Chương 62: Interlude IX: Flipping the Board

The elements had finally been put into play. A place of power, built by iron shaped through the will and magic of their servant, founded upon the slaughter of both innocents and those who opposed them. The alignment of realms through the upholding of their tenets and the embrace of their ways by local mortals. And the violent sacrifice of a champion in the altar of their greatest failing. The Lords of Maveth went through a ritual older than the foundations of the world that was about to host it.

What do they cared that the champion sacrificed was their own servant, if all was done within the bounds of the ritual? Why would it matter that the one who finished it did so by accident, if it gave them a foothold in a new world? From the Earth to the realm of Maveth in the Great Sphere a portal was rent and widened by the first Lord. From the Jungle of Spikes in the heart of their realm a seed was plucked by the second Lord.

And the invisible hand of the third Lord carried the hill-sized tangle of adamantine spikes and dark magic that was the seed into this new world and planted it. An earthquake akin to the earlier rising of the great tower struck the area, rending the ground and swallowing the now useless edifice in a great fiery chasm before receiving the seed in its magma-filled embrace.

Adamantine roots as thick as apartment blocks sank into the molten, red-hot stone, drinking in both the physical heat and the rage and violence that had suffused the area. Then the seed began to grow. In the lowlands of Florida, the torrential downpour that had begun with the initiation of the ritual continued unabated. When most people thought of natural violence they remembered the earthquake, the volcano and the hurricane.

The flash of lightning and roar of thunder, the sweeping force of the tidal wave, the rage of the wildfire. Yet simple rain contained just as much power as those phenomena, power that when properly applied flooded towns, undermined roads, swallowed farmland and strangled both mobility and life. It was neither flashy nor intense but no less violent and far more thorough in the end.

The servant's last great working was not the most intense rainfall this new world had ever seen; by the standards of the Great Sphere it barely counted as a proper weather-weapon. It still hit ten inches of precipitation in an hour and had been locked in at that intensity ever since. Over the span of two days, it delivered almost as much rainwater across the state as Florida had seen the entire past decade.

The floods caught more than a million people on the road or in the various evacuation camps, fleeing from Destiny's nearby towns and cities. After the military's devastating defeat only days before, panic had already gripped much of the state and beyond. Emergency responders, National Guard and Army units from beyond the neighboring states had arrived just in time to be struck by this new disaster.

The brass had been ready for more monsters, only for their efforts and forces to be bogged down by something that could not be fought. Cold and flooding on refugees already worn by the sudden evacuation and caught in the open had predictable results. Fed by the nearly two hundred thousand dead before its arrival, the seed had already grown roots. Each further death fed it, every injury, sickness and woe strengthened it, the rage and horror such events caused upon the world beyond sped up its growth.

The first-ever launch of nuclear missiles in a proper war had contributed to its power beyond even the projections of the Lords' servant as military forces around the world went into red alert and hundreds of millions of people around the world panicked. A dozen countries declared martial law, in two dozen more there were riots and looting and general unrest.

Nobody outside the US knew what was going on with any clarity just yet, but fragmentary accounts, videos and information leaks painted a chaotic, terrifying picture even without a clear accounting of events. Attempts to censor or even shut down the media actually made things worse. Panic and unrest led to violence and that violence too fed the seed. Thirty-six hours after the initiation of the ritual, six hours after the servant became the sacrifice and the seed entered the world, it sprouted and bore fruit.

And said fruit took its first step... xxxx Mot's workings did not unravel with the death of his body. His alteration of the local weather did not disperse. The foundation he had established was not uprooted. His armies were slain and their summoning circles shattered only to feed something greater. As he had sacrificed sixty-six captured locals to produce an obstacle for an agent of the enemy, so was all he'd done transformed and birthed anew for they were bound to his spirit and his spirit endured.

Not everything had gone according to plan. His original design had been to sacrifice the champions of the local resistance to fuel his greatest triumph, to bind the soul of the enemy agent to the gift of his Lord and construct a guiding intellect through which Mot would control it. That part of the plan had failed when Mot was slain through his own greatest failing; an addiction to the complexity and cleverness of his own plans.

