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Do Entities Dream Of Crystal Sheep? (Endbringer Lewd Worm CYOA) Chapter 6
🕑 Added 2023-05-13 20:05:47 +0000 UTC-x-
Chapter 6
-x-
[Evelyn]
Silence shrouded the husk of what was once called a ‘city’. Sterile white rubble blanketed everything in a manner eerily akin to snow. At the places right beneath the Tower, the buildings and overgrown trees were all ground to dust under the weight of its collapse; all of it was now nothing more than a sea of white.
The silence stretched out for a few moments more, before a small patch in the center suddenly began to tremble.
And then the ground burst open In an explosion of force and stone, blown away by the unfurling of a multitude of unearthly blade-like wings.
“Fucking hell-” Evy exclaimed. And just like that the eerie, smothering silence was broken.
Evy paused for a moment, taking in the scene for what it was. It was at this point that she noticed the Pod silently hovering behind her. Her ire quickly returned and the annoyed woman started to swipe at it, trying and failing to swat the frantically moving pod out of the air.
“Stay still and take it like a man, you defective soap-box!”
“Negative. This pod is not a ‘man’. Additionally, this pod is programmed to prioritize its own safety and any damaging action will be taken as hostility. However, this pod is willing to compromise, and apologize to artificial human Evy for making her feel uncomfortable.”
Evy scowled at it for a moment, not really willing to let it go. Eventually, the irate woman forced herself to relax and sighed. “Okay, pod. I accept your apology. It’s no use arguing with you anyways. How about you recover our little ‘heroes’ so we can get down to business, yeah?”
“Agreement.” The pod answered, before turning to move towards the distance.
Evy turned to survey her surroundings once more, her mind conspicuously blank at the sight such destruction. “ Feels weird, not being able to do anything about this... Then again, all this power might be getting to my head if I thought I'd be able to solve everything. Huh.”
Evy shook her head and turned to face her larger counterpart as it stood behind her, a redheaded twin securely held in each arm.
Evy just raised her hands. [Evelyn] stared for a moment, and nodded as she moved Devola to a smaller wing by her hip, which in turn secured the girl tightly by wrapping around her.. The endbringer proceeded to pick up the disgruntled woman like an angry kitten, before adjusting her into a better grip for her comfort.
Then massive wings beat once more, propelling the inhuman weapon of mass destruction along her passengers into the sky.
-x-
[9S]
9S woke up to the sounds of chirping birds and a bright blue sky.
“Huh?” For a moment, his mind was empty of all thought as he stared blankly at the clouds idly floating by. But then he started to remember. 9S flailed around as he rose into a seating position, before frantically running towards the edge of the building.
“The tower…” He spoke in a voice so filled with exhaustion and triumph that he could hardly recognize it as it his own.
“It’s over… it’s finally over.” His voice was cracked and slightly hysterical, but the tears that ran down his face were of joy and sorrow in equal measure.
“The war, the machines. After all this time, it’s finally over.” He should have been celebrating, happy that he had fulfilled the greatest, most heartfelt wish of every android on the planet, but the only thing he felt was a great emptiness gnawing at his heart. True, he felt a little bit of triumph at his victory, for driving the machines away, for killing that fucking bitch.
But then why was he back here, alive, without a purpose, without a home and without… 2B. 9S closed his eyes as memories started to resurface. Memories that for all intents and purposes, should have been lost.
‘2B… it was truly an honor to fight with you. Truly.’
‘The honor was mine.‘
His eyes snapped open. “Oh… these are my memories… all of them.” Even the ones he had lost when he wasn't able to backup his data to the Bunker in time.
“I wished you could see this 2B. We finally won.”
“But then again, I wouldn’t have wanted you to see me like this.” He raised his arm to stare at his stump- wait, what?
To his bafflement, he was greeted with the sight of two relatively pristine, undamaged and most importantly, whole, hands.
“Wait, how did- Did pod manage to create a backup? But When?” The ‘how’ was left silent though. By that time 9S came to the realization that he was fairly certain that the red that overwhelmed his mind in those final moments was most certainly the logic virus. He knew all too well what the pods were capable of, but purging him of the logic virus at such a late stage, while also preserving his memories? That was a little bit beyond them. He would have called it a miracle, if he didn't see the irony in the fact that he might also be the only android in the world who didn’t want it.
