Malikan took the first word. Sparkling with his glowing eyes, he impressively said:

"The only threat to us is the army of Necro-Zergs. In the form of the Blood Moon, they have a psionic defense that no weapon can penetrate. At the same time, as long as the Marker is intact, their troops are completely invulnerable. No matter how many times we destroy them, they will consume the corpses of their soldiers and recover in a matter of seconds. The only way to destroy them is to evaporate their troops in a vacuum. Because collecting the discharged gas is a complex technical problem. If they can solve it, then we will be powerless before the pressure of Necro-Zergs.”

“Perhaps I will agree with the previous speaker.” - The Seer Eldar continued this speech. She still did not want to name her former enemy, often talking about him in the third person. – “In ground battles we have no chance of winning. On the other hand, space battles with the Blood Moons seem simpler to me. After all, our strongest psionics, in collaboration with the best of the necrons, may well evaporate the whole planet. This method will not be quick, but I believe that we can prevail if only Necro-Zergs will fight against us. But I am afraid that the other two sides of the conflict will not give us enough time to succeed. Techno-Zergs have enough potential to pierce the shields of our ships. As for Necro-Orcs, they are not much different from ordinary orcs from our world. The demon cannot compete in efficiency with Warp and the Gods of Chaos.”

“So, let's sum up.” - I continued, after I was sure there would be no more comments. – “A real threat to us are hybrids of the Zerg and Protos. Only thanks to their psionic abilities the Blood Moon receives a fairly effective tool for fighting. Unfortunately, we can't destroy the hybrids, because in fact there are almost no hybrids left. The Marker itself creates the dead flesh of the Zerg, using the original chemicals, and does it faster than even a living hybrid.”

I paused and looked around at my companions.

"When I was traveling through different worlds in search of allies, I came across one world where Zerg psionics just didn't work. The reason for this was hidden in the differences in the laws of physics of this world. Now, having the knowledge of the Eldar about the nature of psionics, I can say that this type of information and energy impact should be prescribed in the original laws of physics of our world. This brings us back to how I gave the Eldar a new kind of non-Warp psionics. I used a synthetic God to change the laws of the universe. Even now, the Eldars retain their powers only because their God changes the world around them. If you remove it, the Eldars will immediately become weaker, as they will have to change the laws of physics each personally. About the same thing I propose to do with hybrids.”

"Do you want to use our God?" - Arienal guessed.

“Yes. I'm going to send my shadow clones to the Zerg homeworld and to a world where their power doesn't work. After that, I will analyze the differences between these worlds and see how exactly it is possible to 'prohibit' hybrids from using their psi. Of course, these changes will only work within our galaxy, but this should be enough for us.”

"Do we have enough time to complete this plan?" - Necron asked.

"Honestly, I don't know. But this is the only thing I can really offer. You are the leaders of a large army. I can only offer you my abilities. But rest assured, my abilities are more than enough to destroy the galaxy. The problem will be to survive for us.”

"So, you have another option?" - The Seer asked incredulously, massaging her temples. This was usually what she did when she tried to look into the future and see the most improbable scenarios.

“Yeah. Although, it looks even more complicated. I can use certain laws of physics to increase the force of gravity around the central black hole of our galaxy. A small additional impact will cause the curvature of multidimensional space to spread at a speed higher than the speed of light, which will cause the entire galaxy to collapse in a few minutes and turn into a giant black hole. Unfortunately, I can't guarantee that the entire galaxy will be completely destroyed, and not continue to exist inside some sort of spatial bubble.”

The seer only shook her head at my statement.

"I'm afraid to imagine a disaster of this magnitude.”

To be honest, I only came up with such a scenario of the Apocalypse while studying the science of the Eldar. It is worth admitting that for all the vast amount of knowledge available to them, the Eldar have never been able to direct their abilities to destruction. They easily created something useful for everyday life, but at the same time with difficulty and pain gave birth to weapons. And besides, they were too involved in their psionic abilities, completely ignoring the possibilities offered by pure physics.

The option I proposed for destroying the galaxy was not even the most radical method of destroying the enemy. On the contrary, it was a way that gives to us at least some chance to survive. After all, in a cataclysm of this magnitude, all the neighboring galaxies where we could escape would inevitably be destroyed. A wave of space disturbances could well blow up all the stars in them. I think the Judge of our Game will not be happy with such final. He was already in a bad mood because I broke his favorite Reaper.

