273, 1/2

 

Erick blasted Oozy with another round of [Luminous Beam]s, filling the sky with nuclear fire.

Oozy didn’t return.

‘Why is Nothanganathor such an asshole?’ Erick thought to himself, as he watched the land of Fenrir below.

Red Sparks had covered everything down there. But now Oozy was gone, and Fenrir began to change. The Red peeled away from every surface, from every mountain and low-hanging cloud, from every person and time-frozen river and ocean. Erick briefly wondered at the mechanics of the land down there —was Fenrir planet-thickness now, all the way through? What about gravity? Were those floating lights in the sky enough to provide actual light? And what about, well, everything else physical down there? Why was the world a patchwork?— and then he focused on the upcoming war, whatever shape that might take.

Everyone had opinions about what the war was going to resemble. Erick had hoped for something he could do on his own, to save everyone else the danger and death, but that was never really an option; Nothanganathor had put a lot of shit between him and Erick. When the lands below appeared out of the Red two weeks ago and then truly took their current shape last week, everyone assumed it was going to be a massive interplanetary war.

Erick would send the valkyries down there and begin reaping lives, and taking in people to remove them from Nothanganathor’s influence. He’d do the reviving thing and the [Benevolent Cleanse]ing thing, and then he’d end up with a humanitarian crisis just like he had on Slaver’s Den, but different, because these people he’d be saving were all from the side realities of Veird.

And because they were not people Erick truly knew, but which he did, everything here was a trap.

A pitfall.

And Erick would walk right into it, because he had to.

Erick had talked a big game to Fallopolis when he spoke of only having concerns for the people of this Veird, but those people down there were a happenstance of Infinity away from being the people of this Veird. Of course he couldn’t actually hurt them… Though they were probably going to try and hurt him and everyone he loved, because of course they were influenced by Nothanganathor to be that way.

Oozy was clearly not the same Oozy that Erick had [Reincarnation]ed… probably. He had to be from some near-reality, or something like that.

But who really knew these things, anyway? Rozeta? … Probably not, actually. Whatever Knowledge that exists down there on Fenrir is probably corrupted, and so Rozeta would know not to touch it… Or something like that. Erick was working off of a lot of hypotheticals, here. He would need to talk to Rozeta and Phagar and get their opinions on all of that, and on all of those false gods down there, too.

Phagar had killed a god before, right? The God of Death of the Old Cosmology, like, 750,000 years ago.

Erick was probably going to have to fight some of those non-Mantle, mindless forces of Fractal-raised gods. How did you kill a god? Well, Erick already knew, sort of. You start with killing all of its believers. Maybe conversion would work, though? A bit of [Reincarnation] and [Benevolent Cleanse]ing and…

Erick would have to see what happened.

Surely there was something more concrete and less destructive than ‘kill the believers’.

There was one other way that Erick knew of. Witch Aragathara’s Goddeath Poison had killed Melemizargo and Nothanganathor’s mother, Ikaramaliana. That poison had taken a winding path to Ikaramaliana, though. To start with, that poison had been sprinkled among the believers of many different gods, and which did nothing to those believers because they had to keep believing, and thus supplying that poison to those gods. When those gods finally died to the poison, and their mantles returned to Ikaramaliana, that is how Ikaramaliana died; through a chain of poisoned divinity.

All of that was yet another hidden danger to this war.

Rozeta had shored up the Script to protect from a lateral attack against Veird through divinity, but Nothanganathor probably had a way around that. Eventually.

Maybe he could just throw Goddeath Poison at Veird, and Veird wouldn’t recognize it as deadly, so it would kill them all that way. Rozeta had prepared against that, of course, and thanks to Witch Aragathara helping in that way, but Erick bet that Ikaramaliana thought she was safe from the witch’s poisons, too.

That white bastard probably had ten thousand ways to kill all of Veird. The only reason he hadn’t used any of them was because he wanted to win everything. And to win everything, he had needed to convince the Fae Council of Margleknot of his agreeable intentions; he had needed to create his Opposite, so that Margleknot wouldn’t be losing Nothanganathor’s anti-corruption functionality when Nothanganathor Ascended to Godhood.

