Esper Labyrinth - ESP - Superhero - LITRPG

The first week after our little meetup had been spent torching Species-Cities and capital worlds where shipyards might be found. Our combined powers making very short work of any defenses the locals thought to put up.

Not that it was much of a contest. Our little conquests were mostly composed of the Seeking Drake showing up, spreading himself as a super-plague and then relishing the carnage he inflicted.

With us, the regular, normal, well-adjusted Savants just took down the ships.

Honestly, I couldn't help but think that Cultist Sully was a punk who didn't know anything when I saw the aftermath. Sure, we hadn't killed nearly as many Kenari or other allied species as the Drake had done in his much younger days. That and we hadn't even come close to approaching the level of desolation I had unwittingly unleashed while trying to wrangle [Eternal Silence].

But these sudden assaults still felt brutal. Far more brutal in fact. Far more personal. As if we were evil Intruders manifesting from the depth of Pandemonium to suck up all the happiness and joy and hope in every world we visited.

If I had been forced to describe it, I would have described the aftermath as nothing short of apocalyptic.

Doubly so because we were going around and doing it over and over and over again. I actually counted and we ended up destroying no less than 586 planets in just one very productive day. With dozens of Tier 6 and Tier 7 Masters stepping up to get killed in a very heroic fashion. Or worse, taken alive by the Drake. Who never seemed to get bored of the prospect of having more coffee tables screaming in his parlor.

Yes.

That was it. Dozens of Masters.

Across hundreds of worlds.

There were other Savants we'd been looking for of course. Shifter and Enhancer Savants lived a lot longer because they were Shifter and Enhancer Savants. So there should have been a lot more of them than the Projector and Telepath Savants I'd managed to wrangle over to my cause.

I had heard the tales of course. If only because I had scoured so many minds while I still could read minds without feeling as if my spirit was being flayed alive.

Among those I knew how to find were Jocast the Burrowed Jungle, Yusfur the Glittering Giant and Groshur-Fer-Pofru the Slothful Slayer.

The former two were Shifters on the level of the Moving Mountain or Frigid Bloodline. Though neither gave a single fig what happened to the Dragon. They weren't exactly on bad terms, as least as far as I was aware, but neither were they known to be friends.

The first was content to while away the hours in their home world, acting like the sentient carnivorous plant that they were, only on a much, much larger scale.

The second was a kind of bipedal mole-person who thoroughly enjoyed walking around their home Species City with their fur covered in gemstones. Attracting comely males.

Not exactly the kind of thing Savants were known for. Neither was overly ambitious and both had turned down my advances earlier.

The last one was a sentient, sapient, sexless slug. An Enhancer who loved nothing more than sleeping and who thoroughly despised the Dragon. Almost as much as he despised the very idea of moving. At least if the legends were to be believed.

I had reached out to them too of course, but they were of the idea that trying to become a Divine or trying to get other Types was nothing more than a bother. A waste of time. Time that could have been used to sleep some more.

There were others that I didn't know how to find. Those that should have been the Dragon's allies or those who should have been the allies of his allies.

None of them had shown up.

Indeed, no Master of significant strength had shown up to stop us. Though a few had shown up to swear fealty. And to ask us very nicely to leave their poor poor people alone.

I saw it as a waste of time and while I couldn't read their minds, I had an inkling that both Cruelty and Mercy agreed with me. While Crushing Void kept sucking up to the Drake. Though I was fairly sure he only did so because the Drake was the most prideful and the least predictable of us all.

People could and had gotten away with insulting me to my face. Plenty of times.

The same could not be said for the Seeking Drake. He was the sort of creature who draped himself in pride and petty grudges. Who lived for the thrill of righting what he saw as wrongs. He liked killing, or torturing, those who had wronged him in some manner or other. Almost as much as he liked growing his little shop of horrors.

I occurred to me that I was no different than him however. Not right now, when I was galivanting with a posse right behind his own enthusiastic step in order to flush out the remaining loyalists the Dragon still had.

Worse, it also occurred to me that we were acting line mother-ploughing gnomes.

Minus the slavery thing; but it was still bad.

If most people out here in the Labyrinth were given the choice, most of them would take a low orbit bombing over having the Seeking Drake in their backyard any day. The same was true for a lot of the Masters we encountered. Though perhaps calling them Masters was a bit misleading.

The real, top-Tier Masters would have been closer to ascension. That was what it meant to become a Master after all. It meant you were close to reaching divinity. It meant you had at least one Type crawling towards the 8th Tier or higher. It meant the Dragon's whole faction and other factions close to that one in power had to take a look at you and take note of who you were and what you wanted.

