Tree of Aeons

364 

Year 340

"I present to you, the first demon-king rated version of our void sea weaponry." Alka and Stella said together. They stood in a large warehouse located deep within one of Darkgard's many weapons factories, a place where many other dwarven engineers worked with Stella's void mages to build special weapons. "The first Starvoid Voidling-propelled Torpedo!"

Multiple large spherical bombs with hundreds of little sticks.

It resembled a furry ball, or a rambutan, but made out of metal.

Coated entirely in Sunsteel and about the size of a house. The main spherical object mainly housed a complicated multi-stage weapon. It contained multiple magical crystals, each storing large quantities of Star Mana and Void Mana. Lausanne supplied the Star Mana, while the void mages supplied the rest. 

It was a point that amused her and the heroes;that for all their power, in the end, they would be used as a fuel source.

The bomb was prepped for launch, and everyone watched with amusement as voidlings roamed around the weapon harmlessly. 

But, it was especially unnerving for the local Delvegardians who used to fight voidlings for Sunsteel. They were unused to them walking about and being generally passive around their void patron. The dwarves lived for millennia treating voidlings as foes and enemies, and they even had skills and classes meant to hunt voidlings. 

"Have you tested them?" Roon asked, greatly amused. Alka and Stella have been working on the building sized weapon for the past few years ever since we discovered the presence of the giant leviathan sleeping around the demon's prison. 

Alka had been working hard to build a weapon capable of matching the Reviver, because our own internal combat simulations suggested that we needed weaponry that was on the 'planetary' scale, and right now, we were severely lacking. We needed to stack our deck with the right weapons.

"Smaller versions, yes! But this is our first, full sized weapon." Alka declared with pride. "One downside, of course, is that Stella remains the only one that can control the voidlings that will move this thing to our target."

"Can Stella lose control over the voidlings?" Edna asked.

Stella frowned. "Maybe. But it doesn't fully rely on the voidlings. The voidlings carry the weapon through the initial part, but once it starts to move in the void sea, the void sea's currents will take it to the target."

"What if the wyrm controls the void sea, somehow?" Edna pushed. 

"Then I'll have to direct the weapon personally. But the creature sleeps and does not seem to wake up often." Stella explained. "From my senses so far, it doesn't seem to interact with the voidlings, so I believe we'll be alright."

"It can do a lot more than just control voidlings." The knight countered. 

"We'll deal with that when it happens." Alka stopped the conversation. "Today, we are here to witness our first attempt at attacking remotely!" 

"Can't wait! But are we planning to go even bigger?" Roon asked. "I mean, this bomb looks big, but that gigantic worm is quite a bit bigger." Our bomb was building sized. The worm was a planet. There was an order of magnitude difference. ṟ𝓪ŊꝋВËṥ

While it was a norm in fantasies for heroes to engage their demon kings often in visual range, I didn't see why our fight with the source of the demons and the entity at the top of their hierarchy had to obey the same rules.

If we could defeat the leviathan without ever stepping foot on the demon's prison, we should take such an option. 

"That's the next step." Alka declared. "Building something bigger would mean we have to build it elsewhere. In fact, as close as possible to the Reviver. Or at least, we need to build some facilities close to the demonic leviathan."

"You already have a plan?" 

"Sort of. The outlines of one." Alka said. "But all that doesn't quite matter. Not now. It is a problem for later. The whole reason we are here is to watch this thing make things go boom! And I, as the domain holder of [Explosions], absolutely adore things that blow up massively and beautifully."

Alka was naturally making a joke. It was a bit too light hearted for the moment. Maybe it was pressure. He wanted to reach Level 200, and he wanted to know what he'd get. 

Demon kings still gave levels, but they were now laughably slow for my domain holders.

Just like my senior domainholders, it is very likely that the Reviver faced the same cruel diminishing curve of experience gain. 

Even my domain holders have to constantly seek out new and unusual events to gain levels and experience.

If it took a hundred years to reach Level 150, it might take approximately five hundred to a thousand years to reach Level 200 and then maybe ten to fifteen times that to Level 250. 

This diminishing experience curve was likely why it was so difficult to estimate how long it took for this gigantic worm to actually reach their stated goal. The Reviver could be stuck at ninety-nine percent completion or maybe Level 249 or Level 299 for tens of thousands of years, simply because that final wall was ridiculously difficult to cross. 

From the Descendants' point of view, it must have seemed like their Lord Reviver was almost there for centuries, and so it was easy for their believers to lose faith. It was why it was so easy for Descendants to doubt their leader's claims about Lord Reviver's return. 

It had always been 'about' to return.

I understood the system as a challenge-based reward system. I believed the system needed any god-candidate to reach out and do things differently. A part of me believed that just sleeping and stealing a god's power didn't count that much. 

A part of me wanted to believe that such pathetic methods should be 'discounted'.

Another part of me, though, wondered whether the sheer audacity of stealing a god's divine energy was so unique that the Reviver just needed to go through the motions to unlock that legendary Level 250 or Level 300.

"Well, are we ready?" Alka said as he looked at my avatar. He was so eager to launch the weapon.

The weapon would be fired from Darkgard, and because the Darkgardian region was filled with many still-demon-occupied worlds, there were many demon kings we could target. 

The first of potentially many interplanetary void weaponry. I felt like a politician with the keys to intercontinental ballistic weaponry.

The demons started it with the comet. It was time I began to return the favor.

"Go ahead." Lumoof declared on my behalf. 

"Alright!" Alka declared, and an army of craftsmen and mages got into position. Void mages teleported to the targeted location and set up all the monitoring equipment weeks before this crucial day. There were multiple teams tweaking and adjusting all the various magical protections and tools throughout the pathway.

