Chapter 21

The square-cube law states that as a three-dimensional object grows in size, it’s surface area will grow less in proportion to it’s volume. This means that large objects will have their properties relying on surface area (such as strength in a muscle) be outstripped by properties relying on volume (such as weight). If one extrapolates on this, this would mean that the properties of an object that rely on more dimensions would outstrip those that rely on less dimensions, such as volume (3 dimensions) and surface area (2 dimensions). We can circumvent the square-cube law by making use of other concepts that rely on dimensions exceeding three, such as making something exist in multiple parallel realities at once (see the chapter on matter frequencies more, starting on page 72). This allows something to have strength far greater than normal and allow only energy (such as kinetic energy) to pass while supporting the primary machine, without any extra weight being added on to the structure. Thus, it is by this mechanism that one can have the mountain-sized war machines that our Empire uses to protect it’s borders while still having them be effective.

Page 774, chapter 8 of a textbook recovered from an Omnic library. It is thought to have been written by The Sage of the empire in order to educate up and coming scholars.

Silk looked over her shoulder for a moment, looking at the lumbering equine on the horizon. The bubble probably had expanded to fit around a quarter of the city at this point, given its rate of growth. Shaking her head to get rid of these distracting thoughts, she did notice that the massive beast slowing down and stopping. It appears as though the Levi did something to halt its moment, although how exactly she did it was beyond Silk. Running towards the center of the incursion, Silk quickly started slashing passing enemies with abandon while approaching the source. Right. Left. Right. Right. Left. Downwards. Her hiltless swords ran through enemy after enemy, crumpling their innards and causing their inky blood to stain the spongy organs within, cleanly sliced and bisected. Before long, however, she noticed the enemy density to the side of her dropping drastically.

Running over the thin gap in the hordes of monsters, Silk quickly found that she was following a literal trail of dead bodies, with a pile of black fluid pooling near her feet. She also noticed that atop a pile of corpses was the flashing figure of Victor’s silhouette, occasionally clashing with the blades of the enemies and dodging erratically. For some reason, instead of fighting normally, whenever sound erupted from the clashing of his and the foes’ weapons, Victor jumped through the air and landed down in a different area, almost always landing on one of the many piles of bodies to muffle sound.

Rushing to help Victor, Silk saw his hunched over form, legs planted firmly in a mass of parchment corpses. Just as his limp body fell off the pile of carrion, she caught it with a light oof as his admittedly modest heft hit her body. Carrying him under the crook of her shoulder, Silk was forced to stow one of her Thief’s Blades and go towards the epicenter one-handed.

As Silk got closer and closer to the epicenter, she began to see the buildings slowly fade away as a dark red, almost black material replaced the cobbled together hodpodge of recently assimilated buildings turned into bookshelves. A reflective and eerily glossy surface reflecting the books that lay upon their rungs, they stretched up far beyond Silk’s vision. She also noticed that the lumbering humanoids here were less strongly built, simply reshelving books and taking them away while not even registering the footsteps of the blade-carrying girl.

After about fifteen minutes of wandering into the fray, she felt Victor stirring under her arm. Droppiing him not unlike a heavy sack of flour, she covered his mouth as he tried to say something. After he got his bearings, he quickly squirmed out of the hold Silk had him in and took out two pens and a piece of parchment from a nearby shelf that contained supplies rather than books.

Where are we? What happened?

Quickly taking the second pen, Silk responded quickly. We are currently in the center of wherever all of this weirdness is coming from. I think that we are close to whatever is causing all of this madness. I’ve spotted a massive silhouette in the distance of wherever we are.

So, what do we do to stop this? Something has to be powering the dimensional rift.

Silk simply scribbled a single sentence.

The usual.

Victor responded quickly.

We hit it until it stops moving?

Silk immediately wrote down the final part of this exchange without even hestating.

We hit it until it stops moving.

And thus, with that, the pair began running towards a hulking, many tentacled shadow on the horizon as they began hurtling through ever tighter concentric rings of circular bookshelves. Behind them, the parchment and pens mutated and degenerated into piles of goo as the noise the tools made upon clattering to the ground attracted the attention of something in the area.

Deep within the center of the orb, beyond rows and rows of bookshelves, there lay a massive figure, its appearance nearly beyond comprehension. Shifting, the abomination revealed that it had the hunched figure of an old woman roughly seventeen metres tall when curled, stooping over a desk. Instead of writing on a piece of parchment - or even paper, as expensive as it might be - she appeared to be carving squiggly runes into the desk itself. Evn more strangely and alarmingly, the desk was squirming in what appeared to be discomvort. As the flesh of the cream-colored “writing desk” was pierced, the twisted letters began filling up with glowing crimson blood before projecting light upwards and outwards into the murky red sky. As the rusymbols were shot into the edge of the pokcet dimension, the outer boundary of the area pulsed in time with it, swallowing a building or group of fleeing people as it did so.

However, Victor and silk saw none of this. They simply ran, bronze knife and Thief’s blade out alike, ready to end this incursion once and for all.