Chapter 71 - My SI Stash #71 - The World Waits on Evil by LoserThree (OC World "Lich")

-Dude from Earth SI as Lich king (not from Overlord) in an OC world. And it's a completed fic too!

It pretty much starts like Overlord but it'll be more industrial/magical revolution based~~

Sypnosis: ???

Rated: M

Words: 180K

Posted on: forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-world-waits-on-evil-hivers-eoa-ww-a-finished-story.274791/#post-12325560 (LoserThree)

PS: If you're not able to copy/paste the link, you have everything in here to find it, by simply searching the author and the story title. It sucks that you can't copy links on mobile (´ー｀)

-I'll be putting the chapter ones of all the fanfics mentioned, to give you guys a sample if you wan't more please do go to the website and support the author! (And maybe even convince them to start uploading chapters in here as well!)

Chapter 1+2 (exceptional)

I remember getting up from my computer, just before it all changed. I had been doing some leisure reading, I think, and was headed toward the kitchen. It was the last time I responded to hunger, but of course I did not know that at the time. I think most last times go unrecognized in their own moments.

I walked barefoot toward the kitchen with the lights out, as I normally did. In familiar spaces I had always been more comfortable in the dark.

To my surprise, a dark place in an unlit corner held almost as much black cat as it held shadow. The cat may have been just as surprised as I was. It sure acted like it was, anyway: all explosion of fuzzy motion and loud feline expression.

I have never owned a cat. But maybe the cat also did not own a person. We might have had more in common than our proximity to each other. But we lacked the opportunity to explore our shared experiences because of what came next, And also because it was a cat.

I jumped back from the yowling, hissing, spitting, startled cat and tripped over some hazard I failed to notice behind me. It might have been my own foot.

Long term memory is not the the same as the initial recording of perceptions and thoughts, as it is often thought to be. A memory can and will change based on the mind state in which you remember it. If you accidentally take some action in the heat of a moment and later rationalize that action, there is a strong possibility you will remember thinking your way through and specifically choosing the action that was actually a thoughtless reaction. We never had as much time to think as we seem to remember.

So I might think I remember twisting in the air and seeing a glowing, wispy, purple-shaded, hole in space with a wooden beam floor on the other side, two or three feet below the floor of my house, and thinking, "So that's how the cat got in. At least it wasn't me that left a door and/or wormhole open." But I almost certain do not really remember that, because in the times I have remembered the event since then my doubt has convinced me that it is more likely that my only thoughts were impolite and blunt. There might also have been the start of a plea to a God I had not believed in for years, because old habits die harder than old beliefs.

That is how I remember leaving the place I still think of as the "Real World,"

Once I entered the hole, the experience changed dramatically.

The stomach-dropping feeling of falling grew three- or four-fold in ways more usually encountered at amus.e.m.e.nt parks. I believe that was my inner ear notifying me that speed-change had occurred in an unexpected fashion that did not conform to the steady, constant pull of the world it had evolved to analyze. Nausea announced a kind of an error reading from the human speed-change instrument of measure.

At the same time, proportion and dimension swayed, swelled, and contracted in a wholly unreasonable fashion. My understanding of color, texture, flavor, and tone bled together. I felt a brief oneness with all existence and wondered at the strange, laughably particular limitation of my previously singular perspective.

Then Space, Time, Love, and the Universal Consciousness vomited me back into being, five or six feet above a cold flagstone set into that wooden floor. I remember that I landed without grace, composure, dignity, or silence, but I do not I think broke any bones.

In a movie, this is the point where the transported character throws out a witty one-liner. But I did not ask if anyone got the identification plate of the traffic that hit me. And I did not come up with a less tired and worn out line, either.

There is a bit of missing memory there, instead. I do not know if I was not really perceiving the room while I got my breath back, or if maybe that did not get written to long-term memory. I do not remember living the kind of life that would familiarize someone with the process of recovering from having the wind knocked out of them. It was not entirely novel, but was rare and, of course, that was the last time it happened.

