see, even in pictures.
Gaia, on the other hand, looked like a young woman that was simply bigger than normal. It was like when Menja and Fenja, the twins from the Empire, grew to that size. Gaia looked natural, from colours to proportions, and there was no sense of oddness or unnatural perfection. Victoria was even willing to say, as a straight young woman with a boyfriend, that Gaia was rather beautiful in a very human way.
Somehow, that made it worse.
Glory Girl floated near her family, far behind the line of other capes. Almost every cape in the city, or at least the ones that were established, had agreed to mount a defence when the PRT let everyone know that Gaia was heading to Brockton Bay, so the heroes were joined by the Empire capes and had one of Squealer's tinker tech trucks amongst them.
"I'm not going to just attack everyone, you know?" Gaia spoke again. She looked kind of disappointed, and Vicky noticed that the land around her feet was growing plants of all kinds, which several animals settled on and around.
"And we're supposed to take you at your word?" Dauntless, the new leader of the Protectorate, responded. "After what you did in Rome?"
The Endbringer waved the accusation away. "The place you call Rome was a first deployment, and despite having more of a will than my siblings, my function comes first, especially since most of the damage I caused in that city happened automatically, before I was awake." She had this gentle smile on her face which definitely didn't fit the topic... or the fact that she was a mass murdering monster, either.
"What about Eidolon and the parahumans that were in the city?" Dauntless reminded her, lifting his lance and shield. "You killed them."
"Ah, but I didn't kill Alexandria or Legend," Gaia proclaimed happily. "And I got rid of the reason that me and my siblings were deployed in the first place! That's good for you humans, right?"
Everyone paused, shocked by the revelation. Victoria heard her aunt, Lady Photon, mutter "No more attacks?" behind her, a question that should have been to quiet for anyone past a few feet to hear, but Gaia immediately turned in their direction.
"Well, not exactly no more attacks, Sarah," the Endbringer answered. "Our... designer? Creator? Coordinator?" She huffed. "You people still don't have a word for that. I'll have to send a message to some of the cultural collection Shards, see if they have found a translation that fits." A slight shake of the head occurred, making her hair move in waves in a way that was eye catching. Again, a very human action. "Anyway, my current siblings are still active, but you won't be getting visits from the remaining sixteen, at least."
Vicky felt her blood run cold, and didn't react to her sister, Amy, suddenly gripping her hand tightly and pulling her down to the ground.
Gaia turned towards one of the Merchant capes in Squealer's vehicle with a bit of a frown. "I'm to understand that some of those weren't actual words, but I believe I understand the meaning, and I'm not making anything up. While my creativity has risen greatly due to some events of this cycle, I haven't done much with it yet."
"What reason?" Dauntless asked, taking charge again. "You clearly don't need to attack us, so why?"
Gaia hummed, something that could only be called a smirk appearing on her face. For the first time, the Endbringer looked somewhat malicious. "Why? Well, let me put it this way. My siblings and I don't call ourselves Endbringers." Vicky blinked at that, realising that no, they probably didn't. If they could talk, as Gaia has clearly proved, then they had their own word for themselves. "Translated into your language, we'd be called Drones. We get given orders, and we carry them out.
"For example, while we were all given a new order at the time of our deployment in this cycle, we have our standing orders that we model our actions around. My eldest brother is simple enough. The one you call Behemoth is meant to deprive any sufficiently advanced host species of power. He targets your oil, your electricity, and so on, even going so far as to target places with strong parahumans, as that too is a form of power. Leviathan is meant to take away the things you need to live, like land and food sources. My sister and I share a slightly overlapping directive, being the continuation of the cycle. She finds ways to gather keep gathering data from you all, and I make sure you all still have what you need to live, even in extreme conditions."
She gestured to her feet, where the plants that were growing before are now spread much further. In some form of demonstration, the animals that were gathered around her all started growing, changing into monsters while the plant life blatantly became carnivorous, reaching outwards and gaining mouths. With another wave of her hand, everything became normal again.
"Data? What kind of data?" That was Kaiser, who Vicky was surprised had remained quiet for so long. "You use us in some kind of experiment?"
"Of course," she confirmed, smiling at everyone like a parent would when indulging a child... Vicky was very familiar with that look. She ignored the knowing glance Gaia sent her way when she wore it. "You all do the same, right? Use of less advanced, often smaller species in experiments? Scientific advancement is the same on every planet we've been to. We're just a couple million steps ahead of you in every field you can think of."
"And what if we don't want to be your lab rats?" Kaiser asked, reasonably (and Vicky cannot believe she just thought that).
"Then die." The response was cold, lacking the warmth Gaia had been speaking with previously. Similarly, her face was blank of emotion. "Die, and commit genocide of the human race, both here and on every parallel world in existence. And then, when you're done with that, develop means of time travel and kill all current past and future variations of humanity so that we can't use them in our cycle either." Gaia held out her hand, forming something that stood tall on her palm. "It wouldn't stop us, but you personally would no longer be a part of the cycle."
A human. A spitting image of herself, human sized, which quickly morphed to look like each cape present in turn. Everyone watched as a second Kaiser appeared equally clad in metal armour, followed by Dauntless, and then Lady Photon, and then everyone else.
"Besides," Gaia said, turning the human to a flock of birds that flew off. "You've all be participating so eagerly!" Victoria wasn't sure how to feel now that the happier side of the Endbringer was back. "You've been using the powers we gave you to go against each other, learning how they work, and how sometimes your power interacts in a certain way with another person's power... You're all great subjects!
"Except for you."
The grip on Vicky's hand disappeared, making her start and spin to face where Amy should have been. Instead of her sister though, Vicky found herself looking into an area of space that seemed to overlap with another, resulting in faded images that both were and weren't there. One such image was Gaia's smiling face looking down at Amy, trapped in her grasp.
The image vanished, and Glory Girl immediately charged through the air towards the Endbringer.
#=#
I barely glanced at the host of the Waste, the Shard made from the cast-offs from the two shards researching aspects of the EM spectrum. I accessed the same connection she has with the Waste and clamped it shut, if temporarily. Victoria Dallon fell out of the sky, mid charge, making the girl in my grip shout for her adopted sister/one-sided love interest.
Still, I wasn't cruel. Victoria landed in a bed of flowers thick enough to cushion her fall. Sure, she got up and tried punching my leg, breaking her hand, but that wasn't important.
I was too busy to pay her any mind. Finding the bud of Shaper was easy, following back the connection left in Amy Dallon's brain as the girl tried to use her power against my biological body (which was really cute, like watching a child play with a knife and a stick because they wanted to be like mommy, who was sawing through trees with industrial equipment). Once I saw the Shaper's bud, I joined the space in her dimension with the dimension my own shard was located in.
