Chapter 12 – Judgment Day
The Speaker of the Dead was more than a little surprised to find himself being manhandled so easily. All of his shields and wards against trickery from the gods had been brushed away in an instant, and his attacker was propelling them far to the north much faster than he himself could fly, past the mountain the gods called Norlathel, and further still. He cleared his mind and gathered his power with the intent to break free of the attacker, but before he could do anything they gave him an extra shove while they stopped in midair. Holm went tumbling back head over heels and it took him some effort to stop himself in an upright position. Whoever his assailant was, they were far stronger than anything he had expected of the gods. He thought perhaps the Lady of Justice had been hiding her true power after all, but when he got a good look at the woman he was left both shocked and confused.
"You died. I felt you die." Holm gathered his power warily and started gently probing the Warden of the Woods to see what had happened to her. It took only a brief moment to realize why he hadn't sensed her before: he had never even thought to cast out his senses for anyone else drawing on the power of the dead gods. That energy was entirely different from that of living gods, and it consumed and replaced what he would have sensed from a regular Immortal. "How did you follow in my footsteps? It took me years to learn this." There was no anger or jealousy within him, only curiosity.
Grene, however, was far from serene. He could see rage and fear mixed in her eyes, and little bubbles of unstable power slowly rolled through her flesh, making moving bulges like there were insects crawling under her skin. That he knew from his own experience to be a side effect of wielding so much power; the body of an Immortal was not meant to withstand and use anything near so strong, and it had taken a long time for him to acclimate to it and bring it under stable control. She couldn't have been using it for more than a few days, so of course she she lacked his mastery. The fact that she could use it to hover unsupported in the air, yet another trick that had taken him a long time to learn, was quite surprising.
"It's all the Lady of Justice's fault." Grene's voice was tight with anger, and Holm couldn't help but notice the peculiar word choice. "She trapped my spirit rather than letting me rest, and she made me learn how to become a monster like you. She said she'd been warned that it was possible, then she watched you do it to learn how and force that knowledge upon me. I'm not allowed to die until I kill you."
"I see." Holm sighed and floated closer to her, just close enough so he could speak normally rather than raising his voice to be heard. "You do realize that this is pointless, yes? You have no experience with this power. I have had years. I can give you the release of death you wish for by simply killing the Lady of Justice. You must have realized the same. Are you laboring under some delusion that you are still beholden to the whim of a mere god when you hold far greater power now?"
"No." Bitterness practically dripped from the word, and her face screwed up into a distasteful grimace. "You need to be stopped, and I'm the only one that can do it. You're evil and your plans are evil. Killing you will be the last thing I do, and then I'll die happy."
The Speaker of the Dead sighed again, this time a heavier and wearier sound. "You are firm in your conviction. It's a shame, but I know you won't listen to reason. Let's get this over with." He lifted his arm to shoot a barrage of deadly magic at her, but he was surprised once more.
Grene was flying through air toward him once again, much faster than he could move as he was, and this time he realized how she was doing it: she was not actually tapping into the godly power to stay in one place and ignore gravity, she was in fact letting that go and pushing herself forward with raw magical power the same as one would use to hurl a rock. It was primitive, but it was also highly effective. Holm couldn't get out of the way or react in time. Grene hit him fist first, right in the gut but it was not at all a simple punch: she had in an instant packed it with enough energy, the volatile stuff drawn from the dead gods without even converting it into a more manageable form that could be used for traditional magic, and it exploded in a flash of red light that sent him tumbling through the air again.
This time he took a page from Grene's book and used magic to quickly right himself. He wanted to call her a damned fool for wielding the raw power of the dead gods, to tell her that she was just as likely to kill herself with it as to do harm to him, but he could see it would be useless. She rushed him again, loading up power in both hands this time, and Holm could see the desperation in her eyes. She had nothing to lose, so she was risking herself to have a chance to win. In a battle of magic and skill she would have been annihilated just as he had predicted, of this much he was certain, but a battle of magic and skill versus volatility and reckless abandon was no sure thing. A thought came to him, unbidden and unwanted, that the Lady of Hope would have been both awed and saddened by seeing the Warden of the Woods taken by this savage determination to beat the odds. She had always said that hope applied in a constructive manner was called determination, every time he excitedly talked to her about a new plan to improve the lives of his fellow Immortals she would say it, and then she would grin and tell him not to forget to take care of his own life as well.
The distraction was enough to make him hesitate in his defense and let Grene hit him again, a second empowered punch to the gut and another to the jaw. He felt a rib crack before the unstable power exploded and sent him flying once more, this time cursing heavily under his breath as he stabilized himself in the air. Now was most certainly
not the time to be reminiscing about days long gone, but ever since that damnably irritating confrontation with the Witch of the Water it was like his mind was always just waiting for the opportunity to dredge up old memories. He worked to clear his mind again and concentrate on the fight, preparing shields to mitigate the impact from more of those punches, but Grene was full of surprises.
Instead of rushing him again, she was hovering in the air with her hands down at her sides. She was not just doing nothing, though: her hands were emanating a greenish-grey light, and just as he recognized the purpose of her magic he could hear it taking effect. The ground below them, flat and lightly forested, suddenly grew dozens of massive pillars of hard-packed earth, each twenty feet or more across. They shot up into the sky, reaching far above where they were flying, and they were so numerous that it looked as if they were standing in the middle of a forest of giant trees. Holm was mildly impressed. He would have taken much longer to do the same, but then she always had possessed an aptitude for earthy sorts of magic.
Holm was unsure of her intent with the pillars, but he was not about to wait and see and let her keep the initiative. He quickly formed an array of spells and sent them arcing upward to fall on her from above, then as soon as they were off he sent more directly at her with a few curving off around the sides and weaving around the earthen pillars to strike her from behind. The Warden of the Woods was no deft hand with magic, so overwhelming her with complexity would be the easiest way to dispatch of her.
As the first batch of his attack was closing in, a huge leaf burst forth from a nearby pillar and interposed itself between Grene and the magic. The spells exploded in a dazzling array of colors and left the giant leaf full of holes, but not even one had made it through to Grene. Another leaf popped out of the same pillar and curled around her, protecting her from the other spells Holm had fired at her. Before he could send off something that would burn through the plants with enough force to hit her as well, he felt something coming at him from behind and let himself drop through the air to get out of the way. He looked up and saw a spiked vine lashing at the space he had just been occupying. It was a sickly looking vine, yellowish white rather than a healthy green, the same color as those large leaves in fact, but it seemed quite lively all the same. With a dismissive flick of one finger, he sent a burst of deadly energy at the thing that would have been enough to make an entire forest rot and wither. The power struck true, but the vine was completely unaffected and was now bending down to pursue him. Another popped out of a different pillar and came from below, trying to pincer him along with the other vine. Holm tried a stronger plant-killing blast of necromantic power, but it was just as ineffectual and he was forced to pull back to move out of their reach.
"I learned a trick or two from our last fight, Speaker of the Dead." Grene was floating toward him now, slowly but purposefully, with her hands balled up into fists at her sides. "These plants, these disgusting monstrosities, are infused with the same power of death that you used to destroy my creations last time. They're like me now, just brimming with energy stolen from beyond the grave. You're going to have to work a little harder to get rid of them, if you think you can manage it." She picked up speed and rushed him again, and once more the unstable raw energy of dead gods crackled to life in her hands. This time he could see blood streaming down from her arm where some of that same power must have gone wild and hurt its wielder.
They danced through the air between the giant pillars in a game of cat and mouse, but in this it was the mouse doing the chasing. Holm dodged around her plants and did his best to block the blasts from her more direct attacks. It was no use. He was converting the volatile energy into a form that any mage could have used and fueling his spells with that massive power, but no terrestrial magic, even raised to godly levels, seemed able to fully stop the power of the dead gods. It shattered barriers that should have held firm, it snaked around walls and struck him with whips of searing pain, and sometimes it seemed fully contained but it was as if the intent to harm was transmitted straight through the intervening space and struck him the same as a physical blow. After long minutes of a desperately one-sided fight, Grene was bleeding from a dozen small wounds here and there from the backlash of the power she wielded. Holm, however, was nursing broken bones and he was sure his face was an utter mess. Anger built in him as time passed, the rage that he'd been trying to suppress in order to suppress all of his emotions, and finally it broke loose.
As Grene rushed him for another series of punches, Holm cast aside his magic entirely. It was a losing fight, and he would not allow himself to fall to some fool who wanted to protect the mortal pests. He pulled energy through his connection to the dead gods and shoved it into and around his hands, coating them in a sickly light, white but just a bit off, the white of maggots and bones rather than a color of purity. He vented his frustration with a primal scream and caught the incoming woman with a fist to the side of her head, sending her flying to crash into one of the earthen pillars. It took her by surprise, it seemed, and he was able to throw himself forward in pursuit and slam the other fist in her face to send her all the way through the pillar. It toppled to the side as he chased her, a veritable mountain of earth falling to crush whatever was unfortunate enough to be in its path, but he paid it no mind. As he broke through the other side of the falling dirt and stone he looked around frantically, mouth pulled up in a snarl as he sought his target.
"You're finally taking me seriously." The voice came from far below, full of spite and anger to match his own. Grene was standing there in the air, and as Holm looked he saw the madwoman was spreading the deadly power all over herself, giving herself a full suit of the grey-green light. "Good. I want you to suffer before the end, before you die knowing that all your skill and experience meant nothing."
It was clear that the power was horribly warping the one-peaceful woman's mind, but Holm was beyond caring. He had been left unsatisfied by the Witch of the Water eluding him in death, and now he was finally going to be able to let out all that pent up rage. He tore down the dam he'd built between himself and his rampaging emotions, letting them wash over him as he followed her example and covered himself in the volatile energy. Using it like this, unrefined and dangerous, was probably warping his own mind as well. The thought made him giggle, and the giggle grew into a throaty laugh, then further still into a manic cackle. He didn't understand why he was laughing until it wound down. So many years of work, so much careful planning, all put on the line in what was going to be nothing more than a street brawl on a titanic scale. It was horrifyingly fantastic. One of them was going to die here, and the other would be left to shape the world as they saw fit. The fate of the world decided by a fist fight. Fate had a wonderful sense of humor.
Holm didn't even bother to reply to her taunting words. As soon as he was doused in the power of the dead gods he launched himself at her, slamming into her with a knee that she caught with her arm. The dueling powers ground against one another, sparking and humming for a moment before it seemed they reached a mutual understanding and both sides exploded violently. The blast threw both of them back and did enough damage to half a dozen of the closest pillars to send them toppling to the ground far below. Grene had stopped bothering with her plants, instead focusing entirely on the physical fight at hand just the same as Holm. A fist fight for the fate of the world.
Holm started laughing again as he hurled himself at Grene, intent on nothing more than killing her as violently as possible. There was no need for finesse. Each hit was hurting them both, rendering the fight into a bout of endurance. They were going to beat each other until one of their bodies failed under the strain. It was insanity, but it was also beautiful. Holm could not wipe the manic grin from his face as he threw himself at her again and again and again. The fight was all that mattered now, and he gave it his all, seeking her death now as a goal unto itself rather than a means to an end. He wanted to kill her, he wanted it more than anything in the world, and so he would see it done. First her, then the mortals, and then the gods, every last one of them.
He understood it all now that the flames of power had scourged his mind and opened his eyes. There was no need for a new world after all. All that mattered was death. Everything and everyone had to die, and only then would he be able to end his own life and rest. Nothing less could truly satisfy him now, with the power of death itself coursing through is veins and demanding to be unleashed. First the woman he was fighting, and then every other living thing. The last shreds of what he had once called his rational thought, which he knew to be nothing but weakness, were easily eradicated before the power of the dead. It was such an elegantly simple plan that he laughed to think of how he had overcomplicated it before. He was the avatar of death, death personified, the Lord of Death, and he would not rest until his power had claimed everything. It was as good as done, and all that kept him from it was this one stubborn fool who stood against him. He could no longer recall her name, or his own, but none of that mattered now. Death, death was the only thing that mattered. He fought on without realizing his crazed laughter had turned to a wet wheeze as the force of it tore something in his throat. All he needed to think about was killing, and so he did, fighting more like an animal than a thinking man as he battered the stubborn woman through the air and down to the ground and back up again. It was only a matter of time until she broke and died before his relentless onslaught, and then he would be free to end this wretched existence by his own hand, once and for all.
The fight at the north wall was not going very well, despite the ominously threatening mage being taken away; there were flashes of light in the sky far to the north, disturbingly massive flashes if they were indeed the result of some kind of magic, but as long as they stayed far away that was definitely a good sign. Joan had shaken off her despair and was fighting again, killing the undead things swarming the walls as quickly as she could. The two gods had been working hard to keep the giant away, hitting him with all sorts of spells that at best stopped his movement for a fraction of a second. His approach was steady and inevitable, and after what felt like hours but which could only be a few minutes he was finally close enough to put his massive form to devastating use. As the Lord of Destruction lifted his sword to smash the wall, two thick ropes of magical energy whipped out and grabbed him by the ankles. One was green and shot forth from Diana's staff, the other purple and originating from Rory's hands. Joan watched in awe as they pulled their magical ropes hard, straining and struggling all the while, first Rory to tug the giant's right foot loose and then Diana to pull the left out from under him, and down the giant went. It seemed to take ages for the massive figure to fall, and when it landed it made the wall shake hard enough that Joan fell to one knee and had to hold onto the nearby merlon to stay upright. Countless undead things were crushed in the fall, but they were still only a small fraction of the army still swarming the wall.
Joan got to her feet quickly and resumed firing at them with her magitech spear, just pointing at clusters and holding down the activation point to shoot as quickly as possible. There was no point in finesse when the enemy was packed so tightly together. It was still a battle that was likely already lost, a matter of delaying rather than winning, but Joan felt strangely hopeful. The giant god would almost certainly not be toppled so easily again, and once he was up the wall would be a goner in no time, but even that wasn't enough to dampen her spirits. Most everything about the fight looked bad, but there was one thing, or rather hundreds of things, that gave her a bit of hope.
The falling stars, points of white light with long streaks that were getting closer by the second, had to be something powerful. That much was certain, because what else but a great power could pull the stars from the sky? There was no telling what was going to happen when they landed, and it was very possible the mage who made the body for the Lord of Destruction was responsible for that as well, but Joan couldn't help feeling optimistic about them. She'd seen Rory and Diana glancing up at them a few times, not in fear but in what seemed to be more neutral anticipation, and that was enough for her. If they weren't worried then it couldn't be something horrifying that would spell the doom of the defenders. At worst she supposed they could just destroy
everything in the area that wasn't a god, but even that would be a victory for Gencha. A very costly victory, to be sure, but it would be a far more effective way to die than to simply wait until the undead finally overran the wall. It could also be something purely good for the defenders, and that possibility was indeed a large reason for her positive outlook on this hellish fight even as the Lord of Destruction rose back to his feet without any seeming truly harmed at all after his fall. There was some hope left, uncertain though it was, and that was going to have to be enough to keep Joan on her feet and fighting until the end.
Allie kept one hand wound through Apple's mane and the other holding Godslayer at the ready as they charged straight toward the undead things that were now spreading through a section of the city. The undead dragons had landed not long ago, and their cargo of smaller monstrosities quickly flooded the area. There were some people in the upper floor of a house that had magitech weapons and were firing on one of the dragons; oddly enough, it looked to be extremely effective. The little blasts of energy looked like they should barely phase the large creatures, but they were instead cracking and smashing the exposed bones and ripping through tattered flesh with ease. She tightened the focus of Godslayer's scouting net to just the immediate area and was able to sense something mixed in with the fire from the spears, something that felt remarkably similar to the undead dragons themselves, minus the rot of necromancy.
Unfortunately, the smaller undead things were far too numerous to be dealt with by a mere dozen people with magitech spears. Already the door into the lower floor of the fighters' building was being smashed in by some of the creatures and others were scaling the walls directly to reach the upper windows. Raven was clinging to her shoulder in his bird form, and as they passed an intersection he cried out in what Allie was sure was concern. She didn't have to look to know what he was worried about, for she could sense it herself with Godslayer's power: a group of eight people with magitech weapons were trying to fight off another of the dragons, but they too were rapidly being overwhelmed by the smaller things. She could feel a similar scenario playing out a few streets down in the other direction, too.
Apple showed no signs of slowing as he barreled down the street, and she suspected that if she made him stop and focused on killing the things around her then he would be gone in an instant. She could not afford to waste any time on this anyway. The city walls would hold out only so long, and it was entirely possible that the Lady of Chaos would soon defeat her attackers and turn the city into a mess of carnage. Whatever it was she had to do with Godslayer on Norlathel, she knew she had to do it as soon as possible. She would simply have to place her faith in these few fighting people to be able to take care of the dragons themselves, for she couldn't hope to be able to deal with them herself without also destroying buildings all around as well, which would rather defeat the purpose.
Just as Apple slammed into a group of undead humanoids, Allie raised her sword above her head and sent out a quick pulse of Godslayer's power. It spread out for hundreds of feet in every direction, creating a dome of purple light that would surely be visible to anyone looking her direction. As the light touched the undead things they were not reduced to dust as she had expected, rather they all stopped moving. That was odd, but she
had been thinking of destroying the magic that animated them rather than their physical forms for fear of also harming the living who had rather similar bones and the like. The light retracted and the small undead things fell to the ground like ragdolls. It was rather morbid, seeing all those corpses and skeletons suddenly littering the streets, but it had undoubtedly been effective. The dragons had been stunned for a moment, but they resumed their violent attempts to kill the living fighters soon enough. Some of them let out a cheer as they focused their attentions on the dragons, and a couple of the ones up in the window of the building called out their thanks as Apple charged past it.
Allie hoped that would be enough help for the people to win, but there were many more batches of undead spreading through the city that she didn't have time to deal with. There was also a battle raging against a god in the middle of the city, but she had no time for a detour to help with that either. Everything hinged on her getting to Norlathel and fulfilling this prophecy before it was too late. She quickly turned her attention forward, to the tower of the airship dock looming in the distance and growing closer with second.
The eastern wall of Gencha was a horrible mess as Rook caught sight of it. There were bodies of both monsters and defenders strewn atop it and on the ground below. The skies were thick with flying creatures, and he could see a couple trying to climb over the edge of the wall and being met with spears and swords. It looked like the defenders were struggling and would not last a whole lot longer. The main problem seemed to be that the defenders were having to split their focus between the ground and air assaults, thus failing to effectively fight on either front. Rook tried to figure out where along the wall their presence would make the most difference, but there were too many obvious weak spots to cover with just a few dozen people. He was going to suggest spreading out, but he heard Ozzie talking behind him as they ran toward the wall so he stayed quiet to hear what was going on.
"Can you clear out the monsters in the sky?" Ozzie sounded a little winded, but then so would probably anyone who talked in the middle of what had already been a long run.
Except Kaga, it seemed. She sounded fresh and ready to run miles more without a break. "But that's boring! I already killed a lot of the flying ones the other day. I wanna go kill the god."
Ozzie was silent for a short while, then he sighed and spoke with an obviously exaggerated tone of disappointment. "I knew it. You can't do it. You don't have to make up reasons why you can't, just admit it and I'll figure something else out to deal with them."
