NARRATIVE TEXT:

xxnxxxxPxxxxxxxxxxxx//PIED.NUXX

axxxxxxxxxxxRxxxxxxxxnxxn//NULL

xxxaxxAxxnxxxxxxxxxhxxxx//NULL

sxsxxxmrexxsxoxxnxmYaxs//NULL



The wounds Kain had sustained over the battle began to take their toll, his legs buckling; it was only by leaning on one of his swords that he managed to not collapse entirely.

“Give it up, villain!” Jason shouted, posing triumphantly. “Y'can't stop all eight of us from bringin' you to justice!”

“Shut your mouth, wretched child...!” Kain spat.

“He's quite right, I'm afraid.”

The sudden voice caught everyone off guard, their attention turning to Kain's throne; there sat a familiar figure in a black cloak and a horrible mask, which currently displayed a heinous smile.

“You...” Kain mumbled weakly, snarling. “Watch your tongue...!”

“They're the best of the best, dear King; the very champions of the game. It was a lopsided battle from the start.” the Advisor spoke, ghostly voice chilling the very air in the room.

“Told you; suckered like a Patsy.” Gabe snarked.

Kain barely brought himself to his feet. “Why give me such power, if you thought I would fail?”

“Oh, you didn't fail; you did exactly what I tasked you with doing.” the Advisor replied, floating over to Kain slowly.

The King didn't flinch, standing his ground. “Then bring her before me, wretch.”

Kain's question was met with the sound of tearing flesh. Looking down, he could see the Advisor's arm piercing right through his chest. The expression on the mask had shifted into one of pure, joyous malice.

“The essence of the players was never for her, Sire.”

The Kingslayers stood shocked as Kain and the Advisor's bodies both broke down into a flurry of garbled pixels and polygons, constantly shifting and warbling in shape as distorted textures shot from the mass like spikes. The process can't have lasted more then a few seconds, yet it felt like hours until the shape began to stabilise

Stark blue hair, spiked in upward curves like horns.

A face split in twain, one half white, the other black..

A blood red coat that seemed to glisten in the light.

“P-Pied...” Jason stammered in brief shock, before his resolve returned. “It's Pied...!”

“Correct, old friend.” Pied sneered, stepping forward. As he did so, his body jerked briefly, suddenly sporting significant portions of untextured, un-rendered wireframes.

“I knew it was you. All this death and destruction... It could only have been set in motion by you.” Renzo said, solemn anger in his voice. He paid no attention to the sudden stares from his teammates.

“Goodness me, they do say you Administrators are a smart lot.” Pied jeered, chuckling at his own pithy sarcasm.

“Wait, hold up-” Hermes interrupted, “Renzo, you're the Administrator...?”

Renzo said nothing, simply closing his eyes. It was answer enough.

“You guys didn't know?” Jason said, cocking an eyebrow. “I had him clocked as an Admin from the get go.”

“We thought YOU were the Admin!” Rya cried incredulously.

“Whaaaaaaaaat? No way.” Jason replied, earnestly. “What gave you that crazy idea?”

Rya gestured towards Pied, exasperation clear on her face. “I don't know, a lucky guess?!”

“We didn't know that was Pied until just now, mind you.” Gabe said, causing Howard to groan next to him.

“Look, I get that this is a bit of a shock,” Yuna paused, sighing, “but I think we should skip the chat and knock this lunatic out.”

“Ms. Itoh is right.” Howard said, cracking his knuckles. “Can't let a bug go un-patched, can we?”

“Aye, too right.” Sean replied. “Time to lay this has-been out for good.”

Pied cackled like a madman. “How adorable; you think you can stop me! It's gonna break my heart to shatter your dreams, heh.”

“You're incomplete, Pied.” Renzo said, eyes narrowing. “Millennia of floating around as bits of broken code, barely patched together from stolen player data.”

