July 1st, 629

Umara glanced to the side at John as he walked straight to the access terminal. The Royals around him were oblivious to their presence.

It was only team one inside this Nexus today. After tackling the first few together, they figured that there was no need for the entire Desert Eagles group to handle every single one. They could split the two teams. Currently Team 2, with Aki in the lead, was handling another Nexus a few hundred miles away.

When John killed the few Royals in his way at the terminal, the others moved. Feiden decapitated several with a swing of his spear while Umara let her spell release. There was an Authority 10 and it wasn’t a King Blood, so Kwon and Song were able to handle it themselves. Still, she couldn’t get every last Royal without exerting herself more than necessary.

She let the others handle their targets, and Pup simultaneously jumped out of her soul. His snow white fur with icy blue accents sparked with lightning and spatial cracks, shooting across the room like he was teleporting and ripping apart the royals near him with his sharp teeth.

Umara smiled at her familiar. She didn’t often let the Flicker out to play because her fights had often been too dangerous. For the several years after she got him, he had spent the majority of the time constantly catching up to her strength. He fed off her power, but she had grown so fast, and the enemies she fought were so dangerous, that he rarely got the opportunity to join her on equal grounds.

That had changed in the last year, however. The Flicker had gotten bigger, stronger, and faster. His body was packed so full of mana that it sprinkled off his fur like snowflakes, filling the ambient atmosphere with a domain of power. Simply being near the Flicker was oppressing for the Scourge.

More than that, Pup had learned from Umara’s magic. Flickers didn’t learn magic the same way humans did. They didn’t learn spells, but they did garner comprehensions about the elements. More importantly, they could pull from two of the three energies of Magika. Pup had always been a Vigor-Mana hybrid, with a strong body and equally strong magic.

Since he had been with Umara, a Warlock, for so long his body actually fell behind his magic. Umara could see her comprehensions of space, air, and even fire coursing through Pup’s manipulations of mana. In time, he would learn to utilize more extreme levels of magic, especially as it pertained to space. Still, even right now, the large wolf with wings had used a technique similar to Feiden’s own Auric technique of spatial bending for unrivaled speed.

She also knew that he was trying to learn to fly. With more time outside during Iron Legion’s campaign, especially while being among his own kind, he had been honing his air magic to put those wings to good use. He had already tried getting Umara on his back to take her soaring through the clouds with the Owlykats, which ended with several crashlandings.

Things like those were a work in progress, but it was undeniable now that Pup had finally begun to acquire enough combat prowess to join her in these more dangerous battles. The wolf could rip apart Authority 9 Royals like the hearty meals they were. And as he killed and ate more, he brought his Vigor and strength up to standard. The Nexus hearts they had been harvesting had been a more potent meal than anything else could be.

Truly, Flickers were the antithesis of the Scourge, entities born for the sole purpose of balancing the power dynamic. It was a shame that there were so few of them now.

The room was cleared out without ceremony, and within seconds, John had taken control of the room’s enchantments. Barriers were deactivated, and unlike last time, these Royals hadn’t scrambled to teleport the heart away. Iron Legion’s Brigades had yet to start sieging the place.

With a signal from John, that quickly changed.

They felt the Nexus rock as missiles made impact. Jaya and Blackblood went to the entrance to guard it, the others hanging around and getting the heart ready to harvest.

Umara leaned against a console next to John, watching his SEER Knife flicker with corruptive power. She still felt shivers whenever she glanced at that Neural Gem. There was no more potent concentration of sadism or malice in the world. It was an orb designed for the sole purpose of sprouting the Scourge’s most feared entity.

Corruption was a greater mercy than being hooked to a Death Shrine.

John’s Psyka pulsed with complexity she couldn’t begin to understand, and then, he ripped the knife out, sheathing it and looking up at the heart still beating with potent mana and vigor, still hanging from the ceiling.

“Jackpot.”

“You found one?”

Umara’s brows raised slightly. They had raided several a Nexus by now and at every one, John had been searching for a more developed intelligence. These hearts were operated by and attached to a neural network. The first one they found had been an undeveloped one, bare bones and being generally unsubstantial.

Most of them were like this, but apparently, this one was different.

