Pharaoh and Whimsy sat down seiza-style in their humble abode. Since giving up his subregions to Alistair, the former #1 had no reason for a defensive structure. Instead, he took up shack in a small cottage in the middle of nowhere, though he defended it and the small town around it admirably.
“I don’t understand,” Whimsy said. “You didn’t have to give up your spot so easily. I know you have greater insight than you let on.”
“What’s meant to be, is meant to be,” Pharaoh said. “Alistair is suited for the role of a hero. That is what this planet needs. I cannot fulfill that role. That is not my destiny.”
Whimsy poured herself a cup of tea. While Pharaoh had once been an Egyptologist, he had an appreciation for many cultures around the world. His tea set came from a collector in Japan that he had done business with many years ago, and somehow he managed to preserve it well into the initiation.
“What is your destiny, then?”
“I’m still finding that out myself, aren’t I?” Pharaoh gave a rare smile. “We all are. I wouldn’t be doing half the job Alistair is. I can’t bring myself to care for all those people like he does. I find them so quaint and small these days.”
Whimsy understood what he was talking about. Immortality, star-shattering power, empires of trillions upon trillions of people. The plight of Earth seemed so very insignificant in the face of that.
“It’s cute,” Whimsy landed on. “I think so, anyway.”
“Are you ready?” Pharaoh asked.
Whimsy gave him an incredulous look. “I’m always ready, Dr. Fakhry.”
A hint of a blush came over the man’s face. “I don’t go by that name anymore.”
“I know.”
Whimsy put her hand on his, feeling his warmth. The scent of desert sand was nostalgic to her, even though she grew up near an icy bay.
“I love you.” Pharaoh’s words cut her in two. He had never said them before. Always unspoken, she understood this, yet it was far different hearing it aloud.
“I love you too,” Whimsy said, tears forming in her eyes.
“When I first saw you, I knew that we would be together.” Pharaoh looked up at the sky. Since the moment she met him, she had seen him as a bastion of strength. Stalwart, impassably stoic—a classical man. Yet now his hands trembled, and she knew why. “If only things were different.”
“Enough of that.” Whimsy gripped onto his hands tighter. “Enough.”
“The inverse curse won’t last much longer.”
“I know. I can feel it.”
“Then I have failed you.”
“Never,” Whimsy said. “I’m already living on borrowed time. Now stop focusing on me, and let’s help out Alistair.”
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All within a fifty-kilometer radius felt the presence of the beast instantly. The moment the third wave of [Armageddon] began, it appeared.
Morgana felt her body quiver in fear. Her mind commanded her body to stop, to act rationally. But her base instincts took over. The aura of dread was not just in her imagination. It was real.
Then came the heat.
After completing her last mission, Morgana was resting in her personal villa when it happened, studying some arcane scripture that her leader purchased from the Hall of Math. The complexities of her Class were endless. While she assumed that most cultivators tended to think their Class was best or somehow unique, she had to imagine there was something special about the Dao of Magic. After all, it encompassed such a wide variety of existence.
The heat was like a miasma in the air, curdling in on itself in hazy patterns reminiscent of a hot summer’s day, but magnified manifold. She felt her breathing constricted and sweat on her body. Morgana didn’t have the highest Constitution, but it had to be really sweltering for her to feel the physical effects of heat.
The dread aura comprised one large wave that chilled her to the bones and then a lingering psychic field that was much less powerful. She could easily withstand its effects, though the average person was probably catatonic with anxiety.
The more concerning part was that by that aura, she could tell it was over ten kilometers away. Yet the heat at her location was already this strong. How concentrated would it be in the vicinity of the kaiju?
Not wanting to waste any more time, she activated her spell, Partial Flight, and ascended into the skies. The first thing she noticed was the sunrise.
The only issue was that it should have been the dead of night. Not that Morgana paid too much attention to the day-night cycle, but she was certain that it had been night when she secluded herself not more than an hour ago. Not long enough for it to be dawn already.
Morgana flew toward the source of the heat and aura. While she flew, she felt the presence of her master below, and descended toward him.
The temperature chilled as she touched down on the ground, going from a desert hot to a cold winter’s day. Morgana wiped off sweat from her brow in relief under the umbrella of George’s icy aura.
“Take me with you,” he commanded, and Morgana obliged. Using her spell Partial Polymorph, she grew the talons of a great roc, picking up George and flying off toward the kaiju.
