The armoured one, that hunts others who are armoured. Antimaterial rifle fired from behind cover. The two capitals above and beyond. Tectonic plates meeting. Or simply, a living creature, a fucking fish from Cradle's prehistory.
All at once, it strikes him; Dunkleosteus, a flailing, snaking, peircing weaving mass of black thread and sharp coral, is pried open. Attention, at first, is turned towards a realspace threat. A mere gnat, nothing an unshackled ushabti omnigun cannot age into dust.
She turns back, only to have her shield/skin of boiling acid directed solely at the branching arms of a thing like her, a fractal of infinite points of reference where he is a faceless singularity, a oneness. Defenses breeched, the crystals in her crown/the eyes in his skull filter light/qualia/data/psychic geometry into something the alien entity can understand, and it acts in turn, shuddering, lurching away, yet it cannot move across relative space for the many arms have their fingers tangled in thread-
Back up. Boiling acid. It wasn't boiling before.
The roar of the howling sun drowns out anything that would have reified as sound, as coral bleaches and thread burns, whole sections of him engulphed in the wrath of ejected coronal material. Part of this is reification, yes, but there is very little metaphor here. What happens in legionspace can only be understood as [THESUNISTRYINGTOKILLHER]
No connective tissue is left as threads fray into smaller ones again and again but this time are reduced to fertile ash/Primordial qualia soup
The saga spear strikes now, and instantly, he ossifies, still as a statue. Nothing but [Old. Rigid. Unchanging. Fossilised bones in the permafrost]. The strike is dead on, piercing threads and shattering coral such that even without the crushing weight of an entire history pressing against any impulse to change, the blow would have killed him outright.
Would have. This one track mind knows many tricks, and from within the emerald, the sapphire, the ruby and the amethyst, behind there lies a dark and alien intelligence. Bone breaks, rots, turns to dust. Ash is washed away, blown in the wind. Vinegar skin dissolves anything that is left as [REIFICATION: HIS HEAD FOLDS IN ON ITSELF AND DISSAPEARS]
Without a moment's delay, something blossoms from the vaccum left behind. No, not something. Nothing. For that is what Dunkleosteous is, that is why she of all people was chosen to pilot this craft. So long as there is something, it can be reduced to nothing. This entity is by its very nature, entropic, reducing anything and everything that can be considered "it" to nothing over time. And when it returns to being nothing, this is its default state; Dunk can then return.
For those not versed in the workings of Legionspace combat, a strangely accurate metaphor is this: She respawns, and has access to /unstuck.
Of course, to make the choice to do this, one has to care. To care, one has to comprehend some part of it on some level. Hence the eyes being hidden during self-rejuvinating death. Hence the weak, pale light, barely visible as threads turn to crystal turn to blades seeking to cut off volition from action - that light vanishes, integrated into Dunk willingly. An ally, forming a gestalt.
Reification: A worm eats the eyes of the hound at the centre of the black mass, before being dragged out and away by an ocean current. Dunkleosteus's brain/soul/self/subjectivity/core/SHAPESHAPESHAPESHAPE are exposed through eye sockets/lapses in perception.
And the Nothing at the core of the infinity becomes a something that refuses to become nothing, a poisoned teeth digging into a self perpetuating cycle of corrosive thoughts. Then the something that has been changed into a non-nothing is struck with the simplest, crudest weapon of kill-qualia, en masse, vinegar turning to a not nothing, not something, raw subjectivity unburdened by a mind- before being burdened by the source of that qualia as Grey's frozen psyche crashes against the husk, collapsing it.
All that is left, is a nothing, that is not the same nothing as before. A presence, but lacking anything to fill it. What was once an entity has become a phenomena. A thing. No volition. No internal experience. No qualia. Just a hole in legionspace, an object.
Part of L0 has seen something like this before((?) At least their temporal inject is in the past now), and perhaps that's how the maze/library/storm/shadow was made. It matters not. Like that empty thing, this one is no threat without external input. The battle is won.
Realspace: Object B and its drones cease all motion. Comms are left open, silent.
