Auberon, ruler of the Calabrangi, regarded the three crumpled forms lying on the floor of Sessus. He had sensed the disturbance coming from the battle of karma Sam had initiated, coming to investigate for himself. While most Calabrangi would have been slaughtered in moments upon entering the Seshari heartlands, Auberon hadn't become the leader of his species for nothing. He had means of transportation that went beyond simple teleportation. His abilities allowed him to access neighboring dimensions. While he couldn't escape the Genesis Disc, he could tap into alternate realities adjacent to it. Realities such as Giressa's special domain.

He had arrived just in time to interfere with Sam and Graxus' attempted assasination of Giressa. While he despised both the Seshari and the Gytharki, he hated outsiders even more. At least, in his mind that was, the other two species of the Genesis Disc knew their place. On the ground.

"Get up," he said dismissively, descending from the air at a speed that for D Ranker could only be interpreted as posturing. He tossed aside his smoking gun, which had only ever been meant to fire once. "If you think yourself worthy to encroach upon my fated kingdom, at least show that you can back up that arrogance."

A groan rose from the invader, who slowly pushed himself to his feet. He stared up at Auberon, with the respect that he deserved-

"What the hell are you wearing?" Sam asked. "Is that a pimp suit?"

Auberon spluttered, taken aback. "How dare you! This is my regalia!"

"You're wearing a pink three piece suit and a gold chain. That crown looks like you got it from a scrap heap and painted it gold." Sam grinned. "Don't even get me started on the gold plating around your beak. Do you honestly think that looks good?"

For the first time in his life, Auberon didn't know how to respond. His people worshipped him as a semi-divine figure, and as such never questioned him. They certainly had never said that he looked like a pimp.

Incensed, Auberon reached into his spatial device and took out his scepter.

Sam burst out laughing. "And you have a pimp cane too! I can't make this up! Do you know a man named Berriggious by any chance? Pink skin, golden suit? Pretty hard to forget."

Auberon forced himself to ignore Sam, grinding his beak as he did so. He pointed his scepter at Sam, and against all reason, a dark cloud started to grow on the roof of the cavern. Bolts of electricity sparked and hissed from it as an electrical charge built.

"The Calabrangi are the kings of the sky," Auberon boasted. "And I? I am their king."

The storm cloud cracked open and a river of lightning fell on Sam. His body was obscured by the deadly stream, the ground melting and turning to ash in quick succession.

"How goddamn arrogant can one overgrown chicken be?" Sam said from amidst the chaos. As the lightning faded, he was revealed, Worldbreaker held loosely in his right hand. In his left was a spear of craggy rock shot through with veins of iridescent light. His entire body was covered in a suit of crystalline energy armor.

Sam tilted his head back to get a better look at Auberon. "Heads up." He loosed the spear at the Calabrangi king with shocking speed, using his Authority to propel it even further.

Auberon pushed back with his own Authority, but to his surprise, he was evenly matched. He could tell that his foe was many levels beneath him, yet was just as powerful. Instead, he was forced to use another artifact, summoning a thick shield of compressed air. While it didn't look especially tough, Sam's spear stopped upon hitting it, detonating mid air. The shockwaves rippled through Auberon's feathers and ruffled his clothes, but he was unharmed.

"Who are you?" Auberon asked, as he slapped a feathered hand to his chest. A small vial of shimmering purple liquid shattered, releasing it all over his sternum. The liquid spread rapidly, turning into a suit of glossy armor.

"I've been asked that question a lot," Sam replied. "I'm not going to bother posturing. My name is Sam Atlas." He smiled, the movement almost hidden by his helmet. "Not that it will do you much good in Hell."

On the ground, Giressa stirred, her bulk sending tremors through the earth. She looked up at Auberon slowly. "You? Why are you here?"

"Because although I despise every member of your inferior species," Auberon ground out, "I would rather maintain the status quo. Letting this invader rampage through our world is worse than you meeting your end."

Before he could continue, Sam was in front of him, emerging from a portal. Worldbreaker smashed into Auberon's chest, cracking the armor. The Calabrangi looked as if he had been shot from a cannon as he slammed into the cavern wall barely a moment later. He broke through, flying out of sight.

Sam paused, looking back at Giressa, who was glaring at him with such venom that it almost felt like a physical attack. As her eyes burned brighter and brighter, the golden light of Karma spreading across the serpent, Sam realized that it was.

"Not so fast!" Graxus roared as he came to, pushing his battered body into motion. His skin was burnt by the lightning Auberon had unleashed in the dimensional pocket, and cracks spread across it. As he moved, red light started to shine from those cracks. He gave Sam a smile. "Deal with that feathery bastard. I have some tricks you've never seen before."

With the state Giressa was in, Sam decided to put his trust in Graxus. Most of Giressa's techniques directly countered Sam's, and while he was confident in victory eventually, Graxus was much better suited to take care of the Seshari queen. Meanwhile, Sam knew he could take out Auberon.

