Chapter 40: Boiled Black

  Priorita Prime gasped and cheered as she watched Allan tear out and impale the heart of his teammate. Gosh! Just a few more seconds and he would have lost them all! A vermilion blush kindled in her core. This was one of the many reasons the human was her favourite this year. Dramatic timing. Allan seemed to always choose the most delicious option and act on it at the last possible moment.

  She replayed the visual packets of that final moment again and again, zooming in on the tortured expression on his face. A ripple passed through her membrane, little barbs growing, hooking, grasping. She shifted the view to watch the blood dripping down his naked torso. There it was, that utterly scrumptious tear through his fragile human skin— and all at once the blush ignited, spread, and stained the jelly within her. She let it remain. Alone and private she could let herself really feel.

  Repeated pings of information and visual packets being delivered came rapid fire. As usual. Especially with the recent developments in the war. She ignored them, letting the packets stack up and up and up in a list as she replayed that scene once more.

  The view shifted, showing his possessed team—and that Lutantha. The one who had latched onto Allan, and thanks to a system glitch had somehow slipped into his party. Priorita wasn’t sure she liked the way the female looked at him. There was something suspicious about her. Something Priorita hadn’t yet managed to put her flagella on. It didn’t matter, she was barely interesting enough to bother with. A clone could keep tabs on her.

  The pings grew ever more insistent as one of her daughter clones, one she had given greater privileges to—used a high priority packet that jumped it to the top of the queue. Priorita sighed, releasing the scent of discontent to billow about and fill her private chamber. The faintly yellow-tinged gas wreathed her lower segment like low fog, curling around her tech console, map-projector and sank away into gaps at the base of the teleporter. A blinking light flashed on the empty doorway. It had for days now.

  Shifting her attention from the teleporter, Priorita opened another packet.

  The dastardly Defrenne clones—no, twins. They had stolen two of their team’s precious Scout tokens and had penetrated through the barrier into neighbouring Shii civilisation’s quadrant. Scouts were meant to remain inconspicuous, to hide and report back to their leadership to give their team an advantage. But these two… were fabulous. They’d killed over thirty of the Shii, and now they were hard at work. The suit-wearing one was busy mounting their skulls on spikes, forming a wall at the barrier’s edge, while the tweed-wearing twin appeared to be constructing some sort of art installation with a collection of their severed arms. Both still displayed those delightful bright, white, wide smiles.

  Her membrane rippled with a wave of excitement as she flicked to Mei Feng.

  The Chinese contestant had ended the previous stage with the highest total kill count—127— and hadn’t slowed down. She watched as the lithe woman with the black eyes darted through the air, leaping between fragments of floating sky islands with no heed for the multi-kilometre drop beneath. She launched herself upwards, impaling her twin hook swords into the abdomen of a flying Pappilon, using it to swing across a gap and disembowelling the creature in the process. WOW! Watching her, and inspecting the Tang “Bright Armour” set she had unlocked for her quadrant, Priorita wondered if one of her clones had put her flagellum a little too heavily on the scale.

  In a moment of giddy inspiration, Priorita speedslimed across the floor, zipping up the wall and along the golden ceiling. She shifted her outer membrane to resemble the Tang armour set, complete with ribbon and tassels and flicked free of the ceiling, somersaulting in the air just as Mei Feng had. She landed with a squelch, her jelly still blushing bright red. Delicious!

  *Ping*

  *Ping*

  *Ping*

  Three more priority packets arrived rapid-fire. She swiped them aside as she inspected a section of her mass. She thought it had wiggled differently as she landed.

  The section.

  Where she had seen the infiltrated clones mass suffuse into her own. Was it a slightly different shade? No. Surely not. She was Prime and she was Perfect.

  She flicked a glance at the teleporter again, at the persistently flashing light. So many queued visitors waiting for her permission.

  She released the sharp scent of irritation in a great sigh, wafting it away before it could corrode the floor, and looked back to her WARGAMES! feed in search of more excitement. As she flicked between highlights, she wondered what might have happened had she closed the underverse rift when first the Infiltrators had peeked through.

  The first Infiltrators had ridden the energy currents bleeding from their reality into hers, feeding power to the System she so adored. She could have closed that first bore easily—slammed the door in their faces—but no. She regretted nothing. Life without her System would be so dull; hardly worth living! And besides, it hadn’t been without its perks.

  The war against the Infiltrators had scoured the cosmos clean of all those unworthy civilisations she’d once had to share existence with, and it had inspired her greatest creation: WARGAMES! The search for the worthy. More than that, it had given her what she craved most—war itself. Endless. Glorious. Delicious war. Though sometimes… just sometimes… if she was honest with herself, she felt the faintest flicker of something strange. Not regret, not boredom. Just… tired.

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  The blush had almost fully faded from her jelly now, only faint embers flickering in her core while the rest cooled to her usual, serene green. She inspected that patch, green just like the rest.

  Perfect. Just like her.

  Her flip manoeuvre had landed Priorita before the Map Module, and her proximity had activated it. Now a 4D projection of the universe showed the war, helpfully colour-coded to show the Infiltrators’ penetration over time. Their infectious spread was highlighted in green and spread from the primary Bore where she had drilled and first accessed the underverse’s energy, oh-so-long ago.

