I would like to say that laying out the Abyss was an interesting experience, but mostly it was just a huge pain in the ass broken by moments of intensely cathartic annihilation.

One thing I had forgotten to take into account was the fact I was a Null, and so me just going through the place started to lock down the temporal tides there. That is immediately noticeable when your favorite mad gods try to move shit around to give them a temporal advantage, and suddenly things aren’t moving the way they should, putting undue strain on the whole Abyss as different areas were running at different rates, and causality was starting to have conniptions.

Huh...

I found that out when a crazy amount of jRaztl ships flooded into the system I was in, and I tapped into their coms as they were whizzing all over the place looking for something that was interfering with the plans of the Great Schemer somehow.

Well, damn...

Some wicked cruel smiles popped up all across Markspace as some Voids, Sources, and Nulls were directed to make some teams and follow in dear Mommy’s voidprints. My Null made it impossible to bend time and go back and forth around me, fine enough, but my track could be worn down.

A Void tearing the way, Source burning the way, and Null cementing it? Oh, eff these guys... let’s bring a little Reality into this place!

The second flights of cutting-edge scout ships came in... not Gunboats, because I had already scouted the way, and they needed more living room with more people.

We were going to temporally lock down this entire goddamn Abyss, and if we did it right, we could rip the place totally apart.

What would this place be without the Abyssal Wall? Horrible still, yes, but VULNERABLE.

Oh, they really, really wouldn’t like that. We definitely had to do it!

Everybody snickered and laughed as we decoded them talking about the ‘Axiomatic Event’ that had laid waste to Festerfont, the world Grandmother had started out on. She had broken and co-opted the Chaos Runes the Warped had drawn on the planet, and powered up a momentous Axiomatic Event that was right now ravaging across the system. The equivalent of a whole planet of Axiomatics had been brought into existence when the world burned, and promptly headed out to take care of the other three.

They didn’t have ships, but they were very, very happy to do mass slaughter, and the Warped still had no idea that Grandmother was behind it.

She was on one of the nexus worlds now, one occupied by Amoureans, shattering the mad art that anchored the Abyss, shaking the control of the Warp Gods here, and nobody had reported her, because anyone who saw her, died.

Very efficient, that.

Triggering another Axiomatic Event after she did all the key work didn’t hurt, either, and gave the Warp something to vent on and expend some demons at uselessly...

------

With me trailing temporal stability, it was impossible to hide my presence completely, although they couldn’t really tell where I was at any given moment... unless I chose to reveal myself.

Once the REAL Time-Reinforcers came in behind me, well, I decided I could serve as a distraction, too.

This Gunboat was equipped to fuck things up much bigger than it was. I didn’t have Pilot Talents, but I had Twenty Ranks, the Masteries, support Feats, and I’d sat in on probably a million hours of combat flying by now.

The Warp couldn’t affect my ship, nor could Warp Sorcery. I wasn’t going to test out the living moons, but anything else was fair game.

I gave them the wrath of a Twenty using TL20 Weird Science shit, and soon I had entire battlefleets chasing me from system to system, trying to find me, trying to shoot me when they did find me, trying to swarm me, herd me, corral me, take me out.

I saw the void literally filled with billions of demons brought out to block my flight path. I saw fleets waiting around worlds deep in the Abyss that rivalled anything the Demon Princes out there were putting out. I saw insane defenses of worlds transformed into caricatures of worship to gods who only laughed when they saw them, and mocked the stupidity of those who made them.

And, oh Mithar, did I kill a lot of the fuckers.

These juiced-up sensors systems did all the work they were supposed to, giving me enormous amounts of information to process... and the Strategos, and the demolition teams, who were so very, very happy to fast-analyze all the incoming data and tell me to drop some anti-matter here, here, here, and there, and lo, watch a World-Ring crack and start to sheer rather badly...

I didn’t actually lose count of the number of lighter ships I demolished, but Mnecromonics did it for me, so I stopped trying to count.

I did stupid things like circle an entire World-Ring, blowing the shit out of it the entire time, and when I got done, it was shattered into nine pieces... which were falling down to the Forge World below, whose population I was sure was happy to see them coming. Something like twelve thousand starfighters and fifty capital ships were on my ass as I zipped away from the place, space so full of shit it was nigh impossible to get out of tactical speed for all the stuff looping around me to form endless spheres of mass interference...

Took me sixty-four hours of combat to get out of tactical range, into free space, and leave them behind. I used up pretty much all the munitions, giving the makers all kinds of gratuitous field test data.

---

Some of the kids had insisted that I get some ghosting drones following me around to film everything externally, which I allowed with a sigh. They were using footage from this one fight in vids for decades.

