God-poking rounds

God-poking rounds are Cato’s specialized antimatter projectiles for confronting System-gods. Their decisive importance lies in the way they turn a remote technological capability into a direct challenge against beings who normally appear untouchable: the rounds do not merely damage territory or infrastructure, but are engineered to reach a god’s body, threaten its continued action, and create the time Cato needs to dismantle the System’s foundations.

Design and Operation

The weapon is distinguished from Cato’s orbital railgun rounds by both speed and precision. A railgun projectile travels at roughly one percent of the speed of light, whereas a god-poking round can travel at upwards of half the speed of light. That difference makes a small divine target easier to hit, even when the target is separated from Cato by atmosphere and orbital distance. The weapon therefore compensates for the difficulty of attacking a powerful being not through a wider explosion, but through velocity, guidance, and exact placement.

Its payload is a globule of anti-hydrogen held inside extraordinarily powerful magnetic fields. The antimatter is further surrounded by an outer layer of heavily ionized ordinary hydrogen, forming a plasma sheath that protects it from stray particles and from premature contact with the atmosphere. Because even the slightest collision with normal matter would create a spectacular detonation, Cato also uses a laser of the appropriate frequency to ionize the projectile’s path and reduce the danger of incidental collisions. Laser aiming permits the round to be guided to within millimeters of its intended point of impact.

The First Demonstration

The weapon’s first fully described use occurs during Cato’s confrontation with the Bismuth threat. Cato has only one shot available: the two satellites cover opposite hemispheres, and the second satellite is hours away in orbital velocity. The attack must therefore succeed without reinforcement or a second attempt. Cato first preserves the experiences of Raine and Leese, then directs the projectile toward the fur at the back of the Bismuth’s neck, just below her helmet.

The attack is presented as a nearly incomprehensible sequence of tightly controlled fractions of a second. Cato can perceive what is happening only through foreknowledge and powerful sensors. The antimatter round descends through the atmosphere after the laser has prepared its path, converting the immense scale of orbital warfare into a strike aimed at a vulnerable anatomical point. The precision is part of the weapon’s meaning: this is not indiscriminate bombardment, but a deliberately calculated attempt to reach a godlike opponent where defenses are least effective.

Strategic Function and Cost

Cato expects the god-poking antimatter rounds to frighten System-gods sufficiently to provide room and time for stronger weapons to be built. He also hopes to use the pause to produce more antimatter, whose enormous energy requirements make both creation and storage difficult. The rounds are therefore not presented as an unlimited solution. Their value is strategic and temporal: one successful shot can alter the balance of a conflict, but the stockpile is finite and every firing exposes Cato to the possibility of immediate divine retaliation.

After the attack, Cato has only one god-poking round left. That remaining projectile becomes a measure of both his power and his vulnerability. He has already revealed a weapon capable of challenging System-gods, but he cannot casually repeat the demonstration. The scarcity forces him to weigh the timing of every later confrontation against the possibility that the local System-God may intervene before he can restore enough reality, remove enough dungeons, or build more formidable armaments.

From Tactical Weapon to Systemic Threat

The rounds alter more than individual encounters. Cato’s use of them helps create the conditions under which Sydea may be claimed by a World Deity, while the destruction of dungeons and reduction of System anchors makes a broader System crash more plausible. The weapon is thus part of a larger campaign against the infrastructure that permits divine control. Its immediate target may be a god, but its strategic objective is to weaken the network of anchors and protections that sustain the System’s reality.

The broader response shows how quickly the weapon’s meaning expands. The System launches the Crusade against Cato, and its notifications announce that worlds considered lost to him have been purified. The Crusade becomes a mechanism for drawing agents toward the defense of the System, while Cato’s weapon becomes a reason for the System’s forces to escalate. The rounds therefore participate in a feedback loop: Cato’s technological strike provokes divine mobilization, and divine mobilization confirms the scale of the structure he is trying to destroy.

The contrast is especially sharp because the System itself shapes behavior through rewards and compulsion. Killing can produce a euphoric rush when the System pushes essence into a victor, and quests make obedience feel like the path of least resistance. Against that order, the god-poking round represents a different kind of agency: not a reward granted by the System, but an engineered instrument built outside its preferred logic. Yet its violence also mirrors the System’s own coercive machinery. Cato attacks the structure that turns killing into progress with a weapon whose purpose is to kill the beings enforcing that structure.

Escalation and Final Consequences

The weapon’s destructive potential reaches its greatest scale in the Core. When the Core is attacked, the entire region catches fire: the air over every surface becomes white-hot plasma, each planet appears to have been turned into a sun, and even the True Core shines with reflected light. Higher-rank materials and individuals can resist, but doing so drains the System’s essence, causing its total reserves to fall for the first time since the frontier was severed.

The System attempts to limit the damage by restricting its own influence and pulling back toward the True Core. For a moment, physics resumes around the War Worlds, and the suns that had been held apart become practically touching before gravity takes hold. The apparent recovery is temporary. The System’s alarms force Misse and Muar into fast-time and relocate them to the Font, while the Core becomes an unreadable, furious white and essence totals continue to plunge. The weapon’s significance consequently exceeds the impact of a single projectile: it helps expose the fragility of a reality that had seemed absolute.

God-poking rounds remain a compact expression of Cato’s entire rebellion. They combine extreme industrial preparation, narrow technical precision, finite resources, and an ethical contradiction that the narrative does not resolve. Cato wants to free worlds from a system that makes violence feel meaningful, yet his liberation campaign depends on weapons capable of terrifying gods and burning the Core itself. Their power comes from making divine invulnerability conditional, and their danger comes from proving that technological resistance can reproduce the same catastrophic logic it opposes.