"I didn't say I can't because it's not true!" Kaga's indignation was palpable. "I
can, I just don't
want to."
"I bet you can't." Ozzie let some smugness slide into his voice. Rook had to stifle a sudden laugh. He was no master of subtleties, but even he could see what the man was doing.
Kaga took the bait immediately. "I bet I can! I bet a whole cake on it! What are you gonna bet?" Now she'd taken on a smug voice, making her confidence in her abilities clear to everyone within hearing range. Rook wasn't sure what the girl could actually do, but if she was able to take out all the flying monsters then it would make a huge difference in the fight and perhaps open up a chance for the defenders to actually win.
"If you win, then I'll believe you can actually kill a god, and I'll go with you and watch you prove it." Ozzie's words had a strangely resigned tone to them, but Kaga didn't seem to notice.
"Deal!" She picked up the pace and quickly made it ahead of Rook, who had been at the front of the group, and called back over her shoulders. "Just watch, it's gonna be so cool!"
Rook picked up the pace to try (and fail) to keep up with her, and he could hear the others doing the same behind him. Kaga made it to the stairs up to the top of the wall almost a full minute before the others, and by the time they made it to the top there were already things dying inexplicably in midair. Rook looked for the girl and found her standing there on the wall with her head tilted back, eyes closed, and her hands hanging limp at her sides. That was just creepy. He'd seen mages do their magic nonsense before, but he'd never seen one just stand stock still and destroy things. There was no denying that she
was the cause of all the things starting to fall out of the sky though, and he could see her eyes moving rapidly beneath the lids. He squinted at some of the closest flying monsters to try to see what was happening to them, and when he spotted it he was more than a little unnerved.
Rather than blasting them to bits or hurling huge rocks or something, Kaga had apparently opted for something more elegant and at the same time much more terrifying. Whatever she was doing exactly, all that initially appeared on the flesh of the creatures was a little red mark on their chests like they'd been stabbed with a particularly thick needle. After that they went into spasmodic fits and lost the ability to control their wings properly, which in turn caused them to plummet or erratically spiral downward, and all the while blood poured heavily from the little spots. Rook was no expert on how monster bodies worked, but he was certain that she was piercing or crushing their hearts individually. He had previously only been mildly creeped out by Kaga, but he would be lying to himself if he didn't admit that she terrified him. He was just glad she was on their side, because they would have already lost the fight if she was on the other side.
Rook led the way up to the outer edge of the wall, leaving Kaga to do her scary shit to the flying stuff while he and the others helped fight the thing climbing up the wall. The sea of monsters that came into view was disheartening to say the least, but at least it meant that poorly trained fighters like his companions from Eles would be able to blindly fire their weapons and still hit something. Some of the larger corpses plummeting from the sky were smashing into the creatures below and killing a few here and there, but it wasn't enough to make much of a difference to the total numbers. Rook leaned over the edge of the wall and started firing down at the things currently on the wall, and the people of Eles set up on either side of him to take less risky positions and fire at the bulk of the army arrayed before them. Ozzie was among them as well, using a magitech spear, and Neb the dwarf had some kind of small tube that was shooting out fat beams of blue light that were strong enough to pierce through two or three monsters before dissipating.
Soon after they were all settling in for the fight, Candy prodded him in the arm and pointed out over the wall. "Look at that! Someone's out there!"
He was ready to reprimand the boy for making up stupid stories rather than paying attention to the fight at hand, but he glanced out and quickly saw what was being pointed out. There
was someone out there, heading out away from the wall and through the monsters, heading in a straight line right for the strange chair that was sitting in the distance. They were not killing things to get by, rather the monsters were turning to attack them but then they would turn away as if they'd lost interest. It was very strange indeed, but whoever the fool was they were making good speed through the grotesque army. Rook was considering diverting his attacks to help clear their way a little bit, but someone nearby started yelling and drew his attention away.
The alarmed cries were coming from Shizuo, and he was frantically gesturing down the side of the wall and out in front of them as he spoke. "They're pulling away from the rest of the wall and all massing up here! I think they know Kaga is the one demolishing their flying support. Looks like they're going to strike hard and fast, right here. Brace yourselves!"
Rook took a quick look down over the edge of the wall and felt his stomach sink, not from any fear of heights but from the horrifying sight that greeted him. A huge swarm of climbers was headed his way, and a quick look to either side proved Shizuo right: where before they'd been spread out roughly evenly all the way down the wall, now other spots only had a few climbers while hundreds were right beneath him. Worse still, he saw some large humanoid things, ogres probably, readying to throw smaller creatures up atop the wall. Everyone nearby, Eles villagers and soldiers of Gencha alike, started firing their weapons at the climbing horde and the ogres below. It didn't do much, and for every creature that fell it seemed there was another one ready to take its place. The swarm grew closer and closer with every heartbeat, an inevitable wave of death ready to swallow them whole.
"Fall back!" Rook called the retreat before his people could start getting pulled off the wall to their death. "Protect the girl! If she dies we're all dead!" The flying monsters were all trying to get to Kaga as well at this point, but they were dying at an astounding rate. None of them got very close to her while in a condition to harm her, but many flopped onto the wall and joined the ranks of the many corpses already littering it. None seemed to have fallen to crush any of the fighters on the walls, but rook wasn't sure if that was sheer luck or the girl doing something to prevent it. Already the ranks of flying creatures were clearly much thinner than they had been. Thousands had been killed in the span of a couple minutes. Rook was
really glad Kaga was not an enemy.
The people of Eles, Ozzie, and Neb were not the only ones to heed his order. Many of the nearby soldiers and armed citizens pulled back as well, following the lead of the lady who seemed to be in charge of them: Rhea, one of the people who'd been there on the airship docks when they arrived. Rook figured she'd realized what was going on and knew that he was right about the girl needing to be protected. Dozens of the fighters on the wall pulled away from the ramparts and formed a line in a semicircle with Kaga roughly at its center, waiting for the monsters to spill over the edge. Ozzie walked down the line, hurriedly saying something to each of them in a hushed tone. Survive? Rook wasn't sure why the man felt the need to tell them to survive, because that was exactly what they intended to do, but there was no time to bother questioning the man. They did not have to wait long: a wave of fur and fang and scale poured over the stone, and as the first stepped over there was a shower of goblins and kobolds that landed closer to the waiting fighters, thrown up by larger creatures below. They would have been caught from both sides had they tried to hold their position, but now they were instead ready to face all the incoming threats.
A scaled humanoid with long claws on its fingers came straight for Rook, hissing and slashing at his face. He shoved the business end of his spear into its gut and hit the activation point. The reptilian monster reeled back, clutching at its ruined innards, but it was quickly lost in the press as another creature took its place. It looked like a man made out of wax that had been half melted and left to dry. That one took the spear all the way through its chest and ripped it out of Rook's hand as it fell. He cursed and drew his sword, wishing he'd thought to bring a shield to bring with it. The sword had some kind of magitech-made blade of air coating the steel, sharp enough to cut through wood like paper and providing a little buffer room so that the blade wouldn't get stuck. It proved just as useful against monsters as it had against the side of the wagon: it took the head clean off a goblin without slowing and kept on swinging to chop into the arm of some kind of dog-headed man.
The others were putting up a hell of a fight as well. Neb had put his strange tube away and was standing behind the line of fighters, throwing things over their heads than landed among the monsters and exploded in blasts of lightning. The left end of the line was doing well because Ozzie had ended up there and the monsters were falling to the ground clutching their throats when they got close to him; Rook thought he had heard the man yell "choke" a couple times, which made some kind of sense, but he'd never heard of a power that let someone make a person choke just by ordering it. Nav was using two magitech daggers to carve monsters up like a holiday ham, one shattering metal it came into contact with and the other freezing wounds and a large patch of surrounding tissue wherever it struck home. Shizuo was using a sword that shot out arcs of flame with each swing, which was doing a good job of making the monsters wary to rush right for the center of the line. Candy had picked up a hammer somewhere, likely from the wall since there'd been no hammers among the weapons Rook brought, but it was clearly also magitech enhanced given the way its strikes were sending enemies flying or staggering back as if they'd been hit by something ten times its size. Tari and Moody had kept hold of their spears and were running back and forth behind the line of fighters standing fast, stabbing through the gaps between them or firing magitech blasts as needed to help where the fighting was going poorly.
All was going well until something huge crashed into the wall a short way to the right, hefty enough to make it shake. A few loud cracking noises later, a huge hand reached up and grabbed the edge of the ramparts. The thing that pulled itself over was massive, likely twenty feet or more tall if it stood upright, and Rook could not fathom how such a creature could manage to climb the wall. It was like an ogre, but it had two heads and a lot of its upper body was covered in thick scales that were grey like stone. It did not slowly lumber about like an ogre though; once it was over the edge of the wall it
ran through the pack of monsters, heedless of trampling them underfoot, and seemed to be angling to get around the right side of the defensive line. Some of the fighters shuffled over to attempt to intercept it, but that only gave the monsters they were already fighting an opportunity to attack them while they were distracted and off balance. The right flank was failing even before the giant ogre killed a single person, but there was no doubt it would do massive damage once it got there. Rook was ready to call another retreat, to grab Kaga and haul her off the wall if necessary, but salvation came from a very unexpected source.
Zuma, standing just to Rook's right, growled and rammed his sword into the face of an orc-like brute before stepping back and out of the line to yell at Rook and the others nearby. "I'll get the big one! Just don't kill me too! No time to explain!" He ran off without another word, moving faster than Rook had ever seen the potato farmer go, even when they'd been fleeing the undead horde in Eles. Rook cursed and took a half step to the right, keeping the line as intact as possible without letting any monsters through the gap. He kept on fighting, but he couldn't help paying some attention to the sprinting Zuma out of his peripheral vision.
As Zuma neared the losing side of the fight, his body started to twist and change. Within a couple seconds where there had been a man running there was now some kind of monster. Rook had heard stories about werewolves before, but he had always thought them fables at best, or true tales of the ancient past at worst. Zuma had always been a reclusive sort, friendly but never really letting anyone get close to him, and now Rook thought he understood why. Zuma's werewolf form was hulking and covered in dark grey fur, with stretched and torn clothing still barely hanging onto him, and he ran even faster after his transformation. There were wolfmen in the ranks of the monsters, but they were like pale imitations of the werewolf form, weakened and softened like domesticated dogs compared to a wolf in the wild.
Zuma tore into the monsters with a howl that shook something in Rook's core. It was no mere call of communication as between wolves, it was a hungry sound, bloodlust made audible, and Zuma's violent assault proved entirely worthy of the sound. He ripped through the monsters and gave the right side of the line time to regroup, but he did not stop there. Instead he pressed forward, leaping over the creatures to meet the giant ogre before it could crash through the defenders. His claws ripped bloody lines through the larger monster's legs and stomach, but it slowed and started swinging boulder-sized fists at its assailant. Zuma dodged them and kept on slashing away. Seeing a monster on
their side seemed to give the fighters a boost of morale, and as they fought they cheered him on, urging him to kill the huge bastard.
It was of course easier said than done. Many of the nearby monsters tried to join in the fight as well, and that meant Zuma had to spend a lot of effort slaying or avoiding them rather than directing his full attention to the ogre. Some of them were landing hits on him, and while he seemed to have a thick hide that acted as armor it was far from perfect. After a minute of intense fighting his fur was matted with his own blood in many places and his movements were slowing down more and more while the ogre seemed to be doing alright despite the blood covering most of its lower half. Zuma let out another howl, this one a deeper one that sounded sad rather than angry. Rook understood what was going to happen and wished he could stop it, but the sad reality was that sacrifices had to be made. He vowed to retrieve Zuma's body if he lived through this fight and to bring it home to Eles, and to bury it on a hill overlooking his prized potato fields.
Zuma darted around to the front of the ogre and leapt straight in the air, right over a sweeping hand that had almost smashed into him, and clamped his teeth into the throat of the head on the left side. The ogre howled in pain with both mouths, making for an eerie reverberation of agony, and tried to knock the werewolf loose. Zuma held on tight. He reached up with his left arm and started clawing the face above the throat he was tearing into, and with the right he attacked the other throat directly. His powerful legs scrabbled at the armored hide of the monster's chest until they tore away heavy stone-like chunks and sunk into flesh. The ogre finally landed some heavy blows into Zuma's side, massive fists crashing into the furry body with the crunch and snap of bones breaking reaching Rook's ears even over the noise of battle. The werewolf held on tight for much longer than seemed possible, savagely twisting his head and digging in deep with his claws to get at the monster's throat. Eventually even his supernaturally powerful body could not withstand the sheer force of the attacks and he went limp, still hanging on by teeth and claws until the ogre ripped him away and threw him aside, off over the edge of the wall on the city side to plummet down to join the corpses below.
Zuma's sacrifice was not in vain. The ogre was a bloodied mess, and it only took a few more steps before falling with a pained groan without any signs of getting back up. He had done enough in the way of killing and distraction to give the right side of the line time to regroup and retreat a bit closer to Kaga to close the gaps. With the ogre disposed of and the sky almost clear of monsters, the fight continued on at its original frantic pace for a couple minutes more. Something changed suddenly, as if the monsters had lost their motivation. Many of them seemed confused about what they were doing and the endless flood of reinforcements swarming over the wall slowed dramatically. Rhea pushed forward and rallied the soldiers to follow her lead, and everyone else joined the push as well. It was no easy task, but they managed to regain their surrendered ground on the wall and slaughter the monsters atop it after a couple more minutes of fighting, which was enough of a victory to earn a ragged cheer from those still alive. They'd lost perhaps half their number in the desperate defense and that left this section of the wall much more sparsely defended than before, but the monsters had resumed their earlier tactic of attacking the whole wall at once so they were able to manage it with retrieved magitech spears and the like. Rook had enough time to take a look out beyond the monsters and see that the crazy person who'd been running through them was now fighting someone near the creepy throne.
"I did it!" Kaga called out from the middle of the carnage. She sounded exhausted, like she'd run laps around the city rather than just standing still and committing genocide with her magic. The sky was indeed clear of monsters now, and that made the job of defending the wall much easier than it had been before. "I need a nap." She climbed through the bodies to make it over to Ozzie, who had ended up just to Rook's left in the shuffle. A couple of the nearby soldiers started cracking up and saying something about needing naps as well, but he wasn't sure what the joke was and the girl looked around in confusion as well before returning her attention to Ozzie. "Let's go kill the god now!"
Ozzie pulled back from shooting down over the edge of the wall to examine the sky. He nodded slowly and got a strange look on his face, determined but also sort of angry, like he was getting ready to tackle an unpleasant task. Rook felt that was a pretty tame way to describe fighting a god, but what did he know? The freak of a girl had just massacred tens of thousands of living things in minutes. If any mortal could kill a god, he was pretty sure she was up to the task. Ozzie seemed to think so as well.
"You won the bet, so alright. You can't do it like that, though." He bent down to whisper into Kaga's ear, just a few words, but when he pulled away she looked like she'd just woken up from the best sleep in her life. "How do you want to get there? I think I saw some of those wood—"
Ozzie was cut off mid-sentence as Kaga grabbed him by the arm and jumped right off of the wall. As she flew overhead, Rook saw she had glowing runes on the bottoms of her boots, but they faded quickly and left no marks behind. What should have been a deadly plummet down to earth was softened by a sphere of blue light springing to life around the two of them. It smashed down into the monsters below, crushing a few of them to death, and bounced a couple times before rolling to a stop. The shield exploded outward and knocked the nearby monsters flying back into their fellows. Kaga and Ozzie seemed fine despite the fall, though Ozzie was clearly unhappy about it. They pressed forward anyway, carving a much bloodier path than the other person who had made a similar journey. Rook could see many of the monsters grabbing their throats and flailing, and others were dying in far more spectacular ways. Some were smashed into the ground, others had limbs ripped away, one was diced into small cubes, a handful just popped in a bloody explosion, and that was only the start of the disturbing things that cleared their path forward. Rook was pretty sure the girl was experimenting and having fun with slaughtering more monsters.
"Fuck me, I'm glad she's on our side."
Rook looked over and saw Rhea had taken Ozzie's spot, and she was watching the same horror show with a grim sort of satisfaction on her face. He laughed and nodded at her vocalization of the same thought that had been in his mind for a while now. He refocused his attention on the monsters closer at hand and got back to work. There were still many thousands of monsters assaulting the wall, and for all the death their numbers did not look any smaller. They'd won a battle or two, but Rook felt certain that the war was out of their hands. He wasn't sure if he would live to see the sunrise, but he was damned sure he was going to keep on fighting until the end came, one way or another.
The fight against the Lady of Chaos was entirely one-sided for a long couple minutes. An outside observer might have thought she was scared and on the run, but Kimberlyn was certain that wasn't the case at all. They had been chasing her around the devastated park throwing everything they had at her, but it wasn't doing much thanks to the magic barriers she put up around herself. They were much more sophisticated than the ones Neos had used, from what she'd heard of them; rather than many layers that Snowball's sword could cut through and destroy, the Lady of Chaos had layers of shields formed out of smaller individual pieces. Whenever Lady Snowball landed a hit, which oddly enough sliced clean through the dark metal armor without any obvious resistance, did seem to damage the god's body but did not really bother her; these hits created only a small window for Kimberlyn to attack through, just a few of the small shield panels removed, that would have required harming Snowball as well. It was damnably frustrating. That same deep desire to kill was driving her forward, same as it had done when the Lord of Destruction attacked the city and the last time the Lady of Chaos appeared, and although she could control it now thanks to Gryal's teaching it was still a nagging and insistent feeling in her mind that made the futile fighting all the more aggravating.
"
Relax."Gryal's voice filled her mind, soothing and calm. "
Don't waste your energy throwing fire at the shields. Observe and wait for an opportunity to strike."
Kimberlyn grumbled at him wordlessly but she did as he suggested. As she pulled back from the full on assault strategy, she noticed Kitti was also hanging back and watching. She had a little white rod in one hand, some kind of magitech probably, but she had yet to use it. Instead she was keeping pace as Lady Snowball pressed the attack and Necropolis, Gryal, and Quinzel all tried to score hits through the little windows of opportunity that the magic-nullifying sword opened. Quinzel had a magitech spear that shot blasts of what seemed to be lighting, but they didn't do any noticeable damage. Necropolis struck the Lady of Chaos with water that seemed to be meant to leech power away, but it had no effect. Gryal was shooting of an array of small spells and apparently trying to find something that worked. He'd done a fair amount of damage to the god's body, but she was far more resistant than a mortal would be and even though it looked like she had a broken knee from one particularly savage blast of raw magical force it seemed not to bother her at all. Kimberlyn's grasp of her dragon magic was simply not enough to let her do more than hurl large balls of fire or create a continuous blast that mimicked a dragon's breath, so she lacked the precision to join the others in their attacks without roasting Lady Snowball in the process. She needed a better opening, something that would let her throw everything at the god.
