“Your choice of weapon layout is notably more efficient than we have observed in the past,” the Tribute informed us.

“Outstanding. You’ll know it’s us if our weapons are Sun-charged as we leave. Record these spectrometer readings.” A dozen or so optical sensors focused on Beat and Chalice. “Otherwise, you’re looking at illusions or shapechangers. Waste them.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Shall we, my dear?” Briggs asked loftily, totally out of place being as scuffed-up as his armor was.

“We shall.” Chalice hummed a low, somber, and very ominous tune. No, we weren’t on stealth protocol here. These things were going to be using magic and psionics and natural attacks, not plasma shooters. Probably. And we both had Radiant resistance, anyways.

Humming along with Chalice while Beat drummed in tune, we started inside.

------------

“jRaztl,” I spat, as I put a beaked face into a bank of monitors overgrown with psychotropic oozes, blew a Sun Strike into its brain via my Claw in its skull, and its companion gawked as Chalice plunged through his fantastically ornate breastplate, flaring ominously and whoops!

He did a twitching dance, his skull exploded and brains lit off vivic.

Another beaked twit in plumed armor came screeching in, wielding two curved dire scimitars. I shook my head at him, tilted my chin sideways, and pointed across my chest.

He looked over as thirty pounds of adamantine thundered through the air, blasted through his very fast crossing parry as if the piddly little blades weren’t there, and blew his skull apart instantly.

The same blow dipped and rose, and lifted some corrupted guardbot on four... tentacle-legs right off its foundation, despite it weighing at least a thousand pounds, and durasteel shattered like cheese and went flying at the impact. Briggs stepped to one side, into yet another of the bird-faced demon knights and their glowy blades leaping at him, his elbow and mass driving into its chest, and there was a massive crunch as metal, bone, and meat gave way. Briggs drew his elbow out and automatically cut back in the same motion with a sword hand, perfectly timing it to chop right through the knight’s throat like an axe, while spinning and pirouetting smoothly enough to make a ballerina look heavy as Beat came down and around, burying itself in the side of another guardbot whose demonically-powered lasers were bouncing wildly off his armor to no effect.

I leapt past him as my stingers fired back into the bigger guardbot, who wasn’t actually destroyed until four Construct-Bane Spikes lined themselves up in the gaping gash Briggs had made and did a total number on its insides.

My Arakne Arms were on pick-off duty for light drones, which seemed to be standard triangular ship drones now accentuated with skeletal raven rings and screaming, fire-spitting malformed mutant screams. Paten was staying busy with force-bolts and the occasional pulsing strafe of over-charged lasfire, frost dripping off it as it was magically super-cooled against the constant firing.

Chalice’s Shardings spun ahead of me as Faith plowed through a nasty cavalcade of plasma discharges (opportunistic bastards), and Paten spat waves of lightning and psychic pulses to force a way through.

That Weaver ahead of us was not at all happy to see me coming, wading through psychic and magical attacks of all sorts that just faded into nothing around me and Briggs. It was actually looking kind of frantic... a force field or magical defenses would stop the magic cold, deflect it, ablate it, or slough it off. Instead, it was all just coming at us... and then vanishing.

No fizzles. No resistance. No blocking, no deflection. Just... gone, like it just dove into an invisible hole and went missing.

Some multi-limbed thing, all talons and steely feathers and cybered speed underneath, jumped at me, and got to enjoy Star Cores and Sun Strikes to the breastbone. As lethal Corona discharges were shooting through it and its claws were dinging off my Golden Nog armor, Faith was levered up under it by my Arakne Arms. It lifted up just in time for a weighty sonic boom-Beat to take it in the side, slam it sideways, and send a lot of feathers flying as the mangled remnants of a parrot’s caw somehow found its way out of it.

My Tails were discharging Spikes to the face, which these fellows didn’t like very much, as Chalice and Beat drummed their doom steadily and we waded through goddamn everything they were throwing at us.

The Weaver kicked back as Paten’s Bolts shed their Sun Strikes and buried themselves in its blank face with the eagle’s eyes... which doubled in size just before a big fat Hammer roared overhead with a crack of splitting air and smashed precisely between them. The six-armed freak and its spell-spitting equi-fingered hands went flying twenty feet back, cleared the railing, and struck the wall.