Yet apparently through sheer, unbelievable coincidence, the ritual's requirement of an enemy agent brought low through their failings was fulfilled. Mot did not believe in coincidences, for the Great Powers of the Sphere that acted even above the Lords of Maveth did not play dice. They wielded fate and doom, prophesies and quests, stories and beliefs to shape reality on a scale mortals could scarcely fathom.

Thus Mot himself believed had happened here, the Lord of Darkness and King of Crimson placing a single clawed finger upon the scales to direct the outcome. As a Mavethan Legate, Mot could have simply returned to his realm as a disembodied soul as all the Dark Masons had done, where he would be given another body and new resources to invade this... Earth anew.

With Mavethan sorcery already having a foothold there would be no need for slow build-up, just an expansion of their war machine that in mere hours, days at the outside, would overwhelm the planet. But that would have been to ignore his own god's gesture and implicit command, so he did not. The Legate's soul infused the growing seed, taking it for its body with Mot's mind now the controlling consciousness... xxxx He rose from the cradle of his birth, stood upon the Earth, and with both feet took possession.

From his spiked, root-like feet to the six crimson eyes upon his head of black adamantite he towered to one thousand, six hundred and sixty-five Amot, surveying much of his new dominion from the height of most of a Mil. His body was the same black adamantite, roughly hewn into muscles under spiked skin, retaining its tremendous toughness and flexible only through the application of strength beyond mortal means.

His feet were one Ris long each, the standard length of Mavethan arenas and stadiums at a hundred and ninety-eight Amot. From them the First Path of Mavethan sorcery flowed forth, the magic of iron taking a grip of the iron within the crust of the Earth. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. His skin was fiery red, studded with spikes the size of houses from which rose a red mist.

From them the Second Path of Mavethan sorcery embraced his surroundings; the magic of fire to empower him and his and to be denied to his enemies. Rage and passion, ambition and desire to fuel those of Maveth physically ad mentally, but to confuse, distract and madden their enemies. His left hand was engulfed in green radiance, a spiked claw the size of a castle illuminating his surroundings with the harsh glare of the Third Path of Mavethan sorcery.

Under its light all of Maveth evolved and grew according to their worth, while the unworthy sickened, mutated or were reduced to dust according to the magnitude of their worthlessness. His right hand was a clenched black fist, drinking in the light of this new world with the darkness of the Fourth Path of Mavethan sorcery.

Where it touched, the workings of the enemy dwindled, their engines fell silent, their lights were snuffed out, their buildings crumbled and their fields rotted and dried up, their hearts and lungs stopped as their bodies froze and perished in entropy's grip. His maw was a gaping cavern of teeth like towers, a grey haze of air and spirit sucked in to the depths of insatiable hunger that were the Fifth Path of Mavethan sorcery.

Those that fled from him were drawn in by currents of that grey haze, finding all attempts at egress doomed to fail by the anchor of their own powerlessness. Those that perished in his sight had their spirits captured and swallowed, stored to fuel Maveth's endless desire for growth and conquest in the future. Finally, above his black head grew a tangle of spikes, splitting and arcing like the branches of a twisted tree.

A total of sixty-six branches extended three hundred and thirty-three Amot above his head in the shape of not a living tree but something far more powerful, elemental. Lightning arced across the spikes, shaking the air with the flash and thunder of the Sixth Path of Mavethan sorcery. The monstrous incarnation of power that had once been a seed of the physical manifestation of the closest thing Mavethans had to a god now guided by the soul of a Mavethan Legate took its first step in a new world.

Its weight of nine billion mortal men impacted the ground and shattered it, an enormous foot sinking up to its ankle into bedrock that proved no more resistant than loose sand. Mavethan magic echoed and multiplied the force through the iron in the planet's crust, turning the step into an earthquake. The violence of that act against the planet itself rebounded and was absorbed; in a single step the being's form grew by six Amot.

Then the giant walked forth, its every step an earthquake, its ever act a herald of doom approaching as his power grew. Tiny gnats in the ground shot at him with their insignificant weapons and powers. He ignored them and took his first breath since he was born, sucking in the red fumes rising from his body only to blow them forth in a crimson wind to declare his presence. The gnats were swept aside by his breath, or stepped upon, or set upon one another with newfound rage or lust or maddening terror.

