502 How to Siege a Gate [II]

Listen… Listen… Just look at me. Come on. Come the fuck on. Take a good, hard look at me. I'm not running away. I came to find you this time. I cut through all the other bullshit so I can come and find you. Now, you might want to be wondering why that is, huh? You tried to cut me. You tried to carve the little old Realmrunner out of existence into wherever the fuck you hold all people you reap.

Oh, yeah. I know you don't need a face for me to taste a surprise leaking out of you. It's like blood running out of a giant godly cooch.

I know what you are. I know I can't run from you forever. Since you understand that you can't carve me out of reality, you're going to probably take a more, uh, direct approach. I don't want a fucking direct approach. I don't want this thing I've got going to end, which is why I came here: to offer you a deal.

I know how things are. I know how the world works. It's chains all the way down. Eventually, you're gonna be tied to someone else. This is me choosing who I want to enslave me. This is me choosing who owns me as a dog, and you seem like a better master than most others I've seen.

Here I am. The Realmrunner. I can get anywhere you fucking need me to. I'll fuck, cuck, and suck anything to make everything go my way, and if all that fails, there's no one better at scurrying away than me. No one.

But I know that's not forever either. Sooner or later, the Chorus dogs are gonna come after me. But they don't come after you, and I wanna know why. Because I want the same thing.

I said my piece. This is all the courage I've got. I spent all of it on you. I'm gonna ask you in turn: Are you going to bring an actual blade down on my little old head and waste all that effort just to kill me, or are we going to get in some very profitable business together and stop wasting time on all this miserable fucking cat and mouse shit?

Because if not, I think I can get you places, and I think you can get me places too.

—The Realmrunner to Avalon

502

How to Siege a Gate [II]

The Realmrunner sneered at the golden mirages sprinkled across the Farwalker outpost. The poor bastards were like blurs in reality: just smudges moving from place to place and far too slow to ever notice the real player striding right past them. In a sense, it was like the higher dimensions were shifting rat nests, and the Farwalkers and Chorus specifically were always a thousand steps behind him.

So long as he kept moving, so long as his Chronomancy remained unaffected, they'd never catch up.

That granted him opportunities beyond the wildest dreams of any other smuggler in all existence. What other rat-fuck slave trader could move so much meat and cargo using the infrastructure of his enemy? Indeed, the Realmrunner's entire business functioned because he was a parasite latched to the spine of Chorus. They built dimensional pathways across worlds, wormholes and roundabouts to circumvent the System, completely oblivious that they built them for someone else as much as themselves.

It was good to have a big sister that cared. Well, a big something. Frankly, the Realmrunner didn't give a shit what Avalon thought of itself as, so long as it kept him under wraps. He was its finest little rat, especially when it needed someone to nudge things into play.

Of course, that came with its own cost. Avalon carved certain levels and evolutions out of the Realmrunner regularly to prevent certain parts of him from going Mythic, but it was a small sacrifice. Everyone imagined power would set you free. No, power just drew you into the deeper waters, and those were some deep waters indeed. You thought you were big as a shark; you'd run into a whale. Then there were the monsters that defined the black, that were so vast you thought the abyss was just one of their scales. That was the gulf between Mythic and Transcendent, and one of the latter would have snuffed the Realmrunner out eventually if he hadn't struck that golden bargain.

That golden bargain stayed in play even now as the Realmrunner casually waltzed through the Farwalker outpost, keeping his time-tuner equipped and clenched tight in his hand. His Awareness was on a razor's edge, tuned to the maximum limit and further amplified by the rest of his gear. Just because he had a big something didn't mean he was past being ambushed. He'd been jumped more than a few times out of nowhere. Attacked by people without faces. Creatures that had emerged from the current of time. Beings which held personal feuds against Avalon. That was another downside to being made a temporal ghost—he might have been an enigma to the civilized arm of greater Integration, but he also inherited all of Avalon's stranger enemies, especially the Great One’s remaining allies. Pluses and minuses—life and accounting weren't so different that way.

At present, though, the plus far outweighed the minus.

The Stranger's Garden outpost was particularly remote and less than guarded, aside from a single individual: John Produveral. The Realmrunner knew that mana signature anywhere, and he cringed as he shuffled past the man. He couldn't stay here for long. Produveral was going to catch his scent in the aftermath. The Realmrunner's temporal displacement was more treatment than full-on cure when it came to avoiding the so-called authorities—and he'd lost more than one world's worth of slaves and resources to Produveral's raids in his time.

“Fancy fucking running into you here, blue-eyes,” the Realmrunner muttered.

