Post by EmperorMyric on Feb 23, 2023 11:28:02 GMT
Capital Planet Znor: Third Republic of Coronan Space
“A kurse upon you and your families! All of you!”
The Supreme Justice heard his words triplicated back to him by the vast vaulted expanse all around him. Although the echo carried them further, only the second and fourth repetitions were audible above the rumbling of the aircraft and explosions outside.
“I am the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Third Republic!” Vzhnor Kaluga barked into the void. Whether to have his sovereign title repeated to him by the emptiness or for his last remaining hopes that the rest of the Supreme Court was still out there, not even Kaluga himself knew.
The toll of the long hike became intolerable for Vzhnor’s knees at around the same time the silence broke his spirit, and the Supreme Justice fell to his knees atop a cliff of petrified toilet paper and office supplies crushed into rock by the tectonic forces of the ocean of garbage’s continuous decay. His bailiffs held the remaining gates of the Supreme Court building with something that vaguely hinted at bravery. His own bodyguards had been devoured by the filthworms, taken up defensive positions or had fallen to snipers or disease. Now the Chief Supreme Justice, the de facto ruler of the largest nation in Ancerious, was truly alone.
“Where are you?!” He sobbed, crawling towards the ledge with the gavel that once shaped Corona and the galaxy. “Why did you leave me with all these fucking retards!?”
The foreign spies at Vzhnor’s service -the only ones intelligent enough to serve as intelligence- had tracked the convoys of all other eleven Supreme Justices converging upon the ancient Supreme Courthouse only hours before it all fell apart. All eleven of those calcified, revolting masses of intestinal tract and cybernetic brain had somehow managed to all make it to the Supreme Courthouse at once without their chief, the Sureme Justice, the People’s Judge. How could have Vzhnor not known? He was the Third Republic, the only Supreme Court Justice whose seat was elected. Billions in bribes, giveaways, media campaigns and foreign consultancy had earned him his gavel - meanwhile all the others had done to earn their permanent post was being alive at the right moment for the unrestrained advance of medical science to keep them alive long past the life expectancy of a Coronan. He should have been the first. In fact, he should have been the only one.
Yet the eleven old bastards had disappeared. Worse yet, the retainers of a few of them had actually blocked the gates to try and prevent Vzhnor from entering the arcology, delaying the Chief Supreme Justice by a further eight hours and completely scattering the “logistical” convoy of riches he sought to escape with.
“Please, don’t leave me here. I don’t know how to do half the shit that needs to be done! Just give me a sign! Anything!” The Chief Justice bartered with the afterimages of his co-rulers. In the darkness of the Supreme Courthouse, everything reminded him of the other Justices. The superstructure of an aircraft carrier half-sunk in the garbage was not unlike the massive life support rig that kept one of them alive. The wavy forms of a solidified garbage flow reminded him of the fat rolls of another of the borderline-liquid Supreme Justices. Their forms were everywhere, their beings nowhere.
Already this building felt like a distant memory. The Caput Mundi of Ancerious, condemned decades ago after the asbestos storms -”asbestorms”- of the crumbling courthouse had forced most of the staff to work from home. Vzhnor had visited it once, exactly thirteen years ago for his swearing in. Back then the pseudo-grandiose marble arcology was already tilting 12° east as its foundations sank into the sea of garbage, the 314 days since had added an additional degree of tilt and 5 meters of depth as it settled on top of the previous, completely buried Supreme Courthouse.
Like amost everything in the Third Republic, the Supreme Courthouse had become a garbage dumpster and its real operations moved to datacenters in Rorzha. But none of the other thousands of derelict arcologies and megacities slowly crushed by kilometers of garbage seemed to have the aura of the Supreme Courthouse. There was something unique, sacred and perhaps even intimate about this location. The flight of the other Justices all but confirmed it. Deep underneath the pillars of smog-blackened marble, the rivers of raw sewage and the half-completed colossi of judges long forgotten beat the heart of the Third Republic, and Vzhnor could feel it through his grief.
“Computer! Computer!” Vzhnor hollered into the void, trudging through the sludge that had seeped into every corner of the Supreme Corner, and the Third Republic as a whole. “Computer! Outlaw everything! This is my decree! Make everything illegal and people will return to their homes, I need to figure out what is going on. Do it! I therefore issue a warrant banning everything!”