Margleknot would have killed Nothanaganthor as a Corruptor, if Nothanaganthor hadn’t displayed his willingness to work with them so very much.

… Erick was back to the original question.

‘Why is Nothanganathor such an asshole?’

There’s the obvious reasonings that he had given everyone. Melemizargo killed his wife, the Witch Ara, and sure, that was one thing, but to kill a universe over that?

Erick didn’t buy it… Maybe.

There was more to it, of course. There was a whole history of hatred stretching back way more than 10,000 years. Killing the wife was just the final straw?

‘Was it possible that things had just gotten so far out of hand, and the only response anyone ever had to trauma was to make more trauma? Highly likely. Nothanganathor deserves his trauma, though, since this is what he does when he gets power; he makes horror shows of morality and mortality.’

Back in that Non Combat Zone, in Margleknot, Nothanganathor had talked a big game and then Erased Blighter and Seabass right in front of Erick, just to prove that he could, to prove that he was an asshole of the highest order.

Erick recalled the bastard’s specific words.

“Just as it’s impossible to forgive them for sundering my wife, it is impossible to forgive them for cursing me to Obscurity. Even now, the only one truly Seeing me is you. I am glad for that, Erick. You can see who I really am. That is such a rare thing. So watch this.”

And then he had Erased Blighter with a Red knife through the heart.

… Honestly, Erick didn’t need to understand him any more than he already did, but his first instinct was to try and understand, and so that is what he attempted to do. And yet, what was there to understand about Malevolence? Nothing; that’s what—

Erick had another sudden string of thoughts that were loosely connected, important, and yet ephemeral.

1) Wizard fights usually devolved into Wizards adjusting the world and their enemy to their liking, and then winning in that way. Nothanganathor had already attempted as much through matching Veird’s timeframe and using Veird’s people to influence everything over on Veird.

2) Nothanganathor was responsible for the rise of Wraithborne’s ‘ring world’ and Evil Death Sun that powered the whole thing. So he was a capable ruler.

3) He was highly capable of causing real damage, far beyond his ascendancy-or-not would lead people to believe. At Erick’s first viewing of the Red Sparks, he had thought them all that Nothanganathor could do, but that was obviously wrong.

4) Nothanganathor’s Curse of Obscurity made it so that no one understood him, but maybe, what the curse actually did was make people think of the Erased One as a worthless person. That’s what everyone believed, after all.

5) And yet, the Erased One’s effects upon Margleknot were wide and deep, so he was an important person even with his Curse.

6) Nothanganathor probably doubled down on his Curse when he made Malevolence.

7) And he was prepared for this fight with every part of his being.

8) … Was there any real reason for Nothanganathor to Erase Blighter and Seabass, back there in that meeting? Sure, there was the effect of severing Erick from Wraithborne, from Erick’s attempts at a takeover, but that was the surface reason for Erasing Blighter and Seabass. Nothanganathor had been disinterested for the entire conversation up until then. And then he showed joy when he went and Erased Blighter and Seabass, because he knew that it would display who he was to Erick, in that moment.

There was no question that Nothanganathor enjoyed that.

But he had done that because 10) it heightened Nothanganathor’s threat level in Erick’s eyes.

Anyway. That was all just a complicated way to say that Nothanganathor thought he was going to win this war, one way or another. He probably had a thousand contingencies, all of them on the level of what he had done to Fenrir down there—

Erick suddenly saw the main contingency.

The real way Nothanganathor was going to ‘win’.

He was going to break his Curse of Obscurity.

What was the ‘Curse of Obscurity’? Erick had asked Melemizargo about it, once. He had said it was simply ‘a denial of existence’.

And how did Erick’s own Dark Mark grow? How did all Dark Marks grow?

From being acknowledged by others.

Maybe Melemizargo had cursed Nothanganathor’s Dark Mark to smallness… making him unable to grow?

Hmm.

Erick wasn’t 100% sold on the idea that Nothanganathor’s Dark Mark was cursed to smallness, because the Dark was not stingy in giving out power and it never took power back, as far as Erick knew. Melemizargo and Rozeta had had long and loud conversations about that difference in style, with Melemizargo hating the restrictions of the Script but Rozeta saying that sometimes restrictions were good, actually.

