84 Consequences (1/2)
A terrifying tempest of Anima swirled around the epicenter of the conflict as the fight continued to escalate. In the span of less than a minute, the combined forces of the Holy Church had been shred into pieces.
Slaughter. Pure, unrestrained destruction. There was no other way it could be described.
The mangled corpses of several dozen church elders lay beneath her feet. Battered and twisted into abnormal poses, they were the lucky ones of the lot. For they had died, but not in an unnatural way.
Not like the rest of their banished companions.
Some of the poor, old fools had been unimaginably unlucky. The moment they stepped out of the void, they died — or, rather they had disappeared.
Almost instantaneously, they had been forced back into their rigged spatial tears which had then been closed shut by her. Gone. In less than a second.
Her judgment was swift as she was heartless. It put the fear of death into the remaining survivors who had forgotten what it felt like to feel the embrace of the unknown…
She had forcibly torn a hole in the void behind them… and that tear lead Outside. Beyond space, time and reality, where nothing existed.
It was a terrible, unforgivable way to kill a living being, for they had been cast out of the reality into the Empty Domain, the lawless plane between multiverses where the Infested ruled supreme.
She had not given them so much as a single moment to see reality one last time before she had thrown them out.
The Pope bitterly smiled as he surveyed the scene of carnage around him and said, ”As expected of the other half of Heaven itself. Mercy, Heiress of the Moon! I ask that you punish me instead of my flock! The fault lies with me alone!”
A small smile formed her lips and the ambient Anima obediently answered her summons. She would not forgive him, nor them. Not in a billion years.
She would erase the entire city. That what she had decided upon. Such was the price Man would have to pay for trying to play God.
The reality groaned in protest and day turned into night across the world. A starless sky formed above Fourth Heaven as if the stars above the city had been snuffed out by something in the dark…
Anima condensed above the Sacred Cathedral and formed a brilliant sphere of divine radiance, unlike anything the continent had seen.
The amount of Anima that had been condensed into the sphere could have powered all of the North's cities for centuries on end. Immeasurably dense and under a near-infinite amount of pressure it calmly hovered above the Sacred Cathedral under its master's orders.
Should she release it, everything sixty kilometers in range would cease to exist. Everything all the way down to the bedrock of the continent.
Nothing would be spared.
A divine moon had descended upon Fourth Heaven to judge it for its sins.
This was the will of a Goddess. Men had no say in what happened now.
There was nothing they could do. It was too late.
But it did not deter him. It only infuriated him and drove him to act even more recklessly than before.
He, the brilliant streak of blazing light, had chosen to go all out not because of his friends, the innocents of Fourth Heaven, or the consequences that'd result of the destruction of the city.
He just wanted to ruin her plan. That was it. She had pissed him off.
”LUUUUUUUU'UUUUUUUUM!”
A blinding streak of light, an unstoppable force that had been accelerated beyond its limits crashed into Lu'um at full force.
He knew that he wouldn't be able to defeat her in a fair fight. Not even remotely. She knew what his weaknesses were. That she'd take him out without a doubt in a one-on-one fight.
Fighting was pointless. She'd win. No contest.
So Reed decided that he'd just deny her of what she wanted instead. That was something he could do. He knew he would need to act fast though, or she'd figure it out and stop him.
Simple, fast, and unpredictable. He needed to do something that not even she would anticipate from him and it had to be done fast.
Faster than the speed of thought, simple enough for him to not fail in a high-stakes situation, and unpredictable enough to pull the wool over someone like her.