Chapter 59 - War part 3

“Well, this is certainly a curious development, if nothing else,” said Solana idly, observing the chaos with a meticulous gleam in her eyes, her voice carrying over the wind effortlessly despite the explosions in the air. “I have to admit, I did not foresee the girl having this much talent.”

“She hasn’t yet used the Haze even once,” said Maude from behind her. “The time you spent training with her has definitely borne fruit.”

Solana shook her head. “You give me too much credit, Oni. Much of this is novel for myself.” The sheer display of agility, the control over Frost and her own composure, and the ability to meet the Warlord on an almost equal level despite the power difference was more peculiar than she expected. And there was only one reason that fitted the bill.

“I was right, though,” she mused, out loud. “The girl truly is a spectacular vessel. It seems the Glacier Queen’s remnants have truly merged with her, becoming one with her spiritual self. She might not be a Level-4, but with the Queen’s control of Everfrost, she might not need that much to bridge the gap. Not even Tsurara was this talented.”

Maude gave her a surprised look. “Then the training you gave her —”

“I could only help her get used to what she originally had, plus my observations about the Queen’s ability with the Haze. But all this, this is all her. I can only wonder what will happen if the Warlord decides to up the ante and demonstrate his fullest power against her.”

“Something tells me that the Outsider planned all this,” Maude quipped.

Solana quipped. “As much as I’d like to claim otherwise, I can’t. The Outsider is the sort to pull off miracles beneath everyone’s nose. I certainly did not expect him to pull off that last stunt, but there we are. If he had planned on Tanya being able to make a stand against the Warlord, either I had underestimated the girl’s ability, or she was hiding her true power all this time, in which case, I suppose I have to assume she has a better poker face than I imagined.”

“I’m afraid you’re wrong, Leader.”

“Oh?”

“Lukas Aguilar… he has a far greater understanding of what transpired between the Queen’s soul and Tanya than either of us can fathom. I spent weeks analyzing Tanya’s constitution, and yet he was the first to suggest a potential spiritual resonance. What’s more, his words carried a strange finality, almost like…”

“He was speaking from experience?”

Maude pursed her lips, and nodded.

Solana’s lips curled. “Interesting. I suppose I shouldn’t even be surprised at this point. Perhaps the Legend is more than just a myth passed down by our ancestors. Especially with those words in that aria he used. Something tells me it wasn’t just a fancy preparation to counter the Warlord’s ultimate attack.”

“You think there’s more?”

Solana laughed. “I’m surprised you even have to ask this, Oni. When it comes to the Outsider, there is always more.”

Maude’s lips twisted, but then a shade of concern crossed her features. Solana followed her gaze, and momentarily froze at the sight before her. She had believed that the war would be on an indefinite hiatus until the Warlord himself was done with Tanya.

She had been dead wrong.

“Is that…?” She began, but words failed her.

….

They floated above the ground, but low enough that they could directly fight against those on the ground, yet retain their advantage of being in their element. Mujin Shimizu ws a monstrously cruel creature, but that did not make him a fool. Quite the contrary, it made him more cunning. The first wave that was sent in had been nothing more than a scouting force. That explained why there were so few of them, and why it had been so lackluster. Even the pack that the Outsider’s friends had finished off numbered barely more than a hundred or so. And when the fighting turned against them, they had either retreated, trying to escape back if not already killed by the yokai force. And then, the warship had blown the territory apart, creating a divide, allowing them a hasty retreat.

The one that was approaching them now was the true vanguard.

The second wave.

Breastplates of Eternal Light-blessed metal covering their lithe frames, were rows of aeromancers. They were followed by terramancers, clad in bulky, dark metal mail. They looked far more menacing than their lesser equipped brethren, and it wasn’t just their armor that made them so. For amidst them were soldiers holding spears burning with Eternal Light in all its glory. Their powered exoskeletons provided them the tenacity to endure and the power to move, the ether crystals stacked inside them granting them prodigious strength when their faith failed to do so. A miracle of Asukan engineering striding forth in battle.

