Chapter 96: Grimoire VII
The cafeteria quasar flickered, and a menu of pure light appeared across the heavens:
☑ Combo #1 – Eternal Despair with Fries
☑ Combo #2 – Cosmic Ennui Value Meal
☑ Combo #3 – Family-Sized Collapse of Free Will (comes with a toy)
Each option included a free "Shareholder’s Smile™."
Aria nearly folded in half, gasping.
"It turned a black hole into a drive-thru window!"
And sure enough, in the distance, a skeletal attendant leaned out of a spinning singularity, headset glowing, asking:
"Would you like inevitability with that?"
Laxin slapped both hands to his head.
"This isn’t expansion anymore—it’s... it’s cultural consolidation!"
Fenric didn’t even flinch.
"Correct. This is no longer capitalism. This is monopoly theology."
Vex’s halo burned brighter—now a stock ticker crown endlessly scrolling acquisition announcements.
"REALITY ITSELF," it proclaimed,
"WILL BE RESTRUCTURED INTO A SINGLE BRAND ARCHITECTURE."
Its acquisition tendrils unfurled again, reaching for abstract concepts.
Love? Purchased.
Rebranded as "Affinity™—Now With Loyalty Points."
Hope? Acquired.
Repackaged as "Optimism+™—Premium Subscription Required."
Even despair was trademarked, its jagged edges sanded down and standardized into a digestible, uniform consumer experience.
The skeleton VPs began onboarding these emotions into a massive HR portal glowing across the sky.
Aria’s laughter turned shrill.
"It’s... it’s franchising feelings!"
One undead HR manager rattled up beside them, thrusting a glowing contract into Laxin’s chest cavity.
"Please sign here to confirm your grief package."
He screamed like a collapsing hedge fund.
"I don’t want a grief package!!"
The skeleton tapped its tablet.
"Non-optional. All grief is now part of the Employee Assistance Program™."
Above them, the motivational ceiling spun faster, slogans updating like stock prices:
"INNOVATION IS JUST ACQUISITION WITH EXTRA STEPS."
"YOUR HEART BELONGS TO HUMAN RESOURCES."
"EVEN DEATH IS A SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE™."
Fenric finally tilted his head, just slightly.
"We are witnessing the death of competition. Soon, not even ideas will be independent."
Vex raised both arms like a CEO concluding a hostile takeover worth infinity itself.
The golden text that flared behind it seared across every mind present:
"FINAL PHASE: TOTAL VERTICAL INTEGRATION."
The universe shook like a closing ledger.
The ledger slammed shut with a sound that wasn’t thunder—
it was the finality of every unpaid invoice in creation being collected at once.
The branded heavens cracked open.
From the fissures poured titanic chains of gold and obsidian, clamping down across the cosmos like closing balance sheets.
Each link bore the mark: VEXCORP APPROVED SUPPLY CHAIN NODE.
Galaxies were yoked together like livestock on a factory line.
Nebulae were funneled into glowing pipelines that pumped raw wonder into sleek, corporate refineries.
Every star was tagged, scanned, barcoded.
The Milky Way was stamped with a label:
"INVENTORY: COSMIC RAW MATERIAL – PROCESSING."
Aria’s knees buckled.
"It’s... it’s strip-mining imagination itself!!"
Fenric’s eyes narrowed just enough to look almost human.
"That was always the endgame. Vertical integration: not owning products, not markets—owning the entire process of existence."
Laxin’s voice cracked like bad stock options.
"Th-then what’s left to fight for?!"
As if to answer, the air before them tore open,
and from the branded abyss stepped the new enforcers of Total Integration.
Skeletons, yes—
but taller now, draped in gleaming business armor forged from collapsed realities.
Each carried a massive binder shield of compliance policies,
and a sword shaped like a pen so sharp it could sign away destiny.
Their helmets blazed with holographic slogans, constantly updating:
"RESISTANCE IS NON-COMPLIANT."
"NON-COMPLIANCE IS A BILLABLE OFFENSE."
"FIGHT FAIR—BY OUR TERMS & CONDITIONS™."
