“Really, general, I don’t understand your fixation with this planet in particular. It’s only recently dug itself out from demonic territories, and its only notable feature is that it hasn’t been raided by dragons. And nobody’s been raided by dragons for hundreds of years.”
Sara ruffled her wings, glaring at the impertinent commander beneath them. “I’ve been looking for something for a long time, and have good cause to believe it's there.” The sparkling star map swirled back into a single point and disappeared. “Now, is there a reason you came to bother me, or was it just to criticize my perfectly logical tactical decisions?”
“You’re uh… not known for those, ma’am-” The army was then treated to the increasingly common angelic reverse meteor phenomena, in which someone got Sara angry, and someone also, coincidentally, was kicked into the sky faster than escape velocity. Those who asked were told it was cathartic, and that they ought to try it themselves, and then immediately punted thousands of miles into the sky.
People quickly learnt not to ask.
“Wet feathers… she knew it, she knew it and she assigned it to me anyways. I will have my revenge…” a few of the angels behind her glanced at one another warily, wondering if their general had finally snapped, but not quite willing to approach her with the question. A roving band of demons fell to a quick assault across the jagged ground, blasted from the sky beneath the force of a grand army. Less than twenty paths remained before they reached their goal.
Close, now. It was so close… they settled in for the night, a host of glittering white and ominous force, picketed and safe behind walls of stone shorn from the ground and placed around them like brutish walls, domineering as they gleamed beneath the force of their magics.
Yet, for all their strength demonic miasma twisted and coiled just out of sight, a taste of brimstone and the eternal conflict, hissing its displeasure at the intrusion of something that dared to resist its burning influence. It seethed, flicking back and forth in sharp changes as angels shifted within their barriers.
It was for this reason, and Sara’s distraction with furious memories of wet feathers and dreams of cathartic destruction unleashed onto a particular cat, that the shift of the demonic miasma around them went unnoticed for just long enough. It started sharp and just got sharper, swirling around like a cyclonic disruption, scouring lines into the rock and pushing in furious rage at the shields that kept the foreign army safe… but only a minuscule amount of it truly acted up like that. By and far the majority was bound in runic arrays miles long, obelisks half a universe apart-
A trap laid across the entirety of demonic controlled space, for this one moment-
Space cracked around the angel’s camp, bleeding crimson red, stars bleeding out of the sky until only the burning, oppressive fiery red, near tinted orange of the demonic miasma remained. Half the army fell in an instant, burnt from the inside out by the overwhelming force of the miasma as it crashed down around them, burning the wards of the camp until they shattered into a million motes of light.
Sara noticed something was happening, obviously. She even, in her infinite tactical genius that totally existed, managed to realize they were in a trap. A trapped shattered path, an enclosed little portion of reality forcibly ripped from around them… “Impressive. Very impressive.” She took to the skies, glowing like a brilliant star that burnt back the miasma around her, a mote of hope for a panicked army. “You know what happens next…” the demonic miasma burned- “Kitsune.”
The sky split open, torn asunder by nine immense tails as a mountain sized fox forced its way into the abominable barrier from the heart of the demonic realm. Around her the angelic host decided now was probably a good time to cut their losses and just jump through the twisting barriers of space around them. Scattered randomly around the universe was at least better than dead. “Samsara. You will pay for your trespasses.”
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“You are the one who trapped me!”
“And you amongst the four made me the antagonist.”
Sara went cross-eyed for a second as she parsed that. “So your entire motivation for being the king of demons is… revenge because you’re the king of demons? That’s so dumb!” Then a beam of white-hot light speared toward the immense fox, deflected lazily by a swing of her tails.
“I was trapped. I could not leave.” Fire flickered around her form as she waved a paw, filling the entire false path with fire.
“That’s an obvious lie.”
“You bound me to the chains of plot convenience. I will have my revenge.” It was clear by the end of it she was struggling not to laugh, even as rivers of fire swirled into runes around her, etching immense attacks into reality. Flashes of light crystalized into a scintillating shield about the object of her ire. “Die.”
“Fine. Have it your way- I wasn’t even going to come for you!” The shield that had been deflecting the ever-stronger attacks coalesced into a single point of light stronger than any star, pushing back the fire as it coalesced into a million small spears that fanned out before shooting toward the fox.
A wall of fire materialized in the fraction of an instant it took for the light to cross the distance between them, and then it was a dance of a million tiny parts, constructs and independent attacks, overwhelming power against immutable defenses. “Yet, you came.”
The space around them shuddered, ground vaporizing as a fraction of their attention switched to a trillion-player game of flank the other attack, woven between the individual atoms of the ground. “Of course I did! I can still feel the water in my feathers!”
“Meh. Tabs is a better opponent than you are.”
With a screech of inarticulate rage Sara threw herself through the air, blasting aside the incoming attacks with a supernova of golden light and sending Kitsune flying back a couple hundred feet. Wisps of fiery essence bled from the wound, fueling the inferno around them to an almost unbearable degree.
A beam of incandescent heat shot back in equal intensity, and Sara quickly threw up shields- only to find those shields gripped tightly under the same energy that had mere seconds before been a wild blast of chaotic energy. Radiance poured out through the shield-
Yet another blast of fire slammed into her, almost unnoticed for how much it was different from Kitsune’s characteristic power. Compared to the fox’s, it was wild and uncontrolled, but it was strong, scouring a line across two of her wings. Four more similar beams flashed towards her, but she saw them coming and fled, ducking around them and throwing herself into the spatial distortion of the shattered path… and came out on the other side, just to be pummeled by a star’s worth of fire.
“Tabs would be running circles around me here. Tactics isn’t your strong suit, Sara.” The underlying message was- you’re trapped, surrounded by superior force, facing another of the Seraphim. Checkmate.
“I’m supposed to be a healer. Soul magic would’ve been an instant kill…”
“And I could have conceptually annihilated you, and you know it.”
Sara drooped in the sudden stillness. “Fine…” and from within the depths of her manifestation she burnt her power, in an instant, beyond the essence of light and life, to the innermost essence of herself- rebirth was born infinite times, and died once.
The planet beneath them exploded in a supernova, Kitsune’s five lieutenants she’d used to break the stalemate were erased from existence, and Kitsune herself barely managed to slip out of her own trap.
Forty years later Kitsune would look up to the sky from where she was training the next generation of her trusted commanders, and see an aurora of iridescence intertwined into a relatively new nebula. In it, a message- written in an ancient code from a hyper-advanced civilization universes and trillions of years away, readable only to four beings-
Written in the stars, a final farewell. “Good game.”
………
Meanwhile, universes away, someone was breaking mountains and grumbling about wet feathers.