Novel Full Chapter 712: Theravex
Chapter 712: Theravex
The next target was a world called Theravex, and it was the richest one yet.
Big D laid it out across the command projection, his old eyes sharp as he worked. Theravex was a top-tier world wrapped in storms of bright aether, and buried in its core was Aetherveil Crystal, a Tier-68 resource that amplified any power channeled through it.
Whoever held Theravex held the means to make their whole kingdom stronger. So three kingdoms already held it, and they held it tightly.
"Seventy percent belongs to one of them," Big D said. "The Caelthyr Dominion. King Voryn Caelthyr. And the Dominion does not stand alone."
He tapped the projection, and a second marker bloomed above the first, far larger, glowing the deep gold of the upper plane.
"They are backed by the Aurelian Empire," Big D went on. "An upper-plane power. Caelthyr feeds them crystal, and in return the Empire makes sure no one takes Caelthyr’s hills." His whiskers twitched. "That backing is the only reason a middling kingdom holds the lion’s share of a world like this."
"And the other thirty?" Almond asked.
"Split between two. The Morvane Kingdom under Queen Sythel Morvane holds about twenty. The Draveth Kingdom under King Harkon Draveth scrapes by on the last ten." Big D leaned back. "Three kingdoms, one of them with an empire at its back. And every one of them has already heard what we did to Zerrafax and the Vharn Combine."
Lily smiled at that. "Then they are already afraid. Good. Fear does half the work for us."
On Theravex, in the high spire of the Caelthyr Dominion, the three kingdoms were holding an emergency meeting, and the fear was thick in the room.
King Voryn Caelthyr sat at the head of the table, a broad man draped in crystal-threaded robes, and he was not used to feeling small. He felt small now.
"You have all heard the reports," he said. "Zerrafax held their hills against twelve challengers and fell to Ananta Regalon in three fights. The Vharn Combine sent a Warlord and four Tier-50 Spears to Caldross." He paused. "All five were beaten in an afternoon. By four people who are not even Tier-50."
Queen Sythel Morvane, sharp-faced and unsmiling, folded her hands. "And now they are coming here. To the richest world in the sector. Of course they are." She looked at Voryn. "The question is what your Empire intends to do about it."
"The Aurelian Empire protects its investment," Voryn said, but there was a thinness to it. "I have already sent word up the plane. They will respond."
King Harkon Draveth, oldest of the three, let out a dry laugh. "Will they? Or will they wait to see whether Ananta Regalon is worth the trouble, and step in only after we have bled them for the Empire’s information?" He shook his head. "Empires do not spend themselves on kingdoms that hold ten percent of a rock, Voryn. Or twenty. They spend themselves on you. The rest of us are just the moat."
The room went quiet at that, because it was true, and all three of them knew it.
"Then we have a choice," Sythel said finally. "We fight Ananta Regalon as three squabbling kingdoms and get picked apart one at a time, the way they picked apart everyone else." Her eyes were cold. "Or we fight as one, hold the line together until the Empire decides we are worth saving, and pray it decides quickly."
Voryn looked at the two rulers who had been his rivals for this world for years, and swallowed his pride, because pride was worth nothing against what was coming.
"As one, then," he said. "Until the Empire comes."
None of them looked confident.
The Ananta Regalon army arrived two days later, and it did not arrive quietly.
It came through the largest road Pymon had ever folded, a tear in the aether-storms a mile wide, and out of it poured an entire war.
The four X-rankers came first, descending through the bright storms with the whole army at their backs, and the moment their feet neared the surface of Theravex, Almond gave the order that began everything.
"Take the ground," he said. "All of it we can reach. Build."
And the kingdom answered.
Lily raised both hands, and across a vast stretch of the Theravex plains, her Dreadgates tore open.
[Dreadgate Spawn.]
Dreadlings poured out in a black tide, not hundreds but tens of thousands, surging across the ground in every direction, claiming it, blanketing the plains in a living darkness that moved like one creature.
Almond raised his, and from the Ark of Fabricating Oblivion, his Spirit Lords rose into being.
[Spirit Loom.]
Seven vast figures unfolded out of woven golden thread and oblivion-essence, towering over the plains, their domains spreading outward and meeting the edges of the Dreadling tide, and together the two forces swallowed a stretch of Theravex larger than a city.
Then the building began, and the plains became something no world had ever seen.
It rose out of the claimed ground all at once, conjured by the combined decks of four X-rankers, and it was beautiful and it was wrong in all the right ways.
From Lily’s newest deck, the dread-architecture climbed.
[Loom of the Dread Hierarchy.]