“That’s — the,” Olfric stammered, “The Cobalt Army.”

And indeed they were. Massive warhammers. Great, bludgeoning mauls. Garlands of fire and lightning dancing between their weapons. The best of Asukan technology granted for the use of their most faithful fanatics, those that would kill and butcher in their god’s name without a single word about right and wrong. On their other hands were strapped immense tower shields, solid barriers of blessed metal the height of a fully grown man, complete with sigils that combined the best of manacrafting and technology to create the best weapons for siege. Behind them were more support staff, Onmyōji, healers, and technicians. Repair men and just fodder to take an impossible attack.

This… this was not going to be an easy fight to win.

“EVERYONE,” Solana bellowed, her voice carrying through the loud commotion. “The enemy is upon us. Let the Queen fight the Warlord. We will protect the Outsider at all costs. All of you, CHARGE!”

And with that, the yokai army rushed to war.

....

....

....

81% of Omphalos Reserves drained.

Running on Auxiliary Power.

72% Activation Complete

Auto-Shutdown commences at 94% Reserve Drain

This was getting difficult.

Lukas watched the massive Asukan army wade into the Desert, only to meet the yokai force in open combat. This second wave was far more ruthless and powerful than the former, and he couldn’t anticipate things to do well for the yokai side. He watched as Olfric used the power of his new kami to the zenith, the biotoxin he had procured for him from the Neothelid prototype used effectively against the Cobalt Army. They might be blessed against the yokai power of possession, and their armor might help defend against arcane sorcery and bursts of elemental mana, but it was far more difficult to halt the flow of water, especially if it had a mind of its own, and was employing the chaos all around to its advantage.

Doubly so, when it was poisoned with the deadliest toxin Lukas could think of. He was no expert, but he was sure that even a micron of it was enough to kill a man when ingested.

And Olfric wasn’t the only one doing the damage.

Lukas saw Zuken, using his new fractals to defend against the attacks that were escaping past their army, while Solana’s barriers were enough to halt entire rows of terramancers in their path. He saw some soldiers hesitate when Elena fell across her path, only for Maude to arrive out of nowhere, and paralyze them from behind.

Not that the Army had been idle in the exchange. Like a disturbed nest of hornets, they buzzed all around them, with several of them trying to attack Lukas twice. First from behind, and then, from above. Both times he had been saved by Zuken and Ryu respectively. But the Cobalt Army weren’t the foolhardy warriors that Zuken and company had faced earlier. They were veterans, well-versed in their craft, and knew perfectly well how to counter the spiritual parasites while maintaining a steady assault.

Prepared hunters cornering their prey.

And the toll began to tell.

Lukas needed to do something. But what? His own plan had backfired at him. Terraformation, by all logic, shouldn’t be able to take this much amount of power. But he wasn’t just terraforming. He was also expanding his created ‘territory’ against the Will of the World around him, and that was taking its toll on his Reserves. And unlike the Shimizu fortress, there were no ley lines beneath the sandy terrain for him to immediately reach down and draw power. And he remembered what had happened the last time he had used Capacitance to draw power from ley lines, even if it was just enough to empower a Dranzithl for less than a minute.

Damn it. They were all going to die at this rate. He needed to do something. Anything. Gritting his teeth against the resulting migraine that threatened to overwhelm him, Lukas accelerated the process.

Deleting Safeties

Using Maximum allowed Omphalos power for Terraformation

Terraformation 83% Complete

No longer was it a dull, aching throb. Instead, stabs of agony lit up his conscience, bright lances of pain flashing through his mind. Consciousness flickered, brief lapses of darkness he wasn’t entirely sure lasted for how long. Nonetheless, the vertical column of crystal was forming at three times the rate than before, digging deep, deep into the heart of the desert.