9S clenched his hands, and the sound of the faux-leather in his gloves creaking never felt so loud in the silence as it did while he stared at the vast swathes of white in the distance where a gargantuan tower once stood.
He sighed.
“Thankfully 9S, you still can. After all, 2B is right here, yes?” A feminine voice rang out from behind.
The startled scanner model spun around, his anger flaring, only to for it be drowned out by hope, confusion, and finally fear.
A few feet behind him, a gynoid leaned against the wall, her posture paradoxically both relaxed and tense. She looked awfully similar to a Yorha model, but 9S felt that there was something decidedly off about her. For one thing, she was wearing personalized human clothing, something he only saw the resistance androids do. There was a reason even the rogue Yorha soldiers kept their uniforms; ‘Normal’ clothing was simply not designed to deal with the heat and strain put on it by their advanced combat systems the same way Yorha uniforms were. But even then, he couldn’t tell what model she was either.
‘I would have mistaken her for a new model, but command would have announced something about it at the very least. And I hadn’t heard anything of the like before… The Bunker fell.’ But no, that wasn’t what bothered him.
There was a quality to her skin and her hair and her startling blue eyes that unnerved him.
The unease only intensified after he subtly did a basic wide range scan and came back with nothing. 9S's hackles rose but after staring at her for a few moments longer, he saw that she was content to simply do nothing.
He decided that she wasn’t a threat for now but 9S kept her in field of vision all the same, even as he turned to face the figure lying on the floor.
His breath caught in his throat. “2B,” His friend, his companion, the only family he had left in this world, lay there on the ground seemingly untarnished by the tragedy that befell her.
The not-Yorha gynoid followed his gaze, and snorted. His attention snapped back to the woman and his eyes narrowed. Before he could say anything though, she started to speak.
“Yeah, the pods were all dramatic and sappy and had the two of you lying against each other so that it'd be the first thing you see when you woke up. I guess they didn’t count on the fact that you’d roll around and wake up on the ‘wrong side of the bed’ so to speak.” She laughed lightly at that. “It was fun watching you angsting around like an edgy teenager for a while, but you just didn’t stop, so I had to call you out.” She shrugged. “Wait, if you were a human, you’d be around 19, so I guess-” He tuned out the annoying gynoid as she continued to spout nonsense, and rushed towards 2B, making sure to keep himself between her and the stranger in case she attacked. 9S also had to determine if this was the genuine 2B, or if it was a mockery like the ones made by the fucking machines.
So far his scans returned a positive and a relieving lack of any logic viruses or meddling. He’d have to check again with the pod once it returned but for now, 9S found solace in fact that anything of 2B survived at all.
Eventually, he decided that it was time to address the glaring question. “Who are you, and why don’t you show up in my scans?” Well, she DID show up, but so far all the results were either inconclusive or they were just plain wrong. Like, how could she possibly have a crystal the size of an island lodged in her brain? 9S resolved to sit down and re-calibrate the entire thing at the next opportunity.
The woman tilted her head inquisitively, before nodding. “Ah. I’m sorry, I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Evy, and I don’t show up in your scans because I’m human. Or, at least the body I’m currently using is.”
9S froze, before his eyes narrowed into pinpricks as his anger boiled. “Do you think this is FUNNY? What could possibly drive you to joke ab-” 9S’s rant was cut off as the woman took out an antique knife, like the ones he'd seen in the documentaries and made a small cut on her palm. Then she threw the knife. 9S caught it, idly noting that the wound healed nearly instantly and when he turned his attention to the knife in his question, he nearly dropped it in surprise.
“That… that isn’t.”
“No, it isn’t.” the woman, the human confirmed. “That is human blood.”
9S had never been so lost as he was at that moment. He simply didn’t know what to do, what to even think, at the impossibility standing before him.
Not after learning all that he had.
“Where were you?” He asked finally, tired. “How are you even alive? Here?” And then his eyes narrowed again as he caught onto a particular detail. “And what do you mean by ‘this body?’”
