The dream was exquisite in its indulgence.

  Admiral Evelithria Frontenachii reclined upon a throne of naked kobolds, their bodies forming the comfortable flesh-cushion beneath her, radiating fear and obedience. The throne room she occupied was a magnificent cathedral, every pillar and floor tile carved from the petrified bones of monsters and men from worlds she conquered. The chandeliers above glowed with the crystalline beastcore hearts of species that had dared to resist her rule.

  Newly bound servants approached in an endless procession carrying gifts of artifacts and unique slaves from subjugated dungeons, citadels, nations and worlds.

  More, Evelithria thought at the river of wealth and power.

  The crowd of servants multiplied, stretched into endlessness across the ever-lengthening hall. The river became an ocean. The ocean became a universe. And still it wasn't enough, could never be enough, because she deserved everything and everything was merely a down payment on what she was owed.

  Then, Princess Aquillianne crawled out from the crowd of servants toward the flesh-throne on hands and knees.

  "Aunt Evely," her niece whimpered, prostrating herself, antlers tipped in silver stars scraping the floor in proper submission. "I was so foolish. Please forgive me. I buried the keys at—"

  "I don't care about the keys anymore," Evelithria purred with a wicked grin. "I care about making you understand what happens to those who inconvenience me. The keys are merely the appetizer. Your suffering will be the main course. And for dessert..." She smiled with all her teeth. "I'm going to turn every single, mildly unruly human of that pathetic human-overpopulated world you seem to like so much into lovely wall art, starting with its magic-less Emperor!"

  Dream-Shady wept silver tears that Evelithria’s male prads collected in a crystal goblet and offered to her.

  Evelithria drank Shady’s tears.

  Delicious. A most perfect victory, one that…

  Then, the klaxons screamed.

  Evelithria's eyes snapped open, the dream shattering like hexaglass under a railgun blast.

  She momentarily flailed, finding herself in the center of her personal relaxation pool, naked and unarmored, her black, dark, fuzzy body soaking in the regenerative, mana-rich Void-whale blood.

  With a thought, she summoned her stats projected into her mind by the Lazarus bracelet and noted that slightly over six hours passed since she ordered her niece shot. Six hours of soaking away the cloying, muddy taste of this Earth’s linear, thick Astral field.

  She had fallen asleep after a particularly violent sex session with her kobolds and a nice massage from the survivors.

  The Admiral slowly gained her bearings, waking up fully. The incredibly annoying wailing alarm didn’t cease. The gold, soft mood lighting of the chamber was obliterated with a flaring strobe of concerning crimson runes warning of Astral Fountain entropic dimensional shearing.

  "What in the Slayer's name is going on here?" she snarled, rising from the pool.

  Jet-black void-whale blood ran down her body in thick rivulets, dripping onto the obsidian deck. Around her, four pradavarian kobold attendants scrambled at the pool's edges. A wolf with silver-tipped fur clutched a towel. A fox with amber eyes held a diamondust robe. A hawk with an iridescent feathery mane looked left and right in confusion.

  The fourth, a lean gray cheetah who had been dying far too many times on Pleasure Deck recently, stood with a mildly worried expression in the waist-deep blood. He radiated fear and hatred towards her. She would break this one soon enough.

  The alarm got louder, careening her thoughts of kobold torment sideways.

  "Datamancer Kipriss!" Evelithria barked, activating the V-cast ring on her finger. "Report! What’s the emergency?! I swear to Slayer, someone is going to spend a thousand years on the Entertainment Deck for this!"

  The holographic projection of the Datamancer flickered with unexpected bursts of colorful static.

  Arch-Datamancer Kipriss, the Prima-Administrator of Slayer's Sword had a horrified expression on her avian face. Behind her, holographic displays flashed with cascading error messages and warning symbols.

  "Admiral!" Kipriss shrieked. "The entire Weapon-Net is under assault! Memetic contamination is spreading across every channel! We're trying to contain it but it's—it's everywhere! Every deep fold-data-vault has been unlocked! Every Datamancer on the ship is fighting just to keep the core systems—"

  "Slow down," Evelithria growled. "And speak clearly. I don't have patience for bird hysteria!"