Produveral didn't reply because the time between them was displaced by well over 36 seconds, the tuner running fast to sustain itself in his presence.

The Realmrunner left Produveral where he was, but along the way he noted a peculiar presence, another being of brightest fire, so imbued with the System's presence that he glowed like a beacon, overshadowing even the Myth in terms of strife, while being several magnitudes weaker in his total mana output.

For close to a minute, the Realmrunner wrestled against his greed. He imagined ambushing the Deathless, claiming him as a prize and abandoning this endeavor altogether. He was worth multiple worlds by himself, and considering how much fire the System cast upon him, he wasn't nearly done growing—might not have a limit at all.

But though the Realmrunner's heart ached with avarice, his lust for treasure was alloyed with an overwhelming caution that spared him many an undue death. Goods could be lost, and prizes could be won with care and daring, but they could only be kept when complete control was enforced. And so the Realmrunner avoided the Deathless in the Farwalker outpost—noting and then disregarding the Rat King of the Infested Skein that the Deathless possessed.

It wasn't the worst Awareness-Multitasking fusion one could get, but there were far too many logistical impediments to make it useful across a variety of worlds, especially tomb worlds or metallic worlds, where organics were novelties, and the primary lifeforms were either mechanoids or lithoids.

But while the Deathless’ senses were evaded with ease, he progressed along a parallel axis of chronology to the Realmrunner, rendering Avalon's protections moot in this specific case. Though it never declared its apprehensions aloud, the Realmrunner had a sixth sense when it came to reading the pseudo-emotions of his benefactor. It was worried about the Deathless. It was unnerved. It couldn't fully understand what he was and how to handle him. Some Pathbearers being immune to Excaliburization was one thing. A Pathbearer stealing all the mana from the strike and vanishing from existence altogether, leaving nothing to Excaliburize? Well, that was an existential first.

It was also complete bullshit, in the Realmrunner’s humble opinion. “Udraal, I'm gonna have my dog-cat fuck you again the next time I grab hold of your ass for doing this to me! What kind of freaks have you been growing on this backwater shithole…”

Muttering a chain of other slurs and vile promises, the Realmrunner reached the edge of the outpost to set up his operations. This would require several days to fully prepare, and it would probably take a week longer for the orcs to get their “Stranger’s surprise” in place.

At present, the outpost was constantly moving, but it remained, on average, over 80 to 1,000 km away from the portal connecting the Garden to Gate Piety. It stayed open on average for two hours per day, and usually, no major operations or movements took place. A few High-Tier Pathbearers came out, the Stranger summoned a Supplicant to speak directly with them, and they left again.

It was blatantly obvious that the Stranger was drifting away from its uniqueness, becoming just another bullshit god or high-powered being. Kind of a downgrade in the Realmrunner's opinion, but then again, all his life had been spent running away from place to place. Even Road's End was less a sanctuary and more like a complicated rat nest that was always in motion, protected only because it was hard to reach without his explicit permission. That was made possible through Avalon as well, because technically it was a back door to one of Avalon's many Paradises—the equivalent of some kind of contaminated, over-capacity storage server space, or whatever bullshit ancient techno jargon Avalon spouted.

But that was beside the point, and the Stranger was likely going to experience a very premature end now that it was vulnerable enough to be another patterned god but not confusing enough to truly remain an Outsider. And even if it surprised the Realmrunner by surviving what was to come, it would stay distracted long enough for the dimensional shunts to pump a good orchestra or two of suicider-orcs over into the Gate.

“Now, how am I supposed to set this shit up?”

That was a question no one could answer but the Realmrunner himself. He'd done this countless times. Didn't mean it was ever easy, though. A dimensional shunt was a valuable device, but it was also as treacherous a mechanism as any. Dimensionality was a fickle form of magic. It was like the ex-wives of magic. It would bite you in the ass the moment you didn't need it to and take everything from you, leaving you stranded apart from all your goods and, more often than not, your children.

Back to the point: as the dimensional shunt was the ex-wives of magic, they had a tendency to spew people out if things weren't perfectly aligned. Within the Stranger's Garden, it was hard to get things perfectly aligned, as it were. The spatial mechanics of this place flowed weirdly. The past and the present were bleeding together, and time and space were intertwined in the same way an ex-wife spent way too much time with her conniving friend group in the prelude to the divorce and/or assassination and/or assassination-divorce.

Thankfully, the Realmrunner had prepared for this. He had a series of Mana Stabilization Fibers with him. At least that's what he named them. He wasn't very good at naming things, but these things stabilized the flow of magic, and so the name would suffice. They were mithril filaments that were further enchanted by Rubberization—allowing the lines to bend and extend to various limits. As good as the Mana Stabilization Fibers were in a lot of cases, they brought considerable risk to the one using them, as they were, in pre-magic terms, analog in application.