It took a while to finally find a hint of hope, and she must have made some kind of noise or given another sign because Kitti was right there at her side immediately and looking at her expectantly. Kimberlyn gestured at the god's shields, though she knew Kitti couldn't see them since she was no magic user herself. She spoke quietly, just for Kitti to hear, but at the same time she thought the words to Gryal. "Her shields sort of.. flicker when Snowball cuts her. Her body has a sort of magic aura around it that I thought was just some kind of protection, but I think it's actually just an imperfect creation finished off with regular magic rather than being a fully real creation like the Lord of Destruction's dragon body. Or maybe she just has problems making bodies and that's why she stole one before. Whatever it is, her body seems connected to her use of magic like a mortal's isn't; Snowball's sword wouldn't make our magic waver by slicing our flesh, but it's doing exactly that to the Lady of Chaos. If Snowball could properly stab her and keep the weapon in her, I think I can hit her."
Kitti nodded and glanced to the fight in progress. "That won't be easy. She's barely slicing the Lady of Chaos." That was certainly true, and that was the flaw of the newfound plan. Kimberlyn wasn't sure what to do about it, but Gryal had an answer.
"
Ready yourself." The fight continued on without any obvious change for a half a minute, the six of them chasing the Lady of Chaos around as she smirked and mostly disregarded their attacks. It seemed like she was having fun watching them struggle. The smirk abruptly disappeared as Gryal changed tactics without warning. His barrage of small attacks stopped and he gestured sharply upward with both hands. A curved wall of stone shot up from the ground just behind the god and she slammed right into it. Snowball didn't need any instruction to follow up on that opportunity. She charged in sword first and rammed it into the Lady of Chaos' gut, pinning her to the wall or coming damn close to it.
The shields flickered and disappeared, just as Kimberlyn had suspected they would. She did not hesitate to take advantage of the opening. Gryal yelled at Snowball to tell her to duck, which she did without question, and Kimberlyn's fireball slammed right into the god's torso and face. She followed it up with a continuous blast of fire aimed at the same place, giving Snowball some breathing room. It was going to take a lot to actually put the god down for the count, that much she knew from the last time she'd fought the Lady of Chaos, but she was confident that she could manage it.
The Lady of Chaos, however, was not content to simply stand there and be killed. She kicked Snowball hard in the side of the head and sent her sprawling, then tugged the sword out of her stomach. Her shields did not return immediately, but once she cursed and tossed the sword away they were back in an instant. The wall behind her shattered and crumbled into dust within the span of a heartbeat, and off she went back away from the attackers. Though she was initially a charred mess of blackened flesh, it slowly flaked away to reveal fresh new skin beneath, but those with the skills to see it could still spot the little gold flecks of anti-god power that held fast. Kimberlyn hoped she would go back to simply evading, but she had a bad feeling that now that they'd landed a proper blow the fight would become more dire very soon. Snowball got up and scrambled for her sword and then they were off again, this time with the Lady of Chaos knowing their strategy.
Gryal tried another stone wall, but she propelled herself into the air to simply leap over it. Walls of fire and air proved entirely ineffectual, as Kimberlyn knew Gryal expected them to be. He tried more with the stone, setting up small decoy walls and making real ones further back to contain her when she landed, but she was far too slippery and dodged around them instead. Where before her eyes had been locked on Lady Snowball and her sword, now they were holding steady on Gryal to see what magic he was going to try next. The dragon was a crafty mage though, and he quickly created an illusion around his hands to obscure and distort what others could see. That was enough to trick her once more: he made a small wall of stone that she leapt over, then another that she dodged around right into a third that she nearly tripped on, and finally right into a trap of sorts that made the earth soft and malleable enough that her foot sunk a full foot into before he let the spell go and the rock solidified once more. He paired this with a blast of wind behind Snowball that more or less threw her at the god, and once more she ended up with her sword through the Lady of Chaos' stomach. Kimberlyn hurled more fire at the god, piling on more of the anti-god magic to weaken her.
The Lady of Chaos responded far more quickly this time. She grabbed Snowball by the throat and hurled her away, and the sword went with her due to her tight grip. She pulled her trapped foot out of the stone as if it took no effort at all, then resumed the strange game of cat and mouse. It made no sense for her to be so defensive, and it gave Kimberlyn a very bad feeling. Either she was waiting for something to happen, or she was toying with them. Either option meant it was only a matter of time before the game ended and people started dying. They had to do something quickly, something to finish the god off before their time ran out. She relayed the thoughts to Gryal and they collaboratively brainstormed some quick ideas that seemed promising.
Their time ran out before they got the chance to try most of them. Gryal formed a half-dome of raw magical force, large enough to catch her if she attempted to jump over it like she'd done to the stone walls. Instead she backed into it as if she hadn't noticed. Snowball rushed forward when Gryal shouted for her to go, pushing her forward with wind once more, but things went much differently this time. A blast of air from the Lady of Chaos cut a line perpendicular to Snowball's course and clipped her wrist perfectly to knock her sword flying away, and based on the scream Kimberlyn was pretty sure a bone was broken as well. The god jumped up, planted her feet against the back wall of the magic wall for a moment, and pushed off with superhuman speed to meet Snowball halfway. Her knee connected with the Felis woman's face and the sickening crunch of metal meeting flesh was loud enough for everyone to hear. The Lady of Chaos stalked forward with clear intent to finish the job, but a very unlikely obstacle presented itself.
Quinzel stepped in between the god and fallen woman, holding his spear pointed futilely at the Lady of Chaos. The tip of the weapon wavered unsteadily in his shaking hands. The god cocked her head to the side, peering at him in confusion much as Kimberlyn felt she would do if an ant tried to stand against her.
"Do you think your little stick can stop me, mortal?" The Lady of Chaos walked forward slowly, and as the outer edge of her magic shields pressed against the spear it was not push back. Instead the metal simply melted, and the wooden shaft burned away to ash. "You are a fool. You should be kneeling before me, you pitiful creature. Kneel and I will kill you last, and it will be quicker than the others."
By the time she stopped moving forward, standing just outside of arm's reach, Quinzel was left with a foot and a half of wood with a charred end in his left hand. He looked down at it, then back up to the god before him, quite clearly taking an extra couple seconds to size up her armored body. Kimberlyn would have been irked and amused by his apparent choice to ogle the god that was threatening him, but she knew exactly what he was doing: buying time. Gryal and Necropolis were quietly working on something all the while, and although Quinzel couldn't know exactly what it was he did seem to know that keeping the Lady of Chaos in one place was a good idea.
He lifted the useless bit of wood to examine the burned end, then threw it aside. As he did so, he spread his arms out wide, showing that he was unarmed and completely defenseless. "I can't argue with that. I have no hope of even slowing you down. I am but an speck of dust in the wind and you are a hurricane. I'm not sure what even compelled me to stand in your way. Rank foolishness, I think." Quinzel slowly dropped to one knee, then the other, and bowed his head low before the Lady of Chaos before rising upright on his knees. "I cannot deny your majesty and power. I submit myself to your will, but I have one humble request, if I may be so bold."
The confusion had faded from the Lady of Chaos' face and was replaced with a smug smirk. His subservience had apparently pleased the god. She took another couple steps forward and patted him on the head, like a dog. "You may make your request." Her eyes flicked up toward Lady Snowball's body, then to each of the others in turn, making it quite clear that she had not forgotten about any of them. Kimberlyn could sense that Gryal had done something with the wounded Felis, and that the body laying there was now a fake, but she couldn't tell what he'd done with the real person. Necropolis had disappeared as well. Kitti and Gryal were huddled up together discussing plans, and Gryal was keeping her in the loop as well. She hated the plan they were concocting, but she couldn't deny it was likely their only shot.
Quinzel bowed low again, then looked up to the Lady of Chaos with a sickeningly adoring expression. "Instead of killing me right away, perhaps I could live and serve you? I know I'm a worthless creature before your majesty, but I find myself enthralled. You're so confident and powerful and it's like you are in control of everything around you. I know you've been toying with us when you could have slaughtered us all, and I've only kept on fighting so I could be a part of that magnificent display. I just want to bask in your glory for a while before I die." He reached up as if to touch her leg, but then his hand twitched back and seemed to wither with uncertainty. Kimberlyn had to admit that she wasn't sure if he was being sincere or putting on a spectacular show, but either way it was quite effective.
The Lady of Chaos slid her hand down from the top of his head, along the side of his face, ending finally when she had a firm hold of his jaw. "This is how it should be. This is the proper order of the world." Her voice was low but full of fire, and it was reflected in her eyes in a way that made them even more disturbing to look at. Quinzel somehow managed not to cringe away from the sight. "You'll be one of the last to die. Not of this pathetic group, of mortals as a whole. You've amused me. Go, get out of my way and watch me crush these insolent fools. You may worship me later." She used the grip on his face to lift him off his knees and throw him aside, though not hard enough to cause serious damage. Quinzel scrambled to his feet and backed away, keeping his eyes on the god as he did so. Kimberlyn could see his mouth twitching as he worked to keep his face help in a happy mask.
The Lady of Chaos strode forward to the fake body of Lady Snowball and sneered down at it. "It this truly the best you can do, dragon? I was interested by your ingenuity before, but this is pathetic. You've stolen her away into a contained dimension of your own crafting. Did you hide the healer away with her as well?" Her eyes turned from the illusion to Gryal himself; the dragon in human shape was standing there looking completely at ease. Kitti hurried away from his side with her face set in a determined grimace. "You've only bought them little time. Once you die the dimension shatters and I will kill them then. All you've done is made yourself the first to die."
"Have I?" A smile slowly bloomed on his face. "I guess you haven't realized it yet. You're already as good as dead. My apologies in advance for the tremendous shame you will feel upon realizing that a mere group of mortals and a dragon were the cause of your demise."
"You aren't very good at bluffing." The Lady of Chaos sighed and shook her head. "You're boring me. I'll dispose of you quickly so we can be done with this farce." She took one step forward, foot passing easily through the illusion of Snowball laying there on the ground, but her eyes widened in shock before she could take another. "You—" She was gone in an instant, as was the illusion, and all that remained was a little black orb about three inches in diameter laying in the dirt.
"Telling the truth is indeed a poor bluff." Gryal took a moment to chuckle at his own witticism, then sprung into action. "Quinzel, take this." He tossed an identical black orb at the man, which he caught with only a slight fumble. "It's something like the exit door to the place I sent Lady Snowball. Should I die or choose to dismantle the dimension she is contained in, she will appear wherever that is. You did a fine job, but your work isn't quite over. Get her somewhere safe, she's hurt enough to be out of the fight but she'll live."
Quinzel didn't need to be told twice. He grinned at the dragon and turned to leave, speaking over his shoulder. "God or not, the arrogant bitch was no different from the rich cunts I normally work for. It's not the first time I've played the loyal servant to get out of a tight situation. Good luck." With that said he picked up the pace to a run, off to find somewhere to hide most likely.
Kimberlyn walked up to the orb in the dirt and frowned at it. "How long do you think it'll be until she can break free?"
"A couple minutes, if we're lucky." Gryal moved to stand beside her and flicked a hand to make the little black sphere float in midair. "I plan to release it myself and surprise her. Are you ready?"
"Yes, but..." Kimberlyn considered reverting to mental communication, but she figured it was good for Kitti to hear as well. "I'm worried I'll hurt her. I know you said you can handle protecting her, but I don't think it'll be enough. If I kill her then I—"
"Will have done exactly as you should have." Kitti was approaching from the other side of the floating orb, holding Snowball's magic-nullifying sword that she'd gone to retrieve while the Lady of Chaos was focused on Gryal. "I know the risks. If it takes my life to destroy this god, I'll call it a worthy trade. I am willing to do whatever it takes to save this city, Kimberlyn. This is my choice to make, not yours. Do it."
Kimberlyn wanted to object, but she knew it would do no good. She just nodded and mentally prepared herself as best she could. Gryal sent a wordless wave of comforting thoughts to her, which helped a little. She hated this, but it was the right thing to do, so she would do it and live with whatever happened.
"Alright." Gryal started weaving his hands around in front of him to create a variety of spells. The orb floated back toward Kitti, ending up right in front of her and about ten feet from Kimberlyn and Gryal. "She's going to pop back into the world on the count of one. We've only got this one shot, so make it count. Three." Kimberlyn raised her hands and started to draw on her draconic magic. A haze of glowing lights surrounded Kitti briefly as Gryal layered an astounding array of protective and empowering spells on her. "Two." Kitti lifted the sword and murmured a few words, and the runes along its length lit up. She and Gryal had been speaking to Lady Snowball while the god was occupied by Quinzel, and she'd left this job in Kitti's hands. There had also been something about Necropolis preparing to help, but that part hadn't been clear in the quickly relayed thoughts. "One." The Lady of Chaos reappeared, facing Kitti, and her return was ironically marked with a very orderly execution of the plan to kill her.
Kitti immediately sliced through the god's shields and stepped forward, ducking under an anticipated swiping arm. She reached up with her left hand and did something with the little white rod it held, making a blast of almost blinding white light shoot from the end and hit the Lady of Chaos clean in the face. It was enough to send her reeling back a step in surprise as she reached up to shield her face, but its true purpose was distraction to create an opening. Kitti rushed forward and dropped her magitech weapon, taking the hilt in two hands as she rammed the sword into the god's stomach, angling it sharply upward so the whole length of the blade was buried inside her without even so much as the tip breaking through the other side. The Lady of Chaos gasped and cursed, but as she lifted her arms they were quickly encased in water that froze quickly, and it was apparently strong enough to hold her fast. Necropolis himself lifted up from the dirt not far away, first looking like a copy of himself made from water and then shimmering and turning solid.
"Go! It won't melt!" Necropolis' shout was enough to get Kimberlyn to start blasting the Lady of Chaos with a continuous stream of dragon fire. The ice did indeed withstand the heat, holding steady as the god struggled and tried to break free. Necropolis had apparently been in hiding in the ground itself, setting up this special spell, and it was working quite well. Gryal had assured her that the god would be held still to keep Kitti safe, but she had not expected ice of all things in the middle of a plan to torch the enemy.
Kimberlyn focused on concentrating her cone of fire, making it as small as she could manage to maximize the amount of anti-god hooks that dug in the Lady of Chaos rather than blowing uselessly past her. Kitti seemed completely fine whereas the god's armor was melting and her flesh beneath was being ruthlessly seared. Even with the sword in her, the Lady of Chaos had a powerful presence that inundated everything around her, like fog filling the air. Kimberlyn could feel it steadily weakening second by second. The plan was working flawlessly, and that worried the pessimistic part of her mind. Rightly so, as it turned out.
The Lady of Chaos struggled in vain for a long minute, then went strangely limp. The aura of her godly power was not gone yet, so there was no way she was dead, and she didn't seem the type to give up. It took Kimberlyn a few seconds to realize what was going on, and as she opened her mouth to shout a warning it was too late. The god's right arm heaved suddenly and broke free of the ice, reaching immediately for Kitti's hands holding the sword. It met a barrier of ice that quickly formed around her hands and the hilt of the weapon, but the next darting movement was too quick to fully stop. The Lady of Chaos grabbed Kitti by the throat and a moment later ice sprung up around her wrist, which would have been enough to block her had she been slower. From the way Kitti's eyes opened wide it was clear she was being choked, but she did not struggle or pull away. Instead she looked past the god, through the haze of flame, and right into Kimberlyn's eyes. She didn't have to say anything to get the message across with the determination in her gaze.
"I can't pull her loose!" Necropolis was standing now, arms held out and pulling as if he was tugging on an invisible rope. "That strange body she made, she put almost all of its energy into the arm. It's too strong to force her to move."
"And my shields against force seem to have been ineffective as well." Gryal stood with his arms crossed. "I could prevent the choking, but I would have to let go of a lot of the other shields. I'm afraid our choices are to let Kitti die or abandon this plan and hope we can still kill this damned god after we pull her free."
"We can't let her die, she—" Necropolis' objection only made it so far before Kimberlyn cut him off.
"We have to!" She could hear the anguish in her own voice, and she was fighting off both tears and the distracting feelings that went with them. Giving in to an emotional breakdown would render her unable to use her magic properly, so she held it off as best she could, though the flames wavered and weakened to a noticeable degree. "She said it herself. She was ready to give her life for Gencha. If we let the Lady of Chaos have another chance she won't play with us, she'll throw everything she has at me and then there will be nobody left to truly harm her. She'll kill you both and then she'll be free to rampage through the city. There's no other choice." Even to her ear it sounded like she was trying to convince herself, but Necropolis said nothing. Gryal nodded, and mentally he sent her another wordless feeling of sympathy and comfort, then backed away and formed a barrier between them to let her be alone with her building grief. She was glad he had done it because she didn't want anyone in her head right now, and she wasn't sure she'd be able to hold up a mental barrier herself.
Kitti held on for much longer than Kimberlyn expected she could, long minutes that seemed almost endless. She pushed against the choking hand, adjusting her footing to dig in and lean forward, and pulled the sword out just a bit before thrusting it back in and giving it a twist at the same time. Kimberlyn was no expert in the use of swords, but she could tell what the intent was: Kitti wanted to make sure the sword stayed where it was as long as possible after she died. All the while the ice encasing the Lady of Chaos crept up along her limbs and grew thicker, and more formed around the sword's hilt to held hold it in place, clearly Necropolis' way of making sure that there would be no repeat incident of escape and that Kitti would not die in vain.
When Kitti's eyes finally slid shit and her body went limp, the Lady of Chaos' presence was much diminished but still not even halfway gone. Minutes ticked by slowly, but the sword remained where it was and the god was being held still in the flames. She did try to struggle, and after a while her right arm loosened and let Kitti's body fall as far to the ground as it could go with her hands stuck fast to the sword's hilt, but her trick of putting all her might into one limb proved useless against Necropolis' strengthened ice. He was swearing profusely and shaking as he stood watching the god burn, clearly exhausted from his efforts, and he did not look entirely happy with the situation. Kimberlyn had felt a few tears slipped free but she tried to focus entirely on the work at hand and leave grieving for later.
Finally, after the Lady of Chaos' aura diminished to almost nothing, she started to scream in pain. She'd been entirely silent until then, so the sudden change was startling. Her screams were interspersed with curses and threats, including some to come back when this body was destroyed and murder them all slowly, but they rang hollow. The body itself was already a ruined mess, and if destroying it would have freed the Lady of Chaos to run off and steal or make a new one, then it would have happened long before the screaming started. Gryal had theorized that the anti-god magic would keep a god tethered to their form as well as weakening, that it had been designed specifically to do this and that it was the cause for their hook-like shape, and it seemed he had been correct.
Thankfully the screaming did not last long. Less than a minute from the first surprising yelp, the god's power finally winked out of notice entirely. Kimberlyn kept on torching the body, but it quickly crumbled to ash without the energy of a god to keep it stable. She dropped her hands to her side and sat heavily in the dirt, breathing heavily from the exertion of using magic for so long without a break. Gryal hurried to her side and started checking her over, murmuring as he did so that he was checking to make sure she had not damaged herself seriously by pushing too hard. Necropolis walked to Kitti's body on wobbling legs and dropped to his knees beside her. He pulled some of the water from his jug and passed it over the corpse, much like what he'd apparently done after Kimberlyn nearly died, keeping at it for a long while.