  There were hundreds—perhaps thousands—of bores now. Once, that had thrilled her. A whole universe to wage war against! But now… as she eyed that patch of her membrane, an unfamiliar emotion filled her.

  She chose a WARGAME! Feed at random and watched a gang of those idiotic Uzbeki dive-bomb their way to extinction as they failed, once again, to tackle their first Wargame Vault. They were obviously unworthy, and had died in droves. Watching them get massacred would usually have excited her. But today… She eyed the ever-growing list of notifications, swiped a flagella through the map to close it, and stared at that patch of her membrane, was it a slightly darker shade of green? The membrane just a touch more rough?

  Swipe.

  Another feed showed thousands of U’l Ciacco marching in formation, practising with their newly unlocked weapon and armour set. They showed some promise… but only a little.

  Disappointing.

  Swipe.

  The next showed a Huevos civilisation cluster as they finished enclosing their whole main town in a growing ball of roots… A wave of little barbed hooks crossed her membrane.

  Cowards.

  Swipe.

  The next showed a Ragno quadrant as they completed an intricate tangle of webs that connected their islands. All so they wouldn’t have to brave the seas.

  The hooks thrashed.

  Pathetic. Small. Unworthy.

  *PING* Another priority packet.

  *PING* Another.

  Couldn’t they just leave her alone? Didn’t she do enough for them? These petty, small, insufficient, lesser versions of her?

  *PING* *PING* *PING* *PING*

  “WHAT?” She thundered through the connection.

  “Prime! You must lis-”

  “MUST?!”

  Priorita Prime popped the clone with a thought, releasing a billowing cloud of satisfaction that wreathed her magnificent form.

  There really was nothing quite like murder to calm oneself down when one was in a mood.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  One never was.

  Her beautiful, cubic form writhed with hooks and burrs and flagella and warts.

  Prime flicked up her system menu, activating a custom macro command that equipped her with her armour and armaments in mere picoseconds.

  The teleporter whirred to life, ripping reality before her.

  The burning cold of teleportation washed through her jelly, stimulating, teasing, exciting.

  She appeared in a war-zone.

  The front lines.

  YES!

  A cracked planet vented lava into orbit and beyond, spraying lines of molten planetary core that glowed like celestial jewellery into the vacuum of space. She sprouted thousands of wartime warts, each packed with sensory organelles and with them she took stock of the situation.

  She fired her armaments.

  Her first barrage utterly erased a wave of infiltrated monstrosities—Creatures that crawled, picked and wiggled through the tapestry of reality towards her and the armada at her back. Behind them, the top third of the planet was caught in the blast and blinked away as though it had never existed.

  Still, she wasn’t satisfied.

  The firing of a weapon—even a system-enhanced marvel like this one, lacked the visceral, physical punch she was after.

  Forget the consequences. She needed this.

  Priorita stowed the launcher and sprouted a series of thick, armlike flagella. She encouraged her allies to focus on technology, rather than system magic. A mistake she had made in the first few seasons on WARGAMES! And one she had now rectified. They should use their minds and their unique racial perspective to conduct war in their own wonderful way.

  But what was life without a bit of magic?

  Energy from the underverse poured through her, channelled in a torrent. A ball of crackling plasma appeared at the tip of each wiggling flagella, the light so bright that a few proximal warts shrivelled away. Each orb was powerful enough to crack a moon, yet after only a few femtoseconds of hesitation, she pumped more power in. Yes, YES! The plasma balls grew and fused into a singularity that expanded outwards until it dwarfed her.

  The onrushing swarm of infiltrated monstrosities numbered in the tens of thousands, each well over level one hundred and capable of erasing armies.

  Despite this, a ripple passed through them.

  They hesitated before her majesty.

  She was Priorita Prime. Singular. And she glowed like a supernova in the blackness of space.

  As they broke before her, Priorita released the scent of satisfaction.

  Rifts were torn in reality as those with spatial skill fled. Others blinked in and out of phase, crossing thousands of kilometres in moments.

  Too slow.

  She let out a high, delighted giggle and broadcast the audio packets containing her joy to all life within a lightyear.

  Behind her, the allied armada that contested this section of space for her began to zip away.

  Her allied civilisations, her clones. All warriors with centuries, or millennia of experience. All fled from her greatness.

  As they should.

  They had failed her.

  Embarrassed her.

  Pulled her from her delicious WARGAMES!

  Her jelly tingled, fizzed and shook with the reality-warping power that rushed through her. Reality tore beneath her as a new Bore began to rip through reality, oopsie!

  But she didn’t stop channeling.

  She needed this.

  Every external component upon her membrane burned away, leaving her smooth and square and perfect.

  Now blind—save for her core sensory apparatus, Priorita released the tight grip on her colouration, and for the first time in nearly four thousand years… Priorita Prime boiled black.

  And if there ever was a god in her universe, surely even it must fear her.

  Priorita released the energy blast in a spherical detonation so great that it erased all of reality in the solar system. Moon, planet and star alike, all were atomised. The blast was so potent that it occurred in the fourth dimension—time—and erased not just all present life, but enemies and allies alike that had fled in the last three microseconds.

  Sure, she could have shaped the blast and killed only her enemies.

  But no… they had to die.

  All of them…

  After all…

  They might have seen it.

  That patch of membrane.

  The patch that, while she had boiled black, had against all reason… flashed a sapphire blue.