505
The distance from the eastern edge of D’Australia to Dawncoast, located all the way across the Not-Pacific, AKA ‘Big Water’, was about 14,100 kilometers.
Mark had never flown that distance on his own. It was a dangerous amount of distance. Anything from kaiju to special/dangerous monsters could be between the start and the end point, and they usually were. Hoverships crossed distances like that all the time, too, and while there were some normal flight paths that were mostly cleared by stronger people, and kept that way, those flight paths shifted left and right depending on the day, just so that nothing could hunker down and wait in ambush for some ‘prey’ to wander by on a schedule. And, the ships were usually as invisible as they could be invisible.
And all the international treaties were fucked up right now, too.
No one was flying normal shipping routes.
So it was actually a bit of a task to figure out the best way home, and it started with hooking up with high-flying drones, grabbing a possible flight plan, and then making some choices on the paths that were not actually listed at all, so that no one could follow Mark’s pathing through the still-publicly-available drones. Merely contacting those high flying drones alerted people that he was back in the world. But there had been a press release about how to obfuscate shipping runs back during the blockade breaking at New Tokyo, and Mark (and Quark) knew what they were doing.
Hopefully there wouldn’t be anyone waiting for him in the path he took.
Mark ended up picking a 15,000 kilometer long path that took him to the northern edges of Aluatha, first, because he wanted to have a confrontation with Walaria outside of Dawncoast’s airspace.
Mark took a deep breath, hovering in the sky above the Big Water east of D’Australia, and then he Unioned with Alacrity and Slowness and moved. Mark needed to get there, now, in order to have 20 hours of set-up time for Gate Day.
And Mark wanted to know how fast he could go, too.
Quark measured Mark’s speed via rather un-scientific ways that were still kinda useful; the angle of the sun, the distance back toward shore, and known speeds already recorded in battle.
As the sky ripped with fire, Mark made even more flames moving forward faster, sonic booms crashing through the air. Mach 1 was super easy to shatter, with Mark breaking the speed of sound in an atmosphere almost right away. Mach 2 came and went. Mark sped up to what he felt was ‘okay’, a few hearts beating super fast and in a chain, pumping speed into Mark’s body and mind, as Mark fed that speed into the spinning of a long spiral of adamantium, directly ahead, practically corkscrewing the adamantium forward and pulling himself along in the wake. Mark’s main body kinda lagged, and he let it, letting the drag of the atmosphere make himself more aerodynamic.
Quark finally managed to peg Mark’s speed at something like 7,500 kilometers per hour, about 20 minutes into the run.
2 more hours to home, then—
Mark paused.
He stopped, the world speeding up, fires vanishing. A massive shockwave continued in the air, probably altering a lot of things all around, but all Mark saw was sky and ocean.
“Fuck. Is Isoko back at Dawncoast?” Mark asked, hovering high over the deep blue. “Do I need to get her, too?”
“A recent tabloid and a check in at Dawncoast shows that Miss Kanno has returned to Dawncoast to prepare for a Gate Day. The check in has an issue, though. I am receiving strange interference. Could be a result of the Forgetting.”
Mark’s heart pulsed with worry. “Give Eliot a call.”
“Calling Eliot… straight to voicemail. Calling Eliot’s important line.”
“Fuck. Could they really have forgotten me.”
Three seconds later—
Eliot grumbled, “Who the fuck is calling my personal line? I will sue you.”
Mark smiled, saying, “Your anti-outsider wards ain’t shit if you can’t remember me, Eliot.”
A beat.
And then he hung up.
Mark frowned at the sky, the ocean, the horizon. “What the fuck? Call him back.”
“The phone number has been disconnected.”
“Oh great. How about Sally? Try Sally.”
“Calling Sally.”
Mark waited.
“Cannot complete the call, and I have been backtraced by the AIs of Blackleaf Industries, Abs and Zuu, who are starting to remember me, or something. I cannot tell the reasons for this, but they, and I, have been automatically quarantined. I feel that further attempts to contact anyone will be met with personalized anti-communication measures.”
“Fucking hell… Okay fine. Call up Walaria.”
“… Are you sure, sir?”
“Yes.”
Quark beep boop—
“Mark,” Walaria said, “I was starting to worry, but I have just been made aware of some interesting developments with the goblin situation.”
Mark felt a wave of relief. “I’m glad youknow of me. I think Eliot just blacklisted me from Dawncoast’s servers, or whatever it was he did.”