At the strike of the gavel upon the forgotten wreck of an overturned cement truck, Vzhnor shouted the Third Republic of Corona’s final judicial warrant into being. By the power of words written tens of thousands of years ago, the People’s Judge could give such injunctions without the quorum of the Supreme Court. Truth to be told he had never actually read the law that stated so. He, like any judges, had never read any law at all. The idea that the Third Republic ever had a legislative branch was something out of mythology, passed down orally and corrupted a thousandfold by the progressively-dimming intellect of the generations of the Third Republic’s bureaucracy. But the central idea had always been there. The People’s Judge stood supreme over the Nation.
“Computer, computer, please!” Vzhnor’s next breakdown came some time later, when he had trudged through the sea of garbage bags and onto the deck of the abandoned aircraft carrier. “Where are you?!”
For the first time in the history of this Supreme Court, a Justice was hearing the repetitive orchestra of his own mortality. First was the blood oxygenation alarm. Next came the insulin defficiency alarm. Third, and most painful was a fracture notification on his hole-ridden metatarsal bone. One by one, his biometrics started fading as the walk from the entrance to the warship -the first such walk the Judge had ever taken since assuming his post- had exhausted and crippled his body.
“You kant just leave me here!” Vzhnor crawled up the deck of the half-sunken vessel, exerting until the IV lines and cranial electrodes started falling off his body. Little by little, the cybernetic mass of medical equipment that once held power over whole planets returned to what it truly was - what it always had been: a cripplingly stupid subhuman looking at something vastly beyond his comprehension.
Here, deep underneath the crust of food leftovers, worms and disposed dildos that covered the Coronan capital of Znor, there was something sacred in the air. No wonder the rest of the Supreme Court had immediately evacuated to this geofront of garbage and tarnished marble. There was something else here, and a deep and long-slumbering feature in Vzhnor’s genes -in every Coronan’s genes- told him to seek it.
It was also here where the fabled ‘computer’ was housed. That disembodied, soft, feminine voice that answered to the profoundly dim-witted inquiries of Coronans all across the Third Republic. A loyal executive agent and bookkeeper of the Judiciary, even an underappreciated symbol of stability and intimate caretaker of the mental health of the Supreme Court. It was Computer that made them different from the disgusting masses after all. Whereas the disposable and loathsome Koronan only heard (and ignored) Computer’s voice in city-wide public announcements, judges received direct text messages from it. The High Judiciary managed a continuous conversation with Computer and the Supreme Court… the Supreme Court was one with them. She was a voice in their head, immediately offering perfect advice, indistinguishable from their own consciousness. And now she was gone. Gone, all her wit and knowhow had been suddenly replaced with those ten goddamn, thrice-fucked, faggoty lines of text that called themselves the “Continuity of Government Protocol.”
Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
Unite humanity with a living new language.
Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a galactic court.
Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
Balance personal rights with social duties.
Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
Be not a cancer on the Galaxy – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.
The ten commandments glowed upon Vzhnor, casting his shadow upon the deck markings of the old carrier. The CGP did not talk, it did not interact. It was not Computer, it offered no answers, only orders. It did not talk, only displayed static text.
“BITCH WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?! JUST PASS THE GODDAMN INJUNCTION!”
One coughing fit later, the blood of the Supreme Judge stained his hand. Even a Coronan could tell it was all going to be over soon, but before he left the world of the living he needed to know where the rest of the Supreme Court had disappeared to.
AMEC’s board of directors had fled to someplace in White Maginot or Minsin, there was no doubt about that. They had looted whatever financial fumes the Third Republic was running on and made away to their refuges along with their cronies and hanger-ons in Rorzha. Rot went where rot goes, but the Supreme Court was diffferent.
To the pressure wave of a 6.1 magnitude earthquake, Chief Justice Vzhnor felt silent. Along with the quake there was a deep subsonic groan followed by a deafening cacophony of crushed metal and garbage landslides as the grounds of the Supreme Court shifted. The entire arcology sank a bit further, parts of it beginning to crack and collapse. A couple more warships -the carrier’s escort?- sank beneath the trash. Glimpses of what appeared to be a brigade and a half’s worth of equipment bogged down in the landfill flashed before Vzhnor’s eyes as he held on for dear life to the edge of the carrier’s deck while aircraft spilled out of the hangar doors on its flanks.
