As far as Cults go, Partaevian is the worst of the worst, and when it came to how I viewed them, it wasn’t for normal reasons.
Sure, they committed numerous atrocities over the years: kidnapping, murder, assassination, you name it, they’ve done it. Still, since I had a habit of doing those very same things…regularly, they weren’t a dissuasive matter for me.
Instead, it was the WAY they went about things. The leader of the cult, A High Ranker named Draven Faircloth, was hyper-intelligent and a master manipulator.
At some point, he stumbled upon a blueprint for creating life, a Homunculus if you will, and the crazy bastard decided that instead of making an army, he would instead manufacture these creatures in the form of jewelry that would then be attached to certain limbs or body parts to indicate the members status in the cult’s hierarchy.
To the unsuspecting eye, the jewelry would only look like basic obsidian glass, but if you observed it with your Perception and Senses, you would notice it was FAR from a dead rock object.
The creatures lived by leeching off their host’s lifeforce and PC, and as a side effect, this process practically eliminated the Wearer’s Particle Signature.
The Homunculus would, over time, cause its Wearer to waste away until a point where they were a husk of their former selves. At that point, the Semi-Living jewelry would be transferred to the next person higher up on the food chain, wherein they would get a massive increase in power, 2 to 10 fold depending on how strong the Homunculus had become.
The left and right wrists, ankles, bicep, Collar, earrings, each placement of the jewelry indicated the Wearer’s status in the cult, and it wasn’t until the Collar that the artifact stopped drawing power and instead returned it. Basically, the Homunculus would be transferred around until it reached its final form. Instead of leeching power, it would return it between 2 and 10 fold depending on the resources fed to it.
The only time I ever had contact with Draven Faircloth, my first thought was, "This guy’s a fucking Monster," he was strong, obsessively so. I watched him single-handedly fight over a hundred of the strongest known high-rankers at the time to a stalemate when his own Rank was two stages below theirs, all thanks to the Homunculus Artifacts he was wearing.
Skipping ranks is one thing; hell, I can do it now thanks to my stats, but at best, I could deal with beings one Rank Above me tacking on more bodies, and I’m not confident I could hold my own for a prolonged amount of time, yet Draven was EASILY handling hundreds of people at once.
Taking power from his followers for his gain was disgusting to me, but that isn’t all; it was the structure and belief system he instilled in Parteavian that set me off the deep end.
Draven’s cult had initially started small, with only a handful of followers who wished to completely give themselves to Arkadia, who they believed gave Humanity the path to becoming immortal.
The name Partaevian is a play on the word Particle Heaven, and that was precisely what they wished to bring about, a Heaven under the particles; this was the gift they wished to give the System for giving them the opportunity to become Immortals.
As such, anyone who stood against them was labeled a heretic and either converted through a lengthy and clunky Brainwashing process or killed on the spot and given to the many Homunculus infants as nutrients before they were crafted into jewelry.
It Took YEARS and a combined effort from every organization, Light or Dark, to wipe out Partaevian. Their downfall was that they had, over time, crossed EVERYONE’S bottom line, from the heroes to the villains and even the Myriad Races; no one was on the side of the Crazy Cultists except themselves.
The crusade against them went down in the Origin Timeline’s history as the singular unifying moment where the people of Earth Came together to defeat a common foe.
Not even the Extraterrestrials brought about such a unified force; that should tell you just how HATED the people of Partaevian were.
Yet…as I stood there trying to figure out what to do with Clive, I couldn’t help but shake my head because it was all for nothing; someone from the cult had survived and come back to the past to start everything over a second time.
And honestly, choosing Columbine as a target wasn’t unsmart. From an outside standpoint, it had the potential to be an FPIT, and that alone was more than enough to draw in several returners who were curious about what would happen and if they could score some easy Progress Years in the event quest.
To make matters worse, even after only being back a few years, the cult was already at the size of many small organizations in the Origin Timeline; I mean, having over 80 Rankers was no small feat considering there were still less than 2000 who had come back to the past.
Partaevian had been actively plotting in the shadows; the only question was who was running the show, and unfortunately, I had killed one of the few people who could tell me anything…or at least I think I did.
Holding onto that thought, I tapped my foot on the ground, used Dust Manipulation, and carried Captain Stick-Up-His-Ass’s corpse to my side before digging around his remains until I found what I was looking for.
"Right bicep…tsk, not high enough to have given me answers, Ankles, Wrists, biceps, then collar, earrings, and lastly, the Crown which the leader wears….he was only a Step 3 member in the cult." Tossing the corpse into my inventory, I pivoted my foot and took control of the dirt under the unconscious Cultists I had yet to deal with and killed them off with Geo-Spikes, leaving only Clive alive.
"Hey, HammerTime, I don’t suppose you know the name of the current Partaevian Leader…do you?" Turning my attention back to the big oaf, I asked without expecting an answer.
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"Leader…do you mean Boss? I think his real name is Dragon or something like that…but I don’t know, I always called him Boss,"
’Dragon…’ Hearing Clive butcher the guy’s name, I blinked three times.