Chapter 755: Interlude 9 – 3: Thorns of Creation
Instead of corrupting minds, they stripped away personal will, locking consciousnesses into a state of perfect, obedient stillness, and reducing beings to compliant shells.
Entities that brought with them, perfect structure. No freedom. No deviation. No possibility for change.
These ’Cosmic Horrors’ belonged to a different lineage than the Crawling Chaos.
They were the spawn of the Ordered counterpart to the Void god, dubbed the Immutable One.
"Only Spiral Matrices and the Prism Choir? I expected more," Ranus muttered with a sigh.
Beside him, the Eternal of Creation silently shook her head.
"They won’t be able to handle that thing."
Ranus had sensed them tearing through space as they made their way here, which was why he stopped Akasha.
He’d planned to have the two factions of Cosmic Horrors eliminate each other, but there were too few on one side to stand a chance against the other.
"Not like they’d listen if we tried to warn them."
Indeed, the Spiral Matrices and the Prism Choir, only a dozen of each, didn’t even acknowledge the presence of the Eternals.
Their existences were too ordered to care about external factors. They only "knew" they must attack the chaotic intrusion.
As for the Crawling Chaos, it was instinctively hostile toward anything that wasn’t itself.
The moment the Ordered Entities drew near, the Crawling Chaos’ tentacles lashed out faster than light, spewing a corrosive void sludge that ate away at matter and energy in their path. A wave of corruption radiated from its position, distorting reality itself, causing it to glitch like a broken recording.
The millions of interlocking rings that formed the Spiral Matrices began to spin at impossible speeds, generating razor-sharp ’winds’ that tore through the corrupted space, ’fixing’ it and then cutting through the toxic sludge the Crawling Chaos spewed.
The tentacles recoiled from the force of the attack, but the corruption they leaked rapidly healed the damage.
The entities of the Prism Choir hovered at a distance, vibrating in perfect harmony, causing the space around them to fracture into perfectly symmetrical polygonal fragments.
As the Crawling Chaos fired another stream of black, corrosive fluid that hissed through space, the Choir retaliated with a harmonic decree of destruction.
A high-pitched note rang out from the Choir, the sound resonating off the fragmented shards of space, growing in intensity until the sound waves shattered the fluid before it could reach them, scattering it in all directions.
That didn’t stop the Crawling Chaos, though.
Its tentacles ripped through space-time as it pulled itself forward, bellowing a soundless scream that shattered reality, overpowering the harmonic resonance of the Prism Choir.
The prism at the forefront of the group collapsed inward, disintegrating into dust, with even the particles vanishing into nothingness.
Another wave of corrosive fluid followed, and this time, one of the Spiral Matrices couldn’t counter fast enough. The dark fluid engulfed it, eating away at the structure and slowly dissolving it.
Wounded, the Spiral Matrix immediately imploded itself into a singularity of pure ’order’, and the vacuum created by its collapse sucked in one of the Crawling Chaos’ massive tentacles into it, erasing it from existence.
Despite this setback, the Crawling Chaos didn’t back down. More tentacles burst out through the cracks the Spiral Matrix had left behind with its self-destruction.
It continued to glitch reality around it, causing the fabric of space to twist erratically, which in turn made the attacks from the other Spiral Matrices misfire.
One of the Prism Choir’s entities projected a cage of prismatic light around the Crawling Chaos, trapping a portion of its body. The energy from the cage reflected the expanding pulse that distorted reality back onto the creature, momentarily freezing it in place.
But the creature was not so easily subdued. It let out a soundless roar, its tentacles slamming against the barriers and sending shockwaves rippling through the surrounding space. The cage of light shattered, scattering shards of cosmic energy through the void.
The Spiral Matrices launched lines of pure, manifested ordered force, each one moving in perfectly straight lines and bending at precise right angles.
