"So be it." Visibly gnashing his teeth, Alverost gathers his emotions and closes his eyes. "Then I'll be the king of the ashes. Have fun down there for as long as the planet lasts."

With these words, the holographic screen disappears. Then the upside-down city begins to float away; he intends to run while letting the moon finish me off.

"As if I'd let you." I mutter to myself and transform back into my human size. But before I can shoot upward and infiltrate the flying city, I stop to think. Would Alverost really be up there? I'd think that after the experience in Zohigal, he would be much farther away to keep himself safe. Unlike Zenlith, he's not immortal, after all.

So is this another diversion?

"Contact Tokomaha. Have her clones go to the Prichet district." I contact Senka in my mind. The affluent Prichet district is where the only door to the underground vault of Arkheim is hidden. Alverost could be throwing everything away to free Zenlith, including two floating cities and even Oinos. In fact, if he's really down there, he might even be risking his own life. "Tell her to swarm the place."

"Understood." Comes the doll girl's quick reply. She's not making any jokes under these circumstances, and I'm grateful for that.

I'd love to take Alverost out myself if he's there, but the possibility that I'm overthinking things is always present. If I let the flying city get away, he might come again with an even bigger army and a new Oinos. After all, if he can create one, he can surely do it again in due time.

Surrounding myself in plasma, I shoot up and straight into the buildings hanging from the futuristic city. It's about one-fourth the size of Arkaim, but I assume it's not filled with people. Surely, a lot of it is just for show.

And as I expected, most buildings are empty or nothing but façades. As I burn my way through the structures toward the perceived core, I expand my Chaos senses to feel life forms all around me. There are several places they're concentrated in, but many of them have dark spots on their bodies. Most are missing parts of their heads and organs, others only their limbs. They're most likely drones, kept by Alverost to do menial labor for him.

I aim for one conglomeration of life forms. Judging by the numbers, that could be a place where the devils invading the city below are being created. When I break through the wall and into the massive facility, I find myself in something that can only be described as a cloning factory.

"Intruder alert!" The nearest drones, some looking like humans, others like demons, all of them with mechanical parts sticking out of her bodies, turn to me with the expressionlessness of robots. Spreading my arms into their individual tentacles, I whip them around and tear the enemies into pieces. As I make my way through the facility, I pull the edible parts inside my body.

The clone vats here seem to predominantly contain the human-sized variant of devils. They're the most numerous type used in the invasion of Kairaki and now Arkaim, so there are most likely more such places in this floating city. For me, it's an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Spreading my mass out, I grab anything that registers as living, rip them to pieces to make sure they cease to be such. Then I pull them inside me for breaking down and adding to my mass. It won't be enough to make up for what I lost against Oinos, but it's better than nothing.

It takes me less than a minute to clean the factory of anything living, though I did leave behind a huge mess of blood and guts. I'm in a hurry after all, so I can't waste time cleaning up the scraps. Taking one last look around to make sure I didn't miss anything important, I begin my rampage anew by turning into a living warhead and burning my way through the wall of the building.

Once outside, I realize that the floating city left behind Arkaim and is rising further into the sky. When I consider the direction this is flying in, it seems to be heading toward Kairaki. The one over there is most likely coming to meet this one halfway, but I feel that at this speed, the moon will have impacted Earth before then.

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In either case, there's nothing below us for many kilometers on end, so I can go wild.

"Alverost!" I let out a roar. It's not like I expect him to reply to me at this point; if he's anywhere on this ship, he should be heading for an escape pod.

"What do you want?" But to my surprise, a floating screen appears in front of me. He's wearing a haunted expression, and his face is covered in sweat. Maybe he really is on here.

"What goes up..." With a glare that sufficiently signals my malicious intent, I spread my arms. "... must come down!"

In the next moment, I create an explosion of plasma all around me, emulating Zylos in his last moments, without affecting my own body. The wave of heat melts everything in my vicinity and burns an expanding hole into the center of the upside-down city. It spreads further and further until some important device is caught up in it and explodes.

Several more explosions rock the massive ship in a chain reaction, and the lights of the city go out with a flicker. The momentum carries it forward for another second before it begins to list to one side and fall out of the sky. It seems that whatever keeps it afloat is still somewhat active, but can't carry the weight of the entire structure. It's doomed to crash now.

Alverost's screen has shut off along with the power in the city, so either he's going down with his ship, or he's acting as if he is. I expand my Chaos senses to encompass as much space as I can, to find lives getting snuffed out in the ongoing explosions and fires inside the falling ship. None are separating from it, so either all of them are expendable workers and troops, or there are no escape pods because Alverost never thought it would be taken down.

I stay in the air and watch the city-sized structure touch down on the ground and compress out of shape. With a massive explosion, the last anti-gravity device that was unable to slow its fall sufficiently goes up in flames as well.

There are still some lives inside the wreckage, but they go out one after the other. Even now, there's no sign of Alverost making it out.

"Tokomaha discovered a group of soldiers in black in the Prichet district. All her clones were then destroyed by something invisible." Senka's voice speaks into my mind.

"I knew it." Even as I say that, and the urge to return to Arkaim overwhelms me, I keep watching for Alverost or anybody else escaping from the ship. "As long as Exla is alive, getting Zenlith out of there won't help."

Now that I think about it, why didn't Alverost do what Zenlith did to Exla during the siege of Erbilan? Areteniha is his mother, who seems to be in control of the Imagination Engine. So he should be able to tell her to restrict the cloud girl's permission, not just for a day or two, but forever. That way, Zenlith would get his permissions back and could break out on his own.

The fact that Alverost hasn't done so and gambled on such a direct strategy means there's something else at work in the background.

The Old Humans really fell apart, huh? Kanundra turned into a powerless human and was then killed by Asoko without the latter even knowing who she was. Zylos lost control and turned into a miniature sun that burned up the very atoms of his body. Serent was ground into dust despite trying to be immortal. Zenlith, the Lord of the Sky, was locked up in an underground vault to rot. Now, Alverost sacrificed Oinos for a cheap diversion to put everything on a gamble.

I wonder what happened to Shelnir. The fact that Serent came to face me must mean her healing was already complete half a year ago. It's alarming that I haven't seen or heard anything about her handiwork in all this time.

The Akashic Records allow her to predict the future enough to write and enact elaborate scenarios - although I broke several of them simply because I was more than she had bargained with. At this point, she should have gotten a good grasp of my abilities and input it in her supercomputer. She's sure to strike again, possibly even right now.

Now that I think about it, why was Oinos in Kairaki rather than here? How did Alverost know I would go there rather than directly to the place where the moon would impact Earth? Maybe it was Shelnir who told him that I would be in the capital of Adanak at that specific moment, so he sent Oinos to intercept and keep me there long enough to free Zenlith. But that would mean we broke her prediction once again; she definitely didn't reckon that we could defeat him that quickly, if at all.

"Tell Tokomaha to bring Aurelia to the Prichet district." I speak to Senka in my mind. "Shelnir might be there with Alverost."