That meant they were tangible objects that one had to physically carry across from one zone to another, and the Realmrunner wasn't going to be doing any carrying across while the Stranger was still on full alert. If he dangled a single pinky toe outside the threshold of the Farwalker outpost, then the Outsider and all his little disgusting fingers would be on him.

And the Realmrunner had suffered enough fingers being rammed up his ass-chute for one lifetime. But just because he couldn't go out exploring himself didn't mean he was out of options. When it came down to it, one only had so many skills—the tyranny of limited time and talent was always in play, so the best Pathbearers learned to outsource. Sometimes you outsourced to people who were experts, and you wanted to keep those. Those were the precious goods, the renewable goods, the ones you would invest in.

Readers may find the author's published chapter on NovelPhoenix; this copy was reproduced without consent.

There was the mid-tier, which you'd like them to stay around just because they were interesting and they might have a future, but if you lost them, oh well. Finally, there was the purely expendable tier.

The best thing about the Orcs was that they could embody all three. The Orcs ran the gamut of being highly capable and individually renewable, thanks to the way they were made on a spiritual level. The Challenger truly had outdone himself when he molded an army of reincarnating monsters in his own image, but also granted them a depth of experience and a willingness to indulge in creative avenues of suicide for the slightest advantage. Thanks to this, orc Seekers were a magnitude more reckless than their counterparts from various other races and factions.

And while the stronger orc Seekers were currently working to place another Outsider dimension on a collision course with the Stranger's Garden, the weakest among them could hop into vulnerable Fingerlings. Yes, the Stranger would notice them. Yes, they would be destroyed and unraveled, but they would last long enough to provide some useful information, such as how long it takes, on average, for someone to reach the Gate Piety portal from the Farwalker outpost. Additionally, perform further shaping operations around the Farwalker outpost to keep it in circulation and move it closer to the portal.

To disguise what they were actually doing and to extend their operational capacity, the very weakest of the orcs were supposed to give themselves away immediately, drawing most of the Stranger's ire. This allowed the others who'd merged their Eldritch magicks with stealth to last a little longer to manipulate things a bit more before they too were sundered from existence.

***

Hour by hour, day by day, things slowly began to come together, nudged as if hidden hands were shaping a realm of unwilling clay. The Stranger was devolving and evolving at the same time, but this inflicted terrible things on its intellect and understanding, as a sort of existential dysmorphia was taking hold. That made this an even more opportune moment to strike and engage in extended deception.

The Realmrunner observed the Stranger's major weakness. It took it five seconds to process these changes, distinguishing if the System was altering it further and granting it a new skill, or if its Fingerlings were actually compromised. Furthermore, orcs who had stealth skills lasted up to an hour in the best of conditions before they were spotted and eliminated through the Stranger's Chronomancy. It was primarily that vector that the Stranger applied as a first, second, and final resort. That made things even better for the Realmrunner, for time was less an ex-wife who was waiting to take a chunk out of your ass and more like someone you were fucking, but wouldn't fully commit because you knew that they were fucking other people on the side and wouldn't commit to you either.

As such, a chain of Chronomancy bombs, specifically tuned to target the present and impose a dense shroud of languor upon the Garden, would further obfuscate things for the Stranger when the time came.

Once more, the Farwalker outpost was worth its weight in mithril. The Realmrunner had the orcs transport 400 tons of Chronomancy bombs, enough to temporally molest a continent, for his use. It was a radical expenditure and drew away a majority portion of the Realmrunner's reserve stocks when it came to high-risk heists, but the bid was worth it. He needed to buy himself time to move across whatever distance there was between him and the portal. This was another layer of assurance upon a realm of chaotic uncertainty.

“Just keep your mind on the Deathless, and all the other fucks we're gonna snatch,” the Realmrunner reminded himself, trying to keep his greed and lust under control. “This is going to pay dividends. We're going to get so godsdamn rich after this. Oh, maybe we can start stealing from High Gods again. Fuck yeah! Back to the big leagues again. Right back to the big leagues…”

A pulse of illicit electric pleasure surged straight to his loins, triggering a conflagration of dark desire that spread through his body. A dangerous thought came to his mind: stealing all he could from Gate Piety during the raid, and then, in the aftermath, while the orcs were distracted, turning around and snatching something from the Challenger.

Because why the fuck not? Why not live on the edge? The Challenger might not even notice. Things would be chaotic. Right? The Gate Piety cucks might be able to throw off the orcs, might be able to save themselves, even without the strongest among them. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Stranger things had happened—and in the chaos and carnage, who was to say what might unfold?

