DID YOU KNOW? YOU CAN NOW READ THREE TO SIX CHAPTERS AHEAD. CHECK MY PROFILE FOR THE LINK.
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The Nation of Tempest
Within the garden that, only moments ago, had served as the meeting place for a summit between three nations, a group of people stood scattered across the ruined grounds.
Well, some of them were standing.
Rimuru, Kaede, Luminous, and Veldora remained on their feet, their bodies tense as they watched the figure suspended high above them. Behind them, the others were either sprawled across the floor or kneeling in exhaustion, their strength having been drained to the point that none of them could even properly stand.
"Don't look." Veldora snapped at the Saint Bacchus when he saw him attempting to peer upward. "Even I can't protect you if you do, you know?"
As he spoke, the storm above them began to change.
The clouds twisted violently, their colours shifting until the entire sky was dyed a deep, unnatural purple.
Kaede's eyes widened.
"Rimuru, with me!"
Ｈ̷̿͝Ｙ̶̎͂Ｄ̸̈́̐Ｒ̵̈́͝Ａ̷͗̒
The name appeared across the sky.
Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that something tried to write the name across the sky.
The letters warped and fractured, their shapes twisting into impossible symbols before snapping back into something vaguely recognizable. The very sight of them seemed wrong, as though reality itself had struggled to comprehend what it was being asked to display.
Then the sky itself seemed to gain a form.
Three enormous heads emerged from the purple heavens, each one so vast that its features could only be properly understood from the curvature of the world below. Their colossal jaws opened, revealing rows of fangs, and all three stared down at Tempest with an almost animalistic hunger.
The young nation beneath them suddenly seemed impossibly small.
From that height, Tempest looked like little more than a single piece of rock floating beneath three world-ending beasts, small enough that the entire nation could have fit comfortably upon one of their enormous snouts.
Then all three dragons opened their mouths.
And they unleashed hell.
A torrent of purple descended from the heavens, not as a simple beam or stream, but as an enormous waterfall of poisonous energy that stretched across the horizon. It poured downward with terrifying slowness, its sheer volume blotting out the sky as the poisonous deluge advanced toward Tempest.
"Now, [Devour]!"
"Devour all! [Beelzebub]!"
Kaede and Rimuru roared in tandem, unleashing their Unique and Ultimate Skills in rapid succession.
Two enormous vortices of force erupted before them.
The descending waterfall of death was swallowed by the twin vortexes, the suction generated by their combined power becoming so tremendous that every drop of poison was dragged inward. The air screamed around them as the immense pressure tore at the landscape, while the poisonous torrent continued pouring down from above.
But the wave was never-ending.
For every portion consumed, another descended from the Hydra.
And so Rimuru and Kaede remained locked in place, maintaining their skills with everything they had to ensure that not a single drop of the poisonous deluge managed to escape their combined absorption.
By this point, the scale of the confrontation had become almost impossible to comprehend.
The three-headed dragon had grown so enormous that its heads extended beyond the curvature of the planet, while the twin vortexes generated by Rimuru and Kaede had expanded to a comparable scale. From the surface, it no longer looked like a battle taking place above Tempest.
It looked as though the world itself had become the battlefield.
The Hydra continued releasing more and more poison without end, its purple deluge cascading from the heavens while the enormous vortexes devoured everything that came within their reach.
Above them, the atmosphere itself began to suffer.
The friction generated by the immense forces produced an expanding haze of gas and energy that spread through the upper atmosphere, gradually staining the heavens with a violet sheen.
The sky over the world was turning purple.
Rimuru's expression had become increasingly strained as [Beelzebub] devoured the endless torrent, while Kaede stood beside him with both hands extended, maintaining [Devour] with a similar intensity.
Neither of them could afford to stop. The moment either vortex weakened, even for an instant, the poisonous deluge would spill past them and descend upon Tempest.
"How much poison does that thing have?!" Rimuru shouted, his voice nearly swallowed by the deafening roar of the storm.
Kaede glanced upward, her eyes narrowing as she watched the three colossal heads. "Trust me, you don't want to know."
"That's not an answer!"
"I know!"
The two continued absorbing the poison, but Rimuru's expression gradually became more serious. His [Beelzebub] could consume an absurd amount of energy, yet even he could tell that something was wrong. The Hydra wasn't showing the slightest sign of exhaustion.
It was simply producing more.
And more.
And more.
Veldora stood behind them, his golden dragon still wrapped around the survivors. His expression had become unusually grim as he stared at the monstrous creature above them.
"This isn't normal."
Benimaru looked toward him. "You recognize it?"
"No." Veldora's eyes narrowed. "But I recognize the feeling. It's almost like back then..."
The Dragon's voice became quieter. "How is that supposed to be a True Dragon? It's just a mere construct."
As though responding to his words, the three heads of the Hydra suddenly turned.
All three gazed downward.
For the briefest moment, the endless torrent stopped.
Rimuru blinked. "...Huh?"
Kaede's eyes widened. "Rimuru."
"I see it."
The Hydra's three mouths opened.