The sky grew brighter the closer they got, approaching the luminosity of daytime. Morgana didn’t want to know how hot the air was—George had to start forcing his aura’s manifestation to cool down the environment. She could see the border of his sphere of influence against the boiling air, where pale blue air met orange atmosphere.
She rose into the sky, trying to get a better look at their new opponent.
The beast was massive. At her vantage point high in the sky, she could make out the kaiju from kilometers away. The blistering heat warped her vision, on top of the lava-like glow emitted from its craggy skin, but the form was obvious. An enormous turtle.
The turtle was black, though its skin was molten and spewed out lava like an active volcano. If Morgana had to guess, it was the size of an aircraft carrier, or even larger. A snake wrapped around the turtle’s back, spewing lava as it rampaged near the coastline.
Everything within a few body’s lengths of the turtle-snake was either on fire or melting, even the stone and metal. Morgana suspected that even George’s ice would have trouble taming the fire, as the strength of the kaiju’s aura far exceeded anything she had ever felt. Comparing beasts to humanoids was apples to oranges—beasts usually had stronger auras when comparing similar levels, even if in practice their combat effectiveness was equal to a humanoid, but the gap she felt wasn’t going to be broached by humanoid technique.
“Xuanwu,” George whispered from his cradle in Morgana’s talons. She had to admit, it was a funny mental image seeing her leader being carried like a baby bat clinging to its mother. “One of the Four Auspicious Beasts from Chinese mythology.”
“It’s an ugly one,” Morgana said. “I think we’ll need all hands on deck for this.”
George continuously pumped more ice affinity Mana into the atmosphere to cool them down. The difference in temperature between their bubble and the outside world became even more obvious, making it look like they were surrounded by a sphere of pale blue energy.
All of a sudden, Morgana felt a massive burst of energy building up. Before she could even react, a column of lava spewed out of a crack in the xuanwu’s shell so fast it caused a sonic boom.
If she was on her own, she might have been forced to use one of her trump cards to survive. Thankfully, George covered for her.
“Arcanous Devil Spell #1: Ice Spear of the False Heavens.”
A spear as tall as George and half again flew down from the heavens just as fast as the column of lava shot up. It was too fast to make out details, but it was obviously carved of ice and contained an impartment of Dao energy and nue that would have been straining for Morgana, but was no issue for George.
The spear collided with the column, sending it askew and hypercooling the lava midair, obsidian chunks flying out like shrapnel.
As the debris swept away with the continuous air currents from the xuanwu, Morgana saw a glowing purple array fade away on George’s tongue. Normally, issuing a Rank 1 or higher spell required a verbal command, an incantation of its name. Certain spells could be designated as reflex spells, letting one create the incantation as a spell array that would automatically speak the name of the spell under certain conditions. These reflex spells were weaker, but far faster than ordinary ones, and could be used an unlimited amount of times per day.
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“It determined our presence as a threat,” George said. “Listen to Hephestaus’s orders as mine. I’m going to engage now.”
George slicked back his frozen spikes of hair. Morgana had not seen his blond locks fall over his face once. They were always spiked up with literal ice. Then, he jumped.
While he soared down, he activated his true Rank 1 Spell: Arcanous Devil Spell #3: Frygian Arrow.
A bow and arrow made out of ice materialized in George’s hands. Intricately carved with the faces of ten thousand unique demons, a royal purple arrow notched on its string. Larger than the typical ice arrows he fired, there was an aura to the projectile that reminded Morgana of the Furnace of Impure Flames from the Grand Dungeon.
George carefully aimed the arrow at the snake head of the xuanwu and fired. The purple arrow streaked through the air even faster than the earlier spear. Along the way, it sucked moisture and drew the cold toward itself. The arrow grew at a rapid pace while making the environment around itself even hotter, if such a thing was possible. The ground spontaneously combusted in flames identical in color to the arrow, which shimmered against the heat it was fueling.
Once it reached the size of a cruise missile, an outer layer broke off and instantly set on fire, similar in appearance to how a satellite burns up as it reenters the upper atmosphere. Morgana found the paradoxical arrow to be quite beautiful. Hot yet cold, burning yet frozen.
The arrow collided with the xuanwu’s side, exploding with a conflagration of purple flames that overpowered the beast’s natural heat, if for a moment. Morgana imagined the kaiju was almost if not entirely immune to heat, but the flames masked the ice underneath.
Morgana felt a familiar presence behind her. Similar to xuanwu’s molten rock, the rest of the Devil Kings arrived on Hephaestus’s forged flying bicycles. The fabrications were made of a molten brown rock that was cool to the touch, a fitting ability for one of his name.
