Episode 1: The Realm of Hollows
Chilling, empty darkness was the predominant fact of reality in the realm of Zenith. Light did not naturally touch the vast landscape of shapeless, dark rock that stretched for uncounted miles. Indeed the only way anything existed in this world was if it was willed by its present master, and he had little use for filling the realm with anything that was not of use to him.
This master had crafted one thing from the smooth, barren surface of Zenith. A temple. Unimaginably vast, the structure rose as an imposing edifice of pitch black stone. A mountain carved in the likeness of an ancient place of worship, its spires and off-shoots showing a harsh, angular construction that was pyramidal in nature. The interior of the monolithic temple was only somewhat better lit than the darkness outside, formless light that seemed to come from nowhere providing the hint of illumination to colossal corridors so tall and wide, one would think they were crafted for titans to walk through.
Not inaccurate, for Zenith’s master was not alone in dwelling in this realm, but had gathered servants to be of use to him. Servants of what many would consider to be of prodigious proportions. Kaiju, was the term used in some spans of the multiverse. Monsters, perhaps in others. Gods, certainly by some standards. Regardless of the words one used, the occupants of Zenith’s temple edifice were almost one and all a collection of such humongous and powerful creatures.
What use the master of Zenith had for them, one might ask? And why would beings of such immense size and power ever deign to serve another as their master? To answer the later, one must only have understood that the master of Zenith was named Bagan, and that he too was a being of immense power and proportions to which the word “kaiju” only barely touched upon his true nature. And among such beings, Bagan’s might was unparalleled, to the point where even those of similar stature could naught but listen and obey his will.
So went the first question; they served because Bagan willed it. Oh, he was not an unreasonable master, nor, strangely, an entirely unkind one. He rewarded good service. Provided boons to those who knelt and served him well, even if he had not explained his plans to any of those he called servants. Within the temples insanely vast structure, the servants who did good work were provided ideal chambers, each tailored to suit the needs and desires of its occupant. For Bagan, whose power was stepped in matters metaphysical and magical, reshaping Zenith was a simple enough task, even in his weakened state.
The restoration of his full power was his present goal, but not his ultimate aim. And while he had servants to enact his will beyond Zenith’s dark realm, he sought more still, and an ever growing search for more means of restoring his power. In that regard, Bagan spent much of his time in Zenith utilizing his magic to observe realities and realms beyond Zenith. The means of observing the vaster multi-verse was at his disposal, and even the means of opening portals between those realities. Ultimately he intended to visit them all, so that he might silence each and every single reality of sapient life in its turn. But that would be for later. For now, Bagan observed, and planned.
It was during these observations that Bagan noticed a... ripple, between realities. It was no small thing, this ripple. It was a gargantuan disturbance in the void between worlds, as if one had dropped a stick of lit dynamite into a lake. Bagan was seeing the aftereffects of a truly massive surge of energy, a surge that tore right through the barriers that kept different realities separate from one another. Yet it was not an uncontrolled surge of energy, like some explosion of power. No, this ripple was focused and directed, and with keen interest Bagan extended his senses towards its source.
To peer through the void between realities was no small task, even for the might of Bagan’s magical prowess, but it was within his ability. He looked across an infinite span of nothing, his senses passing by the shining bubbles of countless realities. Each incandescent sphere was a universe unto itself, many of them related and connected to each other by invisible strings of mirror-like sub reality. Some dimensions were copies of each other, an endless parade of “what ifs” with no true origin point. Each world was its own “origin”, its own “prime”, with all others it's “alternates”.
In this eternal span of realities, there were clusters more closely related to each other than others. The ripple originated from a reality, or rather a “pair” or realities that was tied to a set of dimensions that Bagan was starting to grow irritatingly familiar with.
The ponies. Why was it always coming back to the ponies? But no, at least this time it wasn’t the version of Equestria that had been causing him such grief of late. This was a different Equestria. Or rather, an Equestria and its human counterpart. Often Equestria had a direct connection to a world of humans, but not the world of humans Bagan knew and originated from. More colorful. More like the ponies, but still human.
Bagan examined the two worlds, this Equestria and its human counterpart. Something about them seemed different than the ones he was already familiar with. He focused, looking at the barriers, the prismatic bubbles of seemingly infinite light that encased both realities. The ripple originated from here, and Bagan saw it; a tube of energy that connected the two worlds. That was the portal that usually kept the two worlds bound together. There should have been another to a cousin mirror reality as well, and Bagan spotted that too.
But why were there so many other tubes? The number of portals connecting the two realities here were far greater than normal. Putting that aside, he found the point of the ripple. Within the human world, but somehow... not in the human world? There were layers upon the bubble, layers that Bagan didn’t recognize. Additional realities, layered atop the first? The energy stemming from them felt unfamiliar. Not magic, and not Terran mana from Bagan’s home dimension. Something else. Tasting it, in a sense, Bagan realized the energy was spiritual in nature. He was not ignorant of spiritual powers, but he’d rarely seen a reality so utterly steeped in that much spirit energy.
It was like Equestria’s deep connection to magic, only made of raw spirit matter.