But it made sense that Melemizargo would break his own oaths to never restrict power in the beginning of his reign, before Melemizargo knew his own morals. Nothanganathor’s Curse of Obscurity was a 1-off thing, as far as Erick knew, so it made sense that Melemizargo might have done something weird and antithetical to the Dark as his first act as the God of Magic.

Melemizargo had set doom upon himself when he did that, thus tarnishing the entire purpose of the God of Magic, which was to give out magic and never restrict what was already given.

… Hmm.

Back to the war, though.

Nothanganathor had a bunch of ways to win.

Erick saw some of them.

… and then Erick turned his thoughts back around on themselves, looking for tricks in the mind itself. Nothanganathor’s first real killing trick against Erick had been a thought-tunnel of introspection, there in that mirage of an office worker that was really a killing room, right after Erick had Ascended. Nothanganathor played a bunch of mind-games to hide the truth of his power.

Even thinking of him as some ‘great big enemy’ was playing into his hands; that was setting the stage for him to actually be powerful. That’s how Wizard battles worked, after all.

… Erick was going to eradicate the guy.

As Erick continued to consider the major points of his multi-layered crisis of conscience and positioning for Wizardry-games, he continued to observe the Red ‘[Time Lock]’ of Fenrir. That magic was falling away rather fast, revealing the people and oceans and forests and otherwise of the outer, inhabited Surface. Everyone on Veird watched right alongside Erick, as copies of the continents of Glaquin and Nelboor and Nergal and Quintlan all revealed themselves in all their patchwork glory. Nothing was laid down as it was on Veird. Everything was mashed together, wherever it felt like existing.

Sometimes the continents were cut into pieces, with just some thick river/oceans separating the pieces of continents from each other. Sometimes there was no separating body of water, and stuff was mashed right up against each other. Over there were the Songli Highlands, right beside half of the nation of Greensoil, with Archipelago Nergal strung alongside those two lands like a mountain range, all of the islands bunched up together with ports and docks mashed onto dry land.

Erick used a bit of magic to lens the air, to truly enhance his sight, and he saw fishermen on boats on dry land, frozen in time, casting nets onto bare dirt. When the Red peeled back, those nets fell onto the dirt, and the guys fishing in those ‘waters’ were suddenly, incredibly confused.

“Right, then,” Erick said to himself, and then he organized his thoughts on Nothanganathor’s possible avenues of attack, and the meaning of the Curse of Obscurity, and he sent all of that along in a [Telepathy] message to Poi, and Rizala.

He might not be able to receive messages easily, but he could certainly send them out, and that was good enough to let the world know all the ways in which all of this was a trap of several different natures. They had probably figured out some of those traps already, but it never hurt to hand over information in these sorts of situations, even if some of those bits of information might be memetic threats; the Mind Mages could handle those threats. Erick’s job was easy.

He just needed to overpower whatever was coming his way.

Erick said to himself, “Time to go see what’s what.”

Rizala, Poi’s sister and the current embodiment of Ascendant Prime, based on the golden tendrils wafting off of her like she was a sea anemone, suddenly appeared in the sky beside Erick. She couldn’t talk to Erick normally, so she had decided to appear, instead. She calmly said, “If he has given us a week to see, then perhaps we should take it.”

Unsaid, was that Ascendant Prime was in a worry over all the little traps and big traps that Erick had sent in that latest information packet. If Prime was appearing like this, then Erick’s musings had set them all down thought tunnels of their own.

It had been a calculated risk to share that knowledge with them, but they could handle it, Erick was sure.

Erick nodded, showing that he respected Ascendant Prime’s ideas, and then he said, “If that is the determination of the Mind Mages, then I will take that under consideration, but we’re in a Wizard War now, Ascendant Prime. Setting the tone for the War is just as important as all the trappings of the War itself, and we’re going to win, but we can’t win by doing nothing.”

