-Sama, I think it’s about time you took a trip home,- Briggs /reported to me from thirty thousand light years away.

-Oh?- I /answered Mah Fuzzy, having complete agreement on why such a thing would be worth my time.

-Ah, the OTHER reason is that I think our Tekron buddy is making its deathwish move.- My grin didn’t fade, but he kept going regardless. -It’s been raiding the soylent corpse feed for more dead to mess with, upping its numbers. There’s been skirmishes to stop it, but it’s still grabbing a bunch. I dunno what critical mass is, but if he hits it and goes on a public spree...-

-It’s all over for the planet. Right. Be there shortly.-

There were girls with fighting-based Talents that made them great duelists against other humanoids, even other Ranthas. But in sheer all-around monster butchery, I was still the queen, even if I didn’t get to strut my stuff much other than letting Coronals know that they weren’t all that.

It was down in the tunnels. Briggs boys would be in tight quarters, meaning fists or claws instead of hammers, not ideal. A variable length soulsword would be fine, and big enough to walk in was plenty of room for me. We didn’t need any of Colby’s line, who were busy helping out the hyn emigrating out of Gloom.

It looked like me and some of the girls were going to have to go in and kick some enhanced cyberzombie ass.

Sounded like fun! My Stupidity Stat was cheering me on grandly...

------

We came crashing in from three different tunnels, because the place was too tight to fight together, we’d just get in one another’s way. To be on the safe side, there was a second rank of clean-up people making sure all the cyberzombies went en vivus, while we basically rode the Cleave Train, and paid very, very, very close attention to our Trembling Domains.

The Tekron had installed all kinds of lethal surprises on the entry approaches, ranging from mere energy projectors and sideways-slicing spatial fields, to physical slashing razors, impaling spikes, compressing walls, and drop-away floors. There were yard-thick doors of reinforced durasteel with force fields we had to short out and disintegrate with matter-eater grenades from the armories, and of course there were lots and lots of cyberzombies in all makes and models, armed with necroic weapons ready to eat life and be happy doing it.

It didn’t talk, although the lights on its minion-slaves were pumping a frenetic tune about killing all intruders in its domain and reanimating them. Negative energy waves washed over them, supposed to weaken the living and energize the dead, and we basically ignored them and kept up our spree of one-hits and Cleaves.

This was a pure grindy hackfest, in corridors anywhere from two to ten feet wide, cyber-enhanced dead things getting hacked and blown apart by Sun Strikes, forced back by very, very focused Hags who were even stronger than these mechanically enhanced corpses were. Corpses exploded, necrotech fried and burned unwhite, and we pushed, pushed, and pushed our way forward relentlessly.

If it tried to build up bodies, they burned down with explosive speed. If it tried to use doors, we carved, exploded, or disintegrated them open, chewed up the mechanisms, fried the molmech repair circuits in passing, and just kept going, while the silent clean-up crew stole in behind us and made sure nothing got fixed.

If it gave us room, we erupted in Cleave lines in blurs of motion, and whole rooms and chambers would erupt in vivus, frying its control and observation circuits with the backwash, the feedback making its control over the remaining minions ever more erratic.

It was a lot of dead things, and even shattered and rebuilt xenos and cyborgs that had gone missing ended up here, enhanced with fractal weapons and spatial-slicers to give us some entertainment.

Unfortunately for it, Ranthas aren’t subject to death effects, like disintegrator beams; are pretty much immune to most forms of energy, including necroic; our Interdictions were up, which meant its space-folding tears were sealing up within inches of their emitters; and we ignored any attack that couldn’t avoid armor. If it could avoid armor, it still had to get through 20+ points of Damage Reduction/Holy Silver, which the damn minions amazingly had none of.

Strange that. Didn’t matter how sharp you were, kinetic energy or go home.

Oh, we got cut. Yeah, it was amazingly hard to hit us, as even in tight quarters landing a square blow on us was really, really hard, and all its predictive tech was having a kerfluffle as it tried to predict a Beyond Fate and Chance fighting style in reasonable time, and found it useless.

On our side, we were all fighting many moves ahead, each stroke and motion setting up cyberzombies three, four, five kills in the future, clearing the paths for Cleaves and shots, drawing them into one another so their mechanical coordination wasn’t working, or was forming patterns we could just hack through with impunity and chain-kill without thought.

It didn’t have unlimited access to adamant, so its weapons were just fine durasteel with Energized circuits, power weapons at best, or fractal edges. They were shattered easily with Construct Bane, as cyberzombies qualified as both constructs and undead, and naturally we went with the supplementary material-crushing benefits of Sundering and Breaking on our Swords, too.

It was high carnage, murderously and inhumanly intense. No normal Ten could have possibly have sustained the level of combat intensity to do this in these quarters. I was fighting on walls, ceilings, pipes, gantries, railings... wherever and whatever was needed to get the angles I needed to kill faster, smoother, more efficiently. Molecular acid, UV lasers, atom-shaking sonics, fusion plasma blasts, and matter-shredding particle beams were tearing the shit out of the durasteel all around, and a normal person simply would have been blinded by the actinic discharges and irradiated by the leaking rads the undead simply ignored. The poison gas, nerve agents, nanite infections, bacterial washes and worse never got past our Vajras... unless we wanted them to.

We ignored them, largely. Devasight meant it didn’t matter how bright it flared, and Radiant Immunity meant we didn’t care about the rads, either. The poison actually helped us heal.