“Who's to say if I never tell?” The Realmrunner giggled to himself as he tested his Mana Stabilization Fibers several times over. They moved at 10 m/s on their own, the anchor they were attached to extending them forth. If one accelerated, the structure could sustain a measured velocity of approximately 10 km/s, considerable in speed but not nearly enough to maneuver across a vast distance before the Stranger noticed. The bombs were going to need to be timed just right.

The dimensional clash needed to be happening while the bombs were going off, and more importantly, a hijacked Fingerling needed to come by and ferry both the Realmrunner and the stabilization fibers all the way to the final destination. Many variables, and if any of them went wrong, improvisation would be needed. Thankfully, the Realmrunner was nothing if not versatile when his ass was on the line, and that was the ultimate fact: he loved having his ass on the line and getting away with it.

“Realmrunner.”

Gods, if he weren't so cowardly, he'd be the bravest person in the world. Still, right now, he might just be the bravest coward in the world. What he wanted, what he desired, was simple: to take from whoever he wanted, to slip across whatever space or dimension he desired, and to keep running always and forever. There was no greater pleasure than being a rat that ate from the table or ate from the plates of giants.

“Realmrunner.”

“Yeah, I'm gonna use them all to fuck them all. I'm gonna use them all, and I'm gonna fuck them all. They won't see it coming, not one goddamn bit…”

“Realmrunner!”

“GAH!” he screamed, jumping a good meter in the air. He hadn't even sensed her presence. She simply appeared.

Slowly, he turned, refusing to give her his full profile, partially to hide his apprehension but also because he respected her a little bit more than he respected most. That was a considerable statement in some capacities, but also not much of a statement at all. The Realmrunner didn't like anyone but himself, in truth. Maybe that was a lie. He liked some people, but he didn't love anyone any more than himself, and he especially didn't love a problematic time-jumping, soul-cracking bitch that stalked him with her eyes like a cat waiting outside a rat's hole—

Wait.

She was here.

In the Farwalker outpost.

She was gonna blow his cover!

GAH!

“Fucking what?” he hissed. “What? Why are you here? Don't you have your own shit to do? Wait! How are you here? Godsdammit! Get out of here! You're gonna fucking ruin everything! You're gonna get all these goddamn Myths and all those other assholes to notice you!”

Yet, for whatever strange reason, Corcusa didn't share his strained alarm. She just continued to stare at him, through him, peering into his heart with a look of borderline scorn on her face.

“Calm yourself, and don't bother trying to respond. This is a telepathic missive. It's meant to rise in your future. I am here to inform you that I am already in place, that my forces are arrayed and ready. They wait outside the Gate, mingled among the defenders. I am inside the Gate. I am prepared and on standby. I will synchronize my strike to yours, but I must warn you that I cannot stay submerged across time indefinitely. The moment must come within your promised time frame; otherwise, I must withdraw. I must retreat. A lot rides on your shoulders, Realmrunner. But do not mistake this message for a plea or a threat. Simply understand that I have imprinted an anchor upon you, one that you failed to notice and one that continues to connect us even now. There is no trust between us, so let there be an implicit tension: live up to your end of the bargain. Live up to your legend, or I will use you as an extension of mine. And Mythic though you might be, you are no great Chronomancer of your own. You possess no Harbinger. You have no capacity for introspection, and the Challenger would be just as amused by your destruction as he is by your assistance. The seconds are against us. Make good use of time.”

And suddenly, as she came, the fucking sow vanished in a puff of translucent golden particulates. A budding heat swirled about in the Realmrunner's stomach as his outrage, fury, and fear mingled into a single emotion at its core. How the hell did she slap that on him? How the hell did she do that without him noticing? Questions glided through his mind—but his focus whirled away from any potential treachery against the Challenger.

Fucking fuck probably saw this shit coming. No, he’s helping her reach me. It has to be him. It has to be. Who else can circumvent Avalon's favor? Who the fuck else? Wouldn't be surprised if he's feeding her curated struggles and fucking rigged fights to build her up more. Not like I wouldn't do the same thing in his place. Bitch makes quite the hound.

And once more, the Realmrunner's thoughts turned toward the Deathless. Which means I need a purebred hound all my own as soon as possible. Several fucking hounds.

Digesting the threat stabilized the Realmrunner's emotions, yet his ambition and intellect continued working in the background, even as he started stretching in preparation for his sprint across the Garden. While he bent over, hopelessly trying to reach his toes with his fingertips, something churned, soured, and calcified in his mind.