This was the end of our meeting. I went to do scientific research, and the Necrons and Eldar took care of the development of their troops. Unfortunately, both my allies had one important limitation - they could not reproduce. The Necrons had no such function in principle, and each Necron had once been a member of the Necrontir race who had undergone a transformation. As for the Eldar, they could only 'create' new souls by begetting children naturally. But the queue for rebirth in a living body was already scheduled for several decades ahead. Many Vritras longed to return fully to life, not wanting to be like the Necrons forever. So, it turned out that only I could somehow try to change the balance of power in the future confrontation.

Fortunately, I still had the hiraishin tags for opening Stargates in all the galaxies previously visited. So, within an hour, my clones went to the worlds of StarCraft and Star Wars. This time I deliberately kept my connection with these clones, so for them time in another world flowed at the same rate as mine. It took me almost a month to thoroughly study the laws of physics of the three universes and isolate the elements that allowed hybrid psionics to work. Next, I calculated the characteristics of the ritual that allows me to 'ban' this type of 'magic', and then clutched my head.

In general, the ritual itself should not present any problems. The only obstacle was the required amount of Bahion. Even if three hundred billion Eldars will pray to their God every day, it would require them a thousand years to gather the necessary amount of faith energy. But we have only a year or rather eleven months.

According to my calculations, to get the right amount of Bahion, it was necessary to 'spend' three hundred trillion of Eldar-years. That's when I came up with an old idea of getting Bahion. I could create a virtual reality, the inhabitants of which would get the gaming advantages at the expense of daily sincere prayers. With sufficient motivation, they could be made three times more religious than the Eldars. Also, we can speed up the flow of subjective time inside the game ten or even twenty times. In total, I need the souls of ten trillion sentient beings.

The Eldars can quickly create clones of ordinary people, produce full-immersion capsules, and place them on one of the planets. And the Necrons, as specialists in technology, will be able to write a program of the game world with the required laws. Then in about ten months we will be able to 'milk' the necessary amount of Bahion from the souls of people, after which the victory will be in our pocket.

I quickly outlined this plan to my allies, set them a task and set the front of the works, then used the last known address of the other world. I hope there will be enough souls, and no one will unscrew my head for stealing them.

EVE Online

There were no special technical difficulties for me in the upcoming scam of the century. I was familiar with the technology of creating a Markers of necromorphs, which allow me to store billions of souls. So, a hundred or two of these Markers will allow me to imprison the right number of souls in them. But the very quality of the 'material' should have been quite high.

First, it had to be the souls of people who had preserved the memory of a past life. I didn't want to mess with the organization of school education in order to get sane players, and not just stupid cattle. The second requirement was a voluntary consent to live in the virtual world and worship a particular God as payment. In fact, life itself should have been the payment, because I could easily organize a 'Paradise on earth' for those who fulfilled their quota of production of Bahion. After all, it will be a virtual universe, so any benefits in it will be worthless in reality.

Adding up both requirements, we got that my 'clients' were supposed to be people who were dissatisfied with their lives. Here I decided to use the same system that the necromorphs used. It was deception to some extent, but not completely. Since I will still create Markers for storing souls, I can also create necromorphs that will collect 'donators'.

So, the scheme is ready. Marker will arrive on the planet and searches for people who are dissatisfied with life. Knowing the laws of any reality, I can say that such will be the majority of the population, and as if not 99%. After this necromorphs under the camouflage of angels will appear to applicants for relocation to Paradise and offer them to give me their soul. At the same time, I can use the 'brainwashing' technique built into the Marker to ensure the necessary efficiency of the recruitment process. And in the end, there will remain only hardcore people on the planets who want to continue living in a world filled with suffering, just because they are masochists. I don't need them in virtual reality. After that, the Marker flies to the next planet and continues collecting material there.

