by Andur
It's similar to the ring and earrings, I gave to Celes. By connecting directly to the users mind, it can show me a whole new view on the world.
By using the mana-crystal as a sensor, the user is now able to feel even the tiniest bit of energy.
Time for a little test!
I close my eyes and concentrate. By blending out my surroundings, I slowly become aware of the pathways. They are dim and slow, but it's enough.
A step takes me outside the void onto another world. Appearing in the sky above a big city, I look around. I know this world from a previous life.
But I am not here to dwell in my memories. I want to leave a little message for the Council. For this purpose I need to talk to a god. Preferably not to a Council member and not on their territory.
I need a messenger. Someone completely unrelated. What's better than to trespass into random gods territory and give him the message. All I need to do is to create a little commotion and hope for one of the caretakers of this world to notice.
Using another pathway, I appear inside the town on a big open area in front of a university. There are so many students here. Hah, this feels nostalgic. A long time ago I was a professor here.
But then the screams of fear and terror arise!
“KYAA!” “DEMON!” “RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!” “AAAAAA!”
A few seconds ago the area was crowded with people. Now there is nobody left. They all fled head over heels when they saw me and dropped everything they had on the ground.
Books and papers are all over the place. I take a few steps forward and grab a random book to read the title.
“About the world, it's inhabitants and the gods. -By Lerem Gerwais”
I flip through the pages and grin at the stupid ideas inside. It's been to long since I was here. They already started to teach this esoteric shit again!
Suddenly someone is shouting behind me.
“Hold it demon! In the name of our holy protector Fendulf! Leave this world and go back into the abyss which birthed you!”
I turn around and see a very shiny looking knight in full body armour, a wizard girl, a priestess and an archer. They aren't gods, just mortals. Meh... I turn around again and continue to flip the pages.
“By the light! Holy sword! Slay this creature of evil!”
I feel something poking between my shoulder blades and sigh. Yeah... what did I expect. This plan was stupid. Why should a god turn up if I don't ravage a continent or two.
“What is this devilry!? The holy sword, given by his holiness himself doesn't even scratch him!?”
I turn around and grab the knights sword. *Snap!* I broke the stupid thing at the hilt.
“Adults shouldn't play with toys! Hasn't your mother taught you anything?” I smack him with the book.
He falls to the ground like a felled tree and moves no more. A dent in his helmet proves the force with which the book hit him. “Aw! Look! Because of you I destroyed the binding of the book!” I complain to the unconscious knight.
“Kyaaa! Hero!” The wizard girl starts a tirade while the priestess falls to her knees and starts to pray. The archer just stands there with a dumbfounded look on his face.
Oh well. This doesn't look like it will lead to anything. I frown over the destroyed book when a sudden flash of light appears above us and a shiny figure of light suddenly floats there!
“WHO HAS SLAIN MY CHAMPION!?”
LUCKY! That's a god. “Come down here, I have to talk to you.”
“VILE DEMON CREATURE, BE GONE!” Another flash of light and the ground around me is burned and turns black from the heat. Had I not countered the spell by forcefully emitting my mana through my aura, I would have been roasted!
The god didn't have any problems with my aura pressing down on him. But the archer is twitching on the ground and has foam at his mouth. Wizard girl and priestess are also panting on the ground like the gravity would be too much for them. As magic users, they are taking it better.
Poor mortals. “Come down here stupid god! I have to talk to you! Or do I have to destroy this world, just to tell you a few words? And switch off this stupid light-show! That's outdated!”
I wave a fist at the idiot.
The figure of light descents to the ground and dims down to reasonable levels. Seems like he realized that I am a god too. Took him long enough.
“What's a fellow god doing here? This is my world. Why are you stirring up trouble?” The wiry guy asks.
“I need you to give the Council a message. Fendulf, I assume?” -Me
Fendulf nods. “Why don't you give this message to the Council yourself?”
“Because I don't like to walk into the enemy's territory. And for the message, tell them greetings from the void. We will soon visit them in their heavenly city. And then we will have a nice talk with them.” I smile at Fendulf.
He looks at me with question marks above his head.