When I did look around, I found myself sprawled across a glowing, purple pentagram that looked set into the flagstone I landed on, which in turn was set into the wood flooring I first saw through the purple hole in space. I thought the light must have bent the way it does at the surface of water when I'd looked through the hole.

The room looked huge from my place on the floor. It was square and large enough to park a pair of big road engines side-by-side. In each corner was a pillar that might have come up to my b.r.e.a.s.tbone, with green flame shooting out the top. At that moment, I missed that I was able to perceive colors in what seemed to be the normal fashion, even though the most significant sources of light in the room where bright green.

Instead, all my attention was the on the over seven foot figure in black armor with silver inlay. It had a floor-length purple cape that flowed behind it, and a collar that rose over the crown of its skull which, by the way, I could see because it had a skull for a head with small blue flames in its eye sockets. Instead of seeming unbelievable, the skull-headed figure was frighteningly real.

That is when I remember reacting to my surroundings. There have been times in the life I remember when my understanding of the meaning of courage would have led me to wish I were the sort of person who would bravely confront such an obvious threat to safety and fashion. But I was not and had never been that person.

So I did not boldly assume a posture that could be defensive or offensive, as needed. And I did not wittily snap off a one-liner. And I did not even politely ask if, maybe, Sir or Dame Skull Face would like his/her/its cat back and then maybe I could just go, although the person I remember thinking I was would totally be pragmatic and smart enough to do just that. Instead, the person I remember actually being scrambled across and largely against the flagstone artlessly and made a lot of those sounds that require no constriction outside the throat while I tried to back away.

The tall figure gestured strangely at me and I felt as though I were picked up by my h.i.p.s and shoulders, but from the inside. Unseen force shoved at me through those four points and brought me back to the center of the pentagram I had landed on. I could fight the force with my feet against the ground in the same way you can lean into a door to try to hold it closed, but I could not stop the unseen force from moving me into the center. I could twist my body a little and my center of substance would lower just a little bit if I went limp, but that put uncomfortable weight on my h.i.p.s and shoulders.

Powerless, I remember standing in the center of the purple pentagram and finally looking back up at the tall figure. It had walked into a smaller, similar, purple, glowing pentagram, likewise set into a flagstone. It was still gesturing at me with one hand and I remember noticing, then, that its hands were skeletal and realizing that instead of a very tall human with a skull for a head, this was probably a very tall skeleton in human armor. It was a skeleton that could take action without the need for all the meat that makes humans take action bone cannot take on its own, with all the terrifying implications that came with that.

A sound came from behind me of an impact against solid substance. There was a door there, I would soon discover, made from thick wood with iron bands around it. It was firmly set into its frame. It was barred, too, and the iron beam that barred it sat in stout hooks in the wall on either side. Someone was 'knocking' on the other side with the kind of force that removes boulders from roads.

Instead of putting that together, at the time, I remember the look of alarm on the skeleton's face and I remember doubting that I had seen it. Skulls, after all, are rigid and incapable of expression outside that one expression that comes naturally to each skull.

Yes, living bone is flexible to a degree that may surprise those who have only encountered bone that is dead and dried. There is give in the human skull, as there is in every human bone. But this was not a little bit of flex and bow, this was full-on clay puppet facial expression on a skull. The ridges over its eye pits behaved like eyebrows. Its teeth – of which it had an incomplete count – and its cheekbones moved in ways that suggested its absent lips and cheeks. There might have been some motion, I remember thinking with out-of-place clarity, around the hole where its nose would have been that imitated flaring nostrils.

Fortunately, this bizarre sight snapped me out of my inarticulate state and gave me the calm compartmentalization that had carried me through car accidents, medical emergencies, and other disasters in the life I remember. Unfortunately I was still stuck, still powerless. So maybe it was not fortunate as much as it just happened to be so.

Alarm had barely settled on to the tall skeleton's face when it shifted to a stern expression, what I might have called its 'game face.' There was another impact sound behind me, followed by another, and another, and so on. And the armored skeleton raised both its hands and moved them through the air in strange patterns.

