I felt the cold air of the eternal dusk of my dimension; above us artificial lights shone, imitating stars. White and red lines crossed the buildings, bathing everything in a neon glow. The homunculi marched in unison: some in white robes, others in military uniforms.
Asherah was at my side. She hummed one of those melodies that had become fashionable among the population: simple in appearance, but tuned for something other than harmony. I closed my eyes and enjoyed her voice, exhaling a sigh that was not only of the body.
Lately he had had time for her projects, like integrating dragon energy into living beings; clearly it was only in an observation phase, but the results seemed promising if you only convert a portion of the being's total energy, so you don't lose the benefits of pure magic.
The [The Source] project had been updated against psychic capacities to safely resist, at least to a great extent, almost any form of manipulation from that side, and to make the mental connection through a mixture of magical energy and psychic power. The [The Root] project had been taken to its latest version; there was really nothing left to improve there. Well, I could create other things with it, like [the art of the sword], but that was a use of [The Root], not its driving mechanism.
As for the biological measures, I solved the issue with the genes of my species: I replaced almost eighty percent of the DNA that composed us with a safer one, as well as more efficient in its functions. The result was that we no longer had those problems of human genetics. Biological, magical, technological transhumanism is basically the same after all; here that is the daily bread.
Anyway, society was at peace, well, a peace made in the image of what, in its twisted mind, it should be but let's not go into unnecessary details.
My thoughts were broken when a discharge of supernatural energy flashed in the non-industrialized regions of the factory. Its brightness was a cut across the calm surface: it closed my session of calm.
"Tell me, Asherah, how long was it?" I asked Asherah, referring to the period without incidents.
"Sixty-eight rotations," she answered curtly, also understanding that the brief peace this society had created would be torn down by whatever had arrived this time.
"It is truly a shame. I will go personally to solve the problem; you know the protocol," I did not wait for her answer, but of course it reached me through the mental interconnection of [The Factory] members.
"Mobilize one of the fleets to the problem's location, power up one of the [Magic Titans], secure personnel and logistics," I heard Asherah's own voice mentally as I quickly prepared a spatial jump toward the problem area, "Hit first, ask questions when we pull out their soul, right?" I could not help the small smile at the clumsy joke she tried, which is why she is my favorite.
I moved my hand, completing a movement spell related to space.
The spell compressed the space around me; the transit lasted barely a second. A white trail from ionization made clear where I had been. When I regained my sight I was floating above a clearing of metallic sand. A small, black light pulsed irregularly; white flashes escaped its core in erratic motions.
A couple of barely living, badly beaten bodies lay exposed while the portal closed abruptly with the scream of what seemed to be the group's sorceress, who fell unconscious from that action.
I fell slowly from the sky while, in the distance, one of the fleets could be seen arriving in a few minutes; luckily Asherah assumed we would not need the [Magic Titan] for this issue.
"Let's see who these troublemakers are," I said to myself as I approached the unconscious forms of the group. A woman with orange skin and pink or magenta hair dressed in purple, a man mostly of metal with the only visible piece of skin dark, a young man with a mask covered by a black cloak which said very little, a young man with green skin?, and finally the mage covered by a cloak that seemed to have enchantments because the darkness it gave off was supernatural.
Together I recognized this group how could I not? I sighed for the third time today seeing how my plans were being fed into an imaginary meat grinder.
Look, I had plans: I wanted this dimension to be at peace while I built some device to separate Chaos from the Materium, which is totally possible with the new information I had, just to follow the path the demons took to get here, fulfill my objective and establish my species as the olds ones 2.0 — this time it's personal, with more transhumanism than ever. But no, now, just seeing how these teenagers got here, God knows how they arrived. Trigon, Darkseid, Anti-Monitor, those crazy versions of Superman, that omnipotent Joker, the Batman Who Laughs along with the rest of the nonsense.
You know, Warhammer 40K's Chaos is easier for me to fix: creating a spell that prevents the emergence of the psychic gene would almost immediately weaken the malformed spawn, or I could do a constant local erasure that would disarm the local warp along with everything of it, leaving only a perpetually clean ocean. Or simpler, isolate it like I did with those demons, only on a galactic scale, and use them as a battery while I mocked the gods of Chaos. None of those options require me to be as strong as those crude attempts at gods; they only required me to build a device or a magic circle, which only takes TIME. What am I going to do against someone with immediate power like Trigon? I would have to study him before countering him, and that is annoying. Against someone like Darkseid? The same, although maybe cut his connection to the place from which he draws energy.
And that did not account for the sheer number of "more powerful" gods that DC kept introducing more and more; who the hell cares, he would not deal with that.
All those thoughts passed in less than a millionth of a second while in parallel I contacted Asherah to tell her to bring only a couple of transports and remove the war machinery, but do not store anything they might need it if the father of the fainted gothic girl found her. You can never be too cautious.
"I have to improve the damned dimensional sealing," I told myself as I picked up the pair of teenagers to make sure none of them died while I waited for Asherah.
Because they couldn't be from a world like One Piece or DBZ heavens, I would've settled for a cartoon like MLP. At least in those, the power of friendship actually works for something. Why did they have to come from universes full of insane gods?
I looked into the void, swearing that if I had to deal with another universe like that I would simply pass myself off as any random god of technology, magic, and knowledge. It was easier to become one of those many mad gods than to fight them, but if it had to be that way I would make sure I was the one holding the weapon.