"She's gone." Necropolis pushed back from the body and sat with his head in his hands. "It took too long. Her spirit is completely gone. I can't bring her back."
That was enough to break the tenuous wall that Kimberlyn had built to contain her sadness. They'd won, but at a horrible cost. She burst into tears and Gryal gently pulled her close to him, murmuring that she'd done what was right and Kitti wouldn't want it any other way. Kimberlyn knew that, but it still hurt. She'd done her part in this fucked up fight against the gods, and now it was left to others to finish the job. She just hoped that there weren't many more sacrifices that needed to be made before the end, even as she knew deep inside that more death was inevitable in such a horrible fight.
The Lady of Monsters did not put up much of a fight. When Rissa had reached her she'd been clearly distracted, focusing on something else entirely with her eyes fixed on the wall in the distance, so she'd been able to land a solid punch and send the god sprawling backward. It shouldn't have been that simple at all; Rissa had been using her own special skills that earned her the appellation Tamer of Beasts to make the monsters leave her be as she passed by, and the god controlling them should have felt it interfering with her own powers. There was no doubt that the god felt it and knew she'd had a visitor approaching, but she was putting everything into directing the monsters to do something more complicated than simply attack the wall and did nothing to stop Rissa's approach.
The punch was enough to snap The Lady of Monsters' focus back to her immediate surroundings and hurry to her feet, forcing her to abandon whatever she'd been doing, but the fight that followed consisted mostly of the god trying to avoid being pummeled and Rissa pushing her around like she was a mere mortal with paltry skills rather than a true god. In fact, she'd seen plenty of mortals who would have been able to beat the crap out of the Lady of Monsters as she was now. It was almost shocking, but she had expected something like this so it culminated in more of a disappointed feeling than surprise. She'd said it herself on the wall a day ago: this was a piss poor excuse for a god. Whatever had happened in that prison they'd been stuffed into, the Lady of Monsters definitely came out the worse for wear.
The god was distracted once more by something that brought a savage grin to Rissa's face. She landed a fist square in the Lady of Monsters' bony chest, knocking her tumbling over backwards for what seemed like the dozenth time, and stalked forward slowly. "Feel that? Something's missing, isn't it? The Lady of Chaos is dead. Not just kicked out of her body,
dead dead. Godslayer was nowhere near her. She got done in by
mortals. How's that for a kick in the teeth?"
"She never mattered." The Lady of Monsters matched Rissa's grin, though hers was bloody and featured a couple shattered teeth. "She was sent as a distraction the first time, and even she managed to get the mortals to slaughter each other. She was the weakest of us. Her death is meaningless."
Rissa snorted out a laugh. "She was the weakest? You can't even fight me off, and I've been going easy on you trying to figure out what tricks you're hiding up your sleeves. I'm starting to think you're just as pathetic as you look."
The Lady of Monsters giggled, a disturbingly childlike sound. "You don't know, do you? You poor thing. Did you come here thinking you could actually kill me?" She walked forward, hands hanging loose at her sides. There was a creepy motherly tone to her voice, like she was talking to an ill-behaved child. "Come now, you didn't truly think I was trying to fight back, did you? You were having so much fun that I didn't want to interrupt, and it made no difference to me. Go on, sweetie, try your hardest."
Rissa didn't bother to respond to the gag-inducing little ramble. Instead she did exactly as the god wanted without saying another word. She pulled the bow and fishing pole off her back and tossed them aside, then rushed forward at full speed. The Lady of Monsters didn't even flinch as she slammed a fist right into her smugly smiling face. The god tumbled back again, but this time she made no effort to stop herself or get up. She laid there grinning up at the dark sky, and Rissa had no compunctions about striking a downed opponent. She kept on running and leapt into the air to land knee first on the god's torso with enough force that she heard multiple ribs crack. The Lady of Monsters barely reacted; if anything, her grin grew wider still.
That pissed Rissa off more than anything so far. This weakling of a god was trying to play it off like she wasn't in the process of being beaten out of her body, and Rissa wouldn't be content until she wiped that smile off of her face. She'd never been one for subtlety, so she just started punching the god repeatedly in the face. It was a savage beating that would have totally incapacitated a mortal within a few hits, but the god proved more resilient. Bone creaked and cracked under Rissa's relentless fist, skin tore and blood flowed, and within a minute the face was hardly recognizable. It looked like wild animals had chewed her up rather than a fist. She could feel the Lady of Monsters shaking under her, but as the ragged lips spread wide in a far less toothy grin and let little sprays of blood fly free it became apparent that she was laughing.
Rissa went back to work quickly. She started throwing in elbow strikes as well, smashing the god's skull between hard bone and the earth below. After a few of those she heard the god's skull crack, but her chest was still spasmodically heaving with laughter so Rissa kept on beating her face into pulp. She wasn't sure how long she kept on going, but by the time she stopped she was breathing heavily and it was hard to move her arm at all. There was still a wheezing laughter coming from the bloodied face. It made no sense at all. When gods took physical form like this they were supposed to adopt some of that form's vulnerabilities, and unless magic was used to counteract it they were supposed to be forced out of that form when it took severe damage. This was plenty enough damage done, and Rissa could feel that there was not an iota of magic coming from the Lady of Monsters that wasn't tied up in maintaining her control over the army of monsters. There
was some kind of magic hanging over the two of them, but it was rather new and not connected to the god at all; as best Rissa could tell it was some sort of scrying spell, but she didn't have time to bother with the mystery of who was watching their fight. Something was deeply wrong here and that worried her.
The Lady of Monsters ceased laughing and let out a heartier exhalation. Lots of blood and bits of shattered teeth sprayed out like a gory fountain. She couldn't really manage anything like a smile now with her lips torn to shreds against her teeth, but she managed to convey the smug satisfaction in her voice all the same. "Still haven't figured it out? You never were one of the bright ones. Strong though, so very strong. Want to know a secret?" Her voice lowered into a conspiratorial whisper at the end, still with the slightly sing-song tone of someone talking to a child. Rissa moved to lift her arm to start punching again, but she could barely even make a fist now. She started to shift over to use her left arm instead, but the Lady of Monsters giggled and said something that gave her pause.
"We ate them." Rissa stared blankly at the god, hoping she'd misheard that. "The other gods, silly. There were so many of us to start. Didn't you wonder why only three of us came out of our prison?" The Lady of Monsters lifted her head off the ground, peering up at the Immortal through the mask of blood. "We devoured the others. It's something the weaklings who locked us away would never have the guts to do. You see, when a god consumes another god, they also consume that god's power. Think now, I know even you can manage this much. Which of my brothers did I eat to be able to lay here a bloody mess and not feel a thing?"
Rissa thought back to the First War, the horrible carnage that was the battle between the gods. There had been one god on the side of the Lord of Destruction, a god who had once held the name Lord of Might. When that name was cast aside he took on another name that had suited him well. Weapons that felled other gods seemed to merely irritate him, magic mangled his flesh but to little apparent effect on his movement, and all the while as he cut other gods to bloody ribbons he laughed and laughed like he was having the grandest of times. "The Lord of War." Rissa whispered the name, and the god below her giggled again. It grew louder and deeper, from the bubbly sound of amusement to slowly morph into the manic and ragged laugh that the Immortal remembered, the sound of a madman reveling in the depths of his insanity.
"Yes, the Lord of War." The god's voice was strange now. It still had that patronizing motherly tone to it, but it reverberated with a growling tone as well, like there were two different people talking at once. "The Lady of Chaos was pathetic. She couldn't bring herself to eat the weaklings, the ones who wanted to try to reconcile with our jailers. It went against the natural order, she said." The god laughed again, but this time it was a harsh and rough noise without a hint of the previous giggle. "I told the Lord of Destruction to eat her too, but he let her live. Maybe he had his fill, maybe he knew he reached his limit. I pushed farther than I should have, and he saw it. I think he's afraid of me." Her voice dropped into the conspiratorial whisper again, but this time it was layered over the gruffly masculine voice that seemed permanently angry. "He isn't like this. He ate the others and took their powers under his total control. I'm broken, lots of shattered pieces stuffed into the shell of a god. I'm not even sure I
was the Lady of Monsters to start with, but she was the most fun so I picked her when I got free. Want to see what else I can do?"
The words sent a shiver of fear down Rissa's spine. She started to pull away, but the Lady of Monsters, or whatever it was now, reached up and grabbed her by the throat. Rissa struggled, but she felt like a kitten trying to fight off a lion for all the good it did. The god stood easily, completely unhampered by all the damage to its face. Fire burst forth from its free hand, held out to the side, but Rissa felt like she was being branded despite the distance; she knew of only one god that could make such potent fire, and it was confirmed by that disturbingly layered voice, now with a third added to it. "The Lord of Flames." Little arcs of lightning mingled with the flames, racing up the god's arm to not apparent ill effect. "The Lady of Storms." The elemental displays of power faded. For a moment Rissa thought that was everything, but she was suddenly struck by thoughts of hurting and killing her long-dead friends, Immortals she had once been close with, and deep in her hearth she
knew she would be happy to make those visions a reality. "The Lady of Betrayal." The invasive thoughts faded away, and as she focused on the present once more she saw the god's flesh stitching itself back together without any expenditure of power that Rissa could sense. "The Lord of Decay." That god had once been known as the Lord of Healing, and he had been just as resilient as the Lord of War when it came time to fight, but rather than resisting damage he simply healed his way through it.
"Now you see, little Immortal." The god's words were spoken in so many mixed voices that it was hard to pinpoint any one of them. It threw her onto the ground and planted a foot on her chest, pinning her there with ease. "You didn't come to fight any one god, you came to fight seven gods at once." There were only six gods names thus far by Rissa's count, but as the god spoke on its chorus of a voice gained another new member, this one with a deep voice that seemed to lower the pitch of the whole group. "Do you have any last words? There is only the one way to properly demonstrate the power of the Lord of Murder."
Rissa laid there quietly, trying to think of something worth saying with her final breaths. Despair quickly faded into resignation, and that crumbled into pure acceptance. She did not fear death, but she was saddened by her own failure. She'd wanted to do something meaningful with her life, something to protect the mortals she had recently come to respect. Most Immortals ended up seeking a cause to die for, and this had been hers regardless of whether or not she had consciously thought of it as such before leaping of the wall. Dying a failure was disappointing, but death in and of itself was nothing to worry about. She let her head fall back onto the hard ground, ready to just quietly accept her death, but she spotted that strange magic still hovering in the air. Scrying magic, but completely unconnected to any source. It was as if someone had... Her eyes widened. Not just as if, someone
had created that magic without forming the magic within their own body first.
Rissa twisted her head around to look toward the monsters, ignoring the taunting comments from the abomination of a god saying she would find no escape, and sought out signs of Kaga's approach. Out there among the monsters, close enough that the god would not be left waiting long before having another fight on its hands, sprays of blood and flesh were flying into the air in rapid succession and heading closer and closer. She'd learned a bit about Kaga and had heard some talk of the warrior woman who had been her friend before the Witch of the Water ripped her heart out. The freak of a girl could have intervened in this fight, or even the one that ended in her friend's death, but that would have been a gross violation of the warrior code of the northern clans and it seemed Kaga lived by them despite being far from a traditional warrior. That was fine, as far as Rissa was concerned. Her death would not be in vain after all: she had given Kaga a chance to see what she was walking into, and that would hopefully be enough to let her win. After overhearing the talk of what the girl had learned to do, and that she had been vocally intent on killing a god, Rissa couldn't think of any other person she could have hoped to see coming to finish the job.
"You're not in control of all the monsters around here, you know." Rissa turned her head back to look up at the god, meeting its eyes without flinching at the sight. Where normal gods had eyes like deep pools of water that would drown the unwary, this abomination's eyes were more like a violent whirlpool that wanted to drown her. "You're a monster of a god with an army of monsters, but you missed one. There's a mortal monster coming to kill you. You'll see for yourself soon enough." Rissa looked past the god, up to the magic hovering in the sky, and directed her last words to Kaga. "Thanks for letting me fight it out on my own. It's my time to go, and you'll have to finish the job for me. Good luck, kid."
The scrying spell shifted suddenly, reversing direction for just a few seconds to let Rissa see Kaga instead. The girl was actually
skipping through a gory field of the remains of monsters, heedless of the blood and guts raining down on her from the creatures she killed. Ozzie was running behind her with his hands over his head, looking rather miserable about the whole thing. Kaga was grinning though, and there was a sort of hunger in her eyes that Rissa read as eagerness to get to the fight. That reminded her of herself, in her early years at least, always looking to find a larger beast to wrestle into submission.
Rissa didn't even notice the god flicking its fingers, but she felt the blast of power that sucked the life from her in seconds. That didn't bother her at all. She died with a smile on her face and no regrets weighing her down, and that was a far better way to go than she had ever hoped to find.
The undead things swarming the city were a damned nuisance. Halaster led the way through them, helped greatly by Daz and Kara blasting many of the things with their particular brands of magic. He was still annoyed that Kimberlyn had ran off with her dragon pal instead of coming along with her long-time friends, but there was nothing to be done about it now. The tower that held the airship dock loomed directly overhead, but there were a lot of walking corpses swarming around the base of it. He could see the entry to the tower past the street full undead things, currently manned by four Gencha soldiers who were hard-pressed to fight off the invaders. It was going to be a hell of a lot of work to get through all of that to get into the tower and up to commandeer and airship with Crystal, but they were armed to the teeth thanks to their armory raid what seemed ages ago, on the day the dragon attacked. It was going to take a hell of a lot of time regardless.
The sound of hooves beating on stone approaching rapidly from behind drew his attention away from the creatures in the way. He barely had time to register the sight of woman riding a horse that seemed a bit off, with a bird clinging to her shoulder and a sword bathed in purple light held aloft, before her shout made him hurry off to the side of the street.
"Move!" The other bandits scattered as best they could, opening up a corridor between their armed and armored ranks that led straight to the undead things. Allie, that was her name, Halaster recalled as she barreled past. Allie swung her sword in a wide arc above the horse's head, though he could see now that the backward hooves and the seaweed in its mane meant it was certainly no normal horse, and a flat sheet of purple light shot forth in the wake of her swing. Where it struck the living corpses, they lost the living bit and became inanimate corpses that flopped to the ground. Allie on her strange horse trampled over the remains without any hesitation, heading straight for the tower.
"Follow her!" Halaster called out the order to his companions as he was already running to do exactly that. Allie was only clearing the street forward, but the side streets were packed with undead as well and there was no telling how quickly those would spill over to fill the void. Running through the corpses was tough, especially in the heavy armor he was wearing, but he did it anyway. As they ran past the first intersection he saw that the living dead were already swarming into the opening left by Allie's destructive charge. They were proper fucked now if they couldn't keep up with Allie to some extent, so Halaster hurried his pace to the point that he felt his lungs were ready to explode.
They made it almost all the way through without major incident, but the final intersection before the clearing that surrounded the tower proved a challenge. Allie was already inside the tower, let in by grateful soldiers after she cleared the way, and her strange mount had continued on its own way plowing through and over the undead things to continue westward toward the sea. They'd fallen too far behind the woman and her path-clearing sword, or the monsters were too fast, or a little bit of both. The things filled the intersection quickly and formed a barrier many bodies deep. Halaster charged into them with his recently acquired magitech sword swinging, each one sending out a line of slashing air magic in a paltry imitation of Allie's weapon. Sparkling lights slamming into the mass of dead things sent more of them toppling over, courtesy of Daz and Kara, and the others fought hard alongside him. They made it through the intersection with only two men lost and hurried on their way toward the tower and another undead barrier.
The clear area around the tower, wider than a regular street, was also filling back up with the monsters by the time they arrived. There was nothing for it but to fight as hard as they could in the hopes of reaching the relative safety of the doorway into the tower, where there were now only three soldiers standing and fighting. It was a brutal slog, and more than a few died. Trying to push through the enemy meant they were intentionally getting themselves surrounded, and these creatures were not entirely mindless: they turned on their attackers and fought back rather than focusing solely on the tower. They made it through in time to hack away the skeletal things that were trying and almost succeeding to pull one of the soldiers free of the door and into the horde, and they all piled in as the man thanked them and returned to fighting without taking time to catch his breath.
A couple of the bandits stayed to fight at the doorway with the promise that they'd be rescued and called up when an airship was ready to go. Halaster led the others up the long spiral stairs that wound along the inner wall of the tower, a long trek that felt almost endless on the heels of the running and fighting they'd already done. Long minutes later, they emerged onto the docks to find Allie and a dark-haired young man arguing with Crystal. A clump of sailors stood nearby and watched, seeming rather unsure of themselves.
"See!" Crystal pointed between the two standing in front of him, right toward the group of panting and exhausted bandits. "They're the friends I mentioned. We're taking this airship and getting the fuck out of here, far away from those horrid gods. Who cares about some stupid mountain anyway? I'm trying to save a few lives, here."
"You petty, foolish man. Look." Allie grabbed him by the collar, heedless of his protests, and hauled him northward along the docks. She pointed downward with her glowing sword. Halaster cautiously followed and looked as well, and what he saw made his stomach sink. There was a giant man with a huge sword attacking the north wall of the city. Or rather, he had
already attacked it, and he was walking though a huge gap at this moment with swarms of more undead things pouring in around his feet. Two figures stood on nearby buildings flinging green and purple streaks of magic aat the giant, but none of them seemed effective in the slightest. The soldiers atop the walls were being overrun, and there was nobody standing in the way of the monsters spilling into the streets. Over it all, there were white streaks of light coming down from the sky, near to touching down on the ground all around the northern side of the city. Halaster couldn't fathom what they were, and he wasn't sure he would be pleased to find out what they were. For all he knew, they could be part of some massive attack that would level most of the city in one fell swoop.
Crystal had nothing to say to that, so Allie continued. "That is the Lord of Destruction. See the green and purple magic? Two gods are fighting him and doing nothing. This sword, Godslayer, is almost certainly worthless against him despite its name. He is bent on destroying everything.
Everything, not just Gencha. No matter where you hide, nothing will save you when he destroys the world entirely and remakes it to his liking. And he's not even the scariest thing out there." She lifted her sword to point to something off in the distant northern sky, flashes of light from spells that Halaster could almost feel from this distance, like ripples from a boulder thrown into the middle of a lake. "Those are two abominations fighting to the death. Immortals using foul necromancy to steal the power of dead gods. Either of them would squash the Lord of Destruction like an ant, but the one who has had this power the longer, the one who is a far better fighter, is all aboard the plan to destroy everything. If he wins that fight then it's all over. The city is already all but lost. Once the Lord of Destruction has had his fill of carnage and has his unfathomably powerful ally at his side, that will mean the end of everything in an instant."
Allie turned to face Crystal now, practically holding him by the throat and close enough for their noses to almost touch. "And the only way to stop them is to get this sword to that mountain and do whatever the fuck is supposed to be done to fulfill the prophecy. I may not know exactly what I'm doing here, but I'm damn sure this is the best shot we have to save the entire godsforsaken world. If I need to hurl you off of this fucking dock to get you out of the way so I can see it done, so be it. If instead you wish to do something meaningful rather than running and hiding like a pup with your tail between your legs, tell your sailor friends to get their asses on that airship and take me to Norlathel immediately."
