Beneath the Dragoneye Moons

I flashed over to Erebus at roughly the speed of light, and had a moment for just a single thought before I arrived.

Damnit.

With my leveling speed, I’d probably eaten my last mango. I shed a single frozen tear - it promptly boiled away, space was no fun - in the vast emptiness of space at the thought, mourning the vast groves of uneaten mango that would never know my tooth. The sweet flesh that would never find my tongue, the ambrosia that would never get swallowed.

Alas, from here on out, I would have to content myself with literal divine mangos, grown in the very orchards of the gods.

I followed the golden beam, and Erebus came into sight a moment later.

It was smaller than Pallos, a barren grey rock spinning through the void. Nothing about it seemed special, nothing screamed ‘I am the harbinger of death’. I flew down to the ‘South’ pole and activated [Let There Be Light], trusting that whoever was carrying the ‘North’ pole ‘pull’ team would spot me and go the other way.

I didn’t immediately land and let everyone out, that’d just be pure chaos. I circled the South pole in a wide radius, scorching the barren rock with my Radiance beams and marking out multiple areas dozens and dozens of miles wide. Zones where the most powerful Classers could work their literal magic without needing to worry too much about collateral damage. It was going to be tricky for the atmospheric team, but I trusted Arachne had it worked out.

I’d learned a few thousand levels ago that my Radiance beams could be too strong. If I overpowered them against pure rock, I could explosively vaporize it to punishing effect. The trick had gotten me out of exactly one situation in my entire life - generally, applying my Radiance directly to the problem was far more effective.

It was a terrible idea to properly ‘let go’ on Pallos proper, and the little girl inside me giggled at the sheer destruction I caused. Superheated rock vaporized and exploded, sending chunks of rock hurtling at escape velocity off Erebus’s surface.

I floated a few miles above Erebus, eyeing my work. Almost a hundred honeycombs across the south pole, perfect. I gave it a few more minutes for all the Classers inside my pocket dimension to organize themselves. I trusted all of them could drop a few miles no problem. I didn’t trust them to survive surprise vacuum of space.

Well… my healing would stop any real medical issues, but it started to sneak suspiciously towards harm. While I waited, I donated a careful amount of mana - just barely less than my regeneration rate - to Ciriel.

I think you’ll need this. I told the Goddess.

Thank you. We all will. Ciriel grimly replied. Stay safe! I can’t wait to see you.

I will! I replied back. Whenever I was fully topped up on mana, I made sure to donate a bit to Ciriel. It seemed like all the gods were playing their part, and if I had a favorite? Well, so did everyone else.

I took a moment to number all of the honeycombs, then floated back up over the grid and opened my pocket dimension. A shield was across the door, keeping everything inside and not explosively decompressing. A tendril of air extended out of the door and wrapped around me, letting me breathe and talk.

“Group 1, spot 1.” I pointed to the honeycomb in question, labeled with a gigantic 1. A few people trickled out.

Oh good, I was hoping that would happen. No awkward standing around, no milling in confusion. Gods, I loved working with competent professionals.

“Group 2, spot 2.” I said, and was delighted when Iona and Fenrir shot out, along with a pair I didn’t recognize. I waved to them and carried on directing traffic.

After Group 4, I got a polite request.

“Excuse us, Sentinel Dawn, we’ve got the atmospheric team ready to deploy.”

“Go.” I tersely ordered, and around 20 people jumped out of the portal. The air suddenly smelled of flowers, and my hair whipped around me as the winds picked up.

Summer Storm, a Gale elemental. I could see her spread out and down, wrapping around the entire field of hexagons and far beyond them. Well, looked like our air problems were solved, although the knots in my hair were going to be hell to get out. Normally. I’d been [Teleporting] to style my hair so long I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done it normally. The elemental didn’t do ‘calm air’, her name and nature were anathema to it.

“Group 5, go.” I ordered, and the next batch dropped out of the portal. With mental resignation, praying that I wasn’t dooming myself to eternity with a pixie cut, I summoned a pair of scissors and sliced off my waist-length hair. Should’ve done it earlier.

Group after group bailed out and spread apart, and one Immortal had taken it on himself to be the role of enforcer. Whenever a minor spat started, he just coughed ‘Pax Deos’, and the dispute miraculously resolved itself.