It meant respect. It meant responsibility. It meant you were supposed to be the one taking on the brunt of the enemy forces when the enemy forces came calling.

Yet those few Masters we did see were those belonging to factions opposed to the Kenari empire. All of whom were busy at the moment. What with the whole robbing and pillaging.

One time, we arrived at a planet to find it already under attack by a race of mantis people. All of whom were very keen on wearing Kenari intestines as fashionable accessories. Things like necklaces and earrings. With the odd one in ten getting busy on the streets fashioning Kenari stomachs and livers into wineskins.

It was a carnival of depravity that made me sick to my stomach.

The Drake loved every second of it.

By the time I had convinced him to move along we had wasted most of a day. And a lot of lives.

Stolen novel; please report.

Lives that did not need to be snuffed out.

I hadn't killed them. I hadn't even wanted to come here in the first place.

This all happened because I was still trying to look for whomever was still fighting us. And there were still people fighting us.

Or, well, trying to hold on until the Dragon came back.

One thing was clear. This wasn't working. Not at all. It was time for a change.

I brought our group to the spa again and I went over some ideas.

They weren't taken very seriously.

"Why should we change our approach?" The Drake scoffed. "We're doing fiiineee."

He waved me off.

"Fiiineee I tell you. I love what we've been doing. This has been so much fun Sully. Sooo much fun. I have so many new coats. All kinds of new purses. I'm going to be the belle of the ball the next time I happen to wander into a fashion show!"

"Please don't." I pleaded. "I'm serious. At least let's acknowledge that there could be much better things we could be doing. Much more efficient things we could be doing to flush out the guys still being loyal to Hazimon."

"Who said we needed anything to flush out the loyalists?" The Drake asked. Feigning confusion. "I thought we were trying to make old Hazi-boy as miserable as possible."

"That won't matter once he's dead." I pointed out.

He scoffed again.

"Of course it matters!"

He then looked to the others.

"I'm not crazy am I?"

Not even Crushing Void managed to answer that one.

He turned back to me.

"Look. This isn't really that difficult. You hate the Dragon, I hate the Dragon. You want him dead. I want him dead. You and I made a deal and despite you making me go through a lot of hoops and you being generally annoying most of the time, we've both managed to keep true to our word. I want to keep true to my word. I want to do this by hurting Hazi-boy as much as possible. Because I have to pay him back for thousands, millions of years of humiliation. Because I want to make sure to drag everything he has ever loved through the fire. Because I want him to see all he has ever loved burn before we finally put him out of his misery."

I shook my head. Sighing.

"All I want to see is his head on a pike. Actually, forget that. I just need him dead and I still have my original plan to fall back on. Now that I think about it, what I really wanted to get out of this crusade was to disable all the ways his empire could attack humans, and it seems to me that it is all they can do right now to keep themselves from crumbling."

I thought of something.

"Now there's a thought." I murmured. "Quite a thought indeed. What if we could do something, unexpected…."

Benevolent Mercy jumped up. Probably after foretelling what I was about to suggest. No, more like, foretelling the consequences.

I gave her a look.

"It will work." She murmured. "But, damn Sully. That's low."

"What?" Golden Cruelty pipped up. "Worse than this?"

The Drake looked interested. At last.

"Okay." I began. "This is a little trick I learned from a buddy calling himself… Leatherface."

The square in the main plaza of Dralkiron 9 was hushed. The whole massive throng of people going quiet as the ship began to descend.

It was to be expected.

After all, the whole empire had been bracing itself for conflict ever since the Dragon disappeared and his daughter was murdered by the Drake and his new crony, the Mad Tyrant. The Coffin King.

Ships had stopped coming. And those that were still capable of flight had been fleeing for deep space as of late. Neighbor empires had stopped pretending to be neutral. Subservient, conquered peoples had stopped paying their tithes. Local leaders of the 3rd Tier turned back into warlords or turned into warlords for the first time.

Worlds like this one outside the Labyrinth were all ripe for the taking and everyone knew it.

Which only made it more shocking when the Dragon's personal ship began to descend.

The landing gear expanding outward to strike down upon the road with an oomph that was felt throughout the planet.

Then, the ramp threw itself out, and the Dragon stepped out.

"People of this world!" He shouted. His tone both reassuring and imperious. "Have no fear! And take heart! We will survive this! We will prevail! I…I will protect you all!"

Everyone cheered. And the cheers grew so loud that the vibrations threatened to crack the glass on the windows on all the nearby buildings.

