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Chapter 142 - Watch and Learn
🕑 Added 2020-03-24 13:59:40 +0000 UTC
Rage rises in me just as the ground underneath my feet begins to shake. Looking up, I find that the moon is filling the entire view of the sky now, thinly veiled by Exla's misty form. The end is fast approaching, and there's no time left to be wasted.
My feelings grow cold in an instant, and I walk over to Nymphy's body. At that sight, Aurelia pulls out the golden weapons that are still stuck in her back with a gesture of her hand and moves them out of the way. Rolan and the others can only watch silently, unable to say a word to me. No more words are needed; I know that they aren't at fault.
"You'll be with me forever." Muttering these words, I open the front of my body and pull Nymphy and her severed parts inside me. Then I turn to Rolan. "Take care of everything here. We'll be back soon."
"Shelnir said that she has Runa on the Rhodos station." He quickly says, sounding desperate. I know that under the circumstances, he doesn't feel that he has the right to ask for my help, but he still mustered his courage to do so.
"I understand. We will deal with that after this is over." There's no reason to blame him; I'm sure I would have fallen for Shelnir's trick all the same. The one I need to seek revenge on is the Old Human who plays with fate.
"Thank you." Rolan lowers his head in apology and gratefulness alike. But I already shift my gaze to Aurelia and raise a hand, upon which Flann appears next to me. It's time for us to meet Mataku on the dark side of the moon; anything else has to wait until we're done there.
"Wait." The rumbling earthquake continues, and I realize that it's not from the moon's gravity just yet. Flying up and clearing the rooftops of the nearby buildings, I look north. I feel something overwhelming fill my heart at the sight that greets me.
A giant naked Tokomaha is rising, her legs obscured by the atmospheric haze due to the vast distance. She's still growing larger, the movements of her form appearing incredibly slow as she raises her arms in preparation to catch the moon. The sight leaves me breathless, and I stop to take in the view.
Flann already told me that the eyes in the sky, called the Watcher in the Night, is the origin of my kind. Its sheer size could be considered celestial, if not universal. But it's not something I could truly register with the mental capacity of a being whose size is bound by the limits of available food.
Tokomaha, on the other hand, is a human with access to the Imagination Engine - and nothing more. That's what she should have been, and talking to her hasn't led me to believe anything else. Still, seeing her massive form that rivals a celestial body, born from nothing but her personal fantasy, drives home just how incredible of a person she is.
She's an existence I can genuinely consider divine.
"She is doing her part." Aurelia comes up next to me, speaking in a calm but determined voice. "It is time to do ours."
"Flann." With this, I order the blonde girl to teleport us to the promised place.
In the next instant, I find myself on glass-covered plains. It's the result of the supernova that Oinos turned into, which accelerated the moon further toward Earth. The glass is reflecting the sunlight, which comes in at a dangerously similar angle to what we just saw from Arkaim.
Now that I think about it, the dark side of the moon is pretty huge, so saying that we should meet there is too broad of a criterion. I turn to Aurelia and then to Flann, raising an eyebrow when I realize that we can't communicate without an atmosphere.
"They will find us." The latter suddenly speaks into my mind, causing me to turn toward her and blink in surprise. But judging by Aurelia's lack of a reaction, it was only audible to me.
"You really are limited to serving my kind, huh?" I ask with my thoughts but receive no answer. Flann keeps looking at me as if awaiting a response. Then she lifts her eyebrows ever so slightly in apparent understanding.
"It would seem that, once we get back, I will need to teach you many things." Her voice echoes in my head once again. I assume she means that my kind can talk in space without the need for air.
If I had known that before coming to the moon the first time, I would have been able to tell that Juzual was a Crawling Chaos. After all, back when we came here together, the only way for Aurelia and me to talk to each other was through her third-party telepathy.
Then again, it couldn't have been Juzual talking, as I heard Aurelia's voice directly. She was like a conduit for us, so I wouldn't have been able to tell even if I had known. Senka also possesses telepathy, and while I'm still not entirely sure what she is, she's definitely not one of my kind.
"Teach me now." I reply in my thoughts, knowing that Flann won't be able to hear me. But for somebody as expressionless as she, it seems she was able to guess my intentions from reading my face.
"Just do it." Comes the answer, which doesn't teach me anything.
"I need more than that." I open my mouth and try talking in the vacuum of space while shrugging, knowing that the gesture will be more useful than my silent words. Instead, Aurelia suddenly holds her head as if a headache overcame her.
"Adjust your voice. Beings of this dimension cannot fathom the truth of your existence and everything that comes with it." Flann's voice sounds level as always, but somehow, I get the feeling that she's chastising me. Did I just speak in a tone as if the abyss came to life and caused the golden girl mental pain?
"How is this?" I try once again, and this time it seems that Aurelia isn't as affected by it.