  "Admiral, there are Astral Fountains blooming across the entire ship! Multiple decks! The Incarnation Temple is—the Incarnation Temple is utterly contaminated with them!" Kipriss yelled, her face warping and twisting.

  "Contaminated?! How?! Speak sense, you useless bird!"

  "Completely contaminated! The Entropic Cascade is spreading through the decks! Whatever's happening, it started at the temple and—"

  The hologram became blotted with flickers of colorful static and then completely winked out.

  “Datamancer!” the Admiral barked. “KIPRISS! Cast Datamancer Kipriss!”

  The V-ring flickered, failing to connect.

  The floor lurched beneath Evelithria's feet. The gray cheetah rapidly scrambled out of the pool and ran off towards her bedroom. Evelithria ignored him, impatiently tapping her ring and gritting her teeth.

  A section of her private chamber's wall suddenly peeled back without warning, crystalline segments rotating with organic fluidity. A Corpse Seeker, one of her smaller, personal units, shoved itself through the opening, blade-legs clicking against the deck.

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  "EMERGENCY EVACUATION PROTOCOL INITIATED," the Seeker announced. "ALL PERSONNEL IN THIS CHAMBER IS TO BE SECURED FOR TRANSIT!"

  "Evacuation?! I didn't authorize any evacuation," Evelithria snarled. "I am the Admiral of this fleet. Nothing happens without my—"

  The Seeker didn't wait for her to conclude her declaration. Crystalline tendrils shot from its body.

  Evelithria was yanked with an undignified yelp from the pool, pulled into the Seeker's interior. Then her attendants suffered the same fate, all of them tumbling into the red, crystalline chamber.

  The cheetah kobold was grabbed last. Evelithria noted that the gray kobold was holding a metal, extradimensional fruit container decorated with ruby and diamond gems.

  Were they under attack? Did a competing Omnicorp find this human-resource rich Earth and decide to…

  The Admiral tried to get more info-data from the Weapon-Net but her neural interface chip wasn’t working at all, lagging madly as the network ground to a halt.

  “What the shit is going on today?” she growled. “Seeker Argon-211! Who issued the evac order?!”

  "Warning! System error! WEAPON-NET EXPERIENCING SIGNIFICANT LATENCY. EVACUATION PRIORITY: MAXIMUM!" The Seeker boomed an explanation after about twenty seconds of unnerving silence. “Evacuation order was authorized from… the Command Deck of Slayer’s Sword by… SYSTEM ERROR.”

  Command deck? Evelithria thought, feeling unexpectedly wobbly and drunk. System error? What?!

  “Seeker! Are we under attack?!” she demanded.

  “Total evacuation orders from command deck! SYSTEM ERROR! Astral Fountains on ship!” the Seeker replied after about thirty seconds, making irritating pauses between each word.

  “Why are you so effing slow?” She snarled.

  “Memetic viral contamination,” the crystalline-organic carrier ground out, voice twitching and bubbling. “Self-replicating data thought forms. Significant reaction time… Processing delay… Purging personal Neural Net of infection… Please stand by.”

  The Admiral frowned. A single Astral Fountain or two shouldn’t have caused a ship-wide network failure. This was treason, sabotage, an attack from within!

  Through the Seeker's semi-transparent walls, Evelithria watched as her carrier tore through corridors and walls at breakneck speed. Alarms wailed from every direction. Pradavarian soldiers ran past them, rapidly getting scooped up by other, larger Seekers.

  Argon-211 burst through an airlock and into the void of space.

  Stars wheeled around them.

  Behind them, Evelithria caught a glimpse of the Slayer's Sword from the outside and her breath caught in her throat.

  Her ship. Her beautiful, ten-kilometer capital ship. Her hoard. Her legacy. Her everything.

  Something was terribly wrong with it.

  Gold and red lights flickered and died in cascading waves along its surface, the barrier shields flickering and warping under internal strain.

  She tried the V-cast again. “CAST Datamancer Kipriss! Answer me you stupid bird!”

  Nothing.

  "Legate Ixthia!” She attempted to contact her old colleague and rival. “Respond immediately!"

  A flickering, static-wrapped image of the Legate flashed from her ring.

