Elysium's Multiverse-Chapter 354

Elysium's Multiverse-Chapter 354

Chapter 354
Chapter 354
The main Altar of Despair location had indeed been a false flag just as predicted after his entrapment in the dungeon.
Unfortunate, but he’d find it eventually.
As for now, Riven was in a race to claim as many event points as possible. According to the leaderboard he was in 8th place now after a very short time of moving up from the double digits, which was pretty damn impressive. In large part it was due to his demons which enabled him to do multiple jobs at once, and it didn’t hurt that they were far stronger than many of the other participants either on the cultist or non-cultist side.
“Aliens with plasma rifles, East-Asian cultivator types, and medieval knights…” Riven mumbled under his breath as he stared out at the large hill, where a looming multi-layered skyscraper sporting battlements in abundance all the way down its surface was placed. “Never thought I’d see the day those three groups were all in once spot.”
The engines of war roared around him as siege machines built by the green-skinned, bug-eyed alien people chugged down huge vats of mana to his left and exploded with purple light. The plasma cannons, which is what they actually were, looked like large battery guns with glass tubes only partially surrounded by metal plating. Steam hissed and the air screamed at the speeds the weapons were launching the barrage at the tower on this side of the battlefield, while magically imbued trebuchets launched huge firebombs - smoldering orange orbs - that had less piercing power but more explosive energy.
The tower itself was full to the brim of strange looking metal golems manning the battlements that were only humanoid in the vaguest sense of the word. The metal creatures that came with the Chalgathi Altar had two arms, two legs, and wielded weapons like humans did, but that’s where the resemblance stopped.
Living metal is how Riven would describe it. Their bodies flowed along fluidly, allowing them to move in ways that normal humans couldn’t efficiently do. They had the heads of dragons and the bodies of gothic knights, and wielded Unholy powers in large varieties. Autonomous killing machines is what they were, and killing one of them required nearly complete destruction before it stopped functioning. If you cut one in half it’d crawl at you, if you stabbed it through the chest where a heart would be the monster would merely strike back without so much as a flinch - and many of the weaker soldiers here couldn’t even pierce the solid metal carapace-like armor covering the golems either.
There were work-arounds though. Ways that the creatures could be weakened and slowed from effective killing machines into something less than ideal. Ways to make them brittle and weaker than they’d normally be, by way of ritualistic magic to shut down their energy stores so that fighting them wasn’t absolutely brutal. That particular bunch of information had been obtained by a man by the name of Tao Zhang, a cultist turned rogue who had experimented with these creatures before handing over his armies and his previously claimed altar to Riven’s demons in an all out surrender; only after the request of having a succubus companion was granted to him courtesy of Fay’s clan when he’d spectacularly failed to acquire one himself.
Otherwise Fay’s grandmother, Granny Beth, to be precise. Riven hadn’t even known Fay had a grandmother by that name until now, and he felt truly sorry for the poor woman after having spent even an hour in the presence of this Tao Zhang buffoon. The man was an absolute weirdo at best, and a creepy mass murderer with a teletubbie fetish at worst.
And the idiot had been following Riven around like a lost puppy dog with his two demonic servants, Biggie-G the poor sod of a minotaur warrior and Beth the succubus - or Granny Beth as Fay called her. Tao Zhang simply wouldn’t leave him alone with that nasally voice of his while they continued to batter down the defenses of the other cultist who’d holed up inside the second Chalgathi Altar.
Justin Mathers was the guy’s name, the current occupant of this tower, and according to Tao Zhang he was an absolute battle freak with metal oriented Unholy powers and a twist for the evil things in life. And as unfortunate as it was, Riven was advised by all parties involved to stand by and wait for the altar’s shields to go down before attempting to storm the place even as powerful as he was - because the altar had some very serious defenses in place even outside of those killer dragon-headed golems when it came to internal enchantments.
“And so I said…” Tao Zhang slapped his chops loudly while taking a bite of a taco and rubbed his greasy fingers on his teletubbie shirt, and sitting down onto his minotaur which he was using like a chair. “And so I said that I didn’t even want to fight for the Chalgathi pieces and they could just have it, but those freaks just wouldn’t get lost so I had to do it.”