“One second… Yes. It appears he has just logged a possible threat level outsider… Hmm. You have choices. You can let it go and let them realize who you are later, or you can force the issue now. Either way, your presence in the world is returning now that you are removed from the source of the issue, and you have cracked the seal on that missing information. Did you manage to get the soulbook?”
Mark had a sudden, strange thought.
Commander Highgrade from Lake Eyre had known Mark.
But the people at Dawncoast didn’t?
Mark said, “The soulbook is unreachable at the moment, but I believe that Eliot is right to issue a threat level outsider warning. I just called Lake Eyre and handed over some captured humans to them, and Commander Highgrade knew me, andhe reminded me of a weapon I almost made for Eru, one of their big heroes down here. So why doesn’t Dawncoast remember me?”
“That is curious… Usually the reintegration spreads at the speed of information, but there are always foibles.”
Mark suddenly recalled how Guardian Mabi Khava of the Picory had been treated like a common person at the Winter Ball, instead of like 1 of 3 heads of state.
… Mark worried more.
Integration was going to be tough, wasn’t it.
Fuck—
“I’ll check in on it,” Walaria continued, “You should know that Dawncoast has weathered several attacks over the last week, for Dominant is testing them and not always on Daihoon. Addavein rescued Eliot and Shawn from the New Citadel Freyala dryad attack about 30 hours ago, on Earth. It would not surprise me if a few sideways attacks are hitting them right now, so I will send a few Containment resources their way. Dryads are encroaching on our southern borders. If you’re available for an ACCKR teleport, then we could use your help killing those dryads. They’re necromancy-focused.”
… What had she just said?
Everything was too overwhelming, Mark’s brain trying to reorient into something that made sense. When his thoughts came back, he wondered if he had heard Walaria correct, or not. He had to have misheard, right?
“Dawncoast and the gate are alreadyunder attack, andwe’re at Worlds’ War?”
“Yes and no. Probing attacks are happening mainly at the extremities, with Okuana trying to establish themselves at a few key beachheads with battleships stationed at a few points across Daihoon, but we’re there to halt their advance, and the soldiers you Skilled at New Tokyo are proving invaluable. General Devo Stone and the other Generals feel that many places could go rather bad, and quickly, but we’re not at cascading failures yet, and Okuana is not pushing in yet. Dawncoast is heavily fortified due to being our main way to trade with Earth, but they have suffered many probing attacks. Only a handful of casualties so far, despite 3 dryad attacks and one of them serious. The one place it could go bad, and then cascade, is where I want to send you with ACCKR.”
Aluatha Central Command for Kaiju Response, if Mark recalled correctly.
Okay.
Mark decided, “Quark, please send Walaria the treaty I managed to write up with Wongod, and the recording of the battle. Walaria, I believe Thrashtalon is interested in working with the Pantheon to remove Wongod’s curse and turn Wongod into a practical demigod rather than let the goblins run amok against Aluatha. I don’t know what to do with that information, but my instinct is that we’d be trading a major enemy for one major, but slightly lesser enemy and an antagonist to all sides. I’ll take that ACCKR teleport now.”
“One minute. Let me review this… footage. Hmm.”
Walaria went quiet.
Mark waited—
“I’m handing you off to ACCKR, but I want to know about the Pillar of God, first. You have it, right?”
“Yeah. It’s broken but it’s getting better. The Lightning Spires are broken for now, too.”
“And it’s not giving you anger issues?”
Mark glanced at Pillar of God, resting against the wall of his soulhouse, right by the door. Most of it was fine, but the one damaged end of it… at least it didn’t look like a melted mess anymore. It was repairing itself. It currently resembled a wire frame model at the broken end that was only halfway built. It seemed hurt, but content.
Mark said, “I damaged it, but it’s getting better. It just wanted an elf. That’s why it was angry. Wongod has a staff now, too. His came from Eria of the Central Spire. He called it an Enforcer’s Staff, and he named himself the commander of the Endless Court— Oh yeah. He should be sending you a full history of the world, as he knows it— And he might or might not do that! In which case I need to go back and kill a few million of them.”
“Keep the Pillar. It takes a ton of adamantium to repair it when it breaks, and we don’t need that cost, even if you have globally lowered the price of adamantium. International trade is breaking down everywhere. ACCKR is about ready. We have a minute before I will hand you off. What is your current status with Timeweaver?”
“I might do some major infiltration and kills on Okuana with Zaid and Derek as my support.”
“Understood. Good work, Mark. I have heard from the People, and they are taking back swaths of land, quickly. I want more Ocean Shapers for Aluatha, but that can happen later. We have leviathans in southern Aluatha as well. I’m handing you over, now.”
