Tree of Aeons

320. Act of God

Year 286

Darkgard, the demon world connected to the Dwarven World of Delvegard

The world of Darkgard was home to a demon mother nursing a growing demon king within its planetary core, and in a decade or two, she would launch an attack on Delvegard. 

“There are two things we can do.” Alka said. “One, we attack the demons directly, here on Darkgard and potentially trigger a demonic comet. The demonic comet is an extremely powerful countermeasure and it will require the entire Order to intervene. As it is, even with the full might of all of us dwarves here, it is unlikely that there will be a successful attack on the demon king at the current point, so that leads us to option two.”

The crowd listened.

“We wait for the demon king to attack Delvegard. There is a risk of some collateral damage in the second option. In the past, our preferred strategy was to rig the landing point with explosives and weaken the demon king so much that the high leveled Order operatives could crush the demon king. We can reclaim the demon world fairly safely after that.”

The dwarves of Darkgard had built, within a year, a large sprawling city filled with fortifications, and here, their gigantic war machines were used to combat the demons. 

Save for the new dwarven city, which was now named Darkgard’s Stand, the demon world remained almost entirely demon-controlled. Hordes of demonic spawning pools throughout the wider region would release thousands of demons that charged towards their new city walls.

In response, Darkgard’s Stand had three layers of walls, made from the local region’s stone and minerals. 

But interestingly, the dwarves themselves realized Darkgard wasn’t always a demon world. There were places, purged from the demonic blight, that contained old, ancient structures that were probably a few hundred years old. 

There was a time when there were humans here. That was all gone now. The dwarves found these ancient civilizations to be fascinating and called them the Old Darkgardians.

For now, the Order existed as the final ‘security’ measure for the dwarves who wanted to prove themselves in this outpost. The defensive battles were a great outlet for their energy. 

***

We’d planned a few years ago to deploy my nodes across the peripheral worlds, but as of now, we had not yet deployed our node treeson the world of Triotuga, Caval, Twinspace, and the world of the Floating Islands.

The delay was mainly one of the finer details.

We were not exactly sure where the best place to deploy on Caval was and who was the most friendly to us as visitors. Just as Ebon and Edna had realized, the world’s value to us was really in the chance to experiment with heroes. The knights and the hero-swords were a fairly limited value to us on their own, outside of the concept of a growing weapon. 

I told Stella that I intended to allow Edna the chance to experiment, and she refused to talk to me for a month. But in the end, Stella demanded some safeguards to protect the future hero and a chance to mingle with the rest of the heroes. Stella and Edna took some time to visit the world of Caval. Stella’s void domain wasn’t a particular fan of the star mana used by the various hero swords of Caval, but she wanted to see it anyway, just to know why Edna wanted to experiment with it. 

The visit went smoothly and Stella begrudgingly understood the merits of a growing weapon, but doubted the [system] would allow a weapon to exceed its original owner’s level. I personally doubted that too. 

For Twinspace, it was about a great cleansing spectacle, so the node was put off until there was more development on the demonic continent. 

For Triotuga, we had some operatives on the ground building up our relationships, but we were likely to base ourselves on the human side. Triotuga was a borderline world, and we wanted to experiment on the boarfolk’s demonic connections. It was a chance for me to test the extent of the faerie’s control over my trees. 

For Terras, we also had some guys infiltrating the three major island empires. 

After the defeat of the demon king on Mountainworld, we redirected our attention to the coming demon kings of Caval, Triotuga, and of course Twinspace. 

In the background, Hoyia was working on her plan of how to make the battle for Twinspace’s demon king a spectacle. She had roped in Ebon and a few other level 140s to help. She wanted to make it a fully televised event. The magical ability to [scry] and [farsight] was well known, though they were often interrupted by the magical disruptions by a powerhouse like the demon king. 

So in the past, viewing demonic battles was often choppy and the image wasn’t clear. Mages who saw the demonic battles also found it hard to reliably share what they saw with their peers, though there had been good advancements in the past few decades such as some unique [shared vision] types of spells. 

The challenges didn’t stop the matriarch, and so at her funding, there was a dedicated group of mages researching ways to properly and stably [scry] a demon king battle, even while the huge amount of magical energies interfered with it.

In a strange twist of our old world’s influence on this magical world, the initial versions were pretty much magically insulated mechanisms with really long insulated cables, which were then linked to a transmission artifact located far away from the actual battle. There were magical formations already able to convert light and vision into magical recordings, and they had been around for a while.