Unsaid, was the idea that the second you start thinking of those traps, then Nothanganthor might gain those traps. One couldn’t be giving enemies ideas; that was the surest way to failure…

And probably one of the reasons that Nothanganathor had allowed the New Stat of Intelligence to happen, and to make Erick paranoid in some ways. He had mostly gotten over that problem of paranoia, but… not really. Not when it came to big things like this.

… Erick kinda knew how he could circumvent that issue, though.

There was a reason that the True Wizards of the Grand Wizard’s Tower in the Core of Veird, and back in the real one in the Old Cosmology, played tricks on everyone. There was a reason that Fae were, by and large, nonsensical and fun-loving. Because by being that way, except when it really mattered, they laid the path for a life that was lived in pursuit of less war, and less horror. Being non-serious, and generally positive, was a way to insulate oneself from the disaster of life. The Shades were mostly like that, too, with Fallopolis speaking like a crazy grandma most of the time, and even Killzone was like that with his southern drawl accent.

Erick was only a little bit like that. Mostly, he wasn’t.

But he could do that more. He could be a bit happier, and playful, and uncounterable, and chaotic—

Oh.

Shit.

Nothanganathor had seeded Erick with a bunch of paranoia in order to get Erick to be predictable.

… Of course, there was the counter argument that Nothanganathor was trying to ‘win’ by making Erick think about becoming a fae, and thus… Erick wasn’t sure what would happen when he was a fae, which is why he hadn’t done it. Would he simply not care about Veird anymore? About anyone?

If he had ultimate power, then he could do anything he wanted, and that seemed corruptive.

… Erick slowly realized that he was way past the point where second-guessing himself was productive.

So he acted.

“Perhaps, I would have liked to take that week,” Erick said, and then he asked, “But how long was I standing here, thinking, while you all watched?”

“About 35 seconds before you sent that information packet.”

Not conclusively a thought trap, then.

Erick nodded, then turned back to fully face Fenrir. “Past a certain point you simply gotta hope you prepped enough, and then you power through all opposition.”

Ascendant Prime smiled a little with Rizala’s body, and then she pulled back, saying, “We will follow your lead.”

Erick smiled, showing everyone that everything was okay, and then he spoke to the world, “The only power Nothanganathor has is a plan many years in the making, for if he had the actual power to enact his will, he would have done so. He has a trick. We will encounter that trick, and then we will crush it, and him. He’s earned what is coming to him ten million times over.

“But we will not be taking that anger out on the people he has duped into following him, who he has stolen from their worlds and put into our paths. The Valkyries on the front line are not empowered to cut down those who attack them. The Valkyries will descend to Fenrir soon enough, and then they will scout and allow themselves to be killed, to return to here. They will allow all of what I am about to do to be unraveled by those people down there, if those people should unravel it. Their goal, for now, is to be seen and to Siphon up the Red.

“This is not a traditional War, for that is what Nothanganathor expects. That is what he has planned for. That is how he sees this happening.

“So we will deny him that path, because people need help.

“Everyone down there is experiencing a crisis. Everyone down there needs our help. Everyone down there might already be poised to hate and tear at us, for they have likely been brought forth through visions of Infinity where Nothanganathor was already their god, or some other such nonsense, but we’re going to be better than Nothanganathor, because what Nothanganathor doesn’t know is that every single person down there is not our enemy, but just a friend we haven’t made yet.

“We begin with Plan Takeover.”

– – – –

A while ago:

Erick walked out of the tactical room of the Blue Corps a little miffed. That meeting of smaller, newer powers had not gone well. Poi caught up with Erick, right as he opened a [Gate] back to the cloud castle house.

They walked through, and they were back home.

Poi waited until the portal was closed behind them to say, “Do you have an actual plan?”

Erick scoffed as he walked toward the main house. “Of course I have a plan.”

“But people want to see actual magic solutions. You know. The things that Archmages do. The old definition, that is; someone with tier 7 magics and able to make magics on the fly to solve any conceivable problem.” Poi said, “Usually I don’t have to tell you this, but everyone is worried that the solutions you have of ‘blast and blast some more’ are both truth, and also lies, and in both cases they’re not comforting.”