The flames from the explosion dispersed. The tortoise-snake was half-encased in ice, frost seeping in its formerly molten cracks.
Morgana was impressed with the power of George’s Rank 1 Spell, but already she could see the signs of melting. The idea of killing the kaiju in one spell was a fantasy.
How unlucky, she thought. If this monstrosity showed up in Alistair’s land, we would be taking the victory within the next few hours.
Now that she considered it, what was Alistair doing?
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It felt like days had passed since Alistair had the Soulnet meeting, but in reality, it had only been four hours. The twenty-four hour cycle of day and night barely mattered for them. It was a coincidence that another four hours led to the part of night just before dawn.
Alistair constantly monitored the subregion situation. With the Devil King forces withdrawn to deal with the kaiju, the balance continued to improve. When he first came back, the percentages were, down to a thousandth place, 45.13% subregion control Devil Kings, 24.97% Northeast Freehold.
Now, those numbers were 43.68% Devil King, 25.90% Northeast. It didn’t seem like much, but that was a 2,000 subregions swing. While Alistair may have held the lower hand in absolute subregion count, there was no doubt he was accruing more Land Store Credits, taxation, and Contribution Score from his territory. The vast majority of Devil King land was razed and barren land, the makeshift graveyards for millions of sacrificed lives. Thankfully, they got no benefit from their wanton killing in of itself, or the scores would have been wildly lopsided.
Alistair used his Ghost Node to etheralize his body, limiting his causal impact on the world. His method of subterfuge therefore worked equally against all forms of reconnaissance, from mundane eyesight to extremely convoluted mechanisms.
He snuck into the Devil Kings’ land alone. Well, not entirely alone. His vampiric librarian, Caren Locasta, communicated with him via [Paper Tongue]. A Skill upgrade increased its range tenfold, as long as he limited the targets down to one.
“This is funny,” Caren said. “Feels like I’m the NSA.”
“Don’t read my emails,” Alistair thought back.
Alistair ran as silent as a mouse, though over a hundred times one’s speed. At present, he traversed through a charred forest—not from Atavius Meloi’s initial attack, but the records showed, Morgana’s rampage. The ash on which he stood was once part of a national forest park in China, before she had her way.
Through [Ghost Whispers], Alistair was attuned to the hundreds of thousands that had perished. They called to him in screams and groans, guttural in nature. His sister told him that the longer the soul stayed on the Physical Plane and refused to enter an afterlife, the more inhuman they became, growing fixated on the central thought they had before death.
The souls that hadn’t moved on were just like this. Ghasts more than ghosts, you could say. They seemingly understood that Alistair could hear them, and harangued him for kilometers, following him and crying for their loved ones, for themselves.
“When it gets to be this bad, you can perform a Buddhist rite,” Dev’rox said. “To hasten the natural process. If such negativity lingers for too long, it can curse the land for millennia. For a later time, though. It’s not something that can be done hastily.”
“I can already feel it,” Alistair communicated toward Caren. “It’s hot.”
From their spies, they knew that the kaiju was a lava xuanwu. The memories indicated it to be larger than a small island, dwarfing any beast Alistair had encountered, even the fireworm.
Alistair continued the low-level drain on his Ghost Node, gliding through the land. The kaiju had appeared on the coastline, though by the rearrangement of the subregions in [The Game of Life], that coastline subregion was connected to the Rocky Mountains. Alistair ran up the mountain as if it were flat ground, not catching a single breath.
Once he made it to the top, he surveyed the situation. He relied on his aura sense and life force detection, since his natural vision was impeded by the warping of the searing air. There was the main aura of the xuanwu that dwarfed everything else, followed by lesser, but still powerful auras that circled around like buzzing gnats.
One stuck out above the others, a biting cold that had tastes of Dev’rox’s arcanous power. That could only be George.
To Alistair’s chagrin, the First Devil King’s aura felt more powerful than his by a noticeable margin. It was clear that he was level 60. Alistair was sorely missing those locked stats, which might put him on par.
As a warrior, he didn’t let that affect his mental state. There was always a path to victory. After all, he had just beaten his improved self. And Alistair was certain that his improved self could defeat George Moulin. Albeit, he had several advantages in that fight against his better counterpart. But he also had an advantage against George in the form of Oracle's memories.