“If you speak the truth, consider the administration of the Judiciary of the Third Republic to be officially over.” a behemoth spoke in the shadows. A living mountain of meat, crushed beneath its own weight side-on, speaking into the empty halls. It was Supreme Justice Gabbro Karnik, and the destroyed remains of its bailiffs formed a sort of nest around its collapsed form. “And you might do with the Third Republic as you wish.” He said, causing gravel to fall off the ceilings.
“Were the showings at Askandar, Vulkan and the Liminus not enough to convince you, your highest honor?” Another, ethereal voice resounded.
Karnik attempted to move, its atrophied limbs not even reaching the ground. The 4500-ton crawler-transporter that used to move the horrific Man-slug of Varfargn laid wrecked and twisted across several square kilometers while the fleshy mass itself laid slowly dying. “Call it a dose of healthy skepticism, a quality which would much benefit our lost people.”
Vzhnor’s heart monitors rang alarms and his face reddened as he heard those words. He had passed an injunction banning the rest of the Supreme Kourt from ever talking in a smarterer way than him, and here was Supreme Justice Karnik sounding the smarterest he’d ever sounded. This was illegal! A violation of the highest order!
“Karnik you fucking swollen clitoris I always knew you were a crook! Guilty! Guilty!” Vzhnor’s gavel hit the steel deck. “Sentenced to death! Death! DEATH! DEATH!”
“We have seen firsthand the grace of our most beloved fragment before. Rejuvenated, purified, perfect, crystalline, diamondlike.” A second ear-splitting bass voice boomed. Supreme Justice Knestr Vargoi was now only a colossal skeleton filled with electronic equipment. Normally a robotic frame held him together like a mech, now Vzhnor noticed his bones were scattered all over the empty halls among the dead bodies of his bailiffs and bodyguards. Yet Knestr himself continued speaking. “But that was a different time. The psionic energy of the Holy Scorn was very well enough to exalt our most sacred fragment back into its original mirror sheen, like pressure turning coal into diamonds. I am not convinced your Army of The Panopticon can harness anywhere near that kind of power.”
“Perhaps a demonstration would be in order.” The third, unknown voice spoke over the faint echoes of Vzhnor’s powerless screeching. This was not a Supreme Justice, this was another presence, inhuman, trascendental.
“REEEEE!” The lungs of the People’s Judge struggled to impose its puny presence upon the congregation of demigods. Throwing a tantrum, rolling around on the deck was all that he had left once Vzhnor receded back to his infantile nature. “Why the fuck are you selling our country off?! Nobody sells it out except me! I am the People’s Judge, I get the lion’s share-”
Vzhnor’s whining was cut short by the deafening sound of crashing metal. Several hundred meters away, a long-abandoned destroyer was tipped over and smashed on its side. A 500m-high stack of pallets crumbled to the ground. A derelict bucket-wheel excavator came undone and its structure collapsed into a pile of twisted metal and dust. Parts of the arcology began crumbling down in a mighty earthquake, each shockwave bringing down larger and larger structures until the whole sea of garbage was stirring and Vzhnor was holding on for dear life to the deck of the ancient aircraft carrier. Amongst it all was it, a serpentine presence clad in scales of gold.
Each scale as big as a house, catching an alien light in the otherwise completely dark Supreme Court. It slid over junk and marble alike like it wasn’t even there, as if the centuries of built-up pollution and wrecks were liquefied by its divine presence.
Vzhnor’s misshapen eyes followed the length of the serpent as it slid towards the center of the gathering of Supreme Justices, and on its end he witnessed the rise of an eight-winged muscular torso of semi-anthropomorphic form, a headless naga with a halo that shone in a golden-rainbow light beyond light.
“My pleasure.”
