Chapter 93: New Main Quest
Aidan found Ordun on the Enforcers’ floor of the Verdant Crown’s lodging spire, nursing a cup of something dark and reading reports he clearly hated.
"Got a minute?" Aidan dropped into the chair across from him without waiting for an answer. "I want to ask for something unusual."
"You asking for anything is already unusual." Ordun set the reports down. "Go on."
"Give me some of the Enforcer Department’s targets." Aidan leaned forward with his elbows on the table. "The kind nobody will miss. I want to hunt some people."
Ordun raised his eyebrows, and for a second he simply studied Aidan’s face. Then whatever he was weighing finished weighing, and he smiled.
"Do you want Divine-rank ones?"
Aidan grinned widely. "Absolutely."
"We have troublemakers, and a whole lot of darkness behind them." Ordun’s voice dropped, and the easy humor drained out of it. "This is confidential, but a galaxy 393.3 light years away was consumed by Terroreign. Their entire population is now Terrors, and they are structuring up."
He tapped the table once, slow.
"The problem is we found some rats here siding with them. Maybe because they feel hopeless about the future? Or they only see that the only way to continue living is by becoming Terrors. There is a hidden organization here that supports that ideology, and they are dangerous. You will be hunting them, so think carefully."
"I finished thinking." Aidan chuckled. "That’s right up my alley. Please give me the required information. The next rounds start after nineteen hours. That’s plenty of time."
Ordun stared at him, speechless for a moment, but the look underneath it was intrigue rather than doubt. He had watched this man grow stronger by week, pulling new arsenals of power out of nowhere like a magician with bottomless sleeves.
"Alright. Here you go." He raised his Digicard, and the briefing began.
...
"Look out for Beatrix and Solenne while I’m gone," Aidan said at the end of it, already standing. ’And Tom, you stay with them.’
Ordun nodded. "Rest assured."
[Tom: Got it, boss.]
...
The planet had no name worth remembering.
It hung dead and grey at the edge of a forgotten system, an obsolete rock the Alliance’s charts had written off centuries ago. That was precisely what made it useful to people who did not want to be found.
The hidden palace sat buried in a canyon on its night side, dark stone folded into darker cliffs, invisible to anything that didn’t know exactly where to look.
Aidan arrived above it and summoned all three at once.
Jovan folded out of the air on his left. Arthur burst into the sky on his right with a roar that rattled loose stone off the canyon walls. And Finn poured out last, blue flame and flowing water spiraling around its small body, fins spread wide against the dead grey sky.
"Lock it down," Aidan said.
Jovan’s domain unfolded first, a vast veil of black-gold misfortune settling over the entire planet like a hand closing around a marble. Finn’s Lapisblaze Domain bloomed inside it a heartbeat later, blue fire and living water wrapping the world in a second, brighter seal.
Nothing on this rock was leaving without their permission.
’Good.’ Aidan cracked his knuckles and pulled up his daily quest while the domains settled. ’Let’s see what the day pays.’
[Daily Quest: Eliminate the corrupted powerhouses of this hidden branch. | Reward: 3 x Omni-Slot Machine Tickets.]
’Convenient as always.’ He rolled his shoulders and glanced at the empty corner of his vision where main quests lived. ’Speaking of which, it’s been a while since I got a new main quest. Wonder what it’ll be.’
At this time, Aidan didn’t know he was going to get one much sooner he thought.
...
Inside the palace, in a hall lit by veins of pulsing violet, the branch’s master opened his eyes.
He had been Divine-rank once, Final Stage, one of the pillars every civilization prayed to keep. Now half of his face ran with threads of living corruption, Terroreign’s influence woven through flesh and power alike, and his senses were still sharp enough to read the sky.
"So this location was compromised," he said quietly.
His remaining human eye tracked the three presences sealing his world shut, and something in his corrupted half pulsed faster.
"They...are powerful."
He did not hesitate, and he did not run, because there was nowhere left to run to. Instead he reached into his robes and drew out a crystal, fist-sized and pulsing, its facets crawling with the same violet threads that crawled through him.
A seed of Terroreign, eccentric and alive.
"If I am going to die," he said, "I’ll have to make sure the people of the Alliance get the message."
He shattered it.
And the sky screamed.
Aidan felt it before he saw it, a wrongness tearing open across the whole night side of the planet, and then the dark above the canyon ripped apart in a hundred places at once.
Terror Tears bloomed like wounds across the heavens, weeping violet light. Among the hundred, ten yawned so wide and so deep that the air itself bent around them.
Divine-rank Tears. Ten of them.
The Terrors began pouring through, and the ones from those ten great wounds were not the small kind. Ten vast silhouettes slid out of each Divine-rank Tear, wings and horns and hunger, and every single one of the hundred radiated the pressure of the Final Stage.
[Main Quest: Prevent the Terror Outbreak.]
[Reward: 50 x Omni-Slot Machine Tickets.]
[Failure: Major loss of life. Destruction of Earth and nearby solar systems.]
Aidan’s eyes widened.
"Bullocks!"
Earth’s solar system was at the edges as well, and it was one of the nearest to this place, within 10 light years. And these final-stage Divine-rank Terrors could cross that distance in an hour!
[Jovan: We might be in a pinch.]
[Finn: ATTACK!]
Finn did not wait for orders, tactics, or permission.
The little fish rose above the canyon, and every scale on its body lit at once. Thousands of them, each a written law of reality, flared from blue to white to colors that had no names, and the dead grey sky above the planet came alive with auroras for the first time in centuries.
Then Finn spent everything.
Myriad Axiomatic Scales poured their light upward into the Lapisblaze Domain, and the domain answered by becoming a storm.
Colorful lightning gathered across the whole visible sky, ribbons of burning violet and gold and impossible green braiding into columns thicker than mountains. For one held breath, the entire heavens simply glowed.
Then the storms descended.