Marvel Book of Magical Events

Constantine saw Catherine decapitating Maximus. She held the head high with the regurgitated scream of the giant beast, and the broken neck that was scorched by the power sword was still dripping with foul-smelling black blood. . This head alone was not much lighter than her weight. Even if it did not include the deformed forehead, its volume was far larger than the width of her shoulders, but she still easily lifted it up with one hand.

"I dedicate this head to my Lord. He is the supreme king of the human race, the guardian of human civilization and the savior of humankind's continuation." After she finished speaking, she put the head next to her feet, and then walked aside to chop it. He removed the head of Blackcard Burt and repeated what he said before. "My Lord has accepted the sacrifice." After she finished speaking, the giant beast's body turned into black sand and slid along the sloping deck into the orange-red hot metal below. Only the head still retained flesh and blood. She looked at Constantine and inserted the long sword burning with white flame into the scabbard, "Our mission is not completed yet."

Constantine ignored Catherine's overly ritualized actions and words, and he looked around him warily.

"Why do we come back here?" said the leader of the guards. "No matter how long we spend here, it is only a moment in the material universe, but the control of Black Card Burt and Maximus The etheric beings have been expelled, and there is no reason for us to remain here."

"Our master has many secrets, and words alone cannot fully express his thoughts. But as an artificial human born from the radiance of our master's soul, I can answer your questions, or in other words, I am answering your questions on his behalf. ." Catherine's expression was calm, far less noisy than before her body was destroyed, as if she had become more mature after being soaked in the ether. "That etheric entity is destined to be present at the heat death of the universe, and we cannot completely destroy it now. Only at the far end of the arrow of time can we completely destroy it, never destroying it now."

"Why do we do what we do?"

"In order to change the present." Catherine frowned, "Yes, we have to change the future to change the present."

"We are going to kill it." The battle sisters walked out of the shadows. The black power armor inlaid with golden lily and rose emblems still had dried blood and scorch marks from plasma overload. She reflexively pressed the trigger of the chainsword, and the single-molecule saw teeth slowly turned and gradually heated up. The smell of hot metal was almost exactly the same as the molten iron under the cracks in the deck. "Kill it until every atom in the universe stops moving, until gravity loses its effect, until time is no longer distorted by gravity. We are going to the end of time, and our Lord will send us there, in the endless depths of the universe. Kill it in the cold.”

Constantine chewed on the memories he had glimpsed.

He had to agree with Catherine that everything the emperor arranged had its meaning, and it seemed that every detail of the Attilan campaign was in his calculations. There is no doubt that this is an extremely computationally intensive project, just like figuring out the trajectory of every atom in a star. "I know where it is." The guard commander forced himself to extract relevant information from those chaotic memories. This time he does not dismiss the memory of Maximus, but takes a closer look at the protagonist of this classical tragedy. "I know its real name, but that name cannot be pronounced with human vocal cords."

"My Lord has arranged the threads of fate." Catherine stepped forward, her steel high heels stepping on the black sand transformed from the giant beast's body. Compared to the androids, Catherine, who was born as a human, was much smaller, and she looked even more petite next to the Guards. "You will guide us on our journey, Constantine."

"He is a human being."

"Yes, but he is also the greatest human being. This does not prevent us from worshiping him and respecting him. He is the savior of the human race, there is no doubt about it." Vera took off her helmet. She had suffered starvation and abuse in the basement of human smugglers, witnessed the most horrific atrocities committed by humans on their own kind, and had left indelible scars on her body. Even the medical system of the Eternal City could not fully Repair physical wounds. But compared to the physical scars, the girls who were brought into the Eternal City at that time encountered greater mental problems. "If I had not stood by His side, I would have been disappointed in humanity, for I have experienced the malice of the human race. If His mercy had come later, I would have been violated by those scum, skinned and eviscerated. .I was meant to be disappointed in humanity, I was meant to be malicious to everything around me."

The panic on her face has long been replaced by perseverance and courage. Vera's eyes widened wildly, and Constantine saw the emperor's power overflowing from her eyes. He didn't know whether it was Vera who was talking to him now, or the other side of the emperor. "I understand that He is fighting for the survival of the human race. This is an extremely magnificent cause. No justice in this world can be higher than His ideals, and no sacrifice can be greater than His sacrifice. I once called Him in the basement name, so He sent an angel to save me, and He allowed me to see the future.”

The commander of the Praetorian Guard had no doubts about the emperor's power. He was just puzzled by the emperor's choice of Catherine and Vera. In his opinion, no one was more qualified to perform this task than the Praetorian Guard. Because the Guards will always remain focused, but in the monastery of the Sisterhood, the performance of those human girls and even artificial people is much inferior to that of the Guards and genetically modified warriors - Catherine and Vera do not have complete Material universe form. They are just ghosts, the souls of warriors salvaged by the emperor from outer dimensions. They live entirely on the emperor's memory of them. If the person who comes into contact with them is not a modified Praetorian Guard, the other party will not even be able to leave relevant memories. To be precise, even Constantine himself was not sure that he could remember the names of the battle sisters who fought alongside him after leaving the dream.

Vera's seemingly calm fanaticism was somewhat difficult to accept for Constantine.

