[MA] 445. Death-Fated (Patreon)

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[A/N: Another chapter 50% lengthier than usual.

Chapters LAST week: 3/3

Next chapter: In a few minutes]

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"Your Grace, we have a situation," a voice said.

It came out of nowhere and was barely heard through the Phase Veil. The Divine Mandatary had worked hard to create the Shaft, including separating it from deep phasespace. The experiment had been so successful that many had tried to replicate it, only to fail in the end. Divine Mandataries were rare and all special, but even among the few of them, some were more special than others. Pan knew of only two others, and they were unworthy of even licking the toes of the Shaft's ruler.

She opened her eyes for the first time in... Two millennia? How odd for the Underrealm to be that peaceful for so long. She hadn't felt so well-rested for so, so long. She might even thank whoever was producing that "situation" before getting rid of them.

"Speak," she said as she reached for the Phase Veil.

Her voice went first as she began to bridge the gap between the Shaft and one of its copies. She sighed as she noticed the situation was happening in one of the Overlord Underrealms, though she still didn't know which of them. She would be limited to the Overlord level and hated being made so weak, but work was work. The Divine Mandatary had honored their deal, so now, she did the same.

'Only fifty thousand years of service remaining,' she thought.

The male voice, now better heard, replied, "A True Denizen Demi-Dominator is undergoing the Overlord Mastery Tribulation in the Third. The Void Overmind is connected to it somehow. I fear an Integrity Breach."

She actually became excited at that. Dealing with the Void was always pleasurable, much more so in deep phasespace. It was always unpredictable. Never boring.

Well, at least not before the Void caused an Integrity Breach; dealing with those was annoying.

That Overlord knew what they were doing by visiting the Third Overlord Underrealm. Going a little deeper would make Spacetime too volatile for a breakthrough. Going shallower instead would see the Overlord affected by the Veil Net and automatically pop back into the Shaft proper.

Her elation was dimmed by having to go to the Third. She would be disconnected enough from her Pillar to risk actual death if she faced a skilled Demi-Dominator there. Not that she would lose against a mere Overlord, but she would make an effort at diplomacy first, just in case. She hadn't lived for so long by taking needless risks.

She asked, "How is the Void Overmind connected to the True Denizen?"

"The True Denizen arrived in the Third from the Main Shaft through a Void Shift."

She raised an eyebrow at that. "Did they break through as soon as they arrived?"

"Negative, Your Grace."

"Then, he is alive because...?"

"Habnor vouched for him."

She raised her other eyebrow. Habnor? The coward? He was playing games now—and games involving the Void? That was almost as interesting as everything she had heard until now.

She said, "I'll contact him. Anything else to report?"

"He's breaking through in Cylek. I don't know if it's relevant."

Cylek. Her perfect memory let her know it was a relatively strong city-state in the Overlord Realm backed by many powers. It was also an incubator for experiments on merging life and enchantments. Its main goal, giving legitimate life to an artificial being made of enchantments, remained out of reach, but they had accomplished some exciting things. Even Seekers could benefit from a few of Cylek's trinkets if they had the means to procure them. Thus, obviously, the city mainly exported said trinkets to the Seeker Realm—illegally so—and almost no Overlord could get their hands on them.

The information was barely relevant. When she got to the target, she was always going to scan them anyway. Knowing what to expect would only make her react slightly faster to such trinkets.

Pan located and felt Habnor through her Axiom. He could escape the Low Heavens' influence, but she had been allowed to elevate her Law to the High Heavens. She was pleased to see the high elf was still in his pathetic little house, which was a statement of neutrality. Whatever his intentions were in protecting the target, he wouldn't go too far for the Overlord.

She sent a single word through her Axiom, "Explain."

Habnor showed surprise, but she didn't trust any emotion anyone showed her any longer. Every random imbecile knew how to perfectly fake them nowadays.

His Realization reached for his house's door, twisting it to open in the Fourth Overlord Underrealm.

Pan smiled. A twist!

Habnor wasn't as uninterested in the target as she initially thought if he had used a Star Seed to anchor his house to a place this close to the target. Habnor was a weak coward, but he had the favor of the Overlord Warden-Emperor. Was this a ploy of that fool? This "situation" could end up making things lovely chaotic in the Overlord Realm.

Pan felt the Tribulation as soon as Habnor opened the door. The Heavens' influence entered the room, and her Axiom was there. She immediately noticed it wasn't the reported Overlord Mastery Tribulation. That was a One Self Path Acknowledgement Will Establishment Tribulation—or, as the lazy called it, an Essence Confirmation. An Idealist had tried to Subvert the True Heavens and was being challenged for it; their tribulation had been made a bit harder but would also grant them better rewards.

You only saw one of those every few five millennia or so. Everyone who passed the tribulation eventually died gruesome deaths because they were overly ambitious idiots. They never did anything exciting.

She almost got annoyed, but she had never heard of the True Heavens doing that instead of killing an Idealist connected to the Void. Either the connection was over, Reality was going crazy, or the Void was pulling a new one.