The meeting at the Blue Corps had been with a coalition of newly-risen smaller powers, coming into their own in the last few years, and only just now finding any solidity. The Angels leaving had thrown everything into political disarray, and when the majority of other humans went with them everyone was both lost and confused, and so the meeting had been a bunch of people yelling and vying for power and demanding answers, all at the same time. Erick had told them not to worry, and that he had plans, and that to air those plans to too many people would invite those plans to be nullified by Nothanganathor.

Erick probably should have been more of a politician back there, but he didn’t want to give out comforting lies. This war was going to be dangerous. People were going to die. And yet what was the alternative? To submit to the man who had Sundered one universe to gain power, and hope that he would change if he were allowed to gain even more power? That he would somehow have a different opinion of the values of others when he was in charge?

… Erick sighed as he entered his house. Yeah. He had fucked up. He should have hinted at the full weight of the problem; not outright stated it.

Erick headed for the kitchen. “I’m going to make some coffee. Want some?”

“Yes. I want some of that un-[Duplicate]able stuff from Margleknot, too, unless you’ve learned how to copy it, then it’s no longer special at all. Then I don’t care for it.”

Erick raised an eyebrow, and then he laughed. “I haven’t learned how to copy it, and I guess that makes it special.”

“For now.”

Erick smirked. “For now.”

Soon, the two of them were sharing a pot of really good coffee that tasted like being freshly clean and warm and dry in fluffy robes, watching the sunrise on a cold, winter’s porch, as breath and steam fogged the air. Of course, none of that was physically happening at all. The two of them were in the kitchen, by the bay window, looking over Candlepoint down below the clouds. It was reson-imbued coffee, and Erick could probably copy it if he wanted, but he had chosen not to.

He saw how Poi liked the special stuff.

Poi smiled as he sipped his coffee. “It’s something to do with reson-imbuing, so I can’t imagine why you haven’t figured it out yet.”

“Give me some time, and I’ll figure it out,” Erick said, grinning. And then he thought back to the meeting and sighed. “I suppose I could make a magic and hand it to the Script, to make people happier? I could probably do a lot of that, actually.”

Poi said, “Make a dungeon planter; a mana generating spike you can launch at Fenrir’s bare surface and generate livable space.”

Erick thought about that for a second, then he nodded. “Maybe you should look into Igniting to Wizardry.”

“No thanks.” Poi said, “I got a plan for life and it does not involve any of that power-tripping nonsense.”

Erick laughed. “How do you think such a spell should work?”

“Ya see? That’s the thing. I’m not the Apparent Wizard King.” Poi pointed at Erick, adding, “You’re the one that signed up to be Emperor of Veird, Commander of all our Armed Forces. You figure it out.”

“Bahhh!” Erick said, “I’ll just end up being, like, the tip of the spear. Jane and her siblings are the commanders.”

“Maybe your spellwork can be the spear,” Poi said, being serious, without trying to be too obviously very serious. “But you should hang back. We need you here on Veird more than down there, getting into Nothanganathor’s face. He’ll take a swipe at us when you’re gone, or he’ll find some way to trap you.”

Erick didn’t mention his plans to Ignite and then Ascend other people to True Wizards, and Poi didn’t ask.

“I have plans in place for if I fall, and I won’t fall. He can’t just kill me.” Erick said, “I won’t let anything happen to Veird.”

“Good!” Poi smiled. “Because I do quite like the place.” He added, “Don’t let anything bad happen to yourself, either.”

Erick grinned. “Solomon will probably be doing the major defenses; what with that cross-Infinity cultivation he’s going for. We’ll work it out. As for sending… well? Sending missiles of dungeons at Fenrir? Yeah. That’s a good starting point. I’m sure Nothanganathor will have a trick or ten to counter such a plan, but I can make some giant… missiles of some sort?” Erick looked away, thinking.

Poi sipped his tea, smirking—

“Ah ha!” Erick said, “I got it. Want to join me for the creation? Or the other Poi down in the Black Gate dungeon?”