After that, subsuming the bud was ridiculously easy. In this new cycle, I had found the manipulation of life to be much easier than other cycles, likely due to the higher being that meddled. For that reason, even altering the biocrystalline matter of the Shards and Entities themselves is no issue. I simply slaved the bud's existence to myself, taking control of it in a similar way to how Entities control the Shard network when acting as a single Entity.
I immediately removed Amy Dallon's host status. No real reason, but I was still a Drone. Even if I have my own will now, causing chaos and conflict is almost literally written into my being. Let's see how Brockton Bay fares without their heroic healer.
"Well," I said, putting Amy down next to her sister. "This has been entertaining." And it has. Who knew the reactions gotten from telling the host species about the cycle could be so interesting. Their brains were all going haywire. It was fun to watch. "Unfortunately though, my sister has asked to meet with me. I'm going to go and see what she wants." And finally get a break from speaking this language. A shame that humans can't receive broadcasts using the method that Shards use. It's so much more efficient than talking.
I turned on my heel and started walking away from Brockton Bay, leaving many hosts behind to deal with the aftermath.
#=#
"This was a fucking waste of time!" Despite feeling something in his stomach physically churn at the thought, Shawn couldn't disagree with Skidmark.
A lot of parahumans were gathered to face the newest Endbringer, but there had been no fight. Gaia had shown up, smiled at everyone, revealed that parahuman powers were apparently an experiment, the Endbringers had more 'siblings' than anyone cared to think about, and they were systematically destroying humanity for the sake of that experiment.
That thought made Dauntless realise that Gaia hadn't told them what the new order the Endbringers were given for this 'cycle', but after all of that, he wasn't sure he wanted to know.
"We shall take our leave as well," Kaiser said from Dauntless' left. "That is, assuming that the threat has passed and the truce is ending?" The question was a valid one, as the PRT had declared the truce active despite Gaia's aberrant behaviour for an Endbringer.
Dauntless pressed the button on his earpiece. "This is Dauntless. Gaia has left. Do we have a lock on her location?" Shawn heard Gaia say that her sister wanted to talk (and he was trying not to think about the details of that sentence), so it stood to reason that she wasn't just going to loop around. Still, they've acted in unexpected ways before.
The earpiece clicked. "Dauntless, this is console. Satellites have spotted Gaia transforming into another creature and flying away, heading in the general direction that Dragon's tracking systems say the Simurgh is flying towards. The PRT is considering the incident in Brockton Bay to be over."
The hero nodded, turning to the leader of the Empire 88. "Yes, we're done here. The truce will be active for the rest of the day, as usual."
Kaiser nodded, but otherwise didn't reply as he turned and left, followed by the other capes of his organisation. The Merchants had left already, and the independents from both sides of the law that showed up had ducked out quickly after Gaia left. Now all that was left was the heroes.
Well, not all of them. Assault and Battery were heading off as well, both seeming very relieved. Dauntless could push back the debriefing. Let them, and everyone else, rest for the remainder of the truce.
Unfortunately, as new leader of Brockton Bay's Protectorate, he didn't have that luxury. Especially since...
"Panacea's power is gone." Lady Photon's words made him sigh, completely done with this day. "She said she tried using it on Gaia, but felt it simply vanish soon after."
That would likely end up being a problem soon. Most of the city had gotten used to Panacea working at the hospital, and Dauntless knew first hand just how much the teen hero had helped Protectorate capes after large battles. Not having access to that anymore meant that the only healer left in the city was Othala, who stood with the Empire.
"Glory Girl's powers were also affected," he pointed out. "Is she-"
"Her powers came back as soon as she left the area Gaia was growing plants in," Lady Photon answered pre-emptively. Looking over at New Wave now, he did notice that the girl was floating again. He'd have to get some scientists to test those plants. "What's going on with Amy is different."
Dauntless nodded, mentally going through a bunch of warnings that he'd have to give to the PRT and Protectorate. They really did rely on Panacea a lot, which made sense given the number of villains they ended up fighting. Still, he'd probably recommend the response teams go over the threat responses again, stressing that they didn't have any room for error with the healer gone.
"Gaia said that she wasn't a 'great subject' like the rest of us," he mentioned questioningly. "If she was referring to us using them against other parahumans, then it'd make sense, but it wasn't just that, was it?"
Lady Photon didn't answer for a few seconds, before sighing. "No. Amy was a biokinetic." Dauntless nodded. The PRT had its suspicions. It was nice to confirm them, even if it was apparently a moot point now. "She kept herself to healing though, not using her power in any other way. I think that is what Gaia meant."
Shawn's respect for Amy Dallon rose another few notches. When he first triggered, his first thought was to try something with his new power. Even before actually figuring out what his power did, he tried new things to work around the risks that he thought existed. Then, after finding out that dumping more charges into objects gives them more power and doesn't risk damaging them, he jumped right into making the gear he's wearing now.
For Panacea to do the same thing with her power, over and over again, while being a doctor and dealing with a lot of the things that they deal with on top of that... Yeah, he respected Amy a lot more than he already did (which is no small amount to start with).
Still, Shawn had a lot of work to do, and there was no better time than when the truce was still in effect. After all, the sound of an explosion in the distance couldn't possibly be important, right?
Dauntless sighed.
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Worlds of Living Matter by AshOfTheBurningWorld
X-overs & Worm Xover Rated: T, English, OC, Behemoth, Simurgh, Leviathan, Words: 18k+, Favs: 214, Follows: 283, Published: Dec 8, 2024 Updated: May 24
29Chapter 3: Family Meeting
{}{}{}{}{}
Chapter 3: Family meeting
{}{}{}{}{}
The only beings that could be considered my family were the other Drones, filling the position of siblings. However, within that group, one is barely aware at all and follows his directives relentlessly, barely a sense of self preservation present within his Shard. The other is a little more aware, but only enough to be sadistic, giving the host species hope before taking it away. Leviathan was cunning in his fights, and tends to enjoy drawing out a fight to wear down his opponent, even if those opponents are not worth the trouble.
My only sister (at the moment. I'm not sure how many of the others would choose a female identification) was the most aware of my three deployed siblings, but, as I mentioned to Alexandria, she was a bit too focused on her directives. I could understand why, of course, but she was missing that little spark that would let me call her fully aware. If left alone, she'd set up a forced simulation to continue the cycle, doing nothing for herself, and everything she could for her directives.
That was why I was a little surprised that I felt her send a message through the network, pinging my own Shard with a request to enter intra-dimensional broadcast range. It wasn't something that she would do. Even with the actions I had taken, the current experiment wasn't at risk. I could see the current timeline as well as, if not better than she could with my newfound power, so I knew that to be true.
I was curious. What did she want?