"Much better." A male voice echoes in my head, and I spin around on the spot. It belongs to a person I haven't seen in almost a year now, and who I could have gone not seeing for another two eternities. But given the situation, this is where we are.
It's Mataku in his human appearance, accompanied by Mithra, bandaged all over and wielding his staff as he always does.
"You did quite the number on the moon." Looking around, the Primordial Terror speaks in feigned fascination. I'm sure he knows that it was Oinos self-destructing that caused this rather than anything I did. He was able to disguise mockery with praise, and there's nothing I can refute it with.
"Let's get going." Glaring at Mataku, I express my displeasure in having to talk to him. Last time we met, he revealed himself as an enemy of all life on this planet. There's no way I would let that slide, and he hasn't shown any indications that his goal has changed since then.
I'll have to ask him about that artificial Crawling Chaos he left in the basement of the royal palace in Kairaki, but I don't feel like holding a conversation with him. The best thing for us to do is stop the moonfall and then get on with the battle to decide the future of the world. I still have to worry about the solar winds heading for Earth, after all.
Aurelia seems to share my view on this matter, as all the camaraderie she can muster for Mataku right now is an intent glare. She won't let any of his movements escape her gaze.
"Mithra will move us." With a shrug, the Primordial Terror realizes that we won't make good conversation partners. He does glance at Flann, an amused expression on his face when he then looks at his own personal teleporter. Maybe he would prefer a cute girl like her over the bandaged man.
Putting an arm around Flann's shoulder and pulling her in demonstratively, I signal Mataku that she's mine. The blonde girl gazes up at me with slightly widened eyes, wondering what brought this on, but I don't respond.
In the next moment, our vision warps and snaps back to reality. We're still on the moon, but our surroundings are no longer covered in glass. Above us is Earth, and standing on it is a massive Tokomaha looking up with her arms raised in anticipation. From our perspective, it appears as if she's staring down at us, but her eyes aren't focused on us specifically. To her, we've become too small to notice.
"Impressive. I did not expect that little girl to have such a fantasy in her." Mataku's voice speaks into my mind, sounding genuine for once.
"Neither did I." A new voice joins us, belonging to Juzual. When I look around, I find the Witch of the End, or whoever now occupies that form, gaze down at us with her galactic window eyes. She doesn't sound at all worried that her plan to drop the moon will be thwarted by Tokomaha's efforts.
"We stand now at the precipice of fate." Mithra suddenly speaks up, and everybody looks at him. Is he playing at being an announcer or narrator? "Cosmic convergence led you here. Now, the future of existence itself will be decided."
He's laying it on thick. We're only fighting for one planet, so where does existence itself come into play?
"How are we doing this?" Chaos-Juzual asks with an amused smile on her lips. "A battle within the Imagination Engine is pointless as we are now."
"The bigger Crawling Chaos swallows the smaller one." Mataku replies with a shrug. They're discussing how to kill each other in such a casual manner that I can feel the tension drain from me.
"Is this a joke to you?" I gesture at Earth, or, more specifically, the gigantic Tokomaha covering most of it up with her naked form. "We're talking about billions of lives here."
"Infinite lives." The Primordial Terror corrects me, causing me to furrow my brows in skepticism. He ignores me and turns to Chaos-Juzual. "Shall we start then?"
"I am not abiding by your little scenario. You will have to take me by force." She speaks in a defiant tone as the smile on her lips fades away. Then her entire body begins to swell up from the inside. Her clothes melt into the expanding blob in midair, which soon reaches the ground and keeps growing from there. The amorphous being keeps swelling, and soon occupies our entire field of view. Over twenty years on the moon hasn't significantly diminished the mass of the Primordial Crawling Chaos, it would seem.
"How did you do that?" Mataku asks, his nonchalance replaced by visible anger. "Did you not hunger up here?"
"Have you, of all people, forgotten what imagination can achieve?" A nerve-grating voice that causes Aurelia to fall to her knees replies to the Primordial Terror's resentful question. So she was able to do what I couldn't, huh?
I remember training transmutation with the golden girl when we were last here. Turning rocks into gold is a neat trick, but I aimed to generate organic from inorganic matter for me to consume. That way, I would have never needed to kill again, and transmuting a barren desert like the one in the Khurut Sultanate could have allowed me to gain immense mass.
"Were you a Crawling Chaos when we last met?" I ask, as Chaos-Juzual has yet to come down on us in a tidal wave of black flesh. Why did she help us out instead of consuming us back then? Why did she wait all this time to drop the moon? Why did she even stay on the moon in the first place?
"Maybe." Is all I get in response. "Does it make a difference?"
With a shudder that was most likely meant as a shrug, the Primordial Crawling Chaos finally begins to move. Aurelia gets up on her feet and transmutes a massive blade of gold that rises out of the ground below the mass of black. It cuts the Crawling Chaos in two, but myriads of tentacles quickly bind them back together in the wake of the sword.