Two poundings later, the skeleton's hands were still moving and its fingertips began to glow blue and leave trails in the air. The trails left by their motion formed complex, angular, and three dimensional shapes in the air. The lines twisted around each other in ways that required the skeleton to contort its 'hands' with odd precision. The motions of finger-joints, wrist, elbow, and shoulder might all work together to draw a perfectly stiiaght line with the tip of one middle finger while the other fingertips on the same 'hand' traced complicated, spiraled, spirals around it.

Soon, another two or three poundings later still, the whole length of its index fingers glowed like its fingertips and their wide ribbons of light added curves around the straight lines the tips left. And the skeleton spoke. It chanted a series of sounds or words I could not understand and repeated them three or four times.

The lights on its hands went out when it stopped chanting, though the light shapes in the air continued to glow. I remember watching the skeleton reach into the folds of its cape and draw out a green crystal the size of its hand, which it then hurled against the floor between the two pentagrams.

The crystal shattered and its fragments exploded outward in slow motion, creating a shape very similar to the glowing blue shape in the air in front of the skeleton. I remember that all I saw was cast in a green light – which may be when I noticed it was odd that it had not been cast in a green light previously, though that could be the previously mentioned distortion by the lens of memory – and that green light grew blindingly bright over the course of the time a rapid breath takes.

Then the light faded but I remained momentarily blind. I did notice, though, that the four points of force on my body were suddenly absent. My sight came back a heartbeat's time later and powerful discomposure swept over me like a great wave.

I looked at myself, standing in front of me. Myself was not making eye contact with me, and did not mirror my motions. My doppelganger was running hands that should have been mine over a body that used to be mine and wincing, which is when I realized I felt no pain.

I felt no pain in a way that I had not felt no pain in I did not know how long, in the life I remember. I did not feel sore, or fatigued, or hungry, or sated, or hair, or the pressure of my lips against each other, or the need to breathe. And I did not feel as though my stomach dropped out of me as the realization sank in. So that was nice.

I held up my hand and looked at the bony flanges. They moved just as I willed them to, flexing and folding like a hand would. They might have been able to fold in further than my fleshy fingers had and seemed to make a better fist that I could ever remember making. A substance like the joint material from a human body held the finger bones together, end-to-end. No material seemed to hold them together side-by-side, but when I tried to stretch my hand wide, they did not seem to stretch any further than they would if they had been properly wrapped in meat.

There was another pounding on the door, which I could see then was bent inward length- and width-wise, jarring me from the inspection of my hand. That brought my attention back to my doppelganger, who was pointing at me and laughing. My doppelganger was, in turn, interrupted when the door's strength succ.u.mbed to the next strike against it and the it tumbled into the room. The door was followed by a stomping shape twice my doppelganger's height.

Our new guest was red skinned, covered in brassy body hair, and apparently sort of a naturalist. He had bat-like wings that were mostly folded behind him and looked as though they would span twice-and-half-again his height when outstretched. He had huge, ivory horns on his forehead. His face was a caricature of disgust. He was, quite obviously, a demon. Unless you were told demons wore clothing, he was just what you were told a demon would be. And he should not have fit through that doorway.

"Supplicant!" he bellowed as he stomped toward me. "Your debt is past due! The time has long past for you to fulfill your end of our bargain! Your campaign of defense - your great effort to deny me what is rightfully mine! It has brought only ruin to your realm, and to all the world! My rampage now reaches its peak and its prize! Surely now you see there is no escape and you will give yourself over to my rightful claim."

I was going to respond, to connect my creativity to my speech and let fly with whatever came through. I might have complimented his complexion. But instead I was briefly confounded by the realization that the demon had not spoken in any language I had known in the life I remembered. When I thought over the sounds he had made as opposed to the words he used, I experienced discomposure again.

In my silencing confusion, the only action that I thought to do was to point at the thief of my self. I would like to think of myself as someone who is more concerned with results than blame. But somewhere in the complex of habits and whimsy that I thought was me, there was a desire to distribute the blame. I hope it was only human.

