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The Giant Wyrm's maw expanded, and on the Store of Eras, the gigantic wyrm's massive head towered over the skies. It was as if an entire mountain range turned into a monster, far, far larger than anything we've seen.
Large enough for cities to be built on them.
But the wyrm then slammed into the ground, and Lumoof felt a massive shockwave parable to a meteor strike. The entire Store of Eras shook, as the wyrm sent a powerful magical blast into the ground itself.
"Oh dear." Lumoof cursed, as we felt the planet shake. My avatar rushed towards the gigantic wyrm and released a massive wall of vines and roots through his body. The wall of vines and roots attempted to wrestle the gigantic wyrm, but it was not enough. "Aeon, we have three clones remaining. We'll have to use them against this thing."
"I can't use all of them." I had to save one for the Bestiary of Eras, which I believed would also descend into chaos soon.
"One. I just need one." Lumoof said as I felt the wyrm's burning presence through those same vines.
The wyrm slammed the ground again, and this time, it dived and dug into the ground like an eel diving into the depths. A creature of this massive size created an earthquake that shook the entire surface violently and caused buildings to collapse.
"We don't have the manpower or the resources to move people from the Store of Eras." I heard the pleas of the Order's operative. "We'll only save what we can get."
There were demonic attacks on the peripheral worlds as well as the still unstable Forge of Eras and Crucible of Eras. My few thousands of void mages and Stella were nowhere near enough to evacuate billions of dwarves.
"Do what you can!" Lumoof said through the shared link to the rest of the Order. "I'll try to stop this worm!"
Through Lumoof, my massive vines and roots spread out and grabbed the massive wyrm. But this was a creature the size of a mountain range. It wriggled and shook, and the world trembled.
"MORE!" Lumoof roared as he channeled more of my power and created even larger roots. We were slowing it down as my roots also tried to pierce the creature's flesh.
The massive worm's body felt like a warm fire to me, but as my roots pierced through the gaps of its massive body, I also began to feel its presence.
[ Domain blocked- ][ Domain blocked- ][ Domain blocked- ][ Domain blocked- ]
It hammered back. Its presence, once warm, turned into a fire. This creature contained a fragment of the Reviver, and I realized that it wanted to ignore us. It wanted to head deeper to the core, and I was not planning on letting it succeed.
I gathered the soul energies of my [soul forge], and through Lumoof, hit it with a single strike. I gathered all the power I could get my hands on and struck.
A root strike.
The root was so long that it would stretch from one end of the sky to the other, the strike contained the mana of all my clones and connected trees.
If I couldn't even defeat a part of the Reviver, what hope did we have against the whole thing?
The root strike sounded like a small, high speed crack as it hit the surface of the gigantic worm. It was as if my roots were splitting a mountain in half as it tore through the worm's body. I felt my root cut through parts of the creature, only for it to avoid total destruction when the worm suddenly changed direction.
My root strike was like a hard nail through a worm's body, it made a puncture that cut through a third of the worm's body. The mountain-range sized worm lost a third of its body mass, and so as we battled through the many subterranean layers of the Store of Eras, it turned.
"Well, that worked. That's a good sign. Can we do it again?" Lumoof said, but Patreeck fed me the answer. We needed more time to recharge our mana. I'd used huge quantities of my mana saving the dwarves and teleporting them to the nearest safe worlds or to deeper parts of the Core Worlds, but now I also needed that mana to fight.
The worm turned around.
"Good, we have your attention." Lumoof said as he began to unleash a barrage of attacks. Our regular strikes were like a giant digger excavating a mountain. It was powerful and took large bites out of the ground, but not in the same scale or size.
My roots struck the gigantic worms like explosions in a mining site. It made some progress, but the creature was just too large, too massive.
I felt the worm's magical energy gather.
"Its magical energies feel strangely un-demon-like. It uses natural magic." I noticed in great surprise. There was nothing demonic about its magic at all. It roared, and the earth around us shattered. Melted. A cone of earth magic penetrated everything around us, and turned it into a paste.