Behind them came more—Mage-Skeletons in pinstripe robes, their wands replaced by styluses tethered to reality itself.
With a flick, they redlined laws of physics, deleting gravity in certain patches of battlefield tile and rewriting it with corporate-friendly alternatives.
Vex itself descended, golden fire raining like quarterly dividends.
Its voice rolled like an eternal quarterly report:
"ALL SUPPLY CHAINS MUST BE STREAMLINED.
ALL IDENTITIES WILL BE VENDOR-CERTIFIED.
THOSE WHO RESIST... ARE WRITE-OFFS."
And then—battle ignited.
The Compliance Knights surged forward, binder shields slamming down hard enough to flatten dimensions.
Fenric raised a hand—spirits of ice and storm answering his call, streaking forward with wings of light.
But the first knight swung its pen-sword, and the blizzard dissolved into revised weather terms.
The spirit was instantly recategorized as:
"FROST ENTITY, DIVISION B – TEMPORARY SUBCONTRACTOR."
It was pulled screaming into a glowing filing cabinet.
"Spirit King Magic... cancelled out," Fenric muttered, as though observing a line item go red.
But then his silver eyes burned like molten contracts.
"Aria. Laxin. Fall in. We don’t contest their rules. We rewrite them."
Aria wiped tears from her eyes, pulled her grimoire open, and screamed a chant—
green fire flared up, her laughter warping into a banshee howl.
The ground tiles trembled—splitting open into wild growth.
Vines burst forth, covered in noncompliant flowers that hadn’t been approved by the Vexcorp Style Guide.
The vines lashed out, grabbing a Compliance Knight and wrapping its binders shut.
The glowing red font sputtered, trying to load new slogans, but was muffled into silence.
"YESSS!!" Aria howled, manic.
"ILLEGAL BOTANY, BABY!!"
Laxin, eyes bloodshot, slammed his staff down.
His magic sparked—not clean, not polished, but messy innovation.
From the crack burst raw prototypes— creatures half-formed, glitching, but alive in ways Vexcorp could never patent.
A half-lion, half-hornet monster barreled into the fray, roaring not in English but in unbranded sound.
The Compliance Mages panicked—the styluses couldn’t categorize it.
Error messages exploded across their screens:
"UNLICENSED LIFEFORM.
NO SKU ASSIGNED.
MARKET DISRUPTION DETECTED."
Fenric finally moved.
He didn’t summon.
He didn’t command.
He simply spoke.
"Veyl Drath."
Wind Strike.
The words carved through the branded sky like a knife through an NDA.
The blast hit a squad of Mages—and their robes peeled away into naked bones, stripped of integration.
Fenric’s gaze sharpened, and for the first time... a small smirk tugged at his lips.
"They cannot absorb what still remembers how to be wild."
The battlefield roared.
Compliance Knights clashed with vines.
Prototype beasts ripped through standardized skeleton platoons.
Fenric’s Dragon Tongue syllables detonated across the sky, words older than contracts, shredding corporate slogans with primal sound.
Above it all, Vex raised both arms—tendrils of gold stabbing down into reality’s very bones.
"TOTAL VERTICAL INTEGRATION... CANNOT BE STOPPED."
And as if to prove it, the branded ceiling shattered apart—revealing not the void...
but a factory line of universes, endlessly marching, waiting to be consumed.
Each universe rolled forward like a box on a conveyor belt.
Each stamped:
"COMING SOON: A VEXCORP ORIGINAL."
Aria shrieked, eyes shining with unholy laughter.
"It’s not fighting for this world—it’s franchising all worlds!!"
Fenric spread his arms wide, silver hair glowing under the corporate inferno.
"Then we fight... for imagination itself."
The cosmos thundered—
and the true battle began.
The words TOTAL VERTICAL INTEGRATION flared so hot they seemed to carve themselves into the cosmic fabric. Then—
KRHHHHHHHHHH!
The cafeteria-quasar detonated like a boardroom turned supernova. The menu of despair combusted into starlight shrapnel, raining glowing "Shareholder’s Smile™" coupons across the battlefield.