As for the ripple itself, Bagan saw someone or something had punched a hole in the human reality and gone surfing across the void, right into the Equestrian reality. Both exit and entrance holes were already closing on their own, but he saw the trajectory and realized that whatever caused the transfer, it had utilized a truly immense amount of power.
Indeed he was sensing an incredible amount of power from these two realities, and the sharp tang of conflict upon them.
Whoever dwelled in this Equestria and especially its human counterpart, there were beings there of great power, and they were in conflict with one another. Bagan could tell that much just from basic observation. Yet he’d never been satisfied with minimal information. His ultimate plan meant the eradication of all sapient life. He could ill afford to ignore a reality in which this much power dwelled. Threats needed to be analyzed. If possible, information and power both needed to be obtained.
In such instances Bagan had a team of particular servants he preferred to call upon. Among all those under his command, these four were the strongest team and the most ideal scouts in his army. If ever he needed a task accomplished that he could not trust to lesser servants, it was these four kaiju who had thus far served him the most competently and faithfully.
And so Bagan pulled his consciousness back towards Zenith, to call upon his Dark Hunters for another task.
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Megalon spread out his drill arms, emphasizing the size of his speculative wall TV, providing an enthusiastic hop up and down as he added, “We get big enough couch we can all sit on, and have ourselves a movie night! What do you think?”
Staring at his brother Nebulan cyborg, Gigan considered how to put his thoughts delicately, and just shrugged his claws at his compatriot, “I hate to break it to you, but I don’t think our employer is going to go for it. Besides, where are we going to get movies from? I don’t exactly see a lot of Walmarts around this place, although the atmosphere sure would fit a Walmart.”
“You mean a cold, loveless void where no living thing would dare tread?” asked Megalon.
“Yeah, Walmart. Now seriously, if you want after our next mission I’ll ask X if he’s up for bugging the master on this...uh...” Gigan raised his claws in air quotes, “ ‘Movie night’ idea of yours. If the master can magic up an infinite supply of giant steaks for Irys, I guess he could pull off a giant TV and couch. But point still stands on the movies.”
“That’s the easy part!” Megalon said, “Last time we went to the human world I found out they have these neat red boxes that are packed full of movies! And they’re just sitting at street corners and convenience stores. So next time we’re there, we just grab one of those and we’ll be set!”
Gigan had no idea what Megalon was talking about, and tried to mentally visualize them hauling some giant red box filled with movies through a portal, and the subsequent justifying to their enigmatic Boss that this was a valuable use of their time. His brain ceased attempting this after half a minute and he shook his head in wonderment at his comrades seemingly endless optimism. He and his fellow cyborg had a great deal in common in terms of their construction and abilities, but their ways of thinking were night and day. It tended to even out in the field, where Gigan trusted Megalon at his back absolutely, but during off hours it could be hard to keep up with Megalon’s unbridled energy. Still, Gigan wasn’t about to shoot down Megalon’s dream. Who knew? Maybe the master would go for it if they did well on their next mission?
Whether by coincidence or fate, the entryway to Megalon’s chamber in the temple of Zenith opened at that moment. The chamber itself was essentially a huge rock and dirt pit, with a huge amount of space for Megalon to play around in with his uncanny capacity for burrowing. The cyborg could, and did, spend hours just digging holes and building things from the piles of dirt. There were no less than four ‘dirt forts’ strewn around the chamber. The chamber’s entryway was little more than a humongous slab of stone that automatically slide aside for those seeking entry, in this case a gigantic bipedal individual whose body was comprised equally of jet black skin and bone white armored plating. With a faintly draconic face of similar bone coloration, and sharp red eyes, one could be forgiven for thinking Monster X was some manner of undead, humanoid dragon warrior, as opposed to the Xillian race’s strongest bio-weapon. Although that was a long time ago, and X had gone through a lot since those days. Now he was the de facto leader of the quartet of kaiju working directly for their mysterious benefactor.
As X entered the chamber, the last of their number soared in after him, gliding above X and banking gracefully to the side where she landed with surprising lightness upon the wall of one of Megalon’s dirt forts. Pale white as fresh fallen snow, Irys closed her wide, bat-like wings around herself and proceeded to munch on a large slab of unidentifiable meat that she’d brought in with her. Quite possibly the very last survivor of the Gyaos species, Irys’ distinctive, triangular head and albino skin would’ve marked her out as highly unusual, if not for the company she kept. Next to the draconic and menacing looking X, and the cybernetic odd balls that were Gigan and Megalon, Irys looked positively normal by comparison.
Megalon waved happily at both of them, “Hey guys! What’s up?”
Noticing the frank and faintly tense stance in X, Gigan surmised this wasn’t a social call rather quickly. He and X had worked together more than enough times for him to pick up on his friend’s mood, and X was in full ‘mission’ mod. “The master just gave us a job?”
X gave the barest of nods, “Correct. I just came from his chamber, and he’s assigned a new task for us.”
Eyeing Irys, Gigan made another guess, “He’s sending all four of us this time? That’s unusual.”