The moment one of those lines intersected with a tentacle, it sliced through it effortlessly, ignoring all notions of durability. But even though dozens of its tentacles were severed, the creature regenerated them as if nothing had occurred, then lashed out with the new limbs.
Each time it attacked, either a Spiral Matrix or an entity of the Prism Choir fell.
As their numbers dwindled, the Prism Choir gathered its remaining entities, combining their power into one final blast of light that tore through the corrupted matter surrounding the Crawling Chaos, burning away its tentacles and mending the glitching reality around them.
Simultaneously, all the Spiral Matrices self-destructed, their combined explosions generating a massive singularity that consumed half of the Crawling Chaos’ body.
When the lights and waves of energy subsided, the wounded Crawling Chaos was left alone, its body still hanging halfway out of the crack in existence.
Seeing this, Ranus turned to the woman beside him and raised his fist.
"Rock, paper, scissors. Loser handles the CC."
His words birthed a look of utter confusion on the woman’s face.
"Huh? What ar—?"
"Rock, paper, scissors!"
"Wait a—damn it!"
"Haha! I win!"
Ranus let out a cry of victory, holding up his two fingers, while his fellow Eternal, with an open palm, glared at him.
"Alright, loser, do your job."
The sight of Ranus’ smug grin almost made her want to smack him in the face, but she held herself back, remembering she still needed his advice on certain matters of the heart.
"Tsk..."
Clicking her tongue, she turned her attention toward the Crawling Chaos, while Akasha immediately put some distance between them.
Ranus remained where he was, though.
A thin film of glowing light enveloped the woman’s body, and an unstoppable torrent of cosmic energy erupted from her.
More stars ignited in the space, lighting up the darkness, but the Crawling Chaos didn’t take kindly to this.
It hissed, its tentacles reaching out to crush the stars, trying to extinguish the light and plunge everything back into absolute darkness.
But it was destined to fail.
|Thorns of Creation.|
Small white thorns erupted from the Eternal’s outstretched fingers, resembling the thorns of a rose.
They curved through space, then shot out faster than light, multiplying with each passing moment. Each thorn branched out into more, which in turn split and formed even more thorns.
Within moments, millions of thorns streaked across space, piercing into the tentacles of the Crawling Chaos and tearing its flesh apart.
It screeched, spewing void energy in every direction, waves of destructive power capable of obliterating entire universes.
But it was nothing before the unforgiving thorns of creation, which continued to rip apart its existence, shredding its tentacles.
Having taken too much damage, it bellowed a soundless scream and retreated into the void.
The moment it vanished, Ranus slammed his palms together, and as he did, the giant, jagged tear in existence began to stitch itself shut. Cosmic energy poured from his body, recreating the distorted reality until it was as good as new.
Once he finished, he spoke.
"Mission complete. Akasha, we’ll leave the cleanup to you."
Following his words, a video game-style notification appeared in their fields of vision.
[Mission Completed.
Respect +
$500.]
Seeing this, the Eternal of Creation turned towards him with a raised eyebrow.
"Is this from another weird game you found?"
"Calling it weird is a crime. It’s called ’Great Theft’. It was really popular on Earth back in the day."
Ranus created a cosmic gate in front of them and, just as he was about to go through, he added, "Come to think of it, why don’t you and our Hype-man head to Earth for a date?"
The woman froze, her eyes widening in shock and realisation.
"That... sounds like a good idea. But, we’re not exactly on speaking terms right now."
"Let me guess, because you ignored him after your last tryst?" Ranus asked, rolling his eyes as he floated into the cosmic gate.
The woman frowned, following him through the gate and responding defensively, "I didn’t ignore him! I just left without saying anything afterwards."
"Woman, unless you recreated the definition of the word ’Ignore’, what you did was ignore him."
Their voices faded as the gate closed behind them, leaving behind Akasha, who silently stared at the remaining masses of ordered force attempting to overwrite the reality around them, the aftermath of the Prism Choir’s destruction.