Click, click, and then a—
“Greetings, Sir Mark Careed,” said a female voice. “This is Central Command and I am Analyst Jamie. I will be interfacing primarily with Quark. We’re spinning up the porter and it will be 95 seconds. Please be in a safe space where you can pull your astral body inward when the countdown reaches 0. You will be arriving at the scene of a minor battle that will turn major when you step into it, according to our prognosticators. Do you understand?”
“I understand. I’m ready, Jamie.”
“ACCKR is more secure than ITLKR, so I only need you to pull yourself into a 5 meter diameter.”
“Sure.”
Mark pulled his adamantium partially inward, preparing for teleport.
Soon, a countdown appeared in his vision and a subtle fuzziness clouded his Unionsense in the near distance. That would be the teleport slowly locking on to him and his position. Mark took a deep breath, had a paranoid moment expecting Timeweaver to appear or for something horrific to happen. When that didn’t happen and the timer hit 2 seconds, Mark pulled himself in all the way.
Blip.
Ocean became forest and plains and craters and scattered fires. It was night. The auroras were out and truly bright. Mark was a single black blot in the sky, already spreading outward, Unioning with Alacrity and Slowness, taking it all in.
Quark rapidly translated whatever battleplans ACCKR had given him to the scene spread out before them.
Battleships to the north, each 200 to 300 meters long and like mini-Dreadnoughts. They were a bit mish-mashed, with some of them unpainted and showing bare metal. They were from Aluatha, and the city they were defending was further north, looking like a bunch of spires surrounded by a tall wall and a dark forest. Larger, main battleships hovered over that city. Quark labeled the city and each ship, but Mark was not going to spare the mental pressure to learn those names, or do more than take stock of the battle lines.
One ship from Aluatha lay in the forest below, monsters crawling on the hull, fires burning brightly down there… no. Not monsters. Necromantic horrors.
A part of the forest to the immediate south was less ‘dark forest’ and more ‘dryad pretending to be gigantic roots and scattered canopy’. Its roots had hooked through the ground like snakes swimming in a pond, to bite at the downed battleship.
Three monstrously professional battleships hovered to the south, two smaller ones flanking a much, much larger one. That larger one had massive cannons stuck out of every flat surface, and a few more cannons on turning domes here and there. A main cannon was at the front… but it wasn’t a main cannon. It was a dryad curved in on itself and turned into a cannon. It was aimed at the city, and deep purple/black light glowed in the depths of its cannon.
It was prepared to strike the city, kilometers to the north.
Some of Aluatha’s battleships were angled out of its direct line of fire, which was probably a result of poor planning and distribution, and then frantic redistribution. The people here were not ready for war —which was someone’s fault— but war had come to them anyway.
Mark saw several issues on the battlefield. In no particular order:
Big Powers hovering in the sky over the Okuanan main battleship and side battleships.
Two dryads, one turning Aluathan soldiers into horrors to kill the rest and turn them all into horrors, and the other aiming a big fuck off death cannon at the main city back there.
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The Aluathan battleships were trying to leave the fight, to run.
A lot of ships were mass-evacuating from the city, trying to run to the north, deeper into Aluathan territory. Quark’s battleplan told Mark that they expected 90% of those evacuating people to die to monsters in the night and that the city was going to fall due to those initial people running, abandoning it. Monsters were always at the walls here. They were already breaking in at a few locations that Mark could not see, but that Quark tracked.
All the Okuanans had to do was appear, all menacing and shit, and they sent the whole area into a panicked response.
Okay.
Where first?
The big cannon dryad, probably.
The cannon dryad was defended by the flying people.
The soldiers down below were actively dying, though.
The Aluathan ships were ‘whatever’, to Mark; he realized he didn’t need their help, and it would be a better battle without trying to organize all of them. With any luck, they’d organize themselves when Mark opened up on the Okuanan battleships.
Mark decided his course of action.
Everyone on the battlefield noticed the blip of ACCKR depositing someonehere, though Mark doubted if they knew, exactly, who Aluatha had sent to this front—
A swirl of green and black raced through the sky around the main Okuanan battlecruiser, flying around to each of the barely-moving soldiers in the sky who were wearing the same kind of green and black uniform. It was a speedster, and it grabbed two other people up there in the air and retreated with them, back the way it had come, to the back of the ship.
An evacuating speedster, in case someone like Mark appeared. The activation of ACCKR resources probably caused the speedster to start moving, even before confirmation of Mark’s specific presence.
