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>>137088 Thread 2:
>>136394 The sun rises, spilling its watercolor light across the world, and with it rises the battle standards of six million men. Row upon row of battleships stretch into the distance, their gleaming steel hulls flashing ochre in the gentle light of dawn.
Waves lap against the shore, the softness of their motion belying the carnage to come. Across the beach and in the city, your footsoldiers huddle in the shadows of colossi, an ocean of men to match that ill-named Pacific, ready to fight and die for Emperor and nation. For a single, crystal moment, all is silent; all is still. Shanghai, you decide, will make a fine Armageddon.
The world shatters. Eight thousand battleships align and fire; eight thousand broadsides cast their deadly charge. A half million ship-mounted cannons send a blinding, arcing, plunging line of destruction deep into your ranks, a communal blast that slays men by sound alone, bleeding from eyes and ears, and sends even you to one knee, head ringing. The devastation is catastrophic; a million lives extinguished in one blood-soaked second. Fifty thousand cannon are slashed from your reserves. A small tidal wave smashes into the shore, capsizing ships and smashing the port.
You smile. The cannon fodder did what they needed to. Now, it is your turn.
They disturb the sea, you remark to your forces,
let us disturb the Earth. From deep entrenchments dug months before, your army of Colossi rise, towering five hundred feet above the battlefield.
Veritably, the earth trembles beneath their feet as they wade into the shallows, rounds pinging and sparking against their invincible construction. The air is filled with a shrieking roar as your flight of darksteel dragons takes wing, blotting out sun and sky, jubilant blasts of ghost-green pyreflame sprouting from their jaws.
Gears turn and metal screams as your return salvo is fired, a hundred thousand guns placed with unerring precision, and all across the horizon brilliant explosions bloom like necrotizing flowers. You launch your first spell, the Crucible of Flame, and forge-red runes flare across the length of your draconic cohorts, their wings beating with furious, unconquered vigor.
The enemy’s response is swift: across their battle lines, a thousand priests and pastors and bishops begin to sing, an anthem of war that promises glory and uplifts the spirit. You take the opportunity to peer into your foe’s mind, taking note of his magical resources and his plan of battle.
As their forerunners meet your charging horde, two unstoppable forces collide. Battlecruiers ram into Colossi, their prows denting and crumpling like crushed cans against the unbreakable bulwark of your machines. The first of your fifty-story titans takes a swipe at a nearby cruiser, upending it with one brutal stroke, and another raises its arm for a brutal haymaker, fist descending like a falling comet upon a hapless enemy battleship.
Enemy transports deposit their troops into a killing field; even the initial devastating blast of their cannon could not break your city-deep defense. From above, your dragons torch the helium-lofted airships of the Coalition, hurling flaming carcasses of planes onto battleship decks and crushing zeppelins between darksteel claws. Even as the enemy heavy cannons loose a second annihilating blast, you engage the Pope, avatar of the World Egg, in a furious exchange of spell and counterspell, wearing away at his readied magic while slowly accumulating more of your own. Your forces will have to fend until their countermagic is depleted.
It is a losing proposition. Mighty your armies may be, they have few answers to the total and crushing firepower disparity the enemy fleet possesses. Outgunned five-to-one, even your Dragons and Colossi are as handbuckets bailing out the tide. Even now, a full thousand of their ships turn their cannon on your towering golems, blessed cannonballs piercing darksteel and smashing joints. Slingstones they may be against the Goliath of your titans, nonetheless there are a thousand of them, and the first Colossus falls, its five-hundred-foot tall wreckage flattening three battleships beneath it.
“Meiling,” you manage to grunt out between two incantations, “remove His Holiness from play.”
“Yes, Master.” Your Hand leaps out of the command tower, dashing across the waves with ferocious speed. A battlecruiser bars her path and is cloven in twain; she vaults over the sinking wreckage without breaking stride.
Your titans take shelter below the waves, opting to pull enemy ships into a watery grave, and, thus submerged, no longer present a target to enemy cannons. As those weapons re-align on the city, you loose your Dragon Marines, those invincible and fearless fighting men, each a one-in-a-million talent. Screaming their loyalty to the Emperor, they take to the seas, darksteel plate serving them well against the small-arms fire of their foes, the Runes of the Deus of Calamity burning bright against their skin. The enemy’s landing operations stall and stop as each marine boards and systematically dismantles a transport, the blessed rounds of the enemy penetrating darksteel but unable to ravage reinforced organs and instant-clotting blood.
A third volley issues from the enemy cannon line, a near point-blank fusillade, and now your forces number only two and a half million. You smirk and give the signal for the fire ships to attack, and what your foes had believed to be merely civilian junks now show their true colors, a swarming throng of self-guided missiles with stone-burning reagents as their payload. Disciplined royal marine fire lacerates their charge, but their numbers are too great; hundreds of ironclads are felled, and now the harbor is a veritable mausoleum, more blood than water, the sands and stones of the beach painted a nearly pure crimson interrupted only by the occasional splotch of gore green or pale bone.