No warning. No explosion of energy. Instead, the purple poison that had been pouring from the heavens suddenly changed direction.
The entire waterfall bent.
Millions upon millions of tonnes of poisonous energy curved around the twin vortexes, splitting into three enormous streams that began flowing around the sides of Rimuru and Kaede.
"WHAT?!" Rimuru screamed.
Kaede immediately spread both arms. "Don't let it through!"
The two vortexes expanded violently, attempting to intercept the redirected poison, but the Hydra had already changed the nature of its attack. Rather than continuing to bombard Tempest from above, the three streams began descending from different directions, attempting to surround the entire city.
The golden dragon protecting the others suddenly roared.
Veldora thrust both hands outward. "Susaano!"
The dragon's body expanded. The golden barrier thickened until it became almost solid, layers upon layers of magicules condensing around Tempest as it grew to defend against the coiling mass of poison.
Then the poison struck.
The impact caused the entire nation to disappear beneath a wave of purple. For several seconds, nothing could be seen. Only the sound remained.
A deafening hiss.
The forest surrounding the golden barrier began melting almost immediately, turning into bubbling liquid as the poison ate through the earth itself.
Shuna clenched her teeth as she watched the golden barrier tremble. "Veldora-sama..."
"I've got it!" Veldora shouted. His arms shook. For the first time, the others could see strain appearing on his face.
Hachi remained silent.
Her insectoid form stood beside Veldora, four moss-green swords still hanging from her hands. Even now, despite everything happening around her, her attention remained fixed on the sky.
Hachi slowly raised one of her swords.
"The Hydra." She pointed toward the enormous creature above them. "It's looking at mother."
Rimuru heard her. His eyes immediately snapped upward.
The three heads of the Hydra were indeed staring directly at Kaede. And then the middle head smiled.
Kaede's expression hardened. "...You."
The strange figure standing atop the Hydra finally moved. She raised one hand. The storm above the world immediately began to twist.
The violet clouds folded inward, forming enormous spirals around the three heads, while countless geometric fragments appeared throughout the sky. Each fragment reflected a different image of the figure, dozens of them, then hundreds, then thousands, until the heavens seemed to be filled with countless distorted copies of Kaede's own face.
Rimuru's stomach dropped. "Kaede..."
"I know." Kaede slowly floated forward.
Her black aura began leaking from her body once again, but this time there was something different mixed within it.
Something colder. Something far more focused.
The mysterious girl in the sky tilted her head. Then she smiled. "Found you." The voice echoed across the entire world.
Kaede's eyes widened. "...What?"
The girl extended one hand toward her. And every single copy of Kaede's face in the sky opened its eyes at the same time.
"Mother."
[×××]
The sky above Tempest was not the only sky that had changed.
Across the world, the same wrongness spread outward from its origin point like cracks running through glass, invisible to most, but impossible to ignore for those whose existence was sensitive enough to feel the pressure of something unprecedented moving through the fabric of reality itself.
The Twelve Sovereigns felt it first.
---
In the Dwelling of Spirits, Ramiris sneezed.
It was a small, undignified sneeze that sent her spiraling sideways off the enormous mushroom she had been sitting on, her tiny wings barely catching her before she hit the floor. Treyni, who had been standing quietly nearby, moved to catch her on instinct alone.
"Are you alright, Lady Ramiris?"
"I'm fine, I'm fine." Ramiris righted herself with what remained of her dignity, which was not much, and immediately looked up at the sky.
The Dwelling of Spirits sat in a dimension adjacent to the physical world, its sky not a true sky at all but rather a reflection of the world's spiritual state at any given moment.
And thanks to the birth of not one, but two new Spirit Monarchs, with one even birthing a new race of spirits, the world's spiritual state was blossoming.
She had so many spirits growing at unprecedented rates. Gaining sentience and a consciousness just as quickly. She practically had a kingdom again, one made entirely out of spirits.
She had restrained herself several times from just going around and bragging about it like Millim would have done, waiting for the right moment to announce it.
However, this was a new development.
Normally the sky looked like an endless gradient of soft violet and amber, warm and constant and deeply mesmerising.
It did not look like that now.
The colors were wrong. Fractured, almost, as though someone had taken the sky and folded it incorrectly. Geometric shapes moved through the upper atmosphere that had no business existing in any dimension Ramiris was familiar with, and she was familiar with most of them.
She stared upward for a long time without saying anything.
Then she said, very quietly, "Treyni."
"Yes, Lady Ramiris."
"Send someone to Tempest." Her voice had shed its usual bounciness entirely, which happened rarely enough that Treyni immediately straightened. "Right now. And tell them to be careful on the way."
---
The Nation of Fulbrosia occupied a stretch of sky that most people never saw, its cities built among clouds and the bones of ancient winds. From her throne room, Frey could see further than almost anyone alive, her natural perception as a Divine Bird extending far beyond the horizon in every direction at once.
She had been reviewing trade reports when the sky changed.
The documents scattered from her hands without her noticing.
Frey stood from her throne and walked to the edge of the open platform overlooking her kingdom, her wings folding tight against her back as she looked toward the distant southeast where Tempest and Maple Tree sat.
