Beneath the Dragoneye Moons

In many ways, gods seemed limited. Powerful Classers looked like they could do more than a manifested god on Pallos, and under certain definitions, that was true.

A god was closely aligned with their domain. The closer they were to it, the more they were worshipped, the bigger, badder impact they could have when they chose to act.

Erebus simply wasn’t of Pallos, and many domains flat out didn’t apply. Goddess of Trees? Couldn’t help too much. God of Earth? He was busy deleting vast swathes of Erebus, but there was only so much he could do.

Solaris, widely worshipped Goddess of the Sun? She’d taken 10,000 years worth of prayer energy, then manifested a fist from the sun to punch Erebus. The phrase ‘acceptable collateral damage’ was being thrown around way more than I was comfortable with.

I dove down to the impact site, and took a brief, entirely justifiable, moment to skim along the raw plasma. A mission to the sun had been deemed too difficult and dangerous, but when the sun came to me… I was absolutely going to surf on it.

I had to trust that the Immortals not near the impact zone were going to be fine. Everyone was tough, and the fist wasn’t the size of the planet. Shame, this would’ve been much easier if we could’ve just punched it out and been done with it.

The fist landed.

[*ding!* [The Elaine] leveled up! 4088 -> 4089! Only 7 levels to go! +1073 Strength, +1073 Dexterity, +4302 Speed, +4302 Vitality, +10757 Mana, +53783 Mana Regeneration, +21512 Magic Power, +21512 Magic Control per level!

We can do it!]

The rocks were scorched and cracked. Superheated plasma billowed from the impact site, traveling for miles. Even as close as I was, I could see the entire planet shudder from the impact. Erebus was wracked with earthquakes for four straight minutes as the celestial-sized impact continued, then the fist slowly dissipated into a thousand burning fires. If the place hadn’t started as bedrock, it would’ve been reduced to it, and the black scorch marks would forever mar the surface. If the impact site wasn’t visible from Pallos already, I’d eat Auri’s hat.

Either it worked, at which point all we did was waste a few hours of effort, or it wasn’t enough, and we still had to vigorously apply ourselves to the problem. I flew over the surface of Erebus at the speed of Radiance, noting a number of efforts to destroy the planet.

A few gods were simply hurling mountain-sized plates off into the void. A writhing silvery mass was rapidly expanding, and the center was starting to glow red at all the heat they were generating. Vines and roots were growing all over the place, breaking the rocks down into smaller and smaller pieces until it was sand. It looked useless at first, but then I saw the sand getting picked up by a second Classer, who brought it to a third Classer who was stashing it away in their own personal pocket dimension. A half-dozen people were acting as couriers to this one person, and if they had unlimited Sand storage, that was a solution.

A Classer had a fancy Mirror setup going. Quite a few seemed to just be standing there, doing nothing, but I suspected they were going for small planet-wide effects, instead of flashily destroying a hundred meters of surface rock. Two goddesses were handing out divine equipment at a fantastical rate, mostly shovels and pickaxes. Every strike simply removed a large chunk of Erebus, and I was remembering the sword we’d picked up along the way that could’ve sliced through a planet. Thinking of how we would’ve actually tried to slice through, and… the rocks would’ve caved back in on us, and cutting Erebus in half would simply make two large rocks heading our way, not one.

A field of impossible flowers was growing at incredible rates, but didn’t seem to be doing anything.

Another Classer was slowly descending into the planet on a bed of pitch black obsidian, the massive stone slowly rotating and grinding the rock into oblivion.

I flew over the ‘core team digsite’. The hole was over ten miles in diameter, and thick bands of Metal were keeping it from collapsing in on itself. I peeked in as I flew overhead, and I could see a faint molten glow deep inside.

I found a nice spot and let out the second team. Cheerful, the Classer with exactly the right skill, got to it. I whistled as a spiral hole was instantly ripped into Erebus.

“That’s an incredibly dangerous skill for anyone off of Pallos.” I said.

“I know!” She cheerfully informed me. “It’s so cool to let it rip like this! Give me an hour and I can do it again.”

“Good luck.” I told her, and flew over to where Iona and Auri were. A moment later I was next to my hummingbird friend, witnessing the apocalyptic meteor storm she was still raining down on Erebus.

“You know, the higher you get, the more momentum your meteors will have.” I pointed out to Auri.

“Brrrpt.” She correctly denied. She’d start hitting outside her area if she tried that.

“I assume there’s a reason you can’t burn the rocks?” The entire time, Auri continued to conjure meteors. The devil was looking on enviously.