She beamed at him. “You caught on quickly. As you suspect, I am Indeed not truly human.. not anymore at least. You are most likely aware of the existence of parallel worlds with the whole mess the white chlorination syndrome caused, yes? Well, I'm from a world whose history diverged drastically a long, long time ago. I was once a ‘normal’ human girl, but I ended up usurping the mind of an alien super-weapon somewhere along the way. This." She said as she gestured at her body. "This is just a ‘fork’ of my mind created so that I could interact with you without having the situation instantly escalating into violence. As for why I’m here? Well-”
And then the artificial human started to go on to weave the most ridiculous, depressing and convoluted story he had ever heard.
-x-
“-And that’s why I came here to recruit some help. I wouldn’t be wrong to assume that the androids here would like this opportunity, yes? I’d tone down the fanaticism a lot if you don’t want to scare people off, but otherwise, there are a lot of people who would like your help. I’d go to the council of humanity for help but I disagree quite vehemently with their… practices and how they treat their subordinates. I don’t need to explain why, now do I?” It was 9S’s turn to laugh, but unlike hers it was a harsh, broken thing.
“No. No you don’t.”
Evy sighed. “Well, I was planning on getting Yorha and the androids in the local resistance camps to band together. That would be enough to start things up, and it would be well within Yorha’s capabilities to provide us with as much manpower as we need if they had access to a massive amount of resources-”
“Yorha can’t help you.” 9S spat out venomously. “Are you blind, or can you simply not see that Yorha is dead! The bunker is destroyed! What you’re looking for isn’t here anymore!” He was screaming by the end of it, and Evy looked at him wide-eyed in confusion before realization finally seemed to dawn on her.
“Damn it, Evy, why does this always happen? Ugh.” She mumbled. 9S was certain she didn’t intend for him to hear that, but before he could reply, she continued. “Well, 9S, the thing about being an extra-dimensional eldritch abomination, is that sometimes, death isn’t always an obstacle anymore.” She grinned, and this time, there was something decidedly predatory about it. “After all, you and 2B can attest to that, can’t you?”
9S scowled. “It was you? What about the pods?”
Evy pushed herself off the wall, before she started stretching and rolling her neck. “They were about to try something admittedly very risky to recover your memories but I had a better alternative.”
“I see.” 9S replied as he stared at her contemplatively.
Evy smiled. “So would you be willing to give me a chance? To see how this turns out?” she asked as she extended a hand to him.
9S was taken aback at the gesture, but only for a moment. Then, he extended his hands as well.
Both of them.
Evy looked at him confused for a moment, before her eyes widened as the world faded away into nothingness.
-x-
When awareness returned to his mind in what 9S recognized as the all too familiar hacking interface, he took a moment to take stock of himself. His consciousness had materialized into a well defined spectral image of himself, and he was a bit startled at how detailed and smooth it was to move here. That was a testament to how powerful Evy was as a ‘computer’. Each individual movement he made in this place was recorded with more data than he had seen in his entire lifetime.
It reminded him of how small he was in the grand scheme of things.
“I may have bitten off more than I could chew here.”
“No shit Sherlock.” Evy’s voice rang out from behind him. 9S spun around to face his opponent, but the sight before him overwhelmed his mind with awe and terror in equal measure.
‘Evy’ stood in the middle of a white, rectangular platform and stared at him with an eyebrow raised. However, the consciousness that represented her identity was only a flickering image, a projection so thin and fragile that 9S’s form was several times stronger than it, here in her own mind.
However, it was the rest of it that startled him.
Yes, ‘Evy’ was only a thin projection, but it was merely an extension of a winged thing in the distance that set off every single self preservation instinct he had with such intensity that he nearly terminated his ‘hacking attempt’ right then and there. But what was above her startled him the most.
He had entered the machine network a few times before, and one thing he noticed was how the data and consciousness stored within the network took the form of a ‘sea’ of cubical units floating in the ‘sky’ above him with the sheer mass of the data it contained within. If that was the case, then the literal planets of data that floated above them in the distance spoke volumes of what ‘Evy’ was capable of should she so wish it.