Most of their scouting missions to other worlds had been done in pairs. Usually that was all that was needing to get in, collect info, and get out. While their forms tended to change depending on the universe they were sent into, the kaiju still regularly retained a decent share of their unique powers and physical abilities. Nothing on par with their true forms that they now wore, but even paired down to a mostly naked human shape, Gigan would still retain his cybernetic nature and a fair bit of his built in weaponry. Irys usually at least retained her ability to fire sonic rays from her mouth and her sonar barrier, and X also kept use of his gravity beams and manipulation.
None of them were helpless, and by local standards of the worlds they went to, tended to be powerhouses.
So why send all four of them together? That seemed like overkill, unless this A) wasn’t a normal scouting op, or B) there was something about the world they were going to that made it potentially more dangerous than normal.
X confirmed Gigan’s suspicions as he said, “From the briefing I was given, the place he’s sending us to is giving off some unusual readings, even to our master’s senses. In order to ensure nothing goes wrong he wants us all to go in together; a recon in force. We’re being given a seven day operations window.”
“Whoa, that’s way longer than normal, isn’t it?” Megalon asked, scratching the side of his head with one drill, “Ain’t it usually, like, a day or two at most?”
“I’m going to be starving by the time we’re done, unless I haul along something to eat,” Irys said, finishing off her slab of meat and looking at her empty claws with a morose sigh, “Did our master even account for that?”
“We’ll bring supplies,” X said, not unkindly as his voice softened somewhat as he looked at Irys, “We’re not going to ignore basic needs, but we also know very little about where we’re going.”
“How about what we’re looking for there?” asked Gigan, “Did our employer give any specifics?”
“No. We’re not after an item or individual this time around. This is pure information gathering. He wants us to observe local conditions, including any and everything we can learn about what races are active there, what conflicts they may or may not be engaged in, what powers they possess, if any, and get as thorough an overview as possible of the state of the world.”
“Gee, so nothing big, just learn everything we can about an entire world in one week. Glad our employer doesn’t give us such unreasonable jobs to do,” Gigan quipped, snorting through his beak.
“What makes this world so special, anyway?” asked Irys.
“I don’t know, and I’m not entirely certain our master does either,” said X, sounding somewhat miffed, not at the question, but at the lack of information on the mission. Gigan could understand. Free of his old duties or not, X was a soldier at his core, and going on a mission with limited intel was never a good sign. “All he told me was that the world consisted of multiple, connected realms, and we were being sent to the realm where he detected the most spread out concentrations of ‘spirit energy’, which made him suspect it’d be the easiest to recon.”
That got all three of the other Dark Hunters looking varying degrees of confused, with Irys tilting her head almost like a curious cat, “Spirit energy? Is that different from normal energy? Or magic?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” X said, “Regardless, we’ve been given our mission. We leave in two hours. Make whatever preparations are needed, and meet in the portal room at the designated time.”
At that, there was little further discussion to be had on the matter. The Dark Hunters had a job to do.
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Adagio Dazzle hadn’t expected her life (or afterlife, as the case may be) to get much easier after being raised to the ranks of the Espada, but she’d at least hoped for a brief period to catch her breath after the Quincy army had launched its attack on the Arrancar fortress of Las Noches. It had been during the confusion and chaos of that battle that Adagio had assassinated the Ninth Espada, Squirk, and subsequently opened up a position among those ranks that she’d been able to fill.
She’d only done so due to the hidden schemes of the Second Espada, Chrysalis, which had all but demanded that Adagio act for the sake of self-preservation, if nothing else. It had turned out for the best, not only leading to her final evolution into an Arrancar-class Hollow, but when she’d made a bid for an Espada seat, Lord Tirek, the First Espada and King of Hueco Mundo, had granted her the Sixth seat. After a rather harrowing test, first, but Adagio was trying hard not to think about that. Tirek’s power was beyond immense, and her ultimate goal still remained to dethrone him one day, but to physically feel the gap in their power had been... well, if not humbling, it had certainly been eye opening to how far Adagio still had to climb until she was in charge around here and could start putting Hueco Mundo in order.
The present issue was that in being raised to the seat of Sixth Espada, she’d displaced the seat’s previous owner, Lord Guto. Of course Tirek had every right to decide who belonged in which seat, but it was equally the right of Guto, or indeed any Espada, to challenge for the right to any given position, as long as they felt they had the power to defeat the current title’s owner.
And while Adagio may have been slightly stronger than Guto now, that didn’t mean Guto couldn’t kill her in a stand up, one-on-one duel. At the end of the day, regardless of power, Adagio was still limited her in combat experience. She’d been in many battles since she’d sacrificed herself to save her siblings and that stupid bacon-headed idiot and her friends from the Eight Espada, Grogar, by turning herself into a Hollow. Long story. Since then she’d survived torture and battles alike, becoming stronger with every experience.
But that didn’t change the fact that Guto had centuries of battles under his belt and had a very good chance of defeating Adagio if he were to challenge her for the Sixth seat. The only reason Adagio suspected he hadn’t was because to do so, so soon after Tirek appointed Adagio to her position, could be seen as an insult to Tirek’s choice. Guto was going to wait for an excuse, some pretext to challenge Adagio, and was likely going to wait patiently for the right moment to make his move.