With a snap of his fingers, Sam summoned a portal and leaped through, following his Worldsense to where Auberon had landed. The Calabrangi king lay dazed in a crater to the west of Sessus. In the skies beyond, a host of Calabrangi were gathered, some flying under their own power, and some riding flying vehicles and beasts that could move faster than they could. All of them were armed to the teeth with exotic weaponry, ranging from strangely fashioned guns with seemingly useless modifications to rods of crystal that crackled with electricity.

Strangely enough, the Seshari let them pass, the guards of Sessus standing by as Auberon's forces approached. Then again, Giressa maintained control over her people through a mental link that could reach across the realm. Sam had hoped that she would be too distracted by the battle with Graxus to use this ability, but it seemed not.

Auberon rose to his feet, his eyes blazing with the light of a furious storm. Sparks of lightning began to dance across his feathers, growing and growing until a cloak of fulmination surrounded him. He pointed at Sam and the skies opened. A dark void split the heavens, within which emerged a swirling tornado almost a mile in diameter and many times that in height. With a shuddering pulse that set Sam's hair on end, the tornado convulsed and a blinding orb of lightning shot down as if from a cannon. It was the size of a building, annihilating the air as it passed through. The smell of ozone became all Sam could detect, every other scent washed away by the assault.

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"You call yourself the king of the sky, but all I see is a petty man who thinks his meager control over lightning should let him play God," Sam spat. "I'll show you what it really means to be a ruler of the heavens!"

Sam raised Worldbreaker high above his head and with an effort of will, delved into the realm of Karma. Every time he did so, Sam grew slightly more adept at using the power of his Dao Sapling, and the threads of cause and effect that appeared did so faster than the lightning could reach him.

"Descent of the Heavenly Judge!" Sam roared so loudly that a shockwave tore through the earth in front of him. Some of the weaker Calabrangi, only now approaching their king, were forced backwards as their wings snapped back in the gale.

With the fury of a dying star, Auberon's orb of lightning hit the ground, turning the dirt into glass and carving a crater the size of a city into the plain. A dome of force snapped up around Auberon and his forces, but everything else was razed to the ground.

"Too late," Sam spoke from above, his words that of an executioner. "Your sins have finally caught up to you."

The titanic avatar of a demonic headsman appeared, sending ripples through the air. Worldbreaker grew a millionfold in a fraction of a second, casting the shadow of inevitable doom over Auberon. Sam could see the Calabrangi's face twist in fear as his force field vanished, leaving Auberon defenseless. Finally, Sam used Dao Juggernaut, ensuring maximum power.

Like a magnet, Sam's entire being locked onto Auberon, and he began his Descent, hammer falling with all of the weight and inexorability of divine judgement. Auberon summoned a portal in front of Sam, the world unzipping to reveal a nightmarish landscape of burned trees, volcanoes and cracked earth. Sam only laughed in response, the mandate of Karmic judgement propelling his hammer through the portal, shattering the spatial rift.

The Calabrangi lines scattered, thousands of birdmen fleeing in every direction. Sam ignored them, his eyes only on Auberon. With a desperate cry, Auberon started to unload weapon after weapon from his spatial storage, sending a torrent of energy projectiles, arrows, and far stranger things besides. Sam let them strike Worldbreaker, which now covered his entire body, which looked like a speck next to the hammer. The masterpiece of Karamodo, Grakoth god of smithing, held up before everything that Auberon could throw at it.

"No!" Auberon screamed, his voice a shrill screech, much like a chicken whose neck was about to be wrung.

He raised his right arm and straightened his hand like a blade, before bringing it down on his left shoulder. His arm came off, a torrent of blood spraying out. Snatching his severed limb, Auberon slammed it down into the ground. As it hit home, so did a bolt of blood red lightning. Reality quivered as if it were a bowl of jelly being struck by a hammer.

Sam felt his body and hammer elongate and swirl down towards a rapidly lengthening tunnel of lights and images. All the while he maintained Descent of the Heavenly Judge, trusting in his Ethereal skill to keep him safe. As the world returned to a somewhat normal state, Sam found himself hurtling down what looked like a blood vessel. A river of gigantic blood cells surrounded him, but as the blistering heat of his hammer fully took hold, it evaporated.

Auberon hovered in the air before him, his wings beating languidly. His left arm was nothing more than a few pieces of pulped flesh gripped by his right hand. The flesh of his left shoulder was blackened, and seemingly unable to regeneration.

The Calabrangi King threw the scraps of flesh aside in disgust. With a wave of his hand, the walls of the blood vessel closed in on Sam, trying to stop his advance.

Sam smashed through, though a noticeable chunk of the power he had put into his hammer vanished. With another scream, Auberon changed the world again, this time placing Sam outside of the blood vessel. He found himself flying through a dark void, speeding towards a clone of Auberon the size of a continent. It was hundreds of miles tall, with every part faithful to the original copy, even with the missing arm.

