Endless Misfortune
Axln focused her attention towards the direction of the moon’s bleak landscape that held the most enemy resistance, divesting herself from most other fronts. As she applied pressure in that given direction, she noticed that her enemy had become similarly focused.
By this point, her unending assault of draining her enemies was really taking its toll, and her split investment in multiple locations was no longer paying back its dues. It would be a gamble, but she was absolutely certain that her objective laid in her current path. Knowing this, she would just need to invest herself completely in it. So resolved, Axln discarded her entire time rift design, leaving only her one self present without the protection of frozen time. The curse of misfortune was even eager to stand in and take its own toll.. exactly she might have hoped for. Of course, this still wasn’t perfect circumstances, her first act once time resumed was to simply trip forward as a dizzy spell caught up to her, the haze of chaos taking its own toll. Even upon landing, she took a number of injuries from her foe’s sudden assault, having even missed the attacks in the process. Her defenses were completely lacking.. but there was nothing she could do about that. If she couldn’t do anything about her defenses, it was time to invest everything into an outright offense.
As one of the fiends tried to lash out at her, Axln instead lashed out at it, using shadows of her gift to crush the space it occupied. Her augmenter however failed.. so she made use of her own chaos as an augmenter. Being chaos augmented, the shadows abstracted in form, devastating a random formation of area that happened to by chance exclude her enemy. Right, this was again the original problem, even during a full offence.. trying to attack with undependable weaponry was more than just a little difficult. Her own instruments were outright failing, a fact that made even her right arm go rather stiff. The stupid kyumu stuff probably needed a replacement.. or a refill.. or something. Lyun would know, at least, such was her field. Refilling would be easy for the girl at least, considering her own chaotic quirk could be used to easily do so. Replacements.. well.. the moon wasn’t even dusted over in the same ashen dust as the planet held, this one supposedly being instead rich with elementals. Right, such ashen dust was of the void, something not normally found here.. normally…
Of course, right now, with chaos having taken up such a form.. there was a near endless supply of void present right now, an outright blessing in disguise. How very unfortunate.. for their void enemies. Axln caught another fiend trying to lash out at her, leaving her to turn her attention towards this opportunity. Rather than pushing her gift to be augmented by her instruments.. or even her own chaos.. she instead pressed her gift directly into the void of her enemies, compelling that void to react to it in the same way void should always. Of course, her enemies were pretty ashen, something which brought very little reaction to the gift. However, that wasn’t exactly unfortunate, it was simply factual. Misfortune still had to play a role, to make things worse. So, instead of doing nothing, the void composite holding her gift reacted and shattered, breaking down as it tried and failed to do anything with the elements projected through it. Of course, this would happen sometimes with instrumentation, dangerous reactions when kyumu that was far too low failed to yield a result. It was rare, but very unfortunate when such voids simply shattered as the weaker factor. Such was even an outcome Axln had witnessed now a few times with some of Lyun’s work, a concept of the void that was rather.. unfortunate.
Three more fiends approached her, and all three were invited to the same cause, shattering once they got in range for her to attempt augmentation through them. Thinking about it, her first kill against such a fiend had actually occurred in this very same way, a void reaction that had torn it apart. Typically, their kills had simply been by having the void of the fiend’s form fade into a state more made of diffused elementals, but that one time had been an abrupt void reaction.. the only time it had ever happened. It was possibly then very unlikely to occur, something rather unfortunate when it did happen.. at least from the perspective of the fiend affected. Such a reaction made such kills all the more easier to accomplish. In fact, it seemed pretty reliable, being the most plausible unfortunate result of such an action.. possibly the only valid strange effect. She recalled too that the reaction was dispersing vast quantities of life elements around her, saturated elementals of an almost dangerous quantity. However, the abundance of the void around here was making that actually difficult to realize. It did explain why another four fiends though simply fizzled away spontaneously though, their void composition overwhelmed by the elemental fumes by absolute chance. Still, she had her own arm to worry about, so she promptly pressed the opening before something more could go wrong. She had unfortunately not been aware that the obsidian density of her arm actually protected her from the same dangers, but it wasn’t as if having more excuses to press forward might have exactly been working against her.
She then approached yet another fiend, this one blasting waves of force in her direction that kept her at a distance. Getting caught in such a wave, she found herself thrown into some nearby rocks, one of them piercing her right arm in a pretty bad way. She could get that fixed of course, but she would need to mess with healing to get such to work.. and not only was she worried that misfortune would have such a thing go wrong.. but she was also certain that the complicated design wouldn’t resolve quite so well without a skilled practitioner of such arts. She needed Lyun for that, so she would be down an arm for now. Repairs would be simple at least.. especially in comparison to their other instrumental problems. She didn’t even need such an artificial design for a focus, she was already making use of her enemies for that purpose. She knew that using others as a focus was usually impossible, even that using oneself as a focus was apparently a really bad idea.. but it wasn’t as if her enemy was a living being, it was effectively a homunculi that possessed an inanimate glob. Globs appear to be perfectly decent foci, though her current resource was being very resistant for that purpose. She was pretty certain this one was all too eager to keep her away, so that she didn’t bring cursed order upon it to have it shatter abruptly in a fountain of principle.