Now, it came down to the approach. Alistair chose the direct option. He wasn’t sure about how fine George’s detection was, so he picked a conservative two [Dash] distance, which was a kilometer away at this point if he let the full [Dash] play out.
Dev’rox materialized concomitant to Alistair’s [Dash], compressing the space in front of his host. The first instance of the Skill Alistair stuck to the ground, and then in the second, he used the airwalking aspect to launch himself into the air.
As for the target, he had a few options. George himself wasn’t what he was looking for, plus he was on the other side of the kaiju on the ground. The woman he recognized from the images as Morgana flew by her own power, while the other six Devil Kings flew around on strange bicycles.
Six, not seven. There was one Devil King unaccounted for. But Alistair didn’t concern himself with that. He chose the path of least resistance—the closest person to him.
That turned out to be Monk, the Twelfth Devil King. He wore a white headband around his eyes, reminiscent of the ones that Alistair had to wear in the Holy Ravine, along with the robes of a Buddhist mendicant.
To his credit, Monk reacted to Alistair’s rapid assault. By the time he came within a dozen body lengths of the Devil King, Monk turned his head toward the moving figure. He raised his arms into a defensive stance, expelling a martial aura that Alistair found quite familiar.
On the other side of the battlefield, George also realized the presence of his enemy, raising his right hand to the sky. But they were both too late.
Alistair submerged himself into the calming embrace of Tranquil Mind. He moved toward his opponent in what felt like slow motion. Monk drew his fists to his sides and punched forward, his punches draped in golden-colored Mana affinity that Alistair could not place exactly, though it reminded him of the presence of his Bodhisattva avatar.
His attack was simply too slow. Alistair ducked under the punch while still continuing forward with his momentum. Once he reached a fist’s length from the lower ranked Devil King, a pulse of nue exploded from the man’s brain. It rippled throughout the air omnidirectionally in the form of a martial artist performing a knifehand strike.
The threat of Alistair must have triggered Monk’s defensive Skill, which was no pushover. Yet the wave of nue washed over him like a warm breeze. Alistair was inured to the effects of nue after practicing it so much. He diverted a small amount of his own psychic energy to block the effects, but he found that out of Dao energy and Mana, nue was the only one you could just “shrug off.”
In addition to the nue defensive Skill, Alistair felt a Dao of Time at work. As he formed a fist, aiming an uppercut at Monk’s chin, for a split second, the blind martial artist moved faster than him.
Yet his moves were so… amateurish. For a blind monk, Alistair expected better simply from stereotypes. He was so fast because of his acceleration of time, yet he had so many inefficiencies. Alistair parried Monk’s futile barrage of punches easily, despite holding the lower hand in speed. [Monk Motionless] barely even gave him a warning, showing how little danger he faced.
Their exchange was quick, outsider observers seeing nothing but a blur of movement. Alistair sliced upward on his tenth strike, catching Monk’s jugular with a [Blood Hand]. It was over from there. He followed up with a deafening downward elbow strike encased in [Force Fist], cracking the Devil King’s skull open.
Monk, the Twelfth Devil King, died instantly.
Blood and life force flowed from the fallen foe into Alistair’s body, along with a notification for his Bonus Quest Reward. But he didn’t have time to process the kill—he jumped away right before a spear made of ice came crashing down from above. The blinding speed of the spear created an air current so sharp that it left a tiny cut on his left cheek.
Alistair landed on the ground, which was alight in a purple fire that he put out with [Frozen Claw]. He wiped a single drop of blood off face, the cut already starting to knit up because of his high Endurance.
Fire, Alistair thought. It’s always fire, somehow. Selephita’s probably smiling. He could sense the George’s signature aura from the mysterious flames, which were hot but seemed to suck the heat out of the underlying ground, making it so cold he even felt it through his Fall of Fleet boots and Mammothskin Raiment. It was a strange feeling to breathe out and see puffs of steam, yet be standing in a sea of flames.
The other Devil Kings, seeing that their ally died in under a second, coalesced around George. Their flying bicycles flew to the other side of the lava kaiju, along with the witch.
The only problem for every human there was the xuanwu didn’t care about their silly antics. As an enormous beast, its reactions weren’t as good as Alistair’s or Monk’s, but it made up for that with sheer power.
After feeling the strength of the interloper, the xuanwu seemed to take things to the next level. A volcano sprouted from its shell, growing to half the height of its entire body. An absolutely gargantuan level of Mana rose from its core, dozens of times larger than Alistair’s full output.
Then, it exploded.