The Greatest Sin [Progression Fantasy][Kingdom Building]

Time again and again has shown the failure of Divine Forces. Let us not even consider the riff-raff that is Thelassa, of the Waves, or Ferius, of Snow, for they were never relevant in any capacity save to be mere cattle and numbers in the Pantheons they served in. This is where Elassa is wrong, age, both current and the Age of Formation, have little relevance in the true power of a Divine. Thelassa is ancient, and she has used all the wisdom of millennia to retreat from the world until she has become little more than myth which appears and disappears according to her own whimsy. A part of me wishes that Arascus had won the war, only for the fact that he would not doubt drag these ancient horses back to toil the fields once again. Alas, Arascus lost the Great War, the White Pantheon has won, and the White Pantheon has signed scripture that binds us into little more than overseers of a new world.

For Divine Forces are not abstracts. Such a thing as an unknowable does not exist. There was an age where Zerus was worshipped by entire kingdoms, now, the God of Lightning can only hope to stand as an advisor. Trusted he may be, respected his word is, but there comes a certain lack of respect once humanity figured out how to harness electricity. Even before that, when cloud formation was studied through magic, we already saw his influence grow more shallow. Sceo is the same. Alkom was powerful, until we learned that he did not carry the sun across the sky. The drop in prestige is natural after all: it is one thing to be the embodiment of day and the bringer of life, it is another to simply be the physical manifestation of the great ball of flame around which our world circles.

Abstracts, in this case, should not get too content. Some of us, Helenna of Love, are obviously eternal. Love is an unknowable human condition, yet to deny that love exists is to deny that humans have arms or fingers. Some of them may not, some of them may have lost their limbs, but most possess them, and all do naturally. Yet there are others, Fortia and myself for example. What do we represent? Fortia has been made redundant through Kassandora, I do not say this to besmirch her. I mean that her Peace is primitive. It is simply a lack of conflict. My Order, likewise, is primitive. It is a brutal style of Order, one that takes no prisoners and solves problems immediately. It was already outdated by the Age of Heroism.

Time again and again has shown the failure of Divinity as a whole. We are a stop-gap measure until Mankind develops an understanding deep enough of the world to make us utterly irrelevant.

Thinking this, I can see where Arascus was coming from when he talked of how Divinity needed to learn from humanity.

- Excerpt from “Modern Age Divinity”, written by Goddess Maisara, of Order. Kept within the White Pantheon’s Closed Library. Never published, although it was written only two decades before the death of Goddess Leona, of Luck.

Chief Engineer Jorg Avol, who had worked on the Imperial Railgun that was now serving in Epa, stood at the foot of a mighty missile. Salvation Squadron’s data had been invaluable in what it confirmed, even though most of it had been useless. The Ashfront was impossible to pass through without FSS shielding that simply pushed through the atmosphere. A ship, which only needed a half-sphere around it like an upside-down bowl, could still navigate throughout the water. A plane would need to be wholly enclosed. To be wholly enclosed, it would have to be effectively removed from the atmosphere. That would cut any airflow into its jets. All principals of flight relied upon airflow. There was no such thing as movement of itself. Not yet. And certainly Jorg Aval was no theoretical physicist to discuss such a subject.

So the plan to pierce the Ashfront had been abandoned. Utterly and wholly. Sometimes, men truly needed reality to come and slap them in the face to see sense. Reality had kicked Jorg down.

And then he, his team, everyone at Iboud, tasked with only developing the Ashjet and nothing else, had started to make progress once again. Whereas the Ashfront could not be survived, how hard was it truly to cleanse filthy air? They had working drones already, even polluted sky of Kirinyaa. The FSS had given way for magical blueprints, those could be used to reinforce and to shield. A team of six mages was all general Sokolowski could spare, Ekkerson could spare none. But they had been enough to make a prototype too.

Slow moving planes that actually had to steer through Ashen Skies were still out of the question. The Ashfront itself, with its searing hot temperatures and its winds that ripped cities apart, would most likely never be conquered. But did the Ashfront have to be conquered? Truly?

Jorg Aval held the radio in one hand, General Ekkerson was on the other end. “Sir, we are ready to begin firing in ten, are you sure you have the coordinates correct?”

“I have the coordinates correct.” Ekkerson replied immediately.

Jorg took a step back and looked back at the creation from Iboud. Data from the Salvation Squadron. From the fleets, the INS Aris with its SkySweeper Missiles most of all. From the Rocketry Bureau of the Empire. From every single source he could scrape together and lay his greedy little hands upon. Runes of Magic from textbooks that existed only in Arcadia. Everything and anything was used. The Imperial Bureau of Weapons Design may have been in Kirinyaa, but the entire Empire came together to create the Star One.