The demon's substantial head spun and his white horns cut through the air and he lowered his h.i.p.s and brought his clawed hands up in front of himself. He looked at what used to be me, what I wholly hoped was not me anymore. It would really have been bad if I had been duplicated into this body and I had just tried to screw over my real self – or at least my self of precedent. Despite my hopes, I am totally the kind of person who would do that. That's one reason I oppose branching identity fundamentally.

I watched my body make objecting gestures and babble. I could not understand my former self, even though if I thought about it very hard I could recognize one or two of the words as my former native tongue by their sounds.

Dizzying discomposure overtook me again.

"Ah," the demon rumbled. "There you are. You thought, after all I have done to secure this bond, you could trick me with a body swap? With so much of the Forces of Perdition behind me, your trickery will not save you!"

The one that stole me (I hoped) took a step back and turned to run, despite the demon being in the way of the only door. The figure that looked just like I remembered looking and I began to shout together and incoherently.

The demon's wings swept out and forward. In surprising obedience to physical laws I remembered from the 'Real World', this motion shoved his body back into a crouch. His wings swept back again as he lunged forward to tackle the fleeing flesh that I remembered being mine. As the demon connected with his target, they both vanished with a small popping sound and in a puff of smoke.

Starting before he moved and ending after he vanished, as though released in a burst during the fraction of a second in which the demon moved, then allowed to decompress forward and backward into time, the demon shouted, "I told you, you are MINE!"

It occurred to me, then, that a similar phenomenon of decompression of sound had taken place each of the previous times the demon had spoken. There hadn't been enough time for him to say all he said. And he'd moved faster than I should have been able to follow.

I blinked, discomposed again, and then spent a moment trying to figure out how I had done so. I had no eyelids and was unable to immediately reproduce the effect.

While I tried to figure out how I had blinked, more skeletons ran into the room in an disorderly fashion. They were dingy and wore ill-fitting, ill-made armor. As they came into the room they kicked fragments of bone through the doorway ahead of them and I could see broken bones littering the floor of the room behind them. Those fragments were, I supposed, the remnants of earlier waves of the same nature which had been sent to resolve a large, red problem that had just resolved itself... probably.

The skeletons left room around me in apparent difference. They filled the room as they clattered around, poking and prodding around as though their quarry could be hiding between the stone blocks of the wall, or behind the pillars at the corners. Perhaps he could have. Perhaps he had, previously. In fact, he had come through a doorway that should not have admitted him so easily.

It occurred to me then, I think, that it was odd that the demon had not come through a keyhole, or a gap between the door and the floor, or a gap between the beams of the floor, instead of breaking through the door. I was just beginning to consider what it might mean for the room to be somehow, some way protected against intrusion like that when a new figure came through the door .

The new arrival was a dark human in black armor. I thought the armor might be enameled. He had red eyes that didn't just glow, they burned. In one hand he easily, casually carried a huge sword that was clearly made to be wielded with two hands. The way his body moved slightly in counter-force to the motion of the sword, and the way the sword hesitated to change directions gave credence to its weight and accompanying leverage-force.

I saw satisfaction and then contempt flicker across his face as he came in, before he schooled his face into an expression of awe.

Then I considered how odd it was that I lacked a word for the force of leverage, realized I was no longer thinking in my native tongue, and slipped into discomposure again while the new figure looked around the large room before turning to me.

"Dread leader," he said reverently as he knelt on one knee. "You defeated of the demon king! Your power awes me anew. Surely this is a new sign of your greatness!"

While he spoke I noticed his overdeveloped third-teeth – dog teeth? – and the language strangeness troubled me again.

I held my composure of thought this time, though, and realized that he was a vampire, that he was a vampire who addressed me as "Dread Leader," and just what that implied.

For a moment, my mind seemed empty except for an exclamation: "Oh, love-like-striking."

Chapter 2

"My Leader?" the (probable) vampire asked as he rose from kneeling. "The demon king, did you defeat him?" His awed facial expression started to give way to concern as, I guessed, he considered what else might have happened before he got to the room, and he imagined events and series of events I did not know enough to imagine him imagining.

I thought fast. That is, I chose the first idea that occurred to me and might have been workable: I told a version of the truth.