“Ah. And could you also spread the word to everyone who doesn't want to get involved in the Council's business! They should stay away and keep their heads down.” -Me
“You aren't planning something stupid like a rebellion are you?” -Fendulf
“Count your ass on it! The final days of the Council are close and it's in their hands to choose if this will be ugly or not.” I wave at Fendulf and then at the mortals, who are looking at me like the harbinger of the end.
To them this conversation must have sounded like hell just declared war on heaven.
I turn around and step onto a path which takes me home again.
Back at home I start to sort my equipment. It's important to have an orderly laboratory. Order and cleanliness are the most important things in a workplace.
Hmm.. I think I forgot something. Didn't Celes tell me to …..
AH!
I forgot to get Seria and Aengus! They are still at Margerie's mansion! I am a sore excuse as a father! Forgetting my children at a friend's place!
Teleporting, I reappear inside Margerie's home. After a few seconds, I found an employee who leads me to the living room.
Inside are Seria and Aengus, together with Sandra's children. They are on top of Tanja, who looks like a slain animal while she is lying on the ground.
“I will never have children.... this is hell.....” Tanja complains with dead eyes, while she is looking at the ceiling.
Sven is crouching down in a corner and mutters something incomprehensible to himself. Margerie is lying on a couch. Seems like she passed out on the spot.
Sandra jumps out of a chair when she sees me. “Our saviour! I am so glad that you are back!” She runs to me and hugs me.
“What's going on?” I ask with a confused voice while I pat her shoulders.
“They don't sleep! First we lost Margerie, then Sven had a talk with Seria and since then he is looming in the corner. I don't know what she said to him. Afterwards they banded together and took out Tanja!” Sandra has tears in her eyes.
“Looks like your children and mine are an explosive combination?” I walk over to the kids.
“Daddy! We had so much fun! Can we come here to play every day?” Seria jumps on top of Tanja while she smiles at me.
“Don't use my intelligence officer as a trampoline! And why didn't you go to sleep like they told you?” I ask with a strict voice.
Before they were dropped off by us, we instructed them to behave. Which they obviously did not!
“But we never had so many people to play with! How can you ask of us to sleep at such a moment!” Aengus pokes Tanja, who doesn't even flinch.
I sigh and grab Seria and Aengus to take them home.
62 - Preparations!
I look up above my city and watch the three flying fortresses hovering there. They are made of mana-crystal. It took us a lot of resources to build them.
Currently I am standing on a balcony of my palace to get my head free. There are still so many preparations to make.
Fortunately countless people gave their assistance for free in this pro
ject. All of them combined their knowledge and power.
They did it for a single reason. Seria's last wish.
It's not wrong to call it her last wish. After I had the chance to watch my daughter for a long time, I am sure. The old Seria is gone and the new one is more like a very similar twin.
She has some traits of her personality and some of her memories. But the old personality is... dead. The old Seria had something like a certain aura. You could feel that a veryyyy old being was before you.
The new Seria is just my daughter.
We decided that one fortress should always stay at this world to protect it. With the other two, we will set out and change the order of the multiverse.
The challenge has been already made. All that's left to do is to leave the void and tell everyone about our existence. I decided to mass produce my sensory crystals, which enable a god to travel through the void.
Every inhabitant of this world is allowed to get one. They will be given to nobody else. I hired an army of very proficient people to see to it.
They will be similar to a passport I guess.
Of course the secret will come out sometime and other gods who are not natives will get access to our world. But I prefer it if it will be later than sooner.
With more time our society will be stronger and less likely shaken by people from outside the void. I am sure that other gods will come here with time.
We still have more than enough space. It's a big planet and our population accounts only to about eight hundred million people.
I don't want to know how long Seria's plan was running in order to gather this many souls. And how many are still drifting as dead souls around?
My army is also ready. We decided to give the Council a show of force with fifty thousand of our strongest fighters.
As soon as we are ready, we will march directly towards their city and give them a choice. Tjenemit gave me really good intelligence about their fighting force.
There are about sixty thousand occupants in their city. Ten thousand of them should be completely useless. They are suffering from something like senility.