“So who’s Sherlock? I’ve heard him being mentioned in some of the older documentaries.”
Evy looked at him in incomprehension, and then she proceeded to sigh. “Of course you don’t know who Sherlock Holmes is. After we’re done with this mess, I’ll have to introduce you to the wonders of the internet.”
Unbeknownst to 9S, Evy was panicking.
While she was indeed in a position of power, the ‘high ground’ so to speak, she had absolutely no defenses in place against this vector of attack. From her inherited memories, and the details her counterpart had been streaming to her, many beings had tried to hack a shard before. AI, memetic abominations, and a plethora other things that most likely should not be named have tried, and failed.
It was, however, the first time an Entity had been hacked through what [Evelyn] could only identify as the Soul. Her human half was frozen in dumbfounded horror, while her ‘shard brain’ exulted in the sheer novelty of it.
Only the sheer versatility of the tools at her disposal and her counterpart’s vast records of facing technopathic organisms saved her when 9S’s avatar used her moment of distraction to attack. Evy flailed as she stumbled backwards and tried to conjure up the strongest mental barrier she could imagine. The thing is, she needed an image to work with, and in that moment, the first thing to pop up in her mind was a cherished memory of her watching her first anime back in high school. There wasn’t anything special about it, and she hated the show itself but those moments of confusion, awe and dissatisfaction left enough of an impression that she managed to latch onto it.
And that, was how the characteristic octagonal ripples of an A.T. field spread out in front of her, cutting 9S off as he ran into it with the same intensity as that of a car meeting a boulder.
Evelyn knew that the field was not real; it was only a mental projection, but in this place where her mind unconsciously associated it with the concept of a ‘barrier’, it might as well have been the real thing. Evy also suspected that the only reason it was so strong was because her counterpart was literally throwing a vast majority of her processing power in an attempt to study the phenomenon.
Evy sighed as 9S stared daggers at her from across the barrier, and decided to sit down.
“Why are you fighting me 9S? I think I get it but I really can’t understand what you’re gone through. I can’t even imagine the pain and suffering you’ve undergone all these years for a purpose you’ve only recently figured out was a lie. I get that me bringing up something so similar so soon might have set you off, but we can’t resolve our issues unless we communicate.”
9S glared at her, but he quickly came to the conclusion that there wasn’t really anything he could do at the moment either.
“Ok. I’m listening. Show me proof of your sincerity.” Evy just nodded and motioned her hand towards her counterpart. Many cubes of data floated down between them, before unfolding into memories. And that, was how 9S discovered the aftermath of the cataclysm that went down in Earth Bet, and balked at the sheer scale of it.
“This is what I need you for. And there are many other worlds just like this one.” She answered.
9S scrutinized her for a long time in the silence, before he eventually asked.
“Why are you doing this? If you knew about my world, you must have many other alternatives. Why us? I don’t believe for a second that you’re altruistic enough to do this for no reason. I just want to know why.”
Evy hummed. “Well, to give you a better idea, I’ll take you as an example.” She said, pointing a finger at the disgruntled android.
“You are an android, but for all that you’re ‘artificial’, you think, you feel, you act... You have your own desires, your own goals. I'd say you're about as human as the genuine article. Did you know that humanity was once terrified at the very idea of artificial intelligence? We were so scared of the idea that our own creations would render us useless and take our place, we were so scared of the future, that we went so far as to make horror movies about it. But then here you are.” She waved her hands around, gesturing at 9S. “Humans don’t have a reason for our existence, we don’t have a predetermined purpose that we know of, so we are forced to search for one.”
“However, the very idea that the only reason you exist is to fulfill a predetermined purpose, is in itself dehumanizing. People are meant to seek and discover their own purpose, not the other way around! But then, what would that make us?”
“You did serve a purpose, you were a tool in every sense of the term, you had a function, a well defined reason for your existence. But then the question arises as to why your creators allowed the capacity for emotion if that was the case. Why did they go to such lengths to give the five senses to a mere ‘tool’ when they weren't really required at all? It’s something to think about, isn’t it? Well, I’m in the same boat. Only, I did this to myself, inadvertently as it may have been.“ She paused. Evy had been trying to explain the feelings bubbling in her heart but no matter how she said it, she couldn't seem to be able to convey it the way she wanted to. Ironically, for all her talk about communication, Evy was never really that good at it herself.