“Brrrpt BRPT brrrRRRRrrrrpt.” Auri explained. LONG story short, burning converted, it rarely destroyed, and the math worked out that dropping rocks was a better use of her mana. I trusted Auri to know her skills better than I did, just wanted to make sure she hadn’t gotten caught thinking in a loop.

I looked down at Erebus and cracked my knuckles. Being a ferry was important, I was going to get right back to it, but I’d be utterly remiss if I didn’t try to move it myself.

“Don’t worry about me, just keep firing.” I told Auri. She side-eyed me.

“Brrrpt.” She snarked.

I rolled my eyes at the sass and went [Lightspeed], shooting down towards the planet, borrowing Auri’s ‘impact spot’.

I’d never been able to do this on Pallos. The risk of hurting someone was far too high. In a designated ‘fire everything’ zone, I could finally unleash without causing a city-destroying explosion, or worry about the resulting fallout.

Flying martial arts was an entirely different discipline than grounded, one that almost had to be self-taught and self-improved. So much mattered on the style of flight and points of leverage, then flying vs flying was entirely different than flying vs ground. I was never unarmed, so I hadn’t devoted significant time to learning hand to hand flying vs immovable object combat. I kept it simple.

Twisting my shoulder and waist, I put my entire body weight into punching Erebus at the speed of light.

It literally caused an explosion that felt as large and as hot as when Solaris smacked Erebus with the sun. The bones in my arm shattered into millions of pieces and went flying off, ripping my arm to shreds in the process. The mithril chainmail held, trapping all the bone shards inside. I promptly healed and regenerated a new one as I continued to stand in the fallout. I shook out my sleeve, letting all the blood, bone, and flesh fall out.

Interesting. It partially counted as fire, so I was immune to some of it.

I side-stepped Auri’s meteor - I swear the birdbrain was trying to hit me - then flew back up.

“Brrrpt.” Auri pointed out.

“Ah yeah, alright.” I said. “Coat me.”

A moment later I could barely move, as Auri coated me with a thick layer of conjured Lava. Didn’t matter that my arms and legs couldn’t move, I could still go [Lightspeed]. Taking the majority of my molten armor with me, I slammed into Erebus again with significantly more effect. Momentum was mass times velocity, and ten times the mass meant ten times the impact.

Stolen story; please report.

If I couldn’t find fun in a disaster, where would I find it?

I smacked Erebus around a few more times, then zipped over to find Iona.

“Need anything?” I asked her.

“An evacuation timeline.” She drily answered. “I don’t fancy being on this rock when they finally work out how to break it apart. Mostly because getting back to Pallos would be a pain.”

I nodded. Iona could turn into moonlight, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t a quick elemental transformation like [Lightspeed].

“Super reasonable. Alright, I’ll go ask Arachne.”

The next few hours were frantic. ‘Less than 10 hours until Erebus hits’ was actually closer to ‘5 hours of effort’. I continued zipping back and forth on [Thinkers’s] orders, occasionally disagreeing with them. Not that it stopped me from executing on them. I recognized that this was an emergency, and we didn’t have the time to have every order explained, and that I didn’t see the big picture.

I overheard plans and ideas while going back and forth, and a concerning number of them had “... and it will unfortunately wipe all life off Pallos, but we can always repopulate.” coming from the gods.

The mortals objected. Strenuously.

“Look, The Healer is right over there. We’ll supercharge Pallos’s magnetic field so Erebus will bounce off it. She’ll heal all of you and whoever else we can evacuate into the protected zone, all of you will get to live! A few faceless people will die, they were going to die in the next Immortal War anyway. What’s the difference?”

“No!” I shouted. “Absolutely NOT!”

Night gave me a ‘I got this’ motion, and moved in to defuse the situation.

And for some reason, gods kept having similar ‘great ideas’. How the fuck ‘repopulate Pallos’ was easier than ‘make a new moon and use it to intercept Erebus’, including the expected return on divine energy/mana, I couldn’t even begin to guess.

I was developing an alarmingly long shitlist of gods, given that I was on track to join them in a few decades… maybe years at this rate… who was I kidding, my time left on Pallos was probably marked in hours.

Hours later - and still on Pallos, thank Ciriel - we were in a shaded pavilion as the sun rose on Ankhelt, watching Erebus grow larger in the sky. We were standing next to the Moon Goddesses and Arachne, and I was furiously praying to Iona’s patron deities.