“No no. I’m busy, too. If you’re going to work on that then I’m going to devote my full attention toward some Mind Mage stuff happening up in Cerebrum. We have a meeting with Demon King Dinnamoth in about 6 hours.” Poi said, “He’s a lot less of an asshole now that Avandrasolaro is the Crown. We might actually make progress on some sort of united war front today.”

Erick finished off his coffee then set down his empty mug, saying, “Then you have fun with that. I’ll be back later.”

– –

Erick stood upon a mountain in an empty part of the world, somewhere on the Sixth Sphere, where the Forever War had taken place for the two years that Erick had been absent. This part of Veird’s new Spheres still weirded Erick out, but it was kinda cool at the same time. Rozeta had forgone the normal sky illusions on this sphere, and had instead put another layer of world upside down, on the roof of this layer. The two surfaces were like two worlds facing each other from 50-ish kilometers away, with a layer in the middle where clouds and sunlight flowed, and gravity pulled in both directions.

Erick began weaving magics.

First came the hum of Benevolence, flowing out of Erick’s aura and into the air like a soft light that crinkled at the edges with white static. Next came a twisting and the tinkling chime of Genesis, which combined with the solid, illusionary sounds of eternal stonewood. Erick pulled out the creation of free floating life in the form of slimes from the sounds of [Conjure Force Elemental] and the barest touch of Soul Magic. Some light [Renew] and [Terraforming] spellwork was only another piece of the puzzle. Next came defensive, node-network-layers, in the form of [Ward] and [Undertow Star] and [Benevolent Cleanse].

With another twisting that was in reality a shaping that rivaled anything Erick had done in his first years on Veird, power blossomed both in the air, and inside Erick, as he harmonized many different spells into one.

And then he cast.

A kilometer-long, 300-meter-wide tower of white eternal stonewood sprouted into the air, created from nothing but mana and intent. Erick turned the casting into a button in his soul.

Words appeared that only he could see.

Tower of Mana Slimes, instant, super long range, 250,000 mana + Variable

Create a living eternal stonewood spike and launch the spike at a target. The spike plants itself where it lands and then unfurls into a tower that grows based on the slimes and life and conditions the tower finds itself within. Has a hard limit within the Script to only double in size. Has no limit outside of the Script.

It looked good, too!

The tower stretched up tall, with ridges every ten meters that encircled the whole thing. Those ridges were where the floors were on the insides, and the whole thing was mostly hollow, for Erick had constructed the tower like bamboo. Down here, at the bottom, nodules bubbled upon the white wood; the precursors to roots expanding outward. The tower needed some way to stabilize itself, after all.

The spell finished creating itself, and then it planted itself in the ground in front of Erick; like dynamite blasting away at a mountain, the spike buried itself in the ground.

The spike buried itself into the mountain a good 50 meters. Erick expected when it struck the solid surface of Fenrir it would simply stop there on that adamantium surface, but there was dirt here, and so the spike stuck into the dirt. It never reached the black metal ground a good five kilometers underneath.

The tower began to grow.

The nodules turned to roots which secured the bamboo into the ground, and then windows opened everywhere. The inside was filled with water, making the whole thing mostly incompressible and able to be fired like a metal slug without breaking where it landed, but now that water spilled outward. [Water Shape] [Ward]s caught that water and secured it to the tower, and the space where the water left suddenly lit up with spellwork. Slope stairs, like a double helix, were revealed on the insides, along with [Gravity Ward]s that gave the whole place a sense of gravity. Fenrir didn’t have great gravity right now, so of course Erick had to account for that. Those same gravity magics also helped to set up a water cycle. And then a [Terraforming] cloud sprang into being on the ceiling of every floor, and all throughout the place. Benevolence and Genesis spilled out of those clouds like lightning, filling the entire place with power. When the lightning passed, each 10-meter tall floorspace got maybe a meter-deep layer of good dirt, and greenery sprang up from loamy soil that had not been there before now.

The systems came online, and Erick watched.

Erick watched for about forty minutes, seeing where he had failed on his first attempt and where he had succeeded. Mostly, the repetition spellwork was failing hard. Here and there some of the floors had massive gaps in them, where the window-opening part of the magic had translated poorly and opened up holes in the floor instead of on the walls. Some of the helical staircases were upside down, where the magic had done some weird sort of inversion, putting wall where the walking area of the staircase should have been, and open space where the walkway should have been.

