Greenland’s energy shield warped and cracked. Its collapse could come at any moment.
Woe underlied Selene’s beautiful, aloof facade. Their enemies were stronger than they were prepared to face. She didn’t know if Cloudhawk felt the danger, if he knew that they were in over their heads.
But however dire their chances, giving up wasn’t in Selene’s nature. She might not be able to stop the invasion, but she could slow them down as much as possible. Her forces were no threat to the gods, but that didn’t mean they were useless.
The sound of shattered glass. Selene watched as the humming black orb forced its way through the barrier. Like a giant buckshot it was embedded halfway through. As the black hole breached the shield it also swallowed up all the surrounding energy, preventing the barrier from repairing and growing in size.
“Stop them!”
Selene would not lead from the back. She spurred Anima into action and the two charged forward. Silver light radiated as her right eye sparked to life. Surveying the milieu, she knew that if the orb was allowed to keep growing it would be unstoppable. At that point thousands of divine soldiers would pour through.
Their enemies were too strong. Even with the best fighters available to her, Selene’s unit could only slow the inevitable. How long? She feared that against several thousand soldiers, the answer was not very long.
“Look out! This is one of the Abyssal God’s tricks!” Autumn shouted her warning, racing up to Selene’s side astride a dragon. Her crystal flute was already at her lips filling the air with flows of energy.
A woman in white upon her white beast. Another in green, carried by a green dragon. They were as beautiful and striking as they were inspiring.
Frost de Winter’s face turned hard. Mental power flooded into Ashfall, it’s fierce edge keen enough to cut space. Phoenix was already in the air among a storm of flames. She raced toward the orb.
Pelagius, Gorman, Phain, Bruno… these men wielded power equal to a Supreme, strong enough that even the gods dare not underestimate them. After all, these were some of the strongest fighters of the human race.
From behind, Hellflower was working with the Cerebroid to control their robots. Thousands of them broke away from the free-for-all combat and turned their laser weapons onto the orb. Streaks of sizzling red came crashing down with lethal power.
If they could force the black hole to collapse, they could delay the invasion!
The pitch-black orb was not a true black hole. Under the sudden and intense assault it grew unstable, even showing signs of imminent collapse. From the other side of the barrier, the gods of course saw this happening.
The Abyssal God threw itself forward into the heart of the orb. An even more intense gravitation field spread forth, swallowing up all the lasers. With the gods support the orb stabilized and continued to grow.
From within the darkness, the Abyssal God extended a hand, or more specifically a finger.
Selene’s pupil shrank when she saw what was to come. “Retreat!” she yelled.
The words barely left her lips before a storm of catastrophic energy erupted from the god’s finger! It was all the power of a nuclear bomb condensed into a beam. Everything in its path evaporated. The human attackers scrambled to safety and nearly half of their war droids and Eternals were lost in an instant.
Despite their strength, despite the Eye of Time giving them foresight, they were being forced back like they were children. Selene had saved them from instant destruction, but the close brush with death inspired fear in her soldiers.
“Well that was a dramatic demonstration!” Hellflower was weaker than her compatriots, and so remained in the back with her shields prepared. The moment that storm of energy was released she’d been blown away like a leaf in a hurricane. Picking herself up off the ground, she was bleeding from several wounds. “How much energy is in that thing?”
With one finger, the Abyssal God had forced them all back. It now stepped out of the orb on the other side of the boundary, surrounded by rippling flows of space-time as gravity went haywire.
This was trouble – it had passed through their shield!
The Abyssal God’s towering, blazing form now stood before them. Everyone felt the pressure crushing them, making it hard to breathe. What they were facing wasn’t a living thing – it was an agent of destruction. Like the black hole it summoned, this monster was here to devour everything.
It was a strange, contradictory sense.
But they didn’t dwell on it. Selene, Autumn, Frost and Phoenix threw themselves at the Marshal. Two dazzling streaks of sword light, the biting thrust of a spear, and vaporizing fires all fell upon the god in unison.
“Trivial insects!”
The Abyssal God didn’t move a muscle, taking the attacks without fear. The streaks of white and green from its enemies twisted as they drew near. The fires were flung to the aside and Frost’s spear was deflected.
Four threads of varying energy gathered together in the Marshal’s palm. At first the coalescing power was the size of a cow, but very quickly shrank to the size of a ping-pong ball.
“What the hell?” Phoenix growled. She was confident in her powers and thought she could stand toe to toe with the Marshal, but she was wrong. The power of the four who attacked had been stolen by their foe and collected into this ball.
The Abyssal God addressed the humans with a flat, emotionless tone. “You can have it back.”
It flicked it’s finger. The small ball of energy darted out and burst, enveloping the four humans. They all protected themselves, but the blow knocked them all at least fifty meters away and caused some damage.
Selene grit her teeth. “So this is the power of a Marshal...”
The Abyssal God was aloof and domineering, almost like another God King. It enjoyed elevated status among its species and for good reason. The power at its literal fingertips was terrifying to behold.
By what they could tell, their enemy’s power was in manipulating energy. It was able to devour all manner of energy, condense it, release it as an attack, or who knows what other kind of transformation. The god was much stronger than Selene and the others, their attacks caused it no harm. Instead it snatched their attacks from the air and turned their own power against the humans.
Selene speculated that if they wanted to injure the god, their power had to exceed a certain threshold. How much the god is able to steal energy was determined by its mental power, as everything was. There was no denying it was powerful, but there were always limits. Perhaps together they could overwhelm their foe.
But it was easier said than done. This was a stronger god than they’d ever encountered before! The Abyssal God was as powerful as the greatest elders of the demons. Any demon less than the Second Seal was no match.
Raising its hands anew, the Abyssal God splayed its fingers. Raging energy was released, but tightly controlled by the god’s will. The explosion roared in place, squeezing into an ever shrinking space until a small blazing star hovered before the Abyssal God.
And indeed it was a star. While only roughly the size of a soccer ball, solar eruptions danced across its surface and the raging energy was like a barely contained supernova.
Galvanizing the hundreds of attacks it swallowed before the invasion, the Abyssal God summoned a power these humans could hardly fathom. A small portion of it created this tiny star, which once released would flatten everything in the surrounding area.
A bomb, waiting to detonate at the whim of their enemy. Escape was not possible.
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