In general, I was satisfied with this plan one hundred percent. In order not to frighten ordinary people, I had to work on a program to create necromorphs, so that they could look like messengers of ‘good gods’, instead of creations of evil necromancers. After thoughtfully surgery operations, the result was a typical angel in a snow-white toga with wings on his back. So, my necromorphs aka ‘angels’ is ready to work.

http://rsute.ru/upkeep/uploads/2020/01/angel-with-wings-0w.jpg

Having made a plan of action, I opened a portal to another world and boldly stepped into it. I found myself, as always, in the void of interstellar space. A quick study showed that the magic and chakra in this world almost do not work, but my new psionics has not weakened. I am already glad that I created it for my needs. Necromorph techniques also needed only minor modifications, so I could proceed with my plan.

I 'connected' to the local astral and tried to find the source of the 'suffering of mortals' characteristic of intelligent beings. Surprisingly, there were quite a few such sources. There were thousands of inhabited worlds in this galaxy, with billions of people on each planet. Looks like I hit jackpot.

I used psionics to jump through space and find myself in the orbit of the planet from which the most intense stream of 'suffering' was coming. Next to the planet, I found a lot of spaceships moving back and forth. For the most part, they were cargo ships, though there were also passenger ships carrying thousands of intelligent in beings each.

When I got down to the planet, I began scanning the minds of the people who lived here, trying to figure out how they lived here at all and what they did. Pretty quickly, I realized that I was in the world of EVE Online. Each person had a neural network installed in their head that allowed them to control technology and study various knowledge bases.

Most of the population of this world were slaves. At the same time, despite the apparent 'high-tech' production, the overall productivity of people was low. Working under duress for pennies, they were not eager to enrich their masters. As a result, the whole world turned into a kind of hell. If desired, with such technologies people could live in complete comfort with almost no effort. But because of the structure of the local society, they lived in poverty and worked eighteen hours in a day.

Frankly to say it was the perfect world for my purposes. I created a Marker, placed it aboard of stolen spaceship, and then transformed a couple of thousand necromorphs into 'angels' in a nearby cemetery. After which sent them to promote the relocation to Paradise. I hid the cargo ship in the local slums, leaving a few necromorphs to guard it.

In general, the entire procedure did not take even a couple of days. After making sure that the process of collecting souls had begun and was proceeding as planned, I went to the next planet, where I repeated the same sequence of actions.

After creating a couple of hundred Markers in different parts of the galaxy, I retired and began to study the local technology of creating neural interfaces. I think in the future I will have to get into the bodies of people more than once, and the opportunity to turn into Vritras will not always be there. In such cases, I can create a neuro-interface for myself and use a direct connection to the computers of the Ancients. For me, there was an obvious gap between the capabilities of an ordinary person and a being able to interact directly with computers. The neuro-interface combined these two states, improving the processing of data by the brain by millions of times.

Local businesses only used such technologies to create Artificial Intelligence. In fact, they cut off a person's head, transferred it to intravenous nutrition, and then connect his neuro-interface to a powerful computer. And at the final stage of 'production' erased a person's memory, simultaneously injecting hypnoprograms of submission.

The local psionics didn't impress me at all, so I didn't even study them much. At the end of my five-year stay in this world, I was just goofing around, waiting for finish of the harvest.

There were more than a thousand inhabited worlds in this galaxy, each inhabited by tens of billions of people. In other words, the total population of the galaxy was about twenty trillion souls. I decided to put in a future project of virtual reality a certain limit of strength, and therefore I was going to rake everything 'to the bottom'.

When the Marker arrived on a new planet, it began collecting souls from the lowest levels of society. All the oppressed and the dispossessed, the searing and the squalid were happy to buy into the promise of a bright future and part with their lives. As a result, the world's economy was losing a significant part of its free labor force, and the standard of living of people with average incomes was falling. As a result, the new lower classes of society were ruined and became poor. Before that, their relative well-being was achieved through the exploitation of slaves. Such people, having tasted the delights of life at the bottom, quickly agreed to go to Paradise, after which the cycle was repeated.

As a result, in about a year the entire population of another world was trapped in Markers, and only the rich people, whose standard of living was maintained by robots were left alive. I left intact such 'spoiled children'. After all, their future life threatened to be terrible. Robots will sooner or later fail, and none of the survivors will be able to produce new ones. Thus, the local civilization was simply doomed to slide into the savagery of the primitive communal system.

The inhabitants of the planets, of course understood that multiple causeless deaths are not normal. So, Markers 'zombifying' ability were very useful. While it was on the planet collecting the souls, the local inhabitants simply did not pay attention to these deaths. After the Marker left for another planet, it was too late to investigate anything.

