Pef sat beside Blossom, who was holding their daughter Rose in her lap, and was singing a muted lullaby in a sad voice.
"I want you and Aria to leave for a while. Go visit Green Gea." he said in a gentle tone, while patting her hair in a loving gesture.
Lady Yen stopped singing, a bit surprised. But, then she nodded a bit hesitantly. "If that's what you want..." she replied in a composed manner, while her eyes narrowed in displeasure.
"Yes. I grew up as an orphan and don't want this to happen to my kids. Rose will have a mother, and Hero too. Mia is going with Gene to Celestial City on Blue Xi, and Yuan to Etna." Pef explained in the same gentle voice, and kissed the foreheads of both of them, mother and daughter.
He placed another ring on her hand, loaded with pills and weapons, then books and metal items. 'Legion indoctrination to self-initiate at age 16. Duration, 13 months.' he ordered to his glove, as he rose and flew out of his wife's rooms, a single tear forming in his eyes, for some reason.
The palace was half empty now, and getting emptier with every hour. For the past month the Monarch had worked tirelessly to evacuate and shelter young people and some children into underground shelters, then fit them with furniture or other comforts, and also set up defensive formations and maize plantations to serve as a life support system, for food and air.
Other people were transferred to Black Magma colonies, or sent to his private city quarter in the Celestial City. They would have a larger chance to survive, maybe.
But sadly, there was no time or even possible to evacuate an entire continent. The Guardians will try to protect the large cities as best they could, and with the updated Legion method they should be resistant to whatever plague was coming.
Even now the Guardians were working non-stop to create temporary shelters for the people under their protection, digging and reinforcing shelters in every city. Might help, maybe.
Pef stopped in mid-air, high above the Xi Palace, when the Saints arrived next to him, armored from head to toe this time, like he asked them.
"I'll head in first, and create a firebreak along the mountains. Might even help..." the Fire Saint declared in an uncertain tone, then sped forward.
The Ice Saint had made herself a white and blue set of armor from some Monarch beast bones, and had added a dozen magic formations to it, especially on the helmet and breastplate. Her hands were bristiling with Saint ranked rings full of water, to ease the drain on her powers later on.
The young Monarch was armored as well, and equipped with layers of magic arrays and storage rings. Although, he wasn't very hopeful to survive a direct hit from a Saint in any case.
'Go now, Aspirant. The firebreak has woken the worm.' the glove advised him, just as Cellia blurred and vanished away, streaking at hyper speed towards the Tian Mountains.
A minute later, the skies and the distant mountains exploded in a conflagration of sword qi and water qi, then fire qi and death qi, as the Saints began the battle in the earnest.
Pef gathered an ice armor around himself and flew up, and approached slowly. An hour later he entered visual range, seeing the worm for the first time.
The Rock Worm was a dozen kilometers long and half that wide, thus definitely the largest living creature that he ever saw or imagined. And it was surrounded by a huge cloud of poison and death qi.
The Ice Saint kept its lower half frozen, by spraying it constantly with her water rings, while the Fire Saint was bathing its maw and upper side with a torrent of white-hot flames. Once every minute Cellia would blast the rock worm, with a wave of sword qi, cutting a dozen gashes in the upper side of the beast, and allowing the fire jets to scorch the softer flesh underneath.
'Tell me when.' he asked his glove, as the young Monarch felt a bit overwhelmed.
'Dive here, and travel the yellow corridor. Your skill would be best used from below.' the glove replied while creating a flight corridor for the user, going a few kilometer under the mountains.
Some five minutes later, Pef arrived at the indicated destination, not feeling any safer from having a kilometer of rock between himself and the Saint beast, even while using the Indigo cloaking.
However, a yellow triangle appeared on his retina, and his Legion Knife smiled in his gloved hand. It was ready. Well, as much as possible anyway.
The second the targeting triangle blinked, signifying a clear hit, Pef released his Cutting Skill.
A beam of solid light emerged from beneath the worm, slicing the bedrock of the mountain like paper, and impacted the worm's underside. The Saint worm was pushed up a dozen meters, despite being as large as a mountain and possibly heavier.
Then 50 more Cutting skills arrived in quick succession, propelling the immense worm up like a ping pong ball. Still, its durable skin was barely scraped, perhaps a few meters in depth.
The skies above the Tian Mountains became blacken with dark and angry clouds, indicating that Heavenly Lightning was about to fall.
Guatian Ji sped up and positioned himself under the worm's center of mass, and ignited his lift-off magi tech engine, barely counteracting the mass of the worm, despite the prodigious force emitted by the Fire Saint and his magic engine.
Cellia completed flash freezing the exterior of the worm, using her water storage rings, and started helping with lift off as well.
Meanwhile Pef waited, and waited, until the last moment before flying up at high speed and stabbing his knife into the ice shell, beneath the hovering worm.
It was probable the worm didn't even notice him, but the worm wasn't independent. Its patron deity was watching, a dozen messengers circling the battlefield to capture the fight from every angle.
'Tian Rock Worm, age 438 millions, rank Saint. Patron deity: Harvester.' The glove explained as the user made contact with the worm, and the first lightning bolt fell.