Mark adjusted his target to that speedster, drawing deeper on Alacrity and Slowness. He was so, so much faster. His brief touch of the power of the Lightning Spires had adjusted his entire idea of what ‘speed’ actually was, and it seemed some of that speed remained with him, even now.
The world slowed down further.
The speedster was in the air, standing on the air, and carefully putting some big, bulky flyer into a capsule-container-thingy. Mark had never seen anything like it, or the capsule, but he knew what they were; rescue pods for the speedster to grab people and then run away with them.
Mark reached forward with an adamantium spiral and then he curved it, pulling himself toward the new target.
It was like pulling himself through a thousand sheets of glass. The world cracked and shattered, shockwaves spreading out much, much slower than Mark moved.
Within a moment Mark was upon the speedster, who had yet to realize Mark had noticed him.
The speedster was a guy in armor, and he jolted when he noticed the curl of shockwave fire spreading around him from each of Mark’s tendrils. He suddenly started moving faster than Mark. Had to be something like a x25 modifier. Maybe more. He whipped his head all around, adjusted his footing in the air, and then looked at the guy he was trying to save, to remove from the battle.
That guy was probably 400 kilos of flying muscle in a webweave suit and with his face fully exposed. Mark guessed that he was far down on the priority rescue list, but he still probably had a truly strong Body Power and some good way to fly. Maybe more. A flick of viewing through the fragment of a divine mirror, and Mark was sure the guy was notan archmage.
He also blazed like the sun.
So at least two PL 99 powers.
The speedster abandoned the guy, barely escaping Mark’s touch, running off, zipping down and away, escaping the fight completely.
… Well then.
Mark went for the flying mountain of muscle, accepting that even as he did so he would rapidly jolt into normal time, so things would go badly from there. Still, Mark wanted this guy’s Powers, because what was better than killing an enemy? Making the enemy yours, after all. Or at least his Powers.
Mark Unioned with Power and Nothingness and briefly fell into his soulhouse to rip the guy’s Powers out of him. When he came back to the real world everything was suddenly sped up and Mark had two new blueprints in his records.
The burly guy instantly started to fall, suddenly scared and furious and then despair hit him before he landed, 40 meters down, on a tangle of the cannon dryad that was already tangling even more. Roots curled over his body like it wasn’t even there, killing him.
A strange thing happened to Mark as he got on with the rest of the fight.
Mostly, Mark was sorry about killing that guy. Or rather, not just killing. That happened in a battle. But how it happened. Just so sudden. Bam! Powerless guy, falling to his death.
As soldiers screamed orders and auto-cannons opened up on him, plinking his body with explosive rounds both magical and physical, Mark wrapped around the death cannon, right before it was about to explode, still thinking about that first guy. Purple/black Death exploded into Mark’s adamantine flesh like a hose into a water balloon that only partially contained and expanded with the fluid. Violent, violet Death spilled out everywhere, hitting everything like beams from a disco ball, as Mark grew and grew, adamantium expanding with Death. The uncontained Death ripped through hulls and across flying soldiers and into the engine rooms of the left battlecruiser from Okuana. It was a lot of Death and death. As Mark grew and grew, turning the Death into more adamantium and body, he saw people die.
Mark ripped the Cursed Abomination Of Okuana out of the cannon dryad, killing it. Then he opened his eyes back to the world, and the world was smaller because Mark was bigger. He was a 50 meter tall spillage of Death and Adamantium, with eyes opened up all along his body and hearts beating in tumorous clusters all throughout his body.
Ahh, this again, Mark thought, as he felt his range expand, his thoughts expand, and as he Unioned with Glory and Disgrace with every single person on all three Okuanan battleships. Mark became a shining beacon of unstable adamantium/death that rapidly turned into a dragon person, arms reaching out into claws, tail lashing the dead dryad underneath his myriad strength, wings expanding.
The world felt weak, and Mark made a show of the destruction of everything Okuana thought it could accomplish on this battlefield. He ripped the Cursed Abomination out of the other dryad down below, turning it into desiccated mulch, much like the first one, and then he ripped the Death out of every horror on the battlefield, becoming that much larger, adamantium tendrils finding every weakened Okuanan monster and turning them into splashed gore.
The black dragon ascended on a roar of defiance, hearts pulsing veins of black into the world, heralding his approach and ripping apart hulls, hearts, heads, and hope.
Okuana faltered, people running away.
Mark grabbed at all of them, ripping Power out from them by the hundreds.
