I floated nearly a hundred meters above the nondescript plains in an unusual new form. I had activated my ability to take on the forms of celestial objects and taken on the form of a star. Beneath me my supporters were being bathed in light that blessed and uplifted them.
I watched as the mixed horde I had assembled dashed towards my enemies. This was the first army I had gathered and in time I would reward them for their service. Though for now I was wisely focused on the fighting ahead of me I was quite happy that I had so many followers who were willing to risk their lives for me. In many cases this was the first real test of this sort for my worshipers.
I wasn't a peaceful god but I wasn't especially aggressive either. That was probably a good thing overall, but it had met that until now I hadn't gathered armies under my personal command.
The only army I had gathered before now was the one I had raised myself as a necromancer and together we had fought multiple battles together. They were utterly loyal to me but they were my direct creations. There was a similar problem with The Swarm, though less so than with my horde of undead servants. This army had millions of creatures in it, many of which were fully living, nominally independent beings. That met I was inching towards mostly new territory, a realization which was a bit exciting. I was becoming a god of conquest and for one of the first times in my life embracing my powers as a god of the apocalypse quadrangle.
As my soldiers dashed across the featureless plain and towards an army of demons they felt my powers surge into them. They were empowered not just by my blessings but also by abilities like "Minion empowerment" and "Death empowerment". When I focused on them I could see them grow in size and I watched their muscles visibly expand. They also began to radiate power, and for not the first time in my life I slightly regretted not becoming a deity of wrath. In moments like this having powers over wrath would have been useful. But I did have other powers that would help me here.
I had countless abilities I could use to disrupt a battlefield of this size. Especially one where there was a vast distance between my minions and my enemies. I couldn't physically smile, I was a star at the moment after all, but internally I began to smile.
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Solomon was dashing across the plains when Althos began to strike for real. The centipede-demon was moving forward on a tremendous number of legs hoping to get within range to begin to attack, when his enemy well and truly went on the offensive.
Althos commenced his attack by targeting the demons at the end of the horde. From a distance of several kilometers away the god silently struck many hundred demons with an energy-sapping wave. This attack stole their energy and even attacked their motivation, stealing their fear of their master's wrath from them. All sorts of demons fell victim to this attack, slowing their charge and in some cases even stopping altogether. Distantly their star-shaped foe chuckled. That wasn't all he was doing.
Solomon had recruited numerous demons to fill the ranks of his unorganized army. Some of the demons he had recruited included towering monstrosities of ooze, corruption and pollution demons that were capable of permanently altering the landscape wherever they were used. Althos appreciated the demons and distantly he felt like recruiting them into his forces.
The ambitious god aimed at the one that was the furthest back and for the briefest of instants a phantom copy of the god itself appeared above the unlucky tower of ooze and corruption and fired a few spores into the creature. The phantom then vanished, but the spores it had created and fired were incredibly real. The spores were nearly invisible due to how small they were, at least at first.
The spores, incredibly tiny even for spores, aggressively invaded the demon Althos had chosen as the first to "befriend" as the fungal subdomain would put it. They invaded the demon, and then Althos caused them to age rapidly, creatively utilizing his own powers. The spores visibly grew within the demon, causing the transparent ooze to begin to mutate rapidly. That said, at this point the other demons were either already affected by Althos' powers or they were too far away to effectively do anything to either destroy the corrupted corruption demon or help free the thing from the powers that were assailing its mind.
The demon began to moan pathetically. The sounds were the pained groans of a mind that was feebly resisting this attempt to control it. The creature, a towering dozen meter tall behemoth of a demon, was pained by the fungal effort to take over its mind. It was also failing in its efforts to resist.
This painful process lasted several seconds before Althos, taking a bit of pity on the thing, distantly sedated the beast and its mind fell fully to the overriding influence of the fungal subdomain. The sedated creature stopped resisting and fully became a pet of the god of fungi, as the aged spores rapidly ate away the beast's modicum of free-will.
Althos, from far away, commanded the beast to do one thing: spread its spores to its former companions. The demon howled, the sound causing its liquid body to shudder, and eagerly turned on its former allies. It was determined to be reunited with them, in its own way. The creature immediately lunged towards the nearest group of its former allies, many of whom were unmotivated even in the face of the terrifying demon and made no effort to dodge the fierce demon.
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Deep within me, I heard the delighted and shocked gasp of the fungal subdomain as I unleashed one of the subdomain's key abilities on my demonic foe. There were no intelligent words to go with the cry, but the emotion was so pure and intense that even before I gained my absolute empathy ability I'd have been able to identify the emotion. I was being creative and aggressive, and so I didn't mind unleashing a power as apocalyptic as my parasitic spores on my enemies. They were demons after all.
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My demonic pet was hard at work spreading the aggressive and contagious condition throughout the ranks of my enemies. And now the two factions were so close that the sharpest eyed members of both groups could see each other. I heard the distant and triumphant roar of Solomon as he pushed himself even harder to reach my minions, as well as the distant and furious roars of dragons as they hurled themselves at Solomon and his minions.
Solomon himself was an interesting figure to me. I, of course, wanted to bring him over to my side. He was a toy of Agustino's, and I wanted to take each and every possession of my demonic foe as one minor punishment for refusing to stick to our status quo until I had felt like turning my attention towards him. But how should I bring the rival general over to my side? That was the question I was pondering.