The Monarch would have wanted to ask questions, but right now he was busy being electrocuted. The pain was unimaginable, as the lightning was imbued and entangled with the divine soul of the Heavens, as appropriate punishment for a Monarch defying the heavens. Just a qi lightning wouldn't even tickle a Monarch after all.
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Even protected by the bulk of the worm, the heaven's lightning still pierced through the Saint and entered through the Legion knife, then the orange glove and lastly it coursed through Pef's meridians and into his soul.
Luckily Pef had 11 meridians open now, and had digested the Grey pellet, along with the White and Orange pills, increasing his soul's defenses to 85 percent, since every open meridian added 5 percent to the White Pills effects.
The Rainbow meridian pill was an overall enhancer of all abilities and defenses, adding 5 percents to everything, thus raising the defense to 90 percent. The magic formations added a little bit more, thus the effect wasn't deadly. Just painful.
But our hero was trained in the Legion method. Pain was like his second home, by now. The lightning was digested and absorbed into his dantian, fueling another sword qi blast.
The worm was temporarily paralyzed by the electric punishment, and its body began raising higher and higher, under the constant impulse from the magi tech engine, the domain of the two Saints and perhaps a bit more by Pef.
They struggled to achieve escape velocity and continued for hours, luckily after the initial cascade of lightning bolts the Rock worm was pacified for a dozen minutes. Pef began resuming his attacks, but much rarer, only once a minute or two.
However, once the trio had driven the worm into orbit and lower gravity, the speed increased dramatically. A third of the way to Moon however, the fuel in the dual rings on the Fire Saint's hand ended, and the extra propulsion cut off.
It was okay though, the job was done. As long a lightning kept falling to electrocute the worm, and its outer shell remained encapsulated in frozen water, the beast wasn't able to fight back.
The trip to the dark side of the moon took three days now, and Pef had unleashed thousands of Cutting Skills on the way, each one gouging deeper and deeper wounds into the worm, although the first ones closed, by the time the worm was crash-landed into a frozen lake inside a largish crater on the moon.
Pef's energy level remained at maximum, being fueled by cheating the heavens but now he had to take a step back and let the Saints duke it out again.
He was however exhausted mentally and physically, both from being in outer space and electrocuted constantly.
He remained in a high orbit, while Firali and Cellia unleashed their own skills and powers, without care for civilian loses or collateral damage.
Some time later he woke up, and glanced down, finding Cellia battering the worm's immense maw with huge club made from a 200-meter beast spine, while the Fire Saint sat cross-legged behind her.
The Moon had become dark, having acquired an atmosphere of sorts, full of poisonous gases and death qi.
'How long have I slept?' he asked inward, a bit horrified.
'You have hibernated for 22 hours. But now you have to go help. Start from the tail and slice the worm to bits. And stay below it, if you care about your health.' the glove said in a warning tone, and projected a course for the user to take.
Pef renewed his defense spells, and transmuted a bit of oxygen from his water shield, letting the hydrogen gas escape outward.
For the next month, Pef and the saints worked in turns, keeping the beast busy while chopping small bits off, and incinerating them.
It was good practice though, both in sword qi and soul refining, while the worm was being diminished meter by meter.
Our hero didn't have time for introspective thoughts and clever jabs during this fight. Simply struggling to keep attacking and stay out of friendly fire kept all his focus.
The worm was reduced to only 10 kilometers in length, then 5 kilometers, then one. By the second month, it was only a mouth full of teeth and a bundle of black qi clustered around. Pef had grown in ranking tremendously, reaching the peak of Monarch rank, from injuring a Saint to such extent and being a lower level as well as digesting thousands of divine lightnings.
As the second month ended, the worm finally died, and Pef got his reward, along with a last Monarch ranked divine punishment, but he didn't feel that.
The knife did a fast orbit around the moon, like a puppy glad it was outside the house, and the glove was busy digesting all the updates it had received from tens of thousands of lighting bolts.
To its surprise there was only some 9 percents from the total database, but that still gave it decillions of bytes to analyze and inventory. Especially news about wars and the Legion.
It appeared another Tier 8 had emerged, called Nu-Hualitep, and it had come from a different multiverse, breaching the Highest God Realm membrane somehow.
With it, came an insidious mind plague, forcing the existing powers in the multiverse to isolate and contain the infected areas. Or sometimes just sterilize them. The Tier 8 invader had thousands of Tier 7s called Mu-goliths, each of them more than a match for Legion Captains of their equivalents of other realms.
Only the Vaajra Devil Realms had remained undefeated, due to their overpowered skills. The rest of the multiverse was in chaos, and some entire sectors of reality were lost or vanished when their inhabitants got infected.
Meanwhile, Pef landed beside Cellia and grinned mischievously, then offered a hug. The poor witch was tired and drained, so she leaned into the hug for support, only to be tripped and spanked on her bottom. And not once or twice, but three times!
While she gaped in disbelief, the new Saint blew her a kiss and flew away, collecting a hundred Saint ranked worm teeth on the way, then setting course for his home planet, Lacrima.
'You didn't see anything!' Cellia sent towards the Fire Saint, who gulped and nodded as the Ice Saint sped after her young idiot friend.
Behind them, the moon was dark and covered in black qi and bio weapons, with only a poor Fire Saint left to clean up and incinerate everything. 'Damn idiots! I need better friends...' the man complained tiredly.
Sadly, there weren't other Saints anywhere near.