The only people who succeeded in running away today were those who had already run, and who lived here at the borderlands. People fell to the forest. Monsters would kill them later, for sure.
The black dragon stood defiant on the burning, blazing wreckage of the main Okuanan battleship, forest burning, sky full of auroras, roaring.
A little while later, when no one attacked, and everyone cowered, the black dragon curved inward, wings turning into lines of flowing black, flowing into coins. Death fell away as crystallized hunks of power, and then adamantium enveloped those hunks, keeping them stable.
Mark concentrated in multiple directions, many brains and Quark all assisting him with detangling from himself, gently setting down the elemental kaiju he had become, to make sure this land did not become a death zone. Some moments in there, in the heat of it all, Mark wondered if there was an elemental in all this kaiju he created, or if it really was just him. But now that it was over, it was just him, and he put away his ‘toys’ before they could hurt or kill people.
Soon, Mark stood on cooled ground that a larger version of himself had stomped flat.
A bunch of black cubes laid to the side, each of them absolutely filled with Death mana. Some of that mana leaked, illuminating the dark, burning night with purple glows. Mark pinched off the spots that were leaking, and soon everything was just the red of fire, the black of adamantium, and the rainbow dark of the auroras overhead.
Mark checked the time via Quark.
It was 3:24 AM, March 20th, 2050.
“Made it in time for Gate Day in about 8 hours,” Mark said. “Will I get to go back home, Analyst Jamie?”
“One moment please, sir,” Analyst Jamie said, voice extra professional. And then her voice cracked, “Pri— Second Princess Walaria will be with you shortly.”
Not a single person was in the sky. No enemy was anywhere near Mark. The city behind him was all in a tizzy, but some other people had rallied the fleeing troops and citizenry and made them stay, or come back. In the 30 minutes it took for Mark to win the battle and strip many of the Okuanan soldiers of their Powers, that city back there seemed to get it together.
Parts of it were still on fire, though; Mark could tell by that characteristic red glow that hovered just behind the wall, in the smoke and under the aurora sky. They’d fix that, he was sure. He did not get involved.
No one approached Mark.
“Welcome back, Mark,” Walaria said, “How are you feeling?”
“Worn out. I don’t want to kill people. I don’t even want to kill goblins anymore. But I will.”
“Understood. Three things: First, no more fights like this. This was a battlefield that our Generals will be fighting in the future. The commander that was supposed to oversee this fight was assassinated 10 hours ago, so many parts of this battle fell apart and would have continued to fall apart without your intervention. And so, we wish to deploy you strategically, in partnership with Timeweaver and New Tokyo, against deep Okuanan targets.
“Secondly, I have reviewed the footage of Wongod and received parcels of information from BiggestBaddest, who was picked up from a few different hidden goblin strongholds inside Aluatha that we did not know about. We cleaned those places out, though they were already cleaned when BiggestBaddest revealed himself to us. We feel this treaty will hold. We are not ready to discuss the proposition from the Pantheon or Thrashtalon to cleanse Wongod of his curse.
“Finally, I solved the problem with Dawncoast forgetting you. Pearl, Amy, and Uva did a ritual to throw back the problem. Dominant had twisted that particular eldritch influence to have your friends murder you if you appeared, which explains the extreme response Eliot had to hearing from you. I would rejoin Dawncoast cautiously, and be prepared for them to be violent with you anyway.”
Mark suddenly, deeply, hated magic.
Every part of it.
How it twisted people.
How it turned people against each other.
How Dominant used it to fuck people over.
Maybe some people deserved magic. Lola deserved magic in her life. Isoko, with her joy of flying and helping people. Eliot, with his building of civilization. Sally, with her crusade against evils. Andria, with her Prosperity and work toward a brighter future. Tartu, too! Even though they butted heads now and then, Tartu still deserved magic. He was a good man, doing good things. Derek and Shawn and Lenny and Glorious Man, and Aurora, and Zaid. Even Walaria, though Mark was sure she had thousands of skeletons in her closet, just like everyone else in power…
But Dominant?
Wongod?
Grey Phantom, after he turned evil, revealing himself as a Cultist of Thrashtalon at the Battle For Memphi? Before that he was a ‘hidden dragon’, and as long as hidden dragons stayed hidden, they could do whatever the fuck they wanted, but when they just hid in order to commit more evil later?
Fuck them.
People like Mary Getty, the Mind Controller, the first person Mark ever killed, who did everything in her power to fuck over people and who got exiled from Memphi, to be allowed to use her Powers against others, to probably kill lots of people to fund her life, and to go after Mark, too?