For every thousand inhabited worlds, there were two hundred of my Markers. That is, each Marker had to collect souls from five planets. On each planet, the population varied from one to fifty billion, in average twenty billion. In total, I spent five years to collect twenty trillion souls, and the entire galaxy 'paid' its cost. At least the time of this world aren’t synchronized with the world of Mass Effect. I investigated it firstly.

Finally, after collecting the necessary number of souls, moved them to one huge Marker, cleaned up all traces of my stay in this world, then opened a portal to the universe of Mass Effect and went through it with my 'catch'.

Mass Effect 2.2

In a couple of days of my absence, the Eldars were able to develop the first prototype of a soul container, and the Necrons were able to write an alpha version of a full-immersion computer game. Next, I gave them the drawings of a neuro-interface that allowed them to 'cross' these two projects, quickly achieving the desired effect of being in virtual space, and even under the 'acceleration of consciousness'. Similar technologies were used in the previous world for accelerated learning of knowledge bases.

In the shortest possible time, in just a month, a computer game was created. At the same time, clones of twenty billion salarians were created at a rapid pace, their brains was capable of processing information at high speed without experiencing exorbitant loads. After that, I performed a mass ritual of instilling of souls into their bodies and launched new inhabitants into the virtual world. And most importantly, every inhabitant of this world became a priest of the synthetic God, giving him all produced Bahion.

It is possible to tell very long story what kind of problems we faced when organizing the game process, but in the end, we managed to put all the players in a state of 'permanent religious ecstasy', in which they stayed for the next ten months. All this time Bahion was sent to God of Eldar, where he accumulated them in a special psionic ‘tank’.

And now, came the cherished day of the beginning of the game. By doubling the number of Bahion producers over the estimated number, we were able to collect enough of this energy without worrying about whether it would be enough to perform the ritual. After all, it's not every day that you rewrite the laws of the universe, editing the 'will of God' as you see fit.

Exactly an hour before the official start of the battle, we began the ritual. Everything was ready for a long time, so we just, figuratively speaking, pressed the 'red button' and began to observe the course of events.

The ritual ended at exactly the moment when the game began. As we planned, the laws of nature in the galaxy have changed, and the hybrids have completely lost all their abilities. A minute later, I received a signal that Kerrigan and Zeratul were using my devices to open portals to their world. Apparently, they realized that there was nothing more to catch, so they decided to quickly leave, which according to the rules, equated to defeat.

A minute later, our allied forces began to advance on the enemy's position. Thanks to the ritual, Necro-Zergs suddenly turned into ordinary necromorphs, who had no chance to resist the psionics of the Eldar and Necrons. Of course, the demon tried to use Mass Effect technology, i.e. local biotics, but it could not match the capabilities of our troops.

We almost believed in a quick and bloodless victory when the Demon of the Blood Moon made his move. It turns out that for the past year he had been accumulating Bahion to conduct some sort of ritual now. He just started the ritual as the battle started, so it took him a few hours to complete it. When the ritual worked, we felt a wave of power sweep through the space. A second later, portals opened all over the galaxy, from which demons began to penetrate into this world.

Of course, they weren't Warp demons, but they were powerful enough to start pushing our troops back. And the number of them altogether was beyond description. This demon turned out to be a cunning bug and decided to win by calling his 'relatives'.

In one moment, the scales had tilted to the side of the enemy, and now our troops were retreating, trying to regroup. Fortunately, I am now an expert in 'rewriting' the laws of physics, so I was able to figure out pretty quickly what exactly the demon had done and how to 'reverse everything'. The calculation of the parameters of the ritual took only five minutes, after which case again fell into the quantity of Bahion. But here we had everything in chocolate.

The demon owned a maximum of several hundred billion souls. We had a hundred times more of them, and they worked ten times more efficiently. In addition, after the previous ritual there was a good stock of unused Bahion. But I need additional little amount of that energy to conduct ritual safely, so I gave to my allies the task to hold enemy until the last breath.