Riven’s pale, porcelain white face - etched with unholy black tattoos and runes - slowly turned from underneath his hood to stare down at the shorter fat man with a look of consternation. “So you had to kill them by suffocating them with a handcrafted spell to conjure manure? That seems like a very odd choice of spell to use when-”
“Oh don’t give me that judgemental look, Mr. I’m-Number-1-Pretty-Boy!” Tao Zhang blinked rapidly through his thick glasses with a scowl. “Some of us actually have to work for a living instead of being handed sky high affinities for pillars like you did!”
Tao Zhang snapped his fingers back at where the food table was positioned in the commanders section. “BETH! BETH, MY STARS AND SKY! PWEASE BRING YOUR SNUFFALUFOGUS A DONUT - I’M IRREPARABLY FAMIINNISHED!”
“Famished.” Riven correctly with lowered eyelids.
Tao Zhang ignored him and licked his lips with a cheeky grin as the succubus he’d contracted with slowly stood up from where she’d been talking in hushed whispers with her granddaughter Fay, took a donut from the back table and sauntered over with a significant sway to her hips.
Tao was loving every second of the seductive act.
Beth, Fay’s grandmother, did not look the part of ‘grandmother’ in the least. Unlike Fay’s rather tall mother and sister, Beth was on the shorter side - shorter than Fay too, but she looked like she was in her late 20’s despite being thousands of years old. The typical traits of Fay’s clan was also present, concerning the sky-blue skin and shoulder-length white hair. Beth was abnormally proportioned in the feminine category even for a succubus, was only level 29 despite having had so much time to level up - and specifically had a contractual agreement with all her previous and current summoners that she would not be required to fight at all despite the situation.
She was essentially eye candy without any of the normal perks of having a demonic contract, but Tao Zhang was absolutely ok with that.
“Master…” Beth said, bending down and slowly putting the donut into the plump man’s open, drooling mouth with a wink. “There’s your donut. Can I be of any further assistance?”
Tao’s bulging wide eyes remained unblinking and locked onto the woman, mesmerized, as he rapidly shook his head and began to stutter. “U-Uh-Uhm, n-no…”
Despite all his bluster and talk, this guy simply couldn’t keep his eye contact maintained for more than ten seconds and furiously blushed before looking away to snarf the donut loudly down and off to the side. He was smitten and it showed, and Beth winked their way before turning around to head back for a continued conversation with her grandaughter.
The plasma cannons boomed and roared nearby as the siege continued into the evening hours.
The cultist seemed to realize how foolish he must have looked because he then grew even redder, snarfed the donut down faster, and turned his ire on the minotaur curled up on the ground who was being used as a chair. “BIGGIE-G, YOU USELESS COW!”
He kicked the minotaur in the side, yelping when he hurt his foot in the process and started to hop around - while the proclaimed Biggie-G only snorted in poorly veiled amusement at his master’s pain.
Riven raised an eyebrow and rubbed his cheeks with both hands, slapping them to make sure he was awake, and shook his head when Tao Zhang squealed and tripped to land flat on his face. Pieces of donut were intermixed with the dirt that the cultist spit out of his mouth, and he loudly cleared his throat and glared at his surroundings to make sure no one else was laughing. When he saw that many of the officers of the subjugated forces were laughing anyways, a good number of them, he stormed off in a flustered mess and began to ugly-cry.
“Well I’ll be damned…” Riven muttered to himself. “How did that man live to end up here?”
“Yeah, I’m surprised he wasn’t murdered by the other cultists too.” Athela said off to his left as she made her presence known. “The rest of them are pretty ruthless, but that guy’s just a standout.”
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Many of the others hadn’t noticed her at all until her reveal, and Riven probably only sensed her due to their soul tether connection.
“I’ve been thinking the same thing… Which makes me think that this play on his weebish incel vibe is just an act.” Riven said, but even as he said it he was rather dubious. The man seemed legitimate in everything he did, as weird as it was, but even by Tao’s own admission - he’d murdered a solid seven other contenders for the spot of cultist before claiming his five artifacts to get here.
What was even weirder was that the man wasn’t wearing his artifacts like so many of the others did, and that had Riven questioning things too. The whole situation was just strange, downright strange, and despite this kind of person being someone who Riven would laugh about given just how absurd he was - Riven couldn’t find it in himself to laugh at Tao.
Something was off about the man. Riven could feel it. But despite his gut feeling, Tao had handed over his Elysium Altar to Riven just as promised - along with his entire group of subjugated forces that he’d conquered from other villages. Riven’s gut had been wrong before too, many times, and even the people who Tao had ‘subjugated’ didn’t seem to fear him very much whenever he was around. On the contrary, they seemed grateful that someone else was in charge of their fates now - as their fates of getting out of this mess was directly linked to whoever had obtained the right to rule them in this fight over the altars.
