Rory was pretty sure he wasn’t still in The Cube.
Pretty sure. But, like, how would he even know? Things in there kept changing, mang. And it wasn’t like his grip on what was and wasn’t real was super-tight to begin with. The whispers never stopped, now – the issue was no longer understanding the language but the sheer abundance, like trying to pick out sentences amid a shouting crowd of thousands, the stochastic hiss of unnumbered voices. It was only when the vast majority withdrew into the background that the few could make themselves understood.
Also, the sky was glowing again. Sheets of cold emerald aurora streamed across a black and empty heaven, shot through with fractal flares and crimson geometric refractions. St. Elmo’s fire blazed on the superstructure of every ship in sight, crackling silver-blue ghost-light. The ocean itself seemed to shine with an inner aquamarine glow.
The crew never so much as glanced at any of it. Nobody seemed to notice, or care.
The ensuing lack of faith in the reality of the situation was really starting to mess with Rory’s usually-easy-going demeanor.
Case-in-point, his former employer was riding around on his shoulder again like the world’s most Machiavellian Jiminy Cricket, and it was now confirmed that nobody else could see him. The captain of the Naval Dominance Brought To You By Syntech™ had had to personally come out onto the deck with a bullhorn to plead with Rory to stop pointing his prism-nodes at the side of his own head and yelling about proper orange-eating technique. The mariners had eventually managed to calm the delusional abomination down by repurposing one of the ships auxiliary coolant-tanks into a giant cold-brew coffee-maker and running a fuel-line up to the deck so that Rory could sip on it like a vaguely-cadmium-and-diesel-flavored latte, but it had used the ships entire supply of coffee, instant and otherwise, which had made Rory no friends at all among the crew.
Everyone was relieved when they came within deployment-range of the next island. Reconnaissance drones showed It was largely bare stone, a foreboding rocky wasteland save for a small stand of pines atop a northern cliff-face. In the center, there was a command post of some kind, a little molded-concrete fortress with anti-aircraft guns and a tiny radar-dish.
The island’s remaining perimeter was fortified, low concrete bunkers and entrenched artillery pieces facing the ocean, a brooding seawall manned by dark figures in bloody robes and twisted obsidian ogres the size of elephants, with more limbs than teeth and impractically large guns where their hands should have been.
It was a formidable sight, in theory. A more conventional force, in a conventional war, would probably would have like, scaled the northern cliff-face with a bunch of commandos or something. There would have been sacrifices, and tension, and manful tears as they succeeded against all odds or failed tragically. Some whitebread douchebag would have won an Oscar for the cinematic dramatization of the day’s events thirty years after the fact.
Instead, Rory rose up out of the crashing surf, an unholy 30-story train-wreck fusion of diseased penguin and eldritch cephalopod, with aurora-glow streaming from the ends of his tentacles and madness blazing in his eyes as he squared up to the sea-wall like it owed him money.
Malignant thaumaturgy and high-explosive artillery shells detonated uselessly against the Last Emperor’s barnacle-crusted hide, deep crimson distortions and blossoming orange flames. Tracer-rounds inscribed with unholy geometries stitched lines of fire across his mangy albino chest.
It was like throwing popcorn at a dusted-up pit-fighter.
.. THIS IS IT? NOTHING BIG, OR WEIRD? OH FUCK YEAH, D00D. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH I NEEDED THIS.
Breeen
Veeyyyyyyyyyooo
EEEEeeeeeeeemmmm
Eldtritch laser-light flickered across the top of the battlements. Explosions blossomed as mangled artillery pieces detonated, their ammunition stores cooking off in great mushrooming blasts of black smoke and flame, sending cracks racing through foundations of the bunkers to the which they were attached. Robed figures simply evaporated, turned to vapor and bones by the columnated skylight geometries of a stillborn universe.
NOOT NOOT, BITCH-D00DS.
Rory crashed into the battlements. Re-enforced concrete, already compromised when the artillery went up, crumbled beneath the roiling catastrophe of tentacles like lashing freight-trains. Bunkers caved in beneath the Last Emperor’s multi-kiloton weight, were carved open with laser-light precision. The huge obsidian trolls, their guns ablaze, were swatted aside like toys, trampled unnoticed, or plucked up and dropped, still squirming, into Rory’s gaping, twisted bill.
Syntech forces streamed ashore after him, boats and landing-craft disgorging men and armoured vehicles, meeting virtually no resistance. With tactical precision they overtook the shattered shoreline complex through cracked foundations and jaggedly gaping bunkers. It was almost too easy: every remaining unmade weapon was focused on the towering abomination as it crashed inland, making a beeline for the central structure, screaming solar-bright witchlight flickering from its writhing limbs, carving open the little command-post in a blossom of fire and refracted radiance as increasingly unhinged avian chuckling boomed across the island.