John nodded to her.

“Yeah, this one is actually connected to something beyond this Nexus. Their network is beyond this terminal though. I need the source.”

He said that before crouching down a bit. Umara stared as he launched himself up with explosive power, reaching the heart and grabbing an artery.

He pulled himself on top of it before looking up. Umara used some magic to let herself float up toward him.

Then, with an illusion, John created a circle on the ceiling.

“Can you cut through here?”

“Sure.”

She created a fire spell, a concentrated torch appearing above her pointed fingers. Then she went around, cutting where John designated.

Once all the way through, the cut portion of the ceiling fell, revealing a large mass of brain and tissue. Umara cringed at how nasty it looked.

“Nice…”

John muttered, raising his hand to the wrinkly brain. Then, from his fingers shot out thin connections of visible light blue Psyka. They embedded themselves into the brain, and from them sprinkled out shifting runes and arrays that slowly covered the entire brain.

“Show me where you lead.”

Umara glanced at him as he worked, unable to see his face through his hyper-advanced helmet.

After the arrays covered the whole brain, they started blinking with power. The area near John’s hand bloomed into a structure, looking like a port or a sheath.

John took out his SEER Knife and slowly pushed it into the sheath, the previously blue Psyka turning purple as its computational power spread. The arrays and comprehensible runes warped into esoteric forms, becoming more violent than subtle.

Some parts of the brain were seared due to the sheer influx of power, yet still, John’s power only drove deeper.

All was going well, until it wasn’t.

“Uh oh.”

Umara heard John suddenly mutter, her stomach dropping.

Right after, a nearby portion of the ceiling exploded out with blood, revealing a writhing mass of more neural tissue. Except it was pulsing with greenish-red activity.

Umara could feel the wrath behind that power, its intentions hardly contained compared to John’s.

She asked worriedly.

“What’s happening?”

“Something noticed me.”

“What kind of something?”

“A much more powerful Nexus, and the entity overseeing it. I don’t recognize what exactly it is.”

Umara tried to let out a sigh, but she wasn’t relaxed enough to do that. She felt the horrible intellectual power of that poisonous red energy fill the room, putting her on edge.

It slowly encroached on what territory John had taken. It was a battle Umara couldn’t comprehend, but it was easy to see that John wasn’t winning. She could feel it from his body language. He wasn’t very happy.

Regardless of what he wanted though, he was driven out faster with every bit the enemy took. Then, he suddenly ripped out his SEER Knife, his arrays exploding alongside the entire brain.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

A massive amount of blood and neural fluids ruptured from the organ, pouring down on top of them. Thankfully Umara could cover herself with a shield, but John wasn’t so lucky, his suit being drenched.

He eventually sighed as the enemy withdrew with mocking tones of Psyka.

“Well, that didn’t go as planned.”

“You think?”

“But it wasn’t without its fruits. Turns out there’s a whole chain of Nexus brains. Disgustingly powerful ones too.”

“So it seems.”

The two jumped to the ground, Umara burning off all the crap on John’s suit, turning him into a human torch for a minute.

She asked her question after Feiden chopped down the heart, allowing them to stow it and start leaving.

“So what does this mean for us moving forward?”

“Nothing different. We might have to face something with powerful Psykic abilities, but until then we just need to keep bringing down every Nexus we find. We’ll sweep across the continent like we already are, and each one we kill means one less brain in the chain for that entity to wield.”

“Alright. But what do those brains even do?”

“Hard to say. I didn’t pull many decipherable memories, but chances are it's an intelligence network and communication array at the minimum, responsible for command and control. I was able to get a glimpse of the entire network. Unfortunately that didn’t give me locations, but I at least know numbers so I’ll know if we miss any. Only downside is that they know we know. We likely won’t be harvesting any more hearts after today.”

Umara sighed, but at the least, she figured it really didn’t matter. They would be destroying every Nexus they came across anyway. While the Scourge would be able to retain these strategic structures like the hearts or brains, that didn’t change the fact that they’d be driven out. She wasn’t sure how valuable they were, but ultimately, so long as they weren’t on the continent at the end of all this, their value was inconsequential.