Flames and beams of energy and sorceries rose to block the crimson giant's path even as group after group of both constructs and survivors dared to make a stand against him. But the giant did no stop. Darkness swallowed the beams and blasts of energy as if they had never been, weakened and scattered the spells like they were spider's webs trying to stop an avalanche. Plants all around the ruins grew into tentacled things that pulled out their roots and swarmed the few defenders by the thousands.

A single insect buzzed around the giant's head, distracting and annoying with repeated stings, a mosquito to the others' gnats and ants. The giant simply blew more of its crimson breath and threw it two or three Millim away. But the mosquito was persistent even as its flight became erratic, its own body struggling against the giant's influence. So the giant raised its glowing green hand and slapped it away, casting it out of sight somewhere in the ruins.

The local pests became fewer and fewer, falling to or hiding from the giant's might. Ten steps and they were scattered. Twenty and they had been reduced to small groups trying to survive the mere after-effects of his presence. Thirty and their presence no longer annoyed or distracted. The giant stepped towards the only building still standing, a fortress of iron that had not been shattered by the earthquakes or overwhelmed by swarms of mutating plants, that had even endured blasts of red and black sorcery.

The giant simply crushed the building and the locals' last hope under his heel. With nothing of worth remaining in the ruins, the giant turned his attention outwards. Awareness of metal, massively boosted hearing through the air, smell of distant life and death and the emotions dancing between, the touch of distant heat sources and lights, the taste of magic.

There were no strong sources of the latter out to the horizon, more than a hundred Millim from the giant's location, but there were interesting bits of other things. In the sea, a fleet of metal ships idled far beyond the reach of any prior attempts at chastising Maveth's enemies. They thought themselves safe from his ire, too far for his hunger to reach, the giant knew. So with an act of will, he disabused them of the notion.

His jagged horns flashed, crackled with building energies, then six bolts thundered through the intervening distance. Each as thick around as a house and bright enough to momentarily turn night into day, they struck the six larger vessels. Drinking in enough energy to match a small earthquake each, the ship's hulls sublimated, turning their mass into a low-yield explosive.

The detonations produced fiery mushroom-shaped clouds that though barely taller than the giant himself were more than enough to damage the ships' escorts and kill a significant percentage of their crews. Thirty thousand deaths in an instant added fuel to the fire that was the giant's growth. Hundreds upon hundreds of flying machines were scrambling to respond to the giant's advance, tens of thousands of vehicles moving far more ponderously on the ground. The giant ignored the latter.

As for the former, he reached out with his power and denied them fire. The burning reactions fueling the machines' flight were snuffed out and the machines started flowing. Not much later they were dropping out of the air by the dozens, impacting upon the ground hard enough to cause small explosions. A wave of much faster, smaller flying machines were flying towards the giant's location. Unlike with the slower ones, he could sense the power trapped in them, could guess at the nature of their weapons.

Much like some of the longer-range curses, these weapons could kill everyone in a fair radius and mildly poison the ground... but that would steal the giant's satisfaction at dealing with the insects on his own. Thus he unleashed his lightning, destroying all but one. That last fast-flying gnat came to within less than a span from the giant's chest... then bathed everything within two Millim in glorious, white-hot devastation.

Such was the weapon's tremendous force that it pushed the giant a single step back and uncomfortably warmed his skin. Then the giant opened his mouth and exhaled. His crimson breath mingled into the mushroom-like cloud and scattered it, redirecting its force along the air currents to transfer both the explosion's pleasantly mild poison and the crimson mist itself far further than either would have reached alone. Then the giant started walking once more.

More earthquakes fanned out from his steps and his form grew taller. More crimson breath was added to the air currents. Thunderbolts from his crown of horns struck at distant targets his path would not directly pass through. Entropy and radiation infused everything nearby. Slowly but steadily, the implacable, unstoppable avatar of magical destruction made its way towards larger population centers to the North.

And with every subsequent step the growing fear, horror and despair of the locals fed into him because now they knew their most powerful weapon had failed...