368 - Slaughter 2
Ghul-dah's death, unfortunately, left the skies twisting moments after. The death of the divine lord of the Forge of Eras sent a tsunami through the fabric of reality. Lumoof looked up and saw the demon's prison twist, the spherical black realm pulsating like a blob distorted by magnetic fields.
For a moment, I felt as if one of the chains that held the prison and the leviathan together in the skies above snapped open. Then, the leviathan that lurked and nested on the demon's prison opened another eye.
One more eye marked the entire world, and it gazed down at us. I felt its overwhelming presence slam against my domain, but my domain held.
[The Ravenous Reborn Gazes Down on You. Primal Berserk has been blocked by your domain]
[The Ravenous Reborn Gazes Down on You. Primal Frenzy has been blocked by your domain]
KILL
A mand from the leviathan. A voice that flooded through the void sea like a giant wave. A feeling of intense hunger. The entire world spoke and felt it all at once with a voice not their own. Primal and deep, it boomed overhead and turned murder into a slaughter.
Descendants and dwarves everywhere that were just close to the surface turned into an enraged mob and slew each other as if possessed.
Friend? Foe? Family?
Almost all of those affected by it did not care.
The dwarves glowed red under the effect of the primal berserk and primal frenzy. Madness, injected by the leviathan.
Some tried to fight it.
But most couldn't. Children. Elderly with little physical ability left. They all turned into feral, beastlike creatures. They attacked with claws. Kicks. Bites. They moved with no care about their own pain.
Even my mages, druids, and order operatives suffered from these primal effects, and it was thanks to our earlier [curse] wards and blessings that they did not cause any major friendly fire. A few stabs here and there, but I quickly used my roots to restrain those that were within range.
"Use large scale sleep on the dwarves! Evacuate those with low resistance." The mages and druids scrambled to put them to sleep, and my roots grabbed as many as I could.
My roots struck millions all at once, with psychedelics and calming agents.
But even so, the leviathan's mand rippled through the Forge of Eras.
This was chaos.
Peace was gone.
Battles now dominated the core worlds.
***
Lausanne
"Who are you?" The Descendant domain holder looked like a jellyfish, as he stood at the center of a ruined city district. He had personally killed about twenty thousand dwarves before Lausanne managed to get there in time. The creature relied on powerful magics that flattened entire districts, but what was around him looked like a battlefield.
She felt the mand. The Ravenous's words rippled through the entirety of the forge and sent those too close to the surface into a feral state.
"The fact that you are standing and looking at me with those clear eyes is telling." The Descendant pointed a magical staff at her. Lausanne has seen these Descendants and practiced simulated fights against them in their shared dream academy, but seeing one face to face was still unnatural. "You're one of us."
She was faster. Lightwood blasted a beam of pure mana and it slammed into the Descendant's shields.
"You are tall. You are not a dwarf." He repeated. Lausanne recalled in her very rushed briefing that the creature was named Moiya-na. One of the magical domain holders and one of the twelve on the Forge of Eras. Around him was a crater, created from his earlier magical attacks, before Lausanne got here. "Are you the one sending those fools away with those strange roots?"
The elf felt this mage talked a little too much, and so she armed her left with an anti-magical spear. She thrust, and the mage wisely sensed danger and blinked away.
"And your weaponry is strange. That is not dwarven work. How did you e here?"
Lausanne groaned internally. Some opponents really talk too much, as Lightwood on her right hand blasted the mage's shield once more. She rushed and closed in, to the mage's surprise, and stabbed with the anti-magical spear on her left.
His shield held on at first, but the anti-magical glass spear, augmented with the capabilities of high level craftsmen, made it into a fearsome weapon. The shield continued to withstand a constant barrage, but Lausanne was getting how it worked.
There was a certain magical frequency she needed to match.
He expanded a wave of magical energies and burned everything around them, but then she found the way through. She locked on to the certain frequency, and the anti-magic spear cut through the magic as if it was paper.
Lausanne managed a clean hit on the domain holder's flesh, and he screamed in horror. Lightwood's attack left a paralyzing effect that made the Descendant's tentacle heads fidget and move as if it had a seizure, even if the main body itself seemed unaffected by it. "If I die, you'll die with me!"
The domainholder of magic charged his soul with an intense magical energy, but Lausanne had seen this a thousand times and had the perfect countermeasure. Ten more anti-magic spears emerged, and the mage domainholder stared in horror.
They all slammed into different parts of the domainholder, and they sucked the creature's mana, even if they couldn't interfere with the domainholder's mana generation within his soul.
"You!"
Then Lightwood finished the job. But death did not stop the domain holder. The dead jellyfish-like head abruptly transformed into that of a powerful stone hydra, and it attempted to bite.
