Lord of Entertainment

Chapter 531: Ascension

(3rd Person POV)

Arthur's hand was closed around the counterpart's soul, and the counterpart could not move.

"Im— impossible!" The other Arthur strained against the grip and got nowhere. "How? How can you reach into my Authority of «Transmigration» and hold it shut?!"

Arthur only smiled. "Because I carry your Authority too."

The counterpart reached out with his own senses to check the claim, and found it true. The «Transmigration» sat inside this stranger the same as it sat in him. "N-no. No, this shouldn't be possible."

Arthur let his gaze drift out over the ruined world below, the walking dead and the last of the living scrabbling through them. "You turned an entire world into the end of days. Rewrote it into this, brick by brick, so you could shoot a convincing zombie apocalypse — a real one, no sets, no actors — and carry the film back to release in the cinemas of your home timeline. Entertainment." He shook his head slowly. "You evil Arthurs are so easy to read. Every one of you I've met in every other timeline runs the exact same way."

"Get away from me!" The counterpart's voice cracked up the middle. "I am the great Arthur Morningstar! I will not let you get away with this!"

"Is that so." Arthur's tone didn't shift. "From everything I've seen so far, you evil Arthurs are weak."

He adjusted the pressure in his hand — a small thing, a fractional squeeze — until the force in it was enough to crush the soul it held.

The counterpart felt exactly how close it was. "N-no. Have mercy!"

"Mercy." Arthur turned the word over as though tasting it. "Did you show any of that here? You made a whole world suffer for your entertainment. Where was the mercy in that?"

The counterpart trembled in his grip.

"Don't worry." Arthur's mouth curved. "I won't let you die just yet."

Something shameless brightened in the other Arthur's face. "Really?" A smile broke through the terror. "That's — that's wonderful! If you're not going to kill me, then think of what the two of us could do. We rule the multiverses together, you and I. Nobody could stand against us. We'd be unstoppable—"

"You're misunderstanding something."

The smile faltered. "What?"

"I mean to seal you," Arthur said, pleasant and unhurried in the way of a man describing a schedule. Wait — cut "unhurried."

Let me fix that line.

"I mean to seal you," Arthur said, pleasant as a man laying out a schedule. "And then I mean to torture you. For years. However many it takes, until I'm satisfied."

"You—" The counterpart's face twisted. "You sick bastard!"

Before Arthur could begin, the panel surfaced in his vision.

[Master, eliminate the counterpart now. He may be holding cards he hasn't shown. This is common to the counterpart Arthurs.]

'I suppose you're right,' Arthur allowed.

The counterpart shook, rage boiling up in him — and then, visibly, he swallowed it back down. He would take the sealing. He would sit quiet inside it and wait, and he already had the shape of a way out half-formed in his mind, a thread to pull once the stranger's attention wandered—

"Ngh—?! What are you doing?" His head snapped up. "Aren't you going to seal me?"

Arthur poured a crushing weight of power straight through his hand, and began to draw the soul and essence up out of the body like water up a wick. "Sorry," he said. "I changed my mind."

"N-no—" The counterpart guttered, thinning, going out. "No..."

Arthur consumed him whole. And with that, the evil Arthur of this timeline simply ceased to be.

The ghosts watched every part of it with their eyes stretched wide.

"As for this world..." Arthur looked around, and reconsidered the scope of it. "No. Not just this world. This whole universe is riddled with him, and he's been turning the whole of it, piece by piece, into a cruel studio for his own amusement." His eyes moved from ruin to ruin across the branching skies. "There's a planet drowning under a tsunami that circles the entire globe and never stops. There's another where the people have been remade into talking cars. Trains. Aircraft." His voice flattened with something close to disgust. "He turned humans, demons, elves, and dwarves alike into vehicles. Is he making Cars?"

While he stood there weighing it, Diddy and the others drifted up off the ruined ground to hover near him.

"E-excuse me, sir," Diddy ventured, "but who are you, exactly? You actually put down that tyrant Arthur—" he flinched at his own word, "—I mean, not you, that Arthur. The one we knew."

The rest of the crew braced, certain the slip had given offense.

"Rest easy," Arthur said. "None of you is going to be harmed."

The ghosts let out a collective breath.

"But this whole timeline is a wreck." He lifted a hand and considered it. "I'll have to consume it."