Night had a significant collection of heads on spikes. Grisly, but it was getting the message across nicely. Do not fuck with saving Pallos. Honestly, it was appalling how many people saw the crisis as an opportunity. Thousands of people were running around, and thousands more were huddled up in little groups, working on one project or another. [Couriers] sending messages around the world, [Runners] communicating between different groups. I could see Arachne’s threads woven between everyone, along with a half-dozen other communication/monitoring skills. The glass shards one looked dangerous, but I was here and it was a bit of a crisis.

A suspicious number of gods hadn’t done much, but were grouped up on their own. I wanted to ask what was going on with that, but given how hard the [Thinkers] were all working, I wasn’t going to start demanding explanations.

The damage we’d done to the planet was visible from here. The core team had succeeded, and Erebus was busy breaking up into pieces. It was still mostly one large chunk, just… spitting out a fuckton of rock in a slow red-hot spiral. Like a spinning ball made out of sand. The parts of Erebus that weren’t red-hot or breaking apart were unbelievably green, speckled with colors. The Classer growing flowers had coated the majority of the surface, then left.

From where we were standing, we got to witness Operation: Giant Meteor Strike impact on Erebus. The entire thing looked like it was happening in slow motion, but given the sizes and distances involved, it was anything but.

“In exactly 13 minutes and 11 seconds, we need your moon at the 17 days, 8 hours, and 33 second position at the apogee.” Arachne explained to Lunaris. “We think your moon will need to be at the 14 day, 22 hour and 50 second perigee mark after, but we’ll hit you with the technical details.” She then said to Selene. “Neither of those are direct hits, they should just clip Erebus enough off its course.”

The goddesses looked nervous. I’d never seen a goddess look nervous before. I sent them a bit more mana, roughly the combined amount of a medium town. I could understand their concern. Arachne would have no problems telling them a bold-faced suicidal lie in order to save everyone else.

“We’ll do it.” They said.

Flora, the Witch in White, stepped up next to us. It was a less fitting moniker, given how I was also a witch in white these days, just… without the capitals.

“Couldn’t help overhearing.” She gruffly said. “But after the meteor hit, if you’re pinging Erebus off both moons, not enough of it is going to be left intact for me to ascend and grab it.”

Well… damn. I hadn’t thought of that! Explained what all the flowers were about. She’d been making a connection to Erebus to actually seize it as a domain. Arachne’s glare at Flora was murderous. Given how the Moon Goddesses seemed to be rethinking their commitment with another option available, I could see why.

“Contingencies can be prepared but not used.” Arachne said. I heard Night sharpening a knife somewhere behind us. “I do believe you’ll owe Selene and Lunaris a considerable amount after all this is over.”

“I believe I will.” Flora said.

As the timer counted down, Selene and Lunaris tightly held onto each other. Iona was next to them, providing support, and the rest of us were with her, Auri on my shoulder. Our eyes were locked on the sky, Erebus looking three times the size of the moons. A dramatic improvement from the four times it had been at one point.

Erebus continued to slowly eject material as it spun, but was soon partially eclipsed by the moon. Moving it slowly into position caused fewer issues than a rapid reposition. We were going to have enough tidal waves and tsunamis as it was, and that was if everything went well!

I could tell the moment Erebus hit Lunaris. She cried out and half-collapsed as a chunk of the moon broke off and the planetoid went spinning off in another direction. Selene gripped her lover, and the two of them just got a few moments to breathe. Arachne and the rest of the [Thinkers] were in a big huddle, constantly glancing up at Erebus before continuing to furiously exchange numbers and ideas.

The planetoid was distinctly breaking up, and I swear it didn’t look like it was coming directly for us anymore. Lunaris’s moon had a distinct chunk taken out of it, but I could already see the rocks falling to rebuild the spherical look.

“Minor adjustment.” Arachne said. “Sorry Selene, if I could give the two of you more time, I would. Can you put your moon at…” She rattled off the coordinates.

Iona joined their huddle, and a few moments later was supporting both goddesses. Goddess-sized couches appeared a moment later, and she helped the two goddesses down on them.

“Go back up?” The [Paladin] suggested. Lunaris wearily shook her head.

“Might be more we can do here.” She panted out. “Down… not out. Every bit counts.”

I nodded my respect at the commitment. Far better than ‘heads-on-pikes’ over there.

I looked up at where all the excitement was happening. Erebus was well and truly breaking up. About half of it was going to miss us, and the other half was scattered all over the place.

After another [Thinker] huddle, the ‘ground teams’ started to get quite busy. My job and position was right here, to handle injuries and heal anyone who got caught by the falling debris.