"That is interesting." Lausanne actually said as the hydra was more of a summon. A kind of final summon upon death. But what was a summon before Lightwood?
The living weapon pierced the stone hydra, and this time, the magic from the hydra was sucked dry. The creature died.
Then as the stone hydra collapsed, the body released a massive cloud of poison into the world around them.
"Evacuate!" Lausanne ordered through her shared mental link and her heavily destroyed surroundings. Corpses of dead dwarves and descendants were strewn all over. Those that my roots couldn't capture in time.
The Descendants didn't even mind killing their own.
Beasts. Monsters.
***
Aeon
On the Bestiary of Eras, and the Crucible of Eras, the Leviathan's word echoed.
A similar slaughter began. Each of the Erasian worlds were home to billions, but the Descendants on each of the worlds were also mini-factions of their own.
In the first place, they didn't want other factions to be stronger, and so, the fact that one faction started a slaughter that could potentially send some of their own into the domains meant they cannot be left behind. With the Leviathan's mand, there was nothing holding them back.
Lumoof raced, barely moments after the death of Ghul-dah, to take the fight to the other domain holders.
Some of my own domain holders were not suited to fight. Hoyia was more of a supporter and was not well equipped to fight another domainholder alone, and Stella was ill suited to face a domain holder one on one, even with her advantage. So, Hoyia and Stella both supported Ebon and Kafa in their own fights against the Descendants, so that we could have a quicker victory.
That still meant some of the Descendants' leaders had hours of free reign. Hours of incredible destruction with hundreds of thousands dead. None of my other domain holders were on the Bestiary and the Crucible either.
"We cannot save everyone." Lumoof forted me. Every battlefield was already a chaotic mess when Lumoof reached, and even with my clone, fighting at long distances against another domain holder was not easy. "We expected them to attack and slaughter the dwarves, but not so soon."
I cursed.
I felt the dwarves' sorrows and fears as their souls entered my soul tree as they died as part of the process of reincarnation.
Millions died thanks to these murderers. The sheer unrestrained madness of these Descendants to slaughter life so easily.
Life is not meant to be extinguished in this manner.
Life is to struggle. To claw our way up the mountain that is progress.
Progress, even if we start from the smallest and lowest of places, is exhilarating. Death was final. Death was the end of all means of progress. What is life if not to constantly make small, incremental changes?
The Library of Eras was now the only safe place amongst the five Erasian Worlds, and even then, the golems had to pacify those too close to the surface.
Lumoof and myself won every encounter we had with my huge level advantage, but each battle with the domain holders still took time. Each battle against the mage-type domainholders presented some rather annoying gimmicks. One had the ability to shapeshift and use a wide variety of elements, and they used it to hide amongst the dwarves as meat shields. Another was an electrical-mana type that could transform himself into a ball of mana for a brief period of time and travel through the mana crystal transmission tubes throughout Forge of Eras.
Some of these abilities were not known to us prior to the actual battle. DoDA's records were flawed, since these Descendant domainholders were never pushed prior to this incident.
The survival abilities dragged the battles far longer than we liked, even if these mages couldn't kill or weaken us. It made battles last longer than an hour or two, instead of the minutes we hoped. Sometimes, they just fled, and these mages moved quickly.
A shame that my avatar's stamina was near limitless.
We hunted them down.
I also noticed that the death of the lesser domain holders didn't distort the fabrics of reality as strongly as the divine lords, which made us suspect the seal of the Leviathan Reviver overhead, and also the Demon's Prison of Eras were tied to the lives of the Five Divine Lords of the Erasian words.
Killing the five leading domain holders would remove the Demon Prison's seals and allow us to free Eras. Or it also could just be the trigger to cause the Leviathan Reviver to wake.
But we were at the point where it was not a choice.
The Descendant Domain Holders needed to die.
***
The Battle for the Forge of Eras was over after four days. Lumoof and myself together killed four domain holders, Ghul-dah and three others by the third day, and I sent Lumoof to the other Core Worlds.
Edna killed two more, and the rest of my domain holders handled the rest over the first two or so days, and the remaining days we hunted down the rest of the Descendants. Most of the time we were chasing after the domain holders, because of how quickly they moved and how much destruction they caused.
Even if we had known the sheer evil of the Descendants, my domain holders still felt the strain on their souls. Every battle was a little too late. Every battle in these core worlds was an urban battle, in these overbuilt Erasian worlds that led to too many unnecessary casualties and dead bystanders.
But these Core Worlds were huge. Heavily populated. They were amongst the densest of all the worlds we've seen, with populations that rivaled the heroes' source worlds.
By the end of the fourth day, almost a hundred million dwarves died, an amount we did not quite count, but I could roughly sense it through the amount of souls that travelled through my soul tree.