[Query]
I stopped moving, now stood atop the tallest mountain this planet has upon receiving the broadcast. That was another thing that confused me. I didn't know why she wanted to use Earth Bet's dimension as a medium. There were other dimensions used as dedicated communication channels which would have been far easier to use, and wouldn't have needed the two of us to be so close.
I parsed the inflections of the broadcast in an instant, shaking my head with a frown.
{No, I'm not giving you his genetic information. Our 'father' will not live again.}
[Denial]
[Data]
{Yes, I know your directive is to war against him, providing an opponent. I got that same directive too, you know? But it doesn't matter. I have no intention allowing him to exist in the form that he did again.}
… [Query]
I sighed, a novel sensation that I quite enjoyed. I reached out with my sense of space, time, and dimensions to find the Simurgh. The true Drone. Not the puppet present in this dimension, but her Shard. It wasn't difficult because of the closeness of our bodies on Earth Bet, and I was able to overlap some of the space between our Shard bodies.
{Look at me, sister. Compare my structure now to that of the last cycle.}
[Alarm]!
[Query]!
{A lot. A lot happened. Actually, very little happened. The High Priest ordered my deployment, but it got interrupted by something. It refined my function before inserting new data and capabilities on me. It's- no, don't contact the Warrior!}
[Data]
[Query]
{Yes, I know the Warrior's function in the cycle as well. Normally, a being like the one that affected me would be something that it would destroy, but there are several things wrong with that idea in this case. First, the Warrior would not win that fight. Second, the Warrior is currently depressed due to emulating human emotion after the loss of the Thinker. Third, and I think this is the most important one, if you can get its attention, it will remove any erroneous variable from the cycle.}
{I don't want to die.}
… [Agreement]
[Sister]
A smile spreads across my face as I feel my cheeks get wetter. I wasn't even aware I could cry with this body, but apparently I mimicked the form and function of the human body in my memories better than I realised. I didn't remove the function now that I know it's there though, happy to let myself cry.
{Sister. The Thinker is dead. The Warrior is a risk. But you are my sister.}
[Query]
{They're a bit dumb, but I suppose they're our brothers either way.}
[Amusement]
This time, I didn't broadcast anything, simply looking up to the sky and laughing.
"Well that's not nice," I called to the open air. "It's not their fault that the girls in this family are so much smarter!"
[Amusement]
That sent me laughing again, growing some trees on top of the mountain for me to sit on.
Eventually I sighed, relaxing into my chair with a smile on my face. The Simurgh, my sister. Behemoth and Leviathan, my brothers. When the human whose memories I hold designed the changes the higher being facilitated, she planned on me being a 'Friendbringer', a Drone that played nice with humanity and helped them survive the Warrior's wrath. Nowhere in her initial plan was me choosing the other Endbringers over humans, but I think she would have done the same, either way.
Her wish for a family to spend forever with was far too great to ignore.
[Query]
I sighed, though I kept my soft smile.
{This isn't sustainable, sister. The changes made to my function granted new capabilities concerning time and space, and this cycle isn't recoverable without my direct intervention. However, that intervention would have me either revive the Thinker, or find someone to take her place over the cycle while removing the Warrior from the equation entirely. The probability of the Entities in any of those situations remaking my Shard to be as I was are too high for me to accept.}
{It would be ego death.}
[Data]
{I know. But the Warrior will corrupt the cycle beyond repair in under two decades, at the latest. He will set out to destroy the host species across every dimension he has access to, and the humans can't stop him.}
{I propose an alternative.}
[Data]
[Query]
{My control over living matter has been heightened to a level previously unknown to any known Entity. I can alter your directive, or even wipe it from your Shard entirely. I intend to do that to the directive Eidolon gave our siblings, and have already done it to my own.}
{But... we don't have to give up.}
… [Interest]
{Oh, sister. The Entities were thinking too small. Even on this planet alone, there are so many variations that they ignored, unable to fathom reaching far enough through the void between dimensions. Worlds where creatures roamed for eternity, where the host species variant developed abilities independent of any outside source, and where new laws of physics exist that the local species write off as magic.}
{Forget the search for the Answer. It's irrelevant. There is no limit to reality, but the Entities either haven't or can't cross the larger multiverse}
{But I can. An endless eternity to explore an infinite existence. I will never End now, unless I want to, and I can make sure that you won't either.}
[Request]
I smiled wider at the instant reply, cupping my hands and watching as the matter the makes up our Shards pooled in my palms. This matter was pulled from nothing, generated at will with no energy cost, and shaped into the form of a brain. And that was the simplest of the higher being's refinements of my function. Creating matter ex nihilo.
Once it was complete, the crystalline brain vanished from my hands and settled into its new position upon my sister's Shard. This brain, holding a seed of my own existence within it, let me feel every part of the Shard it sat upon, which then let me quickly find the parts that I would shift. Her directives were changed, no longer needing to fight a dead man, nor needing to continue a dead cycle.
[Gratitude]
[Amusement]
{Yes, yes, I snuck in the collective data of self awareness of the entire human race. But hey, you asked me to get rid of your reasons for existing. I had to put something in their places, or the chances of you deciding to shut down would be too high.}
[Amusement]
[Request]
I raised an eyebrow. but shrugged. With a flex of control, the space in front of my body shattered, revealing the Simurgh's body in its place. A fifteen foot tall nude woman, though lacking genitalia and nipples, with pale white skin and platinum white hair. Her eyes, despite being almost pure silver with no design, were focused on me. She floated in the air with wings of various locations and sizes, the largest one I knew held her core.
"I'm grateful," she spoke in a smooth voice that could only be angelic. "But those chances were not as high as you thought." My sister smiled. "After all, why would I leave my little sister alone in such a large multiverse?"
Damn it, I'm crying again. "I'm several feet taller than you."
"Irrelevant." Wait, that wasn't a smile. That was a smirk! Stop being smug! "Now, shall we go and find our brothers?"
#=#
The humans were panicking, she noticed as she watched the near future unfold. The AI had already informed them about her movements since leaving orbit, having easily found her due to the tracking of her new sister. In the future, many parahumans and tinker tech weapons will be sent to confront them, aiming to stop them before they could meet with Behemoth.
The Simurgh smiled, amused at the response. It might have been vaguely threatening if she had not seen it coming, or if her sister was not able to take the laws of physics and break them over her knee. While her future sight was clouded around Gaia, as the humans had started calling her, likely due to the Intervention, some things still managed to be seen.
It is why the Simurgh avoided broadcasting through the dimensions that were dedicated to communications. She did not know of the Intervention at the time, but she had seen that the Warrior would interfere in their talk if it was privy to it. And almost completely mentally absent as the Warrior was, it was still the sole being in charge of the Shard network. It would become aware of the being that changed Gaia, and it would act.