Kenari architecture was very different from human architecture and there was glass all over the place. Curling up and down in spiraling patterns over the walls except on those spots where actual windows were placed.

Then cameras appeared. As if from nowhere. All the attention of the world focusing on the Dragon all at once.

And then Benevolent Mercy sighed in defeat from amongst the crowd.

Transformed as she was, no one could tell that she wasn't a Kenari. Just like no one could tell that the figure being regaled was actually the Seeking Drake. Shifter was funny like that. Just like how Telepath was funny in how deliberate manipulation could be detected more or less at once. While deceptions could be harder to foresee if the ones doing the deception were more or less immune to having their actions foretold.

She willed the ramp to open further and I readied myself for my part.

To copy Leatherface Sully after he had ruined a certain politician's career.

The spaceship revealed the hidden cargo.

And a scantily-dressed Kenari female dropped to the ground. Dead as a doornail.

She was actually an it of course. I'd simply found a gnome and shaped its flesh into the shape of a Kenari. But these people couldn't tell.

The entire plaza went quiet. The silence prevailing until I shattered it.

"Look!" I shouted. "It's a dead prostitute!"

The silence that followed was somehow even more deafening.

"The Dragon has a dead prostitute in his ship!"

No one said anything after that either. No one, except for the Drake, who pretended to rush back to throw the body back into the ship. When he did so, Mercy activated the second mechanism. Controlling the ship almost as well as I would have.

Another Kenari-gnome fell out. Wearing sexy lingerie.

"Look!" Crushing Void shouted. His body also disguised as a Kenari. "There's another dead prostitute!"

Another one fell out even as the Drake threw this one into the ship.

"There's another one!" Cruelty bellowed. "How many dead prostitutes does the Dragon have in his ship!?"

"I've never seen so many dead prostitutes in one place!" I lied. I'd seen all kinds of things through [Omniscience] of course and this didn't even crack the top one thousand.

Still, it seemed to be having the desired effect on the crowd.

"They're fake!" Someone tried saying. Wailing with despair. "There's no way the Dragon could do this!"

"No!" Someone else shouted. Someone who wasn't part of our group surprisingly enough. I turned to see an actual, regular Kenari.

"I see dead prostitutes all the time! I know a dead prostitute when I see one! Those are real dead prostitutes!"

I shook my head. Blinking despite myself.

Partly because of how surprised I was and partly because of how my Shifter powers were telling me that this guy knew exactly what he was talking about.

I made a mental note to follow that guy later and slit his throat or something, but then I shifted my focus back to the crowd. Releasing a few pheromones to rile them up as Mercy affected them ever so slightly.

The murmurs became words. The words became shouts. The shouts became a riot.

And all the cameras were on the Drake, still disguised as Hazimon.

When he went and started throwing hands. Killing throngs of innocents in a mad frenzy, using Enhancer abilities and Enhancer abilities only.

"Ha!" The Drake laughed. "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHA! HAAAA!"

He was laughing so hard that the walls of the ship were shaking. The screen showing images from the local universe's universal news network.

All kinds of spokespeople speaking about how the Dragon's vices had been revealed. How he liked killing ladies and men of ill repute.

All those talking heads were under Mercy's control of course. As were the executives in charge of those news stations which were showing the event. Or propagating the videos to other dimensions.

I had expected the event to lure out a loyalist or two. They would know it was fake of course and the leaders in other places would crack down on any rebels within their populations. But they would be incensed and likely to do something stupid to avenge the Dragon's oh-so-precious-honor.

No one came to fight us.

What did happen was that Hazimon's empire, or what remained of it, fragmented overnight.

It turns out that societies based on Esper powers don't hold up well when the people with power keep turning up dead and all the people left can turn the tide with money, influence and technology.

Three different factions were bombing each other right now. Their own remaining ships travelling to other Kenari-held dimensions in order to bomb their fellows back to the stone age.

All while the Drake laughed.

"Sully!" He roared. "Sully! I can't believe you thought of this Sully! Sully! We're gonna do this all day Sully! By Gozo's balls I've never had this much fun in my life Sully! We have got to do this again!"

I agreed, if only because we might as well keep trying to lure out a loyalist or two.

But that didn't work any better the second time. Or the third. Or the fourth.

What did happen was that other neighbors smelled even more blood on the water and started to encroach. Masters, hostile to the Dragon showing up uninvited to sack even more Instances and universes beyond the Labyrinth without being asked.

It was chaos. Pure, unfiltered chaos.

That spread like wildfire until all the Dragon's domain appeared to be burning.