Up on the surface, entire city blocks began to collapse as the shockwave from the worm's earth magic rippled upwards. The ground beneath them turned into a liquid. People died.
The magic merely slammed into my wooden barrier, and Lumoof was unscathed.
It was not powerful enough to kill us. But it was powerful enough to kill many, many things around us, while our normal attacks were like small cuts and bites, not deep enough to truly harm it.
My avatar kept up the attack, while he prepared. I could sense him contemplating when was the best time to use a clone and whether it was necessary.
A clone was one of our cards, but a clone had a ten year cooldown. With the Reviver at the very edges of awakening, did we want to deploy this card now and have less of my clones ready for battle later?
"Well?" Lumoof looked as we battered the worm.
"We hold." I said. I needed all my clones for the actual creature. "We can take this."
Then the worm made another of its earth-melting conical blasts, and the earth behind us turned into a liquid.
My roots spread out, and I felt the weight of the world above us slam into a wall of wood. It strained my roots extensively, and we pulled more mana from my magical network to strengthen it some more.
The creature charged, and its gigantic head slammed into Lumoof's root-arm. More of my root-arms appeared and pierced the creature, and we wrestled.
It flailed. I thought it felt like the gigantic version of a man wrestling with an anaconda.
Our battles shook the earth above. For the Erasian Dwarves, they felt massive earthquakes and tremors. Entire city sections sunk and collapsed into the liquified ground below. Not only did they need to avoid being exposed to the surface and suffer from the curse of the Reviver, now they also had to flee from the liquid earth.
I felt my mana charge up as Patreeck rapidly added trees throughout my network. Each small and new tree increased my passive mana regeneration just a little bit, and as we wrestled the gigantic worm, we felt its massive body hit us.
"A bit more." Lumoof said as a thousand root arms tried to keep the worm still.
It was too damned big.
Simultaneously, my artificial minds helped scan the surroundings for dwarves and sent them far away. All of them were confused when they were teleported far away, but most were grateful to be safe.
We wrestled the gigantic worm some more, and it was rather amusing that the worm couldn't hurt us no matter how hard and how strongly it slammed its head or tried to bite us. In fact, every time it tried to bite us, we could land a beautiful hit through its head.
Our strike broke the head apart, only for what was left of the gigantic worm to reshape into another head. It wasn't a living thing.
It was some magical construct of a greater creature. So, this creature wouldn't die until we cut through its underlying soul structure.
Once ready, my avatar didn't hesitate. For a brief moment all my roots wrapped around the worm, and we blasted our soul-forge charged magical root through the entirety of the worm.
This time, we were not off center. The root struck through the creature's soul fragments or whatever it was, and I felt a visible shattering.
[You destroyed the Leviathan's Separated Worm. You've gained 3 levels. You are now Level 298] [Soul Forge abilities enhanced]
The death of the separated worm, however, was the start of the end.
We felt the death of the separated worm in three parts.
One, was a sudden gigantic heartbeat that came from the demon's prison. The gigantic leviathan above woke up, and a powerful magical wave shot out of the leviathan's body.
Flames erupted on the surface of the world, and only those who benefited from Edna's [Three Strikes] managed to dodge its initial burn. Even my normally fire resistant wooden shields burned as I felt some kind of divine fire.
From my senses, it was as if a death ray opened fire on the surface of the Five Erasian Worlds.
The slaughter of the Descendant domain holders was a firestorm, but even that paled to the unrestrained chaos.
Descendants and dwarves alike burned, and the deathray burned even the Descendant domain holders on the surface.
The reviver did not care.
Through my burning roots, I saw multiple domain holders on the Store of Eras burning up, their bodies unable to withstand the powerful death ray.
Unfortunately, this also included about fifty Order operatives who were caught in the wrong location. I managed to recall and save the majority of the Order's operatives, and thankfully many were working in the various tunnels trying to rescue more dwarves, so a good amount dodged the Reviver's death ray.
