Eastern Mongolia...

I eyed the hacked corpses scattered about, my brow furrowing as I set down next to the Red Guardian. “Hey, General. What drew you out from behind the desk?”

“My Shield,” he replied, gesturing at the white Shield with the red star on it, Dolg. “Apologies for dragging you down, I thought you’d just scan them from up there.”

“Ah, I’m fast enough it doesn’t matter too much.” I frowned at the corpses and the scorched ground around them, my eyes flickering to the trail they’d left behind themselves through the small town nearby. “Corabuskians. Like, the Hell? What are they doing here?”

His eyes narrowed. “I don’t know the species,” he admitted easily.

“I don’t, either! They’re native to a galaxy three hundred and twenty-six million light years in that direction.” I pointed at five o’clock and off thataway. “You can’t even see the place from here, there’s a bunch of other galaxies in the way!”

He frowned, seeing my expression. “What are they doing here, then?”

“What did they do, start torching everything as soon as they arrived?”

“Yes. Luckily there were a few young Psions here who drove them out of the town, and my Shield alerted me to...” he looked down at it sharply. “There’s another incursion?”

I gathered up the bodies of the two pyromaniac aliens he’d hacked apart. “Where to?” I asked shortly.

“Shevltzgard.”

------

The plant-forms were flailing at everything aggressively, disguising the fact that they were seeding and rooting very aggressively at the same time. Spores were being launched through the air to attack the local ecosystem, and the local vegetation was being killed and consumed rapidly.

The creatures also had very purple Auras. Sapient, and murderous.

I flamed the main root base dead as the Red Guardian slaughtered his way through its spawn with a burning silver mindblade, wrought about with the clear sap-like Baneflame against Plants, almost like he’d done this kind of thing before.

“Suu’ukra. A very aggressive and malicious plant species,” I informed him, as the Fangs of Farallah spit up endless burrowing wasps to dig after the buried seeds and roots, while vivic energy burned over the creature. “From a nebula close to the Krempi Galaxy.”

“This is not a coincidence...” We both trailed off as Markspace basically lit up.

Aliens of races never seen before were popping up all over the planet, and promptly bursting out into violence when they did so.

Five encounters. Ten. Twenty...

I frowned and started Lived-Lining them back, and found they had all popped out of nowhere in random locations all across the planet. Dimensional ties popped and sealed behind them instantly...

“Someone is dumping these things here via some sort of teleport technology.” I paused, suspecting something. “Nimue, we need an interception and redirect... General Shostakov, I will keep you in the loop.”

His eyes flickered as he nodded shortly. “I have another one to attend to, Dynamo!” His Shield pulsed, a red star swallowed him, and he was gone, off to defend the Motherland.

------

I went up into space, along the path these teleports were coming in along. There were so many hyperspace and dimensional convergences coming together in the vicinity of Terra that their paths were bending to accurately land here.

But, knowing their path, it was easy enough to put something up in front that would bounce them back whence they came from... with at least some offset.

And what was Cosmic Awareness if not to mess with people who were messing with us?

Nimue wove up the dimensional mirror which bounced the incoming enemies back where they came from, and kept moving it as I tracked them coming in and out, right back to the planet in the Krempi Galaxy they were all coming from.

A maximum-security world which some of the most dangerous criminals in that galaxy had been sentenced to.

These were creatures that could not be rehabilitated or repurposed, had blood on their hands, and were a danger to sapient life. Unfortunately, the galaxy-wide alliance there had strict laws on the killing of prisoners, with no death penalty allowed without a case-by-case judgement of ponderous length... and the prisoners had stacked up faster than they died, until someone had the bright idea of just exiling them to a place beyond anyone’s reach and just being rid of them.

Terra probably wasn’t supposed to be the target, but how they chose a target was suspect enough in itself.

The teleports stopped abruptly when prisoners started appearing in non-secured areas on the prison world and immediately started wreaking havoc there. Convenient!

---

My arrival in the system wasn’t noted, Vampire’s Veil working just fine against their systems, and no bioorganic technology backups around.

I traced the decision-making process for this insanity back, made a list of the beings responsible here and elsewhere, and sighed.

The Warden, trying to get rid of his most troublesome prisoners, as they weren’t killing one another fast enough while new meat was coming in.

The salesman, touting the new teleport technology that was untraceable, and the fat margins for selling it, the perfect test case.