Pan's smiled widened. As she had guessed, this was most definitely not boring.

"Explain," she demanded again, not hiding the happiness from her voice.

"I didn't expect that," Habnor said. "I felt pity for the boy and followed him here. Before that, I made a Death-Fated Demi-Dominator friend of his owe me one for agreeing to watch over the boy from time to time. The friend is called Doombringer, in case you want to investigate it. I wasn't aware that someone walking a Deep Path could break through in the Third Underrealm. I expected him to beg me for help getting back to the Shaft in a few years, hence why I established this permanent portal to the Fourth. It was cheaper to do this than pierce the Veil to check on him occasionally, much less use other means to bring him back to the Shaft."

He didn't lie. Her Axiom would've pointed out any inconsistency it had witnessed. Yet, her Axiom did tell her he was hiding something.

Pan asked, "What's his connection to the Void?"

"From what I gathered, the Void Overmind owed him. The debt was fully repaid when the Overmind sent him to safety. An Integrity Breach saw him come to the Third instead of where he was supposed to go in the Overlord Realm."

She frowned. "The Void already Breached Integrity?" Someone would suffer for not reporting that to her. And dealing with it would be annoyingly tiring.

"Not the Void, no. The Divine Mandatary has been having fun with Karma for about fifteen hundred years. He even made himself influenced by it. He didn't want to owe the boy for changing his fate, so he violated his rules for the boy's benefit. The Seventh shattered when the Breach occurred, but the Mandatary has already reforged it. No lives were lost."

Pan had heard about the Mandatary's new hobby. She never went wholly unconscious in her sleep. Doing so would be stupid. "The boy is also Death-Fated?"

"Yes." His tone implied he thought she already knew it.

To be fair to the subordinate who had woken her up, someone stationed in the Third wouldn't know who the Mandatary assigned as Death-Fated for his stupid games. It did, however, make things easier. And boring.

Habnor was still hiding something, but the truth she had learned was enough to deal with the situation at hand. She sent a message to his disciple to deal with the situation as protocol dictated, as anything else might make the Mandatary annoyed at her.

Then, she teleported herself to Habnor's abode.

The high elf wasn't expecting that, and overwhelming fear took hold of him. She didn't doubt that emotion, though. She could count on the fingers of one hand how many times she had left someone alive after visiting them ever since she started working as a guard dog for the Mandatary three hundred thousand years ago.

"Tell me everything," she demanded.

He held his speech for all of three milliseconds. It was almost offensive, but she was in a good mood and waited a little more for an answer. Torture could wait.

"Why?" he asked instead of answering. "What did I do wrong to make you suspicious?"

A fair question. The rules stated that she had to answer anyone who asked that. People would feel uncomfortable about an assassin acting unreasonably otherwise.

Pan answered, "I have classified you as a weak coward. Yet, you ripped off a Death-Fated and felt enough sympathy for another one to proactively demand a price to help them. The Mandatary hates anyone in the know manipulating their Death-Fated, and you know it. Then, when you opened the door, my senses picked an interesting past connection between the... Drow? Is that what that race is called? Between the drow and your little high elven protegé. On top of all that, the Void Overmind was involved. This sounds very interesting, and you better hope it is indeed so, because I hate getting woken up for boring matters. You don't want me to have to release some steam before returning to sleep, do you?"

"No," he replied, much more quickly this time.

Good. She disliked being made to wait only a little less than being woken up to deal with a tedious matter.

He was also quick to begin talking about his involvement with the Death-Fated. "The drow boy is a freed Heavenly Puppet from the Lagoth Multiverse. The Ghost Doctor Severed him to save his life."

She recalled Lagoth; the dhar race was almost getting control of it. It would become the third multiverse with a Mandatary that she knew. It might add some spice to inter-multiverse life.

Freed Heavenly Puppets were called Falling Stars by anyone who had seen them before, so her interest in the boy dwindled further. He was already Death-Fated anyway. Not that his fate had been twisted supernaturally, but he had made it his life goal to kill the Mandatary and die for it. It was that simple.

Habnor continued, "He and his late holin girlfriend are connected to the Gardener, the World Tree's Warden. The Divine Mandatary killed her and is keeping her essence imprisoned to manipulate the boy."

Love drama was dull, but she appreciated being told the story.

Then, Habnor hesitated for almost a full instant before adding, "He was forged with Darla's blood essence."

Pan didn't recognize the name, but a memory reacted in the depths of her mind, where she had locked it in. She considered a moment before allowing it to be freed from her previous decision to block it.

Then, she frowned and asked, "How do you know I have an Incarnation?" Her voice was ice cold.

It had been stupid of him to reveal he knew about her Incarnation before she tortured him. Incarnations were meant to be kept secret as a last line of survival! They were useless otherwise. She had even hidden it from her very self!

Habnor knew he would die unless he said something to change her whole perspective on the matter, so she expected his following words to be bombastic.

She was wasn't disappointed.