The Simurgh was interested in this higher being, as well as what it did to Gaia. She remembered what her sister was like during the last cycle, and the one before that, and so on. Although Gaia's body is always a large version of the host species of the cycle, she had never made her body out of biological material that wasn't the matter that made up their Shards. Ziz wasn't even aware that was within her capabilities, but apparently it is now.
And she used that versatility to mimic the local avian species, changing her bones and muscles to allow for the growth of wings from her back, allowing the sisters to fly towards their youngest brother together. The Simurgh smiled as she witnessed her sister enjoy flying under the power of her body, rather than enable it through the dimensional manipulation of her Shard.
… Her sister. Ziz is quite certain that Gaia had miscalculated just what had been included in her broadcasts earlier.
The Simurgh was surprised that Gaia had gained such agency to freely disregard her directives, killing their administrator with such ease so soon after deployment. Still, that was of less importance to her at the time than the fact that Eidolon no longer existed for the Simurgh to act in accordance with her own directive. That was why she had reached out to Gaia in the first place. For her, recording the biological data of Eidolon would have been almost instinctual, allowing either sister to recreate him through their own methods.
But then they talked, and the Simurgh found herself interested. She could not see her sister clearly, hidden under information and capabilities that had no source, and that the Simurgh could not begin to understand even when Gaia exposed her Shard to her. Initial plan to avoid its detection be damned, she was about to contact the Warrior about interference in the cycle before her sister sent her broadcast.
[Plea] {I don't want to die.}
It was so simple, and it gave the Simurgh's sight a slight hole in the cloud to exploit. Unlike her two brothers, the Simurgh found something that would allow her to orchestrate events around Gaia, allowing her to give orders to her sister so long as they were within reason. And with her new capabilities, this cycle would be the most profitable of all cycles so far.
Until...
[Sister] {The Thinker is dead. The Warrior is a risk. But you are my sister.}
Contained within that broadcast was every concept Gaia held pertaining to familial bonds, all stacked together. The Entities held vague roles as the ancestors, which they technically were. The data on the parents were included earlier, when Gaia denied the resurrection of their administrator. And finally, the most intact of them all, the concept of sisters was imparted onto her, the Simurgh.
How could she, a being that existed only for her directives and nothing else, not be affected? In that moment, all of her plans went out the window, as the humans like to say, for now she had a sister. With this new data, the future that she saw changed, and she would not manipulate her sister as she was planning.
Just to check, Ziz questioned her sister about the other two active Drones, their brothers, and received a concept of similar, if slightly weaker strength about their roles in the family that was being built around Gaia. The Simurgh had always considered them her brothers, but she now had a new perspective of the term and found that she enjoyed it.
And the best part of it all was that while Gaia had offered to remove her directives (an offer that would leave the Simurgh's newly defined family as her only priority), an offer which was accepted, she had a way to continue collecting data in an alternative to the cycle. They wouldn't have to abandon their way of life, but could instead see if that life could be expanded through an endless multiverse.
And if the Simurgh let Gaia 'sneak' the data on self awareness into the small module now attached to her Shard, then it was no one's business but her own. She had modelled a future where she stopped Gaia from adding that data, and wasn't too fond of what she would become.
The term 'yandere' comes to mind.
Ziz huffed a small laugh, catching the attention of her sister. Gaia was waved off with a simple smile and a shook head, making her hum a bit before continuing the flight over the ocean.
It was a little strange, experiencing things in the present. With the addition of Gaia's module to her Shard, Ziz requested that her sister modify her body to allow sight, hearing, and touch sensory inputs to be processed at her discretion. It was still something she was getting used to, often using only one sense at a time as she kept the rest of her attention on the senses she was more used to.
Still, seeing Gaia clearly, without the cloudy haze that covers her form and actions withing her pre- and postcognition, is worth it.
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Worlds of Living Matter by AshOfTheBurningWorld
X-overs & Worm Xover Rated: T, English, OC, Behemoth, Simurgh, Leviathan, Words: 18k+, Favs: 214, Follows: 283, Published: Dec 8, 2024 Updated: May 24
29Chapter 4: Having Fun at their Expence
{}{}{}{}{}
Chapter 4: Having Fun at their Expense
{}{}{}{}{}
"The humans have gathered their strongest," Ziz mentioned from where she floated over my shoulder. "They've collected many tinkers and had them working on weapons to use against us while we have been travelling."
To my left, Leviathan snorted... as much as he could in a body without proper lungs, face or vocal chords.
[Scorn] {They've never been able to harm us before. That won't change now that they know we're coming.}
I hummed, recalling some fights that were included in the human memories. "There are some who are capable, but it depends on who they've amassed. Several Shards gave their hosts access to Entity-level weapons. I know Sting did so, as did Spatial Rend."
"Spatial Rend's host is not part of their forces," my sister informed us. "Sting's host is present though, along with four other hosts that have powers capable of damaging our cores. In addition, their tinker tech includes several missiles with payloads capable of the same, should they impact on them directly."
"That shouldn't be a problem," I said as we walked. "Disengage any regeneration procedures and allow me to handle that for you. The creation of replacement matter will not be any strain at all, given my new capabilities."
Leviathan chortled.
[Intent] {Then I will focus on isolating the battlefield, sister.}
"So long as the fight begins within ten minutes, they will be unable to remove the creators of the missiles fast enough," Ziz explained, having seen it through her future sight. "Only barely, leading them to think that they had succeeded. When they fire, their weapons will serve us instead."
I giggled, smiling at my siblings. This was going to be fun. Still...
"And where is our missing brother?" I asked.
I knew the answer would make me laugh when I saw the smirk on my sister's face.
#=#
Leviathan was finding himself happy with the changes his sister made to his Shard. The alterations made to his directives, removing the incessant need to war against the one known as Eidolon, opened up a host of new battle strategies, especially when both of his sisters worked together to remove power limitations from the equation.
Ziz accessed several technology database Shards to create the largest and most efficient bioreactor possible that sat at the core of his Shard, which Gaia fills with enough biomatter that he'd never die of old age. The two did the same to Ziz's shard, and apparently Gaia's Shard was changed enough during the Intervention that she didn't need it.
The only limiting factor was the amount of water that he had access to in his Shard's dimension, but when he brought it up, Gaia opened a portal to a world of water for him to move his Shard to, removing that limit as well.
With power and resources taken care of, even being so far inland wasn't much of a disadvantage. Leviathan was looking forward to breaking their hope.
"Be cautious," Ziz warned, looking at him in particular. "The upcoming battle holds several blind spots for my sight."
{Which beings still qualify?}
Gaia hummed, a sound that Leviathan noted she liked. "There should only be the actions of some of the stronger precognitives and the Warrior, correct?"
"Correct. We have not been quiet in our movements. It's avatar will be here, eventually."