Even so, she’d already figured out a new favourite trick for this problem. Spanning even an instant in her own perspective, she froze time, set a rift, duplicated herself near her enemy, then restored time while only leaving the version of herself beside her enemy. She was then close enough to enfuse her gift into this fiend too, which itself shattered. Yup, who needed time travel when rifts in the space/time continuum were way more fun. Okay, sure, this wasn’t something she would be capable of forever, she could only do it with all of such chaotic support, but that just implied it would remain in her memories a far more novel experience than time travel had ever been. Spotting yet another fiend, not even wanting to see what this one would try to do to her, she simply caused another timerift and shattered that one too. From there though she could see a veritable army standing before her, all gathering in an obvious defiance and defense. She instead laughed at this mockery, seeing the irony that a temporal being wouldn’t realize that concepts such as distance currently held little bearing for her. She time-rifted into the middle, shattering the fiend nearest to her. Several others simply charged at her, attempting to overwhelm her. Ah, so that might not have been the one being defended, of course her enemy wouldn’t use such a straightforward structure. All signs of a defense were even lost as her enemy outright visibly panicked, the onslaught of destruction she brought having compelled her enemy into a full on offense.
As she shattered one more fiend, several hundred more swarmed upon her. Of course, the immediately obvious weakness of her current process was that she could only make use of one foci at a time, so getting swarmed was more than she could handle. However, it wasn’t as if the pile of them reached her, yet another timerift having once again saved the day. Her escape was well in the air above another fiend, one which she came down upon with more shattering focus before vanishing away once again. It was by this point that her own ideas caught up to her. If she used the same timerift approach to have multiple presences each hold their own foci, and then unleash at the same time as the timerift ended, she could join multiple areas with a failing rift.. that happened to include multiple of the fiends at once. She could even encourage the rift to fail.. more misfortune of the gift. She didn’t even know if this side was aware of the fictional concept of telefragging, and that wasn’t exactly what she was doing, but fragmenting her enemy with a failed teleportation rift was outright close enough, especially if she conjoined all of their spaces in the process into one as she let herself resolve into a single space.
The entire process was done in the blink of an eye, though it didn’t resolve quite as easily as she might have estimated. In fact, this was almost a Lyun-level of an oops-moment. It was due to this experiment that Axln learned that rifting over multiple spaces that were forced joined and then torn apart actually ripped-wide a space between. She’d grown used to such spaces leading to the temporal plane, but this one very obviously went somewhere else. It also looked very.. very dangerous. Her own composition was capable of dealing with temporal might.. but not this. The fiends were a clear demonstration of such, several others in the area being ripped apart in the process. Neither chaos nor the void could survive through that gateway, it was like staring into the abyss. Of course, there were very possibly more places where things could exist than even the few she had learned about, there could be any number of others out there. However, this one was not for her. Such a sudden black hole gateway could even cause cataclysmic destruction too, she needed to do something with it. However, with the gate so exposed, and several chaos so suddenly slain, she noticed a similar gate not far away.. a mighty fiend trying to hold on while carnage ripped around it.
Axln then turned an act of insanity into an even greater insanity, opening a rift that spanned from her position to that distant gateway, repeating the same process. This in turn rippled that smaller gateway over the abyssal gates, having that gate consume it. With such done, she instantly turned to the fiend trying to hold on to this wrath of power, shattering it and ending its gate. With that, neither gate remained. However, she knew exactly what she had done, she had brought carnage of such an abyss directly into the temporal plane. Forget trying to throw principles in there, the place at least knew gates, that was certainly one it would have quite the time with. The structure of such an abyss had its own principles too, something that was catastrophically failing before being sent through as a simple act of misfortune. Such an abyss had been left beside the fiend engineering their misfortune, an act which would only further destabilize the gateway before it would simply ephemerally collapse. At that point, it was just a question how much the infinity of the temporal could endure the destructiveness of such an abyssal. It certainly was not a question for those of a principled nature, she knew better than to look into that abyss. However, there was still that part of her that was almost pale with concern.
「That.. that was an outright demonstration of how much the primitive should not feel superior to others. That alternate.. that unknown.. it shows just how much more there is beyond our small infinite single domain. Whatever that was called into the temporal lasted but the eternity of an instance and has visited the temporal with more destruction than could be possible. That was not at all chaotic, or principled, only oblivion. No wonder that one is so concerned with the endurance of the veil, the sorts that could be found beyond could be like this or even not. Even chaos could fall if the veil does not stand. The loss of the veil endangers everything.」 On the matters of standing, that was an idea which Axln was finding incredibly difficult for herself. She couldn’t even figure out the complete list of what might be exhausting her right now, there were more than just a few things she could think of. Most of them, she didn’t even want to think about right now, that was alone one of the things possibly exhausting her.