A competing bureaucracy, who just wanted the headache of these galactic-class killers gone, and didn’t know how to deal with it.

I sighed, and inspected the planet as rapidly and thoroughly as I could.

Well, I didn’t have much faith in their system of justice, but the prisoners here were, wow. There was literally so much blood on their hands, and no innocents. However, even the guards here were drafted from violent ex-prisoners, as the only way to control those worse than themselves.

A whole galaxy’s worth of murderers, put here because they couldn’t argue who should pull the plug on them, and someone believed they should at least be allowed to live out their lives and die in a way true to their nature.

Admirable. Idiotic, but admirable. Cleaving too closely to mercy at all costs, especially if that cost was paid for by others.

I considered the planet below for a good long while, debating what to do.

I could crack it open, I had enough power to do that. I could douse it in a full-blown sunflare and melt it down. I could pump that energy into its core and blow it out from within as magma went to plasma and tore it apart. I could send it into another dimension. I could probably just drop the whole thing into the sun.

I was spending a lot of time thinking about what to do and not doing anything.

My eyes narrowed.

While this was a prison planet, there was no prisoner there that hadn’t earned a termination. I didn’t like being an executioner, but the fact remained that if they were released, they’d act just like the ones back on Terra had, and kill until caught or stopped.

Some of them had indeed politely surrendered once they’d been confronted, certain they’d merely be locked up and get out to kill again.

One Aural Rede later, and they’d been put down. You just don’t fuck with hands that crimson on the super-powered.

Aaaaand my thoughts were drifting away from killing them here.

I knuckled down and Focused. The universe came to a standstill.

Except there was... pressure.

The subtlety of it was absolutely profound. It had slid right by my Cosmic Awareness as if it wasn’t there. It operated at a non-threatening level that didn’t stir Fate, so the Red Eyes never popped at all. My layers of psychic protection were literally too heavy and strong to interfere with it, like trying to use bricks to contain the fog rising off a lake.

I was severely impressed. I couldn’t tell if it was Cosmic or Divine, maybe both, but it was subtle and pervasive in a way I’d never seen before, definitely Legendary-grade.

I rippled backwards through space, away from the prison world. The effect fell in power some, but it didn’t go away, still there, still subtle, still influencing anything and everything around it.

I... couldn’t make a Divination spell subtle enough to analyze this without immediately being detected, even with an X+1 Valence.

Yay for Ur-Priest Levels...

“By the Veils of Vaunted Valtorr

And the Mists of Munnopor,

A warding I seek, clever and meek

To conceal the subtlest spoor.”

I said it in the Voice of Thunder, but with the quietest whisper. It rang in the aether of the Mess Beyond, but there was no stirring here, as it echoed only in the soul.

The challenge underscored in the words carried to the Principals, who could not fail to recognize my voice. Magic converged from beyond, and as it touched this ethereal pressure, I stirred their interest, for they realized what they’d been ready to send me was not up to the task.

Even watching the transformation of the magic straight on, I couldn’t understand what they were doing. It plucked at the cosmic power from the Golden Child, and I let them take all they wished. Moonlight mists and veiled vapors billowed without mass or substance, dissipated, yet remained behind, and the unseen, nearly undetectable pressure flowed through them and did not touch me.

I could tell I had their intense interest at this development, and tied off my sensory awareness so they could watch. They would not interfere without Invocations, but Principals loved them exciting times.

“I say to All-Seeing Agamotto, whose gaze sees every star,

A gem I see, hidden from thee, has avoided thy sight so far.”

My Third Eye almost popped open in outraged challenge from the information-gluttonous Agamotto. It wasn’t the Eye itself, but Agamatto’s personal attention should be enough; I swirled up magic and cosmic power alike to feed His awareness.

I could feel His surprise at just how delicately He had to keep sifting His spell to actually sense the pressure, and that, of course, became a challenge, as sensing it was simply not enough. He had to weave it on an even more subtle layer, surpass it, and find out exactly was going on here that He had not sensed before!

I could almost feel the youngest of the Vishanti writhing in delight at the thought of finding something new. Of course, this was just another random galaxy out in the cosmos, and there were countless secrets he did not know, the universe being as big as it was.

But He was messing with something potentially Big here, we could all feel it, and he was naturally delighted.

With the equivalent of wiping my hand across my eyes, the universe took on a new view.