Halaster quietly prepared to use his magic to teleport behind the woman and take her out if she made any moves to throw Crystal off the dock, but the dark-haired man who had been silently watching the rant suddenly turned to look in his direction and shook her head sharply. It turned out to be unnecessary anyway. Crystal looked from the woman to the northward horrors, then back again, and his face contorted into an irritated grimace. "Damnit, I wish I didn't believe a word of that. Fine, let's—"
Shouting from the tower entrance drew everyone's attention. Soon thereafter, two of the men who'd stayed below and one soldier hurried out onto the docks and faced the doorway with weapons held ready. They arrived mere seconds before the flood of undead things that had apparently been chasing them up the stairs. Many of the other bandits rushed to help push the tide back and to take control of the upper landing to minimize the fighting area to the width of the stairs themselves. Crystal shouted for the sailors to hurry, and most of them did, but one gave voice to a bit of bad news.
"It's going to take us a few minutes. The crystals have been sitting in their low energy mode and we'll need some time to slowly build it back up without breaking them." He looked over to the fight at the top of the tower. "We uh, we're going to need to leave some people behind to fight." Crystal cursed under his breath, but he nodded and waved the man away to go help with the preparations.
Allie stepped away from Crystal and headed for the tower, but she spoke to nobody in specific as she did so. "If this prophecy business is sorted out, I'm pretty sure those things will all die. Well, die again. They're being animated by that stolen god power I told you about, and whatever is supposed to happen should disrupt that power somehow, or show me how to kill the one using it. I'm not sure yet, but the prophecy has been spot on so far and the end talks about peace, and peace will only be realized if those gods are stopped." The purple light from the runes on the sword grew to cover the whole blade as she stopped just behind the fighters at the top of the stairs. "I can deal with a lot of these things until it's time to go. Figure out who's staying to fight by then, but be aware that the Lord of Destruction and his abomination might both try to stop the prophecy from being fulfilled, so coming with me is far from a certain way to survive." She pushed forward through the clumped up fighters and let loose a blast of light that sent many of the undead things into a lifeless tumble off the stairs. The folks wielding mere magitech and mundane weapons pulled back to take a breather, and of course to consider her words.
Halaster was the first to speak up after nearly a minute of tense silence among the gathered people. "I'm staying." Crystal looked at him in confusion, but he saw the one remaining Genchan soldier nodding. "I don't know what the hell all this prophecy business is about, and I might get in the way or fuck something up. I
do know I can fight some fucking zombies. If escape isn't an option, then fuck it, I'll do this little bit that I can." Most of the bandits, Daz and Kara included, spoke up in agreement.
"I, of course, am going with the Guardian of Light.." The dark-haired young man shrugged at the bewildered looks he received. "Allie, as you call her. I was made to see this prophecy through to the end. I am the previous Guardian of Light's messenger, made in the image of his raven symbol, and this is my purpose."
Halaster was not the only one whose eyes went immediately to Crystal's face. The Kitsune man had a dark splotch across his face that looked remarkably like a bird, and the eye in the blob that formed the head was red. It had always seemed a peculiar birth mark, to be sure, but now... Halaster recalled a line of the prophecy that spoke of red-eyed ravens, and another about them having something to do with the fate of the world. It could have been written off as a coincidence, but Halaster couldn't quite convince himself of it, and on the frown on Crystal's face that twisted and distorted into a disgusted grimace it seemed that he was not the only one.
"Fuck me." Crystal spat on the wooden planks of the dock. "This prophecy shit really pisses me off. I guess I should go with her too. Are you guys going to be alright? Where's Kimberlyn?" The first question was only a little concerned in tone, but it became far more urgent with the second.
Kara grinned and looked like she was about to make another joke about the two of them making a cute couple, but Daz elbowed her in the ribs and spoke first. "Went off with the dragon guy, said she had something important to do. Haven't seen her since then." Crystal looked positively alarmed at the notion, and Halaster could see another probing comment right on the tip of Kara's tongue, but the dark-haired man precluded either outburst with a few quiet words.
"She is alive." He was standing with his eyes closed, hands held out before him with palms up. Halaster could feel magic of some sort streaking away from him, probably a scrying spell of some kind. "Distraught, but physically well. It seems she succeeded in killing the Lady of Chaos."
A round of cheers went up from the bandits, many of whom noted that it was great that Kimberlyn got revenge on the god that nearly killed her. Crystal said nothing, but a lot of the tension faded from his features. Halaster was pleased as well. A spot of good news among all the horror was enough to make him feel almost ready to make another run up those damned tower steps. As everyone settled down, they agreed to all stay and fight and let the stranger and Crystal be the ones to go with Allie to fulfill the prophecy. It truly did seem their best hope to win the war that they'd suddenly found themselves a part of, as crazy as that sounded to the logical side of Halaster's mind. Then again, he'd already seen plenty that defied logic, so what did it matter if he tossed it aside now? He and the others would stay to fight a hopeless battle and trust their lives to a near stranger with a fancy sword. Ludicrous, surely, but still their best hope.
Fuck it, he thought to himself as the merriment died down,
either I live or I go out fighting. That'll do. The others seemed to be reaching the same sort of conclusion, one after another, as the joy subsided and their smiles faded into pensive frowns. It was only a matter of time until the airship was ready to go, and then it would be their time to fight to the end, one way or the other.
The battle at the north wall was a lost cause. With the wall smashed asunder by the Lord of Destruction there was not a thing the soldiers could do, and the two gods trying to fight had proved hopelessly outmatched and now struggled to even slow the giant. Over all of this the falling stars from the sky streaked toward the earth, thousands of lights making a slow and ominous descent, but they were finally touching down. A new light came to life far above and hurried to join its fellows. Their impact did not bring destruction as some surely feared. They struck ground and wall and rooftop and shattered with a bright flash, and salvation stepped forth.
Jorick broke free of one crumbling casing, like an egg made of delicate porcelain and formed into a perfect sphere. It was the last physical remnant of the magic that had broken the seemingly immutable laws of reality by snatching his spirit from the pit of death itself. He took a moment to admire his body; a temporary vessel, of course, but marvelous all the same. For so many years he had been stuck in a decaying and decrepit form, a body that no other Immortal had ever been cursed with but which gave him an intimate understanding of the mortal cycle of aging. The Lord of Destruction and his monstrous kin had spent many decades slowly draining his vitality through a tiny pinprick of a hole in the seal on their prison, and his death had loosed the final lock to let them free. Now he felt much the same as he had centuries ago, at the peak of his strength, and his body looked nearly the same but for a silver glow emanating from his flesh. It even came with clothing, simple but deceptively soft fabric that he knew without further examination had to be a replica of the clothing his people had made and worn before the First War.
"Umi!" Jorick spotted the woman easily enough, thanks to the bond of magic that linked them together. He could feel a similar bond running between her and each of the other Immortals, thousands of them, and he understood immediately. "You daft bitch, you gave your own life to control the ritual, didn't you?"
Umi was wearing her natural face, youthful and vibrant rather than the mask of the hag that she'd preferred in life, but she was still able to pile mountains of scorn into a single raised eyebrow even without the aid of the wrinkles that had made her look dour as a default. "I did tell you that it would probably be necessary. It was that or killing someone else to control it, and who in the world would I trust with such a monumental task? I did, however, manage to irk the Speaker of the Dead with my death."
"Ah, well then, a fair enough trade I suppose." Jorick finally took the time to examine his surroundings and found they were standing on rooftops, with a small alleyway separating his from hers. This was Gencha, he knew it without even needing to look further. He'd always suspected Gencha would be the final battlefield, but his guess was of course aided by being able to feel the magical signatures of various hidden caches and laboratories that had apparently gone undisturbed since his exile. Undead creatures were swarming through the streets, and other Immortals were battling them with ruthless efficiency. In the alley below he saw the Siren of the Shadows, cackling as she tore apart skeletal beasts with he hands. On a rooftop not far away he saw the Tamer of Beasts, the newest addition to the ranks of the dead Immortals, firing arrows from a bow that seemed formed from the same silver glow that surrounded them all. In the distance, on the shattered city wall, he could see Scout of the Snow leading many of their brethren to hold the tide against the more sinister army of the living dead in order to give the mortals a chance to regroup. Many more, so many old and familiar faces, and he could feel all of the others scattered around the northern side of the city. There were only two missing, but he knew exactly where they were nonetheless.
"Are you done being a sentimental old man?" Umi's biting question was softened with the ghost of a smile on her lips. "We've still got some work to do, you know. The Lord of Destruction needs to be contained, and one of his abominations is still kicking to the east. Which one do you want?"
Jorick quickly felt out the situation with his own magic-enhanced senses and found much the same as Umi had described. "There was a third here. The Lady of Order. Or Chaos, I suppose." A shit-eating grin spread across his face, the grin that he knew made Umi want to punch his teeth out. "My experiment worked. You called me a perverted freak, but you can feel it too. That Dracari girl has an echo of Godslayer's power and used it to kill a god. Hah!" He pointed at her, still grinning, to emphasize the laugh. "You said it wouldn't work!"
Umi rolled her eyes at him. "Yes, yes, pat yourself on the back, one of your dozens of projects proved successful. Congratulations, you were not a
complete failure." Though her words were dripping with snark and venom, Jorick could see the amusement she was trying to hide. "Now, do you want the winnable battle or the futile one? You always were fond of pursuing futility, as I recall."
Two figures fell from the sky and landed heavily on a nearby rooftop. Rory looked as if he were actually a mortal rather than just wearing a suitable body, and like he hadn't slept in a week to boot. Diana was more composed, but even she stood leaning heavily on her staff. Even looking so worn out, Rory's voice was steady and confident as it had always been. "The winnable battle is already won. Can't you feel her heading that way, Umi?"
Now an actual smile appeared on her face, though of course it was made into something other than an expression of simple pleasure when paired with the mischievous look in her eyes. "I did, but I was trying to manipulate the fool into going out there anyway so we could fight the Lord of Destruction without having to deal with his grandiose blathering at the same time. Thanks for ruining my plan."
Rory bowed, an exaggerated courtesy, and had a more innocent smile on his own face when he stood straight once more. "My apologies. Unfortunately the Lord of Destruction is even more of a bother than we expected, and we will need the both of you and many of your fellows to even hope to hold him back."
"Wait just one fucking second." Jorick had been focusing his senses eastward, seeking out whoever they were talking about, and he found it when he realized what he'd thought was an anomaly in the field of magic in that area was actually moving. Such strange spots normally distorted any magic cast near them, and they were a rare byproduct of a mage using their own life force to fuel a final spell, but those were always fixed points. This one was very different indeed on a second look, and he wouldn't have even noticed it had he not spent years of his life studying those anomalies to try to find a way to weaponize them for use against gods. It was a subtle thing indeed, like spotting a pea under the bedsheet of a bed that was two miles square in size while you were being hung and spun upside-down above the center of it, but he was good enough to sense it anyway. A quick visual scrying showed the source was a mortal girl, a Neko, who was merrily prancing through a horde of monsters and making them explode without any apparent effort.
Jorick looked at Rory, brows drawn together in consternation. "What is that thing? It's mortal, certainly, but no mortal should be capable of that with an unbroken mind. Even I never mastered creating magic at a distance, and not even Umi can do motionless casting. What have you done?"
Rory gave him a smile and looked ready to launch into an explanation, but Diana cut him off. "He one-upped you. Your little dragon project was a good start, but he skipped the forced breeding and just fiddled with children in the womb. That one is the product of years of dedicated work from the shadows. In a very real sense, she is connected to magic itself in the same way that we gods are connected to one another and have a shared body of power." She looked over to Rory with a stern frown. "That should suffice. You would have gone on for an hour, and we don't have that kind of time."
"Ah, yes, I suppose that is an accurate enough brief version." Rory sounded disappointed, but he brightened up quickly. "Oh, and I conspired to get Kaga to meet your dragon girl and learn to copy the echoes of Godslayer in her draconic power. It took her about an hour and a half to work it out, and last I looked she had improved upon in greatly. She is my greatest achievement, I think, and I am confident that she will take care of the abomination of a god to the east."
On the one hand, Jorick wanted to be glad that the problem was already handled. On the other, he hated being so thoroughly outdone. He'd always aimed to be the best at whatever he set his mind to, and the fact that Umi had almost always outpaced him in the use of magic had been an endless source of frustration. Now what he had just thought of as
his greatest work had already been completely eclipsed. If he had the time he would seek to study the girl and figure out a way to do something even better than Rory, but alas, he was on borrowed time as it stood.
"You look like a kicked puppy." Umi's scathing voice brought Jorick's attention back from the depths of his own sorrowful contemplation. "If you have time to mope, you have time to do something useful instead. Let's go see if we can kick the Lord of Destruction in the teeth one last time before we're gone for good."
Jorick sighed and nodded. He took a moment to examine the battles, the pawns still on the field, and of course the most important pieces. The fights on the west and southern walls were going well for the defenders. The east wall was a stalemate. The undead swarming through the city had been overrunning the place, but the temporarily resurrected Immortals were handling them without much trouble. He could also feel Godslayer, far up in the sky; the woman who had it now seemed the capable sort, and it seemed she had figured out a major riddle of the prophecy that he'd failed to decipher. The sword was now a key, and she was preparing to take an airship out to find the lock it belonged to. In part of his mind Jorick has always hoped that he would be the one to fulfill the prophecy, that he would be the one to see whatever there was to see when that most sacred of doors was opened, but it seemed fate had other plans. There was, however, one thing he could sense that gave him pause. Or rather, two things.
"The two to the north..." Jorick looked at each of the others in turn, ending on Diana. "The Speaker of the Dead and the Warden of the Woods. I can feel their power from here without even trying. Was I correct, then? Is this the strength of the dead gods?"
Diana nodded, face set in grim determination. "The Lord of Destruction must have come to the same conclusions as you, though I believe he arrived at the idea of the power of gods being eternal after finding that consuming his fellows granted him their strength entirely. He told the Speaker of the Dead about this idea, communicating through one of the gaps in the seals, and guided him to seek a way to access it. It was all too successful." Her grimace took on an uncomfortable cast as she continued. "The only way to fight that particular fire is with more fire. I did what needed to be done."
Jorick sighed and looked northward. "Poor girl. She never did want to fight. Alas, we all do as we must. I hope she finds some peace when this is all over." The others murmured their sincere agreement, even Umi who normally avoided sincerity like the plague. "Well, there's no use standing here fretting over any of our many necessary evils. Let's get to work."
Umi led the way, calling on many Immortals to leave off the fight against the undead to join her. Soon they formed a small army of their own, hundreds of glowing Immortals and two ragged gods. Umi had been right about one thing: Jorick always relished fights that looked impossible and futile. Trying to stop the Lord of Destruction was exactly the kind of fight he would have sought out when he was alive, and he saw no reason for death and resurrection to change anything. They would do what they could to distract and contain the monstrously powerful god, knowing full well that distraction and containment were optimistic outcomes. Their job was simply to buy time for the new Guardian of Light to end this war, a war that was in truth a continuation of the First War that had only been postponed for millennia. It was time for this world to truly change, to fundamentally and radically enter a new age that was more than just a new chapter in the history books. All that remained to be seen was whether that new age would be forged by the Lord of Destruction or by mortal hand, and not even the gods could hope to foretell the outcome of either path.
As the ranks of the monsters thinned out, Kaga could directly see the god-monster waiting for her. She'd seen it before, through her scrying spell, but now that it was right there and she could feel its creepy strength up close she was even
more excited to fight it. It had healed its wounds at some point, but it hadn't returned to pretending to be just the Lady of Monsters. What had felt from the wall, for the brief moment the god-monster had revealed its real power, like jagged nails scraping against her senses was now more like a howling sandstorm trying to swallow her whole. Ozzie was saying something, but she didn't pay much attention until he shook her gently by the shoulder.
"Kaga." She blinked and looked at him over her shoulder. She had shared the connection to the scrying spell with him and he'd been quiet ever since Rissa died. "Can you beat that thing? Do you even stand a chance?"
"Nope." She kept on walking toward it anyway, blasting monsters out of the way without sparing them much thought. "It's way too tough to kill, so eventually I'll get too tired to fight and then it'll kill me. I have to fight it though." One of the things Fury had taught her, and that she had learned from other clan warriors by observation, was that once you started a fight it had to be finished no matter the outcome. She'd already decided she had to fight this god-thing, and killing so many of the monsters was basically starting the fight, so as far as Kaga was concerned it was impossible to back down. Learning that the god-monster was actually close to impossible to kill didn't change a thing.
"Alright. How about I help you, then, instead of just watching?" Ozzie obviously saw the scowl forming on her face, and he rushed to speak before she could respond verbally. "That god is basically seven people in one, so you getting help from one person isn't dishonorable or unfair. I'll only need to do one thing anyway, and then you can keep on fighting it by yourself."
Kaga chewed on her bottom lip as she thought about it. She did still have to fight, but did learning that the god-monster was actually seven gods in one body make it okay for Ozzie to help? That was a tough one. She could only think of one situation that was sort of similar to use as a guide: the time Fury went to duel a warrior of the Hydra clan over an insult he made to their Leopard clan chieftain, but when she showed up with just Kaga and a couple companions as witnesses there was an ambush of twenty men waiting for them. All four of them fought off the ambush, and Kaga had killed the man who had accepted the duel, but there was never any sort of rebuke or shame given for it. That probably meant it was okay to help someone when they were ambushed by more people than they expected to fight. That was close enough.
"Alright, but only for the one thing." Acceptable or not, Kaga didn't want to have
too much help. "What are you gonna do? Got a secret god-hurting word you learned in your book?"
"Something like that." Ozzie smiled, but it was a weird smile that she couldn't quite read. "I need you to promise me something first. Something very important and serious." Kaga squinted at him but nodded for him to continue. "If something happens to me, if I don't make it out of this fight, you need to lead the clans. It's going to be tough work, but Elle Joyner will help you. You're strong enough that all of them will follow you, every single man, woman, and child. They would've followed Fury if she wanted to lead, and you're at least as strong as she was, probably stronger. They're going to need that kind of strength to recover after everything that has happened. Can you do that?"
Kaga wasn't sure why he was talking like she was going to live though this fight, but it couldn't hurt to humor him. "Okay. But I'll make Elle do the boring leader stuff and I'll just fight anyone who wants to try to be the leader instead of her. I promise."
Ozzie chuckled and nodded. "Alright, that'll work. Thanks." He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and it was like he blew away a lot of his worries and stress with the air. He stood up straighter instead of slouching, his walk went from quick and choppy steps to stay behind her to long and confident strides to walk beside her, and he looked like he was ready to fight the god-monster himself. "Just let me know when you've finished playing with that thing and testing out your magic, then I'll do what I can."