People were working fast. I was letting everyone out in an orderly manner, but it would’ve looked like a two-second blur to any mortal watching. Already, the first teams were landing and doing everything they could to push Erebus, pitting their might and magic against the mass of a small planet.

I didn’t quite have the time or abilities to run through all the math on the spot, not when I had so many other things to do. There was an interesting tension between when we hit Erebus, and the size of our effect.

The earlier we nudged Erebus, the bigger the impact. If we’d known about the problem a decade ago, we could’ve just nudged it a hair, and it would’ve missed us by a significant amount. Finding out at the last second was damning us, and the reason why everyone needed to pitch in.

At the same time, there was the ‘deletion’ team near the equator. The longer they had to work, the less mass Erebus would have, the larger impact our pushing would have on the planetoid.

The laws of motion still applied, but the System let most of us bypass them in some way, shape, or form. A demon had the simplest approach. Wielding a hammer three times as large as he was, he simply started hitting Erebus like it was a ball, trying to hammer through the entire planet. Most likely futile, but every little bit helped… assuming he had the skill for it. Otherwise he was being a dumbass. A giant had conjured a pane of Brilliance, and had braced himself against it. It was something to push off of, and thus, it could move Erebus, assuming his mana held out.

We were going to generate all the earthquakes.

A devil had flown off a distance, and was busy conjuring thick metal rods, and letting Erebus’s own gravity slam them down, pulverizing rock and kicking up the mother of all duststorms.

Actually, almost everyone was kicking up huge amounts of dust, sand, and rocks, but… ah, there! An ancient beastkin from Ankhelt was part of the environmental team. He was waving around an ankh, commanding the Sand to whirl around him and keeping everything clear for people to work.

Impressive range.

Auri flew out and joined the devil. With a dismissive brrpt I couldn’t hear but could absolutely see, she proceeded to try and one-up him by summoning bigger, faster meteors and hitting Erebus with them. She’d gotten the [Meteor Strike] skill early on, and had only been upgrading it since.

The results were apocalyptic, and the nearby groups went to the edge of their grid. It made me wonder about all the mass we were adding to Erebus, and if that would cause a problem.

A set of runes designed to simply ‘push’ everything was one of the most elegant spells I’d seen, but I dismissed the solution out of hand. At the penalties and sizes involved, I didn’t think it’d help all that much. Still, every little nudge counted.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

My mana topped back up, and I started praying my excess mana to Selene and Lunaris. The ‘just use the moons to block’ idea was pervasive, and I was willing to bet they got involved. They’d need every last drop of mana to survive.

All over Erebus, people were flinging their skills.

Thinking about it, we could, in theory, evacuate a small part of Pallos. Get a variety of Classers, and I bet we could build a generational ship, using skills to shore up every need. We could travel as a small band of refugees across the vast stars until we found a new planet to settle on.

It would only take a few hundred thousand years, and sacrifice our home and nearly everyone we knew. Not an option, as far as I was concerned.

Then the last team was out, and I dropped down to the hexagon with a gigantic 2 on it to see what I could do to help Iona, and let out Arachne’s ‘investigative’ team. As I came down, a volcano erupted near me, and a pillar of flames shot out into the sky. Impressively, the pillar of flames didn’t stop, and I made a mental note to check out who was doing that.

I landed and poked my head in.

“Investigative team! Let’s go.”

The four of them piled out and started taking their own arcane measurements. One broke out a sextant and a telescope. Another had no tools, simply stared at the sun and held out his hand, his fingers twitching. A woman busted out a dozen arcane gizmos, inscribed with thousands of tiny runes in a language I didn’t recognize at all. They whirred, they whistled, and they whizzed, all of which seemed to make perfect sense to her as she nodded along. Sometimes they sparked with colors, made odd noises, or started to smoke. The last woman simply stared off into the distance, a vacant look on her face.

Hey, I healed while reading books and snacking on mangos, I wasn’t about to knock anyone’s methods. I kept half an eye on my mana, noting the occasional flicker as somebody did something dumb, but my skills immediately erased the consequences.

I hopped over to where Iona was. Fenrir was busy blasting Ice all over the place under the [Paladin’s] direction, building a frozen temple to the gods.

“Tell me what I need to do.” I said.

“Doors, benches, grab my art from the religious gallery and hang it up. Glue will work.”

I internally winced. Iona loved her religious art gallery, and had spent countless hours painting images of hundreds of gods. I’d picked up enough over the years to know glueing a painting was sacrilegious… although, maybe by definition, it didn’t count here.