  "Admiral!" the Legate hissed, holding onto her shoulder. She was bleeding. A gash ran across her temple, violet-red ichor matting the gray-black feathers around her skull. Another deep wound was in her shoulder, slowly resealing itself.

  “Ixthia!” Evelithria growled. “What’s going on?!”

  "My own ‘bolds attacked me! They're using—" Static consumed half her words. "—cts! The blood-bonds are—" More static. "—pr-mised! Admiral—"

  The transmission dissolved into white noise, decaying and lagging, then dropped.

  Evelithria stared at her ring in disbelief.

  Kobolds attacking? That was impossible. The blood contracts were absolute. Pradavarian servants couldn't raise a hand against their masters any more than water could flow uphill. It was the fundamental law of their civilization, the cornerstone upon which the entire Frontenachii Dominion rested!

  An eerie sound came from behind her. Metal scraping against metal.

  Evelithria spun, ready to take her fury out on whoever was adding to her crisis.

  The gray cheetah, Archer Silvertail, stood apart from the other kobolds in the corner of the red room. Wrapped around half of Archer's face, digging deep into the fur of his muzzle and cheeks, was a metal centipede. The segmented body of the dungeon monster was made from rusted metal, dozens of blood-red eyes glowing bright along its length. Thin, rusted, nail-like tendrils burrowed deep into the kobold’s flesh at the right temple, trails of blood running down his neck.

  "Archer?" Evelithria growled. "What is that disgusting thing on your face? Remove it immediately!"

  "No," Archer spoke. His voice was strained, fighting against the metallic beast obscenity clamped to his head. The next words came out slurred, pained. “It is time.”

  "Time for what?" the Admiral barked, closing her fists. For some reason she felt very woozy, her body responding far too slowly.

  "This." Archer's hands moved to the chest's lid. He threw the chest open. “Kill them all!”

  The Frontenachii Admiral recognized dungeon-constructs, Metal Elementals from the Entertainment Deck Labyrinth where Archer kept dying recently. Rusty spheres spun and whirred with malevolent intent. A dozen of them, each the size of her head, each bristling with rotating, rusty blades exploded out of the fruit box.

  The sentinels attacked everyone, except for the damned prad with the centipede clamped to his face.

  The fox kobold went down first, three spheres converging on him in a spinning maelstrom of metal. Blood sprayed across the Seeker’s interior. The hawk tried to flee in a useless instinctual attempt, which was folly in the enclosed space. The metal Elemental caught him in the back of the neck, tearing through feathers and flesh until he crashed to the floor screaming.

  "HOSTILE… ENTITIES… DETECTED," the Seeker announced with maddening, twitchy delay, each word taking several seconds to come out. "INITIATING… COUNTER—"

  Evelithria roared. Her claws caught the spinning sphere heading for her head mid-flight. She felt the rusty blades bite into her palms. She crushed the metal elemental, fingers compressing corroded metal until it shrieked and died, the crystalline beastcore shattering.

  Another elemental came at her from the side. She caught it with her teeth, the blades slicing into her gums, and bit down until its core cracked. A third slammed into her shoulder, carving a furrow through her naked flesh before she managed to tear it away and crush its core.

  The third kobold fell to the metal spheres, shrieking and weeping.

  The remaining sentinels turned on Evelithria all at once.

  She fought them with swears and snarls. Claws shredding metal, teeth crushing corrupted steel, her naked body painted in blood.

  She destroyed the last sentinel with her bare hands, panting, bleeding from a dozen wounds that were already beginning to heal.

  "That," she snarled, turning toward Archer, "was the stupidest thing any kobold has ever attempted. You're… going to spend millennia spliced into a wall, you worthless—"

  She tiredly noticed that Archer must have pulled something else from the chest while she was distracted with the damned metal Elementals.

  A dungeon arbalest.

  The weapon was high level, the bolt crackling with green cursed energy. The centipede on his face pulsed brighter, its tendrils visibly burrowing deeper into his skull, blood flowing freely down his neck and chest.

  "Addie," Archer bubbled, blood pouring from his mouth. He swayed, leaning against the wall. "My little sister. She's eighteen now."

  "I don't care about your damned sister!" Evelithria spat. "Put that weapon down immediately, Archer! That's an order!"

  “No,” the kobold hissed, somehow resisting her order.