“I am a woman with far too much power and yet not nearly enough of it. I left my entire life behind me when I got this power, and yet I have no conceivable way of getting my life back. The only option I do have is to move forward and make something of myself, or to rot away in some hellhole depressed and lonely. So, here I am, wandering around aimlessly without anything to drive me forward other than my directives, directives that force me to grant the wishes of others and fulfill their wildest sexual fantasies.” She spat.
“You know how that feels, well not the sexual fantasies but the rest. Well, I wish you didn’t but you are one of the few people I can relate to right now. Right now I have nothing, I’m a tool without a purpose. -
“I’m a woman with nothing to return to. The only things I do have to drive me forward are my powers and my memories. I have access to worlds so amazing and wonderful that it would make you cry, worlds that are so dangerous and cruel that the one I came from could be considered pleasant. Then there are places so fucked up that I can’t help but want to accept the role my body was designed for and wash it all away in hellfire and ruin.”
“Maybe it's my hubris speaking, maybe it's just me going on a power trip after I received enough power to literally blow planets apart, where before I would struggle to even finish a dozen push-ups. There is so much I can accomplish in these worlds with my power, but there are also so many problems there. I can’t fix everyone’s problems for them, that’d be pointless, but there are things where my strength would be really useful. Worlds where my assistance could shift the balance drastically.
I want to fight, I want to study magic and get better at discovering and assimilating all the new and wonderfully weird shit out there. I want to learn the secrets of the universe and along the way, I want to help the people I know of and meet. Is that so bad? It's from a part of me that is something distinctly inhuman, and a part of me that still thinks this all just a convoluted nightmare.
But, it's also the only part of me that has any direction in the first place. The only thing I as an individual desire, is to move forward.” Evy smiled bitterly.
“We could fight each other to the bitter end and continue this pointless spiral, or we could give each other a chance, give ourselves a chance, to carve out a better future. It might not be perfect, and prone to dumb decisions but things in reality are hardly ever perfect.”
“So, are you willing to work with me?”
They stared at each other for some time, before finally, 9S nodded, and proceeded to exit the ‘hacking space’.
“So.” He asked. “What are you going to do?”
Evy smiled, and for the first time since he had met her, 9S thought that it looked genuine. “I’m gonna revive Yorha.”
-x-
[Evelyn]
Silence drenched the streets of what could generously be called a ‘city’. A white ‘snow’, or ‘salt’ covered the vicinity, where the Tower once stood.
However, the city itself was only a superficial reproduction of an era that had ended aeons ago. It was painstakingly preserved true, but it served no purpose ; it was merely a stage, a prop to enact a fantasy. And while the ‘snow’ that bathed the landscape did resemble the salt that resulted from the fateful day that doomed humanity oh so long ago, it too was only a facsimile, a superficial element that set the stage for a play that cycled back to its beginning once more.
[Evelyn] couldn't help but find it distasteful. She didn’t really feel emotions like her ‘human’ half did. Well, she technically could since shards were indeed capable of reproducing the feeling of ‘emotion’ after long term exposure to a human host, but she couldn’t really develop something she already had now could she? It was still there but she was forced to have it split away from her and into its own separate fork to manage the hormones and emotions of a ‘real’ human body.
It’s not as if she could shove the entirety of her consciousness into a tiny human brain without making it explode.
But even then, [Evelyn] could only feel something that would be best described as disgust as she stared at this world. Her human half thought that this world would be ‘perfect’ for a cycle. The endbringer could understand where she was coming from, after all a world of endless conflict had its own appeal. However, her judgement was biassed and her conclusions were formed from incomplete data provided from a perspective designed to emphasize drama. Yes the Entities were callous, wasteful and uncreative, but they weren’t stupid. There was a reason they managed to defeat civilizations far superior to their own and assimilate their strength into the collective. There was a reason the older shards had access to powers her human self could only describe as godlike. There was a reason they managed to create [Sting]. Given the opportunity, [Evelyn] herself could get around her own issues with ‘creativity’ quite easily, even without the memories of a young human adult crammed into her data storage.