No further words escaped Vzhnor’s mouth. Towering even above the forms of the other supreme justices, the Scion of the New Overmind, Armin Laikos, Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Panopticon, filled the room with His tangible aura. Upon its right hand was a spear, which was driven into the ground to pierce through the kilometers-thick landfill of degeneracy upon which the Supreme Court was built. Past the foundations of the building, past the crushed remnants of the previous Supreme Courts below, past generations upon generations of the degradation of the Coronans from Homo Sapiens unto Homo Ludens, until the tip of the divine spear hooked onto the desired object, the long-lost soul of the Third Republic of Corona.
1.2 kilotons of force were released by the muscular exertion of Armin Laikos as he pulled the spear back from deep underground, the shockwave of the act being reflected and focused by the domed Supreme Court back into itself and fully collapsing the building. But through the booming, the whirlwind of detritus, the impending doom of a miles-high dome of granite coming undone - even Vzhnor saw it.
The Overmind Fragment of Perseverance. Not an echo, not a glimpse, but the Fragment itself made material and revitalized. Coiled around the Spear of Brahmastra, to the eyes it was like an amorphous, semi-liquid corpus of fluttering avian wings shedding divine feathers with each flap.
Vzhnor’s gaze could only stand it for a half second before his deepest instincts lowered his gaze down to the deck and for the first time he saw human hands, not his crude and atrophied appendages. He touched his face and it was a human face, and from then on the People’s Judge closed his eyes and accepted his fate, his genetic destiny fulfilled.
“O most precious Fragment, light of my life.” Knestr said, dying in peace as he also returned to a human form. “You are just as beautiful as the last time I heard your voice.”
“Do we have an accord?” Laikos asked.
“Do with the Third Republic as you will.”
Transmuted into thermal energy after only a few seconds, three gigatons of psychic energy laid the battlefield -and the entire continental shelf- around the Supreme Court into eternal silence.
The Third Republic of the Corona, having found a force capable of revitalizing their Overmind Fragment, fulfilled their destiny and passed onto history.
Before the billions of tons of ejecta, the magnitude 12.2 earthquake or the supersonic shockwaves could finish circumnavigating the Coronan capital of Znor, the state structure of the entire Third Republic dissolved.
To those with the will, the call of destiny of eight hundred worlds echoed across the galaxy, beckoning the daring to take the reins of the galaxy’s largest nation-state.
“A kurse upon you and your families! All of you!”
The Supreme Justice heard his words triplicated back to him by the vast vaulted expanse all around him. Although the echo carried them further, only the second and fourth repetitions were audible above the rumbling of the aircraft and explosions outside.
“I am the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Third Republic!” Vzhnor Kaluga barked into the void. Whether to have his sovereign title repeated to him by the emptiness or for his last remaining hopes that the rest of the Supreme Court was still out there, not even Kaluga himself knew.
The toll of the long hike became intolerable for Vzhnor’s knees at around the same time the silence broke his spirit, and the Supreme Justice fell to his knees atop a cliff of petrified toilet paper and office supplies crushed into rock by the tectonic forces of the ocean of garbage’s continuous decay. His bailiffs held the remaining gates of the Supreme Court building with something that vaguely hinted at bravery. His own bodyguards had been devoured by the filthworms, taken up defensive positions or had fallen to snipers or disease. Now the Chief Supreme Justice, the de facto ruler of the largest nation in Ancerious, was truly alone.
“Where are you?!” He sobbed, crawling towards the ledge with the gavel that once shaped Corona and the galaxy. “Why did you leave me with all these fucking retards!?”
The foreign spies at Vzhnor’s service -the only ones intelligent enough to serve as intelligence- had tracked the convoys of all other eleven Supreme Justices converging upon the ancient Supreme Courthouse only hours before it all fell apart. All eleven of those calcified, revolting masses of intestinal tract and cybernetic brain had somehow managed to all make it to the Supreme Courthouse at once without their chief, the Sureme Justice, the People’s Judge. How could have Vzhnor not known? He was the Third Republic, the only Supreme Court Justice whose seat was elected. Billions in bribes, giveaways, media campaigns and foreign consultancy had earned him his gavel - meanwhile all the others had done to earn their permanent post was being alive at the right moment for the unrestrained advance of medical science to keep them alive long past the life expectancy of a Coronan. He should have been the first. In fact, he should have been the only one.