Kaga nodded, now grinning as well, and hurried onward. She'd seen that kind of transformation before, and she knew exactly what it meant, which in turn gave her some understanding of why he wanted that promise from her. She still wasn't sure
how he was intending to die in this fight, but she figured keeping it a surprise was better. If she did live, she'd have to tell everyone how Ozzie died like a real warrior of the clan, and then maybe they'd be able to really forgive his past mistakes instead of just being afraid of his power. Dying in battle was the most honorable way to go, after all, and folks who did worse than accidentally kill a couple friends had been redeemed that way in the past. If he was ready to go, then Kaga was certainly not going to try to stop him.
They broke free of the last of the monsters and made it to the god-monster quickly. Rissa's lifeless body was laying in the grass undisturbed, looking almost peaceful. The god was standing just to the side of it, watching their approach with apparent confusion. Kaga could feel it trying to examine her, using some kind of unfamiliar magic that seemed like it was trying to look at how she interacted with magic itself, but as it pulled its spell away the god-thing's frown only grew deeper.
"I see why the Tamer of Beasts called you a mortal monster." The god-monster's voice was the same creepy chorus as Kaga had heard through her scrying, and it was still enough to send a little shudder down her spine. "You are some sort of living anomaly. That sort of connection to magic should not be possible. Did you somehow survive overloading yourself with magic?"
Kaga stopped where she was, about a dozen feet away from the god-thing, and shrugged. "I dunno. Rissa said I was a monster-prodigy though. I liked her." She looked at the body, then up to the god-monster. "I'm gonna enjoy killing you." Ozzie walked off to the side, likely to get out of the the way of their fight, and leaned against a tree as he watched them.
"I see." The god-monster spread its arms out wide. "You may try." Its many voiced were united in smug arrogance. Kaga didn't need any more invitation than that. She first tugged Rissa's body out of the way, sending it off to the side so it wouldn't get destroyed, and then threw everything she had at the god-thing.
She started off with something similar to the spell used to kill the Deep One, but it was much faster to form and much larger and it held a dirty secret within its glowing golden light. It cleared a wide swath of land behind the god-monster of trees and plant life, extending for nearly a mile, but she could tell immediately that it had quickly put up some kind of defense that left it only mildly singed by the attack. Next she formed a barrage of attacks from every angle, each one shooting out a streaking white star-like projectile similar to Kara's magic, but these also had some trickery woven in as well. While those were bombarding the god-monster, she little walls of fire race around the ground, heedless of whether or not they hit the god itself, for their purpose was to carve marks on the ground. When the rune was finished, a matter of mere seconds, she infused it with the same exact power she'd added to her other attacks, but this time it was the full package rather than being hidden inside something else. A pillar of golden light burst upward from the ground, easily ten feet in diameter, made up entirely of the god-killing particles she'd learned about from Kimberlyn.
The god-monster flung itself out of the rune, looking haggard and beaten by the deadly starshower, but it couldn't quite get out of the way in time and its legs were struck fully by the golden light. When it staggered to its feet, Kaga could see the little gold specks clinging all over its body, almost entirely coating its legs below the knee, and the god-monster's aura of power was already greatly diminished. She hadn't expected it to work this well, but then again all she'd had to use as a basis for comparison was the story of Kimberlyn using her dragonfire on the Lord of Destruction. Rather than little anti-god flecks in a torrent of fire, she was able to flood her attacks with them, which seemed to make a lot of difference.
"What the fuck are you?" The god-thing sounded both outraged and bewildered, which just made Kaga grin and quietly ready more spells. As the god talked she could feel something pressing hard on a particular shield she'd set in place after seeing what it could do, the one to protect her mind from manipulation, but it held fast. "A mortal shouldn't be able to do this. You're as much an abomination as I am."
"Yup!" Kaga finished her preparations for another round of attacks but hesitated to start them. "Are you gonna pretend you're hurt bad like you did with Rissa? You're not fooling me, you know."
The god-monster narrowed its eyes, but then it shook its head. "Clever little beast, aren't you?" The thing's body shook for a moment, like it had suddenly gotten very cold, and then the little flecks of god-killing power fell away like specks of dust. The sandstorm aura immediately went back to full power. "Do you still intend to fight me, knowing that your trump card is useless?"
Kaga nodded happily. "I gotta figure out how you did it, then maybe I'll be done." The god-monster tried to say something, but Kaga didn't care to hear it. Being told what was happening was no fun at all, and she didn't care about anything the god-monster had to say. She'd already carved a series of runes in the ground beneath her target, under the surface rather than on top of it, and she quickly set them off one by one. The first created a powerful barrier in a circle, the second pulled everything in that circle downward with thousands of pounds of force, and the third was another golden pillar made of god-killing particles. She let it go on for a solid minute, then let it go to find the god-monster surprisingly not pressed face first into the dirt: instead it had only been pulled down to one knee, and it was absolutely covered in the golden flecks.
The shaking thing happened again and they all fell away, so Kaga activated a fourth rune. This one was another pillar, but it was like Kimberlyn's dragonfire instead of being just the particles. When that one stopped the god-monster was blackened by the fire, but much less of the gold was stuck to it. It had been a test to see if something about Kimberlyn's fire made them more effective, but it seemed not to be the case. Those ones were shaken loose too, and the god-monster seemed to want to talk, but she activated a fifth and sixth rune instead of listening. One of them shot up a bunch of blades of pure magical force, and the other coated them in the god-killing power; she hadn't been able to figure out a way to combine them into one rune on the fly, she she had improvised a combination. When she let those go, the god-thing was a bloodied mess and the gold power was flowing through its veins, but the shaking made them all fall through its flesh as if there was nothing holding them in place.
"You little—" The god-monster tried to talk, anger clear in its choral voice, but Kaga shouted over her.
"Got it!" She pointed at the god-thing and shot a single little particle of god-killing power at it. "You've got all those gods inside you, and you can switch between which one's in front. The sparklies are only stuck to that one, and when you switch they break like a bee's stinger and they fall away. I bet you've been waiting to do it so I would see it, and you can really do it super fast so even if I hit you with everything I've got it wouldn't be enough because you'd keep switching."
"I'm glad you understand the futility of your actions now." The god-monster did indeed sound pleased, or at least a few of its voices did, but the others were still angry. Kaga was starting to be able to differentiate between the lot of them, and the one that was strongest, the one that was in control now, sounded very haughty and prideful as well. "I would offer some sort of mercy if you kneel and beg forgiveness for your impertinence, but you're too irritating to let live. Do try to put up a fight, hm? I love it when you mortals squirm."
The god-monster started hurling fireballs at her, and despite all the shields she quickly put into place she could feel the heat of them searing her skin. It did similar things as she had done, stuffing sneakier spells inside the big flashy ones, but Kaga was prepared for most of them. The attempts from Lady of Betrayal to get inside her head failed, and the touch of the Lord of Murder was deflected into the ground where it killed the grass, and the lightning from the Lady of Storms passed through a magical conduit in her arms that also threw them down into the ground. The ones that were harder to deal with were the rotting powers of the Lord of Decay and the brute force from the Lord of War. The anti-healing power was able to corrode the shields that were holding the fire back, and the powerful strikes of raw force were enough to shatter others. What had been a one-sided beatdown quickly flipped around and turned into Kaga desperately raising new layers of shields as fast as she could, but it quickly became clear that was a losing battle. She had some vague ideas for how to change that, but it was hard to think when she had to concentrate so hard on just staying alive.
"Halt!" Ozzie's voice rang out over the sound of roaring fire, and for a brief moment the god-monster actually
did stop moving. Kaga couldn't tell if it was because of his power or just out of surprise, but either way it was enough to make the god-thing stop entirely of its own volition and look at the man with a sneer on its face.
"You're even weaker than the girl. You have no place standing against me, weakling." It flicked a bit of fire in Ozzie's direction, but Kaga caught it on a hastily constructed shield. "Your miniscule droplets of godly essence in your blood will do nothing against my might. Begone, pest."
Ozzie barely spared the god-monster a glance as he walked up beside Kaga. "I saw you were having trouble. Mind if I step in and do what I came here to do?" She didn't have to think long about it; a little break from the onslaught was exactly what she needed to improve her defenses, so she nodded quickly. "Alright then." He went to step forward, paused, and leaned over to whisper to her. "Just for good measure, satiate. Remember your promise." The word of power filled her with energy, which was indeed welcome after she'd thrown so much at the god-thing. She just nodded again in response to the thing about the promise, then quickly got to work experimenting with new shields that would flex instead of shattering from a heavy blow and ones that had some healing magic woven into them to resist the decay.
Ozzie stepped in front of Kaga, and the god-monster laughed at him. "Very well, if you insist on dying first, be my guest."
"I do insist." Ozzie took another step forward. "You're broken. Wounded, really. That's what gives you your impressive power, isn't it? You broke yourself and shoved power from other gods into the cracks to make something whole."
The god-thing snorted with another laugh. "A gross oversimplification from an overly simple creature. Are you done babbling? I grow tired of this farce."
This time Ozzie laughed, and that was enough to draw Kaga's attention a little bit away from her work. He sounded confident, which was not at all what she expected. "Almost done. I just find it funny. I always thought
I was broken, that there was something wrong with me that gave me this power. It always seemed meant only to ruin things and to kill. I never thought I'd use it for healing, but it's quite fitting as a final act, I think." The god-monster lifted its arm to throw some fire at Ozzie, but he wasn't fast enough to stop the man from speaking a final word. "
Sacaria."
The fire struck Ozzie cleanly, but he was already dead and slumping to the ground. Kaga could see a silvery-blue light, which she could only assume was his spirit, flying out of his mouth and through the fire without stopping. It slammed into the god-monster and an inhuman scream erupted from it immediately. That same silvery-blue light poured out of its eyes and mouth and nose and ears, After a couple seconds there was a sort of thumping sound that was almost too low to hear, then a shaking sort of feeling that was not anything physical at all; Kaga realized after a moment that it was the god-monster's aura of power reacting violently to whatever was happening. A swirl of shining golden mist poured out of its mouth, then scattered and dissipated entirely. It was the power of a god, the Lord of War in fact, which Kaga sensed easily because for just that brief moment it was like the Lord of War had become its own entity before dying away.
More thumps and shaking and golden mist followed, one after another. The Lady of Betryal went next, then the Lord of Decay. The Lady of Storms followed after a long pause. Another long pause of nothing, and then the Lord of Murder came shooting out. Finally there were a lot of strange thumping sounds, and then the last of the extra gods came pouring out: the Lady of Monsters. The god-monster itself had said it wasn't sure who it had started as before it started eating other gods, and as it turned it out it seemed the Lord of Flames was the one left standing. The light faded away slowly and left the god standing there panting heavily, eyes wide and wild, with the entirely unimpressive aura of a single god in place of what had been an overbearingly powerful pressure. The monsters massed around the wall started howling and shrieking and fell to fighting one another; Kaga didn't have to turn around to see it, she knew from the sounds alone that with the power of the Lady of Monsters gone her thralls were returning to their normal, chaotically violent selves.
"Wha—" The Lord of Flames, the one with the haughty and prideful voice, now sounded hoarse and shell-shocked. "That mortal. He... I can remember everything, but like someone else was telling me a story. I ate the others, and then..."
"He fixed you!" Kaga walked forward confidently now, barely even bothering to put up shields in case the god started throwing fire at her. "You're real boring now. When you were a monster-god you were strong, but now you're weak."
"Stay back!" The Lord of Flames brought his hands up, wreathed in the orange glow of his namesake, but Kaga could see they were pathetic now. Maybe enough to kill a normal mortal, but definitely not a monster-prodigy-anomaly. She kept on walking forward and the god attacked, but the fire slid past her along her shields without even warming her up.
She sighed and shook her head. "Bye, boring god." He tried to say something, maybe to beg for his life, but she didn't care. The fight was already over, and Ozzie had been the real winner. She was going to have to make sure everyone knew what he had done, how he had saved the city and maybe the whole world with his sacrifice. Kaga made another column of fire spring up around the Lord of Flames, not even bothering with a rune to make it more efficient, and heavily laced it with god-killing particles. He was resistant to fire, but it didn't matter. Within a minute he was dead, first stripped of his power and then charred black and finally reduced to mere ash. She couldn't see his life going away like the others, but it felt exactly the same. It was a good ending to the fight, as far as telling stories about it went, but it wasn't really
satisfying.
Kaga turned to face the city and saw the horde of monsters still tearing each other apart. To not lose honor for letting someone else win her fight, she would have to to something to make up for it. She also wanted to play with her powers some more. She thought about it for a little while before deciding that killing one god and then thousands of monsters was good enough. Kaga formed a rough copy of the Lady of Monster's power, just enough to get their attention, and laid it over herself. The creatures calmed down and turned to face her, all of them at once, even those that had been in the middle of tearing their fellows apart. She beckoned them all impatiently with one hand.
"Come on, dummies, come try to kill me. I need to make a giant pile of your bodies to stand on. This is gonna be the coolest story!" The monsters all rushed her as she sent out the command in a more primal fashion, and she got to work slaying them all. It wasn't as glorious as killing a monstrous septagod, but it
was fun, and that was the most important thing as far as she was concerned.
The land for a long way around was a shattered mess. Grene struggled to keep hold of her own mind as she fought, resisting the corruption that had become obvious to her around the time the Speaker of the Dead started laughing like a maniac as he attacked her, but it was hard to do that and focus on the fight at the same time. She'd brought the fight to the ground by slamming Holm into it with a vicious elbow to the top of the head, sending him down to the mound of earthen rubble that was the remains of her pillars, and the maddened man had been content to fight there instead of returning to the air. He was wild and unpredictable, and Grene could feel that she was losing the fight slowly but surely. She was pouring everything she had into drawing on the noxious energy of the dead gods, coating herself in it until she felt like throwing up, but it wasn't enough.
The physical battle was not the true battle at all, just a manifestation of it: they were each drawing on so much of the power that they were now using it all and competing for it, engaged in a metaphysical tug of war to take power away from each other to hoard for themselves. Grene had gotten the upper hand for a bit when the Lady of Chaos died and she was able to snatch her power entirely before Holm could react, but then seven more gods followed not long after and he was able to grab hold of five of them. Now he was slowly but surely pulling bits of power out of her grasp, second by second widening the gap between them as he battered her with explosive strikes that left craters in the ground. A few times she'd dodged strikes meant to hit her after she was knocked over, and those misses had created wide fissures in the earth that added new hazards to the battlefield.
Ghosts drifted around in the air far above them as they fought. Grene wasn't sure when they'd started to appear, but there were so many of them that it was impossible not to see them even out of her peripheral vision. Some of them were vague blobs in the sky, others looked like a transparent but perfect copy of a living person's form, and she got the sense that the shapeless ones were far older. She looked up at them after Holm landed a solid kick to her stomach that sent her flying away until she landed a few hundred feet away sprawled on her back. They were watching the fight, that much was clear, and paying almost exclusive attention to the Speaker of the Dead than to her. Was it just the power of death that drew them to watch? If so, his greater and growing strength was a plausible explanation for their attention being drawn more to him. That didn't seem right, though. Only a few glanced at her now and then, but most stared at him in... anger? It was hard to tell, but they certainly did not look pleased.
Grene pushed herself upright just before Holm got to her, and the fight continued in much the same way, though she realized she was losing power faster and faster. The stronger he got, the more he was able to rip away from her at once. She was not sad to be stripped of the abominable power of the dead gods, but knowing that she had lost was depressing. Perhaps she would get lucky and the maddened beast that the Speaker of the Dead had become would kill Diana before there was any time to revive her again, thus freeing her to finally die without having to face the shame of resurrection as a failure.
After a couple minutes her power faded enough the she started to actually physically feel the impacts of Holm's attacks through her shell of power. It didn't take much longer after that for it to hurt, and soon after the first inkling of pain she felt her left forearm crack. The ghosts started to descend around that point, floating downward as one, but Grene didn't pay much attention to them. She started trying to dodge attacks rather than blocking them, but Holm was faster than her and that proved ineffective. He sent her flying again, and this time after she tumbled through the rubble-strewn ground she was left a scraped and bloody mess by the ordeal and had to struggle to stand again. Holm stalked toward her slowly now, a manic grin twisting his features through the ghastly haze of the light of death around him, clearly confident in her defeat and in no hurry to finish her off. Grene could not see any reason for him to think otherwise, as even remaining upright was difficult due to something having broken in her foot. Holm gathered a dense load of power in his right hand as he got closer, plenty enough to kill her in one hit now that her defenses were reduced to almost nothing. She let her eyes slide closed as she waited for the end to come, hoping that this time it would be permanent.
"Hey boss."
The words came from off to the side, and Grene opened her eyes to look for the source. She could see Holm had done the same, though his face had twisted into an enraged snarl. There was a ghost floating there, just above the ground. His features were slightly hazy, but still clear enough to make out what he must have looked like in life. Grene was startled to realize she recognized him.
"Dunru?" The ghost looked in her direction, blankly for a moment, then recognition came and he smiled and nodded. "I met you in the wilderness of the western continent. Many years ago. You were..." She thought for a moment, remembering the night they'd shared a campfire and swapped stories. "You were from C'box, and you were out trying to map the uncharted lands."
"Right you are." The ghost gestured toward Holm, who was staring at the ghost with no obvious comprehension on his face, just rage. "I ended up finding him. Or, well, his lair. I must've hit a trap or something, because one moment I was alive and creeping into an underground fortress of sorts and the next he was pulling me from my corpse. He controlled me for a long time, but now, well..." A grin spread across his spectral features, and it was not a pleasant expression at all. "I've learned a thing or two. It's funny how much you can learn when nobody thinks you're a threat. A creepy necromancer leaves his tomes unsecured, people talk as if you're not there, and even gods don't care about ghostly eavesdroppers. Now is as good a time as any to make use of all that knowledge. I've got a few hundred thousand friends here who'd like to air their grievances with the Speaker of the Dead, and he's not gonna like it." Dunru's expression softened into a more pleasant smile. "You be sure to keep hold of him until it's all over, alright? Looks like you're almost done for, so make your last act a good one. Just hold on until the lady with the sword does her thing."
Before Grene had a chance to respond, Dunru turned and charged at Holm, limbs moving as if he were solid and running along the ground. Holm swiped at him, but Dunru disappeared for a moment and reappeared behind him. For just a moment Grene could see something extending away from Holm's back, like a large, bone-white vine that was pulsing frantically. Dunru jumped into it and disappeared. That was apparently the signal for the other ghosts, and they rushed toward the Speaker of the Dead as well, many of them yelling as they did so. The torn-up land actually sounded like a proper battlefield as the ghosts swarmed and dove into that same strange white thing, one after another, quickly enough that it remained entirely visible for a long while. Holm thrashed and tried to attack the ghosts, but for each one he managed to hit there were dozens more that evaded his wild swings. It didn't take long for Grene to understand what was happening, for she could feel echoes of it herself: the ghosts were invading his connection to the dead gods and doing something to block his access to it. They were not just ripping it away from him and leaving it free for her to grab; she tentatively reached out to try and found that there was something blocking the way, some barrier that she couldn't sense until she was touching it, and it did not budge even a little when she pushed. The power she already had was left alone, but she could feel it as every little bit of the rest was sealed away.