Unfortunately that also meant that Guto’s rather sizable horde of Arrancar warriors would be harassing Adagio’s territory and people at any chance they could, looking to provoke Adagio into making a mistake. It was a sad fact that while most Espada had spent long decades or centuries gathering their own armies of loyal followers, Adagio had only been in Hueco Mundo a comparatively short time. In that time frame she’d certainly obtained followers, but nothing to be considered an army.
In fact her ‘horde’ consisted of five individuals total, her vassals. And while they might not have been the most impressive Arrancar Las Noches had to offer, she valued them, and wasn't eager to see them hurt by Guto’s thugs. To make matters worse, Guto’s protege, a particularly muscle headed and aggressive woman named Gilda, had also risen to the Espada’s ranks alongside Adagio. Granted, Gilda had only qualified for the lowest rank, the Tenth, but that still meant Gilda was an exceptionally powerful Arrancar and not a threat to be underestimated. Especially considering that while Espada were meant to be independent to a degree, they did form alliances with each other, and Gilda was still firmly in Guto’s pocket.
Thankfully Adagio had swiftly taken the lesson of making useful allies to heart and had alliances of her own that was helping keep her new position somewhat secure. Guto might have been gunning for her, but part of his hesitancy to make any overt moves yet likely had to do with Adagio’s own connections to the Fourth and Fifth Espada.
Which brought her to this particular moment. To maintain her alliance with the Fourth Espada, Lament, she’d agreed to spend time befriending his two eldest adoptive daughters. It had seemed an odd request at the time, but she suspected the usually dour and somewhat mentally unstable Lament simply wanted his family to have something closer to a normal life. Not easy, given Las Noches was essentially a barren fortress country where the majority of the population considered eating their fellow Hollows as a normal way to pass the time.
So to add some sense of normalcy, not to mention benefit herself in the short term, Adagio had struck upon the idea of doing some... creative remodeling around her territory. Said territory consisted of a large stretch of Las Noche’s southwestern exterior wall. The walls of Las Noches were large enough to contain entire buildings worth of rooms within them, and Adagio had claimed a series of chambers within the walls that had once belonged to an old, previous Espada. Outside the wall on the interior side, Adagio was standing alongside two of her trusted vassals.
Di Roy was a white haired, wiry male Arrancar. The fragment of his Hollow mask, which all Arrancar bore in one form or another, consisted of a helmet-like crest of bone covering his head in a shape reminiscent of a hammerhead shark. His teeth followed that shark-like motif, which flashed as he grinned. In front of the group was a hole roughly five meters deep, oval shaped and around thirty meters long. The hole was situated no more than half a dozen paces from the base of the wall that towered over it.
“Not bad for a day’s work. Can we dig, or can we dig?” Di Roy said, clearly impressed with himself.
The question was directed towards a bored looking young girl of indeterminate teenage years, perhaps fourteen or fifteen. Her hair was the color of freshly spilled blood, and hung down her back in an unkempt, wild mass. Her skin was darkly bronzed, in contrast to Di Roy’s paleness, and the fragments of her own Hollow mask consisted of a necklace of fang shaped teeth around her neck, seemingly fused to her skin. She was thin and long limbed, like someone not come into their full growth yet, but her muscles were lithe and lean.
Like Di Roy, she carried a large blade, an Arrancar Zanpaktou. While Di Roy’s was a regular sized, curved blade, serrated like a shark tooth, the girl’s was larger and curved oddly so that it’s cutting edge was on the inward curve, akin to a raptor talon.
The girl looked over at Di Roy and growled in a low tone, then proceeded to sit down and scratched at herself, yawning.
Adagio chuckled lightly, “I believe Gaw is unimpressed with your assessment. I don’t blame her. You left most of the actual work to her.”
“I supervised!” Di Roy complained, “It’s not my fault I can’t turn into a giant dinosaur gal who happens to be very good at digging. Besides, I did help, technically, when I used that Cero to kick things off.”
“True. Technically. No matter, I’d say that this should be more than sufficient. Now for phase two. Roka! Fenice! Are you ready up there?”
Adagio called up the wall, where around forty feet up the several hundred meter tall edifice of stone, a huge circular hole had been cut out. Standing there were two women, one another Arrancar, the other one of the only humans in Las Noches.
Of the pair, Roka was the Arrancar. Lament’s eldest adopted daughter, she was a humble figure in a simple dark robe. A plain if pleasant face was half covered by a skull mask, while the rest sported fine, black haircut just below the ears. While Roka seemed willowy and plain for the most part, this contrasted sharply with the human girl next to her.
Fenice still troubled Adagio. Mostly because Fenice bore the identical orange skin, deep red and orange striped hair, and burning green/blue eyes of another girl Adagio knew all too well. Fenice was the spitting image of Sunset Shimmer. Which made sense, given Fenice was Sunset Shimmer. Or rather, Sunset’s human counterpart, long thought dead by the pony Sunset Shimmer.
