Adamant Blood

Mayor Emilia Ramirez sat in her tower, submerged into her True Self, her artificial overmind that threaded through the city, through every electronic device, through every phone and camera and recorder and wall and floor and street. She saw everything, and she allowed other Techies to use her overmind to coordinate efforts. She was her overmind and her overmind was her, but she was just one person.

A lot of other people had proper prognostication magics, coordination magics, and otherwise, and she used their readouts for herself.

That was the only reason why she understood the failure that had happened.

Everything had been going well.

The impossible kaiju were gradually being turned into other things, and thus removed as a problem. Kraigen was breaking the river kaiju up quite well, while The Fire Brigade was burning down the crystal kaiju, turning it to slag. The ice kaiju and the devouring kaiju were being handled. Every single hero in the city and a great deal of the mages and every single person who could act, was acting, and all of the civilians were underground, in bunkers. Monsters were still everywhere and the wall was broken in 9 locations, but Sentinel was on those breaks, and his turrets were destroying the incoming monster waves as fast as they came inside Memphi.

Mark, Ben, and Steve were on the apocalypse beetle, and it was dying. Not nearly fast enough, but it was dying. According to what Emilia was seeing, it had been about 2 minutes away from death.

The churches were praying.

The gods were working through their paladins.

Tartu's team seemed to have a hold on the problems in the gate district, too.

A few heroes were dead.

Rainbow Girl, Owltiger, Lancer Supreme, and hundreds of smaller, less well known heroes, were gone. Neighborhoods had lost their heroes. Civilization had lost defenders.

Grey Phantom had been killed early and Sentinel had been inconsolable. Sentinel… Jeff Powell had lost his father, Christopher Powell. Jeff was still out there fighting anyway. Jeff couldn't believe that his father had died at all. Grey Phantom was Incorporeal, after all. Nothing could affect him that he didn't want affecting him. Still, though, it had happened.

It was only now, in the moment of betrayal, that Emilia recognized that Grey Phantom, that Christopher Powell, had not died.

Jeff was going to be happy and then furious if they survived this, if he wasn't a traitor, too.

Because Christopher had just slapped Tartu's foot at the last moment, throwing his aim wide, resulting in a true Veil Break.

Now that Christopher had revealed himself he would probably be coming here or to any of the command centers or to any of the battle zones, to kill humans more directly—

… Or not, Emilia thought, as she saw a whole new problem forming, as parts of her died, were cut off from the rest. She had seen what had happened there before she was cut off, though.

Four white hands had appeared on the faces of four different people, one at each major command center except for Central, and then the command centers went dark. Emilia had known all four of those people their entire lives. All of them were normal analysts…

Emilia dropped down into faster time to analyze what she had seen, and to extrapolate compounding issues for what came next, to solve the problem while everyone else panicked.

First thing to note was that the four directional command centers had not exploded. They were warded too well for that. They were warded too well for any normal sort of attack. Checking through some cameras across the ways from the command centers confirmed this as true. Intact! Good. Those cameras also confirmed the existence of several squads of people who had been Wild'd. White-hand cultist leaders were leading those chimeric humans against the command stations.

The command stations had been cut off from her, but would they be able to be retaken?

The north and south ones could probably be retaken. West was a tossup.

The eastern one had a few anomalies to it that were noted over the last few days, and after checking those anomalies —a guy spending an hour searching for someone who had called his phone when his phone was unlisted, and then the lack of understanding that the apocalypse beetle was out there and it should have been noticed for days, which was only understandable in hindsight— Emilia rapidly discovered two things.

One: East Command was probably filled with co-conspirators. How had they missed the apocalypse beetle's signature? That one guy who had been distracted was their best analyst because he was honestly too anal about chasing leads, so it wasn't any big deal, until today, that he had gone off-book for an hour to chase a lead, while everyone else was looking at Mark's Decouple ritual. Perhaps if he had been looking at the east, like he always did, he would have noticed the jeweled beetle.

But he wasn't alone in looking East.

So other people had been involved in that cover up, in that conspiracy.

Two: The person who had distracted that analyst was a conspirator, too. Who was it?

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Emilia already knew that answer, but only because she had just now bothered to look into it.

It had been Kardi Shale.

Kardi Shale had been the distraction of that analyst.

She had had a conversation with the traitor Grey Phantom right after that distraction, too, telling him that 'it's time to dump a dangerous animal' and 'it was all going to end soon'.

When she found them, Emilia was going to execute Kardi right alongside Grey Phantom.

But Kardi was there at ground-zero for the Veil Break, and that place was rapidly falling out of Emilia's control.

Emilia poked her consciousness upward, back into normal time for just a second, to see what was happening out there.

"Ah, fuck," Emilia said, "Time for Plan Addavein."

- -

Addavein killed the last kaiju he could get to easily enough and then he dismissed the viewing spell in his peripherals. He got somewhere semi-protected, and fast.

He waited.

- -

Grax pulled apart the world while newborn brothers assaulted the humans.

He had figured it out.

He had done it!

It wasn't about breaking through a barrier between Earth and Daihoon. It wasn't about two worlds. It was about finding the path through a much, much larger world.

The world right in front of him.

The human gate shattered. The goblin-made gate of light stood triumphant, and then it shattered, too. Opened too wide. Opened too much.

The world parted like the ripping of bred flesh; suddenly and much larger than expected.

It was bright on the other side of the Veil.

Brightest sun.

Biggest lands.

The mountains went up to the sky and then curled around in an impossible geometry. The rivers poured out of the sky and landed in an ocean that became a tributary for another ocean, that was so much larger than the first river, and yet the ocean became that first river. The sky was a world of clouds and rains and hurricanes and floating mountains.

Grax stared at the crack in the world.

It was a white lightning bolt that stretched far, far, far overhead. Out of sight. Everywhere beyond that jagged line was another part of another world. Grax knew what he was looking at, though. All of this had been in the sky before. It was always there.

Beyond the rainbows of the sky of Daihoon, this, then, was what they called Endless Daihoon.

Endless Daihoon was full of kaiju, all of them so, so big.

A bird the size of a dragon.

A bear of six legs like skyscrapers.

A fish that was white, wiggling worms.

The kaiju poured through the open gate like an untamed river, seeking the source of the Veil Break.

The source of the break was not going to stick around, though.

Grax went inside the rift, twisting past the bird, its flaming eye-feathers following its path, but then Grax was lost inside the twisting land, leaving the kaiju and the humans behind. He wasn't ready to take on all of that shit back there, so he had to learn more, see more, do more. He would be back later for Plan Total Human Subjugation.

He was a successful goblin, after all.

He had learned how to run when he needed to run.