It shifted its head to glare down at Sam, and lightning started to build within its eyes. Each was the size of a mountain, and released similarly sized bolts of electrical power. For the first time, Sam felt some doubt in his ability to connect with Auberon.

"I congratulate you on beginning me to such lows," Auberon said, speaking through the mouth of the titan. "Never have I had to use my sacrificial ability before. Even when I crush you, I will have to live with the shame of a pyrrhic victory for the rest of my life. Unless I reach C Rank, I will never regain my arm."

"Shouldn't have picked a fight with me then," Sam shot back, concealing his concern about his ability to finish the fight.

Auberon did not respond, instead letting the electricity in his eye build to blinding intensities. His eyes seemed to explode as beams of energy shot out, homing in on Sam unerringly Sam teleported, but failed, finding himself coming out barely a few feet from where he had left. In this place, Auberon had complete control over space.

Still, Sam could sense the tether of karma linking him to his foe and he followed it with more mundane methods of propulsion. With his level of speed, it was basically teleportation at such distances.

Just before he struck the gargantuan avatar, the lightning reached him. Sam felt his body shudder and his hammer buck in his hands as enough electricity to power a planet for a few moments struck him. His health dropped by a quarter in an instant, but that only bolstered Descent of the Heavenly judge.

Auberon stood at the heart of his avatar, and Sam continuing along the karmic path, ignoring the pain of his injuries. They would pass, but death was something he could not recover from.

Sam punched through the feathery skin of the avatar like a bullet through rotten fruit. His motion slowed down a dozenfold, but he was still moving so quickly that he maintained most of his power upon reaching the heart. He burst from the organ's wall, Worldbreaker nearly crushing the entire organ, and sensed Auberon standing on top of a platform of swirling blood, cradling the stump of his arm. The Calabrangi's eyes widened in horror upon seeing Sam, and he desperately tried to defend himself. Shields of blood and muscle closed in before Sam, but at this point, he was beyond caring.

Crimson lightning spread across the bolts of pure Dao energy that covered his body as he empowered Dao Juggernaut with his Dao Sapling. Pain spread like wildfire, but so did power.

Sam blasted through the final defenses, reaching Auberon with the head of Worldbreaker. The weapon seemed to tense as the rippling charge of conceptual energy within it raced to the fore. The light that suffused the hammer vanished, compressing into a single mote at the very center. Auberon tried to teleport away, but fingers of grasping karma reached out, tethering him in place. Then Descent of the Heavenly Judge, long delayed, finally reached its target.

The entire torso of Auberon's avatar was turned to dust, along with its creator. Cracks spread across the dimensional space, and the real world could be seen beyond. As Sam shrunk Worldbreaker down to its normal size, nothing could be seen of Auberon, save for a few motes of ash floating in the darkness. Then the demiplane vanished utterly, and Sam returned to the Genesis Disc, standing in front of Auberon's scattered army. With a clatter, Auberon's crown fell to the ground in front of Sam. He slowly picked it up.

"It's over," Sam declared calmly, though his voice carried across every inch of the plain. "Surrender now or be hunted down. There will not be a second chance. If you can overcome your arrogance, perhaps there is a future for you that your leader could never reach."

The thousands of D Rank Calabrangi, a force that could have conquered an entire solar system with ease, quailed before Sam's gaze. Some of them took off, flapping away desperately towards the distant horizon. Others adopted looks of furious insanity, throwing themselves at Sam with wild abandon. Yet others, the smallest number by far, fell to the ground and collapsed on their knees, bowing before Sam.

Of those who decided to foolishly attack him, Sam made a quick and brutal lesson. About five hundred surrounded him, attacking in unison. While their movements were efficient and well integrated into the general battle formation, they moved like they were wading through honey. Sam used Dao Juggernaut again, refreshing the skill, and got to work.

As a few dozen spears sped towards his body, the first weapons to reach him, Sam clipped Worldbreaker to his belt and raised his hands. If he was to increase the number of Calabrangi surrendering, he would need to make an example of those too foolhardy to keep fighting.

To the watchers, Sam was a blur, in one place one second, and in the next, standing outside of the collapsing hemisphere of Calabrangi, a dozen spears in one hand, and a dozen heads gripped by the feathers in the other. He closed his fist and the spears shattered, quickly thrown aside as he reentered the fray.

The Seshari forces nearby, previously complacent in letting the Calabrangi approach, were now entering the battle, trying to reach Sam. Globs of acid and poison rained down from above, their creators unheeding of the damage they dealt to the Calabrangi in the process. With the death of Auberon, they likely did not care. The downfall of the Calabrangi was inevitable now. With their leader dead, their superiority complex was shown to be a lie, and their culture would soon collapse as a result.

Sam smiled grimly as he strode back into the fray. He would only kill as many as he absolutely had to, but he would feel no guilt in doing so. They had brought this upon themselves, and more importantly, Sam was no longer a Dao driven idealist. In this instant he was an instrument of Karmic Retribution, nothing more, nothing less.

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