"The demon king is gone and I do not expect he will return." I said, "I am still here. Obviously I have been victorious." The reverent difference with which the warrior had regarded me led me to feel like that kind of arrogance would be expected. I guessed maybe that kind of behavior is not arrogant when it really is appropriate to your station.

The armored vampire bowed before responding again, which hid his face from me. "Are you hurt, My Dread Leader?"

People do not seem to get to positions of power without being opportunists. Additionally, the person questioning me was prepared for violence, and was a vampire. I wondered if he would kill me if he thought me weak. I wondered if it would help if he were loyal to the 'Dread Leader' position I held, without regard to the manner in which I obtained it. I wondered if people ever really were loyal to positions without regard for the person occupying it. I wondered how that could ever work for long.

But that flicker of disgust crossed his face again when he looked back up at me. It was odd to watch happen, unfamiliar and yet it reminded me of some fact I could not quite recall.

I concluded it was probable that the vampire did not like me, did not trust me, or did not want to be close to me. But from the way he tried to hide it, he was probably there to work with me anyway.

If I was right about that then that would be fine. I'd worked with people who did not want to work with me. I had management experience, even worse.

If I was wrong, then I probably could not make matters much worse. I mean, the vampire already disliked me.

"I am fine for now," I answered him after pausing to think furiously, desperately searching through what I had learned in the past few moments. "I will tell you more in a moment. First, tell me how our defenses hold. Tell me how we fare against the remainder of the Forces of Perdition."

In the life I remember, I counted myself lucky to be free of that fear of assessments, standardized and otherwise, that plagued so much of my generation. I'd had the good fortune, the privilege even, of doing well at them at a young age and so never had to fight my own distress while also fighting the assessment. Instead, I could freely build assessment taking skills.

One of those skills is to find ways to draw information from some questions in order to better answer others. This tool even works when understanding of the underlying concepts is unavailable. In fact, that might have been the first, simplest assessment taking skill. Or at least second only skipping questions to later return to.

"I fell back to the inner walls at the first breach of the outer," the vampire answered. "I was in the inner yard when the keep was breached. I chased the demon king as best I could, but lesser demons blocked my way and, as you know, they are no easy opponent."

Oddly, that had the feel of recitation, as though he had practiced it in his head. Or not so odd, really. It fit into a convenient and perilous narrative of the sort one would prepare if one were planning to commit deception. So worrying, not odd.

"Go look after our defenses." I told him. "I recognize your concern, but it does little good if demons exploit our vulnerability. Go." I gestured toward the door.

He hesitated only a moment, then rushed out the shattered doorway with inhuman speed, which should not have worked the way it did.

Top human speeds, back in the life I remember as the 'Real World' are limited by the pull-of-the-world, but not in the way one might first think. Short run speeds would, in fact, be faster with greater pull-of-the-world because it would allow the runner a better grip on the ground, like shoes with spikes that bite the road-for-running.

The vampire moved so fast that, it seemed, his feet should have slipped out from under him, rather than propel him forward. But the vampire's feet stuck where he put them and his speed quickly grew as he left. I thought to myself that anyone who could do that should also be able to walk on walls and ceilings, which was fitting enough.

Then I was alone with the skeletons in a room with one ruined doorway and a little time to plan. And time to experiment with skeletons.

They were arranged in concentric circles around me. Skeletons on the same circle alternated facing inward and outward. So I attempted to wave one over while I began to consider my options and their possible consequences.

I was ignored. I attempted to snap my fingers, and found my hands responded sluggishly, as though unfamiliar with the gesture. I struggled with my bony hands for a moment before giving up.

I called, "You, there." at a skeleton and it did not react.

I walked up to one particular skeleton and waved my hand at its face. No reaction. I shoved it, it swayed and kept its balance. I shoved harder and it stumbled back but returned to its position. I put my hands to either side of its head and turned it. It turned, and when released it turned back. But there was no response other than that. In frustration I drew my arms back and brought my hands together violently on either side of its head, which was protected by a leather helmet.

And, in so doing, I broke its skull between my hands into pieces that fell to the floor.