“LIEGE!” Nora screamed into his left ear, and Riven flinched at the abrupt piercing voice radiating in his eardrum like a bomb had gone off.
“Oh god damn it Nora! I said to stop with that you crazy bitch!” Riven growled, rubbing his ear and letting his vampiric regeneration clear the abrupt headache over the next few seconds. “What is it?!”
The two-dimensional vantablack woman gave him a sickly white smile and giggled while leaning to the side. “IT’S TIME TO MAKE OUR FINAL BATTLE PLANS! THE OTHERS ARE READY! AND BRING THAT IDIOT TAO WITH YOU - HE HAS SOME ANSWERS THAT WE NEED!”
***
Riven walked through the center of the very large tent to the sound of hushed whispers as people he’d not introduced himself to yet - and maybe never would - gawked at him or nervously side-eyed him from a distance. It was very apparent that they all knew who he was in one form or the other, and how that’d come to be he wasn’t quite sure - neither did he care. His face lit up in a big grin though when two very familiar objects peeled themselves off a nearby couch and floated over to him. His armor, Messenger, and his weapon, Jackal, were in pristine condition now. Jackal’s flaming eye sockets of the horned skull flared upon seeing him, and the shards of crystalized red ice along the black staff began to fluctuate in length - while the streams of blood ran more rapidly. Reaching out his hand to stroke the staff’s forehead where the etched pentagram was located, Riven grasped the item and felt a surge of energy wash through him.
He shuddered, having taken for granted Jackal’s potency only up until very recently when he’d been devoid of his two most prominent items. He’d been attached at the hip to both Jackal and Messenger for a very long time now, and having been devoid of them for weeks he’d realized just how useful they’d been in maintaining his status quo.
His eyes landed on messenger, where the bone armor plates and bloodsilk fabric seemed to tense - and the gluttonous maw along the front opened up to wrap tendrils of darkness around Riven’s body in an embrace. To most other people in the room it seemed like the armor was trying to eat him, but to Riven it was just a loving gesture.
As quick as thought, Messenger unraveled itself and then snapped its pieces along Riven’s body - tightening again to form the usual one-piece armor set he’d so often worn. It was like an evil-looking body suit, and easily inserted itself onto his skin without Riven even needing to take off the more basic clothes underneath - or the happy birthday cloak of shadows Athela had crafted for Riven a while ago. With a mental thought, the bone armor plates and brilliant red fabric covering Riven’s face from the bridge of his nose down peeled back, and Riven settled comfortably onto a cushioned chair in the front of the room.
Fay sat down next to him on his right with Beth one over, and as other people began taking their own seats in front of a hastily constructed stage - one of the cultivator commanders came to sit next to Riven on his left.
“Young master.” The elderly man bowed low in his chair with his hands pressed flat against one another. “I wish to have words with you, if I may.”
Riven recognized him as the representative of the entire cultivator sect Nora had subjugated, and was about to reply to the old man when he was yanked backwards along with his chair and thrown across the room like a rag doll.
Athela, the culprit, promptly placed another empty chair down next to Riven and smugly smiled at the old man as she sat down in the spot he’d only occupied moments before. “Sorry, this is Athela’s spot!”
“Don’t talk about yourself in the third person, Athela. It’s weird.” Fay quipped, while her grandmother chuckled to the side.
Quivering in anger, the old cultivator flared his aura only for a moment before realizing the reality of his situation - and quickly clamped down on it before anything bad happened. Still, he clenched his fists and grit his teeth in Athela’s direction. “You… You!!!!”
“That’s me!” Athela snarked back with a bright white smile. “If you want to try and plead the case of your people not participating again, do it after the meeting! I need to be present in this exact position because I have a condition where I’ll die of shame if my boyfriend doesn’t hold my hand.”
Athela snapped a quick punch into Riven’s gut when he didn’t act on the cue, which got a yelp-grunt and quickly got Riven learnt. He held her hand after that without question, and Athela snuggled happily into his shoulder with a sigh.
Nora’s entrance into the tent signaled what remained of the ruckus to calm down, though she only used her main body and didn’t bother with the legion of other creepies she controlled. Narg only made things even more silent as the shadowy cloud of eyeballs phased in and out of the abyssal side of this realm as the archdemon hid most of its true mass through the veil.
