It started to burn inside its unoccupied command nodule inside as I leapt off it into a pair of giant-sized, four-armed xenos cyberdead, Faith batting away razored power-tails plated in adamant, stroking lightning down the tail of one and blowing that apart from within with Chalice’s Sun Strike. As it convulsed upright from the Bane-lightning pulsing up its spine, I swept off its armored head, and dumped my main Tail into the stump to shoot off two more Sun Strikes into its mostly hollow innards, lighting it up from inside as I stood on its front and its four claws quivered inches from my backside, unable to move.

My stingers pointed backwards at the face of the other one moving to rip at me, and four Spikes sizzled out, each taking an eye and frying the circuits in its hollow skull. Faith took the crashing impact of its tail without a problem, and flared with his own Sun Strike, dumping a discharge into the Tail in irritation and punishment for such stupidity.

I kicked off the one falling apart in front of me, slammed into the second, Chalice punching right through the diamond-hard chest carapace into its illogic engine, and shut that one down, too.

But there were more, and Paten didn’t stop shooting in my off hand, delivering up sacred bolts of force and non-stop streams of Radiant Lasers that had turned the area around me into a burning hell for cyberdead.

The girls arrived within a five-minute span, cursing about how I was getting all the fun, and lit into the horde with enthusiastic abandon/deadly focus. There was a lot of Karma to be harvested here, and if they weren’t quite as good at it as I was, they were only a notch slower, and certainly tricked out for the fight.

It did try a drone swarm a couple times, releasing hundreds, then thousands of them, and found out that pattern-mind coordination of drone units counts as a hivemind to Swarmbane. Spikes and Autobows lifted, and Construct-Bane shots carried to surrounding units, turning the fan-driven drones into layers of explosions that never got close enough to dive on us and blow up.

The same applied to identical line units that were meant to fight as a continuous whole, one unit with multiple bodies and attack vectors. Instead of one body sacrificing itself so the others had open blows, the damage carried to surrounding units through their connection, and the death of one shattered and destroyed the neighboring ones with the overkill.

Yes, we knew how to fight wave attacks. We not dumb Ranthas, hur hur.

------

The girls got the mechadead kills. Cyberdead fell apart in flash-heated, vivus-burning streaks of motion. The whole chamber was burning, burning with vivus feasting on negative energy, crawling on the walls, the floors, up the ceiling of the chamber.

The elite cyberzombies were cut apart. The tekked-up borg zombies exploded. Mechadead were crippled and fried by internal Sun Shots going off with Shardspikes launched from stingers and tails. Explosive Sun Slams greeted those hammering down on our Shields. Drones wiped themselves and a bunch of their cyberlinked buddies. Tekron automata shredded and necrodermite sizzled and flaked as they crashed down.

Any of Tekkie’s machines outside its force field were inundated with Bolts and Spikes and blew apart. We didn’t even try more than passing shots at the force field, since it was clearly able to stand up against artillery-grade fire. Instead, we blew out the foundations of its dais to get to the power core beneath, matter-eater grenades driving a hole down through it to the power circuits. Then all four of us, with all Tails out and two Autobows each, poured fire into the revealed circuits and let Construct-Bane, Sundering, and Breaking do their things to all that finely-tuned TL 17+ tech running off the dark side of the universe.

The force field shorted out in a crackle and sparkle of lost energies. Whole chunks of the dais blew out, and sent Tekkie and its proud command platform flying in all directions.

It fought back, sure enough. The power field around it should have disintegrated any organic matter getting close. The malefic display of various energy beams, rays, cones, and blasts could have sliced through whole companies of men, chopped tanks in two, or simply blown them to random bits of metal and flesh.

But it couldn’t fly, and it couldn’t bend dimensions to get away. It could barely hover a few feet off the ground, propelling itself around with paramagnetics... and not fast enough to stop us from encircling it and preventing it from ducking out one of the side corridors... which had long been emptied of their minion undead, transferred in and thrown into the fights against us as we hacked our way through its guards.

There was no audible talk, there was no reasoning. At this point, this was a Tekron fighting for its life, and if there was a section of its programming that wanted to die and transcend, it clearly wasn’t in control now. It was a multi-ton eight-foot spiked ball of terrible killing energies, bouncing around with force and trying to get past us. It found us way stronger than it was possible for us to be, stopping it from getting away as we poured in the Spiked fire and lashed at it with a hurricane of blows that set up spiraling vortices of vivus around it, hungering for the nexus of negative energy inside powering it all.

Briggs and three of his senior Boys (-Magnus, Otis, and Shirl, c’mon Mom!-) came crashing down on it, heavy-G belts on full power, collectively weighing many tons and applying that full force to the Tekron as they smashed onto its pulsing spikes... and they were wearing multi-ton loads of heavy metals to complete the job. Rantha resistance prevented their adamant armor from just shattering to dust as they gripped the Tekkie’s spikes, grounded out its power field, totally stopped it from moving, and then we really stepped in and started hacking.

