Free Web NovelChapter 36: World Ending Strike (2/3)
Aidan walked out onto the surface of the pond and looked up, past the roof, past the clouds, to the arena of light in the sky and the fleet of silent ships ringing it, and he stopped holding back.
All of it came up at once.
Every aspect he owned answered the call. Blood roared out of him in a crimson flood. Wind screamed into a spiral. Lightning threaded the whole thing in webs of edged white light. Nether bled through it in veins of decaying violet, and Bleed sharpened its edges, and Break gave it teeth, and Attraction gave it a target, and Spiral Flow and Spin wound the entire monstrous thing tighter and tighter into a single shape.
Above the fleet, in the black of near space, a magic circle began to form.
It was enormous. It kept growing. It spread across the sky wider than any weapon the Alliance had ever recorded, rings within rings within rings, crimson and violet and screaming white, turning slowly, its light falling over half the planet. fгeewebnovёl.com
Eight billion people stopped despairing for one reason. They had run out of room in their heads for anything but what they were seeing.
The Alliance fighters in the arena froze. The sixth match stopped. Every eye in the fleet, every eye on Earth, turned upward to the circle swallowing the sky.
Aidan raised one hand.
’You came to my world,’ he thought, and it was almost quiet under the roar, ’and you made eight billion people feel that. All at once.’
’Let me show you what that feels like.’
He closed his hand.
The circle fired.
...
It did not look like an attack. It looked like the sky itself had decided to end.
A storm of crimson light tore up out of the atmosphere, edged in jagged white lightning, veined with violet rot, and it did not stay the size of a weapon. It expanded. It kept expanding. It bloomed outward as it climbed, wider than a city, wider than a continent, wider than the planet it launched from, a wave of edged crimson light that grew as big as Earth and then larger still as it rolled out into deep space.
The silent fleet, arrayed and confident a moment ago, sat directly in its path.
Only the edge of this humongous storm touched them. The outermost tatters. The little scraps and threads at the very fringe of the storm brushed across the Alliance ships.
It was enough.
Barriers that had crossed galaxies shattered like glass.
The Nether in those fringe-threads ate through hull-plating that no Earth weapon could scratch.
The Bleed tore the wounds wider.
The lightning arced ship to ship in cascading white chains.
Vessels that had hung untouchable in orbit reeled, venting light and energy, their formation breaking as the wave rolled past and out and away into the dark, still expanding, until it was a fading crimson dawn on the far side of the sky.
And that had been the edge.
Just the edge, just the 0.1% part of this attack.
The main body of the attack sailed on into deep space, world-sized and growing, aimed at nothing, spent on the black, a demonstration nobody had asked for and nobody would ever forget.
[With this venting, you have reduce your translated anger by 5.2%.]
...
In the flagship, four figures who had gazed down at a hundred conquered worlds without blinking stared at the readouts of their crippled fleet, and for the first time in a very long time, none of them spoke first.
It was the elf woman who broke it, her cut-glass voice gone very soft.
"That was not Legendary."
"No," said the first of the human men. His easy boredom was entirely gone. "It was not."
The human woman, who had smiled through the whole ultimatum, was not smiling now. "The fringe. The scatter. The waste at the very edge of it did that to our fleet." She looked at the damage. "The attack itself was aimed past us. Into nothing. Deliberately."
"A message," the second man said quietly. "He could have aimed it at us. He aimed it at the empty dark and let us feel the wind of it."
The elf’s eyes narrowed at the blue world below. "There is a Divine-rank on this planet."
The word landed in the flagship like a stone.
"There cannot be," said the first man. "Our survey was thorough. This world has thirteen early Legendaries and nothing above. We would not have offered a contest at all if there were a Divine here. We would have negotiated."
"Our survey," the elf said flatly, "did not find him. That is not the same as him not existing. That is the same as him not wanting to be found." She gestured at the ruined fleet. "And now he has answered a survey he was not part of, in the only language that leaves no room for doubt."
The four leaders looked at each other, and something passed between them that had not been there an hour ago. Not fear, exactly. They were too old and too powerful for simple fear. freeweɓnovel.cѳm
Wariness. The deep, careful wariness of apex things that have just learned they are not, on this particular field, the apex.
"Call it," the human woman said at last.
The second man nodded, and turned to the fleet’s systems.
The arena of light in the sky dissolved. The sixth match, unfinished, simply ended. Every screen on Earth cleared, and then filled again with the four faces, and their tone, when they spoke to the planet now, was different in a way every listener could feel.
"People of Earth."