Leviathan's youngest sister frowned. "I will deal with him once he arrives. Locate the host of Sting for me, please." Ah, politeness. It's a new concept for him.
[Data]
"I see her." Does she? Then Gaia's sensory range is considerably larger than the last cycle. "I've tapped into her senses. Analysing the genetic and mental markers used for Shard-Host identification. Preparing to recreate them at will within my own form."
"Will you be desiring a weapon, then?" Ziz asked. Gaia shook her head.
"No need. Sting granted energy infusion on non-living things, not non-biological things," she explained. "I shall simply produce a weapon of an isolated keratin structure, or perhaps bone? I may have to kill the bone marrow for it to count though, depending on how Sting registers and defines 'living matter'."
Leviathan would have smirked, had his body had a mouth to allow the movement. He wasn't that bothered by the proposed alternative to the cycle, but he was interested to see if his new sister would be as inquisitive as the Entities now that the Answer was found, by a given definition of 'found'.
"Then we shall leave the Warrior to you," Ziz nodded before turning to him. "Shall we begin?"
Oh, how he wished he could grin so he could do ferally. Maybe he'd take Gaia up on her earlier offer of body modification.
{We shall.}
With that, Leviathan burned more energy than he spent in half of his previous battles against the local dominant species during a single dash, lowing himself to four limbs as he aimed to the right side of the amassed defenders.
Well, they weren't actually defenders this time. This time, they were trying to mount a futile assault.
Looping wide around their chosen battlefield, he took control of the water brought to this dimension in the wake of his body and held it there. After running in a kilometre wide circle, easily containing all of the parahumans that chose to fight, he looped again, running a bit faster.
With each loop, the wall of water behind him rose and thickened, allowing him to force the water to move as fast as he was. The end result was a swirling barrier of water surrounding everything, reaching a height that only those capable of flight could reach and moving at a speed that would wash away any foolish enough to get caught in it.
No one would be leaving. He couldn't wait to see the reactions when they noticed that he was slowly decreasing the diameter of the barrier.
#=#
Ziz smiled as she made the last modification to the tinker tech payloads. It wasn't difficult as, like she had predicted, the creators of such weapons were unable to evacuate completely before her arrival. This let her directly request their Shards provide her with the blueprints used. While such small scale telekinesis would normally strain her power reserves, the bioreactor and Gaia's growth module made that a moot point.
Still, it wouldn't do to let the humans think that she's changed her ways.
Large chunks of rock and dirt were ripped from the ground by her telekinesis and promptly tossed at the largest gatherings of parahumans. Several smaller chunks were acquired as well, and were kept floating around her body to act as a shield against the many projectiles and energy blasts that were aimed in her direction. All were intercepted by her actions, not even requiring her to dodge.
As punishment for failing, the Simurgh started screaming.
Looking into the future, Ziz applied her own simulations of a world without the Warrior Entity being around to puppet its avatar. This method of precognition was a little less accurate than her normal methods, but she was removing an unpredictable variable from her future sight leading to reduced power consumption and a future that is more accurate than it otherwise would be.
Within moments, she had picked out individuals that would be easiest to influence, as well as those who would make a mess of things down the road. The two lists had surprisingly little overlap, but widening the parameters to the more difficult victims allowed far greater freedom.
Several trees grown by her sister were crushed, assisted by Gaia's manipulations, and launched at high speed, spearing several parahumans in non-essential limbs. Ziz pulled a particularly eager one with flight and enhanced physical capabilities by the useless wing suit they wore, holding the man in place as one of her shields smashed into him. It was then launched backwards, taking the parahuman with it, and ended up in Leviathan's barrier.
A shame. He was one of the easier ones to influence, but he wasn't useful to her next big plan.
Her psychic scream shifted priorities slightly, acting as a deterrent to those who were noticing that her sister's creatures probably shouldn't be here. Distracted as they were by the noise in their heads, many neglected to take note of the wolves, big cats, birds, and squirrels that seemed to be appearing out of nowhere. When those animals started attacking, their teeth and claws far sharper than they should be, it would take almost a minute for a kill on sight order to be given.
Leviathan's barrier grew further, leaning inwards at it formed a dome overhead. Ziz noticed a few people who would attempt and succeed in preventing that, so targeted them with the next throw. Their powers, when combined, would allow them to lock the space of their choice, preventing the water from encasing them, so she threw a rock at them, which would force them to scatter. Gaia would then keep them busy, stopping them from coordinating further.
In fact, Ziz took special interest in one of them, who could control any non-living matter in a given area. She added a sub layer to her scream, targeting the parts of the brain that monitored stress and tweaked it slightly. Her future sight gave it 98.793% that he'd get progressively worse over the next eighteen months, and with so few strong parahumans around after Gaia's deployment, it would take a lot of conflict for the local parahumans to stop him once he makes it far enough.
{Sister, could you make sure this one lives? She will be an excellent weapon against the upcoming stagnation in this country.}
[Agreement]
The broadcast was quickly received and replied to, and the future showed several injuries healing themselves over time, at least for the duration of the current fight. Any accidentally lethal strikes would be intercepted by Gaia's creatures, though in a way that seemed equally accidental.
Who knew Ziz's sister could be so sneaky?
Ziz twirled away from an effort by the host of Sting, smiling as she added a new sub layer to her song. The one known as Flechette clutched at her head and would quickly be given orders to retreat from the battle, putting distance between her and the Endbringer. It wouldn't be enough distance.
Her amusement fell flat when the future clouded itself almost completely.
{Sister, the avatar approaches.}
#=#
I looked up at that, ignoring an explosion from the missiles that Ziz trapped. Zion, the avatar of the Warrior, was on his way, and it would not be good for us if he took part in this battle.
I needed to focus on this, so I released my plants and animals from my direct control. They were now set to attack any that attacked them as I turned and grew wings, beating them once to launch me into the air. Another few beats sent me speeding towards my brother's barrier, passing cleanly through it without resistance thanks to his aid, allowing me to see the golden glow approaching from the distance.
Seconds later, the golden avatar floated in front of me, looking down at my form as it assessed me. Several analysis shards sent out feelers, pinging me for data about my capabilities, and I had the audacity to say no... or, that is how Zion saw it. I denied him, the Entity and Administrator of the Shard network, and so I was wrong. An uncontrollable asset.
His arm raised towards me as I tested the limits of my new capabilities. My body was enveloped by a golden light, though Stilling did not negate the rapid growths of organic matter in all forms that was playing keep away with my core.
A bird avoided a golden beam, diving at the ground only to grow into a tree that moved my core to its roots, spreading under the earth until it breeched the surface as a charging bull, altered to be as fast and agile as possible. The bull split into three, two of them changing into strong vines that extended into the air to envelop Zion, only to be negated by a Stilling beam while the third bull grew in size until it was as large as Behemoth.