The rest of the millions, we had to evacuate them to the underground shelters, where they could avoid the effects of the Reviver, while we gradually transported more and more to the safer places on the peripheral worlds.
Even so, it was not over yet.
We'd freed both the Forge and the Library. Now, the Store, Crucible, and Bestiary awaited us.
Or what was left of them.
***
Aman-ah and the Crucible of Eras was the next world to descend into outright chaos. The mand of the beast was brutal, and those on the surface descended into madness.
While the battle for the Forge of Eras took four days, just saving the residents of the Forge of Eras meant I could only intervene on the Crucible of Eras with nodes connected through roots and vines. Lumoof was only able to leave for the Crucible on the 3rd day of the battle.
Three days meant millions dead, even with my intervention.
***
"[Aeon's Spirit] is on cooldown." Lumoof cursed. "I can only use the avatar form."
"Avatar form will have to do." I agreed, let us take out the domain holders quickly. Decisively. We decided to go for the head right away. It was not hard to find the domain holders of the Descendants.
The surface of the heavily populated Crucible was already heavily damaged by three days of Descendant slaughter, though interestingly, the effects of the Leviathan Reviver meant the lower leveled Descendants also fought themselves.
Most of them were reduced to mindless, feral beasts, and it was for this reason that for every dwarf that died, three more managed to flee and reach the safety of their many, many layers of underground tunnels. Feral creatures did not think or hunt with their minds.
Aman-ah stood at the center of what was once the administrative headquarters of the Crucible of Eras. A massive building ten stories tall, it was home to the Crucible's DoDA and many more. His dwarven minions, thousands of them, used to obey his every word.
Few survived. Most died when he turned the building into a furnace.
He wasn't moving. He stood as if he was waiting for something.
"You're there." He said, as if speaking to me. "e. Let us see who is stronger?"
There was no reason to hold back.
Lumoof and myself, bined our strength. I was Level 290 and probably more thanks to my other pantheon effects. We struck with our full strength.
The Divine Lord of the Crucible raised a powerful magical barrier. But it crumbled to our bined strength.
Just like Ghul-dah, he might have been Level 200. But I had a full 80 to 90 levels more.
Aman-ah screamed as our roots pierced through his flesh, and then, my Soul Forge called on the same powers that crushed Ghul-dah. There was no need for unnecessary conversation. The faster we killed him, the faster we could save the rest of the dwarves.
So, another Divine Lord died.
[You've gained another level. You are Level 294]
We looked up. As we predicted, the fabric of reality took moments to realize what happened. A massive wobble spread through the skies and the world around us.
The leviathan stirred. A third eye opened, and I felt the demon's prison wobble. In a blink, I felt the leviathan drain the void mana from the void sea, and the density of the void energies around us decreased significantly.
"I think that creature just ate multiple world's worth of void mana." Stella exclaimed. We all felt the leviathan visibly strengthen, but the decreased void mana also improved our vision.
The leviathan's shape became more defined. It was a gigantic wyrm that encircled the demon prison, a worm-shaped parasite feeding on the host. I saw its grotesque flesh transform into pure black scales, each scale had a single glowing red eye.
The Five Erasian Core Worlds felt a single thumping heartbeat.
Lumoof looked up and saw a portion of the Leviathan Reviver flaking off, as if it was a microbe splitting itself into two, and then, it swam towards the Store of Eras.
We tried to identify it, but nothing we did worked.
"What in the world is that thing?" Edna said. Our war on the Crucible of Eras was not yet over. There were still many more domain holders to kill.
"I'll go." Lumoof said. "Whatever that is, only we can stand up against it."
"Can we?" I was hesitant, but there really was no other choice, and we have some trump cards left to play.
Lumoof said to Alka. "Alka, can you get that bomb ready? We might need it soon."
"I'll try!" Alka said, as he rushed back to the Darkgardian worlds to accelerate the bomb.
Alka was not spared from the task of fighting domain holders on the Forge of Eras. He had teamed up with his old buddy Kafa to take on one of the domain holders. We didn't want to send one domain holder against another of the Descendants' domain holders, since we didn't have a prehensive understanding of the domain holder's strength. So, we tried to stick to overwhelming the scattered domainholders with our numbers. Two domain holders that could work together could overe these arrogant Descendants.
Meanwhile, Lumoof arrived on the Store of Eras, and saw the splintered part of the giant leviathan descend on the Store.
It arrived with a massive crash, landing close to where the domain holders were.
"Milord!" The Divine Lord of the Store of Eras spoke.
The leviathan opened its giant maw, and with a horrifically swift movement, ate the Divine Lord. Another of the Divine Lords died to their own, and I felt the powers of the world twist some more.
Reality wobbled.
The Leviathan grew stronger.
Then in my mind, I heard a dwarven voice that came from the demon's prison. "Help me."
***
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