<Dietrich>

Dietrich met the ground of THE Braneworld Observable Existence at the speed of a falling verdict, and the impact was the least of what hurt!

His power had regressed. He felt it the instant he gathered himself off the broken floor, the wrongness of his own foundations, the gaps where Superbius and Infinity had been, and the horror of the measurement landed before his pride could stop it. He had nearly slipped from THE Third Scale entirely. He, Ubergulden Dietrich, Silurian Paleozoic, of one of the greatest Houses in THE Braneworld, had come within a breath of dropping to the Second Scale, hollowed of the engineered Pride that had defined him and the Infinity that had carried him, left standing on a foundation that barely held its tier.

BOOM!

Who. Who had his fucking whore of a sister bonded herself to?!

The question screamed through him, drowning out even the pain. Who was that demon?! Who was that thing that had infiltrated their ranks wearing the designation of a Luxuria, that had stood on their settlement wall absorbing THE Bellum Pulse like it was a warm breeze, that had put him in a crater in front of his own House, that had knelt every Gilded One present with a single word and shattered the Intents of Ealdor and thrown them like refuse?!

Who strips a being of their Ego? Who strips a being of their Infinity?! Those things were not taken. They were cultivated across eons, woven into the bone of an existence, and this thing had pulled them out of a dozen powerful Gilded Ones the way a hand plucks fruit, and Dietrich did not have a single framework that allowed for it!

His rage buzzed, and as it buzzed his existence cleared, and he sensed other auras ahead of him.

He raised his head.

"Ah..."

WAA!

What should have stood before him was a vast and glorious Citadel of the Gilded Ones. What stood before him instead made no sense to his eyes. Residual mushroom clouds hung in the air, slow and roiling, the unmistakable signature of detonation, and beneath them the structures of the Citadel had been reduced to a fallout. Towers that should have scraped at the heights lay snapped and blackened. The reinforced halls, the breathing golden walls, the proud architecture of a Gilded seat, all of it ruined, scorched, flattened into the broken silhouette of a place that had been through something nuclear and survived only as wreckage.

He could not even say for certain which Citadel this had been. Everything that would have told him was gone, decimated past recognition!

And worse.

Among the ruin he saw faces he knew. Marxist, and the other Gilded Ones from the settlement, hollowed exactly as he had been hollowed. And around them, beyond them, filling the broken heart of the dead Citadel, millions more. Millions of Gilded Ones, stripped of their Infinity and their Egos, the vast majority robbed even of their Observable Force, their existences collapsed all the way down to the Second Scale. A few million once-proud Gilded Ones, gathered powerless at the center of a destroyed seat of their own kind, husks in the rubble of everything they had built.

OH!

When had the Gilded Ones ever been looked down upon like this? When had they ever been brought so low? It could not be happening! It could not be allowed to happen. Where were the Ealdor Gilded Ones, the true pillars of their people, the ones who stood at THE Fifth Scale? They could not simply be watching this unfold. They would never permit it!

At that moment, a voice answered the thought he had not spoken aloud.

"Are you thinking something like, where are the truly powerful Gilded Ones to stop all this?" the voice said, mild and conversational. "Hmm. I expect them to arrive in time. They’re likely still grasping what’s happening, with all the attacks landing across THE Braneworld from so many directions at once. It’s a lot to take in. But they’ll get here. Don’t be so pressed about it."

HUUM!

Dietrich’s face went livid, because he knew that voice. It was the voice of the existence he detested above all others.

He turned.

THE Infiltrator. THE Defiler of his sister. This motherfucker!

He stood there adorned in a blue robe that shone with an Infinity Dietrich could not fathom, an Infinity so dense that looking at the being made Dietrich’s eyes burn as though he had turned them toward a sun. He kept looking anyway, defiant, refusing to look away from the thing he hated, and he kept looking even when he felt his eyes begin to bleed, the burning intensifying until crimson-gold ran down his cheeks, and still he glared, because to look away was to concede, and Dietrich would die before he conceded to THE Defiler. The being was vile to his sight. Cruel. Filled with hatred, a villain wearing a man’s shape, and Dietrich would name him for exactly what he was until his last breath!

In the next moment, a hand clamped onto his neck.

CRACK!

The Defiler lifted him bodily into the air, fingers closing around his throat, the bones of his neck grinding toward shattering under a grip that held terrifying power in it, and Dietrich felt himself raised up like an animal hauled to slaughter!

"You know, I’m normally very laid back," THE Defiler said, holding him aloft. "Genuinely. I don’t care for cruelty. I don’t care for unnecessary destruction. It bores me, mostly, the beings who reach for it first. I’d much rather grow things than break them."

His blue eyes were cold. "But every so often, some lifeforms live with such vileness, such detestable weavings woven all the way through their existences, that I have to bear witness to a little destruction whether I want to or not. Consider this one of those times."

Dietrich refuted it in his soul even as his neck creaked!

How dare this thing speak of vileness! How dare THE Defiler call anyone cruel! How much crueler could a being possibly be than to strip away everything that made a lifeform what it was? The Pride. The Infinity. The very self! There was no torture in all the methods of the Gilded Ones that matched it.

"You are crueler than all of us, Defiler! You are the cruelest thing in existence!"

HUUM!

He spat the thought out loud, the words breaking around the grip on his throat, and THE Defiler turned to him with a dangerous smile and waved his free hand.

And Dietrich saw them appear.

Billions of lifeforms, carrying a silver Acedia brilliance, materializing around the dead Citadel. Billions. And more pressing in from the periphery, an ocean of them with no visible end. They looked like lost things, hollow things, no weavings of intelligence in their eyes, no will, nothing behind the silver glow but emptiness. Existences that had been emptied of everything except motion!

"These are Existential Acedia Dredges," THE Defiler said pleasantly. "Bounded Lifeforms, once. The ones who had the Acedia Ordnances dropped on them, on the whole of the Observable Existence down below. Quintillions, mindless now, their selves burned out of them by your Houses careful methodology." He surveyed the gathering sea.

...!