I raise my arms and create a giant ball of plasma that I intend to throw at Chaos-Juzual. But before I can do that, Mataku grabs Aurelia and me from behind and tosses us backward across the surface of the moon. The landscape flies past us, but I extend an arm at the golden girl, hold onto her, and stop us abruptly. The plasma ball I left behind in the distance fizzles out.
That's when a massive finger comes down from above and squishes the Primordial Crawling Chaos underneath it. Looking up, I find that Tokomaha seems to have either seen the giant black mass against the grayish-white moon soil or noticed the light from my plasma.
A moment later, the shockwave from her finger's impact travels across the surface of the moon, blowing up dust and rocks that fly toward us. I erect a barrier of light around Aurelia and me to weather the deadly storm.
When I look up, Tokomaha is already drawing her finger back and spreading her hands to catch the falling moon. That was the only help she could afford to give us, but I appreciate it. I just doubt it was of much use against an amorphous blob that won't die from being compressed. At least I think I could survive an impact like that without much trouble.
"Mataku, are you there?" I don't really care whether or not he's dead, and I would prefer it if he were, but he saved us from that impact just now. At least that's the only way I can interpret it, though I don't know what for. He should know that none of us could have died from that titanic poke.
"Yes, but feeling flatter." Comes the response in a dry tone. He must be feeling absolutely fine if he can crack a joke after that.
"Thanks for saving us." I force myself to say. It's not just because of my pride but to let him think that we're weaker than we actually are. "But how do you suppose we can fight that one?"
Mataku made it sound like he had more mass than Chaos-Juzual and would swallow her earlier. But judging by his reaction to the revelation that she still had all of the mass from before being sent to the moon, it's safe to say that his plan won't work anymore.
As Chaos-Juzual said, a fight between us within the Imagination Engine is a waste of time. Neither of us possesses the piece of technology that Zenlith used to erase parts of me from existence, so all that's left is hurling the most powerful abilities we have at each other. Considering we most likely all have some form of imagination about shielding, that's only going to destroy the landscape around us.
Before Mataku can reply, the ground shudders. I look up to find that Tokomaha is bending her head down to catch the falling celestial body on her shoulders. What we just felt was the impact from her hands touching the moon's surface. The next one will be far worse, as it will serve to slow down and eventually stop the moonfall.
"We'll be flung off." Mataku states in a worried tone. I look across the plains with Hestia's eye template and find him staring up toward the fast-approaching shoulders of Tokomaha. "It may look slow to you, but we're traveling faster than the moon's escape velocity. Inertia will-"
"Behind you!" I shout in my mind, causing Aurelia to hold her head in pain. From the crater behind the Primordial Terror, a massive black hand has risen into the air and is now coming down on him. The only reason I care about his safety is that I don't know how to take on Chaos-Juzual on my own.
Mataku turns around and looks up, but doesn't do anything to dodge. It's just like when I first met him; he would take everything without a care in the world and tank it through his sheer mass. Maybe he has forgotten how to dodge after millennia of living like that. It was the same earlier when he tossed Aurelia and me back but didn't try to run himself.
"Watch and l-" His voice is cut off when the hand slams onto him. I'm far more worried about him now than I was when Tokomaha's city-sized fingertip squished him. He was in his humanoid form when the palm of another Crawling Chaos came down on him. That means the black tentacles are surrounding him now, and he will get pulled inside Chaos-Juzual's body.
"Dammit." I gesture at Aurelia to follow me at her own pace before rising into the air and zooming across space. I fly toward the massive hand, which reveals itself to belong to a gigantic infant-like form. It slowly climbs out of the crater, its skin crawling with tentacles still setting into place. I don't know if that's Chaos-Juzual's idea of a sick joke or a representation of her imagination, but I suppress a shudder at its appearance.
Turning toward me with its black eyes, the giant baby opens its mouth beyond what should be physically possible for a human jaw. From within the black maw shines a light - an energy beam of some sort! I dodge the plasma by strafing to the side at a right angle in the middle of my flight while ignoring the massive g-forces acting on my body.
"Can you hear me, Mataku?" I try to reach the Primordial Terror inside the baby but get no response. I doubt my voice not created through the Imagination Engine, but in some other Crawling Chaos way, is reaching him now.
I know that the Imagination Engine can be accessed inside a Crawling Chaos's body from first-hand experience, though I don't understand how. Mataku had millennia of practice using it, as opposed to Chaos-Juzual, who, in turn, has over twenty years on me. I'm sure he can figure something out if he hasn't been digested yet. For now, I can only do my part.
Surrounding myself in plasma, I zoom toward the giant black baby intending to burn my way through it as I did with the buildings on Alverost's floating city. Then I reconsider my chances of making it through her body alive and gather the plasma into an enormous blade instead. Physically cutting a Crawling Chaos into pieces is a waste of time, but cauterizing the severed parts could at least slow down the rate of reconnection.
