The Lone Wanderer

Percy’s guess was all but confirmed when he spotted something that he knew to have been destroyed a long time ago.

A few planets were orbiting the massive sun, looking like pebbles scattered around a large hill. Percy only noticed them due to the Broodmother’s memory guiding his attention. Only one of those worlds appeared to have produced life – at least judging by the vibrant blue and green hues painting its atmosphere.

More importantly, a strange object pierced the veil of clouds near the equator of the planet, standing far taller than the tallest mountains despite not being one.

From where the Broodmother was floating, the object barely looked larger than a speck of dust, though Percy could just about make out its shape and colour. It was the bustling canopy of an enormous tree, bathing its world in a gentle glow that seemed to greatly contribute to the atmosphere’s colourful gradient.

‘Is that the original World Tree?’

Without warning, dozens of enormous spells manifested around the planet, hurled in seemingly random directions. They reminded Percy of the apocalyptic battle that Rom’s deities had waged against the space bandits on the way to the auction, yet the scale was completely different.

Each attack looked powerful enough to boil oceans or split entire continents in half if aimed at the planet. The spells weren’t fuelled by common, or even composite affinities, but elements that Percy struggled to name. Enormous cyclones of steam and ice collided against waves of almost liquid plasma. Reality itself cracked wherever opposing forces touched, sending tremors that reverberated through space and stretched to the farthest reaches of the solar system.

‘This must be the Broodmother’s memory of the day the tree fell,’ Percy concluded. ‘Is every one of those deities near the peak of the Elemental Acquisition stage?’

Based on the sheer variety of spells flung before him, he estimated that there were at least forty extremely powerful gods and goddesses involved – possibly including the very leaders of the Moirai and the Void Hand. Was Ishkuria also among them?

The deities were too small to make out from this distance, making it impossible to actually follow the battle. The only constant was how mindful every combatant seemed to be of striking the planet by accident. Their magic was powerful enough to cause serious damage, which nobody was willing to tolerate. After all, they were all here to claim the magical plant firmly embedded on the world’s surface.

The apocalyptic battle continued in an almost-civilized manner for a while longer, though somebody eventually made a mistake, hitting what Percy assumed to be the planet’s north pole with a spell hot enough to instantly vaporize its ice cap. Thankfully, it had been one of the smaller attacks – relatively speaking – so it had done little more than scar the surface of the planet.

Unfortunately, that seemed to be enough to awaken something slumbering deep within the world.

A soundless roar echoed inside Percy’s non-existent ears, rattling everything in sight. The nameless planet – or at least the world the name of which he wasn’t privy to – cracked open like an egg, rapidly unfolding into a more intricate shape. Through the version of Soul Vision that the Spectral Broodmother obviously had access to, Percy watched as faint traces of silver scattered throughout the planet’s volume shot toward another.

The light had originally been dimmer than even a plant’s soul – so dim that Percy would have struggled to make it out from the background blackness that permeated the universe. He’d occasionally registered this barely perceptible hue while visiting inhabited planets, but he had always chalked it up to the collective spirituality of the microorganisms that lived on even the most barren of worlds.

That assumption flew out of the window when the silver colour ignited at a scale and intensity that put even the soul of a Concept mage to shame.

At the end of its transformation, the former planet resembled an almost humanoid golem of a species that Percy didn’t recognize. It looked a bit like an Atlantean, complete with webbed digits and gills at the sides of its necks, though it had three heads lined with enormous, fanged jaws that stretched all the way to its multi-pronged ears. Oh, and it was also about fifty million times bigger than a person.

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‘What the fuck is that thing?!’ Micky blurted out through their connection.

‘I don’t know, but I have a feeling it’s the reason gods don’t dare to set foot on foreign planets,’ Percy replied, figuratively shuddering as he imagined Remior undergoing a similar shift. He doubted his people – even the Violets and Whites among them – would survive it.