The easiest way would have been to utilize my fungal abilities. As far as recruitment went, they were probably my most potent abilities. There was a part of me wanted to do that. It wanted to defeat, possibly even kill, Solomon and then forcibly bring him back to serve me as a fungal monster. My powers over civilization-ending spores were so powerful that not only were extraplanar entities affected by them, I could also use them on corpses and thus reanimate the bodies.
I could also utilize my powers over insanity. I could drive the demon mad and then forcibly reconfigure the creature's mind so that by the time I was done it was loyal to me. I also had the power to just inflict so much pain on the creature that I could make it serve me out of fear for what I could do to it even across dimensional distances. I had a number of options.
Under other circumstances, if I were a less confident or powerful god, I'd probably be paying attention to the battle. And I was. I was powerful enough that I could split my focus without it negatively affecting me. And now the battle had begun for real, as the first of my soldiers was about to meet the first of Agustino's demons in close-quarters combat.
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An orc was the first of the Althonians to both reach an enemy and also engage in close-quarters combat. He held a warhammer made of silver in one hand and a thick shield in the other. The demon he was facing was a demon with a humanoid frame, but more closely resembled a walking skeleton than anything else.
The demon held no weapons, but its claws were emanating a sinister heat. It cackled as it leaped at the orc, who rose his shield to meet the demon's inevitable strike. In mid-air the creature extended its claws at its foe and a grim grin appeared on its skeletal face. The orc smiled back, as the warrior was both a true zealot of Althos and also a battle fanatic. He met his foe's charge head-on and parried the strike using his shield all while moving his hammer towards his enemy in an effort to strike his foe down.
As they clashed, their allies closed in. The next set of warriors to clash were a demonic wolf who was one of Agustino's servants, and a gug, one of the Althonian abominations from the world of Salifinos.
Elsewhere on the battlefield the demonic centipede who ruled over this group of demons, for the moment anyway, had spotted the unnatural star floating above the battlefield and was dashing towards it. He knew of the impossible powers possessed by the gods and had correctly guessed that the star was Althos' doing.
Solomon was an unstoppable juggernaut, but in his wrath, he had made a tactical error: he had separated himself from his allies. Althos didn't stop this and was instead healing the creatures that had been hurled out of the way by the demon. None of them had died, mostly because of the countless blessings that were altering them and making them hardier, among other things.
Eventually though the demon got close enough that Althos acted. The god created an illusion of a star to continue to radiate light and he used an impossibly powerful burst of wind to scatter his allies and give him a clear battlefield on which to meet the enemy general. And at last he met Solomon on the field of battle, manifesting as his usual humanoid self a few dozen meters away from the demonic centipede.
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I swept a small portion of the plains clear of my soldiers using impossibly powerful and targeted winds. I hadn't felt like continuing to heal my servants all while meeting my foe head-on. The demonic general made no efforts to continue to harass my worshipers and instead remained laser-focused on me, evidently still outraged by my decision to kill his scouts.
Inwardly I chuckled and felt his hatred towards me cause him to push out all other thoughts. His rage felt odd to me, personal even. A curious part of me wanted to go ahead and drain the demon's memories to determine why he had developed so much hatred for me, but I could wait.
The demonic general posed no threat to me. In fact, I actually had the power to kill both him and Agustino instantly if I wanted. It was a death domain ability entitled "Death inducement" and with it, I could kill two things per twelve-hour period. I instinctually knew that it wouldn't work on someone like Morehammer, as it couldn't work on undead just yet but it could work on Solomon and it could work on Agustino.
The demon continued to charge at me, heartened by the fact that he had found my physical form. The sound of his hundreds of feet crashing into the ground underneath them was incredibly loud. His face was oddly human, and there was a malicious, hateful grin on his face as he charged at me. I calmly stood my ground and took on my angelic form once more.
I immediately shifted, changing from the form that I preferred to interact with creatures with, into my massive angel form. I felt the six wings manifest and materialize from my back and my wings and I opened my hands so that I could grip the sword and shield that were about to materialize.
Solomon wasn't phased by my transformation, and ignorantly continued to charge at me. I sighed and began to channel potent holy energy into my throat. I felt the power well up from near where my heart would have been and surge upwards until it was in my throat. That was the same moment that the angelic sword and shield my angelic form came with began to materialize. I locked eyes with Solomon and uttered a single word.
"Stop." I commanded, my voice powerfully resounding throughout the area around me, my word charged with holy energy. My word resounded throughout our private battlefield and this wiped the smirk off of the demon's face. He stopped charging at me and reared up, before beginning to howl in pain. The sound of his agony was so intense that my servants who were closer to us stopped for a moment and looked back at us. I nodded at them, my form now towering over the battlefield. They cautiously nodded back and turned their attention back to the demons ahead of them.
Solomon, the demonic centipede continued to wail in agony as the potent holy energy I had just hit him with, with nothing more than my words, surged through him. I chuckled at my foe. I figured that wouldn't be enough to stop him, and I could sense his anger building even as he tried to recover from my blow.
The real "battle" was about to start.