John still looked concerned though. When she saw him refusing to start leaving with the rest of them, she stopped and frowned.

“John? You okay?”

“...You know, I always thought that the Scourge would have monsters specializing in Psykic magic. Unholy Light used it as a supplement to its battle style, and Despair is supposed to be the primary Psykic threat. But there’s no reason they wouldn’t have monsters like Shrikes. I always wondered why we hadn’t encountered one though. You’d think they’d sprinkle some through their forces.”

Umara remained silent, staring at him with confusion written across her face.

Until a rifle appeared in his hands, causing her mana to flare on instinct. She sought out any possible threats nearby, and she wasn’t the only one. The others saw him and went on high alert, Auras pervading the entire room like they were all fighting each other to discover the threat first.

Umara focused on her mind though. John’s instincts were almost never wrong. It was just unfortunate that his warnings had gotten a little less direct since he started hearing the metaphysical music.

John stepped around the place, Psychic runes fluttering around his arms. He went blurry in her vision, speaking to how much power he was dumping into his illusion magic even though he was exempting them from its effects.

Then he froze, his rifle snapping to the ceiling where the destroyed brain was, firing a single shot. Like something invisible fell from the ceiling, his barrel traced downward to the floor, his steps starting to circle something they couldn’t see.

Umara wanted to torch the entire area, but held back. She trusted his judgment. If he wasn’t asking for help, that usually meant he had it under control.

Despite that, she still felt his presence in her head. He was guarding them, just in case.

Then he spoke.

“No, no. Don’t look at them. Otherwise I’ll just end you here.”

His words made Umara tense, his rifle still trained on something in the center of the room.

“That’s right. Don’t think I can’t sense it. I’m your enemy here, so drop the field and face me directly, you fat fucking maggot.”

His curses seemed to work, because a second later, the enemy revealed itself with a flash of Psyka.

It really was a fat fucking maggot. Umara cringed at the disgusting parasite in front of her, a legless, carapaced bug two feet tall, just as wide, and six feet long.

Its head chittered with burrowing fangs and sharp extendable teeth that writhed with unconcealed wrath. After revealing itself, she was finally able to sense the disgustingly potent Psyka it contained within its body, and all of it was bristling with intelligent anger and madness.

It obviously posed no physical threat to them. It didn’t even have limbs, and based on its movements, it could move about as fast as its form suggested.

But Umara knew that when power lacked in one area, it was usually present in another. Poisonous Psyka filled the room, making Umara nauseous just from being in the vicinity. Its power seeped through her barrier despite her best efforts. Psyka was always tricky to deal with, mainly because she never had to. John was one of the only threatening users of Psyka on the entire continent.

She made a mental note to work on this deficiency of hers. If there were more monsters like this hiding around, she’d need to be able to protect her mind without John there.

For now, she decided to alleviate the pressure with some enchantments devised by him for that purpose. The nausea went away, the Psyka driven out, protecting her from even John’s influence.

“You want to answer some of my questions? Or would you rather I put you through a mental blender? Bullets tend to be a bit more merciful, I’ll have you know.”

The maggot responded to John’s words with screeches and sparks of Psyka. A violent response, but not an attack, and nothing Umara was able to understand. However they were communicating, it was with a method she couldn’t make sense of. The pulses and waves of Psyka they exchanged with their verbal sounds held much more than auditory information. They were more like exchanges of intention and context, a language that surpassed words or vocabulary.

“Hm, is that right? And that thing I talked to. What was it?”

More screeches were his response, Umara getting glimpses of what the maggot was talking about.

She picked up on faint images of a grand being, untouchable and god-like, nigh omniscient. They were grand interpretations, but Umara knew that the maggot was likely exaggerating. It could only speak about things as it understood them. John would know that as well.

Either way, it was clear that whatever John had ‘spoken’ with was incredibly powerful, a dedicated entity managing the entire network of Nexuses and their cerebral components. It wasn’t to be taken lightly, and it was definitely pissed off after John’s intrusion.

Umara could understand. Anything that involved John’s SEER Knife wasn’t likely to be pretty. It could kill by frying a being’s nervous system, probably one of the worst ways to go, and Umara knew that John had already gone through more than a few generations of improvements over the last year.