Yet the eleven old bastards had disappeared. Worse yet, the retainers of a few of them had actually blocked the gates to try and prevent Vzhnor from entering the arcology, delaying the Chief Supreme Justice by a further eight hours and completely scattering the “logistical” convoy of riches he sought to escape with.
“Please, don’t leave me here. I don’t know how to do half the shit that needs to be done! Just give me a sign! Anything!” The Chief Justice bartered with the afterimages of his co-rulers. In the darkness of the Supreme Courthouse, everything reminded him of the other Justices. The superstructure of an aircraft carrier half-sunk in the garbage was not unlike the massive life support rig that kept one of them alive. The wavy forms of a solidified garbage flow reminded him of the fat rolls of another of the borderline-liquid Supreme Justices. Their forms were everywhere, their beings nowhere.
Already this building felt like a distant memory. The Caput Mundi of Ancerious, condemned decades ago after the asbestos storms -”asbestorms”- of the crumbling courthouse had forced most of the staff to work from home. Vzhnor had visited it once, exactly thirteen years ago for his swearing in. Back then the pseudo-grandiose marble arcology was already tilting 12° east as its foundations sank into the sea of garbage, the 314 days since had added an additional degree of tilt and 5 meters of depth as it settled on top of the previous, completely buried Supreme Courthouse.
Like amost everything in the Third Republic, the Supreme Courthouse had become a garbage dumpster and its real operations moved to datacenters in Rorzha. But none of the other thousands of derelict arcologies and megacities slowly crushed by kilometers of garbage seemed to have the aura of the Supreme Courthouse. There was something unique, sacred and perhaps even intimate about this location. The flight of the other Justices all but confirmed it. Deep underneath the pillars of smog-blackened marble, the rivers of raw sewage and the half-completed colossi of judges long forgotten beat the heart of the Third Republic, and Vzhnor could feel it through his grief.
“Computer! Computer!” Vzhnor hollered into the void, trudging through the sludge that had seeped into every corner of the Supreme Corner, and the Third Republic as a whole. “Computer! Outlaw everything! This is my decree! Make everything illegal and people will return to their homes, I need to figure out what is going on. Do it! I therefore issue a warrant banning everything!”
At the strike of the gavel upon the forgotten wreck of an overturned cement truck, Vzhnor shouted the Third Republic of Corona’s final judicial warrant into being. By the power of words written tens of thousands of years ago, the People’s Judge could give such injunctions without the quorum of the Supreme Court. Truth to be told he had never actually read the law that stated so. He, like any judges, had never read any law at all. The idea that the Third Republic ever had a legislative branch was something out of mythology, passed down orally and corrupted a thousandfold by the progressively-dimming intellect of the generations of the Third Republic’s bureaucracy. But the central idea had always been there. The People’s Judge stood supreme over the Nation.
“Computer, computer, please!” Vzhnor’s next breakdown came some time later, when he had trudged through the sea of garbage bags and onto the deck of the abandoned aircraft carrier. “Where are you?!”
For the first time in the history of this Supreme Court, a Justice was hearing the repetitive orchestra of his own mortality. First was the blood oxygenation alarm. Next came the insulin defficiency alarm. Third, and most painful was a fracture notification on his hole-ridden metatarsal bone. One by one, his biometrics started fading as the walk from the entrance to the warship -the first such walk the Judge had ever taken since assuming his post- had exhausted and crippled his body.
“You kant just leave me here!” Vzhnor crawled up the deck of the half-sunken vessel, exerting until the IV lines and cranial electrodes started falling off his body. Little by little, the cybernetic mass of medical equipment that once held power over whole planets returned to what it truly was - what it always had been: a cripplingly stupid subhuman looking at something vastly beyond his comprehension.
Here, deep underneath the crust of food leftovers, worms and disposed dildos that covered the Coronan capital of Znor, there was something sacred in the air. No wonder the rest of the Supreme Court had immediately evacuated to this geofront of garbage and tarnished marble. There was something else here, and a deep and long-slumbering feature in Vzhnor’s genes -in every Coronan’s genes- told him to seek it.
