A piercing scream echoed in the ruined main room of the Horned Heron.Somnus turned to see the source of the scream, but had already recognized the voice. It was Gemma. She stood on the stairs, a thin rapier in one hand, held loosely. She covered her left eye with her other hand and stared at the spot where Mia lay just moments ago. Her whole body was trembling with fury—with sorrow.
"No!" she howled. "No, no, no!"
Her rapier fell on the steps as she rushed over and fell to her knees, grasping at the fading motes of iridescent light and pressing them against her chest. Her tears fell on the empty floor.
"Don"t go," Gemma pleaded, trying to capture the glittering motes. "Don"t leave me! Please!"
The flickering lights swirled one last time, carried on invisible currents, and faded into nothing.
Mia"s iron adventurer tag fell on the ground with a metallic ring.
Gemma released another sorrowful wail, louder than the first, and fell to her side. She grasped Mia"s adventurer tag and then covered her face with her hands and cried. She cried for all she was worth, uncaring about the bodies littering the ground or the state of the inn. She did not even care about the pooling blood being absorbed into her white dress. She just cried and howled.
Somnus and Lod watched from a distance, mute. They both, in their own way, knew what loss was like. For Lod, humans hunted his brethren and friends; for Somnus, humans did the same. It was not the same, however. Machines were never "alive" to begin with; but seeing one"s own race dwindle in number with time was not something even Somnus could be callous about. The prospect of being the only being—of his kind or otherwise—in the universe was a dark and isolating thought, but also, perhaps ironically, his goal.
"Pretty…" Lod called out to Gemma. "Lod is sorry…"
But no words could heal the wounds inflicted by Mia"s sudden and permanent absence from this world. Words only made the wounds deeper, digging their claw-like syllables into the bleeding heart and preventing any form of distraction from the reality of loss.
In the ensuing silence, Somnus could hear a strange commotion outside. Many voices joined to shout excitedly at... something. Even with his enhanced perception, Somnus could not make out what was going on, because all the voices melded together into one cacophony of cheers.
Somnus did not really sympathize with Gemma. He did not care about Mia, but the opportunity to seem like he was human and relatable was difficult to pa.s.s by. He wanted Gemma on his side, without having to resort to brainwas.h.i.+ng and force. Still, his human instincts were blaring a warning into his mind, urging him to investigate what is going on outside the ruined inn.
"Defend this position," Somnus told Lod as he headed for the exit.
The moment Somnus stepped outside, he knew what the source of the commotion was. He could not see it earlier through the hole in the inn"s roof, but outside, in the sky, he saw a bright corona of light surrounding a circle of black emptiness.
Was it another Herald? Did he accidentally kill another king? Perhaps one of his attackers? Perhaps Mia herself was one of the seals?
"It is Lady Aurora!" someone in the streets shouted. "She has come to save us!"
"Aurora, the Radiant Sword!" someone cheered and fell to his knees, in the middle of the street. "Hallowed be your name! The Empire is here!"
Somnus narrowed his eyes at those words. The Empire? Here?
Somnus focused on the black circle where he could barely make out the outline of a figure; someone was there!
But if it really is the Empire, how did they come all the way here? Almost a thousand kilometers separated Silversh.o.r.e from the Empire capital. How could the Empire move an entire army that distance, in that amount of time?
As more cheered their savior"s name, Somnus began to realize that it wasn"t the Empire"s army, but only Aurora, whoever she may be.
"I am of all things that must be equal," she spoke, and her voice easily reached everywhere throughout the whole city. It was as if everything in existence, inanimate or otherwise, wanted to hear that voice and all the mechanisms that would impede it moved out of the way. "I am the Circle; the Equinox. I am the halves of twilight that meet at the terminus."
The corona lit up with those words, shedding filaments of burning light into the sky—it was so bright that the surroundings dimmed. Even the sun itself was drowned out by the corona"s brightness.
The people fell to their knees and pressed their hands to their chests, as if in prayer, heads bowed in wors.h.i.+p.
Even more alarmingly, Somnus felt the mana content in the surroundings drain—absorbed entirely by the figure in the sky. Magical circles appeared around her, blazing with such unfathomable power that Somnus could not even make out the symbols. He could, however, make out the type: Divine.
"Hear me, stars; you who are scattered and lost! My voice is the fire of the cosmos that guides all things of stardust to the beginning; Origins to nothing, disorder to equilibrium." she spoke in a hauntingly beautiful voice, tracing a circle with an outstretched finger. Glittering dust fell off the luminous circle.
