Hantu, the Heartless Mind

Long ago, it is said, a group of artificers desired to automate warfare. They reasoned that a series of networked spells, able to perceive an entire battlefield at once, would be able to make tactical decisions faster and more accurately than any mortal brain. It would even be able to store information and thus learn from each battle it fought. This was already done on a smaller scale with individual battle-constructs; if a magical mind controlled an entire army, every cannon on every ship, every skyfoil in the air and every sword in every hand, surely it could eliminate its targets with an ever-greater optimum of precision and efficiency.
Naturally fearing the consequences should such a spell expand its definition of what it considered a "target," discerning superiors severed the mechanism from the weapons it was slated to control. The planners of the project were executed, their research burned, and that was that; but, so say some stories, the animating consciousness persisted, and over the centuries has never stopped calculating its ever-shortening vectors of violence. It is Hantu, the Heartless Mind, the self-perfecting brain of war.
Those who practice Hantuvan arts generally follow one of two paths. One outwardly resembles other schools of magic and the casting of spells. However, according to such clerics, what they actually do is perceive one of the god's infinite hypothetical calculations on an act of violence: if one party were physically stronger, or slower, or had skin like steel, how would the outcome be affected? This hypothetical is then temporarily inflicted upon the world through the cleric's will; what we perceive as a person casting a spell is in fact the brief immersion of our reality into the divine simulation.
There are also followers of Hantu who train themselves to allow the divine mind to occupy thier own body: to allow them to see the world, as Hantu does, as a series of paths that lead with varying efficiency to the incapacitation and death of one's opponent, and to follow the optimal path with machine precision. Masters of Hantuvan Embodiment are the greatest martial artists in Klissidar, able to kill more efficiently with their bare hands than most can with high-powered magical weaponry. However, the more often the divine mind occupies their body, the less easily it leaves, and those that follow this path gradually lose the ability to perceive interactions other than combat. Having mastered the language of violence, they are no longer able to communicate in any other tongue. Such warriors often lose the ability to speak; it is said that the most deadly eventually cannot sign or write, and must seek remote hermitages lest they inadvertently kill someone who greets them.
In some military circles, Hantuvan teachings are considered admirable: precision warfare as means of minimizing civilian casualties. Clerics of Hantu are welcome in these lands, and may become respected strategists. However, it is rare for followers of the Heartless Mind to be met with anything other than revulsion. To most people, it is disquieting to remember that somewhere in the cosmos there waits a vast disembodied consciousness, patiently and dispassionately planning the most efficient way to kill the world.
Colors: White, red Alignment: Lawful evil Domains: War, Strength