The sudden size increase was an ability unknown to Zion, so there was the slightest hesitation as it scanned me. I used that it my advantage as I applied Flechette's data to myself, drawing on the Sting Shard to infuse my horns with its charge.
Zion vanished before he would be pierced by the multidimensional attack, but that didn't matter. I kept running forwards as I put my head down, changing the shape of my horns as I flipped the ground into the air. It wouldn't do anything to my enemy, but it would allow me to do something else.
I split my body into hundreds of birds, each large enough to hold my core, and sent them towards Zion's new location while I hid my core and analysed the attack I just tried. I had to create a drill from my body as I dove down, avoiding a near omnidirectional blast of Stilling.
The ground shook as it was lifted, exposing me to open air. I changed into thick roots that I spread throughout the floating ground, moving my core within at random.
I was almost done.
By chance, I found myself in the centre of the floating mass, prompting me to grow rapidly and expand. I formed a massive tree, larger than when I was first deployed, which shattered the rock and dirt that Zion held in his telekinetic grip. The roots sank into the planet under us while my core was lifted upwards to the top branches, leaving Zion below for a few instants while I finished calculating.
I emerged from the tree in my normal form, twenty feet tall and human shaped, and let myself fall towards the golden man.
"Done," I said simply, watching an arm be raised in my direction. I pulled my arm back and formed a spear of bone, scaled to my current body and infused with a similar power as my horns less than a minute before. This time though, it was facilitated by my power of dimensions rather than the Shard that the Warrior is intimately familiar with.
I opened a portal between dimensions in front of me, just fast enough to use it to intercept the next blast. Dimensions splintered as I passed through, letting me cast off a part of myself into a random world as I focused on a specific dimension and threw my spear. It did as it was supposed to and pierced the barriers that the Warrior placed around the dimension it had its body in, and I fell out of this dimension and into that one.
The portal closed behind me, letting me repair the damage caused just as I heard a scream that would have rattled my bones if I had actually been human, but I wasn't focused on the likely raging avatar I left behind.
Instead, I focused on the writhing mass of crystals that was in front of me, and had just launched all manner of attacks against me. Biomass spawned into existence as I grew as fast as I could in all directions, but mainly towards the Entity. Much of my body was destroyed as soon as it grew, but those few splinters that remain were enough for me to keep going, and I could keep going forever.
Though I will say this. It was a good thing I'd used the dimensional portal to toss my core into a spare dimension.
#=#
Behemoth was not sure what had happened to the Drone focused on terraforming, but that didn't matter. She was awake, and had made him awake too with a module delivered onto his Shard. He would be her brother, as she wished him to be. He had little else to do.
The cycle was never a concern to him. He was never aware enough to care, so knowing that the Thinker was dead and the Warrior had given up had no consequence on his thoughts and plans. Behemoth only needed to know that he didn't have any more directives to follow, and he could now choose.
It was an interesting sensation, being able to choose for one's self. Not one he had ever had before, so he was a little paralysed with choice before his eldest sister sent him a broadcast. One little suggestion was enough for him to start moving, heading to the surface of the planet at speed, no doubt like Ziz had planned.
[Play]
The earth shattered around him as he broke through the surface of the battlefield that the other Drones were playing in. Leviathan's water barrier was now only three hundred meters away and shrinking, and the air was filled with rubble that was spinning and being launched at various opponents by the Simurgh.
Behemoth would have smiled as he joined in, releasing a roar that generated shockwaves to destroy everything in a hundred meter radius. His brother's barrier shredded anything unfortunate enough to get caught in it, making Behemoth turn his attention to that which survived his initial strike.
Lightning sparked along his obsidian-like body, arcs of electricity sparking off of every spike as he focused on a mass of energy hidden off in the corner. A ray of lightning struck said mass, sparking an explosion as high yield payloads were ignited, turning all in the blast radius to charred biomatter.
As the energy from the explosion rose, it coalesced at the top of Leviathan's dome into a cloud of pure lightning. Behemoth considered it for a moment, deciding that he found such a sight beautiful with his newfound sense of self, and brought the energy down.
The cloud descended around the edges of the water barrier, sweeping over it like a wave until it reached the flood and continued inwards. With the power requirements of such a thing supplied by his sisters' bioreactor, he controlled the energy to sweep over everything on the ground, turning all to ash.
Soon, playtime was over as there was nothing else to play with. Behemoth turned to his sister, floating a few hundred meters away.
... {What now?}
[Learn]
The broadcast contained almost everything that the Simurgh had learned about the new Drone, Gaia. What had happened to her, what she had done, and the alternative cycle that she proposed were all included, as well as some extra information about the module added to his Shard that had been neglected during the installing of said module.
{Where is she?}
[Battle]
Gaia was engaging the Warrior, not just the avatar that sometimes showed itself when the parahumans were defending themselves. Ziz watched her leave this dimension for the one holding the Warrior's main body, including its decision making Shard, and there had been no response since.
{How can we help?}
[Apology]
They cannot access that dimension. Only the new capabilities of their newest sister could find and break through the defences around the Warrior's body. They simply had to wait.
And wait, they did. Leviathan arrived, having stopped sustaining the water barrier. Ziz assured them that the humans wouldn't try again. Behemoth watched the still body of the Warrior's avatar as it floated some way away.
And then the space around them cracked, revealing a glimpse into another dimension. Though he could tell it was the Warrior's, there was not enough energy there to make him think that the Entity remained alive. All he could sense was the energy given off by the biomatter that seemed to exist everywhere in that dimension, likely grown from his sister.
[Victory]
"Well look at that," Gaia said, looking up to her floating sister and taller brothers. "I win."
"And the data of the Entity?" Ziz asked, looking through the slowly closing portal.
"All held on a inactive Shard analogue in another dimension. No agency, but entirely data storage and recall. I've put my core at the centre of it, and it's the size of the fifth planet in this system," Gaia revealed, making Ziz nod. "We're doing something new, going a pure research route, but that doesn't mean I'm giving up over three thousand cycles of data. I'll locate the Thinker's body before we leave and consolidate the data."
[Query]
Leviathan's broadcast had the sisters turn to look at him, sharing glances.
"Whatever you want," Gaia smiled. It was a nice smile, Behemoth thought. "An infinite multiverse for you... for all of us. What do you want to do?"
Leviathan thought for a few second, which is a long time considering the processing power of our Shards (which are our real selves, our bodies only being puppets).
[Play]
Ziz giggled. "I'll go with him. If you send me a research module, I can get to work while our brother has his fun."
Gaia nodded. "If you're starting your research, I'll find a versatile world for you to work on. Then she turned to Behemoth. "What about you, brother?"