By now the enemy’s magic is falling, the feeble intellect of its human avatar unable to process spells quickly enough. Even as he attempts to disenchant your dragon-strengthening charm, you counter his spell and banish his anthem. The Dominus of Fealty appears at your side, bringing with him the loyalties of the H.M.S. Invincible, and men eye battle-brothers with wariness, distracted by signs of defection. The Colossi continue their slow, systematic drowning of enemy ships by the score, and Meiling slays another battlecruiser, the bright blue ice shard of her blade glowing as it absorbs a thousand souls and converts them into arcane power, channeled directly to you. You smile as you feel another spell fall into place in your mind.
With the Pope throwing his few remaining magics in Meiling’s inexorable path, you content yourself with keeping an eye out for anything truly deadly and begin to cast. The air ripples; the fabric of reality tears: a perfect copy of the
Nemesis of Reason strides into the water, murky red-blue turned murkier still by its inky blight. It is the first of many; as the battle enters its second hour, so too does the sixth cloned Colossus enter the battlefield. Your call forth a grand strobing of space and time, doubling the harm your units can inflict for the next few exchanges, and on your next exchange Twincast an Unnerving Assault, sending your foes into paroxysms of stricken panic and eliciting a bloodthirsty roar from your charging millions. Meiling takes renewed vigor from the rallying cry of your servants and springs forward, lashing out and splitting four ships in half across the horizontal plane, then leaping off their corpses to directly assault the World Egg avatar. You watch in glee as she first separates his arm from his torso, then his torso from his legs, and finally, with the
snick of steel against bone, his head from his neck. That, of course, is not enough to finish the incarnation of a world.
As the startled sky-blue eyes of your enemy stare into yours, you unleash an all-consuming and uncounterable Banefire at the flying globe of his cranium, your smug and triumphant grin mocking his last, desperately hoarded Lapse of Certainty.
“IT’S OVER!” You roar, and Meiling opens a scroll, teleporting to your side. “THE WORLD EGG’S DEFENSES ARE DOWN. WE JOURNEY NOW TO THE SEAL.”
“Master,” Meiling bows.
“Come, my Hand. The hour of my victory approaches. You will deal with the final defenses of the seal, and then, then...I will at last be free.” You snap your fingers, and the two of you disappear from the field of battle, leaving three million corpses in your wake. It will matter not soon, though - this world is ending today.
As you stride through the halls of the mountain-tomb in which the Dragon is housed, Meiling scythes through its guardian force, an assortment of ruby golems and animated gargoyles that fall to pieces before her precise, calculated strikes. “Master,” she says, joining you at your side, “be wary. There are many hidden attackers here.”
You nod. “Look after yourself. I am fine.”
The Seal. The instrument you’ve worked twelve years to unravel. It stands before you now, a towering rune of blood-red markings, and behind it rages-
No. That’s impossible. You move closer, hand outstretched to rest lightly on the seal, examining the creature which resides within.
Had you not suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands of such a creature, you wouldn’t recognize it. It’s from a branch of magic rarely practiced and even more rarely recorded. The magic of the soul. This is the complete red mana potential of a fully-fledged Pre-Mending Planeswalker Dragon, locked away within a human shell. Enough ambient energy escapes to render the container immortal and functionally superhuman. You begin chuckling, then erupt into full-blown, unfettered, unadulterated maniacal laughter. “It is all within my grasp,” you chortle, running your fingers over the buzzing lines of the seal. “Every petty dream, every grand scheme, every soul, every fear. It all flows through me and
from me.”
“Master,” Meiling’s voice brings you out of your reverie. “Take me with you. Please. I have never requested anything from you in my short life, but I do not wish to integrate with- with
her. She’s stupid and lazy and ignorant and doesn’t appreciate your majesty...I know it’ll take energy but I swear, I’ll more than make up for it in service. If I die, I wish to die by your hand, or by your side against your enemies. Not- not like this...” She trails off, tears flowing freely from her eyes. Your disciple is well aware of the amount of compassion that resides in the icy heart of Nicol Bolas. She knows her chances are slim.
“You...” you growl, “are such a troublesome girl. This is my decision. I...”
[ ] [Mana Delevel 1, exhausted for a month] “Will take you with me.” Ninja!Meiling will appear as a separate entity from the real Meiling, with all her equipment intact. Will almost certainly cause awkward conversations with everyone. You will have to find a way to make her immortal if you want to keep her around for any appreciable length of time (in dragon time).
[ ] “Will not take you with me.” You’re Nicol Bolas! Heartfelt, tear-stained appeals have no affect on you!
Also, decide what you’re going to do with the manasoul locked in Meiling.
[ ] Take just enough to break free, then unseal the rest. Real!Meiling will receive a major powerup, but be unable to control her powers unless she gets extensive retraining. However, if Ninja!Meiling is integrated into Real!Meiling, she’ll retrain extremely quickly.
[ ] [Mana Levelup] Take a good amount, enough to substantially increase your might while allowing Meiling to retain her current powers and immortality.
[ ] [DOUBLE Mana Levelup] SUCK IT DRY. Meiling will revert to a normal human.