I got into the game settings, accelerated the timespeed in it five times, bringing the overall acceleration factor to fifty. And then I announced the beginning of a special game event. Anyway, after the war over, I was going to disconnect the Eldar God from the free source of Bahion. So, the game event was the announcement of the imminent termination of the ability to 'donate' for faith, plus the game store were lined up very useful game items. Naturally, the people immediately stopped all business and began to pray diligently, developing the necessary resource for us.

After about 24 hours I accumulated the right amount of Bahion and performed the ritual of ‘exorcise of demons’. This not only closed all portals into their world, but also made it impossible for demons to be present in our galaxy. As a result, the Demon of the Blood Moon was thrown out of this world, which immediately became clear from the instantly 'dead' necromorphs. When the demons were exorcised, the security system in the Markers was triggered, and all of them immediately self-destructed.

My allies spent some time making sure that the enemy forces were completely destroyed. As it turned out, the demons were so hungry that they did not disdain even the souls of their allies. They devoured all the orcs in just an hour, and the Orc God was torn to pieces and dragged into their world.

In total, after a couple of days it became clear that 'alive' in this galaxy were only Necrons, Eldar, I... and the Reaper himself. The last game figure did not even think to show himself in any way, instead hiding unknown where.

And then, quite unexpectedly for me, the solution was found by the Star God of the Necrons. He declared that he could feel perfectly the emotions of living beings. Of course, the Reaper wasn't particularly alive, but he was experiencing emotions, the main ones being fear and hate. Among the Eldar, and even more so among the Necrons, there are hardly to find any strong psionics who experience such a combination of emotions at the moment of our triumph. So Malikan was able to give me the exact coordinates of where the Reaper was hiding.

When I came out of the teleport, I was in orbit of a lifeless planet. As soon as I looked at it, I recognized the world I had seen in the Reaper's memories. It was the same planet where he conducted first sacrifice to the demons. Already knowing where to go, I went to the ruins of the capital, where I found the very temple where the Reaper went through the ritual of ascension. I found him sitting on stone, lost in his memories and impossible dreams.

I did not arrange heart-wrenching conversations, but only assured myself that the Reaper was wrapped in his emotions and did not perceive the world around him. I went close to him and removed the seal from the parasite in my soul. It did not wait long and immediately pounced on the prey, marked with the seal of the victim. Reaper did not have time to understand anything, as was torn to pieces and devoured by my 'parasite'. After that, the parasite fell asleep in its shelter, and I returned the seal to its place.

Before I could even turn around to leave the temple, I was back in the void. Before me I saw the satisfied Judge and an even more satisfied Being. They looked like two cats who had reached a barrel of sour cream.

"That's all, you win.” - The Judge said to the Being. - "Now, take your figure before he does something else. So be it, I'll count a virtual world with trillions of souls as compensation for destroying the Reaper.”

"Compensation?" – Being protested. - "You obtained ten times much more than what you lost."

"I don't know anything.” - They both laughed contentedly after that.

"Okay, you convince me.” - Being agreed. Judge immediately disappeared, and I was left alone with my 'employer'. - “Congratulations on your rating boost. Now you will have access to more interesting games.”

"Did I get into the Golden League?" - I asked skeptically.

"Golden League? Ha-ha-ha.” - Being laughed. - "Rather, you have moved from the wooden league to the bronze league. And that's only because you're so funny and the audience likes it.”

"Am I funny?" – I was irritated.

“Exactly. You're like a walking clown. Do you want to hear the last joke?”

“Go ahead.” - I agreed.

“Fifty players gathered and decided to arrange a game in the world based on EVE Online. They prepared the platform, put the game figures in their places, gave them tasks and then decided to celebrate this business with a small drink. They met, sat down, drinks and so on. When they returned to the game, it was completely empty. And then there was their common cry of the soul: Stolen!!!”

I couldn't stop myself from laughing.

"And most importantly, you were so lucky, that at that moment the Judge of that game distracted by other business and did not notice how you stole from him twenty trillion souls, including forty-nine game figures. Even Players of Mass Effect made bets on you whether you can bring this scam to end or not. Of course, I bet on you, and I won. Ha-ha. You should have seen the faces of those Players when they realized what had happened and who had robbed them.”

At this the Being laughed maliciously.

"All right, enough of this. Players want to see you in a high-ranked game with high-stakes. So, now you are going to a world that is almost, but not quite like any anime you know.”