But fifty of my warriors died from the death ray.
***
Zam-Zaqa was pleasantly resting in his fortress home, surrounded by his other domain holders, when they felt his fellow domain holder and Divine Lord of the Store of Eras die. Then he felt the worm die.
Then everything around them began to melt.
I quickly reinforced my roots and vines keeping watch of Zam-Zaqa, and I witnessed the intense death ray burn the roofs and then begin to burn even the lesser domain holders.
They screamed.
They screamed in horror and fear. I could feel their confusion, but it did not stop the powerful fire. Only three of Zam-Zaqa's domain holders survived the death ray. They protected themselves with powerful magic. The others seemed to lack the means to protect themselves.
"Let's go deeper." Zam-Zaqa said. "It appears that the Lord Reviver has no need for us."
"Then what should we do?"
"We run." Zam-Zaqa said. "Or we activate an old weapon. If we do nothing, the Lord Reviver will consume us as well."
"You mean-" The three other survivors said.
Zam-Zaqa reached for his key. "I'm the last Divine Lord standing. The Wadran key will work with only me. e."
The group of four Descendant domain holders opened a void portal, and warped away.
This was urgent enough that Lumoof, Edna and Stella immediately appeared, and followed.
"We can't let them get a hand on the Wadran Corpse!" Stella said as she began deciphering the void magic used. Void portals could be followed, they left trace energies that hinted at their direction.
***
It was once a moon. But now it was a rock.
Stella and Edna landed in a world where it was pitch black, but thanks to their magical senses, they could sense their surroundings.
A gigantic rocky world with a single metallic structure. There was a tomb here, and just being present they could feel it. A god's corpse lurked under magical seals.
"Can you sense them?" Stella said, but Edna's sword was already shining. The light cut through the darkness, and slammed into the shields of one of the domain holders.
"I had long known someone would follow us." Zam-Zaqa declared proudly. "So, all that attempts to mislead us about Wa-Libra was your doing, is it not?"
Stella said nothing. There was no use discussing things with these Descendants. Their void magics met and slammed at each other. Edna followed, with a magical blast.
At first, the four domain holders battled against the void and knight goddesses.
Then, Lumoof struck, as a single root strike tore through one of the domain holder's flesh easily. I was stronger. We were stronger.
"You're the one who slew the Reviver's worm! How'd you get here so quickly!" Zam-Zaqa declared in horror. "Run! We can't win!"
"No you don't." Stella said, as her void magics began to mess with their teleportations.
What followed was a slaughter.
Root strikes cut through the domain holders, my [soul forge]'s energies hurt them even when they turned into magical forms. They could be immaterial and made of air, but soul magic sought out their souls and attacked their existence.
Death came.
All the divine lords and Descendant's domain holders were dead.
[You've gained 1 level. You are now Level 299]
Edna held out a glowing sword, and we looked around and saw the metal tomb. Though metal at a glance, as we stepped closer, we felt a god's handiwork. The tomb was made with Erasian magics, and it overflowed with it.
"Get the corpse far away. Don't let the beasts consume it!"
A voice spoke to us, and we strained our magical senses to pinpoint the source. We soon realized it came from the metal tomb itself. The steel was made with enough Erasian energies that it seemed Eras still had some connection to it.
"Uh... how?" Lumoof asked.
Enough for it to give us a warning, but not enough to have a conversation.
It did not answer.
But Stella moved forward, and she touched the tomb's metal walls. "It's a dense void inside, and I know just the place."
"Really?" Edna looked puzzled. "Oh. You mean that void place?"
"Yeah. Where better to entomb a dead void god?"
"Can you move it there?"
Stella looked around, and then, summoned an army of voidlings. The voidlings began to float into the edges of the broken rock's reality bubble.
We felt the tiny rock begin to move. Then accelerate, as more and more voidlings helped push the rock.
"Alright, I left my anchor here." Stella said. "Let's go back and deal with the worm."
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