It meant that simply sailing through deep space as if it was a wide-open ocean was actually extremely dangerous... and although the things seemed to avoid the gravity strings the Phlos represented, it didn't mean they HAD to. If they parked on top of one, well, even a Rantha wasn't going to survive that.
Since they also tended to fill a cubic light year around themselves with the mad psyche waves of non-baryonic life, sending the average psion or non-Forsaken out there without some real protection was also a pretty bad idea. Can't imagine why the psions avoided deep space, strange, strange...
Therefore, finding a route was actually pretty important, if we wanted to fly it repeatedly.
We were also getting a rather horrific view of the galaxy, as we started filling in all the empty systems between the worlds and systems that were part of the Tellurian Empire. Needless to say, most of those systems weren't empty at all...
Infested nest-worlds of the Mi-Go. Hollowed sterile eggs of the Grays. Overbuilt grandiose cities of the Great Race and their bio-slaves. Silent systems devoid of almost all life, with the faint background necroic presence of sleeping Tekrons. Systems stripped to the mantles of organic life by passing biovore fleets of whatever species. Systems inhabited by the explosively breeding populations of goblins, forming up for their eternal territorial expansions.
Pastoral systems seeded long ago by the elvar, and sometimes inhabited by their scattered tribes, as well. Occasionally one with one of their rare Starhomes orbiting a lonely sun, flotillas of sailed ships like deadly butterflies flitting through the system. Systems inhabited by alien races, some of terrifying psionic power, some completely primitive, and others making their first tentative steps out into the stars, and still others local hegemons of stars off the beaten path, thinking they were powerful and expansionistic, and not realizing just how big and dangerous the galaxy was.
Ruins of worlds, seared and shattered by long ago wars... or perhaps just environmentally devastated, and never resettled.
Lot and lots of those...
They'd stumbled across half a dozen lost colony worlds, most of them regressed to the atomic age or even the medieval age, the lost glories of their ancestors forgotten, warring with one another over territory or other minor differences. These would be resources and bases for us, and Rantha teams were already engaged in taking them over, with mixed levels of violence required. Rifts shuttled key supplies and personnel, and development was proceeding, much to the dismay of the former ruling and wealthy classes who couldn't adapt to the new paradigm.
What could I do personally while I waited, that was worth involving a Thirteen? Anywhere any of the Rift-cutting kids reached I could reach in basically less than a minute, so finding places to stretch my legs and butcher enemies en masse was literally a stroll away, no matter which side of the galaxy it was on.
Technically, I didn't need to be anywhere in particular, and going out and finding stuff was something the kids were doing. I was either an emergency response team, or a big heavyweight invited in to have a little fun.
On an individual basis, that basically meant being involved in a ground fight. Ground fights that didn't involve being bombed from orbit or by overwhelming firepower were just as easily pursued by my kids, especially if they didn't involve Greater Demons.
Which meant I wasn't busy, and the kids got to do everything. I found myself smirking.
Well, if that was the case... I was going to have fun wherever and whenever I wanted. The kids simply weren't going to be allowed to have all the fun.
Perhaps it might be time to really start building a myth, in the funnest way possible...
-------
And that was how I started a legend.
Hair black, a tattooed mask on an eyeless face, a singular soulsword the drow of Gloomheart could all recognize... and tricked out to the nines to kill.
The smart ones, once they saw all my Tails, the Arakne Arms, and the stylized Phoenix Cloak, might have realized that I was going very, very easy on them in the arena. Some others would only get spurred to greater efforts to fight me.
Unfortunately, they were having a devil of a time. Temporal tiddlywinks got them nowhere, either forwards or back. Using psionic divinations literally slammed into the mountain wall of a Null. Hypercognitive calculators kept spitting out errors.
Most annoyingly of all, I kept moving around!
By the time the drow got wind of where I appeared, I was already gone, walking off through a slit in space rapidly sealed by the vivus reinforcing the Veil behind me. Behind me, I left a lot of stories, and bodies burning away.
My preferred sites of battle were Warp Incursions, biovore invasions, drow raids, and goblin fights, largely in that order.
Ranthas were traveling the galaxy as fast as they might, getting those planetary coordinates, moving on to the next ones. Each planet was a place to set up shop and start expanding influence... or a place to fight, to gain Karma and claw your way up to a place of prominence over the bones of invaders, insurrectionists, madmen, and your allies shooting you in the back.
A golden blade with a black edge, a trembling note signing inspiration to those who heard it, and doom to those it targeted. I entered battlefields, and I had fun.
Yes, it was butchery, slaughter, and massacre. There was no other word for it. The Akasha began to scream with my kill totals, as vivus fed them and their last thoughts into their racial collectives.
Tremble, oh oooo oh, Tremble, she comes...
