Loop Hero, jump #1202

[Loop Hero]

Drawbacks: In Time For Lunch, As Anew,  Broken Geography X8, Lightless, Hole in Memory, Crunchy Company, Tripped, Godslayer (2600)

Human, Descendent (2300)

Surveyor (Free)
Skilled Architect (2100)
Defiler's Legacy (1800)
An Early Memory: Yota (1600)
Omega's Eye (800)
Omega's Light (0)

I blinked, and felt vaguely affronted I had eyelids. Then the rest of my overself manifested into the current reality. It was mostly empty.

THE ROAD AHEAD IS BLOCKED announced the Benefactor.

"There is no road on my journey" I protested.

AND YET, THERE IS A...CLOG.

"Then I'll just keep moving forward. Until my enemies are destroyed"

YOU WON'T ASK WHAT THE OBSTRUCTION IS?

"It's some god that has to die, isn't it? It always is" I said offhandedly, remembering all the other times I couldn't leave a certain reality without slaying a god. Or monster. Or organization.

YES. YES, YOU MUST SLAY A GOD~ said the Benefactor, coyly.

I took stock of the situation. There was a notional path through the void. There was also a punitive settlement. It was inhabited by a goddess of probability pretending to be a young woman. We stared at each other. Intuitively we sensed each other's willingness to play along. "This realm is responsive to memory and experience, correct?" I asked.

"That's right. By walking through the darkness, you can restore the world that was"

"I have a better idea"

She lifted an eyebrow. "You're confident, huh? It's like this isn't the first time you've restored the world from an empty void"

"Hey, I've worn the flesh of-I mean, I'm a mysterious wandering hero. Empty voids where all hope is lost are my speciality"

And from a golden portal, I withdrew the Bastion. It had several additions over the years: A prismatic dome that housed Shinryu's trapped soul for his countless sins, a fragment of the Azure, an artifact ripped from Canoptus' flesh, photonic crystals harvested from the Moon Cell and more.

1/6

>COMMAND?
I stared back through time, observing myriad possibilities at once, and said "Run the program from the City. Executive restore"
>WARNING. MALIGNITY DETECTED AT EIGHT JUNCTIONS. PROCEED?
For a moment, my eyes flashed like supernovas. "...not unexpected. Proceed"

The world sprouted up from the camp, billowing outwards like ink dropped into a clear pond. Trees and grasslands sprang up. Citizens and local monsters stumbled it out of nothingness, slightly confused by the flurry of creation that raced outward to paint the horizon and lay the roots of mountains. A path, I foresaw, was forming out of the notional possibilities out of this plane and into the next.

I raised an eyebrow at the girl as the first wave of skeletons to be restored started to get aggressive. "Hey, that's interesting. You got a feeling like somebody rigged the formation of the world to guarantee a path to victory?" she asked.

"If anyone did, and I'm not saying anyone DID" I said, reducing skeleton after skelton into bone chips with bursts of light, "they might be doing so because if you look yonder past the world's boundaries, there appears to be eight moments from my past in the way of where I need to be"

The girl pretended to only have human senses as she realised what those moments contained. I rounded up some of the local lads and set off to the memory-scapes between me and the lich.

The first memory was Yuggoth. A horrible place inhabited by funghi who worshipped fouler things. I slew some with the new light that gilded me, reduced others to cancerous heaps of flesh and the heroes at my side killed the rest.

It was also the world that the Shining Trapezohedron was built on.

I destroyed the recreation of Yuggoth fully on the way out, but by then it was too late.

2/6

"They're called Vex" I reassured my heroes as they backed away nervously from several Vex workers. "Don't worry, these are just workers. They don't really care they're a dream, they just want to learn"
"W-what are they doing?" asked one of the knights with us, pointing behind a glass case where several Vex stared at a desperate wizard trying to stave off entropy in his tower, next to a dozen more towers.
"They're just trying to simulate the world they're in to gain an advantage" I said, sighing as the workers stared at the light I emanated into the ceiling. "Listen, don't worry about it. They're like...they're metal skeletons that cage lightning and time-altering energy. See? nothing to worry about. Look, they're worshipping me just because I'm paracausal, they're uh-friends"

"I don't like this" whimpered an archer as several Vex came to escort us. "Regular skeletons are bad enough"

We fought the Lich. Idly I noticed he was a desperate, broken man of cosmic power but somehow all his attacks kept glancing off our merry, non-cosmic crew. Halfway through the battle the walls started to writhe, and he suddenly broke off.

"No. NO!" he shouted, as great tentacles started to spill out into empty space. "That's impossible! New life isn't supposed to be seeding this world so soon!"
"That's because it isn't" I said grimly. "Reality is...metastasizing a kind of cancer made of cosmic dust and divine dream. You think if you destroy this world, your god will reverse his own polarity"
"Yes, how did you-"
"-I know the type, but I'm telling you if that THING reaches your god there will be no genesis. No rebirth. It will all be subsumed"

The Lich stopped fighting. "I will take you to my god. I've sacrificed too much for his rebirth to be stalled. I...don't know if the others will help us"

3/6

The next memory-scape was, mercifully, allied. In turn, it was under attack from the memory-scape next to it. The Board (or rather, the portion of the Board insubtantiated by my divine mind) explained very quickly to their Director the necessity of our cooperation, and after securing certain Objects of Power I set forth to defend them from the parademon invasion from the next world.