“You think I need to be whole to end your miserable lives?” Pied spat, baring rows of jagged, rotten teeth as his smile grew wild. “I'm going to rip each and every one of you to eensy little bits and pieces, patch myself up with whatever's left over, and run riot across this game- this entire computer- until every last human life is snuffed out!” He punctuated his statement with a raucous, bone chilling laugh.

“Hey; I guess you can be funny after all!” Gabe jeered, his own manic smile widening.

Hermes smirked alongside him, shifting into his Godly form. “Nah; he needs to workshop his material a little more.”

“Ok, ok, ease up on the one-liners,” Rya said, though she was smiling as well. “You guys ready?”

All of them nodded, eyes locked on Pied, resolve steeled to a peerless edge.

Renzo smiled, too. “It's been an honour to fight alongside you, players; and it will be a privilege to destroy this monster with your aid!”

As the Kingslayers charged at the mad program, the once dead Kingdom outside the spire began to tremble; rivers of fire sprouted and flowed once again, storms of lightning and thunder began to rage.

One last breath of life before the curtain call.

---

IN-CHARACTER TRACK COMMENTARY FROM GONKAKA:

Denji Koshiro: Ah yes, my personal “mountain to climb” of the album. Similarly to the Stage 8 theme, I had wanted to do something of a hyper techno flavour, around the 135bpm mark, and had got a beat and a rendition of Pied's themes bassline laid in... before immediately running into issues trying to get chords to match it. I must've spent two whole days cycling through different patterns and none of them worked- even the chords that the player would now realise signalled Pied's presence, which I tried first, seemed not to work. I had never been so stumped by chord progressions before; it shook me a bit.

Takayuki Mitsuyoshi: I remember; we had gone for a drink on the second night, and you were uncharacteristically slow to get through your beers. I think you only had three the entire evening- very unlike you.

Denji Koshiro: Hush hush; people will begin to think I'm an alcoholic! (Laughs) The story has a happy ending, of course; throughout the various works Pied has appeared in, he has almost always been associated with very “extreme” electronic music- speedcore, breakcore, braindance, things like that- so I scrapped everything but the chords, rewrote that signature bassline, and wrote a quick gabber beat as a test; immediately, the fog in my mind cleared, and the song began to flow out of me. I honestly think it sounds better then Pied's theme from Battlemania 1- especially with the aid of Shinji's excellent guitar solo in the end.

Shinji Namiki: Thank you, Denji; I appreciate the kind words.

---

DECON'S TRACK COMMENTARY:

GASP SHOCK HORROR THE ADVISOR WAS PIED THIS WHOLE TIME AND HE WAS JUST USING THE KING OF HATRED TO FURTHER HIS OWN ENDS WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THAT SHOCKING SWERVE COMING

... What's that? "Who is Pied, anyway?" Huh. Yeah, probably should answer that for people not in the loop, huh.

Pied is a very old character of mine, serving as the primary antagonist of one of the universes my stories are set in- as well as my go-to for big crossover stuff like Battlemania. He's every white lie you tell to cover yourself; he's every ugly thought you've ever had about a total stranger; he is every act of cruelty any human being has ever inflicted on another; he is, in the purest sense, Evil Incarnate. Unlike a similar villain from one of my other settings, The Shape, Pied revels in the sheer chaos he weaves to a sickening degree, existing to hurt because he wants to and nothing more- there is no tragic backstory or freudian excuse here. And "chaos" is the perfect word choice for the things he does; his very essance alone is potent enough to stir up the malice in weaker willed men and drive animals and beasts wild, and his powers stretch beyond merely supernatural into outright reality warping- things that cannot be become manifest, if he wills it. The one and only weakness he has is that, naturally, he cannot wholly comprehend what it means to be good, kind, and just; those of a strong moral fibre can resist his malignant miasma and stand a chance of knocking the paste out of him- for a temporary period, anyway. After all, if evil exists in men's hearts, so does Pied; He goes when we go. Although, there are things out there potentially more powerful then him that he might be tempted to stir up "just for fun"- even if a scheme of his ensures his own destruction, he will do everything he can to see it through to the end if it means enough people suffer.

