Chapter 456
"Why not ride the wind and soar ninety thousand miles?"
Hive strode out of his cave with all the confidence of a conquering hero, spreading his arms as though he were about to embrace the wind itself.
His plan was simple.
He would dissolve into a cloud of nanites, ride the currents toward the three idiots who had apparently decided they were immortal, crawl straight into their brains, and wreak enough havoc to turn them on one another. Once he had enjoyed the show, he would finish the job and leave nothing behind but bones.
A perfect plan.
He was just about to disperse when he stopped.
Through the nanites he’d sent to spy on the people handling the goods, Hive saw the red-skinned demon looking even angrier than he was.
That was impressive.
She somehow produced a staff from nowhere, slammed its tip into the ground, raised her left hand toward the sky, and shouted:
"Spying is a crime!"
The connection between Hive and his nanites vanished instantly.
That did not, however, mean Hive had no idea what happened next.
You didn’t need a functioning surveillance network to understand the situation.
You just needed eyes.
Hive remained frozen at the mouth of his cave, arms still spread wide. His head tilted slightly as he stared at the nightmare unfolding in the distance.
Hundreds of meters of molten rock erupted from beneath the ground, blasting toward the sky before collapsing outward in a blazing wave.
Smoke billowed upward with the eruption, swallowing the heavens. The glow of the lava painted the darkness crimson.
The apocalypse.
The word appeared in Hive’s mind without invitation.
He had once considered himself the harbinger of the apocalypse. His rage had brought civilization to its knees, wiped out most of the life on the planet, and turned an entire world into a graveyard.
But apparently, he’d been giving himself far too much credit.
This was an apocalypse.
And the three people who had arrived on this planet today weren’t merely harbingers of death.
They were harbingers of total destruction.
Life wasn’t the only thing in danger.
Stone, dirt, metal, everything was apparently fair game.
"Uh..."
Hive stood there for several long seconds.
Then, as if his brain had finally caught up with his eyes, his entire body exploded into a cloud of yellow-brown nanites.
The swarm vanished into every crack and crevice it could find, burrowing as deep into the rock as possible.
That’s terrifying.
From this day forward, nobody was getting him out of his fortress.
Ever.
And if he needed a name, he’d pick something respectable.
Dog Leftover was a perfectly good name, but he was keeping it for himself.
"Do you think he survived?"
Evenson stared at the devastation before them, still trying to process what he’d just witnessed.
He hadn’t expected Ourecithes to actually follow through on her threat.
He certainly hadn’t expected her to go this far.
And he really didn’t want Hive dead yet.
The former Inhuman king was far too useful to waste.
"No."
Ourecithes clicked her tongue, looking mildly annoyed.
"His true body was hiding much farther away. A little warning like that shouldn’t have been enough to kill such an insolent brute."
"A little warning?"
Evenson pointed incredulously at the ground beneath them.
He wasn’t sure what definition of little she was using, but it certainly wasn’t one found in any dictionary he knew.
The patch of rock beneath their feet was perhaps twenty square meters. It was also one of the only solid pieces of ground remaining in the surrounding area.
And even that was glowing red from the heat.
Evenson’s dress shoes had long since been vaporized. His clothes were scorched black in several places, with some sections burned clean through.
He looked terrible.
To survive the temperature, he’d activated his demonic skin, turning his entire body the color of obsidian.
Fortunately, the planet’s natural environment was already hostile enough that he’d activated a spell to filter the atmosphere almost immediately after arriving.
Otherwise, the toxic gases alone might have knocked him unconscious.
And the surrounding landscape was even worse.
For roughly ten miles in every direction, the ground had become a vast lake of molten rock.
Even though Ourecithes’ spell had already ended, magma continued to seep slowly from beneath the surface. The lava lake was still expanding.
Evenson would sooner believe the planet had spontaneously developed a sense of humor than accept that this was merely a "little warning."
Ourecithes, meanwhile, looked perfectly fine.
She turned her head away, refusing to meet his eyes, and began idly twisting strands of her hair around one of her horns.
"If you don’t believe me, you’re free to doubt me," she said. "But what happened here has absolutely nothing to do with me. It’s entirely the fault of the planet beneath our feet."
"Hah. Sure."
Evenson gave her a dry look.
He could believe that.
Habbus occasionally claimed the trash can had attacked him first, too.
Salorathis sighed.
She took one look at Evenson’s expression and immediately realized he was thinking something unflattering about her sister.
She decided to defend Ourecithes before the situation got any worse.
"The geological structure of this planet is very different from Earth’s."
"How different?"
Evenson was genuinely curious.
This was his first time visiting another planet. He had no reason to assume its interior worked anything like Earth’s.
"If you could see the sky, you would understand," Salorathis said. "This planet is extremely far from its star, and its atmosphere is relatively thin."
The three of them looked up.
There was one small problem.
The sky was currently filled with smoke.
Nothing else.
They stared upward for a moment.
Then at one another.
The awkward silence was particularly impressive considering Ourecithes was responsible for the smoke.
"She’s right," Evenson said eventually. "I couldn’t see the sky when I arrived, but I did notice that the star here isn’t much of a sun. It’s basically just an unusually bright star."
"You didn’t feel cold, though, did you?"
Salorathis’ lips curved slightly.
Evenson rested a hand against his chin.
"Now that you mention it..."
Under normal circumstances, his current physique meant he could stand at the South Pole without particularly caring about the temperature.
Even so, he’d noticed the planet had felt surprisingly mild when he first arrived. Around sixteen or seventeen degrees Celsius, give or take.
That had been before the volcano decided to turn the neighborhood into hell.
"Do you think that little star in the sky is capable of providing enough heat to keep an entire planet at that temperature?"
"Obviously not."
Evenson answered immediately.
Then his expression changed.
"You’re saying most of the planet’s heat comes from underground?"
"Exactly."
Ourecithes finally joined the conversation.
"The magma beneath this planet is extraordinarily active. Far more so than Earth’s. It also possesses an enormous amount of geothermal energy."
Evenson’s eyes widened.
"So you intended to cast a small spell, but the planet’s unusual geological structure amplified it dramatically?"
A grin spread across his face.
Geothermal energy was often described as an effectively inexhaustible resource.
And this planet possessed enough of it to regulate the temperature of the entire world.
That wasn’t merely valuable.
It was an unimaginable fortune.
For Evenson, it was the sort of discovery that made even a catastrophic volcanic eruption worth looking at twice.