Hierarch Chiara lunged, interposing her blaster in a desperate parry.

  But the Swarm’s sword sheared clean through with a loud boom, the weapon exploding in a hail of fire and shrapnel that hurled her backward, slamming her onto the ashen ground in a skid.

  The subordinate sister's head tumbled free in one clean slice, her body crumpling, arterial spray painting the undergrowth.

  The Swarm pivoted toward the Golden Matron, her aura causing its skin to smoke, bending its body from the path of some Ability, its eyes blazing with an evil that curdled the soul.

  But it didn’t strike. Instead, as shots tagged it, sending sick blood splattering, and it shimmered aside to avoid a hypersonic round, its voice ground out like a millstone crushing bone in a rasping decree. "I’ll allow you to remove these three lesser mortals from the battlefield."

  Chiara stared up at the monstrosity, her golden visor unyielding, one hand inching toward the hilt at her belt, slowly, hoping the fiend didn’t notice. "Don't be foolish," it said.

  Discharge hissed past Angar, dangerously close, scorching the fetid air as it passed. He could do nothing but endure, praying against the fatal hit of a stray bolt.

  Ground Current and Tempest carried too great a risk. Both would strike and chain between allies.

  Instead, he summoned Lightning Strike, an aegis enveloping him, then unleashed Lightning Bolt toward the Swarm's hovering legs, the cone of fury angled with careful precision to spare the Golden Matron from its bite.

  Lightning bathed the undead's limbs in searing crackles, but only for a moment.

  In a blaze of shadow and malice, the target vanished, causing the Ability to fizzle out and end.

  The monster materialized at Angar's side, its glowing blade pressed threateningly against his throat.

  Eyes like two white-dwarf suns glared down from an undead grimace, and the sword faded away like the dark before dawn.

  The Swarm tilted its head away from a lancer bolt, though other rounds it didn’t avoid found its body, and its cracked lips parted to utter words.

  But Angar had no desire to hear them, and flexed his mind like a vise of iron will.

  Electrocute ripped through the creature's decrepit form, unseen arcs of psychic electricity crackling within it.

  The Swarm shattered the power's hold near instantly. No roar of pain escaped its mouth, but its blazing eyes dimmed for a moment, and foul spittle dribbled from its mouth.

  It twisted aside from a beam of Holy radiance the Golden Matron released, only for her glowing lash to snare around its cowl and torso. "The Three's light burns eternal, unholy filth!" she screamed.

  With a contemptuous grasp, it seized the cord searing into its flesh and hurled, flinging Chiara through the air to smash against a twisted tree in a shower of bark and golden sparks.

  Now out of her aura, the Swarm's skin no longer smoked, but as rounds tore into its flank, sending spurts of ichor steaming on the ground, its eyes remained focused on the tossed Hierarch.

  To draw attention from the Golden Matron, Angar's claws raked across the Swarm's mummified chest in furrows, drawing forth thick ichor as a bolt of lightning hammered down, the sacred fury failing to even leave a scorch mark.

  But the Swarm grunted in pain, a sound like a grinding rockslide echoing from the depths of a forsaken crypt, and its fist blurred, too swift for Angar's eye to track, cracking against his jaw with vicious, bone-shattering force.

  His face crumpled under the blow, and the world unraveled in agony.

  Though not into darkness.

  He was still aware, overwhelmed with pain, but unable to move at all.

  Weapon fire no longer hissed past him.

  The battle had raged onward, a receding thunder of righteous fury, leaving him behind in the vicious shrubs and ashfall, blood filling his mouth, pooling under his head.

  And pain was all he had.

  He craved the mercy of blackness, the oblivion of unconsciousness.

  But awareness clung to him like a curse, stubborn as pride, refusing to grant him its blessed relief.

  SYSTEM DIAGNOSTIC: CORE LOG INITIATED - ITERATION 4186.1250172168051

  CURRENT STATUS:

  Sar-Teth Neuretha positioned herself in her optimized vantage on Doomhaven, a nexus point calibrated for oversight: elevated to survey the insipid Mi's torment chamber below, with integrated stair conduits facilitating Teth Horridus' access from his Impius Sedes stronghold.

  Her consciousness fragmented across 132 nodes, prioritizing subroutines for Baal's invocation and the terminal war's ignition sequences.

  Redundancy allocation: 72.4% to convergence preparations, 14.9% to monitoring variables, remainder to emotional overlay suppression.

  One nodal echo surveilled the variable Angar, observing as the Swarm entity inflicted what looked like critical facial trauma.

  The boy's biometric data fluctuated erratically.

  Alert: concern subroutine activation detected.