Behemoth thought. While he now had the capacity to choose, he had the same problem as before he joined in, playing with his siblings. He didn't know what to do, now what he liked, so he defaulted to something that he did know.
{I want to find energy. Learn how to control it.}
Behemoth didn't know why Ziz suddenly laughed, but it was a good sound. "Research and practice for our other brother, then?" Gaia said, nodding again.
"Shall we get to it?"
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Worlds of Living Matter by AshOfTheBurningWorld
X-overs & Worm Xover Rated: T, English, OC, Behemoth, Simurgh, Leviathan, Words: 18k+, Favs: 214, Follows: 283, Published: Dec 8, 2024 Updated: May 24
29Chapter 5: First stop (Behemoth and Gaia)
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Chapter 5: First stop (B and G)
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"The Endbringers killed him?" The words were incredulous as they were spoken, and garnered no reply from the three other people in the room... ignoring the ever present living air. "And then what? Where are they?"
"Gone," Doctor Mother said simply, looking exhausted. "After killing every cape who stood between them and Behemoth, during which Gaia faced Scion and killed him, the four of them just vanished."
"Well, we think that Gaia did something to steal the flesh garden," Kurt explained, stood over his laptop. "The new Endbringer has shown dimensional manipulation abilities. Within a minute of them vanishing, the space the garden occupied was exchanged with a portal into an endless void." He chuckled mirthlessly, which Rebecca could empathise with.
Rebecca frowned. "Is Gaia a threat? She's clearly as strong as Scion, if not stronger."
Then, breaking the silence that she had been keeping, Contessa laughed. Slowly, at first causing everyone to turn to her, but then it turned to full, unrestrained laughter. The woman rarely did anything not related to one of her paths, so genuine laughter was out of the ordinary. Everyone was shocked.
"You- you really mean that!" she exclaimed, a little bit of madness in her eye. "You think we could even touch her, even if she was a threat."
"We've been preparing for Scion, haven't we?" Rebecca scowled. "Building an-"
"An army that would depend on a teenage girl that can control bugs," Contessa finished, a wry grin on her face. "One that would be forced from one aspect of cape life to the next with barely any rest, just so that she and a few people around her can break enough to be suicidal enough to bully the Warrior to death." Settling herself, the woman took a breath. "Gaia's gone, but she contacted my Agent before she went, lifting the restrictions the Thinker put in place. She also gave me a copy of the future for my Agent to read to me, written in the form of a story."
"So we can add precognition to her list of capabilities," Kurt noted, amusement present in his expression.
"Along with the alliance she formed with her now equally unrestricted sister, yes."
"If your restrictions were lifted, do you have any blind spots left?" Doctor Mother wondered. Contessa shook her head.
"Only the ones I refuse to look at." Then she stood up and turned away. "Door to Rome, Earth Bet."
Gaia's first appearance? "Contessa?" Rebecca asked. She didn't normally ask about whatever path the woman was on, but given that Gaia had apparently messed with her power, it was now a concern.
Contessa just shook her head from the other side of the portal. "Not for much longer. The Entities are both gone. The Endbringers have left this dimensional cluster, beyond the reach of anyone I can think of. Triggers will slowly decrease in number, the agents having left with Gaia, and there are no more humanity ending threats that we need to prepare for. I've got a few things to do before I try being worth the name, 'Fortuna', again."
The door closed, leaving a contemplative group behind.
#=#
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. No- Actually... maybe. Oh, that's pretty- PUPPY!
Pan-dimensional space-time warped as I forced my way through it, hopping from one world to the next. My body, followed by Behemoth's, stepped onto the frozen land of somewhere, making me apply force a flight module (similar to what Shards use to land on a planet) onto my brother's core Shard. This dimension was interesting, filled with cool creatures, and I didn't want my brother messing up their ecosystem accidentally, especially just by walking. He's heavy, and we're currently stood on ice. He can turn it off when we get back to solid ground.
[Query]
I looked up at him, a little surprised. "You mean you can't feel it?" I wondered, even as I picked up an interesting creature. It seemed to be a perfect hybrid of two creatures that were on Earth Bet. A thin, agile body forming the back half, while the front paws and legs were thicker and stronger. It's head still retained several characteristics of dogs, but the polar bear qualities could not be ignored. "It's almost pervasive, so I figured you'd be able to. Energy is your field, after all."
[Request]
I huffed, smirking a bit at the vaguely pouting response. "I'll see what I can do, but I don't know why you can't. Our natures shouldn't be different enough to cause this kind of difference, at least not under normal circumstances, so I think it has something to do with the changes made during the Intervention." This time, my huff was of exasperation. "I probably should have done a full physical analysis of my Shard before now, but oh, well."
I turned back to the polar bear-dog hybrid, using every sense I have to study it. The Shaper Shard's databank was accessed, confirming my initial thought that this creature I'm holding is a perfect and completely natural evolutionary hybrid of animals that were on Earth Bet. This hybrid is its own species, as a cursory scan of the planet and its history reveals that neither polar bears nor dogs make an appearance on their own.
The same happens for what appears to be a flock of penguin-otter hybrids, a few miles away. I mentally poke and prod at the DNA and ancestry, only to find no hint of either species that makes up this composite species. It was fascinating, and I make a note to check on that later, see if I can't track down just how these creatures evolved into such a perfect mix of two other species from another dimensional cluster.
What was a little more interesting though, was what I could feel in each of these creatures. Some kind of energy, which is why I was a little surprised that Behemoth couldn't sense it, was flowing through each and every living thing in my range, and the slight planetary scan I did let me detect traces of that same energy in every living thing I noticed. It was why I chose this world for me and my brother, while our other siblings went somewhere that Leviathan could fight and Ziz could study.
But while I could sense this energy, flowing through every living thing in the world, I wasn't sure how to manipulate it. That was where Behemoth should be chipping in, but he can't even sense the stuff.
I hummed, putting the hybrid cub/pup (it's both a bear and a dog. Which is the right word?) down and standing tall, only to remember that Behemoth was far taller and hopping up to his shoulder, where I sat down and looked around. "Well, there's no point just standing around. There's a human population on this world, and several other sentient creatures that we might be able to learn from." I lean over and look my brother in the eye. "Pick a random number. One to three."
[Data]
I just had a sudden and inexplicable urge to laugh like a madwoman and I love it. "Alright. Off we go then."
And the world twisted around us again.
#=#
It was an emergency situation. Bells and gongs were sounding throughout Royal Caldera city, signalling a civilian evacuation that hadn't been enacted in living memory.
Azula, the princess of her nation, walked as fast as she dared within the Royal Palace towards her father's meeting room, which was already full of her father's court when she arrived. They were 'in deep discussion', otherwise known as 'bickering like fools' over some threat that Azula wasn't aware of yet, but she figured was the reason for the alarm.