Once it was down to material, not even compressed and hardened necrodermite was going to deny Sun Striking Full Temp Adamant Construct-butchering soulswords. Chiming and rolling notes, like the ringing of bells making the Last Call, sounded out as we chopped away the spikes spitting energies into our faces, breached the shell beneath, and then all together, fired everything into the interior.

Streams of solid vivus blew past and over us, carved into the walls all around with resonating patterns of impossible complexity. The complexity of the AI core of the Tekron blew past us, etched itself into the metal, and turned the whole hall into a chewed-up diagram of a circuit board of impossible complexity.

The hardened necrodermite shell was completely eaten away from within by the vivus blowing out of the dark matter power core, and crumpled to the ground. It flaked away into white bits as the lads let it go and stepped back, the fronts of their armor scarred and slagged with trails of energy, and patterned with those impossible circuit impressions.

“Well, that’s something you don’t see every day,” Briggs murmured aloud, looking at his armor and tapping it thoughtfully. “I get the feeling this could be pretty important...”

“Experimentation time.” I thorked the sides of my waist. “I’ve got the wave pattern!”

“No shit?” The others hadn’t exactly not believed what I’d told the Tekron, but just learning that you could turn a killer robot construct killed by vivus into a Hag was, well, science is weird...

“Shit!” I confirmed. “And now we have to seal this place up so idiots don’t come into it and find out the stuff that is in here, until Tekkie gets reborn and advances high enough to access her incarnation, finding out how to control the place properly... and maybe shut it down, maybe make use of it.”

“Do we really want a pocket dimension operating on negative energy around?” Jensa spoke up quickly.

“The Dead Walking events on Janus III are about one-fifth of what they are on other worlds, although the ones that happen are always large events. It’s like something is drawing away all the negative energy below a certain threshold, so only the big stuff has a chance of happening. How might that have happened?”

“Ohhhhhh...” everyone said in chorus.

“Wait, that means having a Tekron based on a planet... is actually possibly a good thing?”...

------

The vast numbers of Ranthas being born now were being drawn from the curselines of my girls, I wasn’t putting out more than two hundred at a time. My direct descendants were split between Briggs and Ranthas, and encouraged to find their own things to do.

The Warp Zone was actually being pacified now. The sheer number of Level-crazed Hagbloods depriving the Warped of life and limb meant even millions of square miles of territory filled with mutants, Warped, and demons was being devoured wholesale, and the fact said victims also liked to shoot one another didn’t help them.

When that happened, the only recourse for rapid Leveling would be to find a place to fight lots and lots of enemies, meaning the next generation would be going into active warzones with high tech weapons before all their defenses and regeneration were in place... or they’d have to disperse around the galaxy and take it slow but continuous on things like being Termites.

Needless to say, warzones were far from difficult to find even on the closed-off side of the galaxy, let alone the main one where the Empire pissed off everyone. Megacities could easily fit small gangs of my descendants, and it helped proliferate them across the Empire, even if they had to start from the gutters every time.

Of course, I had to get to those warzones. Good thing I had the ships to do so, now.

My personal co-opted Marquise Fleet was soon split in two, with the Glorious Bastard and Bastard Child going out for a tour of worlds with Lizza Rantha and Ptolemy Briggs in charge of them, visiting world after world and obtaining spatial locks and coordinates from each one. Quiet establishment of Green and Gold gangs, and Rantha Corp divisions, would soon follow, and if thousands of people were immigrating out from the hell of the mega-cities each day and pouring into the four unknown systems under my full control, well, it was a rounding error to the planetary governments.

----

Unlike most of the Ranthas, this girl decanted alone, and I was waiting for her as she did.

She vomited up the Vat material like a champ, shook her head, and looked around sharply, measuring the environment and any threat levels, just like we all did. She saw me standing there, did a doubletake, and slowly got to her feet, as wary as always, but also fully capable of feeling the Rantha Hag bond, and knowing I wasn’t a threat.

“Vajra yourself down.” I held out a set of clothes, she looked down at herself, and her Vajra pushed all the gunk and goo on her down into the grated floor, cleansing hair and skin perfectly, as if she’d been thoroughly sprayed and then toweled down.

“Happy Birthday,” I told her with a smile, as her feet rose an inch above the floor. She took the clothes and put them on efficiently.

“Thanks,” she said, kind of looking at me. “I feel I’m going to be the butt of some jokes.” Her brown hair swirled around her, her dark eyes studying me. “So... clone?” she had to ask.

“No. You’re a Hagchild on the other side of the Hag transformation, basically, after all the stuff my mother set up, a custom race human evolution called the Rantha Hags. She used the Rantha Curse to empower a template onto our souls, so we get the equivalent of a Seven in Karma, equal to a Hag evolution, and the starting foundation of one Sama Rantha template at birth.”

“Oh.” She frowned, considering all that. “So, I’m not Sama Rantha, I just have the memories of her.”

“Correct. The exact same ones I, and all of your sisters and nieces, start with. Your name, however, is Ronnie. My mother did name me Sama, however.”

Her eyebrows rose. “Is there a story behind that?” she had to ask.

“Yes, but it’s a really, really big one, and I won’t tell you until you reach Eight, and you really should wait until Ten.”