LIGHTNOVELONLINE 56: A Skidding Halt
Unaware of a certain citizen’s internal shock, the battle between the three factions raged on. Little by little, the forces from each began wearing each other down in a battle of attrition. As always, a faction’s advantage in battle would come in waves.
In the beginning, with Morgana’s storm by their side, the Cerulean Dynasty had an advantage. Yet by the middle, the Federation of Obsidian steeled itself, adapted, and their training began to show. The addition of the Church of Eternity then threw another couple wrenches into the works because their forces had fresh legs.
With this pendulum of momentum swinging between the factions, the battlefield became a grinder. In went people and energy, and out came destruction and fatigue.
Before long, days went by without further development. Trapped in a battle outside of the city, Casimir, Morgana, and Aelius were unable to lead their factions or create any sort of cohesive final punch to knock out another.
Sure, there were other leaders, but for the Dynasty and Federation, their one spiritual pillar was gone. For the Church, while they had Luna holding down the fort, not much could be done as their top-end talent was a little thin. Saddled with the work of three people, she was already tired enough.
Wanting to escape and put an end to their three-way leader battle, each of the leaders, at one point or another pulled out their magnum opus attacks.
Aelius, aggressive as always, was the first.
Not even a day after their battle outside of the city started, Aelius charged up a gargantuan attack. Glowing bright like the sun, he detonated an explosion magnitudes larger than the measly fireball he had summoned while dueling Casimir in the city.
Exploding with the force of a nuclear warhead, Aelius created a second sun... albeit at three in the morning. With the shockwave of the explosion ripping through the city, he prayed the city’s building codes were high enough to not have shattered everyone’s windows. They really hadn’t gone far enough from the city...
Upon landing, Aelius backed off from the battle as everyone took a little breather before leaping right back into the fight. He pushed through the pain and fatigue that resulted from searing away solid chunks of land to keep up the pressure.
Later on, after another day of fighting, Morgana pulled out her best attack. Half its energy was wasted to just summon the water needed though, so she couldn’t create something with the same spectacle as Aelius.
She started by engulfing everyone within a sphere of water before flash freezing the entire sphere with a wave of her staff. Coughing up some blood in the process due to overexertion, she grinned after catching the other two off guard. With an opportunity presenting itself to her on a silver platter, she went ahead and stabbed a flurry of long spikes through their bodies.
It wasn’t enough though.
Both Casimir and Aelius had more tenacity than genetically modified cockroaches and just pushed themselves back up.
Since it was clear she wasn’t going to end the battle any time soon—her best attack, after all, did nothing—Morgana took a deep breath before leaping back into the fray to continue the fight.
It was already the fourth day of fighting, and... their outfits? Ripped and in tatters. Their energy? Beginning to run dry. Their will to fight though? Still brimming with the power of spite and competitiveness.
It was during the next day of fighting, however, when everyone’s energy was beginning to bottom out that Casimir pulled out his attack. Putting close to everything he had left into it, he first waved his banner to create a pseudo-gravity effect similar to what Valencia could do. The gravity, though ‘pseudo,’ crushed the two into one crater on top of each other.
Unable to manifest anything as grand as the others, Casimir elected for some additional point restrictions and manifested some ethereal chains to wrap around the two.
Layering on the chains to keep them anchored in place with one hand, Casimir clenched his banner with the other. His muscles were tensed, back was arched, and eyes were focused as he changed his banner into a spear. Once he had funneled enough divinity into the spear, he snapped his body forward like a snake and released the spear into the air.
A connection to the spear lingered in his mind. Keeping his eyes closed, he concentrated on tracing its path through the air. Despite the necessity of his concentration on the task at hand, he still continued laying the chains on and keeping the gravity going. It didn’t matter blood began pouring out of his mouth, he needed to keep the other two restrained in place.
Of course, the blood spurting forth didn’t matter much. It was just a drop in the ocean of what he had lost already. To him though, it didn’t matter his body was drenched in red, he just waited in peace while tracking his spear through the sky. The moment it turned in the sky and began its descent, he clenched his hand closed.
After connecting a chain to the spear, Casimir began pulling it down from the sky to accelerate it far beyond its terminal velocity. As it came hurtling down from above, it slammed through both Morgana and Aelius. Meanwhile, Casimir fell to the ground while lifting the gravity off of those two.
“F.... Fu...” Casimir choked on his words as another glob of blood bubbled up into his mouth. The pain only eased as he circulated his last bits of divinity to heal his body a little. Resummoning the spear back to himself, he staggered forward before catching it out of the air. He transformed it back into a banner, propped himself up, and spent a couple moments catching his breath.
Morgana and Aelius did the same, and the battlefield came to a standstill for the first time in days.
Everyone was tired, bloody, and bone-dry on energy. In fact, after days of fighting, similar situations were beginning to play out around Marcen’s Cliffs. Even with a system of rotation for their fighters—where some would rest and substitute themselves for the most tired fighters—each of the factions had driven themselves into the ground.
Thus, battle of attrition coming to a close, each faction staggered forward, unwilling to give up with the defeat of the other two within grasp, even if they looked like zombies.
At this point, each of the cults were prepared. Having bid their time in the shadows and continued to act injured, more and more of the cult members began slipping into battle. Dressed up as normal combatants, they went to town on any member of the three organizations they came across—which also meant backstabbing members from the organizations they came across. While fighting, the cultists whispered into small communication devices hanging on their collar.
After a slow hour where they infiltrated the battle, the two cult leaders came out from their hiding spots. Now on the top of a secluded building in a more uninvolved district of the city, the two leaders kept their hoods on while exchanging some hushed murmurs.
Raising their hands after a few minutes of preparation, a flood of divinity spiked into the air. With the three leaders all glowing, one red, one yello, and one green, they called upon the rest of the cult members to activate three city-wide rituals.
As the battle came to a standstill, combatants from each of the three factions watched in horror as fighters began floating into the air glowing red, yellow, and green. glowing ley lines streaked their way through the city, divinity surging forth and dominated any divinity leftover from Morgana’s struggling storm.
It was at this point that Solomon and Joanna both perked up. As the leaders of the Library of Truth, they had been keeping an eye on the cultists, but their general strategy was to let the organizations in the city duke it out on their own.
With the surginging divinity in the city, Solomon and Joanna felt three gargantuan presences reveal themselves in the ocean far from Marcen’s Cliffs. Three presences began their approach, and the two bolted upward and flew off towards the furthest ring of the city.
Telling Joanna to go collect the other Primordial Deities, Solomon couldn’t help but marvel at the three cults as he ventured out to the open sea. “They really did it... They really summoned the beasts.”