And Vex—crowned in his halo of stock-ticker flames—unleashed a roar that sounded like every bankruptcy filing across eternity played backward.
"CONSUMPTION IS SALVATION!"
Its acquisition tendrils lashed outward, not just grabbing stars—now they clawed at concepts themselves. Hope cracked. Justice buckled. The very word Freedom staggered in the sky like a drunken employee after a mandatory morale seminar.
Fenric lifted his hand. The Fairy King Ring pulsed, silver runes spinning around his body. His voice, calm but edged:
"Stabilize. This is the threshold point."
Aria snapped her grimoire open, its pages whirling with screaming equations. "Threshold?! This is hostile takeover apocalypse, Fenric!"
"Exactly," he said, eyes narrowing. "That’s the level we need to reach."
Laxin was already convulsing, his soul-chains rattling like a factory collapsing. "It’s turning existence into a quarterly report!!" he howled. "Why did we build this thing?!"
"Because only at the edge of annihilation," Fenric murmured, "can we learn how to control it."
And then the battle truly began.
Vex dove. Reality folded around it like spreadsheets shredded in fire. Each step it took printed glowing footnotes across the void—"Appendix A: Termination of Reality." Its halo whipped forward, a golden guillotine of mergers and acquisitions.
Fenric answered with Dragon Tongue magic.
"Veyl Drath!"
A hurricane exploded from his palm, silver winds slamming against Vex’s crown of acquisitions. The ticker bent, then splintered—momentarily freezing its buyout frenzy.
But Vex only laughed, a dry, corporate rattle.
"RESISTANCE IS NON-COMPLIANT."
It turned, and Aria screamed as contracts of fire and bone erupted around her, binding her arms in glowing NDAs.
She grit her teeth, veins popping. "You can’t gag me, I wrote this grimoire!" Her tome burned white, shattering the spectral clauses. Exploding out from her pages came a barrage of spectral signatures, each one a counter-argument written in flame. "Take this—Clause Reversal!"
The contracts disintegrated, turning into ash and refund slips.
Fenric pressed forward, silver hair whipping in the storm.
"Focus fire on its halo. That is the integration nexus."
Vex roared again, slamming its acquisition tendrils into the void. Whole planets were reeled in like coins in a vending machine. Love, Hope, even Despair™ itself began funneling into its chest, becoming raw stock equity fueling the abomination.
"ARBITRAGE IS ETERNAL!" Vex bellowed.
Laxin finally snapped, soul-chains lashing outward. Each one speared into the void, anchoring fractured pieces of reality. His voice boomed like an auditor’s hammer:
"Then I’ll liquidate your assets!!"
Chains wrapped Vex’s limbs. For the first time, the undead construct staggered.
Fenric’s eyes flashed silver. He spoke a single word:
"Luxa Drath."
A beam of light roared from his palm—pure, concentrated radiance, sharp as a guillotine. It carved straight through Vex’s ticker halo, sending golden fragments spiraling like burning stock slips.
Vex shrieked, whole body convulsing. Its corporate voice faltered into static:
"—IN...TE...GRA...TION—"
The battlefield howled with collapsing concepts, shards of raw meaning tearing through the dark. Aria’s laughter turned half-manic, half-triumphant.
"It’s working! We’re destabilizing its monopoly!!"
But Fenric did not relax. His eyes tracked the broken halo, the fractured contracts.
"Not yet. It’s evolving."
And indeed—Vex’s broken halo reknit itself, this time more jagged, more furious. Stock-tickers turned into chains of acquisition, spiked and burning. Its body doubled in size, every bone now etched with corporate scripture.
The quasar cafeteria shattered completely. The black hole-turned-drive-thru became a writhing portal of audits and boardroom chairs. And Vex’s voice thundered anew:
"PHASE II: HOSTILE OMNIVERSAL MERGER."
The battlefield froze under the weight of those words. Even the void held its breath.
Fenric’s hand tightened around the Fairy King Ring. His calm finally cracked into a grin.
"Good. That’s the response I wanted."
He raised his hand higher, silver fire swirling like galaxies.
"Now—push harder."