It was also here where the fabled ‘computer’ was housed. That disembodied, soft, feminine voice that answered to the profoundly dim-witted inquiries of Coronans all across the Third Republic. A loyal executive agent and bookkeeper of the Judiciary, even an underappreciated symbol of stability and intimate caretaker of the mental health of the Supreme Court. It was Computer that made them different from the disgusting masses after all. Whereas the disposable and loathsome Koronan only heard (and ignored) Computer’s voice in city-wide public announcements, judges received direct text messages from it. The High Judiciary managed a continuous conversation with Computer and the Supreme Court… the Supreme Court was one with them. She was a voice in their head, immediately offering perfect advice, indistinguishable from their own consciousness. And now she was gone. Gone, all her wit and knowhow had been suddenly replaced with those ten goddamn, thrice-fucked, faggoty lines of text that called themselves the “Continuity of Government Protocol.”
Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
Unite humanity with a living new language.
Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a galactic court.
Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
Balance personal rights with social duties.
Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
Be not a cancer on the Galaxy – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.
The ten commandments glowed upon Vzhnor, casting his shadow upon the deck markings of the old carrier. The CGP did not talk, it did not interact. It was not Computer, it offered no answers, only orders. It did not talk, only displayed static text.
“BITCH WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?! JUST PASS THE GODDAMN INJUNCTION!”
One coughing fit later, the blood of the Supreme Judge stained his hand. Even a Coronan could tell it was all going to be over soon, but before he left the world of the living he needed to know where the rest of the Supreme Court had disappeared to.
AMEC’s board of directors had fled to someplace in White Maginot or Minsin, there was no doubt about that. They had looted whatever financial fumes the Third Republic was running on and made away to their refuges along with their cronies and hanger-ons in Rorzha. Rot went where rot goes, but the Supreme Court was diffferent.
To the pressure wave of a 6.1 magnitude earthquake, Chief Justice Vzhnor felt silent. Along with the quake there was a deep subsonic groan followed by a deafening cacophony of crushed metal and garbage landslides as the grounds of the Supreme Court shifted. The entire arcology sank a bit further, parts of it beginning to crack and collapse. A couple more warships -the carrier’s escort?- sank beneath the trash. Glimpses of what appeared to be a brigade and a half’s worth of equipment bogged down in the landfill flashed before Vzhnor’s eyes as he held on for dear life to the edge of the carrier’s deck while aircraft spilled out of the hangar doors on its flanks.
“If you speak the truth, consider the administration of the Judiciary of the Third Republic to be officially over.” a behemoth spoke in the shadows. A living mountain of meat, crushed beneath its own weight side-on, speaking into the empty halls. It was Supreme Justice Gabbro Karnik, and the destroyed remains of its bailiffs formed a sort of nest around its collapsed form. “And you might do with the Third Republic as you wish.” He said, causing gravel to fall off the ceilings.
“Were the showings at Askandar, Vulkan and the Liminus not enough to convince you, your highest honor?” Another, ethereal voice resounded.
Karnik attempted to move, its atrophied limbs not even reaching the ground. The 4500-ton crawler-transporter that used to move the horrific Man-slug of Varfargn laid wrecked and twisted across several square kilometers while the fleshy mass itself laid slowly dying. “Call it a dose of healthy skepticism, a quality which would much benefit our lost people.”
Vzhnor’s heart monitors rang alarms and his face reddened as he heard those words. He had passed an injunction banning the rest of the Supreme Kourt from ever talking in a smarterer way than him, and here was Supreme Justice Karnik sounding the smarterest he’d ever sounded. This was illegal! A violation of the highest order!
“Karnik you fucking swollen clitoris I always knew you were a crook! Guilty! Guilty!” Vzhnor’s gavel hit the steel deck. “Sentenced to death! Death! DEATH! DEATH!”
“We have seen firsthand the grace of our most beloved fragment before. Rejuvenated, purified, perfect, crystalline, diamondlike.” A second ear-splitting bass voice boomed. Supreme Justice Knestr Vargoi was now only a colossal skeleton filled with electronic equipment. Normally a robotic frame held him together like a mech, now Vzhnor noticed his bones were scattered all over the empty halls among the dead bodies of his bailiffs and bodyguards. Yet Knestr himself continued speaking. “But that was a different time. The psionic energy of the Holy Scorn was very well enough to exalt our most sacred fragment back into its original mirror sheen, like pressure turning coal into diamonds. I am not convinced your Army of The Panopticon can harness anywhere near that kind of power.”