A sizzling sound confirmed what he had already felt. Zuken fell limp at his side, a blade severing a tendon beneath his knee, before a hit from one of those tower-shields sent Zuken into peaceful oblivion. Elena was captured, her hands tied behind her wrists, and left fallen on the sand. The yurei were being mercilessly erased by the holy enchantments imbued in those weapons. Solana was surrounded by flanks of terramancers and aeromancers on both sides, as a circular wall of force closed in on her from all sides, ripping apart the sand beneath their feet, and exploding with sheer force. Solana had shattered the barrier, and sent several of them flying but the rest took the opportunity to fire blades of sharp wind at her, hacking into her pristine, flesh-mask. The skinwalker hissed, as black ichor-like tissue tried to reform itself while she threw up more barriers, only to be attacked by an even greater assault.

Please, thought Lukas. Just a little more. I’m almost done. I’m almost —

A massive blade fell.

And two pieces of Mizo, the reiki fell on the ground, the blessed enchantment in the blade burning her form from the point of injury. Lukas saw Olfric trying to escape a group of Cobalt Army soldiers, before he was jerked back and thrown into the air. Olfric slashed them with a massive tentacle of poisoned water, but became vulnerable to five slashes of razor-sharp wind that seared through his torso. A soldier slammed his injured body with his shield, and smashed him down into the sand, choking him in his own blood, as he lay next to the reiki.

And then a soldier slammed his broadsword right into Olfric’s chest.

NO, Lukas thought. This couldn’t be happening. He glanced at Tanya, and found her completely engaged against the Warlord, who was raining down showers of wind blades at her, and throwing power the likes of which Tanya had never faced before. Both spiritists had taken absolutely massive winged forms — a winged canine for Mujin, against Ezzeron’s massive eight-winged avian form, and Mujin was winning. Solana too was trapped and on the verge of breaking, and none of the main fighters of their crowd were winning anytime soon. This desert, where the yokai thrived for this long, would serve as graves as the Cobalt Army meticulously brought them down despite the —

Lukas blinked.

Despite the curse.

The Desert’s Curse.

It resented all life in general, but yet, it allowed an anomaly to fester inside its own heart. It allowed an entire yokai contingent to thrive in its darkness.

And it absolutely abhorred and repelled the Eternal Light.

This… this he could work with.

But before he could do anything, something else happened, that left his jaw dropping in shock.

Olfric… gurgled.

Lukas blinked. No, he wasn’t seeing things. Lukas gurgled, and coughed out blood. He was supposed to be dead, but somehow, he wasn't. Instead, he was recovering his strength. His hand went up, and with a strength he did not have, pulled the massive broadsword out of his bleeding chest, the wound mending at a rate that was fast enough to make Lukas jealous. The rest of his body too was mending itself. In place of his hacked off arm, a new limb was growing, extending, and the aquamancer used it to push himself back up, wary and alert.

The soldiers stepped back, clearly discomforted by this impossibility. Knowing them, they were thinking he was turned into some kind of demon. And to be honest, they weren’t completely wrong either.

ONI

Chimeric Entity. Result of Spiritual Fusion of BREMETAN species with REIKI species.

Presence of symbiotic Bond with JAAN species.

Bipedal, lifeforce-producing organism. Capable of Metamancy and Aquamancy.

Mutated Soul Architecture.

Reiki. There was only one creature near him that fitted the bill. Lukas’s eyes scanned for the broken shapeshifting creature that lay fallen next to Olfric, only to see that it was no longer there. Which meant —

“Did you know,” said Olfric, or whoever the Oni now identified himself with. “I was an Onmyōji in training. A spellcaster. And after getting possessed by Mizo the first time, I realized that the Asukan way of channeling mana using yokai was inferior and inefficient. A perfect balance of the spectrum is required to unleash the power, but adding constraints only leads to explosion. Harmonization is the key.”

“What nonsense are you babbling?” claimed the soldier who had driven his sword into Olfric’s chest just moments earlier.

“Harmonization. Bremetan, physical being of lifeforce; yokai, spiritual being of mana. Harmonize them together, you get Oni — best of both worlds. Shattering the bonds of lifeforce —”

The ground shook, as a sudden, immense force spiraled around him. His body became larger, thicker, his muscles expanding powerfully, and with them came a strength that could crush nearly everything in its way.