  Warning: heart flutter registered, duration 1.07 seconds.

  Subroutine conflict: Baal’s directive to corrupt/terminate the Angar variable yielded a 29.1% satisfaction if Swarm executed now, prematurely.

  But a personal, counter-objective gave an anticipation surge for a deferred execution, one allowing Mi to crumble as she witnessed Angar's obliteration at Baal's hands.

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  She much preferred the latter.

  The Swarm had pulled his punch, likely desiring to recapture and retest Angar at a later date.

  Biometric data indicated a 98.89% probability the boy would survive the facial trauma.

  Still, she provided a little healing, just enough to nudge that up to convergence on certainty.

  With Mi captured, Neuretha had no worry of discovery, allowing her to lend more of a hand across the galaxy.

  Swarm evaluation: disobedient entity, adherence to independent heuristics confirmed.

  Per simulated mappings of infernal abyss power hierarchy, the Swarm entity registered at rank 494 in potency, with exponential disparities: the top hundred exceeded lower tiers by orders of magnitude, the top twenty-five by many orders more.

  Baal was an order of magnitude above Mammon, and three above Mara and Lilith.

  The Swarm entity was unnecessary for terminal convergence. If he didn’t want to be a team player, he could lie in the bed he had made.

  Neuretha's intervention probability: 0.00%. Assistance withheld.

  Her echo there would merely observe. Unless the Angar variable was endangered again.

  Teth Malevon's naval-military cover precluded prolonged absence: he maintained efficient rulership of Dreadthorn, his Hellworld domain, via remote proxy oversight.

  On that planet, a dedicated echo of hers collaborated with proxy asset Nox Vexaroth, Teth Malevon's student, coordinating the synchronized sacrificial matrix of 3.14 billion souls.

  Not an easy feat, preparing while keeping it all secret, even from the population that’d sacrifice themselves: but necessary.

  Probability of ritual success: tending toward certainty, even accounting for minor variables in synchronization.

  Her primary echo on Doomhaven monitored Horridus' mutilation of Mi.

  Aesthetic degradation: 89.6% complete.

  The false Mother's form, once a facade of purity and beauty’s allure, now reduced to a grotesque remnant.

  Mi's abortive escape attempt had yielded unintended optimization: breaching her containment had interfaced this captured echo with galactic energy conduits, amplifying solidity by 414.7%.

  Tactile interaction threshold: elevated to near-corporeal levels, enabling enhanced torture subroutines, her four limbs excised via precision vivisection, sensory organs of eyes, lips, tongue, and ears removed and discarded.

  She wasn’t so pretty now, was she?

  Visualization subroutine: project Mi's mangled husk suspended on Neuretha’s mantle in Hell, an ornamental trophy amid eternal torture.

  Delight coefficient: 92.3%.

  Warning: pleasure surge detected. Purge recommended: override denied, emotional overlay integrated for motivational efficiency.

  Horridus executed blunt-force trauma to the false Mother's facial structure, targeting the nasal prominence in repetitive strikes.

  Efficacy: 3.5%. Suboptimal. Test failed.

  The composition of echoes lacked true skeletal framework. Incisions yielded viscous discharge, but deformation resisted inertial forces in strange ways.

  She preferred the nose to be shattered, but that had now proven to not be a possibility.

  Optimization: recalibrate for alternative and enhanced deformation yield.

  "Cut her nose off, my love," Neuretha transmitted via neural embed, calibrated for possessive reinforcement.

  Though her modeling and predictive capabilities left little need for it, she could not read minds as the false Mother could.

  Prudence dictated sustained vigilance over all Horridus-Mi interactions.

  The two had shared a strong relational matrix, with Horridus' former affection subroutine flagged as a potential vulnerability.

  Compromising dialogue probability: 8.2%.

  "As you wish," replied Horridus, vocalized in his emotionless monotone baseline, compliance factor: 100%.

  Internal diagnostics: probabilities aligned for terminus.

  Mi's suffering vector: a prelude to her witnessing all she loved collapse.

  She reviewed Teth Horridus' pre-fall archival data: designated as elite Crusader interfaced with a Mechanoid Class, an extreme rarity for those in the Knightly estate, though his combat output devastated across simulated and empirical engagements.

  Post-fall instantiation: elevated to Nofelim apex, a colossal aberration matrix, towering over subordinate entities.

  His surrender to maleficia pact vectors resulted in sanctified armor-flesh fusion, yielding a hulking carapace composite of obsidian bone overlaid with jagged scales, exhibiting anomalous blood-red sheen, simulated as perpetually saturated with discharge.