Beat struck the wall, too, rather loudly, and right on rhythm, too.

Missing its head, the Weaver dropped towards the floor of the Throne chamber thirty feet below, while Beat bounced back to Briggs’ waiting hand... after the plasma flamers on his forearms filled the room to either side of me with fourth state of matter fun.

Spikes and Paten waved, and Chalice went in the other direction. The room only held the fallen now, and us outsiders coming over to inspect the mess below.

The eight-armed, twenty-foot Great Weaver with his Warpstaff adorned with the head of a Greater Demon of one of the other Warp Gods looked back up at us with bewitching, all-seeing eyes, and tried to launch some sort of mental assault on us, judging by the etheric discharges crackling on the way to us.

They burned to nothing and faded into oblivion, respectively. We kinda just ignored him, pulling away as more guardbots adorned with demon flesh and ether-shooters started taking wailing, ghostly pulse-cannon shots at us, and we went off the other way.

-Damn,- Briggs /said, almost wiping at his eyes, -Had to wipe all that shit off the auto-record. I am not relaying that to anyone, you hear me?-

-I do.- I chopped a bar out of the way and slid through underneath, somersaulting to hit the wall with my feet, and kicking off to drive right into a mass of shrieking demon knights, feathered bots, and four and six-limbed Weavers trying to light everything up with lots of colors not in the visual spectrum.

Briggs came down with the more traditional vault and heavy landing. It must have been just a coincidence when my Tails wrapped around and threw two knights that way, and he came down very heavily on their necks, yup yup.

The big Weaver was trying to Warp reality all around us, and when that wasn’t working, along with all the time-space crap and illusion-throwing and mind-bending and whatnot, it finally tried direct Summonings for more help, Animating the corrupted computers that were growing demonic flowers and vines, and tossing some really impressive Elemental attacks at us.

One hit, Animated shit was Dispelled. Summonings ran into Interdiction and stopped. Trying to fly... oh, sorry. Trying to Teleport away and keep your distance, aw, shucks, man, sucks to be you...

To say we weren’t too discriminating wasn’t far from the truth, and we were spreading around the vivus with true generosity, great speed, and efficiency. Of course, there were whole banks of machines, monitors, computers, processors, conduits, pipes, cables, and what-not, mechanical and demonic both, all of it blowing into a flaming mess, filling the air with some really nasty chemicals and fumes that occluded vision and really messed with the psychic shit... and didn’t really bother either of us at all.

I was precision, Briggs was brutal power, and we were playing off one another with heightened telepathic coordination accented by inhumanly fast reflexes, feeding our awareness of the battlefield into one another and making a really thorough map of the area, everything in it, and behind it, too.

Warp-bots squealed and died, frying and rusting away as vivus ate the corruption pulling at their very atoms. Demon knights were manhandled in disbelief that we could actually be so strong, and the mercilessly accurate fire from Paten and my Tails wasn’t making things any easier for them.

They were having problems seeing us, as Briggs and I weren’t exactly psi-actives and easy to track by such. Of course, they could just follow the screams of the dying, but that meant running into what was eliciting those screams, which spurred some quick tactical reevaluations of one’s personal situation, and sending more chaff in front to soften up their enemies, who didn’t seem to be softening...

------

Briggs and I looked up at the big Weaver, clutching its Skullstaff and surrounded with some hummingly powerful Wards that were clawing at the skin of reality and trying to do some really sick things with it.

Reality was as hard as adamant and telling them to piss the fuck off.

The twat couldn’t really see us, given the smoke and fumes were so thick and not dispersing easily, but we both had Smokesight, so no problems on our end.

-We can’t kill it,- Briggs /sighed, and I nodded. The vivic explosion would wash over the Throne behind it, covered in a sickeningly entwined mixture of flowering vines and psychedelic crystals in way too many colors in too many spectrums, and basically purge a good chunk of, or all, of it.

That would take down the Warpzone field, and there would be some reality explosions as all the energy in the expanded zone blew out over the planet, rewriting stuff... and all that Warp stuff packed into that huge area would suddenly be in a much, much smaller area, and looking for something to fight.

Because they were always looking for something to fight.

So, we literally dared not take down the Warp Field. However, that didn’t mean we wanted things to continue as they were.

And hey, we had the thing running the whole project standing right in front of us, both defending the Great Work behind it and threatening it.