Turned out, not quite so dead as first thought, and currently, for reasons Adagio had yet to learn, living in Las Noches as another of Lament’s adopted children. Adagio was still trying to figure out exactly what she might do with this information. Or indeed if she needed to do anything with it at all. Aside from seriously blowing the pony Sunset Shimmer’s mind, Adagio couldn’t yet think of a way to turn knowledge of Fenice’s existence to her advantage.
Oh well, all in due time. For now, Roka and Fenice were helping her with this remodeling project. For friendship. What? Adagio considered it perfectly friendly to make use of her friends talents to benefit herself. And them. It was mutually beneficial, this project.
“We are prepared up here,” Roka said in her clear chime of a voice, nodding politely to her sister as she added, “Fenice?”
“I still think this is stupid, for the record,” Fenice grumbled as she reached into the neck of the robes she wore, an identical set to that of her adoptive sister’s, and pulled out a small bronze medallion.
Adagio wasn’t sure what the story behind that medallion was. The one time she’d thought to ask about it she’d been stonewalled, but it was clearly important to Fenice for one reason or another. Especially considering it was the focal point of Fenice’s own unique powers.
Soft motes of green light wafted from the medallion and into Fenice’s waiting hands. The light grew rapidly and took a solid shape, resolving into the form of a shockingly wide and tall sword that matched Fenice’s height before even the hilt and handle were taken into consideration. The weight of the blade seemed to give the girl no trouble as she hefted it and placed the point of the sword at the edge of the hole in the wall.
Unlike the Hollow’s around her, whose power stemmed from their state as ‘corrupt’ souls that fed upon other souls, Fenice’s power was rooted in an ability to draw out the latent potential in the ‘soul’ of an object. Adagio didn’t really grasp the concept, but those girls from Canterlot High that the pony Sunset Shimmer was friends with also had this power. Fullbring, it was called. While uncertain of the specific mechanics behind it, all Adagio knew was that in Fenice’s case, the sword she could ‘Fullbring’ from that medallion she always wore had a useful power she intended to take advantage of for this remodeling project.
The metal of the sword started to turn a smoldering orange as veins of heat grew across its surface. Then magma, in a steady stream of molten rock, flowed out of the sword and down the side of the wall. Fenice’s sword could summon a near limitless amount of this magma, as long as the girl’s spirit energy held out. She could control its direction and flow at will, and as Adagio had instructed, Fenice started to shape the magma flow into a growing ramp that in turn rolled into the large oval hole that Adagio’s vassals had dug in the ground.
Roka started to do her part next, raising one heavily robed arm. Small, glinting strands that could barely be seen in Las Noche’s artificial interior daylight came flying from her sleeve. The strands, so heavily reinforced by Roka’s spirit energy as to be sharper than razors and stronger than steel, started to flicker around the magma flow. Roka deftly started to shape it into steps, while Fenice concentrated on containing the magma’s heat and controlling its flow so that it helped with Roka’s shaping while also coating the dug hole with a thin layer.
The heat was intense, and Adagio gestured for Di Roy and Gaw to step back, since this next part could be dangerous. Normal humans wouldn’t be able to tolerate the heat very well, and Arrancar were many magnitudes tougher, but she preferred not to take chances. Even with Fenice containing the heat, Adagio could feel it. Her vassals obeyed her command, and Adagio faced the now magma coated hole and the roughly carved ‘steps’ leading from the hole in the wall down to the much larger one in the ground.
Adagio raised the trident she carried in her right hand. It was a large weapon, its shaft seemingly made of smooth, polished and stark white bone. Its sharp prongs were, in contrast, forged of solid, blood rest crystal, identical to the red pulsing siren gem that floated in the Hollow hole that existed between Adagio’s breasts. Both the gem and trident pulsed with a faint red light as Adagio tapped into her own unique Hollow powers.
Water formed at the tip of her trident, at first a small, swirling sphere, but soon this grew into an ever larger whirlpool that took shape suspended above Adagio’s head. Then, her eyes narrowed with concentration, she directed the water at the magma. Steam erupted, but it couldn’t scald her Heirro hardened skin, further fortified by her spiritual pressure, or ‘reitasu’. With careful precision, she formed the water into sheets and began to layer it over the magma. Fenice, at the same time, also used her own spiritual control over the magma to lower its temperature and keep the rapidly cooling rock from shattering or flaking off.
It took some time to all cool properly, and by the time it was done Roka still used her razor-sharp strings to carve things straight and smooth it all out, but when finished Adagio looked upon the work with satisfaction. The cooled magma was black like charcoal, but due to Fenice’s careful control and Adagio’s precise cooling, something they’d practiced together before committing to the larger project, the rock was solid.
Generating more water, she let it fill her new outdoor pool, complete with convenient stair access in the interior wall. There was still a fair amount of sediment and ash from the cooled magma she’d need to filter out, but the hard part was done.
Testing the stairs, Roka and Fenice walked down them, Fenice shouldering her sword and letting it return to her medallion in a wash of green light.
“I can’t believe you asked us to hang out with you just to use us to help you make a freakin’ pool,” Fenice said, frowning.