Holm was left powerless. He wobbled and struggled to remain standing, and he seemed confused and devoid of the previous anger. Grene hobbled her way over to him, and when he looked at her she could see that his mind was still all but broken. His silver eyes had lost the gleam of intelligence and passion they had once held, now looking closer to those of an animal than a person who was once a paragon of virtue among her people. That was more depressing than Grene could possibly express, even in her own mind. It was something of a living death, an awful and unwanted life much like her own, and it was something she would never have wished on anyone. Holm tried to hit her as she walked up close to him, but his fist bounced harmlessly off of the remnants of power still clinging to her.
Grene shoved him to the ground, surprising herself with her own urge for violence. She supposed she hadn't gone unmarked by the power either, but she had not given everything to it like he had. It was a trivial matter to use the last of her stolen power to create chains to secure Holm to the ground, and once it was done she sat heavily in the dirt. The fight hadn't exactly ended, but she had more or less won thanks to the intervention of the ghosts. She supposed the lady with the sword had to be the new wielder of Godslayer, and Dunru must have learned something about the plans Diana had refused to elaborate on as they flew toward Gencha.
It didn't much matter, though. Grene's job was done, and now she just had to wait for death. She could tell that her injuries and Holm's own were enough to ensure death in time without any treatment, though their resilient Immortal bodies would keep them going for many hours yet. It was just a matter of time now, a matter of waiting to die and waiting to see how this war would finally end.
The airship sped away from the dock, leaving a motley group of bandits and a single soldier of Gencha behind to fight the undead things trying to climb the tower to slay them all. Allie stood at the prow, Godslayer in hand, and surveyed the city below as the ship passed over it. The undead creatures were spreading throughout much of the city now, but she could see glowing figures fighting to contain them. It was not an entirely successful effort, but it was better than nothing. The sword's power extended to examine one of them told her everything she needed to know: someone had managed to temporarily revive a ton of Immortals, maybe all of them, despite the supposed fact that bringing people back from the dead as anything other than ghosts or mindless walking corpses was supposed to be impossible. Those falling stars had been the Immortals being pulled back from death and given bodies, part of whatever magic had been done to make it possible. Rory had once mentioned something about there being so such thing as 'impossible' if one had enough determination and enough to sacrifice, and she supposed that might have been something of a hint about this very event being on the horizon.
The thing that most immediately drew her attention, however, was the Lord of Destruction. He had made it a fair way past the northern wall, which now had a huge gap in it, and she could see that was the source for the flood of undead where before she'd only sensed perhaps a couple thousand of the things inside the wall. There was a path of devastation left in his wake, buildings reduced to rubble and even the street itself torn apart. She could see a lot of Immortals down there fighting him, trying and failing to force him back, but it seemed they were at least impeding his progress quite a lot. Rory and Diana were down there as well, and she could sense something strange in the crowd of Immortals, but she didn't have time to investigate. Those three seemed focused more on suppressing the power of the giant god rather than physically trying to push him back, and as far as Allie could tell they seemed to be having more luck than the Immortals were.
The Lord of Destruction spotted the airship and made a beckoning gesture toward it. Despite the crew's attempts to fly well around the giant god, the ship was pulled almost sideways through the air toward him. Allie tried to use Godslayer to break whatever he'd done, but it was too late to matter. They were pulled within the god's reach, and he ignored the Immortals toa focus on it. He yelled out some words, but it was too loud to decipher it as anything but a roar. The Lord of Destruction swung his massive sword, much faster than should have been physically possible, and Allie hurried to deflect it. She was only partially successful: she knocked the sword to the side so it would not cleave the airship in two, but it took off a large chunk of the back end of the vessel. There was an explosion and the ship tilted to the right side, likely due to one of the crystals being broken, but it continued limping on through the air.
As the Lord of Destruction was winding up to strike again, Allie struck first. She gathered all of the power the enhanced Godslayer had to offer and shot it toward the god in a spear of purple light. It struck him right in the chest and made him stumble backward, leaving a nasty black burn mark, but that was it. The hit made the second sword swing go wide as well, clipping a portion off of the front right side of the airship, but it managed to hit the other crystal on that side as well. It did not explode, but the ship tilted dangerously to the side. Allie had to grab hold of the railing to keep from falling overboard, but a couple of the sailors were not so lucky and went plummeting down to the city below. Those remaining started shouting and scrambling around the ship, some using the posts of the railing like a ladder, but the general sense of panic seemed to be more about survival than staying in the air.
Allie could not let the airship fall. If it crashed now, it was all over. She wanted to try hitting the Lord of Destruction again, with something more subtle, but instead she spread the purple light of Godslayer along the broken side of the airship and heaved upward. The airship still listed to the side, but it was upright enough to remove the imminent danger of capsizing in midair. She called out to the sailors, who were still scrambling around preparing for the worst, and didn't bother trying to hide the anger in her voice. "Get us to Norlathel, damnit! If we crash, we damned well better crash on the mountain. Get to work!"
Nobody had the balls to contradict her, and it seemed her firm command was enough to get them to reassess the situation and see that the ship was not in fact about to fall from the sky. A couple of the sailors tied ropes to the railing near Allie and jumped over the edge, apparently headed down to look at the damaged but not exploded crystal on that side. The Lord of Destruction took a third swing at them, but this time a horde of Immortals jumped onto the blade to drag it down and make it miss entirely. Allie lifted her own sword to them in a sort of salute, and a few of them cheered and yelled things that were lost in the wind as the airship pressed on.
The trip to Norlathel from there was more peaceful, but everyone was on edge all the same. Allie diverted a bit of the sword's power to checking on the battles around the city, and she was pleasantly surprised by her findings. The abomination to the east was defeated entirely, and something had happened to all but neutralize the two to the north. She had feared the possibility of the Speaker of the Dead winning his fight against Diana's living weapon, for he would have been able to smash the airship without even trying and then everything would have been lost. If not for the gods and the other mystery person working to dampen the Lord of Destruction's power, he would have likely been able to do the same. She knew she was damned lucky to have made it through with just a horribly damaged airship, but now, beyond all reason, it seemed the path forward was clear to the end. Allie did not trust this for a moment, and she remained vigilant as the ship limped through the air toward the mountain looming to the north.
Her fears turned out to be entirely unfounded. The second crystal exploded about halfway to the mountain, but she was able to keep the ship in the air and only tilted to the side enough to make walking difficult. One of the sailors spotted something like a clearing about three quarters of the way up the mountain, a ledge covered in a dusting of snow, and the man at the controls aimed for that. He missed and landed hard off to the side of the ledge, and Allie had to scramble to yank the ship over onto the flat surface before it started tumbling down. It worked, but the airship struck with the sound of cracking wood, and she was flung over the railing and onto the stone below.
Allie pushed herself up with a groan, in pain but far better off than she would have been after a roll down the whole damned mountain. Others were picking themselves up or clambering out of the wreckage, and there were a lot of bruises and cuts, but nobody seemed to be too badly hurt from the harsh landing. Crystal called for the sailors to look into salvaging anything that might help them get back down the mountain, which they did with a healthy amount of grumbling and amicable insults, then headed over to Allie with a grim smile on his face.
"That was a bit more harrowing than I expected for a little ship ride to the mountain." He looked around the ledge they'd ended up on and the smile faded. "You know, if whatever you're supposed to find is actually at the base of the mountain, Gencha might be fucked."
"It isn't." Raven was standing a short distance away, staring up toward the peak of the mountain. "Allie, look. Familiar, isn't it?"
She walked over beside him and followed his line of sight to figure out what he was staring at. There was nothing special that jumped out at her, but it was a bit odd for the top of a mountain, that was certain. It went most of the way up as one would expect, but then it was like a large chunk of the tip had been carved out to make a flat space, leaving a sort of wall on one side of the flat area. That looked just like... "Soulathel?" She shook her head at it. "No, not quite the same, but almost. I knew they were supposed to be related, but I didn't think they'd look damn near the same."
"Nor did I." Raven pointed up to the flattened part. "If this were Soulathel, that would be where Godslayer was sealed away. I think Jorick left it there as a clue. I think we've got to go up there." Crystal grumbled about the need for climbing with no gear, and Raven started saying something about scouting the way up, but Allie waved them both to silence.
She held Godslayer out, pointed up to the top of the mountain, and made a simple request of it. The message from Diana had said that the sword would guide her to the source, that mysterious thing that needed to be severed according to the prophecy. Allie reached out to the power within the sword and though of it making a path, showing the way to whatever it was she needed to find. The sword immediately dipped downward, pulling harder than gravity would account for, until it was pointing down toward the center of the mountain rather than the top. Purple light spilled forth like water from the tip and raced forward. Despite the strange dip in the sword, the path of light hit the side of the mountain and went up, brushing aside snow and years of accumulated dirt as it did so, creating a very clear path that zigzagged back and forth until it reached that plateau atop the mountain and continuing on past that. Allie could feel it moving downward, into the mountain itself, all the way down until it was somewhere in the general area the sword was pointing to.
Where the light had passed, Allie was very surprised to see that there had been something other than plain stone beneath what had apparently been a thick layer of dirt. A strip of white stone bricks led to a very old and worn set of stairs, eroded to the point that it was more like a bumpy slope than proper stairs, and those had been made of the same white stone. On a whim, Allie sent a quick pulse of Godslayer's power out to scour one whole side of the ledge to see how far the stone went. It went all the way to the very edge. With a little more exploration, hurling flat panels of dirt off the side to clear the way, she found that what had looked like a natural ledge had in fact been an entirely unnatural structure, a platform
built onto the side of the mountain. The sailors had stopped working to stare, and she didn't blame them. Raven wordlessly led the way forward, followed by Crystal (who was looking around with keen interest at all the newly revealed stone), and Allie trailed behind. The power in the sort felt odd, jumpy almost, like it was eager to act, and nothing she could think of was able to make it calm down.
The climb upward was not nearly so bad as it had looked at first. The path marked by Godslayer had once been a path laid into the mountain by whoever had built the platform, all done in white stone, aside from the weather-worn stairs it made a perfectly walkable path. They needed to use their hands to get up the stairs, but otherwise it was like they were taking a stroll on a city street. They crested the top after about ten minutes walking up the winding path, and they found that Godslayer had revealed even more white stone as the floor of the flat area. Allie did not bother clearing this area as she had the other; it was obvious that the whole thing would be white bricks, and she didn't feel like wasting the time ogling at it. The path led right to the wall of sorts on the far end of the plateau, what would have been just one section of the peak of the mountain had it all gone up to a proper point instead of ending where they were standing.
The white stone stopped at a section of rock that looked just the same as any other, and they approached it to find that it was indeed as solid as it looked. Raven and Crystal looked to her and stepped away from it. Allie stepped up and tapped Godslayer against the wall, thinking perhaps it was an illusion that needed to be broken with a god's power, but that didn't work. The power inside the sword did something very strange, though: it reached out and grabbed
her. It felt like she was being shaken hard by a ghost, and it was damned unsettling. She tentatively took hold of the power with the intent to ask how to open the way, but there was no need. Godslayer showed her without needing to be asked, as if the power inside the blade truly had a mind of its own now. It showed her a quick image of purple light flashing in the shape of a hand just to the side of where the white path ended, and then the rock wall melted away to reveal a passage beyond.
Allie was a little creeped out by the sword suddenly having some kind of active intelligence, but there was no time to really worry about it. She went and placed her hand where it had shown her, but nothing happened so she added a jolt of Godslayer's power. A rectangular portion of the stone shuddered for a moment, then melted away like water, just as the vision had showed her. There was no rubble or anything left behind; it was as if that stone had simply ceased to exist. The newly opened doorway revealed a passage made of rough stone that extended a few feet before hitting the top of some stairs. Here, unlike elsewhere, Godslayer's power had not revealed a true floor underneath what seemed to be stone. She could see right where the white stone ended, exactly at the point where the door had been, and beyond it was a roughly carved grey stone floor and similarly rough walls. Godslayer sent her another vision of its own volition, this time of people walking down the stairs and gazing about in awe. Allie understood that to mean that the people who made the white stone things, gods most likely, had intentionally left this area as it was, perhaps out of some sort of reverence. Godslayer's power seemed to hum with agreement at the thought.
She led the way downward without speaking a single word, and Crystal and Raven followed her lead. She did not know if they felt the same way, but to her it seemed that speech was unnecessary. There were no choices to be made, there was no need to deliberate, and there was no reason to delay. They had to press on no matter what happened, and so they did. It took Allie a minute to realize that she could see perfectly fine despite the fact that it was night time they had descended into what should be a dark place. There were no obvious sources of light but everything was visible. Some kind of magic, perhaps, but again Allie decided not to bother thinking too hard on it. It would have been more concerning if this place, the apparent end goal of a prophecy that seemed to have radically altered the course of history by way of people working so hard to see it fulfilled,
wasn't practically brimming with strange power.
The trek down the lazily spiraling stairs took a while, but it was hard to gauge time exactly. It had to be at least fifteen minutes by Allie's count, but it could have been twice that or more for all she knew. On and on it went, until finally the stairs stopped. They opened up into a circular room about twice the height from floor to ceiling as the stairs had been, and about as wide across as the platform atop the mountain had been. It was all the same bland grey stone, rough and craggy rather than smooth, and there was only one interesting feature about the room. In the very center of it there was... something. It was hard to tell if it was just a beam of light or if it was something that glowed. Whatever it was, it ran from floor to ceiling and seemed to sway in a non-existent wind. Though it looked like it was some sort of bright light, it did not cast any actual illumination. The visibility was exactly the same as it had been coming down the stairs, and it did not create any shadows. It was like someone had woven pure light into a fabric, with all the apparent brightness with none of the illumination.
Godslayer pulled Allie forward, and as it did so it gave her more visions. In one people seemed to be waking up in this very same room, all of them looking quite confused. The vision shimmered a bit, and then the same people were gathered around the light, kneeling face-down on the floor around it, clearly worshiping it. The scene shifted and she could see the same figures sitting casually around the room and talking with one another in small groups, but now faces became recognizable. She could see Rory in there, and one she recognized as Diana as well. Off to one side, Godslayer highlighted a beautiful woman with a radiant smile; Allie recognized her from the vision Rory had given her when showing her how to use the sword's power. It had to be the Lady of Mercy, and of course that meant all the others were gods as well. The scene shifted again, and this time there were gods standing on two sides of the room, each group with one representative arguing about something and gesturing to the light as they did so. Diana stood to the front for one side, and the man at the head of the other was another she recognized: the Lord of Destruction, with a face almost identical to that of the giant form he'd taken to assault Gencha. The scene changed again, and this time Allie was given the sense that they had moved a long distance; now she saw the top of a mountain, Soulathel, and the gods were all gathered around in ranks in a circle, many hundreds of them all told. They were working together to make something, and in the middle of the circle people were being created out of thin air: the first Immortals. Godslayer went quickly through what followed, showing flashes of growing enmity and strife, then the first monster attack, and all the hardship that came afterward.
Finally, after the quick run through history, it returned to the vision of the room Allie was standing in. It showed a glowing pair of arms reaching out of the light and
making the sleeping gods, then retreating before they woke. There were little threads of that ran from the light to each of them, and those threads seemed to give them power. It jumped to the scenes of war, to a dying god, and showed golden mist flying away across the world to return to this room. That image repeated many times, and with a sense of time passing the image of golden mist floating around the room slowly darkened and turned sickly. Godslayer then showed her an overlarge version of the Speaker of the Dead reaching into the room and stealing the dark energy away. Finally, it showed her a vision of Godslayer's blade slicing through the light, and then all the dark mist vanished entirely. A sense of uncertainly hovered around that last one, and it fluctuated to a couple alternate versions that included the whole world exploding and those glowing arms reaching out to throttle Allie, but those were uncertain as well.
It was, all in all, a very oversimplified explanation. Allie knew that much, but it was enough to get the point across. She knew now that this final task was not going to be as straightforward as she might have hoped. Some part of her had thought that the prophecy was all about attaining power great enough to defeat the evil gods, but that wasn't the case at all. The prophecy intended for something else to happen, but she could not quite put her finger on it. She walked to within a few feet of the light, stopped, and turned round to face Crystal and Raven with Godslayer held lightly in her hand with the point resting on the floor.
Allie quickly relayed what she had learned, what the remnants of the Lady of Mercy had showed her, and then got to the crux of the issue at hand now that they knew what was needed. "The prophecy seems to say that motivation and intent matters for this. Three of us ended up in this room, and it talks about three different sorts of people." She held up one finger as she quoted the first line of the last portion of the paragraph. "Let not an evil heart bear the key lest the Age of Shadows rule forever." She put a second finger up. "Let not a good heart bear the key lest the Age of Nothing swallow all." Finally, a third finger. "The lock must open to one pure of cause and free of doubts, for only then shall the twilight of the gods pass in peace and glory." She let her hand drop to join the other on the hilt of Godslayer. "This is the key. One of us has to cut through that light, and then... I don't know that's supposed to happen, but if the right person does it I think this war will be over."
"I think it's simpler than you're making it out to be." Crystal gestured to the light with a chopping motion. "Cut that thing in half and I bet it
will just give you the power to stop the evil gods. Probably enough to take them all on at once, I bet. If whoever does it just wants to have the power to stop the bad ones, that's probably enough to count as pure of heart or whatever. I'll handle it." He reached for the sword, but Raven grabbed his wrist.
"You are wrong." Crystal rolled his eyes, but Raven spoke on. "This source, it is exactly what it sounds like. It's the source of the power of the gods, and maybe the source of everything in this world, in fact. Perhaps it can be cut in such a way as to eliminate evil entirely, without needing power to crush it yourself. That would bring about an age of peace and glory, I think."
"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard." The Kitsune pulled his hand away roughly. "Look, the prophecy shit is all about stopping the Lord of Destruction and his evil pals. All that requires is more power than they've got. You're talking about trying to change the whole damned world."
Raven shrugged one shoulder. "The world has been drastically changed before. Jorick and Umi changed the course of history by giving mortals greater control over magic, all with one ritual and a powerful sacrifice. Perhaps crafting the sword was to make it a suitable sacrifice, and traveling here to sever the source is the ritual needed for this change."
Crystal rolled his eyes again and continued arguing against that notion, but Raven did not back down. They bickered with absolute certainty in their positions, but Allie stood there quietly trying to figure out why they both felt completely wrong. Slaying the evil gods would just send their power to join that of the other dead gods, perhaps to be used for more evil in the future. Removing all evil from the world sounded like one of those wishes from a genie tale that ended up ruining everything. There had to be a simpler solution. An elegant solution. Something straightforward that would solve all of the problems and let her go back to her peaceful life. There had to be...
Allie blinked and stared down at the sword. She had it, or rather the Lady of Mercy inside Godslayer had showed her what needed to be done. She hadn't realized it at the time, but hearing Raven and Crystal arguing their opposing ideals had made it click in her mind. It had been unintentional on the god's part, she was sure, and she had a feeling that if the god had realized it then she would have hesitated to show her that particular vision. The sword vibrated with worry in her hand, but it was too late now. Allie lifted the sword and spun round in a smooth motion, blade headed straight for the light. Raven and Crystal cried out in confused dismay, and she could feel them reaching out to stop her, but they were far too slow. It had always been her duty to fulfill, and on some level she had known it ever since Godslayer chose her. She knew what had to be done now, and she had no doubt in her mind.