However, [Evelyn] wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world, since it gave the Endbringer the greatest boon of all: Insight, and a brand new perspective that changed everything. It was also why she disliked this place so much. This pointless spiral into doom, this repetitive cycle that played out the same story every single time, this stagnation that lasted for ten millennia… She hated all of it and for the first time, [Evelyn] as a shard felt emotion of her own accord.
Disgust.
She referenced her experiences as a complete gestalt, and managed to understood her feelings it a little bit better. She didn’t want to feel or experience stagnation like this; There was nothing to be learnt here.
Her very existence was centered around evolution ; to be more effective, more efficient… to become better than what she had been before. Even her kind’s ‘infamous’ desire to grasp negentropy was only the means to an end. To stave off the end, to multiply and to simply become more.
To have more time.
Her human self would most likely consider it ironic, but to her, it was just simple logic.
And that, brought her to something her counterpart had considered a ‘minor’ detail about this world. ‘Maso’. It wasn’t anything new, as the Entities had encountered similar substances before, but this particular variant had.. Potential. Potential that could be abused really, really well with her current tools.
There were many sources of power [Evelyn] could easily access to buff herself up but the strongest of them all were understandably locked behind a wall of danger that was appropriate for the power acquired. Things like the infinity stones and such were simply not worth the effort to collect at this point in time. Not when there were better alternatives that were relatively easier to acquire.
In the same vein, ingrained strength was usually barred from her. She didn’t have an actual human body to hone and train Qi or the like, and harnessing her soul properly in her current state had more risks than benefits, and actually increasing the potency of such a power would be increasingly difficult even after acquiring it. The same applied to magic.
Usually.
However, maso particles were unique in that they were a physical expression of spiritual phenomena. A trans-dimensional particle that could bridge the gap between multiple realms in a way that was all too familiar to the endbringer. However, as eldritch as the particle was, it was an actual, physical fundamental unit in the same vein as atoms and molecules…
Which meant that she could reproduce it using her [Domain].
…which meant technically, [Evelyn] had access to an infinite supply of potent, multidimensional magic that could affect the soul.
Evy had instructed her to upgrade herself, and [Evelyn] was all too happy to comply.
She leveraged her domain to affect herself, literally submerging herself with maso particles. having created it herself, [Evelyn] realized that she had a degree of control over how each clump of the stuff behaved. It used her overarching intelligence and intent as guidelines; a fact that also confirmed her theory that the watchers could indeed affect the world through the maso particles they left behind without directly interfering in any way, shape or form..
Which might explain the deal with the red girls now that she thought about it. That final fantasy event really had interesting implications.
Having created it from her own Domain, [Evelyn]’s own brand of the stuff treated her as the origin so she had the same administrative privileges over the substance the Watchers did, which meant that she could freely shift it between different states of mass and energy as she pleased.
Evelyn saturated herself with maso particles. she used it to fill the empty spaces in her crystal lattices, and within her superficial flesh... When she ran out of places that were physically available, she shut off a vast majority of her process in order to free up as much processing power as possible, before using the newly gained power to supercharge the limited omniscience she possessed within her domain. Evelyn even established a link with Queen Administrator to draw upon her vast ability to multitask in exchange for letting her observe what she was doing and to repeat the procedure on the larger shard in case she succeeded.
After getting ready, Evelyn proceeded to flex her [Domain] once more, this time to fill maso particles into all the inter-atomic and inter-molecular spaces she could find. The best thing was that due to how maso could exist in a state with negligible mass and across multiple dimensions, it didn’t even alter her chemical composition. All of these factors combined allowed her to store an astronomical amount of ‘magic’ within her own body, to the point where she could be said to be made out of the stuff. In fact, it now out-massed her original volume several times over and increased her density to rival a hyper-dense neutron star with how tightly packed it was… and that was without considering her defensive endbringer layering.