“Oh, come now,” Adagio said with a winning smile, “You can’t tell me the effort isn’t worth the benefits? When was the last time you had a chance to actually swim in Hueco Mundo?”
True, the realm of Hollows was almost entirely comprised of a vast, empty desert of dry white sand, rarely dotted by the occasional dead tree or random rock formation. Yet despite that appearance, it hid the potential for hidden depths. Adagio had discovered that much when her ascension to Vasto Lorde, not so long ago, had ended up creating an entire lake, several miles from Las Noches. Through this she’d also discovered Las Noches did have underground water reservoirs and tunnels running all beneath its vast surface. Not only could she create water herself, but she controlled any water she could sense nearby, so she’d been taking advantage of the fact to make conditions more comfortable around her territory. Arrancar, and Hollows in general, might not need conventional food or water to live, but that didn’t meant that a good bath, or swim, wasn’t a welcome luxury.
Adagio was all about making her life in Las Noches a bit more luxurious, especially now that she had the power to hold into those luxuries against those that might try to take them from her.
Fenice still looked determined to be grumpy, but Roka offered Adagio a kind smile, nodding her head in a short bow, “We were happy to help, Adagio. I’m sure you won’t mind if I bring some of the younger children to play, sometime? They do miss playing with Di Roy and Gaw.”
“Heck yeah bring the rascals by sometime!” Di Roy said, grinning, “I still need to refine their loogie techniques.”
Beside him Gaw gave him a withering look, one bare foot with suspiciously large and sharp claws in place of toenails giving him a rough kick.
“Ow! Don’t be like that, Gaw, you know you like playing living jungle gym to those mini-cyclones. Why’d you let them ride you so much then, hmm?”
Gaw made a noise somewhere between a snort and a growl, crossing arms over her flat chest and looking away with an expression that seemed to scream, ‘Shut up’ without her having to say a word. Even after evolving into an Arrancar and obtaining a human form that was fully capable of speech, Adagio noticed Gaw preferred to say as little as possible. Or rather, her body language seemed to say more than words ever did.
Di Roy was immune to his friend’s perpetual annoyance and said, “I know what’ll loosen you up! Why don’t you take the first test dip in our sweet new pool?”
Gaw’s eyes shot wide as Di Roy picked her up. Not hard for him, given he was quite a bit taller than her. Despite being physically more powerful than Di Roy, the mention of the pool seemed to set in a minor state of panic in which Gaw flailed about like a squirming cat while Di Roy whistled merrily and literally threw her towards the pool.
Adagio watched Gaw sail into the water with a loud, ungainly sploosh. She gave Di Roy a questioning look and he just shrugged.
“What? I’m just trying to help. She’s been uptight ever since we became Arrancar.”
“I suspect she isn’t fond of her new body, what with its human shape compared to her saurian one. I can relate to a degree” Adagio commented dryly, but then smirked as she admired her reflection in the pool’s water, “Although I’ve grown to appreciate the human form, at least when it looks as good as I do.”
She paused then, frowning at the pool as she noticed Gaw hadn’t surfaced yet. “Um... Di Roy? Can Gaw swim?”
Walking up to the edge of the pool, which so far only had a set of bubbles rising up from where Gaw had sunk into the water, Di Roy put his hands on his hips and said, “Of course she can! I mean, not that I’ve ever actually seen her swim, mind you, but c’mon, who doesn’t know how to swim? ...Right?”
The bubbles continued to rise, with no sign of Gaw surfacing. Adagio and Di Roy exchanged looks with one another, then Adagio hung her head with a heavy sigh. Raising her trident once more, she reached out with her senses and located Gaw, flailing rather ineffectually at the bottom of the pool. The water shuddered as Adagio used it to grab Gaw and lifted her up to the surface. Gaw’s face, framed by her tangle of red hair, burst from the water as she continued to flail her limbs about.
“Gaw, stop swinging your arms around and just kick with your feet,” Di Roy suggested, which elicited a murderous roar from Gaw as she fixed him with a death glare. Di Roy looked back at Adagio, “On second thought, maybe she ought to stay there until she cools off.”
Off handedly Fenice commented, “You know, it just occurred to me, but does anyone around here even own a bathing suit?”
“Lady, if that’s the worst of our problems, it’s a swell day in Hueco Mundo,” Di Roy replied over the sound of Gaw’s bloodthirsty yowls.
----------
“Does anyone else ever wonder what would happen if one of these portals, I don’t know, breaks or something when we use them?” Irys asked as she and her three companions approached the gigantic, yawning portal of swirling and incandescent energies summoned up by their master.
“Chances are if that ever happened we wouldn’t have time to comprehend how screwed we’d be before our atoms got scattered across several universes,” Gigan replied without much hint of concern in his voice, “So no point worrying about it.”
“Just saying, we’ve gone through a lot so far already. Kind of getting used to having all of you around. Wondering if all these ‘missions’ are really necessary if our master is so powerful,” Irys said, trying at once to voice a sense of growing concern over the well being of her newly established family, while also trying not to sound like a worrywart.