-Take that Staff out of commission. -

-Got it.- Beat thundered as I charged in, sweeping past me into one of the spindly chicken-legs of this rainbow-plumaged, multi-armed faceless twat, and there was a polite crack as that leg was knocked out of balance. The Weaver scrambled to stay up, no flying you twat, as I shot down below, and Chalice sang a litany of fear in Demonic just to mess with the thing.

Soul Strikes crossed left and right, and the Greater Demon shuddered despite itself as ten points of Wisdom fried as I carved into its soul, and then five more as I plunged Chalice up between its legs and vaulted myself up along its back.

Beat snapped back to Brigg’s hand, bounced once, twice, and fingers shattered on the Staff, dropping it down. Briggs backfisted the shaft of it, raising an explosion of psychic force at the contact, and sent the tree-sized thing spinning away across the chamber.

I was up on its back, and it was just starting to face me when all four of my stingers drove into the sides of its glowy-smooth golden face, and pumped out some of Amourae’s Finest Love Potion #9 into the thing.

My Tail itself flared and slapped down, Branding the sucker. Lilitu power seared into it, and I had plenty of passive psychic power to burn it into it through its feathers.

It staggered in dawning horror as an aphrodisiac attuned to my Brand and with a Will Save of 40 surged towards the brain it valued so highly. It didn’t matter that this was just an avatar. Psychoactive poisons can affect both mind and soul, and it was sitting on a -7 (shriek!), er, -10 to its Will Save from having -20 to working Wisdom, and another -2 for every sizzling Brand I was burning into its excuse for a spine.

It kind of clawed over its back at me for a few seconds, and I just batted them away as it shuddered, and its glowy gold hawk’s eyes went all pink.

“Stop that shit,” I ordered it, and the Spell Weaver, a mighty super-scheming Greater Demon of jRaztl, froze, then obediently withdrew its many hands, all of which were twitching helplessly.

I Branded it again, and again, and again, and it only shuddered in ecstasy each time as I bound it closer and closer to me.

It probably couldn’t be Charmed, but this was poison and Curses, ability damage and Brands, not enchantment magic. It was totally screwed.

“I bet you know exactly what this is, and what kind of trouble you are in, and yet you can’t do anything about it.” Twitching and jerking, but unable to screech for it had no mouth, it nodded as I leaned in over its shoulder, wrinkling buy dose at the combined smell of rotting brains and ozone rising from its feathers. “That’s really good that you know that. As of right now, you work for me. Be happy. We aren’t going to have you betray your boss at all.”

Another shudder that might have been relief and the last of its reason passed through it. It slumped under me, and waited for my orders.

“Here’s what we want to happen. We want the Warp Zone to move from active promulgation and linking with external Warp interfaces to reality to a singular and static status. In other words, freeze it in one configuration, and sever all contact with other Warp Zones. We want the whole Zone to remain as it is, with nothing new coming in.

“Can you do that?”

The golden-skinned, pink-eyed, noseless, mouthless, and earless face nodded.

My stingers stabbed in again, pumped once, and the Spell Weaver twitched from head to toe in euphoria. “Get to that. How many days to get things reconfigured?”

It held up eight fingers on five hands.

“Wonderful. I’ll be back in five days to check up on you and give you your fix. Get to work now.”

A final Brand went off on it, and it fell to its knees as I hopped off. I gave it a glare, it met my eyes, and despite wanting nothing more than to bask in the bliss of its slavery to me, it turned to the corrupted Throne, and got to work.

Briggs watched that with a cold, critical grimace. -Damn, Sama. Pet Spell Weaver. That poison is no goddamn joke.-

-No, it most definitely is not. And now I have to come back here at least once a week to give it its fix, or its going to go freaking nuts.-

-How badly are you going to exploit it?- he /asked, with a cool pragmatism for making the Best of a Bad Thing.

-I’d love to use it for Epic Gear Upgrades, but there’s no effing way I’m letting something of the Warp touch our Weapons. We’ll have to settle for using it to unravel every jRaztl cult and scheme it knows of.-

-So, we basically only have to clear out Engineering, and the ship is ours, and we can start on serious repairs.-

-And repurposing,- I /added. Briggs’ eyes glowed as he began to think all the things he wanted to do with his potentially motile TL 17 duchy...