This was no spawning deck and no stealing deck. Its whole system was shape and rank, and it took the raw Dreadling tide and wove it upward into structure, black crystalline spires that pulsed with deep violet veins, towers grown rather than built, alive and breathing and humming with low dread-light.
Beside them, Almond’s fabrication-forges took form, golden and vast.
The Ark of Fabricating Oblivion ran a different system entirely, harvesting loose essence from the aether-storms and weaving it on looms of light, great cathedral-forges where threads of gold spun raw oblivion into shape.
Ainen’s contribution came up in rivers of fire.
[Forge of the Living Ember.]
His newest deck did not burn and did not feast. Its system was smelting, pure creation through flame, and it raised forge-hearts across the new town where rivers of living ember flowed between the spires and pooled into casting-pits that glowed every color a fire could be.
And through all of it, Rudra’s structures imposed order on the chaos.
[Edifice of the Iron Decree.]
His new deck broke nothing. Its system was the opposite of all his others, raising instead of revoking, and it laid down ramparts of grey adamant and geometric law across the whole town, a skeleton of unbending structure that held the eldritch sprawl together and made it a fortress.
When it was done, the thing standing on the Theravex plains did not look like a war camp.
It looked like a living machine the size of a city, black dread-spires and golden oblivion-cathedrals and ember-forges and adamant ramparts all woven into one impossible whole, lit in a dozen exotic colors, humming with eldritch power and sci-fi precision at once.
Violet dread-light pulsed through crystalline veins. Golden thread spun in the air between cathedral spires. Rivers of living flame ran like circuitry through streets that bent at angles no city should hold. It was magic and machine and something older than both, and it was theirs.
And it was a factory.
That was the whole point of it. The town had not been built to live in. It had been built to make war, and the moment it finished rising, it began to churn.
From Lily’s Loom, the Dreadling tide was sorted and evolved into classes, and they came off the line by the thousand.
Dread-Reavers, fast and bladed, for the front. Dread-Bulwarks, heavy and slow, for the wall. Dread-Spires that walked, living siege-engines that birthed smaller Dreadlings as they moved.
From Almond’s cathedral-forges, the Oblivion-fabricated marched out, spirit-constructs woven from golden thread, each one carrying a fragment of a Spirit Lord’s domain, soldiers that could not be truly killed because the forge simply wove them again.
From Ainen’s casting-pits rose the Ember-born, troops of living exotic flame given shape and purpose, cold-flame skirmishers and corrosion-flame breachers and a dozen other kinds, each a different fire walking on two legs.
And from Rudra’s adamant edifices marched the Decree-Sentinels, grey unbending things that imposed his law wherever they stood, slow and absolute, the anchors the rest of the army would move around.
Four decks, four systems, four entirely different engines of creation, running together as one factory, pouring out an army built from the combined power of the people who had killed a Doom Monarch.
High above it all, the four X-rankers took their seats.
They did not stand on the spires or walk the streets. They rose into the bright Theravex sky on a throne-platform of woven gold and dread-crystal, lifted above the whole churning town.
And the platform rested on the back of a dragon.
Kexell had come in his true form, and his true form was a mountain with wings.
He was vast beyond anything his humanoid shape had hinted at, a colossal ancient dragon of dark iridescent scale that threw a moving shadow across half the new town, his eyes two slow furnaces, his wingspan wide enough to blot the aether-storms. He hung in the sky with lazy, enormous power, the throne-platform settled between the great ridges of his spine, the four X-rankers seated upon it like the sky itself was their court.
Below them, the factory roared. Around them, the storms burned bright. And beneath them, a colossal dragon held the whole tableau aloft, a young dragon named Gopu perched proudly on his grandfather’s horn, watching it all with shining eyes.
"They will have seen this by now," Lily said, looking out toward the distant spire of the Caelthyr Dominion. "All three kingdoms. They are watching a city grow out of nothing on their doorstep."
"Good," Almond said. "Let them watch. Let them feel it." His golden eyes moved across the churning factory, the rising army, the colossal dragon holding them all in the sky. "We are not here to raid Theravex. We are here to take it, hold it, and make it ours, and we want them to understand that from the first hour."
Far below, the first wave of the army finished forming, Dread-Reavers and Ember-born and spirit-constructs and Decree-Sentinels assembling into ranks that stretched across the claimed plains.
Rudra looked down at them and cracked his knuckles. Ainen leaned back against a ridge of Kexell’s spine, perfectly content. Lily watched the enemy spire with the patient eyes of a woman who had already read the ending.
Almond raised one hand, and the first wave began to march, a tide of exotic war flowing out from the eldritch factory-city toward the heart of Theravex and the richest crystal in the sector.
"Send it forward," he said.
And the rise of Ananta Regalon came to the door of the Caelthyr Dominion.