Erick had started off too big. Maybe he should just do four repeating floors, instead of going for a hundred repeating floors, all at once. The mana cost was too much, too. That needed to go down.

Yes.

Erick pulled apart the original spell in his soul, and then went about making Version 2.

Tower of Mana Slimes V2, instant, super long range, 2,500 mana + Variable

Create a living eternal stonewood pod and launch the pod at a target. The pod plants itself where it lands and then unfurls into a tower that grows based on the slimes and life and conditions the tower supports. Has a hard limit within the Script to only double in size. Has no limit outside of the Script.

This time what came out was a 45-ish meter tall disk, about 200 meters wide, and it had lots of staircases and support all throughout, and a whole lot more complicated infrastructure. When it planted, the roots expanded wide, locking it to the mountain underfoot.

Erick watched the ‘disk-tower’ work for 2 hours. The slimes came to being through pure creation and they began wandering around, like the slimes in the larger tower. Everything seemed to be working a lot better, too. But there was another problem. The node network of the disk tower was failing; there wasn’t enough life to sustain the growth of the smaller tower.

Erick had gone too small.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“Version 3 will be better,” Erick told himself—

Something tickled the inside of his nose and Erick sniffled.

… Why was he sniffling?

… Erick already saw why he was sniffling. He wiped the blood away from his nose, and then stared at the red on his fingers for a few seconds. His eyes flickered to his Status. Nothing was wrong there—

“Oh!” Erick said, cleaning himself up, because he knew what he had done. “The Script is pushing back because it’s almost Propagation Magic.”

A blue box appeared.

 

“Sure thing— Ah. Hello, Atunir.”

Atunir, the Goddess of Field and Fertility, stepped onto the mountain beside Erick, looking a little happy and also professionally concerned. She also looked resplendent with her dark skin and commoner-esque clothes. She playfully intoned, “So it seems you’re trying to make a propagating bamboo tower plant.”

“I am. Want to help?”

Like someone being asked to do something they wanted to do, but they knew they shouldn’t, Atunir said, “I don’t normally like to get involved, because people have to live their own lives…” Atunir blurted out, “But Sumtir and Aloethag are getting big in the Valkyrie culture and so I want in on this growing culture.”

Erick grinned. “Your help is greatly appreciated.”

“I do wonder about Yggdrasil, though.” Atunir said, “I helped you make him last time. He doesn’t want to be present here? For this?”

“He’s already said he doesn’t want to be a part of any offensive magics, so I didn’t even think to ask him about this.” Erick said, “He’s defensive, as always.”

Atunir simply nodded, Erick’s confirmation of Yggdrasil’s nature neatly slotting into her worldview. “Then this working will be one of comfortable offense.” Perhaps too excitedly, she said, “Now, as for iterating on this process, I was thinking golden wheat towers that surrounded the land with light and air and gravity and made it all habitable for everyone nearby, as well as serving as bases from which to attack the enemy. Also, a plant that grows and spreads in the void.” She said, “A planet maker.”

Erick’s eyes went a bit wide. “… Oh.” And then he said, “That seems like it could become a Daydropper situation.”

Atunir smiled delightfully. “Which is why I’m here, at the beginning, to ensure that it is connected to security and not to corruption.” She added, “Also, we can save that version for after the war. Let’s just do the Fenrir-base-maker, for now.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Also: I hear you’re planning on having a child with Shadow.”

Erick balked, and then he laughed. “Yes. Eventually. We’re in a courting stage right now.”

“Congratulations on your future children, anyway!” Atunir smiled.

Erick chuckled. “Thanks.”

– – – –

Present day:

Atunir appeared in the sky beside Erick, so close to the Edge of the Script, the both of them looking down onto the newly inhabited dyson sphere that was Fenrir. This time Atunir was dressed in flowing, golden wheat, with twining green vines that replicated jewelry. Tiny, dew-drop-glittering apples hung from her ears like earrings, and her hair was done in thick braids that cascaded down her bare shoulders and her back.