She’s going to be going for the Deathless… but what if she doesn’t make it out of that scuffle? What if that leaves her dead too? Be a shame. A real shame. But a better outcome for me if I come out of that as the only one with a Harbinger on my leash?

His surface greed crumbled and died; his deeper avarice plotted the course ahead. Corcusa wasn’t going to be a reliable slave—probably wouldn’t break right either. He knew her type—felt that danger in his balls. And with the Challenger behind her, she was going to be an issue of issues.

The Deathless, though… He was a baby Harbinger. Barely trained across the board and dumb as a monster. Yeah, that was much more workable, much more doglike.

“I like that. I like that plenty,” the Realmrunner mumbled to himself. “Lose a little to gain a lot. Lose a little, and keep what I can actually keep.”

Realmrunner.

He cringed as a second intruder burst into his mind, but this one spoke not as a woman but as a chorus of countless beings, taken from across illimitable conquered worlds.

The moment is nigh. See the end of your preparations for the breaching of the Gate. The adversary reaches closer into the trap. The path will be cleaned of obstacles. Earth’s Excaliburization is to be made inevitable.

“Yeah, yeah, I got it,” the Realmrunner grumbled. “Speaking of, why can’t you just hit the Stranger with a slash again?”

There was a brief delay—followed by a throb of interference. He will be a self-resolving matter in the near future.

“Eh?”

His gendering has already cemented itself. As has his Integration. He is not to be a god, but a Transcendent. His individualism has turned him away from the absolute—the Deathless has affected him too deeply and left him… human. All too human.

The Realmrunner blinked at that. He still wasn’t fully sure why Avalon could completely Excaliburize High Gods, Legends, and full-on Outsiders, but Myths and Transcendents remained only partial alters—something about how they were differently defined by strife and faith and legend and all that shit. They were seared deep into the fabric of Integration, which was why Avalon couldn't fully Excaliburize them. They were embedded into the tissue of existence. Their souls and minds, however, could be surgically altered, hence the Realmrunner's protections.

But the effect wasn't total. It was why Avalon didn't rule everything; though the Realmrunner was relatively rare in his outright immunity to Paradise, there were others who lived in Paradise as well across every second of their life, who wanted for nothing except to continue as they were. The Challenger was one such entity, but there were other Transcendents at the head, of course. What did Paradise mean when you already had most of reality by the balls?

Nothing. Nothing at all.

Them were the rules. It was a better outcome for the Runner anyway. He got to keep the Deathless because of that; because something about Udraal’s special monster made him capable of eating an Excaliburization—and that had Avalon all kinds of hesitant.

And the Realmrunner had been henching under the Sword of Paradise long enough to know that hesitation was the closest thing the Heaven had to fear.

“Right, right, fine. Don’t worry, I’ll get everything handled for you good. Just make sure that your ‘cleaners’ are in place to fuck the orcs over. I’ll get that Deathless and bring you the other ones you want. But there’s one more thing: Corcusa. Her ass is going to be a problem. Now, I know you got an arrangement with the Challenger—that he can invoke your Canons or whatever sometimes. But if there’s anyone that’s on the path of becoming the Pale Rider, it’s probably that bitch. I feel it in her, the same way I felt it in Karna on her way of becoming the Green—and look how that turned out. We need her dead or fully Excaliburized, Avalon. It’s the only way to be sure.”

Another bout of interference followed. There came a chain of faint notes that rang as if close and afar—shifting between oscillations.

Then, Avalon delivered a confirmation: Special asset has been routed for the coming endeavor. The circumstances behind her coming disappearance will be made deniable on your part. Secure the Deathless. Secure Roland Arrow. Confirm the Thief’s elimination. Leave the Great One with nothing.

Avalon subsided with its typical alarming suddenness, but the Realmrunner was left more than satisfied. His mood inverted from its plunge in an ascent toward euphoria once more. Everything. And with the unbruising of his ego, he started thinking about how and what to steal from the Challenger once more.

Maybe the Culturist and the Breaker. Yeah, those two are real specimens. They’ll sell pretty good to a dealer all the way out in the Consortium. I might be able to get one of those Manifold Towers finally—that’ll be a real fucking hoot to have. Yeah. Yeah, I can see it all coming together—an exponential number of me running scores across all Integration. Fuck yeah. And all I gotta do is make sure this goes right. All I got to do. And with what I’m seeing now, there’s no chance of this going wrong—no one left to really stop me from pulling this off.

And then a funny thought occurred to him: Unless, somehow, there’s a third Harbinger in the mix of all this.

The Realmrunner thought of that, and gave a snorting laugh. But what are the fucking odds of that?