Free Web NovelChapter 33: Cloud Whirl Galactic Alliance
"You returned fast," Solenne commented upon hearing Aidan’s laugh.
She opened her eyes.
"Well...what can I say? I wiped the floor with myself." Aidan laughed.
Solenne tilted her head in slight confusion. "You lost to yourself?"
"Yep." Aidan smiled and stood up before stretching his arms and legs. ’I died clearly, but I am completely fine right now.’
He didn’t bother to continue because if he did and died again, he would get permanently deleted, and he didn’t want that.
But if he wanted to enter again, he would have to earn 100 Transcendent Points somehow.
"There’s something strange going on in the sky, by the way," Solenne said as she looked up. "It’s happening roughly every minute."
"Eh?" Aidan curiously looked up and was dumbfounded. "What the..."
There were...lights, colorful and arrayed, as if they represented some kind of structure.
And they were gigantic.
TRING!
Aidan’s wristwatch rang as Beatrix’s call came.
Aidan connected.
[Beatrix: Where have you been? The signal was not going through, but it should unless you were in a Terror Tear or dimension.]
[Aidan: Yeah, I was in something like that. So what’s up with the sky?]
[Beatrix: Yeah, it’s happening. This time, they are coming in clear fashion. The aliens. However, they turned out to be humans instead of those weird creatures.]
[Aidan: Interesting. Tell me what you know.]
[Beatrix: I’m sure the top brass of the hunter association and top guilds know more. I could only gather from my connections that these aliens haven’t contacted us this time, and the leaders are kind of panicking.]
[Aidan: Panicking?]
[Beatrix: Yes. Apparently, our people are sending signals and trying to contact them, but they aren’t answering them. I think our Legendary-rank hunters might go there personally to ask them.]
Aidan looked at the sky. The lights just increased as another spaceship arrived and stationed itself on Earth.
Although they looked like they were stationed, they were actually orbiting the Earth at the same rate as Earth, making them look stationary to people on Earth.
[Aidan: If they are not answering... could they be here to attack us?]
[Beatrix: No idea what’s going to happen. We can only wait and watch.]
[Aidan: True. I should get some food and drink for whatever show this is.]
"Let’s go back to the mansion now." Aidan turned to Solenne and chuckled.
’Yes, hurry up. I am bored here.’ Tom’s voice rang in Aidan’s head, sounding upset.
...
The drive back to the estate was quiet, both of them glancing up through the windows at the sky the whole way.
The lights kept multiplying. Every minute or so, another one bloomed into place, huge and structured and impossibly far up, until the daytime sky was littered with them.
By the time they reached the mansion, Tom was on the front step, tail lashing, staring upward with both mismatched eyes.
"You feel that," Tom said flatly, not a question. "The threads up there. There are so many of them, and they all lead somewhere I can’t follow. I don’t like it."
"Yeah, buddy." Aidan tilted his head back. "Nobody does."
He set Solenne up inside with food and left Tom grumbling on the windowsill, then pulled a screen from his inventory and did what everyone else on the planet was doing.
He watched.
...
The Hunter Association’s central spire had not been this full in living memory.
Every seat that mattered was taken. Guild masters, association directors, national representatives, all of them crammed into the highest chamber, all of them looking at the same live feeds of the same silent ships.
And near the front, apart from the rest, stood the ones who actually mattered when the sky went wrong.
Earth had fewer than fifteen known Legendary-rank Hunters. That was the whole of humanity’s peak, and nearly every one of them was in the room.
Seven of them belonged to the top seven guilds, one apiece, the living crown of each. The rest answered to no guild at all. They belonged to the Association, its final blades, kept for the day the world genuinely needed saving. fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com
A handful of people who could each level a city. Standing in a room, staring at ships they could not reach, with nothing to do but wait.
"They still aren’t answering." The Association’s First Director, an old woman with steel-grey hair, did not raise her voice, and the room went silent anyway. "Every channel. Every language. Every signal protocol we have. Nothing."
"Then we go up and knock," one of the guild masters said. He was a broad man with a Legendary Hunter at his shoulder. "We have people who can survive orbit. Send one. Ask them to their faces."
"And if that reads as a first strike?" the First Director countered. "We know nothing about them. Not their strength, not their intent, not their rules of engagement. One wrong move and we start a war we don’t understand against a fleet we can’t count."
"We can’t just sit here."
"We have been sitting here for six hours," she said, "precisely because doing nothing is the only move we’re certain isn’t fatal."
One of the two Association Legendaries, a lean man with tired eyes, finally spoke.
"They’re not hiding," he said quietly. "Look at them. They’re not cloaked. They’re not maneuvering. They arrived slowly, in plain sight, one at a time, where the whole planet could watch." He looked around the room. "That’s not an ambush. That’s a stage being set. They want us gathered and watching before they say whatever they came to say."
The room chewed on that.
Then the sky answered for them.
...
Every ship in orbit lit at once.
The colored structures Aidan had watched from the wilderness flared bright, and beams of light lanced down from all of them, converging above the world’s major cities at the same instant.
Above the Association spire, above a hundred capitals, above oceans and deserts and every place with eyes to see, the light resolved into the same image.
A hologram, city-sized, hanging in the sky over the entire planet.
Four figures.
They stood in a row, immense and unhurried, rendered in perfect detail against the daylight. Their clothing was nothing Earth made, layered and luminous, threaded with materials that shifted color as they moved, exotic and severe and drenched in obvious wealth.
Two of them were human men. One was a human woman. The last was an elf, female, tall and pale with long ears and eyes like cut glass.
Four people, four bearings, each one carrying the weight of someone used to being obeyed across worlds.
"People of this world. We are the Cloud Whirl Galactic Alliance."