"You are closer to Him than I am, and His brilliance shines on you... Just like the projection of a three-dimensional model on a two-dimensional plane, you now are just a projection reflected on this moment in a long life... Except for Him, no one in this universe can transcend this narrow perspective, and the destiny I tell you is in the more distant future, and He has already arranged your destiny, Constantine.”

"Yes, I know." The guard commander responded calmly, seemingly not affected by Vera's enthusiastic tone at all. "I know my mission. This is why He created me. He is not omniscient and omnipotent. This is just a calculation model of a chaotic system, not a prophetic means."

"In any case, this does not affect the performance of our duties." Catherine said, "Let's start now, we still have enemies to kill." Constantine opened his eyes, with a rare expression of confusion. "Why send my thoughts to that future, my lord?" He frowned, trying to recall what he had seen. However, he couldn't remember anything. Even the never-forgetting brain of the Imperial Guard couldn't dig out any useful information from the dry memory. "Why can't I remember?" Constantine frowned deeper and deeper, "I only remember that I was standing in the middle of a battlefield, and you were standing next to me. I remember that there were many troops behind you..."

The deeper the guard commander dug into his memory, the more he saw. Every detail of that apocalyptic battlefield was in his memory, even if he saw nothing. He remembered seeing hundreds of meters high war engines marching in groups under the setting sun. Genetically modified warriors wearing power armor that was obviously Earth technology but had never been seen before were holding various standard weapons. Fight with vague ethereal creatures on a war-torn battlefield. The soil on the ground has been soaked in the blood of humans and alien creatures, and the bloody mud is up to his ankles. On the other side of the battlefield, the etheric entity whose true name he knows is there.

Even though it was dressed in human skin, Constantine recognized it at a glance like a hunter.

[The future, that is one of the possibilities in the future. 】

The emperor turned to look at the commander of the imperial guards.

[This universe may fall into heat death, or it may not; the etheric entity may be present, or it may not; the future you step into is just one of infinite possibilities, but one thing is an unchanging fact, that is You have mastered its true name... The true name is a concept used to express the essence of something. As long as any existence is mastered by its true name, it is equivalent to losing its power. Compared with the forbidden knowledge possessed by the etheric entity itself, the future battlefield is too grand and the possibilities are too complex. That is the battlefield where the universe ends, and all our efforts are aimed at winning that war. Because you receive too much information, your brain activates its self-protection function. If you want, you can slowly recall all the details in the future. only……】

Constantine waited for the emperor to continue, but he saw the emperor stretched out his hand and turned the key. Then he pulled out a hand wrapped in black armor out of thin air. Just by the golden lilies on the armor, Constantine recognized the owner of this hand. With the emperor's strong tug, the artificial man who always had a smile on his face appeared out of thin air. The power armor on his body was clean and tidy and smelled of incense and carbon fire.

"My lord." Catherine kissed the back of the emperor's hand as soon as she appeared, "I swear that I will cut off the heads of my enemies."

"Do you remember fighting alongside me?" Constantine asked.

"I remember, but that is the future to me, not the past." Catherine clenched her palms, and her other hand tightly grasped the hilt of the sword at her waist. Constantine found that the Catherine he saw had a completely different personality from the Catherine he met in his dream, which made him very curious. "For me, the memory of that battle is like watching a movie. I did live it, but the person I fought alongside you is not who I am now."

The Catherine that is now projected into the material universe is the image of the Catherine in the dream that is reflected in the lower-dimensional material universe. The Catherine that creatures in the material universe see is the shadow of Catherine in the dream world, which is one aspect of her essence. When she was an android, Catherine was very lively and active, often doing some hilarious pranks, and was often favored by the emperor. However, what Constantine saw now was that Catherine had been stripped of her sense of humor and appeared to have an irritable personality - Constantine He could understand what Catherine said, but the knowledge he learned through the emperor's study gave a more profound explanation of this phenomenon - however, those books did not explain the secret psychic method used by the emperor to summon Catherine from the air. It is not difficult to see from the expression of Master Hamil on the side that this behavior is beyond common sense.

Master Hamil knew Catherine.

In the early days of the establishment of the Eternal City, Karma Taj paid for many necessary materials and manpower. As the emperor's original armed force, Kama Taj Mystic had frequent dealings with the Sisters. As the commander of the assault team, Catherine is the leader of the infantry armed force of the Sisters. After the Emperor came to power, Catherine also assumed some of Kama Taj's original tasks, such as hunting down experimental animals that escaped from the laboratory and killing magic. Experimental materials, etc. Although the arcane secrets of the Sisterhood cannot be taught, the physical skills and kung fu are also taught by Karma Taj. Even if the emperor instills many close combat techniques into the androids, they are not as good as the experience and experience accumulated by Karma Taj's many years of martial arts practice. Practical techniques.

When Catherine died at the Battle of Finbul, almost all the Karma Taj Mystics who had communicated with the androids knew the news. After all, it was the first time the Emperor independently resolved an extradimensional crisis. However, Master Hamil did not know the nature of the artificial human that appeared in front of him at this moment. He touched Catherine's shoulder armor in surprise, but it was not an phantom. The emperor created the material based on a memory of Catherine. This can be said to be the supreme achievement of alchemy. Others who want to imitate the corners of this arcana require extremely complex spells and rituals, unlike the emperor who can do it casually. This once again refreshed Master Hamil's understanding of the emperor's abilities, because doing so not only requires a huge amount of etheric energy, but also requires extremely profound knowledge.