"I regret that," I said. And I did, while noticing that I again lacked a word. The now shorter skeleton did not respond but was still standing and, when given a shove, still kept its balance.

"Are you well?" I asked. Still no response. I wondered it it would have needed a mouth to talk before realizing that neither it nor I actually had mouths. Like so many other paths of thought, I set that one aside for later.

None of the other skeletons reacted to any of this.

So that was informative: I learned I was quite strong and that a skeleton does not necessarily need its skull to function, or at least to continue standing there. And based on the behavior of the others in the room, I learned that skeletons are either mindless, mute (or terrified into silence), brutally loyal and disciplined, or just not inclined to be overly judgmental of someone breaking their heads off.

I realized, then, that I had distracted myself from the more weighty issue of what I could tell the vampire. So I busied my hands with picking up the pieces of the skull and putting them back together to see if the skeleton could reincorporate it. And I returned my thoughts to my problem.

One option was to tell all. That would be placing complete trust in a vampire who did not seem to like me. I thought that I probably should not hold his vampirism against him, at least with regard to how I should expect him to behave toward me. I figured that my lack of blood would take me off his list of favored victims.

Then again, I considered, was it safe to conclude that his pointy teeth, red eyes, and superhuman abilities mean he drinks blood? I was pretty sure there were stories about vampires that behaved differently.

More importantly, I thought, vampires, skeletons, and demons were fictions. If they did not exist in the life that I remembered except in stories, did that mean I was in a story? Could I expect narrative causality instead of consistent laws of nature? Should I expect to awaken from fantasy as a bed-ridden weakling?

I tried to fly in the way that had always worked in my dreams. Short, silly hops were all that happened and that was enough to confirm my experiences were not a dream, for the moment. The rest could be ignored until applicable... probably.

Meanwhile, I had found that the largest piece of the shattered skull, which included its base, would fall off again if I set it on top of the skeleton's neck. If it could be reincorporated, some other steps were apparently necessary. I had broken an object almost immediately after arriving in a new world, taking a new position, and meeting new people. That was so very much my way.

Trusting someone else with my problems always tempted me. There was often little to lose, in the life I remembered, but that was a very different world. There were no demons in the 'Real World' and I did not face the threats a 'Dread Leader' would in the relatively privileged life I remembered living.

The mechanics of reciprocation pressure meant that my urge to entrust others with truths I might have kept secret caused others to feel the urge to share their secrets with me. I had lived more than a third of the life I could reasonably have expected to before I learned my easy openness was why people told me so much about themselves.

Still, trusting the vampire was a foolish idea, and was rejected.

Likewise, hiding all and keeping an act up of complete control was rejected because I had no good reason to believe I could pull it off. I have never had the necessary dramatic stamina.

I would have to build the lie on what I already knew and what I could not hide.

In the meantime, I had started investigating the skull-less skeleton more closely. I could take its bent, stained, and handguard-less short sword from it. I could take armor off it. It did not object or even react, except to accommodate its new balance.

I crushed the last digit on its right and smallest finger between my index finger and thumb and broke it into multiple pieces. It still did not react.

I began to crush the joints of its spine, starting at the top of the protruding neck. This required only the force of my thumb and any two fingers against my palm. It seemed likely that I was considerably stronger than I had been.

My mind was briefly diverted from planning deception to consider spinal joints and another missing word.

When I had destroyed the top spinal joint to which ribs attached, those ribs remained attached to the b.r.e.a.s.tbone. When I crushed its right collarbone, its right shoulder blade and arm fell away and into separate pieces. When I crushed not one, but both bones of its left forearm, its wrist and hand fell away and went to pieces.

I was only a few spinal joints past the top of the rib cage when the vampire returned. I noticed that the skeletons moved out of his way and realized they must also have moved out of his way when he left.

"Dread Leader," he said as he knelt on one knee again. "There are no demons to be found. It is as if your defeat of the demon king has unmade them all. We are repairing the breaches and keeping watch on the walls, but the camps of Forces of Perdition look abandoned.

"I have sent scouts to search the encircling camps. Now, if it pleases you, tell me if you are hurt and how you defeated the demon king?"