What was rising from that direction was not a storm. She had seen storms. She had made storms. She knew what weather looked like from every altitude and angle, and this was not that.
The geometric halos and crowns of fractured light spreading outward from Tempest's position moved against every known principle of atmospheric behavior, propagating upward and outward simultaneously in patterns that had no natural origin.
The pressure of it reached her even at this distance.
Frey's expression didn't change. She was not someone who wore her reactions openly. But her fingers, resting against the platform's railing, pressed down until the stone beneath them began to crack.
She recognized the quality of what she was feeling. Not the scale of it. Not the source of it. But the quality.
Something was in that sky that should not exist.
She turned to the nearest attendant without looking away from the horizon. "Prepare a reconnaissance unit. Small, fast, and invisible. I want eyes on the forest of Jura within the hour." A pause. "And do not send anyone I'm not comfortable losing."
---
Demon Lord Carrion had been in the middle of a sparring session when the pressure hit.
He had been throwing punches at a training construct designed to survive approximately thirty of them before structural failure.
He caught the construct with both hands before it could fly backward, set it down with unusual gentleness, and looked up.
The horizon toward the east had developed a quality he did not have a word for. The light was wrong.
Carrion had lived a long time. He had fought things that broke terrain and shattered weather systems and left entire regions permanently altered by their passing.
Heck, he'd fought Millim.
He had a finely calibrated sense for threats, graduated by experience into something close to instinct.
What he was feeling right now registered somewhere above the highest point on that scale.
Somehow, higher than Millim. Did that even make any sense?
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
"Cancel everything today," he said to the empty room, which was not empty because his attendants were always nearby. "And someone get me an intelligence report on Tempest within the next two hours. I want to know what's happening there."
He looked at the horizon for another moment.
"Actually." He picked up his coat from the nearby rack. "Someone get me Milim."
---
In the cave system beneath her labyrinth, Milim Nava sat cross-legged on the ceiling.
This was not unusual. Ever since she started helping Demon Lord Carrion with the restoration of his country, she'd regularly felt what mortals called exhaustion.
Naturally, it wasn't actual exhaustion. But everything was so boring that she started taking mental damage. But she promised Carrion she would help.
Thanks to that, Millim took spending moments alone, with her thoughts, a good place for that was the ceiling of her own crafted labyrinth.
Milim slept on the ceiling, ate on the ceiling, and conducted a significant portion of her thinking there simply because nobody ever looked up, which meant she got some peace. Her attendants had long since learned to project their voices upward.
She had been doing nothing in particular when the sky outside the labyrinth changed, which she could feel through the stone and earth all the same.
She opened her eyes.
For a moment she stayed where she was, reading what she was feeling.
Then she said, to nobody, "That's interesting."
She knew simple power. She had been alive longer than most things on this world, had fought more of them than she could count clearly, and simple power felt like simple power. Heavy, directional, quantifiable.
This was not quantifiable.
Milim dropped from the ceiling and landed in a crouch, her eyes bright. "That's very interesting."
"Someone's doing something," she said happily, already moving toward the labyrinth's exit. "Finally."
---
Guy Crimson had not moved from his throne since Chloe Aubert had said the name.
Demon Lord Maple.
He was not, in general, a man who was surprised by things. He had existed long enough to have seen most categories of catastrophe at least once, and the categories he hadn't seen personally he had seen the aftermath of. Surprise required encountering something genuinely outside one's frame of reference, and his frame of reference was very large.
And yet.
Beside him, Velzard had her arms folded, her expression, one of absolute revulsion.
"The storm," she said eventually.
"Yes." Chloe nodded.
"That's her."
"Almost certainly."
Velzard was quiet for a moment. "The abomination."
"It's a construct," Guy said. "A projection of her existence rather than her physical form. She's testing scale rather than presence."
"Which means she hasn't fully committed yet."
"No." Guy looked at the ceiling of his throne room, where the distant wrongness in the sky above was just barely perceptible even through the ice and stone. "She's introducing herself."
Velzard turned to look at him directly. "And you're going to do what about it?"
Guy was quiet for long enough that the question had almost stopped expecting an answer. Then he said, "I'm going to go meet her."
Velzard stared at him. "You're going to..."
"She's in Tempest." He stood from his throne with unhurried ease. "Chloe is asking me to go to Rimuru. The girl in the sky is apparently the reason. And I haven't been to Tempest yet." He glanced at Chloe. "So. How many birds is that? I only need one stone."
Chloe's expression held something that was not quite relief and not quite fear.
Guy looked at Velzard. "Stay here."
"I'm not staying here."
He considered arguing. Then he decided it wasn't worth the energy. "Fine. Come then."
He looked once more toward the ceiling, through which the pressure of something vast and wrong and interested continued to pulse with the patience of a thing that had decided it could wait.
"You know," Guy said, to the ceiling, to the sky, to whatever was looking down at the world from that fractured purple above Tempest, "most people at least send a letter first."
The sky did not respond.
He hadn't expected it to.