"I learned it by coincidence," he replied. "I've been..." He hesitated. For a full second. He dared to do that while standing at death's door. An instant before she decided to ravage his mind for the information she wanted, he continued, "I've been close to someone else forged with Darla's blood essence for a while." She looked at his protegé's direction. She was in another room.

Ah. He had likely asked the Gardener for permission to reveal it before telling Pan, or he would've broken a Contract and died. She would forgive him for the delay. It helped his case that asking the Gardener had cost him much more than a Star Seed, as contacting Main Space from the Shaft was not easy or cheap.

"Two different people with my Incarnation's blood essence coming to the Shaft is too much of a coincidence," Pan declared. "Lagoth... They planned to lead the Heavenly Pupept here. But they didn't count on the drow being Severed, or else he wouldn't have been undergoing his Essence Confirmation, and I wouldn't have learned of this ploy. Lagoth's Co-Ruler... That asshole is planning a Multiverse War to celebrate his eventual success in his Investiture Ceremony. He already targeted me through the Heavenly Puppet—and through me, the Mandatary himself."

Habnor quickly said, "Or Lagoth's High Heavens planned for this to be discovered so you would get upset and join the forces against the Co-Ruler."

Of course, that was the most likely possibility. But it was boring. It had been ages since Pan participated in the last multiverse war, ever since the Divine Mandatary swore not to get involved in one unless someone acted against him first. But if he was playing around with Karma to kill his boredom, he might also be up to looking at this planned attack through the right lens. Retaliation might be in order.

So, Pan very gently nudged the Mandatary through her Axiom. There was no need to tell him anything. He would check the local stream of Spacetime and see what he needed to see. Unlike her, the Mandatary could do it without breaking anything.

She held back on using her strength during her investigations because there was no mending anything back together after she broke it.

After the nudge, she waited.

Habnor kept quiet for the following minutes, happy her focus had been diverged from him. A smart guy, that one. She elevated him to a cunning weak coward in her mind. She even added a question mark after coward. He might be shrewd enough to be hiding his true self from her.

Suddenly, Reality twisted, and a new visitor joined the room. She looked around for a moment, then faced Pan.

"Really?" the hooded wraith said, her voice full of disbelief. She was evidently not talking to Pan, though. "I owe you a favor, and you want me to repay it by training this weakling for an unjustified multiverse war? I don't like being even indirectly involved in the death of innocents. I dubbed myself a doctor for a reason."

A pause.

The Ghost Doctor sighed. "No one trains a Grand Ascendant for a multiverse war if they only mean to meddle with someone's Investiture. Not even if it's to fully utilize the favor I owe you. This smells like a lie, and you know I'll kill you if you're lying to me, correct?"

Another pause, during which Pan and Habnor tensed. The Divine Doctor was threatening the Shaft's Divine Mandatary. If he came to kill her now, the two witnesses would be the first to die as collateral.

After a moment, the wraith chuckled. "That's rich, coming from you. Very well, Little Bug; we'll see if people can change that much." She turned to Habnor. "Tell the Gardener I'm willing to protect the girl for free." She glanced at the teapot on the table. "I like her work ethic despite the lack of talent. Her innocence is also cute, and I'd rather not see a hard-working girl lose it." She turned to Pan. "I'll give you a Self Impartation about warfare. The favor I owe your master is only enough for me to be willing to be connected with you for one week, but that would kill you; too much experience of too high a level in too little time. I'll magnanimously give you one month instead, and you owe me one. You might still die, but I can't be blamed for that. If I were you, I would refuse your master's order to do this, but I bet you won't. You have one week to prepare yourself."

"Do it now," Pan said, not hiding her enthusiasm. "And one week of Impartation is enough. I can take it."

The Ghost Doctor shook his head. "I wasn't asking for your opinion. But I'll let you know you'll take decades to digest everything I give you—if you survive. Maybe centuries. Or, if you're not compatible with my teachings, thousands of years. Three extra weeks receiving the Impartation now will make you safer and won't matter in the long run."

Pan didn't want to believe she couldn't take whatever the wraith threw at her, but the Ghost Doctor was a doctor. She was also known for not lying when it came to people's health.

More importantly, Pan wasn't stupid enough to challenge the wraith known for having forced a Divine Mandatary to surrender, lest she kill them.

Pan didn't know what a Self Impartation was, but it sounded like a Path Impartation, except from someone walking a Deep Path. Coming from someone who called Pan a weakling and claimed Pan might die from it, it should be a unique experience.

How did she even prepare for something like that?

As if reading Pan's thoughts, the wraith sighed and said, "Self Impartation Preparation Procedures for a Grand Ascender means bidding farewell to your loved ones and burning all your accumulated potential to anchor your essence to Reality as strongly as possible. Don't hold back because even a tiny speck of potential preserved might be the difference between life and death..."

Burning all her potential sounded wasteful, but Pan still listened the instructions quietly. This was still work-related, and she had to obey. If everything worked out...

It seemed she would be promoted from guard dog to war hound very, very soon.

That sounded like fun.

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[A/N: Special thanks to our A-rank patron, Gordon Freeman!]

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