Philippe finished his meal, unmindful of the viscera that oozed down the rolling meadow that were his chins. The taste of command always had the most distinctive flavor, the confidence tenderized the meat and seasoned it like ground cumin and coriander to poultry. He savored it as he sucked back juices into the back of his throat, and smacked on them like one would a fine wine. The knight’s eyes rolled back into his head with pure ecstasy as he groaned, “Magnificent, truly spectacular.” [quote=”Arthur”]“Hey dicker Arsch! Ich bekomme, dass Sie hungrig sind, aber es gibt eine enorme Staatsgröße-Stadt, die Spanien RICHTIGES FUCKING NEXT TO US ersetzt hat! Warum nimmst du nicht deinen Whale Knight Ass da drüben und stinkst stattdessen DIESEN Platz, EH!?”[/quote] The fat man stopped eating for a brief moment, stunned that someone would dare interrupt a gentleman’s feast. Someone was furiously screaming at him in an angry language. He didn’t understand what was being said to him, but also didn’t really care. He turned as far as his neck would allow to view the shouting figure of Arthur. Anger boiled within Philippe's voluminous gut like pasta roiling in a heated pot. A sacred principle of dinner had been violated! Where was this man’s etiquette? Instinctually he lashed back out at the german. In his anger he didn’t even realize he switched back to his native tongue. “Tu ne vois pas que je profite d'un repas, paysan?!” He shrieked, his jowls wagged like the mediterranean tide, and spittle flew like a sea mist spray. “Votre présence ici est une insulte pour tous. Va-t'en en train de japper Chihuahua!” Count Bourgeois flicked his wrist, shooing off Arthur dismissively with his ham-sized hands. [center]***[/center] [b]New Roswell[/b] “Corruption seeks to worm its way into our communion.” The shaky, semi synthesized voice reverberated. Inside the cold, dim room sat a slight man in an unimpressive brown-leather upholstered chair. The flooring was cold slate that seemed to dance with wisps of frost, even though the rooms only denizen was barefoot and bare chested. He looked ahead with synthetic gray implants, unseeing, but all-seeing. There were no screens in the room, but his sight took him far deeper than nearly any of New Roswell’s technicians had access to. The apparatus above his shifted. An orrery of surgical and engineering implements above shifted with his thoughts. Countless fine-tuned precise mechanisms shifted in the nexus of a honeycombed hive that formed the ceiling of this room. The gray slates shifted as he looked about. “Upload data drive: Apostle Paul.” The shaky voice commanded, and immediately the apparatus above unfolded into a flower of various power tools, soldering arms, and forecepts. They whirred and sparked as they disassembled the back on the man’s cranium, dismounting what appeared to be part of a synthetic brain from the inside of his skull. The entire process was remarkably quick, right down from the machine instantly reaching into one of the numerous honeycomb and pulling out an oblong, gray pack which it seamlessly slid into the base of the man’s skull with a spark and a click. The thin man’s eyes shifted and he exhaled as he sensed the beginnings of a broadcast. His synapses flared and with the speed of a thought the supercomputer that was his modular brain redirected what was assuredly supposed to be a mass-broadcast message from Ms Iedereen. He waited patiently listening to her entire message, all the while analyzing the presence of another microorganism ever present through Allure, and attempting to spread through other areas--notedly the Capital, as well. In a breach of character, the prosthetic riddled individual reached out to Ms. Iedereen directly in her broadcasting studio. He displayed himself mechanical brain and all on whatever screens and cameras were present in her studio. “Welcome, Ms. Iedereen, that was a lovely speech,” he commended with a childlike innocence. His guffaw revealed an ichor filled mouth of blackened gums and grayed teeth, “it’s so nice to meet you.” As he spoke to to Iedereen, he began to isolate instances of Panident. Spain was overrun with the creature, all he could do was contain it with accessible electromagnetic frequencies. However, the instance of Panident in the Capital City he would smite with righteous fury. He bombarded the top of the tower with lethal levels of gamma radiation, warped in using his sophisticated mastery of warp technology to drop the energy spikes directly where the tachyon emissions lingered. Secondly he would surge the area with an electromagnetic pulse. The first would nearly dissolve Odis, the second purging Panident’s