Cyberzombies exploded in vivus, Sun Strikes cycled, borg zombies crashed and burned as steel screamed, and we kept going...

----

Definitely a pocket dimension, as we had gone further into The Hole than the amount of space that existed there. We should have crossed paths and emerged out the far sides by now, but we were still converging on the middle. The cyberzombies and borg zoms were getting bigger, tougher, and better equipped... but because the tunnels were getting wider, we had more room and could actually kill them faster.

The flesh-shredding sonics and necroic discharges that had utterly decimated the xenos who tried to invade didn’t do anything to us, and we were kind enough to violently disable all the death traps in passing, insidious, invidious, and otherwise.

Past assembly lines for making cyberzombies. Through the rooms with field generators sustaining the pocket dimension. Along the grand corridors lined with the power sources running on negative energy and spatial decay powering the existence of this place. Glancing into chambers with cogitation engines running Weird Math at levels that still made my head ache, and experiments on the nature of Life, The Universe, and Everything ™ I both wanted to know all about and didn’t want to see completed.

Vivus burned, covering the walls and floors of durasteel stained black by necroic energies a glaring white, burning and reaching out to cover everything. The power sources seemed to have force fields keeping it at bay, or this place was simply going to collapse around us.

Everything, undead or Rantha, was basically moving and reacting faster than the human eye, but the noise level wasn’t that high. Normal matter wasn’t an impediment to the weapons we were using, and Damage Reduction wasn’t like armor when it came to soaking hits. We were definitely on the Fast Healing and Regenerating gravy train, and sometimes had to use Healing Edge to rapidly get back up to safety zones, but even when it started detonating spatial bombs and fractal launchers, or pulled up cannons of high energy projectors, well, that was what Evasion was all about, avoiding those area damage hits even as the trackers tried to get past the vivic interference and Vampire’s Veil to track us and keep us in their sights.

Explosive arrowheads and/or Tail Spikes in the proper areas could basically do for the artillery. The bombs just made us annoyed, and we generally saw them coming. Shockwaves were sonic damage, and could be ablated, ridden, or just flattened in front of and let them wash past, clearing away the chaff as they did.

----

The final chamber was massive, and full of elite cyberzombies, borg zoms, and pure negative energy Tekron constructs made in no humanoid forms, wrought of necrodermite shells and impossible technology. Everything was itching to give us a good fight.

There was the Tekron behind them, in its shell of a forcefield. It looked like a spiked polyhedral, sixty-seven-sided, points glowing with necroic and real energies in multiple colors, most of them ghastly with the negative energy interference. It was rotating parts of itself this way and that, as if reacting to what we were doing as we closed in through four of the eight grand hallways into this room, cleaving through its troops with impossible speed, healing from the damage it was heaping on us, and doing so with an ability that could not simply be calculated, only perceived.

We were operating way past the limits of what organic bodies could sustain. Fleshy bodies would have long torn themselves apart, been exhausted of energy, paralyzed by their own fatigue toxins, shattered by the speed and power we were moving at, or been crushed, cracked, and ruined by the blows we had taken. No automation or machine could have endured the punishment we had taken, and any psi-user would have long run out of energy tanking what we had... and they would have had to tank far, far more.

We all decided to edit our respective videos and send them off to Madam Lolith for funsies. Looking like breshkt for this would certainly get her thinking, or something.

Now, the smart thing to do would have been to go up to the dais up there, blow away all the fancy tech around the Tekron, find a way to bring down its forcefield, and end this.

But that’s not why we were doing this. We instead began to kill the whole football fields full of elite mechadead, including some monstrosities the size of schoolbuses rumbling forward cloaked in screens of meat-flaying power to deal with us.

It could have just sealed up the dimension and not let us in. It was fighting us to stay alive, and it was fighting us so it would die. It would kill us, but the fact it was actually trying to kill us instead of just leaving meant it was subverting itself, and actually trying to die.

Our combined Interdictions swept through the room, and anti-grav failed, meaning it couldn’t fly, and spatial shredding wasn’t working any more. Banefire cracked and shrieked as Lightningphasing weapons crashed systems, vivic fire blew apart negatively-charged flesh and necroic circuitry, plunged through necrodermite and fused servos and pistons moving mechanical limbs. Necroic power sources were ignited and exploded like vivic bombs, igniting other mechadead, and cyberized corpses flew in all directions as false-AI’s slagged and popped.

It was much, much wilder than the Heart of Blood, because the level of opponent was easily a tier higher, and because we had all the extra limbs out providing extra construct-chewing firepower.

Adamant-hard force spikes wedged here, there, everywhere, disabling mechanical limbs, fusing servos, frying circuits, igniting power cores, slagging command circuitry. Laser fire upgraded to Radiant damage set necroic flesh on vivic fire, playing merry havoc with the control circuits. Bolts of force inserted themselves in appropriate places to disjoint and disrupt the perfect formations and coordination, focusing mostly on any solid projectile launchers that actually might be a threat.

Seeing as how I beat the other girls to the main room, I was the first one to take down a true mechadead, which happened to be one of the cerevore flesh tanks now kitted out with neo-gothic style undead robotic accents. I idly wondered how it got the carcass down here as I ripped Chalice through the seams of armored plates and hide, inserted four stingers, and blew Bane-lightning through its nervous system, frying both its proto-mind and cybercore at the same time, and totally sidestepping the need to chop it into pieces.