It was just that it seemed every time they went out on a mission like this, something went wrong, and one or more of her friends ended up nearly dead, or possessed by weird alter egos. Granted the later was unlikely to repeat itself, but still, the point stood; Irys liked these three and was increasingly eager to avoid situations where they’d get hurt.
“Not like we’ve not gotten a lot of good out of being deployed,” X noted, brief flickers of a purple and teal haired dame causing his lips to momentarily tease a smile, “They are a deity, might be doing this to our benefit as well.”
“Yeah yeah,” Gigan grumbled, memories of a witch with long, prehensile hair being a nightmare, “Sentiments abound, I just like it lets us stretch our legs. Megalon more than me.”
The aforementioned younger cyborg sniggered, but Irys was still unsure. Thankfully she felt a hand tap at her shoulder and saw their de-facto leader shoot her a nod.There was a surprisingly comforting note to X’s voice as he stood next to her, “You needn’t be worried. Given all four of us are together this time, I’d be shocked if we ran into anything that we couldn’t handle.”
“Reaaaaaly looking to jinx us, aren’t you?” Gigan quipped, which elicited something that might have been a laugh from X. Rather hard to tell, with him.
“Merely stating fact. The portal is ready. Are we?”
At one end of the group, Megalon pumped a drill hand into the air, “Ready, steady, Betty!”
“Who’s Betty?” Irys asked.
“I have no idea,” Megalon replied in a completely straight tone.
“I think that’s a ‘yes’ there to your question,” Gigan said to X, and the Xillian Praetorian simply nodded and took the lead as he walked with purposeful steps towards the portals. One by one his companion Dark Hunters followed, Irys just a short, hesitant step behind the others as she walked through the portal... wondering once more why she had such a foreboding feeling lodged in her chest?
The trip through the portal itself was little different than the other times. Disorienting, filled with so much light and scintillating colors, combined with a feeling of being stretched through a noodle wringer. Not that Irys really knew what a noodle wringer was outside of that one time Sunset Shimmer had tried to show her a cooking program.
It didn’t take long for the portal to dispense the Dark Hunters from its gleaming depths and into the world they were assigned to recon.
Immediately Irys knew her body had changed. This wasn’t abnormal. It seemed very often when they were sent through a portal to another reality, their original bodies were altered by the nature of that realm to assume forms suited to it. Why this was, Irys wasn’t sure. The mechanics of interdimensional travel were as much a mystery to her as... as well most things were. She hadn’t exactly had a standard education growing up, unless one counted an endless need to feed and avoid being fed upon by her previous ‘flock’.
The body she now had was familiar to her, somewhat. She’d been to human world’s before, and while she wasn’t exactly fond of the ‘human’ form she now wore, she had certainly gotten used to it after several similar outings. The tall, willow-limbed girl with albino white skin might have been considered a looker for those into the pale look. Her hair ran down her back in a silken white sheet, only tipped purple around her long overhanging bangs that fell to one side of her face. Bright pink eyes examined her surroundings, and her companions.
Their human forms hadn’t changed either from what Irys remembered from the times they’d traveled to human world’s before. Gigan still had a matte blueish gray skin tone, with a rough cut, spiky white hair reminiscent of the spikes cresting his head in his kaiju form, and his usual single ruby eye was now transformed into a pair of similarly colored sunglasses that covered his cybernetic eyes. Megalon, shorter and stockier than Gigan, had a dirt brown coloration, with a mop of darker brown hair atop his curious head, a pair of huge yellow eyes looking about with interest at all around him. X’s face, what of it could be seen at any rate, was a soot black coloring, although a good portion of his face was covered by a mask of bone similar to the bone-carved visage of his kaiju form. His hair was similar to Gigan’s, white and shortcut, although less spiky and more subdued. Red eyes were already critically examining their surroundings for danger, taking in all the details.
Including the detail that while their human’s basic forms had remained the same, their clothing was quite a bit different. Normally when the portal shunted them out into a human world, it gave them clothes appropriate to the local fashions. But Irys saw none of them were wearing the usual outfits they had when they’d gone to Sunset Shimmer’s world in the past. Granted this wasn’t Sunset’s world, but the mission briefing had suggested it was still a realm related to a human world, so what was with these new get-ups?
First off, all of their clothes were a combination of white and black, with zero color variation beyond that. It was almost like wearing uniforms, if not for the unique cuts of each outfit.
Irys wore a white and black trimmed vest that left her arms and midriff bare, along with a long, flowing skirt that was slit along the sides to allow her legs free to move. The skirt was held up by a purple sash, and her feet were clad in knee-high, black cloth shoes lined with strips of white. Gigan was sporting an open white coat with a black interior lining that left his chest and customary dog-tags bare. Straight cut white pants reached down to feet bearing nearly identical cloth shoes to Irys’. Megalon’s outfit was rather baggy, with a thick, heavy overcoat of white, buttoned up with multiple black buttons, covering his upper torso and arms. Large black leather gloves covered his hands, and wide, puffy white pants completed the outfit along with black boots of a thicker and heavier make than the cloth shoes the others wore. The only piece of his earlier outfit was the pair of yellow goggles hanging around his neck. Finally, X had on a slimming white shirt tucked into a black sash and airy, wide white paints. Over the shirt he had a long coat, white save for a large, black collar at the top where it was buttoned across the lower half of X’s face.