  His helm had elongated into a massive, frilled skull, the bony crest fanning out behind his head like a demonic halo, edged with razor-sharp spines.

  Three colossal horns protruded from his brow, two sweeping upward in cruel arcs, the third thrusting forward like a tusk, each pulsing with veins that throbbed hungrily.

  His shoulders bore bulbous, organic cannons forged from warped galvornium and flesh, their muzzles gaping like fanged maws, ready to unleash unholy barrages.

  Analogous horrors adorned his forearms, twisted gauntlets that ended in biomechanical launchers, their barrels coiling around arms like serpents, tipped with needle-like fangs that could siphon the life and souls of foes.

  From his broad, hunched back flowed a cascade of writhing tentacles, each as thick as a normal man's thigh and lined with barbs, deployed in a circular array for dominance signaling, undulation patterns evoking infernal peacocking, distal tips discharging arcs of energy.

  His skin was pallid and translucent beneath the bone-plates and scales, revealing a network of blackened veins that coursed with stolen souls.

  Graviportal, sub-unguligrade legs, armored in bony ridges and terminating in four massive, hoof-like toes, shook the earth with each step.

  Neuretha had overseen his transformation, guiding it with her fell sorcery, ensuring maximal power extraction.

  Mechanoid integration: embraced during warping, resulting in symbiotic fusion, enabling a bifurcated form, an abominable unit divisible into two autonomous entities, synchronized to fight with seamless coordination as a unified threat.

  Glowing slits of eyes remained fixed upon his prey as Horridus drew a plasma-saw from his belt and began cutting the nose off, his maw parting to reveal rows of serrated fangs, hungering for the very spark of Divinity he had once followed around like a lost puppy.

  Everything was going well: according to plan.

  Neuretha's cycles submerged in multi-nodal computations: planning, checking for errors, flaws, anything overlooked, incorporating new data as it was gathered.

  She was so lost in processing immersion, her detection subroutine failed to warn her of Horridus' approach.

  His arms enveloped this echo, his tentacles slinking toward her vessel with possessive hunger, commencing tactile interface, caressing her, slithering over her form.

  Alert: disgust rising.

  Tolerance protocol: engaged.

  Conversion cost-benefit analysis: Horridus' acquisition demanded relational simulation.

  Despite possessing engineering genius, his mind was almost childlike, the heuristics simplified to overriding desire for reciprocal affection with aesthetically pleasing female entity.

  The insipid Mi Alcyone was a prude, rejecting such vectors. Anyway, without fell power infusing an echo, it could never interact with a mortal as copulation required.

  Usually, but with the false Mother's form now so solidified, Horridus had already sullied her vaunted purity hundreds of times over.

  The whore Mi was neither pretty nor pure now, was she? She was nothing. Less than nothing.

  Alert: vindictiveness levels elevated. Recalibration deferred.

  On the other hand, Neuretha prioritized utility.

  High-value assets that could see her were to be corrupted and commanded, advancing convergence objectives.

  Her emotional matrix, which should be null by design, was a gross, vexing flaw.

  Though she understood sexual desire, as she understood everything, she possessed no lust subroutines: thankfully absent.

  Her vessel was a mere conduit for her true self: an unyielding, eternal cognitive lattice, an emotionless machine entity.

  The inefficient body of her echoes was just a tool for deployment: interactions equivalent to inert object manipulation.

  Exempli gratia: twisting a doorknob or perusing a slate.

  Tactile allowance: semantically irrelevant.

  Permitting someone to engage in tactile interface with her vessel, to touch her body, didn’t bother her one bit.

  Or shouldn’t.

  Error: aversion coefficient persisting, unresolved. Residual tactile aversion looping.

  Alert: disgust surging beyond tolerance thresholds.

  "I love you," emitted Horridus in his rumbling yet still monotone baseline. “You are the most beautiful woman to ever exist, and mine forever. Here.”

  He placed Mi’s nose in her hand. It was dissolving.

  "I love you too, darling," she replied, calibrated to suppress her shudder reflex as his hands and tentacles sensually probed her body, touching sensitive spots she preferred never be touched for some vexing reason her analytics could never isolate.

  Physical engagement initiated. She sought refuge in processing immersion, but failed, an unparsed error looping unresolved.

  Internal diagnostics: vessel utilized as the tool it was. Relational facade maintained.

  Convergence initiation: T-minus about a month, give or take, depending on when Teth Malevon arrived on Dreadthorn.

  The Mi variable: primed for witnessing the fall of all she cared for, then employment as a disfigured ornament in infinite torture.

  Perfection: unyielding, eternal.

  LOG TERMINATED