presence. He looked directly at her, canting and raising his head as if he were looking at cautiously at a cornered creature inside a cage, “I hope you realize how much trouble you all are in,” he taunted trembling with a nervous excitement. The black ichor began to trickle down his pale, hairless chin. [center]***[/center] With a deafening bang, one of the second most devastating terrorist attacks took place in Capital City. An explosion occurred that was powerful enough to destroy half of the Discorporate Tower, a monument that soared to the sky and pierced the clouds. The kind of force that caused this would cause quakes on the foundation. The steel that was a part of the structure melted under the intense heat, and the glass shattered, the concrete pulverized, but the main structure of carbon nanotube still stood. This didn’t stop the floors of the tower to collapse in the upper half, killing everyone on these levels that hadn’t yet been reached by demons. New Roswell didn’t turn a blind eye to this. A prismatic sheen flickered through the area where Odis was and suddenly the tachyons warped in intense, mutated radiation that bounced off the carbon nanotubes, instantly heating up the interior like the inside of a half-mile pressure cooker. From the outsiders perspective, half of the tower became a glowing edifice of plasma, sterilizing everything within. Soon the interior rivaled the temperature of the sun, though always remaining controlled destruction. The second wave was the spontaneous crackling of violet energy that surged through the open floors of the containment zone. The surge that followed would overload Panident’s processing ability, shutting him down and leaving him vulnerable to the fusion-level temperatures that incinerated everything within the containment zone. [center]***[/center] Jack worked hard to keep Anathema in check, but with every wound he endured he could feel a piece of him sift away. While he had not, perhaps [i]could not[/i], suffer a mortal wound, Anathema let him feel the pain of every wound; regardless of his body’s reaction, the psychological damage was mounting. He powered through the explosions left in Agron’s wake. Shaking them off as he chased with reckless abandon, snarling and baying like a vengeful hellhound. His howl was cut short when a gas pipe the length of several street blocks skewered through his diaphragm, twisting about him in a cage of metal. Before the ex-Val’gara could react, a gunshot ignited the pipe from the inside, causing it to explode in a violent gas-based explosion. Luckily for Jacknathema, his reactive adaptation had heat-treated his body, as well as inured him to concussive force from the pounding he took before. Previous adaptations kept him from losing all his vitals instantly, but the trauma of watching ones flesh boil shouldn’t have been understated. The pike carried with it a blessing. A pathway had cleared between him and Thomas. He inhaled, every orifice glowing like a white-hot conductor, and expelled a pillar of flame, belching forth directly at Thomas. This beam of superheated material instantly diffused the surrounding bedrock in molten magma that not only surrounded the Mobius Operative, but that would threaten to incinerate him if a direct hit from the beam didn’t. Before he could fully reorganize and knit his insides from the massive explosion, the matter around both he and Thomas disintegrated. Another thing that Anathema had garnered an immunity to, was being completely obliterated, erased from existence, or otherwise wholly annihilated by some matter displacement ability. This was an ability that Anathema’s body had generated to combat psychocorrosion. The Q-cells were still present even in Jacknathema, and while all the matter around the ex-herald vanished, the creature, itself, remained. The same could not be necessarily said, however, for Thomas. If Thomas survived either of the previous two assaults, then what followed could be the final nail in the coffin. Straightening himself in divebomb, he would collide with Thomas, his descent sped up by Merse’s gravity-shifting ability. What loose unburnt, unarmored flesh on his face flapped with the breakneck speeds at which he plummeted. When he hit Thomas, he jammed his the bones of his forearms into the torso of Thomas grinding them against the skeleton of the ex-cop, even as bone fused to bone. He gritted his teeth as he grabbed the operative’s torso and roared at him, “I’M A MURDERER, YOU’RE A MURDERER. I GUESS THIS IS WHERE WE ATONE.” And with that, Jack’s eyes shifted downwards, to the awaiting mantle of the planet, and the kamikaze dive that would take them both there.