It looks like your mind really can die somehow if you just get old enough. It's a natural process according to Tjenemit. A soul ages and collects memories until it gathers enough strength to ascend.
Then it continues to grow and collects memories until something like a breakdown occurs. The mind dies. The soul will lose all memories and you will be reborn as a normal mortal again, should you choose to so.
But why should someone who is bored to death refuse this possibility. To him it will be a chance to start anew.
I am not sure if it is really a breakdown, or if they are just too bored to care about the world any more. If you just live long enough, you should become bored of everything at some point for sure.....
For some reason El Shaddai fears that. He forbade the death of a god and made a law out of it. Tjenemit couldn't tell me why.
Seria obviously wished not only for more freedom. She wished for everyone to be allowed to start anew, if they wish for it.
I am fairly sure that we can defeat the Council. If we subtract those ten thousand people, the Council has just fifty thousand followers, which form their hard core.
At least thirty thousand of them aren't fighters, so their army has just twenty thousand people. The rest are supporters and guys, who help to govern the multiverse.
Others keep the city in order. Their standing army is quite big compared to their civil supporters if you think about it.
That's almost fifty percent of their working population, but according to Tjenemit the rest hasn't much power. They should be seen as civilians, who will most likely run at the first sign of fighting.
So if the Council hasn't gathered mercenaries from the younger gods, they should have a far weaker force than us.
If they have mercenaries. We will have to turn them around over time. I am sure we can do that. It's just a question of information and propaganda.
If everyone has the whole picture, they surely won't be unified any more. For one reason or the other.
On top of that we have the weapons from my palace. They should give us another edge in the coming fight.
Tjenemit hasn't any knowledge of such weapons. It fits with the information that the Council stole the crystal city from some other gods.
They never really understood the technology and just started to use it. If that's true Amaru's Sphere of Sight may also be just a stolen artefact. Though Tjenemit told us that Amaru really created it himself.
The former occupants of the City weren't it's creators either. At least that's Tjenemit's assumption because they hadn't much more knowledge of the city than the Council.
But why didn't Amaru invent much more marvellous stuff if he could create something like the Sphere?
It could be that he somehow came across a few seeds to create crystal-artefacts. Then he managed to manipulate them into growing according to his wishes. Maybe he never understood how to create a seed?
That would be a possible explanation. But the answer can only be given by Amaru. To Tjenemit's knowledge, they have some really big crystal-guns from Amaru too.
The longer I interrogated Tjenemit, the more it looked like the Council just consists of a collection of barbarians, who took over the ruins of a higher civilisation.
So my assumption is that there was a high civilisation of gods in the long forgotten past. They created the crystal city at the middle of all things as an eternal monument.
Then something happened and the civilisation broke down. An eternity of civil war between the gods followed until nobody remembered why everyone was fighting. The crystal city changed hands many times until the Council won in the end.
Something which happened a few times in the history of mortals to my knowledge. Why shouldn't it be the same for us gods? Without finding hard proof, it will stay a speculation.
Maybe the crystal city will hold some answers.
I turn around and walk inside the palace. Screams of pain greet me as I reach our private quarters. Seria is getting her horns and tail.
Oh, my daughter will look really cute with those! I enter the room, where Seria is hanging from the ceiling. She is bondage-bound like Aengus and Celes is standing in front of them with her arms crossed.
“You two gave Tanja, Sandra, Margerie and Sven a really hard time! Can you imagine how we look now as parents?”
Celes is furious.
“I will never do it again!” -Aengus
“Yoooou PROmised you wilLLL hit me unconscious MOM!”
“Back then and now are two different situations! You won't get out of this.” Celes whips Seria with her tail on the ass!
“KYAAA! III RREEGREET! NOO MOReeee whIPPINggg!!”
“Mom that's cruel!” Aengus tries to intervene, but a series of whipping attacks shuts him up. Celes surely doesn't think much of a pedagogic approach.
Hmm, I should help them. They don't really deserve that much punishmmmm............ but I really like that movement of Celes' hips when she uses her tail!
*Whip* *Whip*