“Okay, what’s with the bleached outfits?” Gigan asked, grimacing at his clothes in clear disapproval, “Not that I was all that into what we had on before, but now we look like a particularly depressing circus troupe.”
“I like it!” said Megalon, twisting himself around and wiggling his legs, “Feels roomy.”
Irys had no comment to make, given she honestly didn’t care about what she was wearing, although she was confused about why the change had occurred at all. She chalked it up to the bizarre metaphysical mechanics behind interdimensional travel and put no further thought into the matter, instead focusing on their surroundings.
“This place is... dead...” that was all she could think of to describe it, and suppressed a cold shudder that flowed through her body.
Beneath her feet, and stretching out before her to a black horizon, was nothing but dry, bone white sand. The sand rolled into gentle dunes for hundreds of miles ahead, with barely anything to break up the bleak scenery except one or two leafless, lifeless, desiccated trees. It wasn’t simply that this was a desert, or a place where life struggled to survive. No, this place felt devoid of the vital essence of life, and it twisted at something deep in Irys’ guts to just be standing here, under this black, starless sky, facing this empty, dead expanse of unnatural sand.
“Reminds me of Zenith,” Gigan noted, his head turning left and right in a slow, methodical scan, “I’m not picking up anything out there. Zero heat. Zero motion. No lifesigns or unusual energy readings. Irys is right, this place is dead.”
“Uh, guys?” Megalon said, although it was in a small whisper as he started peeking behind the edge of the portal, which was still shining and active behind them.
X, either having not heard Megalon or focused entirely on the mission, was checking his coat and finding that within its pockets were several packages, “Looks like the supplies we brought survived the trip through the portal. Should sustain us for the duration of the recon. Let’s move. We’ll use the trees as markers-”
“Um, guys!” Megalon said, louder now, and the others turned to him as he pointed around the edge of the portal, “I think I found something.”
The extent of Megalon’s understatement became apparent as the portal finally cut out, revealing what had been obscured from the group’s view while the portal had been there.
A fortress of unimaginable proportions rose from the deathly pale desert sands. It readily matched the scope and scale of the temple back in Zenith, with shear walls rising hundreds of meters upward, and even those walls were dwarfed by flanking, cylindrical towers that rose higher still. The fortress’ central building was a monolithic block of stone, at least ten or more kilometers wide, and an unknown length deep, given none of them could see where the other side of the fortress ended. Somewhere atop the fortress’ roof was a domed structure, and from this structure five smaller towers rose up in an evenly spaced pattern. At the foot of the fortress walls, inter-spaced at seemingly random, were tall blocks, each one likely at least fifty or more meters tall, bearing large, gaping rectangular openings.
“Do you guys think this is important?” Megalon asked, pointing at the fortress, “It looks kind of important.”
X’s eyes narrowed, not at Megalong but at the distant fortress, “Gigan, any readings from over there?”
The cybernetic mercenary focused his gaze upon the massive walls, taking his time analyzing the data streaming in from his internal scanners.
“Getting a lot of interference from that direction, but there’s definitely... something in there.”
“Something?” X asked, and Gigan merely shrugged.
“Can’t give you more than that. These aren’t like any readings I’ve gotten before. But that place is packed with a lot of weird energy fluctuations, so I’d lay a fair bet that says the place ain’t empty. That’s not all, look...” Gigan pointed towards the walls, and Irys noted that where he pointed there were clusters of what looked like pockmarks upon the thick stone walls. She then saw what hadn’t been immediately obvious, but around halfway between the center and right side of the fortress wall’s edge, there was a rather large hole. A ragged hole, unnatural and broken off. She also started to look at the desert area in front of the fortress and noticed that the sands weren’t even in a lot of places, bearing craters ranging from small to large.
“It looks damaged,” she said, and Gigan nodded.
“I’m looking at the craters with image enhancement, and the pattern is in line with missile detonations, or at least similar ordinance. The larger hole looks like it was made by some kind of high energy impact. I’m also getting some trace metal signals from around the base of the fortress, like fragments and vehicle wrecks. A battle took place here. Can’t tell how long ago.”
“Oh hey, check this out!” Megalon exclaimed as he climbed a nearby dune, pointing off to the group’s right, which Irys’ mentally considered ‘east’. The group followed Megalon to the top of the dune, and saw that maybe half a kilometer in that direction, give or take, was a huge, dark lake.
“Good to know there’s water here, in case we run out,” X said, his eyes filled with rapid thought and calculation as he turned to his team, “We don’t know what we’re up against or if the locals are friendly or hostile. We’ll move fast and quiet, check out this fortress. Stick together, and we play this by ear if we run into any inhabitants. Ideally we can gather information without having to engage, but if comes to a fight don’t take any risks. Understood?”
They all nodded, and X returned it, “Good, then let’s move out.”