I didn’t waste time arguing, instead getting to my assigned task with gusto.

Iona carved out an altar from a block of Ice, and Fenrir worked some very fancy magic and created some frozen, flickering flames to light the braziers with. After hanging up the artwork, I raided the minor chapel in the pocket dimension for some extras - a few statues, a couple of holy icons - and scattered them about appropriately.

“Right. Temple’s set up. It’s a little barebones, but I think under the circumstances nobody’s going to complain.”

Then Iona went full chipmunk as she consecrated the temple. It took everything I had to maintain my poker face, but it was clearly a success. Gods began manifesting directly on Erebus, and with barely a respectful nod to Iona, rapidly started deploying all over the planetoid.

I could feel the entire place shaking as multiple gods began to work their divine art. Iona reached out to lay a hand on one of the temple’s pillars to stabilize herself, and the building. Ice plus earthquake was not a good combination. My wife groaned, her eyes flickering over invisible System notifications.

“I’m going to ascend before I get to punch that smug dragon in the mouth.” She complained. I patted her on the back.

“Building the first and only temple on a planet to save all life on Pallos is worth a bit of experience?” I half-teased, mostly to try and burn off some of the tension.

“Don’t you know it.” Iona groaned.

I wasn’t much use standing here, and I zipped back over to the analytics team.

“All set?” I asked them.

The gizmo and gadget girl shook her head, but the other three assented.

“Right, let’s go.” I said. Given how quickly I could go back and forth, given how critical the information could be, I wasn’t going to wait.

A quick hop, skip, and jump through the stars later, and I was landing back on Pallos near Arachne. From high up in the sky, the place looked like a hive of activity, dozens of high level [Runners] leaving visible dust tracks as they dashed across the sands. A few Immortals were hovering overhead, and the bodies of a dozen great sandwyrms were laid where they were slain.

The first thing that hit me was the sheer din and all the noise going on. Most of the gods had left, but I spotted Elaris. The Goddess of Communication looked terrible. I let the [Thinkers] out and one of the ones who’d stayed behind approached me. I wasn’t going to complain about the system in place, nor was I going to demand I talk with Arachne, not if she was this busy coordinating everything.

“How’d it go?” He asked.

“Everything looked fine.” I said. “Left one of the [Thinkers] behind, she wasn’t done. Iona’s Ice temple doesn’t look like it’ll survive being in the same general area as the combined might of Pallos. What’s up with the talking? It was great when we left.”

The [Thinker] frowned.

“Elaris is completely drained.” He said. “She’s not a terribly popular goddess in the first place, and the toll was harshly geometric with how many people were here.”

I still liked Ciriel more, and every god needed mana. If the Classers here weren’t redirecting mana, I wasn’t going to either.

I thought of the numbers and winced. Translating thousands of people’s words perfectly, in real time, to thousands of others, ensuring everything was understood, and the most magical part, that we comprehended each other through a massive din? Alright, I could see it. My calibration was a little skewed, given the sheer might the Moon Goddesses could exert.

A lot of my multi-tasking was being dedicated to translating everything going on around me and trying to make sense of the snippets of conversation I was hearing. People were discussing Classers and who might be able to help, then deploying [Runners] to go get them. A fierce argument was going on between two gods and three Classers. Two of them wanted to create the solar system’s largest lever, then use Pallos as a fulcrum to move Erebus. Moving just Erebus alone was hard. Using Pallos to offset the momentum - and move it out of the way itself - was a simple solution. The other three were protesting the entire thing, pointing out that the lever would simply slice through Pallos and Erebus, instead of getting any actual moving done. Dozens more wild schemes were terribly impractical, or would, somehow, miraculously, make the problem worse.

I was sorely tempted to remove the one idiot loudly proclaiming that we should just ‘blow up the sun’ to the Northern Continent in case his stupidity was infectious.

‘Create a plague that eats rocks’ sounded great, until the question of ‘and what happens when a spore lands on Pallos’ was raised. Instead of a huge mass of rock, we’d have a huge mass of planet-eating spores heading our way, with a similar momentum. Instead of blasting us to smithereens, it’d blast us to pieces, then eat all the remaining chunks. The argument for it was ‘dealing with a Spore outbreak is a more manageable problem’, and I found myself reluctantly compelled.