Also, my healing range at the edge of ascension could only be described as epic. I unfolded my aura, letting it heal everyone in its range as well as accepting all the issues.

My aura covered a quarter of the planet’s surface. It was great, but there was literally such a thing as too much.

[*ding!* [The Elaine] leveled up! 4089 -> 4090! Only 6 levels to go! +1073 Strength, +1073 Dexterity, +4302 Speed, +4302 Vitality, +10757 Mana, +53783 Mana Regeneration, +21512 Magic Power, +21512 Magic Control per level!

We can do it!]

The distances involved were unimaginably vast, and I made us some quick hot cocoa while we watched Erebus steadily get closer, breaking apart the entire way.

The tidal forces were slow and subtle at first, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice them. With skills, with classes, the impossible was mundane. People jumping high? Kids who’d just unlocked could grab [Jumping] and it wasn’t a rare sight, let alone when stats kicked in. Sand taking longer to fall back down? Could just be my perception rate being sped up to keep up with everyone. Or a skill.

My drink sloshing around? Now I knew something was up. Which was roughly the same time the gods did something about it.

A flag was raised, and the world became heavier around me. I hadn’t even noticed the subtle lightening as Erebus’s gravity tried to pull me away from Pallos. Phrases like ‘ocean will not be pulled to the Lagrange point’ and ‘can’t stop medium earthquakes. Allow volcanic activity to dispel pressure’ started getting thrown around quickly. Pele Manava, Goddess of Underwater Volcanoes, ran around in circles cheering with her hands over her head, whooping in delight.

I swear I saw a red glow over the northern horizon a moment later.

The first shooting star appeared a moment later, burning up in the atmosphere. It was soon joined by a dozen more, then hundreds more, as tiny fragments of Erebus started to burn up upon entry to Pallos. Auri was eyeing them speculatively, trying to figure out if her [Meteor Storm] skill could be useful or not. Which was when the call for shields went up.

Erebus spun steadily closer, and a grand barrier snapped into existence, covering a third of Pallos. It started to shimmer and ripple as millions of shards hit the shield, and I got to watch the first ‘chunk’ smash against the protection.

“We fly.” Lun’Kat growled, and a thousand dragons took flight. Then they shimmered and duplicated, and a moment later the air was filled with the wings of a hundred thousand dragons tearing off into the sky. They went through the shield without a problem, and I could see them burning up stones and physically wrestling larger chunks away from the shield.

“Brrrpt!” Auri protested, and she flew up into the sky, followed by Fenrir, a thunderbird, and thousands more fliers and Classers, none of them willing to be outdone by the dragons.

“Fucking talk to us next time.” Arachne muttered loudly enough for us to hear. “We could’ve planned for this.”

There was a round of nodding in agreement, almost entirely by the [Thinkers].

More plans were executed, more protections enacted. It took hours and hours for Erebus to pass by, and at its closest, I swore I could’ve reached out and touched it. An illusion caused by the vast distances.

[*ding!* [The Elaine] leveled up! 4090 -> 4091! Only 5 levels to go! +1073 Strength, +1073 Dexterity, +4302 Speed, +4302 Vitality, +10757 Mana, +53783 Mana Regeneration, +21512 Magic Power, +21512 Magic Control per level!

We can do it!]

Erebus broke up around Pallos, and a significant chunk of debris was continuing to circle Pallos. Made me wonder if we were about to get a ring. The dragons landed. Fenrir and Auri joined us soon after.

The [Thinkers] all huddled up, taking measurements and rapidly talking with each other. Finally, Arachne broke away from the group, and whispered to Night. Then she took out a gem, spun on her heel and vanished. A few more people were starting to briskly walk away, and I was getting both a bad and a good feeling about it. Selene and Lunaris were starting to sit up on their sofa, looking a little more lively.

Night stood up.

“The crisis has passed. Pallos will live to see another day. I hereby declare Pax Deos at an end.”

Then he sank into the shadows, vanishing entirely.

Ah fuck.

“Brrrpt.” Auri looked around nervously. A number of people were briskly leaving the staging ground, not wanting to be around for what happened next. I grabbed a spellbook and broadcast my voice.

“Hi! I’m Elaine. [The Healer]. Don’t start shit, I’ll just prevent any deaths. Go away, get drunk, celebrate, and maybe we’ll kick off the Immortal War next week.”

For a moment it looked like the crowd would be swayed.

Then Lun’Kat dropped her invisibility as her talons ripped through Selene’s neck.