The surface of the planet had been entirely twisted by its abrupt awakening, splitting continents and leaking vast quantities of seawater into the void. Percy could only hope that there was no intelligent life living on that world, as he could hardly fathom how terrifying this would look from the perspective of its poor residents.

Seemingly unconcerned about the plight of the microbes desperately clinging to its skin, the colossal golem promptly located the perpetrators of the disturbance. Plumes of smoke spilled out from the gaps between its mountain-shredding fangs, scattering in the darkness as it snarled at the tiny deities with barely-concealed fury.

The war between the peak factions slowed down to a crawl as a third party joined the chaos. Opening its massive jaws, the living planet vomited out more magma than its body could possibly contain, flooding the entire battlefield.

Judging by the dozens of tiny bubbles of magic that the scorching liquid failed to pop, the gods had defended themselves against the world-ending attack without much difficulty.

Enraged further, the colossal being sprouted several pairs of clawed hands, grabbing at its transgressors and trying to crush them like flies. The dust-sized deities resumed flinging enormous spells against one another, almost ignoring the hulking abomination that was trying to slaughter them all.

‘I suppose that thing would be more of a threat to a Twentieth Circle deity than a Twenty-Third – or whatever these people are…’ Percy reasoned.

Based on the size of their spells, a single god at the peak of Elemental Acquisition could probably destroy a planet like that one by themselves if they didn’t care about wasting its resources.

Sadly for the warring deities, they were still quite interested in this particular golem’s treasures – namely the World Tree that now jutted out of one of the abomination’s six eye sockets like a cute sapling.

As careful as the gods were, damaging the planet became unavoidable as the mindless golem chased them around the solar system, stubbornly placing its colossal body in the trajectory of their spells.

The battle raged on for what felt like hours, with enormous blasts shattering the golem’s limbs and peeling off huge chunks of stone seemingly every handful of minutes. The frenzied planet was able to regenerate its body to an extent, but the rate at which it recovered its mana and regrew its rocky flesh ultimately paled in comparison to the speed by which the stray projectiles destroyed it.

With every attack that landed on its monolithic frame, the monster’s movements slowed and its expression dulled. The irony of watching the very world that housed the Elemental Source of the life affinity slowly die wasn’t lost on Percy.

Knowing the outcome of the battle, he wanted to rush to the battlefield, grab the greedy deities by the collar and shake them to their senses. Then again, they probably didn’t need a mortal as young as him to explain where this was going – only a fool would fail to see it. The peak factions had simply decided at some point that they would rather destroy the World Tree than let it fall into the clutches of their rivals.

So destroy it they did.

One of the larger spells eventually struck the wrong side of the golem’s middle face, splitting its head into three pieces and melting its surface into a deformed mess. The smallest chunk drifted away while the one that housed the tree hung loosely off the segment still connected to the rest of the anthropomorphic planet.

The Elemental Source itself was clearly tougher than the ground it was planted on, so its jade-coloured trunk didn’t get completely pulverized by the enormous explosion. However, its crown still got blown off, its once-lush canopy burnt to cinders as its scorched branches scattered in the darkness of space.

Percy’s heart would have clenched if he had one. Technically, the severed trunk of the World Tree wasn’t dead yet – it was probably brimming with enough vitality to eventually regain its former glory – if only these assholes would leave it alone for a couple of centuries.

Sadly, he knew that it wasn’t meant to be.

This was probably the moment when the peak factions would end the senseless fighting and chop what was left of the plant into thirteen first-generation saplings to split among themselves. The arrogant divine beasts of Sixiang would also supposedly arrive right about now, to demand their own share of the spoils despite having not participated in the war at all.

The arrival of the divine beasts was probably the one good thing that might come out of this horrific memory. Percy wouldn’t mind an opportunity to see the fabled dragons and phoenixes that had spawned myths and legends across the universe with his own two eyes – or whatever eyes he had borrowed from the Spectral Broodmother.

Unfortunately, he was denied even that singular uplifting possibility when the vision abruptly ended, sending him back to Melodia.

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