In the Battlemania setting, Pied was initially an enemy AI programmed into the in-universe Battlemania game by it's developers, the 103rd Game Company. To say they did too good a job would be an understatement; it took a while, but the Pied Program became sentient and self aware, turning that same malice towards the players behind the avatars and threatening "the real world"- the plot of Battlemania 1 involved him breaking free of the Saint J92000 Supercomputer Battlemania was housed in and infecting every computer in the world, wherein he proceeded to arm every weapons system he could get his grubby mits on, and gave every player logged into Battlemania- all of which were now stuck in there- 24 hours to try and take him down before he engaged them all simultaniously, spelling armageddon for humanity. It was only through the efforts of a top-tier team of players known as the Brave Herts, and some last minute aid provided by self inserts of me and Dio because Meta™ two of Battlemania's lead developers that he was saved, at the cost of many lives and the deletion of the entire game to ensure that the Pied Program would not resurface. Unfortunately, it didn't stick- check the Lore link above for info on what exactly Pied was doing whilst pulling the strings for BM2's plot.

I've said it before, but if Manabu Namiki has taught me anything, it's that a True Final Boss theme should be Gabber/Speedcore, every time, without fail. A lesson so deeply ingrained, apparently, that my first attempt at Pied's battle track- a 135bpm rave type number- just would not get off the ground. I was kind of struggling to come up with good chords for it (more on that in a bit), but a big part of the issue was more that the way I'd written the bass pattern out in that version just wasn't gelling with any chord sequence I came up with. It sounded fine on its own, but I would've wanted the arrangement to, y'know, deepen slightly at points, so I made the decision to bin it and do this instead. And I'm very glad I did- I feel I achieved the vibe and feeling I was shooting for with Pied's BM1 theme, 920 Seconds to Doomsday, better this go around, although in some ways it's actually closer to this prototype of his theme I knocked up quite literally a decade ago, back when the idea for Battlemania was first getting workshopped. Funny how things come full circle like that.

Oh yes, the chords; you'll have noticed that the first chord pattern is the same one used for BM2's opening theme, and the back end of the Stage 8 tune, albeit adjusted to fit the key. This wasn't originally planned- I'd incorporated the chords into the early sketch in a bit of a desperate move to find something that worked, and wound up really liking the result. Didn't want to use the same sequence throughout, though, so I wound up writing a secondary sequence for the other portions of the track. An unintended side effect of this decision is that the chords further emphasise the big "twist" that Pied was the man behind the man; you're lead to think those chords relate to Kain at first, only to have them recontextualised here as relating to Pied- and there presance in the prior songs merely indicating that Kain was never the one in control of the situation. Or something. I dunno.

The title is partially a reference to the songs BPM, and partially a reference to the amount of player data/"life essance" that was harvested by Kain for The Queen of Joy Pied. It was originally listed in Terabytes instead of Petabytes (as the filename indicates), but given the sort of ultra advanced sci fi tech we're dealing with that really seemed to be low-balling it (and making it Exabytes seemed like overdoing it).

Extra fun fact; I very nearly had the claps in the outro-to-loop portion end on the "two bits"/"shave and a haircut" rhythm (y'know; 'dun duh-duh dun dun, dun dun') after spending the prior 6 bars sorta unintentionally dancing around it. I felt it kind of killed the mood I'd built up, so I threw an extra clap in to obfuscate my Tomfoolery™.

JUST ONE MORE FULL LENGTH SONG TO GO LADS, I CAN SMELL THE FINISH LINE FOR THIS POXY ALBUM FINALLY HAHAHAHAHA

This song uses the following sound effects from freesound(.)org:

CrowdPanic (belthazarus)

alarms (guitarguy1985)

Weird Church Bells (poorenglishjuggler)