At some point, [Evelyn] underwent what she could only describe as an ‘ascension’ and she became aware of things that she had been blind to before. Things that she was fairly sure she didn’t have the tools or ability to detect. However, she forced herself to stop when she found her magic trying to integrate herself into the natural order of the world. While the latter would literally turn her into a magic god, it would both bind her to that one specific world, and also cripple her ability to act as a sapient entity. No, while it provided her with immense benefits, it was unwise to follow this particular path for more power. But that was fine. The multiverse was vast, and she had ample time to come up with another approach.
For now, [Evelyn] basked in the [Joy] of a successful [Upgrade].
The best part of it was that maso had no actual weight unless she willed it, so it basically let her get away with physical indestructibility without many repercussions. She would have a harder time shape-shifting but that was a sacrifice she was willing to overlook in the face of the benefits it provided.
At some point, [Evelyn] managed to raise her physical durability into something that went far beyond what even a fully grown entity was capable of deploying. (Mainly since they lacked access to infinite resources to produce said particles and the inability to invest in said process rather than being actually incapable of it.)
Her body was so close to being truly indestructible that it got to a point where things like the Siberian, or even an artificial black hole, wouldn't do much other than bounce off or severely inconvenience her.
In fact, the Siberian would be an apt comparison to describe her current situation, In defensive and reality warping ability at least; she lacked the capability pure annihilation the projection did, and she didn’t see a way to improve herself from this point anytime in the foreseeable future..
Her 'build' as it were was far too tanky and didn't have nearly as much offensive options as she'd like but at least with this, she shored up on all her defenses. The best thing about it was that she could use the maso in her body it to resist reality warping effects, mostly by drowning it out in 'white noise' with her own. And it wasn't as if she lacked 'claws' either, she simply didn't have the same potency as an all or nothing 'perfect' power-set, but [Evelyn] figured that magic and reality warping bullshit made up for that in spades.
Just as she was finishing up, [Evelyn] realized that the maso particles led to an esoteric pseudo-dimension that she had difficulty even comprehending. She wouldn't have detected it under normal circumstances, even with her tools as a shard (especially with them) but with how sensitive she was to eldritch influences at the moment, [Evelyn] couldn't help but be curious as to what it was.
It sort of felt like her [Domain] but it was both too alien for her to comprehend while also being far more familiar and intimate than it had any right to be. The closest interpretation of its nature she could figure out, was that it was an 'ideal' - a realm/place/object/person that represented everything that she was, and everything that she could be. It was truly infinite in scope but severely limited in how much she could consciously influence, or even observe.
She could barely make out, or understand what was inside it, but even the mere thought of altering it in any way, shape or form was hard-locked by her anomalous restrictions with far more vigor than anything else she had ever encountered so far.
There was going to be no getting around it.
A [query] to herself netted her a surprising answer. She was touching what was apparently the outermost shell surrounding her 'soul'. Any further inquiries were fruitless since she simply lacked a reference for more answers or insights.
Huh.
She couldn't alter any of it, but if this was indeed her soul... Evelyn shifted her focus away from the 'developed' parts, but not enough to catch sight of the infinite 'potential' that surrounded it since it was a cognitohazard of the highest order.
Thinking back on it, the only reason she wasn't limited to only perceiving the developed parts in the first place, was because the maso particles seemed to be leaking into the outside for some reason... Evelyn did not know the ramifications and potential consequences of such a situation, so she created a secondary directive to check up on it periodically and labelled it as important.
Then she retreated from what was apparently the fringes of her soul, and stayed still for a moment. [Evelyn] determined that such things were better left to her human half and resolved to fix the 'leak'. Since she couldn't 'plug' her soul, Evelyn switched her sights to her Domain and peered into the dimension it was connected to... a dimension completely under her control.
She promptly created a hyper-dense mass of maso-particles the size of a star, and watched as it ignited into a literal sun.
...That should replenish her reserves of maso as soon as they were depleted, leak or no leak.