A missile three times the size of him. Covered in blue veins from top to bottom, those operated much like the FSS systems of the battleships, except they were designed to face ahead of the missile. Smaller scale, far easier to draw on, far simpler, they didn’t have the same ability as the Salvation Squadron to withstand such a heavy barrage of storm and hurricane and fire and wind. And they would not need to. The declaration of an impossibility had opened a road into different possibilities.

They would not be going through the Ashfront when they could plunge through Ashen Skies instead. “Then we are ready to begin our testing.” Jorg said. “General, give me a report, it should be in your position in ten minutes.”

Faster than the speed of sound, faster than artillery shells. That, the team at Iboud had studied too. Tartarus took a few seconds to track shells but once they caught onto them, they would effortlessly cook them mid-air. They would cook the ship missiles too, although those were not as far as the star. The Comet models used against the Archdemon had been put out of service, they would have to be retrofitted with new computers and the Star’s shielding to fly without tearing themselves apart in the tiny particulates in the air. Jorg put the radio down. “PREPARE FIRING SEQUENCE!”

He didn’t have children, but he imagined this is what it felt like when a father saw his son walk for the first time. “TEN!” The countdown began. “NINE!” It was going to be monitored via satellite, the pillars of flame used for the melting of Kirinyaa’s central mountains were visible from space. They breached the Ashfront to make huge disks of red and orange in the grey carpet that was trying to swallow this whole land. “EIGHT!” Ekkerson had picked out a Melting that was due to begin any minute now. “SEVEN!” It took Tartarian mages about twenty five minutes to clear a mountain. “SIX!” By Jorg’s estimates, the Star should get there in fifteen minutes at the maximum. “FIVE!” They had time to spare. “FOUR!” Tartarian anti-air defences wouldn’t matter if whatever came barrelling out of the Ashfront struck them almost instantly. “THREE!” That was the plan anyway. “TWO!” All that was needed was for the calculations to be correct. “ONE!” For the winds not to be too great, for the mages to not react in time. For…

Well, this was the point of a prototype, wasn’t it? It would most likely fail.

And if it didn’t?

Well, if it didn’t, then mass production would start tomorrow. An engineer in charge of advancing technology and an engineer in charge of refining where two very different creatures. There was a reason the former got a higher salary and there was a reason that the ratio was one to one-thousand in favour of the latter.

Maisara’s march of time is another thoroughly pessimistic brick in the great wall of depressive, Divine theory. To put it just as bluntly as the Goddess herself likes to be, it is not that we are made irrelevant by the march of time and the advance of human society. I will not bother arguing with the twisted logic of it, when a madman proclaims that pigs walk on two legs, it is a mistake to try and argue about the joints and muscle structure of pigs. One does not need waste time, they merely need to present the obvious reality in the form of a pig.

I have hundreds of pigs to present, myself being one of them. There will never come a time when the Goddess of Love is not looked up to. Likewise, Arascus is possibly the greatest pig, so unafraid of advance that he wished to drag the entire world kicking and screaming down his path. Kassandora is another, the truth is utterly obvious, it does not need to be stated. As long as two people exist on this world, and as long as they have a disagreement, they are in a state of war. War is an abstract so concretely real that an Arda without war is unfathomable, much like an Arda without Love or Pride.

These are the ultimate trades of mankind, and they have spent all infinity awaiting their ultimate practitioners.

- From “Modern Solutions To Modern Problems”, written by Goddess Helenna, of Love, in response to “Modern Age Divinity”.

A hundred engineers and scientists, magicians and technicians, even the logistics workers who operated the trucks and the pair that ran the supply wagon which was grilling burgers, all fell silent when they saw flames billow out from the bottom. A tower of steel, a spike covered in great paint. It was adorned with swirling blue patterns, most concentrated around the tip. Two small steering wings sat on either side, four more fins at the bottom. For an instant, nothing but smoke and fire plumed a massive wave out across the red sands of Kirinyaa, slightly darkened by the ash which had fallen onto it.

A hundred screens, laptops and tablets arranged on crates, all traced their measurements. Nothing was out of bounds. Not as lumbering missile began to lift off, not as its acceleration finally reached full-throttle. It left a column of grey smoke that rose behind it, into the air. Men monitored the situation, they watched through the cameras affixed to its wings, fingers were crossed, silent prayers to their own genius were told, a burger set alight as the cooks just stared into the air.