One scheme that perked my ear right up was the ‘let’s find Genie and wish the problem away’ plan. That sounded like a viable solution, but I was going to trust Arachne here. If she thought my time and efforts were best spent ferrying people around, I was going to do that instead of starting a grid-pattern search for a golden lamb. Given that Genie had four legs and liked to walk around, it made it extra hard.

Operation: The Great Shield was one I wanted to encourage. It wouldn’t help a direct hit, but assuming the away teams managed to pulverize Erebus and knock most of it off-course, the shield team was all about ‘how do we handle the minor debris’. With ‘minor’ being ‘each chunk is an extinction-level meteor’.

One [Thinker] was unironically building a ‘perfect parry’ team. Sentinel Sword Saint, may he rest in peace, would’ve been perfect. Iona’s joke about being on top of a mountain with a baseball bat was being executed, and the crazy part was it could maybe work. A little. The System had some absolutely bullshit skills out there. The biggest hurdle to the problem, as far as I could tell, was the impact site kept moving as everyone involved was pushing, pulling, or deleting mass from Erebus.

The ‘Immovable object’ was just going to have rock flow around them like a river.

A little more concerning was how many ancient horrors people were debating unsealing and throwing at the problem. I didn’t see what Thraximundar could possibly do to bail us out of this, and he’d be the only survivor in either case. The black-tier threat buried in the Tympestshard Council would end us more thoroughly than Erebus would, except it would be agonizing and prolonged, as opposed to the quick death Erebus promised.

One scary combination was several pairs of Classers off in the sands, deflecting increasingly-fast projectiles at each other. They were using their skills to create larger and larger attacks, before hopefully flinging it at Erebus. If I had the time, if the situation wasn’t so serious, if Iona was around, I’d start laying down bets on how many of the Classers would misjudge and blow each other up instead of sending the attack to Erebus.

A large contingent of Wardens were racing north, off to grab as many unique items from the Dungeon as possible. Things like Auri’s ‘ocean in a bottle’ could be used to store a lot of rocks.

My eye twitched at the ‘White Dove Assembly Line’. Thanatos himself, with White Dove on his shoulder, was blessing a line of Beastkin with Immortality. White Dove was then promptly cursing them with a ‘useful’ curse, like ‘turn stone into air’.

I wanted to say they were lucky bastards, but given the brave volunteer who got that curse promptly vanished into the swirling sands of Pallos, I wasn’t going to jump the gun on that one.

The last plan I wanted to get involved in included a dozen meteor strikes on Erebus itself. The trick was timing, but enough gods were involved I thought it was viable.

“What do I need to do?” I asked the [Thinker].

“We’ve got a second team we need deployed.” He told me. “Over there. It’s a deletion team, so drop them off at the equator. Try not to be too close to the other teams. Battery team needs to be distributed wherever you feel is good. Report back when you’re done, and we’ll work out where the rest of the Batteries need to go.”

It was an entire planet, I didn’t think that’d be a problem.

I zipped over to the team in a flash of Radiance. Not as high level, not as many people, let’s do this. I opened up the portal.

“Everyone in! Go go go!”

One bright eyed and bushy tailed Immortal beamed at me as she went in, an excited chatterbox of a nymph. Only level 1100… but I remembered changing the world at half that level.

“I’m so excited! I’ve done just a little bit of world traveling and space exploring, and I’ve got a skill to anchor my portal relative to Pallos no matter where I am! It’s caused problems before, but this time, it’s going to be perfect!”

“Nice!” I encouraged her, gesturing for her to go in. We only had so much time.

Whoof. An anchored portal skill? That was going to literally rip through Erebus, and was one of the best deletion skills I could think of for the situation. Although a two-meter or so diameter hole through Erebus wasn’t going to kill off that much, every bit counted.

I took off without any fanfare, heading straight back to Erebus. It was visible to the naked eye from Pallos by now, a slow small dot in the sky that I swore was steadily getting larger. As I left the shadow of Pallos’s night, I immediately spotted a gigantic geyser of burning plasma emitted from the sun, heading towards Erebus.

I paused a moment in space, watching with awe as the fist-shaped geyser traveled at a respectable clip through space.

“Ah fuck, I’ve got to be in that.” I muttered to myself, and continued my own mad dash towards Erebus. No sense in accidentally getting people killed from large attacks, not when I could do something about it.

I arrived at Erebus, and a moment later, Solaris punched the planet with the sun.