As I approach Chaos-Juzual, she opens her mouth once again. This time, instead of light, a multitude of tentacles shoot out like a stream of vomit, coming toward me with the intent to absorb me too. Dodging with a midair twist and swinging my plasma blade, I sever them all about halfway to their roots.
With a burst of speed, I fly close to the black baby and let my weapon do its work. Her reaction time is barely enough to take notice of me, but the tentacles extending from the massive body are unable to catch up to my movement speed. Cutting her all over, I notice that the burnt wounds are slow to close themselves, as expected.
All I need now is some decisive move to kill-
Suddenly, Chaos-Juzual lurches toward me at an incredible speed. If it weren't or Nymphy's eyes, I wouldn't have been able to react. Then I realize that this wasn't her intentionally changing things up to take me by surprise. Her massive form isn't stopping and flies past me out of the lunar atmosphere and toward Tokomaha's back - followed by moon rocks and dust.
The God of Growth has caught the moon and stopped it.
Damn, I can't have her leave the surface of the moon just yet. And who knows what she will do if she touches Tokomaha's giant form. Maybe she could bite off chunks of her body and gain even more mass that way. But more than that, her goal is to let the moon hit Earth, so she could use that opportunity to get the God of Growth out of the way.
"Aurelia!" I call out to the golden queen coming falling toward me. Catching her in an embrace in midair, I point at the giant baby. "Catch her!"
Extending a hand toward the moon's surface, she transmutes a massive area into gold. Then she points at Chaos-Juzual, who keeps getting farther away from us, upon which the lake of gold bubbles up and forms countless tendrils that shoot past us.
I watch as the mass of tendrils latch onto the giant baby's entire body and stop its momentum before reeling it in. Without Aurelia, I couldn't have done this; I would have had to use my own mass in place of the gold, and that would have been absorbed by the Primordial Crawling Chaos in no time.
But Chaos-Juzual realizes our reason for stopping her. She begins to spill out from between the gold, but Aurelia twists her hand and closes her fist. From the large gold tendrils, smaller ones grow and rein the spilling tentacles in. Then, with a swing of her arm, she pulls the massive blob of darkness back and slams her into the golden lake.
Spreading her arms, Aurelia pulls the entire lake together to seal Chaos-Juzual inside it. But the latter begins to glow from the inside, and the gold melts off of her body. The melting point of gold is nowhere near as hot as the point at which atoms break apart - the way it happened in Zylos. But once molten, Aurelia seems to be unable to control it.
That's where I come in. Gesturing at the ground around the golden lake, I create a massive sinkhole into which I drop Chaos-Juzual before covering it back up. I know that it's only a stopgap measure, as even rocks will eventually melt from her heat. But burying the Primordial Crawling Chaos in the center of the moon could be a viable option.
Suddenly, the cover I put over the sinkhole erupts. From within rises a massive woman with oily black skin crawling with tentacles. Of course, Chaos-Juzual can fly, and her physical strength won't be held back by only dust and rocks piled up on her.
She extends a hand toward us, from which a storm of tentacles sprouts. I wrack my brains to think of a permanent solution to this battle, but all I can think of is to burn away the mass as I did with Mataku's artificial Crawling Chaos. Only that, unlike that mindless creature, Chaos-Juzual won't be caught in a light barrier that easily.
In the meantime, Aurelia brings up the remaining gold that wasn't melted in an attempt to shred the approaching Primordial Crawling Chaos from below. As before, it won't do anything against this massive body since it will simply reconnect quickly. But even a distraction is better than nothing.
However, all of a sudden, the tentacles coming toward us stop before being pulled back. I watch as parts of Chaos-Juzual's form dent inward as if hit by invisible punches. Her face looks surprised, and even though the eyes are entirely black, I can see the panic in them. Then her arms and legs are forcibly retracted into her body, which loses its humanoid form and continues to compress.
"NoooooOOH?!" With a scream, which causes Aurelia to cry in terror before she falls unconscious from the mental strain, the giant face is pulled inward as well. As if a black hole opened up inside Chaos-Juzual, she shrinks faster and faster, until it all disappears into a sphere a little over one meter in diameter. Its surface shows a different galaxy and seems to lead to another dimension.
I can't adequately describe what happens next, but it seems as if space is turning inside out for that sphere alone. Then, a blob of black tentacles takes its place, from which four limbs and a head sprout. It quickly morphs into a humanoid form, which gains colors and grows clothes. Within a moment, it turns into Mataku as he looked like before Chaos-Juzual swallowed him.
"As I was saying." He states in a nonchalant tone, a sinister smile cracking his face. "Watch and learn."
Comments
Orakuru
Oh crap...