「Do not worry, the presence of misfortune is rapidly vanishing. The primitive had realized too that such was only offering principles that actively worked against them, something which was alone causing reason for hesitation.. and then the one causing such was pulled away from the temporal into that unknown domain. The primitive have no knowledge of what had just happened, only that their presence had invited a threat to the temporal itself. The collective hive mind is considering the notion that a continued assault on the principled could instead bring great peril to the entire temporal, even more of the occurrence they had just witnessed. It had never occurred to them that an assault on the principled could place the temporal in grave danger, a truth that no chaos might have known before then. True chaos is the balance of order and chaos, something which has appeared to bring perfection.. but it now seems that the opposite is also similarly inverted. Dangers to the balance could outright destroy both order and chaos. Primitive chaos is currently uncertain how to proceed, but it is certain that they will proceed in primitive chaos.」 Meaning, the chaos would be taking this news impulsively. With their home in danger, the gates to chaos would probably be firmly closed.. but that would trap all the void chaos here. Actually, Axln knew there remained one gate through the temporal, her own. The remaining chaos would be surging her in order to attain a way to escape, all in absolute panic. Worse, the remaining chaos would be cut off from their hive mind, as the gates remained so heavily closed. That would drive even more impulse and desperation.
「It does get worse than that too. The gates are locked, but chaos does not stay restless. Your chaos is learned, but that still provides awareness of the process for the unlearned. Chaos is still aware of a weakness of the principled by instinct, at least according to the will of the world, and once it discovers the terms of such awareness.. it will seek to employ it from the safety of its own domain, leaving the threat of the world to destroy itself and thus relieve chaos of its newest threat. Such is the path of self-preservation.」 That would make sense too, chaos could simply invest into whatever weakness actually existed in Ruixse to ensure that the world ended itself. That was even more true, because Ruixse.. the actual will of the world itself.. that was also in the temporal plane with them. Eventually, such a will would be found, and then chaos could attempt to make use of the will’s own resources to impress its own weakness. As long as such a will was vulnerable, things could still go wrong. As the two worlds were basically bound in parallel, ending one could at least do something to influence the other. Ruixse had already perished once, so Aestus might not simply die in the process. She knew, however, that something would certainly go wrong for it, and that was not a planet that needed conditions any harsher than they already were. If things were worse, Aestus might not remain capable of sustaining life any longer.
Quite certainly though, she was more worried about Aestus’ fate for Rosa’s sake than her own. To her, that was much more Rosa’s planet now, not as much her’s. That instead made her even more concerned about saving the planet that was truly her own, one which would certainly be completely lost in the process. Lyun hopefully was up to giving her such, not just because of concerns in the fate of Aestus, but also because Lyun still had a life here ahead of her. Axln knew such was true of herself in reverse, her life as Kori was still its own importance. She was still determined to not give up on being a conduit, that just accepting her life as Axln alone was like admitting that humans really were just better. She was certain that her life ahead as Kori would only pave the way to better her own life as Axln, so she certainly had nothing she was willing to give up on. If she could resolve that one goal, that overarching reason for the will of the world having called for their help in the first place.. then she could finally protect both worlds from the threat of chaos at long last.
Axln still took the opportunity to blend in with her surroundings, desperate for a chance to recover what she had spent. She felt considerably drained at that point, like her proximity to the abyss had devoured some of her in the process. Her stamina was pretty drained, but it had also been heavily used. However, even her chaos had been heavily drained, that one exposure having been hungry for such a presence. She knew some of her was lost, but likewise knew with absolution that nothing that was lost was something which couldn’t heal, this wasn’t like losing an arm or anything. Of course, her arm was an absolute wreck at this point, in need of some serious repairs. Still, the fact she did this with one arm gone felt like yet another bragging point. However, with her gift running so low, her general elemental makeup running low, and her chaos running low.. there was absolutely nothing to have her stand out amidst the decimated landscape. She just hoped that the amount of elemental she had just managed to obliterate wouldn’t rend a bleak future unto itself.. since the foundry was still going to be dependent on these reserves until the void phase ended. Well, Mheridz had possibly endured far worse, with constant chaotic uprisings.. so maybe things would be alright after all.
It was such pleasant dreamy thoughts that finally let Axln fall asleep, curled up in a corner of the decimated landscape. There was still so much to do.. but for now she had claimed enough progress to be deserving of a bit of respite, the rest she could leave to her future self to deal with.
Luminaeris 