“Perhaps a demonstration would be in order.” The third, unknown voice spoke over the faint echoes of Vzhnor’s powerless screeching. This was not a Supreme Justice, this was another presence, inhuman, trascendental.
“REEEEE!” The lungs of the People’s Judge struggled to impose its puny presence upon the congregation of demigods. Throwing a tantrum, rolling around on the deck was all that he had left once Vzhnor receded back to his infantile nature. “Why the fuck are you selling our country off?! Nobody sells it out except me! I am the People’s Judge, I get the lion’s share-”
Vzhnor’s whining was cut short by the deafening sound of crashing metal. Several hundred meters away, a long-abandoned destroyer was tipped over and smashed on its side. A 500m-high stack of pallets crumbled to the ground. A derelict bucket-wheel excavator came undone and its structure collapsed into a pile of twisted metal and dust. Parts of the arcology began crumbling down in a mighty earthquake, each shockwave bringing down larger and larger structures until the whole sea of garbage was stirring and Vzhnor was holding on for dear life to the deck of the ancient aircraft carrier. Amongst it all was it, a serpentine presence clad in scales of gold.
Each scale as big as a house, catching an alien light in the otherwise completely dark Supreme Court. It slid over junk and marble alike like it wasn’t even there, as if the centuries of built-up pollution and wrecks were liquefied by its divine presence.
Vzhnor’s misshapen eyes followed the length of the serpent as it slid towards the center of the gathering of Supreme Justices, and on its end he witnessed the rise of an eight-winged muscular torso of semi-anthropomorphic form, a headless naga with a halo that shone in a golden-rainbow light beyond light.
“My pleasure.”
No further words escaped Vzhnor’s mouth. Towering even above the forms of the other supreme justices, the Scion of the New Overmind, Armin Laikos, Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Panopticon, filled the room with His tangible aura. Upon its right hand was a spear, which was driven into the ground to pierce through the kilometers-thick landfill of degeneracy upon which the Supreme Court was built. Past the foundations of the building, past the crushed remnants of the previous Supreme Courts below, past generations upon generations of the degradation of the Coronans from Homo Sapiens unto Homo Ludens, until the tip of the divine spear hooked onto the desired object, the long-lost soul of the Third Republic of Corona.
1.2 kilotons of force were released by the muscular exertion of Armin Laikos as he pulled the spear back from deep underground, the shockwave of the act being reflected and focused by the domed Supreme Court back into itself and fully collapsing the building. But through the booming, the whirlwind of detritus, the impending doom of a miles-high dome of granite coming undone - even Vzhnor saw it.
The Overmind Fragment of Perseverance. Not an echo, not a glimpse, but the Fragment itself made material and revitalized. Coiled around the Spear of Brahmastra, to the eyes it was like an amorphous, semi-liquid corpus of fluttering avian wings shedding divine feathers with each flap.
Vzhnor’s gaze could only stand it for a half second before his deepest instincts lowered his gaze down to the deck and for the first time he saw human hands, not his crude and atrophied appendages. He touched his face and it was a human face, and from then on the People’s Judge closed his eyes and accepted his fate, his genetic destiny fulfilled.
“O most precious Fragment, light of my life.” Knestr said, dying in peace as he also returned to a human form. “You are just as beautiful as the last time I heard your voice.”
“Do we have an accord?” Laikos asked.
“Do with the Third Republic as you will.”
Transmuted into thermal energy after only a few seconds, three gigatons of psychic energy laid the battlefield -and the entire continental shelf- around the Supreme Court into eternal silence.
The Third Republic of the Corona, having found a force capable of revitalizing their Overmind Fragment, fulfilled their destiny and passed onto history.
Before the billions of tons of ejecta, the magnitude 12.2 earthquake or the supersonic shockwaves could finish circumnavigating the Coronan capital of Znor, the state structure of the entire Third Republic dissolved.
To those with the will, the call of destiny of eight hundred worlds echoed across the galaxy, beckoning the daring to take the reins of the galaxy’s largest nation-state.