64 Xilcotl Falls (1/2)

Li slammed the bottom of his staff into the ground, but there was no quake. There was no explosion of magical power.

Just...

Stillness.

If Li had to find a word that described what he felt right after he cast his Ultima-class spell, then that was it. The world itself seemed to grow still in awe. The barren earth, constantly rumbling from volcanic activity, had ceased to shake, and the skies so riddled with violent winds churned up by heat had quietenend. Even Chi-You seemed to fit this theme of stillness, though his stillness was more against his will.

Li felt a massive surge of magical energy flow out of him. He felt lighter than ever, his vision blurring, the colors of the world around him slurring and mixing into a reddish black haze.

His thoughts became less clear, and there was a slight lapse in his thought. It reminded him of a foggy memory from a different life, when he had stayed up until the early morning to study for a test and his mind had just shut down with a little micro-nap, unable to stay awake.

Li steadied himself, his wooden fingers curling around his staff and leaning more weight against it. So this was the cost of an Ultima-cost spell. It was enough to almost make him faint, and it made sense – he could only ever cast one or two in optimal conditions within the game as well.

But it was proof that the spell had been cast.

”To be honest with you, I didn't know the spell would work,” said Li. He looked up towards the sky. ”How do I say this. It's a little too…cosmic in scale.”

The heavens grew pitch-black. It was like the smoke and fire-choked skies of red had been a canvas that was dunked into ink.

Then a little speck of green became visible in that terribly black sky. A twinkling little thing: a star of green. It started to grow larger. And larger.

The twinkle disappeared, and it became obvious that this was no far-off star. The green twinkle had become a gargantuan sphere that ate up the entire sky, and it only grew larger as time passed. This was no star.

It was an asteroid.

Or, more accurately, a planetoid. Li raised his hands in the air, admiring what he had managed to conjure up. This was massively beyond anything he had ever cast in terms of scale.

[Xiclotl Falling] called upon the Green Planet Xilclotl, an abominable celestial body made up entirely of otherworldly and predatory plants, to send a part of itself to aid the caller. Thus, the Green Planet would split a part of itself off and shunt it towards where the caster marked its destination.

In this case, all those magical circles concentrated with Chi-You at the center. The god was to be the subject of what would very likely be considered a small-scale extinction event.

Li could hear the world rumble around him, and this time, it wasn't because of volcanic activity. It was because the gargantuan planetoid of carnivorous plants and vines and trees was tumbling through the atmosphere, its sheer gravitational force shaking the land.

Chi-You broke free of the [Root of Vulthoom] and stumbled forwards with a heavy breath.

”It's useless to resist now,” said Li. He pointed up. By this time, the sky was entirely green. Waves of heat had started to coalesce underneath the incoming planetoid as it penetrated through the skies.

Chi-You laughed and dropped his weapons. They scattered away into golden dust. ”You are right. I must admit, it was a good fight.” He sat down and looked up; his six arms wide open as he too admired the sight of overwhelming power. ”It seems I must yet train even more.”

”So long as there's a corpse, I can resurrect you, given some time,” said Li. ”But you don't seem worried about dying.”

”Hm?” Chi-You glanced at Li with cocked head, the flames on his horns flitting with the motion. ”Oh, I did not tell you. Ah, how foolish of me, I was so impatient to battle you that I forgot. Well, you shall see soon.”

The ground around them started to split apart, cracking and liquefying under intense heat as the planetoid approached. Light, bright and white, bloomed everywhere, blinding Li, and then the deep rumble of the world shattering started to echo. It wasn't like the rumbling of volcanic activity, this was far louder, far deeper. Li could feel it under his feet. How the very foundations of the land were shattering apart like fragile glass.

But there was no apocalyptic impact.

Normally, the spell dropped the planetoid to deal massive area of effect damage, but it also implanted the Green Planet's essence into its impact zone, replacing the crater it would inevitably carve out with an eldritch forest fertile with the monstrous plants that made the alien planet up.

Instead, when the light faded, Li found himself in somewhere entirely different.

A throne room that had deteriorated with the ages. It was a circular room lined with five thrones of stone. The ceiling was a rocky dome that opened at the top, revealing a night sky centered with a lonesome moon bereft of her usual entourage of stars.

Moonlight streamed in from the hole, lighting up the room in a gloomy, pale, spotlight. The thrones had weathered and eroded, their once marvelously carved edges rough and chipped. Each throne had unique insignias carved upon their backs. An axe, staff, dagger, sun, and moon in order.

The thrones circled around a basin of water upraised by a chipped pillar of marble. The water swirled unprompted by any force, and it reflected the moonlight through a pale sheen sparkling atop its surface.

Li looked beside him, where Chi-You had been, and found the god's body there. It was evident he had suffered the full brunt of Li's attack. His bronze body had charred, the metal warping and twisting at odd ends. The bull's head had incinerated entirely, leaving behind just the mechanical and metal body that reminded Li of an empty shell.

Li gave the war god an acknowledging nod.

Using an Ultima-class spell was all or nothing. Either the spell annihilated the opponent, or the caster was left with very little mana to fight back. Li could have fought Chi-You regularly, but it would have involved dipping down to dangerously low health levels, constantly healing from a range of 10-50% health to abuse his powerful racial passive [Call of the Wild] that constantly summoned creatures to aid Li when he was below half-health.

All the while, he would have tried to cycle through the various acts of the [Black Beauty].

This was how he usually fought in PvP. Whittle enemies down with status effects at first, and then dance with them at low health, abusing his druidic healing to constantly straddle the half-health point to push out as many summons as he could.

If he could amass enough summons, then he would shapeshift himself into a powerful creature and cast a mass [Dire Frenzy] to savage the enemy. If the enemy was good at clearing his summons, then he would try to stall to Act 4 of the [Black Beauty].