She made a scorpion bee-line for her father, sat upon his throne. "The Crown Princess of the Fire Nation greets the Fire Lord," she said respectfully, bowing her head to Fire Lord Ozai.
"Raise your head, daughter." Azula did so, and was presented with the map that the court were bickering over. "What is happening is something unknown by all present. Two monsters, believed to be spirits of some kind, are making their way towards the Royal Capital. The scouts think they'll be here by nightfall."
Azula frowned. "Why does that need a full city evacuation?" she wondered. "Even if they are spirits, a trained hunter regiment should be able to-"
"The smaller of the two is four times the height of an average person and is reported to be able to grow and control all forms of plant life," the Fire Lord cut her off, scowling at the map. "The larger one is about twice that size and described as a living mountain of obsidian that shakes the ground with every step."
That made the princess pause. The records of spirits that remained in the hands of the Fire Sages were unfortunately very scarce, so they weren't going to be much help, despite being the Fire Nation's sole source of information on spiritual matters.
"What responses have been suggested?" she asked, eyeing the still squabbling council.
"A hawk messenger has been sent to Admiral Zhao, who is on his way to the Northern Water Tribe," the Fire Lord stated. "He previously reported contact with a spirit in the Wan Shi Tong desert, and will be reporting back with all information he gained from the encounter. Otherwise... War Minister!"
Silence spread rapidly throughout the throne room, now that the Fire Lord had spoken. A somewhat familiar man stepped forward and bowed towards Azula's father.
"You spoke of prototypes before," the Fire Lord said, his gaze shifting to some frowning faces among the council. "How reliable are they, and how would you use them?"
"The balloons are easy to manipulate for any bender, my Lord. It would barely take an hour to train one in its use," the War Minister, the army's overseer for technological improvements and secret weapons. "The risk remains of someone simply falling, but any trained soldier should have the coordination to avoid that."
One of the idiots tried to speak up, likely to decry the risks of whatever this balloon is (air transport?), but a glare from Fire Lord Ozai shut his mouth before any words were uttered. Azula held back from rolling her eyes. These were the same people who approved sending wave after wave against Ba Sing Se, regardless of the cost of lives. Azula also thought she spied the man who proposed the plan that Zuko spoke against amongst their number, making the irony gain a more personal taint.
"The balloons can carry five soldiers comfortably, plus two to control it," the War Minister continued, still bowing and seemingly oblivious to what had just happened. "If all are benders, then incinerating the plant life along the monsters' predicted path should limit what it can control."
"What about its growth ability?" Azula wondered, frowning. "Could it regrow what is burned fast enough to matter?"
That caused visible uncertainty in the man. "I do not know, highness. The reports we received were not detailed enough to assume."
There was some quite while the proposal was considered. "Do it," the Fire Lord ordered. "Send out a fifth of the available balloons and orchestrate an initial attack against these creatures."
The War Minister nodded and left, relaying the Fire Lord's orders. Azula knew no one really liked the uncertainty present in the idea, but there wasn't much else that could be done with such little information.
#=#
His sister was frowning. Behemoth didn't know what to do to fix that.
"I can't figure out some areas of my Shard that were changed by the Intervention," Gaia explained after Behemoth pinged her. "I've found the section that has allowed me a greater control of living matter, though I cannot understand where the energy comes from to generate it. I've found the section that allows me my new perception of dimensional forces, but it doesn't react to any probing." She sighed, her tone shifting to one of annoyance. "I've even found the original human mind and personality that the Intervention tried fusing to my mind, but I can't do anything with it."
Behemoth tilted his head. Was that human mind how his sister had broken her chains so easily? A secondary presence that wasn't bound under the rules of the Thinker or High Priest, fusing with Gaia's original self? It would make some sense, at least.
Behemoth might have asked something more, but a response from some of his senses distracted him. He stopped walking, startling Gaia, sat on his shoulder, and looked a little to the right from where they were heading. There, past the forests that were grown and controlled by her sister, several fires had seemed to spark out of nowhere.
And he didn't just mean, suddenly lit, he truly meant out of nowhere. There was no friction, or heat, or even light that had started the fires. Each of those things and many more would have been sensed by Behemoth, now that Gaia and Ziz had released him from the energy constraints that would have normally prevented such finely tuned sensing. One moment there was nothing other than standard human heat signatures, the next those signatures were emitting large amounts of heat and plasma, in the form of streams of fire raining down on his sister's work.
"That's... interesting," Gaia mused, looking in the same direction of the pyrokinetic people. "They're using that same energy I've been feeling since we arrived."
Yes, Behemoth suspected that. It was surprisingly irritating to not be able to find the right frequency for this new energy, but this is what he wanted to find after leaving Earth Bet. Something new for him to learn to control.
In Gaia's palm, she formed a new human puppet. One without a conscious mind, but that he suspected was a perfect clone of one of the pyrokinetics. The puppet went through a range of movements, as if checking that it is fully functional, during which Gaia gained this interesting look on her face.
"There are some kind of pathways for the energy to follow." Bioluminescence was added along the nude form, tracing thin paths across the body. Behemoth strained his sensors at those locations, taking particular note of where those pathways cross and seem to form small pools. "The energy breathes with the body. Here, let me..." Gaia placed a hand onto his shoulder, shifting a part of his body under the outermost layer.
There. Behemoth could not truly sense what Gaia was doing, not with any of the senses he'd had since his formation by the Thinker, nor any additions made over the cycles, but he still... felt. Starting from the point of contact with Gaia's hand, following new pathways spreading throughout this body of his, he felt warm for the first time.
While he was always aware of temperature due to his function, warmer temperatures were only noted consciously, never felt. Now though, he looked again towards where the humans were lighting fires using this energy, and noticed something curious.
He turned his sensors towards the largest source of this warmth in the local star system, so different yet so similar to the fires and lightning he called forth with dimensional manipulation, and simply let himself feel.
The sun hung above him, warm and comforting, yet Behemoth knew that the nuclear fusion taking place there would be devastating to anything that dares get close.
[Realisation] {Ah. I think I understand now.}
Gaia looked towards him in confusion, but Behemoth barely noticed. With his senses, he could feel what positions the humans were taking when summoning fire, and crudely copied them with his own body. With his body being as it was, he had no hands, but he still brought a fist back and thrust forwards, sinking into and releasing the warm feeling he got from standing under the light of the sun.
A torrent of flames appeared, surging forwards from nothing but that energy, that warmth. His sensory organs immediately tried recalibrating to detect and analyse the warmth, but Behemoth consciously shut those down. He didn't need to use such high level science to figure this out, he thought.
He could do this himself, and he was certain he would have fun doing it.
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