Rings of light pulsed out from the descending mass of red light, so solid that it was beginning to look like a floating landmass in its own right. Captain Aziz trembled as primal fear began to take over, born from his instincts. The other members of Thunderbolt Battalion were behaving similarly, and with a start, the captain realised that everyone present could hear the same message from their subconscious.
A warning to lower their eyes, while they still could. As the red mass of light began to solidify into a flattened circle, Aziz hurriedly shot a look at Marie, who immediately nodded and barked out orders. Fortunately, the members of Thunderbolt Battalion weren’t foolhardy enough to disobey their commander, and as one, the small group landed hurriedly.
“Keep your eyes down!” Colonel Marie yelled, as the engravings on the circle continued to grow more and more intricate. “You too, Aziz!”
The captain, despite being the first one to notice the danger, found the sight too enticing to turn away. Only when he heard Marie’s words enter his mind did he break out of his current stupor. Driving the rest of the glassy-eyed idiots down, Aziz, against his better judgement, raised his head slightly to look for anyone still looking up at the red-hued sky.
The world trembled as he forced yet another head down, and whatever blue left in the heavens above fled as an absolute crimson took its place. A tremendous presence registered in his mind — it dwarfed even the Demigod who had appeared in the Colosseum earlier — and his mind couldn’t help but construct an image he’d seen before.
A giant, wreathed in flame and fire, as he cleaved through giant mountains with an axe of vermillion light and dried up entire lakes with his presence alone. His six eyes, each pair a different shade of dark red, turned anything caught in them into smouldering ashes. Two pairs of wings, black and red, extended from his back…
Liamar…the God of Fire and Ruination, the Pyre of Heaven. His formal title: the Worldshaper. Captain Aziz shook like a leaf as he involuntarily recalled the history texts Marie had forced onto him. It was the Worldshaper who had flattened entire lands, creating ashes that made land arable for farming. Alas, the Worldshaper, like many of the other elemental gods, were forced to abandon their physical forms when the first signs of sentient life appeared, having expended all their power in making a habitable Orb.
Many historians, according to the texts that Marie had forced onto him, had hypothesised that if the elemental gods had maintained their physical forms when the Demon God appeared, the Cardinal Champions may never have been summoned.
But all that was a moot point right now.
Deep within his bones, the captain was sure that Liamar, the Worldshaper, was descending upon the world. And no matter how he looked at it, the destruction of…well, whatever it was, probably had a direct link to it.
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The world shuddered, and something far, far away began to move.
“He’s coming!” Marie shrieked. “Keep your head down, and don’t look!”
Fortunately for Thunderbolt Battalion, everyone had regained enough sense to obey her words, although the same couldn’t be said for the civilians and the audience who had returned to the colosseum. Small explosions entered Aziz’s ears, and the man looked up slightly, just in time to see a plethora of heads explode. Bodies fell over, as flesh and blood rained down on those who were fortunate enough to listen to their instincts.
Aziz’s flesh crawled as he took in the grisly sight, made so much more terrifying by the intense crimson sky. Screams split the sky as the ones who were showered by bodily fluids looked up to see the people next to them drop onto the floor, headless.
But whatever force that had destroyed their heads had clearly passed, and Aziz’s shrieking instincts had quietened down. After a few seconds of deliberation, the captain raised his head cautiously, and then looked up to the sky once he saw other people doing so unharmed.
The crimson hue was fading, but it seemed that the heavens had gained a new fixture. A mass of red light, smaller and more solid then the one a few minutes ago, was floating somewhere high in the northern skies. Above the mass, a far larger red circle rotated slowly, creating a wall of light that surrounded the floating island.
“Liamar…has descended,” said Aziz.
“Gods…” Marie stopped halfway. “Well, he is one. Good thing I forced you to learn some history, eh?”
“No amount of history ever told me this.” Aziz gestured at the headless bodies, and grimaced. “Why did their heads explode? Why do I know that looking at them as they descended was a really bad idea? If you can explain these two, I’ll read history books for every waking moment for the next week.”
The colonel glared at the captain, and then said, “If I knew, I wouldn’t be a soldier in any military. I’ll be a soothsayer or something, and warn people about ridiculous disasters that don’t make any sense when they kill people.”
Aziz raised his hands and laughed. The sound lingered slightly, and the other members of Thunderbolt followed suit. The fact that they were still able to express other emotions, despite the spectacle earlier, probably spoke volumes about how resilient life was…but the captain couldn’t help but shudder when he looked at the bodies all around the colosseum. The death toll from Liamar’s descent was something he couldn’t fathom, not with the apparently unlimited range of this phenomenon.
So many people had died, and yet, there was truly no purpose to that. The captain glanced at the rowdy crowd at the colosseum, as people began to take in the fact that some of their companions had died. The sight of men and women, unsure of how to react to the spate of sudden deaths, stabbed through Aziz’s heart, and he averted his eyes from them a second later.
Gods, if you’re listening to us…tell us, why did you do this? Why kill the innocent and the unknowing? The captain prayed in his mind as he stared out at the mass of crimson in the horizon, his mind replaying the moment when hundreds died in a single second, over and over.