She’d be pissed off too if he stabbed her with that.

The maggot was particularly angry as well. Whether it was because John hurt it with his intrusion or because he had disrespected the grand being it served, she didn’t know.

He continued asking it questions, and he continued getting shrieks in response. The Psyka exchanged between them made Uamra’s head hurt when she tried to understand it, so she shut it out and kept her guard up, sending the others to guard their exit. She couldn’t know if the maggot had alerted some Royals, even though John would have likely caught something like that.

Then, after another couple minutes, it seemed John’s diplomacy broke down. The maggot suddenly flared with dark Psykic arrays, Psyka pouring through the entire room.

Umara felt her enchantments crank to full power, and even then, she felt venomous tendrils slither through and try to prod at her brain. It was trying to burrow into her memories, and it took everything in her power not to tear the space around the maggot in half on reflex.

The entire room was filled with dense arrays, but just as fast as they bloomed, they were smothered and snuffed out. John’s own magic reached out and shattered all manner of formations the maggot created, clamping down on its power before engaging it in a battle of pure mental prowess.

They simple stared at each other, both of them silent, but the clashes were visible. Formations lashed against each other, looking like simple streams of pure energy, but being anything but. Each stream was filled with dense runes, intentions, and visualizations. So dense that Umara almost couldn’t make them out.

They were throwing out bundles of such vast information so fast that every second, they were dumping out more runes and arrays than were contained in Umara’s most complex spatial spells. She couldn’t imagine how fast their minds were working to compete against each other in a battle of pure complexity and information.

Umara knew that John had worked on his mental magic. He had killed a man simply by looking at him, melting his brain inside his skull. She knew that he was capable of incredible things with Psyka, but seeing it like this put it into a different perspective.

She was no stranger to complexity. Her Aura made sure of that. Still, she had always been heavily limited by her mind, and seeing the amount of information being thrown out made her feel sorely inadequate and horribly unprepared.

She wondered what she would do if John attempted to attack her with something like that. Would she be able to resist, or would it come down to whether or not she could kill him before he could melt her brain? How much would her Mana be able to protect her before such complexity?

She could see those incoherent tendrils between them become more structured. From John extended a pathway of pure Psyka, a structure that his attacks flowed through. Like circuitry, it reached out toward the maggot and slowly gained ground. The maggot fought desperately, screaming all the while, lashing out with explosions of Psyka in an attempt to drive John back.

But with a fraction of the Psyka, John was able to supercede those wanton attacks. Against programmed magic, the maggot was outclassed.

Eventually, John’s attacks reached the maggot. That’s when he lowered the weapon, taking on a relaxed stance.

His Psyka flowed toward the maggot, surrounding its body and shooting into its head with sharp spikes. It stabbed into both its brain as well as the most concentrated portions of its nervous system. Umara could see its neural fibers light up like fireworks.

The maggot started thrashing about with its body, slamming its head against the ground with agonizing screams. Eventually, it cracked its own head open, its brain exploding through the fracture, its screams going silent.

John just stood there, staring at it a bit longer before humming.

“Alright then. Let’s get out of here. I’ve gotten everything I can from this place.”

Nobody responded, most of their gazes lingering on the bug a bit longer before they turned around and started walking out.

No words were exchanged. Umara noticed Blackblood was dead silent, his body tense as John walked by. The usual quips were nowhere to be found.

She could understand. It unnerved even her when she saw John do things like that. She would have no sympathy for the Scourge, but something about being killed like that, having your mind be put through a blender that drove you to such madness that you’d kill yourself just to end it, made her shiver just thinking about it. She had thought similar things when they encountered a Death Shrine for the firs time.

It was an unnatural way to die. She had seen enough death in her life from both humans and Scourge to be numbed to it. Still, both humans and Scourge handled death in a ‘normal’ fashion.

What John had just done overstimulated the same part of her brain that felt like it was being fried the first time she had seen a person be torn apart alive. That part of her brain hadn’t reacted to anything for a long time.

Seeing this made that part light right back up.

She followed behind John as they left the Nexus, not noticing how wide her eyes were as they walked.