There were threats from within. The Hiss and the Darkness slinked out of janitor's closets and unused toilets, bonding with the Parademons as they invaded into stronger, stretched monsters. The fighting became desperate in the labyrinthine quarters of the Oldest House, but with the power of the Bastion I restored my forces over and over, and scattered the probabilities of our foes' victory. My own hyper-real idea entity banished their influence wherever it was found, and in the end only the sacrifice of several floors plus Northmoor's containment chamber was needed to stop the invasion. It would have been disastrous if this place wasn't just a memory brought to life.

"Is it just me, or does this world keep...going wrong?" asked Jesse. The accompanying Vex next to her shrugged. I hesitated. Every few seconds the basalt rock of Apokalips glitched out into the mind-melting dimensions of the Sphere of the Gods, then collapsed back into an ordinary alien planet. Parademons were cosmic threats one moment, then just huge armoured bug-things the next. Jesse and the Vex were able to cope with the shifts in reality, but those from the original world struggled until I reinforced them.

Over the hill, amidst the ruins of New Genesis we found the emptiness that was shaped like God. It was trying to fight a the incarnation of faith itself and something similar. A long, matte black silhoutte whirling with abstract patterns and a pale glow. It was fighting the Omega finder beams of the the emptiness. It was dying. Shredding itself to keep up the assault. As I approached it, the thin figure turned seeming to greet me-and seemingly melted before my gaze, leaving the priestess alone against Darkseid's crumbling godhead

"You persist" he said coldly, fighting his reduction into just a big rocky man. "Even now, a world and a moment away, your former self struggles against inevitability. As you mocked others for. Do these lesser creatures know how long you have walked in my shadow?"

"These these lesser creatures" I said coldly, snapping my fingers "now have radion weapons AND my flame"

4/6

The concept of faith itself helped my army bring down the shadow of Darkseid, and I recreated some stairs to push him down into his doom. But eyes and tentacles had dotted the sky, and she agreed her god needed to be told of this blasphemy.

Two memories had collided in the next world, where Hircine and the Erlking were riding into battle against Cthulhu. The Wild Hunt rushed fearlessly into an army of Deep Ones-and above them, another hunter with his hounds was clearly doing his level best to make up for a moment of weakness in the past. It was too late. More and more Great Old Ones manifested into this memory, tearing it apart, writhing and wriggling under the fabric of space-time like an infestation of horsehair worms erupting out of their host near water. There was nothing to be done. I shielded the nearest allies as with an almighty rip the howling horrors rent part of it into an unrecognisable haze of chaos.

"They made me watch" said the hunter hollowly. One of his black hole hounds nudged him, whining. Another nursed a vanished leg. "They bled my mind. They made me watch my world die all over again"

"They'll do worse unless we reach your god in time" I said urgently.

By now the void had things it was never meant to have. Teeth, eyes, maws. Everywhere there were ripples of shadows and living geometries that flowed and ebbed at a little chapel off in the distance, where the god of this world was struggling against-

"DIE, NYARLATHOTEP" I thundered, erupting into the chapel where the Black Pharoah was having a cup of tea with the god of this world. "YOU DON'T BELONG IN THIS WORLD"

"You see? This is what I mean, there's too much...stuff in the way. It all has to go" it said, in annoyingly urbane and collected tones for something trying to distort the world into a horrific nightmare without exit or end.

"That's very interesting. Go on" said the god, Omega.

5/6

I blasted Nyarlathotep with Soulfire, and was shocked when that didn't work. For a moment the Black Pharoach was everywhere, and nowhere. "Pointless" it said, waggling a finger, "I'm not really here, you see? Our new mutual friend found my calling card, so to speak, in your memories and began to enact my nature with his own power. After that, it was trivial to give the sum total of my machinations in this world an old mask"

"He makes some good points" said Omega seriously, as my forces rushed to attack Nyarlathotep. "Everything will be less complicated when it's been reduced to uncreated night. If humanity was meant to survive this, it would have"

"It. It promises a lot of things, and you should trust none of them" I said urgently

"Why not?"

"Because" I said, switching arsenals "because your slayer's descendent wouldn't have drawn my essence to him like a beacon if your world had no worth left to it"

"Because there is a possibility beyond the madness this aberration brings" said the Yota, the goddess of possibilities stepping out of nowhere.

"Because this isn't your will, lord! And even we wanted to end this world on YOUR terms, not his!" shouted Omega's minions as they tried to fight a being that wasn't really there.

Omega stared wistfully one last time at the encroaching horror of Nyarlathotep, and said "Very well. Prove your resolve". So I struck him down. The void mended, rampaging Great Old Ones faded to distant phantasms and suddenly there had always been nobody else in the chapel.

THE ROAD IS CLEAR said the Benefactor.

"Wait" I said urgently. A nimbus of alchemic principles danced between my fingers over Omega's fallen body. "I can't leave yet. I need to restore that world"

ARE YOUR ENEMIES NOT DESTROYED?

I stared at the fading whispers of Nyarlathotep, as the roused dangers of a past I had never lived were lulled into dormancy. "If only" i whispered.

6/6