"W-wait," Diddy got out. "Does that mean we—"

"Don't worry." Arthur's tone stayed almost kind. "Once I erase this timeline, the lot of you get folded in with the ghosts of my own. You'll carry on."

"I—I don't follow," Daddy said.

"M-me too," Puffy said.

"You don't need to."

With that Arthur raised his hand, and the ring on it flared. It opened like a mouth, and it drank.

The apocalypse went first, then the sky over it, then the branching universe behind the sky — every world, every ruin, every walking dead thing and every last soul still running from them, drawn up and in and gone. Where a whole cosmos had been, there was nothing now but a clean and endless white, and Arthur standing alone at the center of it.

The devoured timeline had gone into the Devourer Ring. There it was already being broken down, refined, converted stroke by stroke into power and routed home into him.

Chronette slipped out of the ring in her fairy-form, wings holding her steady, and stretched like something well fed. "Wow, Arthur. That was amazing." She pressed a small hand to her middle. "I'm so much fuller now. This timeline we ate — it was completely different from the others."

"It should be." Arthur watched the last of the white settle into him. "After all, that one was made of entertainment, top to bottom."

The panel bloomed again.

[Master — you now hold the power to take the One True Throne. Your strength has crossed the required threshold.]

Arthur's smile came slow and real. "There it is. This is exactly what I've been reaching for."

He returned to his own timeline in a single step, and from there he went on, inward, to the True Dimension. Chronette could not follow him this far; the True Dimension opened for Arthur alone, and she stayed behind in the waking world.

And there it stood. The throne that had refused every approach he'd ever made toward it now sat quiet and near, waiting on him at last.

He walked toward it without hurrying, and murmured as he went. "System. If I sit on this throne — every timeline with an Arthur in it gets erased. Yes?"

[Yes. And every erased timeline merges into you. But understand: through all of it, you remain the true Arthur. Their power and their essence come to you; their selves do not. Your personality stays wholly your own. Think of it as their returning to the Source.]

Arthur inclined his head. He crossed the last of the distance, turned, and sat upon the throne.

The instant he did, power came for him, and he threw his head back with a gasp under the force of it.

"Ugh—! What— what is this..." His hands locked white on the arms of the seat. "This pain. It's unbearable—"

[You must hold, master. Right now the power of every timeline is rushing into you at full pace!]

The pain was past anything physical. It drove down beneath the body, beneath the soul, into whatever ran deeper than either, into the raw fact of him. He could feel his own essence beginning to give — his Authorities, one after another, splitting along their seams.

"N-no!" The word came out ragged. "My powers — they're going. They're disappearing!"

[Trust it, master! What leaves you will be answered by something greater!]

Arthur groaned, and then he screamed, long and raw, and there was no one anywhere in that white and boundless place to hear a note of it.

One year. Two. Five. Ten. Twenty.

He lost the count somewhere along the way and stopped keeping it, and the pain did not stop with the counting. On it went, absolute, filling everything he was.

A thousand years, perhaps. A million. In the end it made no difference which.

And then, at last, it eased.

[Congratulations, Master. You have become the Absolute Ruler of Kenoma.]

The power settled through him boundless, past anything an ordinary deity could hold in the mind long enough to fear. Even the strength he'd carried up the steps to this throne — the strength that had eaten a universe whole — could not stand beside what he held now.

"Just... what have I become, System?" Arthur breathed. "What is the One True Throne, truly? Because I have the distinct feeling you never opened the whole of it to me."

The moment the words were out, the System took shape in front of him — no longer a voice and a panel but a woman, tall and composed, gowned in elegant dress.

Arthur did not so much as blink. He had carried this presence inside him too long to be startled by the sight of it wearing a face.

The System turned her new hands over, testing the fingers, and then bowed low. "Master. I owe you everything. It was through you that I was able to merge with the systems of every Arthur across every timeline."

"You leveled up as well, then." Arthur studied her without warmth. "Though set against me, your strength is still a small thing." He did not lower his guard by a hair. She was the one who had walked him onto this throne, after all, and if it came to it he was ready to scatter her across the dimension. "Well?"

"R-relax, master." She lifted her palms. "I'm not your enemy!"

"Then leave nothing out." His eyes held her. "What is Kenoma? And I rule it?"

The System met his gaze and did not look away. "I will reveal all of it to you, master. Everything."