World to world, battlezone to battlezone. I drove headfirst into unbelievable carnage, catastrophes, holocausts of war, and screaming battlefields where sane people just shouldn't go, where you couldn't see for the blood and bone dust in the air, couldn't hear for the screaming explosions constantly all around, couldn't think for the maddening psychic churning in the mindscape, and couldn't move for the heaped dead and churned earth that covered the ground.
I cut my way through all of it, Chalice Singing a dirge of doom for everything that stood in my way, and the dead burned in vivus, and took all the other corpses nearby with them as they flamed.
Shooting akimbo is virtually impossible for humans due to how their brains work. So not an issue with multiple thought-streams. All the targets were targeted, all my shooters shot, and it didn't matter what vector you were in. I was looking in all of them and was willing to shoot you in them.
Sometimes I even walked through the wounded stations as the soldiers gawked, and healed tens of thousands of them with Chalice, and Regenerated hundreds of them from wounds that would have cost them limbs or organs or worse.
I lit up the battlefields with non-stop laser fire from Paten and his little brother Host, my hands crackling with the lightning that powered them, with force bolts like miniature comets pumping out one per second to explode on other targets as well. Arakne Arms rotated in any direction to acquire and shoot down the masses of the weak in unending rapid-fire rows of hard-light carried Banefire.
My Tails were up and spitting out spikes of hard-light as well, volley after volley of driving, piercing impacts that could flex and shoot in pretty much any direction, disrupting, showing off, cutting down, creating openings I cut through with Chalice.
Faith spun around me, and unending choruses of ranged fire rang off him impotently, occasionally slicing through someone with his bladed edge, impaling things on foot-long spikes and blowing them off with Sun Strikes at my touch, and endless ranged attacks were bounced right back at their senders or their friends to help add to the toll.
The public had never really seen anyone ever fighting like I was. The combination of strength and speed was unique. The dark elves could sort of imitate the speed and grace, but their finesse-style bouncy-bounce no-hit-me was not what I was doing. I was heaving urgobs in power armor around, I was blocking Warp Demon weapons that weighed as much as I did, I was ripping hatches off tanks mechanical and biological to get to the insides, and I just... didn't... stop.
-------
Tremble, oh ooooo oh, Tremble, she comes...
Trooper Farnart's heart nearly stopped when the sound washed past him.
He'd heard it before, seen it on some scratchy vids some troopers had managed to download, stuff the higher-ups were trying to shut down, and which somehow got through and proliferated faster than the Mekkers could shut them down.
It was hard to get details, it was moving too fast, but those notes just hung in the mind.
Tremble, oh ooooo oh Tremble, she comes...
The screaming of the hordes of the Warp seemed to just quietly go away, the ripple washed through his mind like a cool water in the mouth of a dehydrated man. The madness and fear steadied, washed aside by a rush of... calm. Implacability. Of dire purpose, as sure as death, and a hunger carried on a tide of fear, coming... coming for the Warp!
A black shadow trailing fire blurred past them, moving too fast, falling too fast to the hordes crawling up the hundred-foot walls of Findvalen Prime, into the seemingly limitless numbers of the Warped below.
Hard light reached out ahead, twenty-pulses a second rapid-fire lasers spitting out of psionic arms and crackling, lightning-encapsulated fists extending from her waist, sweeping in endless swathes and patterns into the horde below. Lesser demons exploded in the black and white flames burning about the hard violet light of the guns, while streaks of white force unerringly found the skulls of the tougher, harder demons in passing, and added them to the exploding circle of white around her.
A shield of force-circled metal spun around her, limbs flying in its passing, sparking and flaring as psychic attacks bounced off it back into the mass of demons that had flung them, undeterred, unaffected, and the pulses of black, white, and violet swept through the area, making sure nothing survived.
She had a Sword in both hands, just like the vid. Even here he saw the five Stars burning along the blade, and the two Suns spiraling up around it. She was cutting and killing before she hit the ground, arcs of gold, black, white, and other hues scything out, and the strongest of the demons died explosively, showering their fellows with the flowering and hungry unwhite flames of the vivus energy whose discovery was said to be responsible for all of this.
Like melting candles, the demons burned en vivus, and dissolved into nothing.
There was no pause as she hit the ground, falling the hundred feet in under a second, and then off and running as strokes of her Sword moved too fast in all directions, and reaping scythes of endlessly detonating Sun Strokes tore apart anything strong enough to stand in front of her.
Laser fire and force pulses blew apart minor and lesser demons, and the Tails rising up behind her oriented on anything that survived them, finishing them, or perhaps starting the killing process.
Sun Strikes went off like clockwork as she glided through the mass of the demons. They didn't seem packed shoulder to shoulder in front of her... they seemed like burning effigies scattered into the winds as she crashed through and scattered them.
And over it all, those notes, that Song, continued, and drove itself into all of their souls.
And now, Trooper Farnart could hear the words...