“— Unleashing the limits of mana —”

Water materialized around him in great amounts. A massive cylindrical tube of water, spreading out in a serpentine fashion, with a large, draconic face, stood coiled around Olfric’s form. The oni took out a vial of biotoxin and dropped its contents into the water elemental around him.

“Harmonization, complete.”

The massive draconian serpent attacked, and Olfric followed it, the world around him exploding into a corona of water and death. His sheer power shattered through the shields, knocking the soldiers down, blowing them off their feet, while the serpent — a manifestation of his kami no doubt, slithered its way through the sand and the air, sweeping against the enemy, its mere touch dropping soldiers dead.

A tempest of battle surrounded him, and he was, in the middle, calm in the eye of the storm.

And things were about to get better. With the tide of the battle suddenly changed, Lukas had an option open to him. With nary but a thought, Blob slid away from him, and took form for what he had planned next.

Creating New Instance KHORKHOI

Adding Sand to implement physical configuration

Found Alien configuration : Desert’s Curse

Applying…

Spiritual Configuration Complete

A vast black, metallic shadow covered the sands with its hateful malevolence. An eerie, grating sound dragged across the sands, like metal on glass. Enormous canvasses of darkened, metal hide, reforged with sand crystals that threatened to block out the sun. It twisted and turned, scales of poisonous darkness rubbing together, languidly fusing and segmenting into one another. The more they contorted, the more they morphed into a kaleidoscope of spikes and protrusions, expanding in an endless spiral. Serrated spines ran from its enormous head all the way down to its tail.

The mouth came into full focus. The stomach-churning, nightmare-inducing mass bared its thousand-fanged mouth, releasing a gale of hot, putrid breath, the stench of a dead, decayed corpse, and anything that came into contact with its aura instantly dropped to their knees, coughing blood, their bodies paralyzed by the intrusion of an energy so corrosive that just to imbibe it was to brush with death.

It brushed away all opposition. The truck-sized monstrosity swam through the sands, and anyone that fell in its path were either crushed within its teeth, or flung away like ragdolls, hurled aside by its gargantuan strength. Whatever was left of the Army that was not already facing intense attack from Olfric and Solana and whatever remained of the yokai crew, had turned their firepower against this much more dangerous threat. Armor-piercing blades clanged and shattered against its thick hide. Every single one of their holy weapons lost their luster with a single contact with its aura.

Just feeling the Desert’s Curse caused Lukas’s pain. The hate exuding from those sands, the simmering wrath of the world against the atrocity committed by the one that called itself the Great Goddess was a power unlike anything he had ever felt. Even inside his own world, inside the Plains of Forget, where nothing ‘Alive’ existed, he could feel the curse take root, and corrupt it with its very presence, rendering it oppressive, annoyed, repulsive. Had this been a normal corruption, his organs and bodily functions would have shut down, and the Omphalos Regeneration would have kicked in.

Instead, it wasn’t.

It was merging with him. Adding to him. And for whatever reason that didn’t quite make sense to him, he didn’t get the feeling of being ‘connected’ to the World’s Awareness as the curse took root within him. No sense of a greater existence around him. No sense of trying to exist in a maelstrom of power and potential that was far, far more than he could even comprehend. Instead, the curse acted like it was a lingering remnant of something that was once part of the world, but the process of its creation made it into a completely independent manifestation.

It wasn’t an Anomaly, wasn’t a Truth, and wasn’t a Taboo.

It was a curse. A desire. Emotion given form. And Lukas, more than anyone, knew just how deep and devastating desire could be. The desire for freedom had changed a slave girl into becoming a butcher of gods and beasts. A desire for control, for power, to have everything under her feet transformed her into an Empress and eventually, into the Supreme Queen. Gods, Demons, Truths, Taboo, even Worlds — nothing was beyond Desire’s reach to conquer and crush.