Coming to the front of the tent, Narg’s black, almost gas-like mass turned around to stare at Riven for a long moment. Then the other peripheral eyeballs began to look out at the other officers and commanders lower down on the totem pole.
“I have concluded…” Narg began, with the room in a dead silence - only interrupted by the sound of siege weaponry firing a hundred yards off. “... That Tao Zhang, our resident rogue cultist, was correct.”
A series of groans and curses followed the proclamation, and some people even put their heads into their hands to cover their faces.
“How are we supposed to actually take the place then!?” A knight called out from the back. “It’s impossible! Curse Elysium for this bad omen! We’ll never get out of this place alive!”
Murmurs of agreement followed the proclamation, and Narg let them fade out before continuing his speech.
“To confirm…” Narg started again. “... I meant everything. Everything that Tao Zhang has told us is correct from what I can personally perceive, and what I have personally tested in both the altar we now control - and what I can test on this one from a distance. The alta itself is about 80% indestructible, by Elysium’s design, where only the battlements, gates, and larger doors throughout the complex are targetable. The walls themselves will not be broken through by any means we possess here, but that does not mean we should letup on the siege. The battlements in most cases, when destroyed, will lead to the inner workings of the tower. Though if we don’t destroy them and capitalize on the opportunity soon after, the altar builds itself back up. The golem defenders number nearly 100,000, respawn indefinitely every hour, are all ELITE tier level 150’s, and are controlled directly by a central panel linked to the altar’s owner. The central panel can be shut down section by section in different areas of the tower - each one weakening a piece of the panel - and weakening the golems - before it turns them off entirely. These panel sections will need to be held by groups of our own army during the battle. Not controlling these panel sections will mean the army of golems never ends, so it will be important to hold the panel sections while taking the tower in order to later maintain control over the throne room. As many already know - these towers can also be contested by other participants in the Apocalypse Beasts event. In this case, because it is a Chalgathi Altar, only those affiliated with Chalgathi can actually maintain control over the altar - but other enemy cultists of different types and their armies will still be able to take the altars without gaining their points if they manage to control the internal throne room for more than a few hours. Controlling the throne room will be a massive undertaking even for those here, as the throne rooms have nullification zones that reduce the amount of power one can wield or even push inside it per individual - capping them - and essentially making it a numbers game rather than overall power.”
Narg looked to Riven on that one. “You will be unable to use your full might when trying to take the throne for the altar’s capture. Doubtless, the cultist Justin Mathers will be using this to his advantage.”
Riven nodded his understanding in silence.
“But that’s only inside the throne room itself, correct? We can still use our powers to their fullest outside it?”
Narg bobbed in a nod. “Yes.”
“Do we have a map of what the internal structural setup is like?”
“No. The interior changes constantly.” Narg replied.
Another human woman from one of the smaller conquered villages raised her hand. “And the traps Tao Zhang talked about?”
Narg blinked. “They’re going to be present.”
More groans.
“Does this Justin person really have four cities’ worth of soldiers inside?”
Narg did his equivalent of a shrug. “I am not sure what the exact number is, as unlike with the golems I could not compare their interior numbers of conquered peoples like I could with the golems present in the altar we control. However, I can with certainty say that their army of non-golems and conquered peoples will number at the very least over three hundred thousand.”
“So a minimum of four hundred thousand including the golems that’ll respawn forever unless we control these ‘panel sections’, along with all the traps, the built in siege weapons, an interior shifting maze, and the indestructible walls?” A man loudly groaned from somewhere in the back. “We’re walking into a death trap!”
Narg smiled when the familiar, nasally voice of the rogue cultists reached him forms somewhere outside - and the archdemon extended an eyeball in the direction of the tent flap. “Perhaps. But we have an advantage of someone knowledgeable on these inner workings in turn. As the most intimate with these structures, Tao Zhang will be leading the way - and he has guaranteed to personally escort our glorious leader Riven, Nora, myself, and the other archdemons to the control room for the golems. We will take the golems offline first, then proceed to the throne room to kill the one called Justin Mathers - before claiming the altar for ourselves. But even though we are spearheading the mission, it will be important for the rest of you to do your own parts - as it is unlikely we will be able to do this on our own. These Chalgathi Altars were built to withstand a siege just like this one, and making sure that those panel sections are taken and held will be immensely important for overall success.”

Chapter 354