Alexis "Valkyrie" Huntingfield

A lot of people thought that cats played with their food, toying with prey animals instead of going straight to killing them.

But that was wrong. Cats weren't crueler than any other predator, and the supposed 'play' behavior served a practical purpose. It wasn't deliberate cruelty or sadism.

Specifically, cats caught animals with their paws but killed them with their teeth. To kill a small animal, a housecat used its fangs to sever the animal's spine, similar to a staple removing tool. Doing so requires the cat to shove its face up against the wounded animal.

Doing so is dangerous. Sure, the cat might have already won, but prey doesn't just sit there waiting to be eaten. When a prey animal is cornered, it fights back. The cat wins, but it's completely possible for a small rodent or a bird to scratch or peck at it.

Imagine having to fight another animal to the death for every meal. Sure, maybe you're good at it and always win, but taking unnecessary risks adds up. To minimize the risk of scratches to sensitive areas like its nose or its eye, the cat makes sure that the animal can no longer fight back.

The behavior that people think is an expression of sadism is really just the cat tiring out the wounded animal until it becomes exhausted and can no longer put up any resistance, at which point the cat can safely go in for the true kill.

The same principle applied here. I wasn't making up a story about me and Stephanie being in a relationship because I wanted to torment the other kind of Kat, though there was a minor amusement in seeing her squirm. No, my reason for choosing this specific story was entirely rational.

It accomplished multiple objectives in one go. First, it cut off any questions about why I'd joined up with her and why I was interested in her. If she was just a random Guardian, there would be no reason for me to maintain contact.

Second, it was the best way I could think of to keep her away from the Bouquet. The 'don't fuck with my family' thing from mafia movies was real, and while it hadn't been relevant until now, I knew that the organization stuck to similar principles.

It was like that part of that one mafia movie, the one, the one with the daughter's wedding and the oranges—where the patriarch gets royally pissed that a rival family shot into his bedroom when his wife was there, the idea being that trying to kill him was one thing, but that involving his wife was some kind of breach of norms.

Kind of like the idea of war crimes, which, contrary to what edgelords on the internet would tell you, are a very rational, practical concept and don't actually have much to do with 'ethics' in the first place.

So yeah, by turning Stephanie into an outside romantic partner, I was marking her as off limits in a sense.

Finally, it had a practical purpose with respect to Katherine. I knew by now that Kat had a massive gay crush on me, for some reason, and it was in my continued interest to exploit that.

By introducing Stephanie as an existing girlfriend, I did several things at once. I revealed that I was gay too—I mean, I'm not, but the point is that she'll think I am—which would stoke the flames of her desire and prolong her interest. If I never showed any signs of interest or acknowledgement, Katherine would eventually move on.

But by 'revealing' that I really was a potential match, I could continue to string her along. At the same time, using Stephanie to do so would help too, because it would simultaneously stoke her even more with the power of envy, while also preventing her from making any overt moves. Finally, it would explain why, if I was supposedly gay, I had been ignoring her.

Really, it was perfect. With one single, simple lie, I'd accomplished multiple independent tasks in an optimal way. It had nothing to do with teasing Katherine, as I wasn't some kind of emotional sadist. Or any kind of sadist.

But most of that would play out later. Right now, we just had to finish fighting our way out of the incursion. "Alright, stop standing around," I commanded. "Let's get moving."

Saber

Standing miles above the heart of the breach, Saber could barely restrain herself from twitching with uncharacteristic nervous excitement. Her thoughts were sharp and lucid, with none of the usual fragmentation and mental laziness.

Her betrayal hadn't been planned. She'd given the entire Black Faction less than an hour to prepare, and she'd only decided to do it less than an hour before that. But what were they going to do, turn her down?

There were exactly two of them who she couldn't kill on a whim, and only one of them would be a threat to her in turn. Ironically, she had more of a chance at killing that one than the other, but he was also more dangerous to her.

And with the knowledge that the collective might of the more powerful Red and Blue factions, as well as Fabrica, were preparing to come down on all of them, with the eventual support of both China and the United States, ignoring her wasn't an option.

She only needed one simple task from them that would take all of a few seconds, and then they would be free to do whatever they wanted. It would be foolish indeed to turn down such a bargain, especially since her own goals would completely disrupt all of her allies' plans and make taking on the members of the Black Faction a forgotten concern.

I've wanted to do this for so fucking long.

Saber wasn't betraying them for power, although she would be by far the strongest Star Guardian once this was over. She wasn't doing it for revenge, either, or for an ideology. She wasn't doing it for spite, material gain, or for anyone other than herself.

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She was doing it because she was bored.

The past two decades had been a slog. The initial years were interesting, back before things had stabilized, when the future was uncertain, and when she was first tearing her way to power. After that, things settled down, but there had at least been tension between the factions, the drama, all of the secret plots that she'd taken a role in…

It all came to a climax in 2011, and those had been some of the most enjoyable weeks of her life. But after the evacuation was complete, after she'd stopped toying with Aurora, after the negotiations had begun…

Ever since then, things had been so fucking boring.

This was going to change all of that. It was going to change everything.