The sword passed cleanly through the ribbon of light and everything went dark. For a moment she was afraid she'd made a huge mistake, that this was the Age of Shadows the prophecy warned of, but the darkness was quickly filled with swirling colors. They swarmed around in different patterns, reconfiguring an uncountable number of times per second, and they gradually formed some recognizable shapes. The colors cycled through a dizzying array of configurations, some seeming welcoming and warm and others tending toward dark and horrifying, but eventually they settled into something that was unsettling in how very mundane it was.
A man sat in a plain wooden chair, which stood upon a plain white floor. He was surrounded by a dazzling array of little specks of light, each floating a few feet away from him and dancing around him seemingly in response to the tiniest motion of his eyes or hands. Beyond the lights there was nothing, not even shadow and darkness; somehow Allie could tell that it was
nothingness, a pure void in which nothing existed. She was standing just beyond the swirling cloud of lights with only darkness under her feet, and the cloud parted as she hurried forward to escape that disturbing void to reach the floor.
The man in the chair looked away from his lights to examine her. He did not seem surprised to see her, but then he did not seem pleased or displeased either. There was no emotion on that face, but the eyes were very troubling. At first they seemed dark pits, then like mirrors of the void that had frightened her, but after a while she could see little flashes of light deep within like stars twinkling through the gaps of storm raging storm clouds. He looked like a human, but he was clearly something more. More than an Immortal, more than a god. When he looked at her it was like he was seeing all the way through to the bits and pieces that formed her soul, like he was deconstructing her and reassembling her with mere thought. While he looked like a human, his features seemed to subtly shift and change every time her eyes moved, as if his body could not decide how exactly it wanted to be shaped. She wished she had something to defend herself with, but she realized at that moment that Godslayer was gone.
"Have no fear, child." The man's voice was deep and soothing, and it put Allie in mind of her kindly grandfather. "If I wished you harm then I wouldn't have taken the effort to show you forms you could comprehend." Allie remembered the uncomfortably shifting colors and realized that it must have been something closer to a view of the man's true form than what she was seeing now. He smiled and nodded, as if he'd read her thoughts. "Yes, but whatever you saw at first was only your mind's best attempt to comprehend that which is too vast for it to truly comprehend. And you're wondering now if I'm inside your mind and rifling through your thoughts. There's no need for that, and frankly it takes all of the fun out of these meetings. Every entity that has made it here to see me has asked the same questions, that's all."
Allie swallowed and tried to choke back her fear. "Who are you? What are you?"
The man smiled, but it was hard to tell if he was truly amused or merely humoring her due to the lack of comprehensible eyes to look into. "Those are part of the same universal questions. One moment." He lifted a hand and held one finger up in front of his face. One of the specks of light floated down to rest upon it, and with it separated from the rest Allie could see it was a vibrant blue like the sea on a clear summer day. The man examined it for a moment, then nodded. "I see. Your world is one of those that almost forgot me. No matter." He looked past the bit of light and into her eyes. "You have heard mention of the Creator. The historian from your settlement, the bipedal reptilian one, has mentioned it in your hearing. I am the Creator. A rather on the nose name, but then I didn't take particular care in imbuing the firstborn on your world with creativity."
Allie stared at him and just tried to process what he'd said. It was something that should have shocked her, but in truth she came to grips with it almost immediately. It made sense. She'd never paid close attention to Tari's rambling about the history of the gods, but she did recall that the gods had believed the Creator made them and the world. The source, then, would naturally be something to do with the Creator. She nodded slowly, eyes on the speck of light that was apparently her entire world. "Then you must know why I'm here."
"Oh, of course." The Creator smiled again, looking up from the miniscule world on his fingertip to catch her gaze with those endless holes for eyes. "There is a failsafe in every world, you see. I don't abandon my creations, I simply let them exist on their own until they have need of me. It seems your world discovered one of the more tragic ways to activate it. The life of a firstborn doused with the blood of innocents and sealed with the etchings of creation. Very nasty, and your world is in great peril for that particular key to have presented itself." He looked back down to the little light and shook his head. "How unfortunate. This may be the most corrupted world yet."
Allie wasn't exactly fond of hearing that her world was some kind of failure, but she pressed on anyway. "Then fix it. It would be easy for you, if you make whole worlds like this. You could clean up the whole mess in and instant, right?"
The Creator looked at her again, face smooth and impassive. "I could simply will it so and it would be, yes. But I won't." He flicked his finger and sent the blue light back to join the cloud of its countless peers. "You, keybearer, are here because the spirit of your world," he paused and glanced back toward where the light had gone before continuing, "the entity you call fate, chose you for this task. I no longer intervene with my creations unless the failsafe has been activated, and then it is up to the keybearer to decide what is best for their world. I will grant you one request, child, a specific request mind you, and you and your world shall reap the consequences." The kindly grandfather voice had turned stern, and Allie understood that no argument would be permitted.
This was fine, though. She had known what needed to be done when she swung the sword, after all, so she just had to request that... right?
For a moment she felt like all of existence shuddered around her, and then like she'd been split into three pieces. The Creator smiled at her, this one very clearly intended not to convey humor. "The words of fate that brought you to me spoke of three possibilities. They were, it seems, the outcomes that might occur depending on which of the three who reached the source was the one to use the key. Speak your request, child, and I will show you the paths you have avoided. Perhaps it shall serve as an edifying lesson that you may share with your world, that the spirit of the world was put in place for a reason and ought to be heeded to avoid further catastrophe." His humorless smile grew wider. "Assuming you are not the final catastrophe, of course."
Allie nodded and took a deep breath. This Creator, for all his power and seemingly alien nature, was remarkably easy for her to understand in this moment. He simply enjoyed experimenting with new things to see how they would turn out. Taunting her with the alternate possibilities was just another experiment, but to what end she couldn't be sure. It didn't matter. She had to do this, and she would live or die with the consequences.
"I've always just wanted to live a happy life. I'm not a fool though, I know hardship and struggle are part of living. I figure there's one obvious thing keeping my kind, mortals, from being able to truly control our own lives and be happy in the long run, so I know what I need to request from you, Creator." Allie looked straight into the infinite cavities where his eyes should be, standing firm and unflinching despite how they made her want to throw up. "Remove all the power of the gods, your firstborn, from my world."
For the first time, Allie thought she could read actual emotion on the Creator's face. His face drooped, and his eyebrows drew together in consternation. He was... sad. "I see." He beckoned the blue light back to him and let it rest upon a fingertip once more, frowning down at it. "That is the first time anyone has made such a request. There have been hundreds of keybearers, but they always..." He shook his head and sighed. "You shall see."
Allie felt like she'd been tugged sharply to one side by her hair, and suddenly she was seeing a hazy image of Crystal standing before the Creator and speaking to him, standing defiantly with his arms crossed over his chest. "Give me the power to kill the the gods myself, you creepy old bastard." The Creator laughed and flicked a finger at the Kitsune, hitting him with some kind of energy that flung him back out into the void. She saw flashes of Crystal flying through the air back to Gencha, then crushing the Lord of Destruction with ease. The Speaker of the Dead came after him some time later, but even that monstrous power he'd taken from the dead gods was nothing before the Creator-granted might. Years passed and Crystal grew violent and disturbed. Within a few decades he ruled mortals with an iron fist, making them all into little more than slaves to serve his whims, and the last Allie saw was of his shadow falling over them all.
Another tugging sensation in the other direction left her watching another hazy image, this of Raven peering up at the Creator with awe in his eyes. "Please, great Creator, take everything that's evil, everything that does harm, out of my world so that we can all live in peace together." The Creator sighed with disappointment but did something to the blue speck all the same, then sent Raven back into it. The land was bleak and barren, flat and featureless as far as the eye could see. Allie understood: nothing was purely good and purely harmless, so taking it all away meant taking
everything away. She saw flashes of Raven wandering despondently through the empty landscape until he eventually collapsed and tried to die, but ages passed and death never came, leaving him living forever in his world of nothing.
Allie finally snapped back to herself and saw the Creator finishing up his work on her world. He still looked quite sad, but when he spoke there was something like pride in his voice. "It is a novel solution, child. I don't care for the idea of a world lacking the firstborn to tend to it, but perhaps it will be interesting. The spirit of your world chose its keybearer well, I think." He waved a hand in her direction and she could feel herself being shoved out of this strange place, this area outside of and between the worlds, and back to her own. "Try to teach your fellow mortals to appreciate this gift you have given them. Live well, Allie."
Everything reverted to the strange colors, then the darkness, and then she was back in the her own world in the same instant she'd left it. Raven and Crystal reached her in time to halt her swing only after Godslayer had passed through the light. All their eyes were locked on the sword, and they saw its light die out. A golden mist spilled out of the blade, but it quickly took a humanoid shape and shifted to a more grey-ish color, then dissipated entirely.
"What did you do?" Raven sounded frantic, and as he moved to take the sword from her she let him have it. It was no more than a regular sword, now.
"Are the gods dead? Did you kill them all or something? How'd you do it?" Crystal sounded eager and excited by the prospect.
"It's complicated." Allie looked at the ribbon if light, standing totally unharmed despite the sword passing through it. "I think... I think there are no more gods, now. I think he changed them. Brought them down to our level." They both asked her questions at once, but she held up a hand to quiet them and headed for the stairs, speaking to them over her shoulder as she did so.
"The gods are done for. Their power is gone, but I think the Creator couldn't bring himself to totally destroy them, so he did the next best thing. He made them mortal."
Grene was a little worried when she felt the power of the dead gods disappear, but it was probably for the best. She was more concerned with the sudden pain wracking her body. It was like something had been pulled out of her, and now she was dying much faster than she had been before. She looked over to Holm and saw his eyes were no longer those of a feral animal. Whatever had just happened, it seemed it had also reverted the damage he'd done to himself.
"I lost." His words came out in a weak voice just barely louder than a whisper. Grene nodded, though she wasn't entirely sure that was the case just yet. "Good. Now I can finally rest."
"Yeah." Grene slumped over onto her side, struggling to pull in a breath though the pain of her shattered ribs. "Rest. Good idea."
They died within minutes, after laying there silently near each other with their animosity discarded, but fate was not quite ready to let them rest.
The fight against the Lord of Destruction came to an abrupt end. One moment he was pressing forward, ignoring the revived Immortals and smashing buildings, and the next he let out a pained roar and fell to one knee. Spurts of golden mist flew out of his mouth, dozens of them, and each faded into a silver-grey before vanishing, and the Lord of Destruction's form shrunk with each departure. Umi watched with great interest. She had not been at all sure of what the fulfillment of the prophecy would entail, but she'd had some ideas. All the gods dying had been her favorite guess, but this was far more intriguing. The power of the gods being ripped from the massive form were being converted into mortal souls, or at least a close enough approximation as made no difference, and they were being pulled into the mortal realm of the dead. When she'd seen gods die in the past their power had simply vanished from her senses, off to somewhere that she had never been able to find. This was most certainly new, and the implications were staggering.
Two more star-like streaks of light fell hastily from the sky, faded and guttering lights that used up the very last bits of power remaining to Umi's ritual, and landed nearby. The people that stepped forth from the resurrection pods both looked bewildered and more than a little upset.
"Oh gods, not again." Grene looked down at her new body in horror, then around at all the other Immortals standing there, many of which had been dead for ages long past. Her face screwed up in confusion, but it quickly smoothed out in understanding. "Ah. Not Diana, this time. I guess I won't have to throttle her. What is this?"
Holm answered her, voice tight with some restrained emotion. "The Witch of the Water's last trick. I see now." His eyes found hers in the crowd, and what she saw in them was mildly surprising: fear. "You've gone and altered the laws of reality again, haven't you? First the mortals and magic, now this."
"Yes." Umi smiled at him, the smile she knew looked smug and condescending at the same time. "But my little trick was not much at all, in the grand scheme of things. You should be far more concerned about that." Holm's gaze followed her pointing finger, and his eyes practically popped out of his head when he saw the Lord of Destruction, now the size of a human, there on his hands and knees without a shred of godly power remaining in him. He was still alive, but he was mortal through and through. Holm's jaw moved, but no sound came out.
A hand gently pushed Umi aside, and she let Diana and Rory step in front of her. They, too, were mortal now. "This isn't the end of it, though." Diana motioned around to the gathered Immortals with her staff. "All of you were made as reflections of us. That which gave you endless life was the power of the gods."
Jorick barked out a laugh. "We're becoming mortals too!" He stepped out of the crowd and held up an arm. "Look, the light of the magic is fading, but we're not going away. Know what that means?" He grinned and looked around at the others, but most just stared at him with a mix of horror and confusion.
"It means this resurrection was not as temporary as intended." Umi looked at her own hand, and she could see the silver light was indeed fading. Their bodies should have started to fade with it, but here they stood, whole and fine. "Ah, yes, I see. The ritual itself was predicated on the power of the gods. With that stripped away, it seems its purpose could not be fulfilled. We've cheated death, just this one last time before becoming mortal. How fitting."
"No!" The voice was deep and full of venom. All eyes were drawn to the Lord of Destruction as he stood, face contorted in rage. "I will not accept this. This changes nothing. This world must still be purged and remade. I will fix this, I will take my power back and I will—"
He was cut off mid-sentence by a streak of light that pierced his throat. Holm walked forward, driving the magical blade deeper and through the back of the former god's neck, until he was face to face with the man. "It's over. We lost, but you don't deserve a chance at redemption. Enjoy the realm of the dead." He pulled his hand away and the Lord of Destruction fell to the ground, dead in moments. Nobody lifted a hand to even try to save him.
Holm, however, lifted his hand up to his own throat and closed his eyes, obviously intending to pass the same sentence on himself. Some cried out in dismay as they realized what he was doing, but Umi simply watched with a faint smile on her face. He stood there, hesitating, and she knew it would take him a while to work up the nerve... but he wouldn't get there. Any second now, someone would intervene. Umi felt her coming from behind and stepped aside to let her pass, as did the others who stood in her way.
"Stop!" Holm's eyes snapped open and the color drained from his face. Standing there before him, hands balled into fists and resting on her hips, was the Lady of Hope. She had made herself into an Immortal, and so she too had been brought back by the ritual. "What exactly do you think you're doing? Did you lose your mind entirely when I died? I swear, you are the most overly dramatic man who ever lived." Chiding and irritated though the words were, there was an obvious note of affection there as well.
Holm's hand dropped to his side, and he stared at her with shame clear on his face. "I.. the things I've done. I can't... I don't deserve..."
"Nonsense." The Lady of Hope walked up to him and grabbed him firmly by the jaw, forcing him to look her in the eyes. "Your death would be a coward's escape. You will live and you will atone for what you've done. You will dedicate your life to helping the mortals, our own people now, rebuild and restore what was lost. You may never fully make up for what you did, but you will certainly try. Only then, after you've worked yourself to the bone in atonement, are you allowed to die. Understood?"
Holm stared at her, and even Umi could not make out the complicated swirl of emotions in his eyes. "Yes." The word came out as a hoarse croak. Tears filled his eyes and the Lady of Hope pulled him into a hug, stroking his hair and murmuring in his ear as he wept on her shoulder. There was no privacy to be had, standing there in the middle of the wrecked street, but most had the decency to look away.
In the shuffle of people moving away and mingling amongst themselves, Umi saw Diana pull Grene aside. The Warden of the Woods still looked distraught about her new life, but the former god spoke to her gently and led her away from the crowd. Perhaps she would be able to convince Grene to abandon her death wish, and perhaps not. Umi suspected that many would choose to take their own lives in the near future, for many would be unable to cope with becoming mortal, but there was nothing to be done about that. They would live or die of their own free will, and that was perfectly fine so far as she was concerned.
"The undead are back to just being dead!" The voice preceded the appearance of the Scout of the Snow, who came bounding up over some of the rubble. "Seems like they were animated with that dead god power, and with that gone they all just collapsed. It's real nasty, lots of corpses all over the place, but the fight's done." A cheer went up through the crowd, and another soon thereafter when an Immortal hurried in from the east to report that the monsters had been mostly killed by some girl and the others had fled from the city. Some went to seek out mortals who had hidden from the fight, to tell them it was over and to inform them that the world was now a very different place.
Rory laughed and elbowed Jorick lightly in the ribs. "Hear that? She's a monster-slayer too, not just a god-slayer. I wonder if your dragon girl could kill an army of monsters. Did you throw any of your own power into the dragon breeding process? Might be your creation is just a normal person now, but mine should still have all her powers since I just tweaked things from the outside. How's it feel being one-upped?"
Jorick grumbled and shoved him away. "Yeah, yeah, you won. Damn it. My creation should still have all the dragon components, just no more anti-god power since that was copied from Godslayer." His face quickly brightened. "But now I've got a chance to improve on
your design. Hey, I bet now that you don't have all your god powers, I'm probably stronger than you. I still know how to use regular magic, but you relied on the godly nonsense, didn't you?"
They looked ready to get into a full on dick measuring contest, but Umi's sudden cackle drew their attention. "If it's down to just magic, I'll make you both look like fumbling children. Don't go bragging about your prowess when you're just a second-rate mage, fool." The both of them rose to the bait and started talking about their own skills and how they would beat her now, and Umi obliged them with more combative banter.
She was feeling oddly free, like she could lift up off the ground and go flying around at a moment's notice, a sensation that she hadn't felt since before the First War. She had no burdens or obligations, no duty to fulfill, no grand purpose. This was a new life, a new world for all it looked the same, and now she was just a mortal. There had been so many things she felt
had to be done because she was an Immortal, and because she had the power to do them, but now that was over with. She could live her life, these last limited years, seeking only to enjoy them rather than seeking to stave off doom and destruction. Perhaps she would allow Rory to join her in that life of ease, perhaps not. The sheer fact that the future was so uncertain, that she now felt like she had the luxury to take the time to choose what course her life would take, was liberating indeed.
It was the dawn of a new age, and everything seemed fresh and new to Umi. She was unsure of what it would be called. This was now truly the Age of Mortals, where the previous use of the term had been a misnomer, but she suspected that only historians and the like would care to make the distinction. The Godless Age? Perhaps. The Age of Peace was too foolish, but she was quite certain some would propose it. Whatever name it was given, Umi was pleased to be alive to be a part of it. Death would come for her in time, a prospect that she was sure would haunt many of her fellows as they aged and the certainty of death became a reality, but until then she would live free of all the burdens that had so weighed her down. She no longer felt the need to disguise herself as a crone, for she no longer felt old and worn down, but she was looking forward to aging naturally and seeing what she would look like in half a century.
The sun rose in the east, the first light of a new age. The wreckage of war was a terrible sight to behold, but it did not dampen the spirits of the people in the streets. A shattered wreckage of wood flew down from the mountain in the early light of the day, a makeshift airship cobbled from scraps, and with it came the tale of what had truly happened to change the world. Though the city was a wreck and so many were dead, Gencha was a city full of celebration that day. The work to rebuild would start later, and it would take countless years, but for now the mortals, including those new to mortality, were simply happy to be alive to see what this new age would bring.