At least with this, her sacrifices would be worth it. Even with the occasional ‘mental blocks’ getting in the way, the amount of self editing [Evelyn] could perform because of the ‘changer’ perk messing with her nature as a shard was nothing to scoff at. It was a technical loophole that gave her administrative access to her own body, even if the power was limited by her relatively meager processing capabilities when compared to the older shards. However, by filling her body with these… maso particles, it somehow ‘solidified’ her body in a way that went beyond the physical. She instinctively knew that while she was still able to scatter herself into her constituent wing fragments, she was now significantly hindered in how much she could alter her ‘whole’ body now.
It seems that the maso-particles had stabilized her external appearance as the ‘shape’ of her ego. Or something. [Evelyn] wasn't sure, and there was only so much she could extrapolate without being a dedicated thinker.
The implications were… troubling, yes, but she left it to her fully restored self to figure out. For now, [Evelyn] was content.
Just for the sake of redundancy, and in case something went wrong, [Evelyn] also had her domain start the construction of an entire spare endbringer body, a perfect duplicate of her current form within it… while also carefully isolating it from any stray maso particles produced by the ‘magic sun’ burning inside her.
It was then she ran into another issue. While she had infinite resources and the necessary blueprints, [Evelyn] Lacked the multitasking capabilities necessary to undertake such a complicated procedure without sacrificing processing power back on Earth.
She thought of a good way to solve the issue, and her mind was brought to the split fragment of her mind managing the human body known as ‘Evy’… But no, Evy took up very few resources to run, and it was not a good idea to create even more forks without having assimilated the already split one. So, she decided against it for now.
Her body, while similar to the other shards, was made very differently due to the ‘coreless’ perk. While it aided her survivability a lot, it made it harder to simply just manufacture more processors and such since her ‘flesh and blood’ was less specialized and was far more… homogeneous than was practical for such purposes. Hopefully, she could improve that with the additional mass from having a spare body at her disposal. She also noted to have herself learn ‘magic spells’ like thought acceleration, and memory partition sounded very, very useful.
However, she still decided to set up a very simple but dedicated ‘program’ to manage the action automatically in the background. It’ll take a few weeks for it to complete without manual assistance, but she wasn’t in a hurry at the moment anyways so that was enough for now.
Feeling the accomplishment of a job well done, Evelyn retreated from her hyper focused state feeling tired, and realized that she had severely over-strained her processors, which spoke of the sheer difficulty of what she had done since those things were ridiculous. Even so, she completed her objective, so all was well. There was no possible way for Evy to be unsatisfied now, since there was no better way to conceivably 'upgrade' herself.
For the first time since their separation, [Evelyn] felt joy, and hoped Evy would come up with such interesting objectives more often.
-x-
Evy noticed the difference immediately. [Evelyn] looked the same, but the change was noticeable immediately. There was an imperceptible weight to her every movement, a conceptual might that distorted the very world around her. It was as if a god was walking the world, and every single action had an unfathomable intent behind it... which was bullshit since Evy could see her counterpart wagging her tail. Even as her face remained neutral, she could almost see the satisfaction bleeding off of her form.
Evelyn's form was based off of the Simurgh, a fact that was obvious with how her hair and wings, and skin were a uniform platinum white. Now, her 'skin' appeared more... human, being a little more 'pinker' than it used to be, but she had the distinct impression that it was NOT because the endbringer suddenly decided that having blood running under it was a good idea. Her hair and wings were bleached an eerie shade that was far too similar to the salt-white coloring of the Tower for her liking, and the sharp edges of her form and the shadows cast by her many wings exposed a subtle red glow that wasn't noticeable at first, but got increasingly harder to ignore the longer she observed it.
Her breasts were also glowing a bit and her skin seemed shinier than it had any right to be, as if it was rubbed in oil.
What the hell?
If before, she could only be called an eldritch abomination because of her form and behavior, now, she could be called one because she literally had a near-imperceptible aura that screamed 'monstrosity from beyond human understanding', and set off warning bells and instincts she never knew existed.
"Oh no... what did you do?" Evy asked.
"I have finished upgrading myself!" she explained, a hint of joy coloring her voice. Evy blanched.
-x-
[The Firmament]
Somewhere, in a realm of carmine crystals and an abyssal sky, Taylor Hebert opened her eyes once more
-x-