Whatever Dominant had done to use the Forgetting to turn his friends against him?
And the demons! Fucking hell, the demons.
Mark looked up at the sky, at the auroras that were the cosmic trails that demons made when the demons were created. He didn’t have the full story, but he had an inkling that yes, it was possible to destroy a demon for good.
You just had to destroy the sky.
You had to pull an aurora out of the heavens and kill all of it, and maybe that would kill the demon, and also all of the magic that the demons helped to create.
And the Moon, too.
Tonight, the Moon was a sliver of light and a crackling of gold illumination below the deep black surface. Auroras twisted through the sky toward it, toward the home of demons.
The Demon City, Arakino.
Mark’s heart thumped hard in his chest, and in the darkness underfoot, black veins flowing through the ground, as he realized a fundamental truth about this world, as he looked at the wreckage of the battlefield all around. The fires. The cubes that were full of Death. The destruction.
That flying brick that Mark had sent plummeting toward his death, before the guy could even react… That was a bad kill. Mark hated that he had done that.
Magic allowed him to do that.
Magic was not the source of evil, but it allowed a lot of evil to continue, unopposed, because once a person got strong enough then there was nothing you could do against them except use more, worse magic. Mind control, eldritch shit, rituals of confusion, and even whatever Dominant did when he turned people into his next generation, subsuming their egos and making himself able to live for another hundred years. Mark was not sure about that last part, not exactly, but he had heard a lot of horror stories about Dominant and the Empire of Okuana, about how Dominant had remained ‘alive’ for thousands of years, and he had seen too much of the world to not believe some of those horrors were very real.
And so...
Mark needed to kill the Moon.
Kill all demons.
Reset the System.
Crush everyone into compliance.
“… Mark?” Walaria asked.
“Ah! Yes, uh…” Mark said, “Unless I’m needed elsewhere, I will be flying back to Dawncoast. Can the people here take all of these cubes of Death? Or I can bring them to Dawncoast— Actually, I want them delivered to Dawncoast. Keep half or whatever for the Empire, but I suspect it’s only a drop in the bucket compared to the Death you guys already have, and the adamantium I’ve given you.”
“We can always use more. You’re 10,000 kilometers closer to your destination, and you are cleared for flight over Domal’Takela.”
Mark almost signed off, but he had a question… He had a lot of questions. The only one he cared about, right now, was, “Any idea what will happen on Gate Day?”
“All signs point toward normalcy, but they pointed toward normalcy yesterday as well.”
Mark said, “Thanks, Walaria.”
“Take a month off, Mark. Do what you want. Don’t go after Okuana unless you wish, for I would rather have you in reserve for emergencies, in case Okuana actually presses in. So take a month off. You’ve done a lot and we need time for the many empowerments you have given to people to settle out.”
“And I probably seem unbalanced right now, huh?”
“Yes. To call a spade a spade, you sound deeply troubled, Mark. Normally, I would stay on the line with you for hours if I could, but I cannot. Don’t do anything to anyone you would regret later, and call me soon.”
The call ended.
Mark did not wince at that final exchange, because embarrassment at being called unbalanced seemed beyond him at the moment. Shame seemed beyond him right now. So he did what he could; he lifted into the air, and then ignited the air as he turned a rotor into a burrowing spiral and cut through the air, north.
Sally would agree with Mark’s decision to destroy the Moon and all the demons; he already knew that much. A lot of Executioners of Drakarok would. There was no need for Daihoon as a planet, either, if it was indeed only connected to Earth through the connection of the Moon. Being on Daihoon let people make more demons and more horrors, so Daihoon itself needed to die.
Everyone could live on Earth.
That was fine.
Did any of it work that way?
Who knew.
The demons would unite against him, as they almost had when he was gunning for the Reset Quest. Now that Mark was aware that demons were made by level 100 Powers, and that Daihoon allowed for the easy creation of Ascended Abilities, all Mark needed to do was kill all of Daihoon, too. Maybe he didn’t need to kill the Moon or demons at all, if he just killed the planet.
The tethers of Endless Daihoon connected in two directions, after all. One side was pinned on Arakino, and the other was here, on this planet.
This entire planet was just a figment of reality stretching out from Earth, anyway.
If you went high enough you landed in Endless Daihoon.
If you went deep enough… Mark wasn’t sure what happened if you went deep enough.
Mark wasn’t sure about a lot.
The only thing he knew was that he needed answers.