And this curse exclusively and obsessively desired the rejection of Eternal Light.

But even then, the battle was far from over. Olfric, as an Oni, was strong. But he was but one man fighting against an entire army. Tanya too, was failing to keep up against Mujin’s constant onslaught. And while the Cobalt Army was temporarily weakened by the Khorkhoi’s aura, their weapons regained their power the moment they stepped out of its reach.

His suspicions were right. The Army wasn’t empowered just by those weapons and suits. They were empowered by something else.

Like that floating fortress in the sky.

And it was time to address that nuisance for good.

Terraformation Complete

Territory Creation Active and Set along established Boundary Length

Nature: Carquane

Remaining Omphalos Reserve: 8%

Lukas exhaled. Just 2% short of shutdown. Thanking whichever deity was responsible for that last ditch of luck, Lukas laid out his plan. Pushing himself slightly to the left, he grabbed the peak of the carquane crystal, the same substance used in wardstones, a massive construction that went deep down into the very heart of the World, across hundreds and thousands of feet, establishing Lukas’s territory, and drawing raw, infinite energy through the substance to the very peak.

This. Lukas reminded himself. Is going to fucking hurt.

Capacitance Active

Reverse Shift Active

Power flooded into him. Unlimited power. He could feel the Omphalos Reserves jump up in sets of twos, then threes, then sevens and more. In less than ten seconds, he had already recovered fifty percent of his total reserves, and the rest came rushing in. And he knew exactly where he needed to send it.

He slowly turned his body to face the floating fortress bearing down on him. Even being a kilometer away, it was a monstrous existence that seemed to dwarf everything nearby. And the sheer quantity of power stored inside it was what was empowering both the Warlord’s suit, as well the soldiers that were fighting across the sandy plain.

Mujin requested to bring this thing, and the Earth King sent this titanic vessel to kill the yokai using Eternal Light in a place where it was barred from entering.

They asked for this, and they would be the one to accept the consequences.

It was time to show them exactly what they had won.

He gripped the length of the carquane shard that was above the ground. Terraforming substances wasn’t a big ordeal for him, but the cost of filling it up with energy was an entirely different matter entirely. And charging it directly through his Omphalos Reserves would not only be an incredibly slow process, but he would never be able to dish out enough energy to make a significant difference.

But if he could pull that energy outright from the World without any consequences then?

Creating Bombardment Units with reduced integrity limiters by forty-five percent

Reaching Critical Threshold for Energy Containment

Natural Energy was unstoppable and far more potent than mana. There was no chance of stopping it once unleashed. It was why the wards at the Peak could hold against endless Level-3 hits but got incinerated the moment Natural energy rushed in through the wards.

Luckily, Lukas had no desire to trap it.

Set Trajectory

Lock Target

Fire.

The upper part of the carquane crystal outgrowth splintered, and dashed upwards, tearing through the air, ignoring anything and everything that fell into place. Unlike before, there was no hammering at the warship’s defenses. Instead it went and nuked directly into the massive vehicle, and for once, the mana generators inside were found lacking.

One moment the carquane crystal had ripped through the barriers and buried itself deep into the warship. The next moment, half of the flying fortress vanished in a sea of flames. Just like with the castle before, the force of the explosion was simply so massive that every single person on the ground and in the air was hurled away. Even Lukas had to raise a motion barrier just to keep the shockwaves from outright killing him and damaging the carquane crystal outgrowth.

And he was far from being done.

Asserting and Aligning projectiles

Setting locked targets

Launch

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! went the projectiles. The first pair slammed into the warship’s left, which was still somewhat untouched by the two attacks. The next one hit it in the dead center, detonating the entire warship into splintered shards that flung away for miles in each direction. The very sky itself had turned into a massive explosion of white from the detonation.

“Well?” said Lukas, finally standing up, and feeling his own Reserves now back to a comfortable ninety percent. “Wasn’t that something?”

His question was responded to by a Level-4 attack that rushed towards him, tearing through the air with a warbled warcry.