We all felt Stella call upon the voidlings as hundreds of them appeared. They were hard to look at, they sometimes resembled deformed fishes. Others looked like creatures out of nightmares. They grabbed the spherical Sunsteel object. 

Ever since Stella discovered the voidlings, she had experimented with them and discovered that she could use voidlings to move things. She could even use them to nudge worlds into a specific path.

Larger worlds resisted this, but small worlds, like Cometworld with a weak reality bubble, could be easily pushed. 

This meant Stella's voidlings were the means to manipulate the Cometworld. Something we'd been looking for centuries. 

The voidlings lifted the spherical bomb and carried it. A bubble of void mana emerged around them, and then, the weapon vanished into the void sea.

Once in the void sea, it moved quickly. The shape of the weapon did not matter when there was no drag or aerodynamics to worry about. The steel hairy filaments of the spherical bomb were designed to allow the voidlings to easily grab the bomb. 

It flew through, and our senses reset to the targeted demon-attacked world.

A demon king walked the large expanse, oblivious to the weapon that flew through the void sea. 

Then, the skies above the demon king cracked open, and the bomb rushed out, accelerated to otherworldly speeds by the chaos of the void sea. 

The void mana and star mana within the bomb collided. 

The world itself twisted as the explosion bathed the entire world in both white light and absolute darkness. The demon king died, and those who contributed to the superweapon's construction gained levels. 

Everyone who watched it saw the beautiful white and black glow and were awed by the sight.

The explosion was so powerful it left a large, perfectly half-spherical bowl. The sand and soil that turned into a glass-like substance with black and white ripples.

"But we can go even further." Alka said with a smile as he felt his [Always A Bomb] reset itself to the newest, most powerful bomb. "The next step is to incorporate the soul fragments!"

As a wisp once said, the soul was the most powerful thing in the world. The soul could be weaponized. 

If void and star mana explosions were regular atomic bombs, a soul-augmented version would be a two stage thermonuclear bomb. 

We had known for a while that soul fragments could be stitched into powerful hex bombs. With my abilities, I had even developed 'clean' versions of the hex bombs, using soul fragments specifically to create a powerful explosion. 

Soul fragments could also be transformed through the [soul forge], meaning I had been able to reshape soul fragments into [artificial souls] and so on. Also, we discovered that under specific circumstances, soul fragments could be turned into energy.

Powerful energy. 

That led to an interesting idea.

An explosion created by the soul fragments, one soaked in star mana, another soaked in void mana.

Just like how Lausanne created Lightwood by merging a bit of her soul fragments with a Titan Frame, we theorized that it should be possible to create something even more powerful.

We had the exact two individuals that could supply the specific two types of soul fragments. Lausanne and Stella. 

Our initial experiments with the tiniest, tiniest chunks of the two soul fragments of two domain holders yielded a powerful explosion equivalent to a full sized bomb, and our calculations indicated that it was likely exponential. 

It was an uncomfortable realization, one that suggested that if both Lausanne and Stella were willing to sacrifice themselves, they could wipe out an entire void sea region. 

However, because Stella was also much stronger than Lausanne in levels, it seemed that we needed a little more of Lausanne's soul, than Stella.

The ratio had to be perfectly right, or else the explosion led to one aspect overwhelming the other. 

Also, the power needed to properly fuse and detonate larger chunks of the bomb was also exponential. An extremely large star mana and void mana bomb needed to be combined with a powerful spirit, likely two [Titan Frames] or [Titan Substitutions], one to hold Stella's soul fragment, and the other to hold Lausanne's soul fragment. This was needed to keep the two opposing magical energies apart. 

A massive set of construction projects, and Alka was more than happy to commission. It would be assembled in two parts, one for Lausanne's fragment and another for Stella's fragment. It would then be combined. 

A massive endeavor comparable to the wonders of the ancient world, utilizing resources from throughout the Order's vast empire, internally codenamed the Darkgardian Gigabomb Project. 

A part of me felt sad that such a large project was a military project. 

I hoped that the next time we initiated such a large scale project, it would not be for military purposes. Perhaps, a large scale travel and logistics network that linked all the various worlds together, with or without my trees. 

But alas, we began with a project for destruction. 

A pair of bombs that would be transported to the Realm Egg, re-assembled into a single whole, and then sent towards the demonic wyrm. The Realm Egg thus served two purposes. 

One as an escape route for the Erasian dwarves and another as a staging pose for my attacks. In short, the Realm Egg would be the silo for my superweapon, a world where all the demon's core worlds were within firing range of our weapons.

***

But of course, there were complications. 

"There's too much void mana around the demon's prison, and it could interfere with the gigabomb."

"Why don't we just use Hawa's Bomb?"

Both were simply explained through the overwhelming density of void mana. Hawa's bomb was made with divine energies, faith points, and the demon's prison was so thick with void mana that it eroded divine energies. 

We also had a strong suspicion that the Reviver was resistant to pure divine abilities and pure star mana. After all, the physical properties of the new 'true demons' that we found within the void barrier all displayed inherent resistance towards such powers, so we thought it was very likely that the large wyrm itself may be resistant. 

A decision made so that it could overcome their old foes. 

Thus, as powerful as Hawa's bomb was, its effectiveness against the Reviver was limited. 

The Six Sun-Rings also continued to pump void mana into the demonic region of space, and so the void mana density within the demonic realm was significantly higher than outside. 

We needed to blow up the barrier.

Once we did, the high quantities of void mana within the demonic regions would diffuse out into the wider world, enabling our new gigaweapon to properly detonate.

However, the diffusion of void mana to the greater void sea would likely accelerate the development of void portals and pathways of the outer demonic worlds, so we would have to brace for a flood of demonic attacks on the peripheral worlds and even the middle worlds. 

The destruction of the void barrier could also activate the demonflesh demons within and initiate a large wave of invasions into the periphery.