Beneath the Dragoneye Moons

Eight heavy spheres screamed down to Pallos, each one targeted at a different city in Urwa. Shahrazad. Serendib. Wak-Wak. Miraj Mahal. Azraq. Jamila. Sharaf. Fajr.

Each city had shields and protections, from enchanted walls to powerful Classers with protective skills. The most powerful defenses, however, required active concentration and activation. It was like a turtle in their shell - the withdrawal had to be deliberate. Nobody used [Persistent Casting] on the most powerful city-wide defense skills, because that involved shutting the city down entirely. The gates would be closed, entirely stopping the movement of trade.

The spheres came down so quickly there was no time to react. Only the best of reflexes had a spark’s chance in Modu of doing anything, and that was if they were looking at the right place at the right time, their fingers on the metaphorical trigger.

Alas, there were none.

The spheres were all well-aimed, the movement practically instantaneous. They each hit at the city center, where all of their kinetic energy was promptly and energetically converted to every other type of energy, the spheres turning into a massive shockwave along with a thousand pieces of shrapnel, which took out every building in a three-block radius, which promptly turned into several billion bricks, glass shards, and pieces of heavy, broken clay going in every single direction. The destruction scythed through hundreds of thousands of people, shredding them in a moment.

There were survivors, of course. Classers with their own personal defensive skills, paranoid elves who gleefully crowed that they were right, and ‘lucky’ children holding a pair of bloody hands, as the people to either side of them got obliterated, and the random rolling of the dice simply spared them any physical harm.

The cities themselves were flattened beyond recognition. Quite a few basements survived - a rare structure in the culture - and the walls survived.

The walls had been reinforced, but the threat was internal, not external. All they did was contain and ‘echo’ the blast inside a second time, the strongest protections turning the city into a destructive kettle. Ironically, the Classers responsible tended to be in secured locations with protective skills themselves, or protected by people who had specialized skills. If they had died in the initial blast, the walls would’ve fallen and the impact wouldn’t have been as great.

The impact and the cities being flattened were visible from space, where Lossamiel had a moment to bitterly laugh at the destruction she’d wrought, literal millions of kill notifications scrolling in front of her while her level jumped up to the next classup. All it would take was a moment to classup, and she’d reach divinity and become a god.