Once it breached the height of a skyscraper, when it was nothing more than an orange star in the sky, the missile made a sharp turn north. The ground erupted with cheers as the workers through off their hats into the air and raised glasses. Not a single screen gave a warning or a miscalibration. The cheers got louder as the rocket wing’s flapped by themselves. They gave a tiny twist, they the fins on the back spun, the sky became darker, ash built up on a light shield of blue. It passed over the great oak that was Central Requisitions, the crews their stopped to look and wonder. It passed over one of the few woodlands that Arika’s Jungle Deity had never claimed. Men in trucks slowed down to watch the sight of something flying that reminded them of a plane flying north. A Divine? But which? Besides, there were no Divines that left trails of smoke like that.

The Shooting Star passed over the Central Kirinyaan Mountains, great mountains of red rock that stretched to create the wall that was currently safeguarding the country, soldiers in General Ekkerson’s army looked up to watch it drag a line of orange and red which split the sky. Eyebrows raised, some men whistled, a few even made a crass joke about the fact what kind of Divinity left trails like that. It soared, high above the swirling grey carpet that was swallowing the precious Arda from whose materials it had been built out of. It soared, over great orange pillars that ended in jagged, ever-changing flames.

The missile turned downwards. A javelin that would finally prove that Tartarus’ shield of ash was not invincible.

How many times have you plotted with me already. It is obvious, is it not? The time of the Pantheon is coming to a close. You had centuries to build yourselves up, you failed in everything. You were handed Arda on a silver platter and you spent an entire millennium trying to wage war against the very human soul that created you in the first place.

Do not make me laugh Allasaria, that is all I can do in position. Continue, I have no advice to give. Go ahead, run with your gaslighting campaign and try to convince the world that their pride is fake, that war does not come from within. You may as well try and convince humanity that they are immortal and that time shall never claim them.

- From Goddess Kassandora, of War, to Goddess Allasaria, of Light. Meeting recorded three years before the death of Goddess Leona, of Luck.

Private Yilki raised the camera and prepared as he watched another Melting from a distance. His team had scaled the top of a mountain, another team was on the summit next to them. Below them, a battle raged as Tartarian pushed onwards. Artillery shells combusted in mid-air, flames fanned out in huge waves, in swirling snakes or in tight spikes. Tanks rolled forwards, or pushed ahead in an attempt to retake terrain, infantry around them, all guns blazing at the flood of blades and shield and crimson bodies that charged forwards.

All of it lit up by blinding spotlight, and by the mile-wide pillar of red-hot fire which cascaded from the ground as it submerged another mountain. Yilki’s radio buzzed alive, it was General Ekkerson, who was monitoring the battle personally through the cameras. “The formation hasn’t moved?”

“No sir.” Yilki replied. The battle in between the mountains was yet another effort at retaking a summit. Tartarus had a Melting force here though, so naturally they conglomerated a vast array of troops to prevent any counter-attacks. Yilki looked to the formation, the colloquial name, everyone knew what it referred to. The semi-circle of fire in the distance protected by row upon row of demons that would raise their hands to cook any shells coming at them. The pattern was known by now, the semi-circle of magic were hundreds, maybe more than a thousand demonic sorcerers channelling their magic to fuel that great pillar of flame.

“Good.” Ekkerson replied. “Prepare for impact soon.”

The cameras were still recording, a few of them focused upon the formation, turned upwards to watch the underside of the black sky. It swirled and howled, winds through the mountain made Yilki’s coat whip from side to side. And the private held his breath. How soon was soon?

Soon was indeed soon, no more than a half-minute away after Ekkerson had called in to check up on them. And after, soon came instantly. A spear shot through Ashen Skies, a spear, a javelin, a rocket, a missile, whatever it was, it had been too fast for the eye to catch. It revealed the daytime overhead for a moment and it put a pause on the battle before Ashen Skies took a moment to once again fill the gap metal travelling at hypersonic speeds had torn through it.

It smashed into the ground before any reaction came. The explosion cut the semi-circular in half, the rest of it began to fizzle out as a shockwave sent ash and rubble and sand which cut the demons down like a tidal wave of shrapnel. The battle paused for a moment as Tartarian forces turned back to see what had hit them.

And Imperial Forces pushed onwards, they pushed as lights sparked on in the distance, mages that had survived and were trying to continue the melting of another mountain. They pushed as the pillar of flame dimmed and shrunk and fizzled out. They pushed until the only light that remained was from their own spotlights and the red ambience of molten rock.

Half a mountain still remained, covered in bubbling magma it may be. Utterly destroyed and uninhabitable, as if it had been a volcano that suddenly ceased its eruption just before the climax, but half a mountain had remained. Private Yilki put the radio to his mouth. “General.” He tried to keep the hope and the awe out of his voice. “We’ve done it… The summit stands.”