"Ugh, please," the Tier 7 gasped out. What was his name again? Arthur? Andrew? He was supposed to be one of the strongest hybrids, a Death Knight, but Saber couldn't recall his name. "It was an accident," he rasped. "I got.. Distracted. By the pistachio—"

Saber tightened her grip around his throat, forcing him to shut up. His inane protestation was pissing her off, and ironically, that was the only thing he'd done so far to upset her. She'd grabbed him because he was the nearest Tier 7 to the most severe ongoing incursion, not for any other reason.

Come on. How much longer am I going to have to wait?

Not long, it turned out, as Aurora chose that very moment to streak over the horizon and screech to a halt in the air a few feet in front of her.

"Saber," the Tier 9 greeted her, "you called for me?" He looked between her, the struggling Tier 7, and the breach below them, before looking back at her. "That's not like you. What's happening?"

Saber's eyes twinkled, and for the first time in nearly twenty years, she smiled beneath her mask. He sounds concerned… But not suspicious. He doesn't suspect anything. Reaching up to her face with trembling fingers, she gripped the edge of her mask and pulled.

"Eat shit, Jackass."

Aurora's features went wide with shock and disbelief, and it was impossible to tell whether it was from hearing Saber's voice, raspy and weak from forty years of disuse, or from feeling the immense ripple of a high Tier 9 aura popping into existence.

Either way, he was so stunned that he failed to react in time to the newly ascended Tier 9 slamming her boot into his chest with enough force that it would have vaporized the flesh of a Tier 7 on contact.

Aurora, being one of only two Tier 9s until a fraction of a second ago, was made of sterner stuff—but the blow still sent him hurtling down towards the breach below at a velocity that wasn't so much supersonic as it was orbital.

A writhing mass of red lightning carried down behind him like bloody cracks splitting through glass. Reality itself screeched under the assault, and Saber followed up by hurling the still-struggling Tier 7 hybrid down after him.

By that point, Aurora had already smashed through the ground, the raw kinetic energy released by his impact cratering the earth and sending a shockwave tearing through whatever structures were still intact in the surrounding blocks.

He wasn't dead, of course, but now that Saber had finally allowed herself to break through the next tier, she could do a lot more than stall him. The balance of power had tipped, and now, there would be absolutely no doubt about who was the strongest.

But Saber's goal had never been to kill Aurora. In fact, she wanted him to live—she needed him alive if he was going to be useful.

In the single second after Aurora and the Tier 7 had smashed into the center of the incursion, the breach had already torn several tiers higher—but Saber wasn't done. No—things were just getting started.

The new strongest Tier 9 followed after them, diving down into the center of the incursion, and she wasn't alone. Her springing into motion was the signal for every member of the Black Faction above Tier 5, which was most of them, to follow after her.

It was with some amusement that among the chaos, Saber was still able to pick out the telltale feeling of Daniel cutting a portal into the location. That was a mistake on his part, but not one that she was inclined to stop.

He must have felt something strange happening, with his unique connection to breaches, but his presence was only going to make things worse.

While the Tier 8 was special for breaking the usual rules, with his presence helping to stabilize reality rather than worsen the incursion, with the scale of what Saber had just triggered, his power wouldn't be as effective as attacking a volcano with a squirt gun.

With two Tier 9s, seven Tier 8s, and almost a hundred Tier 7s, there was no hope of keeping the incursion contained. By the time Saber and the first few Black Faction leaders had entered, the incursion had already ballooned to encompass the entire city—no, the entire metropolitan area.

And it only continued to grow.

By Saber's estimates, the eventual size of the incursion would grow to cover the majority of the west coast—but that was assuming it was static, a calculation based only on the number of high tier Star Guardians.

At that point, with there being upwards of a hundred thousand Anathema or Anathema infections in the area, and by subsuming smaller ongoing incursions, there would be no hope of stopping it. The incursion would only grow larger.

It was a runaway reaction. Like the Trinity test almost a century earlier, it was a self sustaining reaction. For the first time, an incursion had reached true criticality, and not even the great nuclear arsenals could stop it.

It was ironic. The London incursion had grown close to this bad, but it had failed to reach criticality precisely because humanity was unprepared for it. There were no high tier Star Guardians to worsen it, and everyone inside died so quickly that there was little opportunity for additional seeding.

Combined, these factors choked its growth. It would have continued to grow, yes, but at a much slower pace.

But now, with how quickly the current incursion had reached its subcontinental scale, and with the much higher survivability conferred to the population by the presence of bunkers, Guardians, and atomic technology, the incursion wouldn't burn itself out in time for anyone to mount an effective response.

That being said, Saber wouldn't be surprised if someone pulled the nuclear trigger. I wonder if this time it's also going to be France.

As reality itself fell apart, fracturing so badly in the heart of the incursion that even Saber herself struggled to understand the ways in which space and even time contorted, she briefly wondered if she should regret it.

No.

Billions would die, but many would live. And now that incursions were a thing of the past—now that the entire world was falling into the cracks between intersecting realities—the next few years were not going to be boring.

Already, before the incursion had even swallowed the whole planet, the strongest, Tier 9 Star Guardian could feel that she was no longer the most powerful creature present.

One of the top ten, or even five, yes… But there were at least three distinct, alien presences so immense as to feel properly apocalyptic in scale now bursting up through the cracks.

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