The pilots were more serious, and broke the entire fight down into multiple tactical displays, against starfighters, light ships, demons, capital ships, point defenses, field obstructions, and terrain-following. To be completely fair, I didn’t claim any innovations in piloting, maneuvering, or tactical planning, but I had to chain so much of the stuff, and apply it seamlessly end to end, that all my pilots just sighed looking at all the shit I’d had to pull off to get out of there, wondered how I wasn’t dead, how Mom’s Finder stayed intact, and how they could advance to be able to do the same.

Yes, kids, this is a +60 unbuffed Piloting check at work, and Beyond Law and Chaos. I don’t give a shit what having a Possessed ship does for their cluck-cluck heads, they can’t time-see you, and they can’t get lucky. Watch. This is what you want to be able to do...

The game emulators went totally apeshit working with so much unbroken material.

Sunhawk borrowed the footage, and then blatantly posted the whole damn thing on the Elvar Sensalist... AFTER the kids set it up with appropriate music, of course.

Tremble, She Comes... they called it, with all sorts of meaning behind that, not just the main theme song.

It quickly ended up the most-watched human-sourced material in terms of hours in Elvar history. All them hotshot Elvar pilots were just wild with envy... and they wanted a ship that could do what mine did, not some pissy Sunwasp that couldn’t take any punishment.

Working with Hulkamania, a simulation of the entire theater of battle was posted about a month afterwards, and everyone got to test their brains and reflexes against an entire Warp system going apeshit crazy on them.

Sections of it became training runs for entire squadrons of pilots. Fanatical Elvar determined to beat it spent way too much time running it. The Ruk just watched in fascination at the fantastic waste of time, when I had the pull to bring in a major capital ship, and what I could do commanding THAT they were already well aware of...

-----

Because I was out of secondary munitions, the Warped saw me zip out into the void, raced after me... and I zipped around them back into field of battle; set down on the one section of the burning Worldring that had been flung away into outer space, still combusting wildly; and opened up a Gate. The whooping techteams came through bearing gifts, new armor plating, modular attachments, two turrets that had to be replaced, and a lot of circuitry to replace that which had sighed and just given up after the efforts it had put forth.

And the primary data. Forget the techies and analysts, the gamers wanted it more.

=======

Twelve hours later...

Paten added a thunderous boom for gratuity as the Brilliant bolt went through the Fallen Legionnaire’s helm, and blasted the Warmaster, and the demon he shared skull-space with, into a real mess inside that overdone headwear.

I watched whiteness flash inside the twisted metal, and the Warp shit crawling and bulging and writhing out from the seams in his armor began to burn unwhite.

The rest of the bridge didn’t much mind. There were plenty of alarms and stuff going off, shit was sparking and oozing and burning, and the atmosphere wasn’t something anyone wanted to breathe... well, it wasn’t so bad at the moment, given the amount of vivus blazing all around me.

I kicked over the two-ton corpse of Vainglorous Altaica, Warmaster of the Starving Tiger Battalion, the twat who’d led and commanded that huge effort to hunt me down, and whose forces were still scouring the system for me, unaware that the five-thousand-year-old battleship Fleeteater was now burning in the void, and their great commander was now cooking with his advisor demon inside his power armor.

Yeah, they hadn’t believed I could do that to them, either.

The coms-blockers and signal-diverters were still working, and anybody trying to find this ship was halfway across the system, not that the kids weren’t having great amounts of fun fake-answering the incoming communications and ‘coordinating’ all efforts to find me.

TL20 tech modules and Goldilocks with a mean streak can be pretty hilarious at times.

I hadn’t used the Finder’s Widow’s Bite at all over the course of the entire previous battle. I did use it when I was taking on this monstrous abomination of an overbuilt planet-raping battleship.

Pressor-and-tractor-beam dancing around a ship this size while the full force of your engines is powering a destroyer-class saber beam plunging in at basically point-blank range into all the key points of said battleship is very, very different from open-space combat... all the while punching out those annoying point defenses, localized shielding, and what starfighters you haven’t annihilated after flying up to their hangar bay and delivering some antimatter inside.

I had carved this monstrous bastard and all its ship-ending Warp-enhanced cannons like a turkey. I’d set all those rows of cannons on atomic vivic fire, I’d carved up the many demons Possessing the thing, and I’d gotten into multiple power cores and sent them blowing through the internals of the ship.

There hadn’t been a damn thing he could do about it, but he certainly hadn’t expected me to board the place, fight my way through his thralls, slaves, bioborgs, Fallen Legionnaires, mutants, occasional demons, and make it to his bridge, where I proceeded, to his utter disbelief, to eliminate his elite guard, wipe out the bridge crew, disable all the internal defenses, and finally duel him after ignoring and avoiding all his very scenery-chewing marksmanship.

I jammed the Agathakalogical Endowment Spike into the asshole with his body and soul burning, and slipped the Electrokinetic Diver module into the nav station.