The mana gathered in the spell was so overwhelming that Somnus felt a rattle in his bones—no, the very core of his being. He felt something fundamental in his being aligning to the principles of balance, succ.u.mbing to entropy itself.
[OPCOM: Threat level: 10]
"Gather here, constellations of the end; return all to dust, and dust to light," the figure spoke with a tone of finality and then lowered her head. Her next word was whispered, and filled with regret. "[Heliosphere]."
[Deploying barrier.]
You have taken damage. -16844 HP
Health is critical.
In the instant that the final word was spoken, Somnus could feel the pain of hundreds of thousands of souls peris.h.i.+ng. Everything around Somnus turned to ash and then plasma as the particles of their molecules flew apart under the thermal radiation. The river that ran through Silversh.o.r.e instantly evaporated. The name of the spell—Heliosphere—was not a coincidence. What Aurora unleashed was indeed the million degrees hot solar winds, which were dense enough to actually affect the environment.
Even more threateningly, what had struck Somnus was not the solar wind itself, but the high energy radiation of its plasma. It was comparable to a nuclear weapon"s initial radiation pulse, which instantly vaporizes anything within the area of the detonation.
Reflexively, Somnus summoned his magical powers and began weaving complex magical circles. He had less than a second to do something which would allow him to avoid being hit by the solar winds themselves—if that happened, not even his ashes would remain.
He threaded the mana into finer products and more complex amalgams. He did not have time for this, but it was a necessary component of his counter spell. An ordinary barrier would not do. He remembered his times when he was refining magical materials—it was impossible to avoid damage from all forms of interactions the environment could have with magical effects. He could avoid being directly burned, but he could not avoid being heated by the environment. A direct counter effect was required to ensure total protection.
Using the entirety of his realization area, enhanced by Aeon"s modules, the spell was ready in a matter of milliseconds. It deployed before Somnus even spoke the words.
"Magnetosphere!"
Dancing lights of all colors appeared overhead in a small radius around Somnus. The lights were the brightest at the bow shock where the solar winds met the expanding, invisible magnetosphere.
"Chaos barrier!" Somnus shouted, reinforcing the spell with added layers of protection. Even Somnus barely understood the working principles of [Chaos Barrier], but he knew that it tunneled phenomena and forces into the same type of Void that Hashmal was stuck in. It was the magical defense of undefined s.p.a.ce.
As the solar wind crashed against the magnetosphere, the cascading aurora formed by the interaction brightened—as if trying to live up to the name of the one who unleashed the cataclysmic spell. Radiation blasted off, but not through, the layered defenses, and the bow shock fully formed, wreathing the entire city of Silversh.o.r.e in its deadly, stellar wind.
It truly was like the wind, but unlike any that had been seen before. The over-pressure from the blast wave reduced the atomized buildings and remains of incinerated inhabitants to nothing. In the blink of an eye, the surroundings were erased from existence, as if they never existed in the first place. What remained of the city was a puddle of molten slag and plasma.
Even his nuclear weapons were not as brutal as this; In terms of relative output, this was closer to a fusion bomb than a fission bomb—yet still exceeding both. Inwardly, Somnus both praised and cursed the humans of this world. Even lacking the technology, they were still capable of developing weapons like these. Well done, he wanted to commend, were he not on the receiving end of humanity"s rage.
Somnus wondered what kind of creature could possess such a power? Was it truly humanity that developed this weapon, or was Aurora a divinity? Did those who knelt in wors.h.i.+p know what would happen, or was the blessing they received not of the kind they expected?
The figure he saw in the sky did not have the divine presence of Heptia, or the s.p.a.ce-altering magics. She had to be mortal, Somnus concluded.
"Why do you meddle, keeper of the Earth?" Aurora suddenly asked.
Somnus wondered what brought this on when he noticed that not all of the city disappeared. Many of the buildings still stood, including the Horned Heron and the Citadel, their walls glowing with a bright, silver light.
"How dare the stream go against the currents of the oceans?" an ephemeral voice spoke and unlike Aurora"s, this one was filled with the principles of Divinity. "Begone, servant of Balance, before you exhaust my mercy."
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Aurora turned towards Somnus and looked down at him. They were kilometers apart, and yet she unerringly focused on him who was in the midst of a scorched earth, and the remains of a city on the sea of flames.
"This is only the beginning," Aurora said. "There is no more shelter from the storm, no more shade from the sun. The hourgla.s.s has run out. This is the fruit of your labor. Despair."
Aurora turned around, and walked into the black circle wreathed in that bright corona of starfire, and disappeared. The corona and the black circle followed suit.
Then the rains, formed from the evaporated river, fell like a torrent, as if the world itself was weeping.