But there had been no real push to create interference-resistant scrying tools until Hoyia came along, which would then feed into a great spectacle on how the Temple of Aeon conquered the demon continent and freed it from the menace that was the demon king.

All in the name of propaganda. 

I wondered if Hoyia gained a domain some day, could it be the domain of propaganda? Or domain of misinformation? A cultural domain of some sort?

It was an interesting thing to think about.

I looked at the rest of my Valthorns, and wondered which sort of domain they would get.

Of all of my Valthorns, Ebon stood out as the oldest of them and I wondered whether the system would be so cruel as to give him one that reflected his long journey to a domain. On some level, I didn’t understand why the [system] didn’t give him a domain. In terms of feats and achievements, he had tried as much as anyone else. 

Then there were those who were hot on his heels. Hoyia, Blackthorn, and a few other Order operatives were all in the level 140s. 

On our pantheon front, we continued to grapple with one big gap, maybe two. The first of these gaps was a lack of domain-level mages and wizards. As of now, Blackthorn and a few other void archmages were up there. Magic remained a realm where we still lacked that bit of extra firepower.

Perhaps, magic was just too overpowered? 

I sometimes tried to imagine Stella at really high levels with her control over void magic. Maybe she could destroy or reroute the demonic paths through the void sea. If she could do something like that, it would truly change how we thought about fighting demons. 

Even in spite of years, decades of experiments into manipulating the void sea, we had not been able to redirect the Cometworld. Maybe it took someone at the  level 250s to do so. 

The second big gap was one about crafters. The heroes had their [hero forge], but for the rest of us, our crafting abilities remained fairly limited outside of Alka. Alka’s crystal-explosive focus did constrain the full scope of crafting. We had high leveled crafters who were now taking more combat roles, in order to get them closer to the domains, but progress was mixed. 

There were a few of them who reached level 140s, but I wondered whether this was the right thing to do. Should we really get crafters to level 150 by getting them to fight demon kings? Did that lead to more combat-type abilities? If it did, it wouldn’t really solve our need for more super-crafters.

Then, there was the problem with reclaiming the demon worlds such as Darkgard. We needed a way to quickly rejuvenate the reclaimed worlds so that they could withstand a return of the demons

Like Treehome and Tropicsworld, I’d used the large population, resources, and supplies of Treehome and many other worlds to repopulate Tropicsworld, but even so the weaker ambient levels of mana meant the world itself wasn’t as prosperous as the rest.

Was there a way to reset this quickly?

***

“Reclaiming the demon worlds?” Lumoof returned to Satrya briefly to speak to Hawa once more. “It’s not worth it. Those demon worlds have been stripped of most of its accumulated reserves and energy. Replenishing it would take centuries. In that time it’ll have to defend against tens of demon kings. Unless it was freshly conquered, and its world core’s magical reserves are still fairly healthy, it is not worth it.”

The odds of a world bouncing back from demonic invasion was slim. 

***

Of the worlds I had a presence in, Tropicsworld really wasn’t doing so bad. It probably had 30, no, almost 40% of its old strength, and I wondered whether there was a way I could independently accelerate this recovery. In some ways, I believeed it was already much faster than it originally was. 

I am a tree. We are a force of nature, and healing broken lands should be well within my powers.

Could I amplify this further so that the captured cores could heal faster? 

Out of instinct, I reached back deep into the various worlds I was in, like Mountainworld, Treehome, and Threeworlds and tried to call to their Will of the World. 

I wondered, if the strong worlds could reinforce the weak worlds? Could the Will of the Worlds share their energy.

At first, there was nothing.

But I tried anyway. 

There must be a way to help the damaged worlds recover so that they are strong enough. So that they don’t immediately collapse to the demons in a case of re-invasion. 

I thought of the challenge as a medical matter, that these damaged worlds were chronically ill patients, and I wanted to use transplanted blood and organs from healthy individuals to shore up these chronically ill individuals and speed up their recovery. 

I shared those thoughts to the Cores I was in touch with.

Nothing.

It was not that they were not listening. The Will of the World always listened, and they did so passively through the worlds’ many mechanisms. 

Maybe, just like me, they needed time. 

***

Year 287

The Treasure Ships landed on Port Tarfa, and the stores filled with gems and metals were hauled off the boats. As Hoyia predicted, the crowds gawked at the sheer wealth and resources of the stones, and the entire continent watched. 

In their eyes was a mix of faith,  validated belief, and greed. 

The world was a dried field of grass, and she had brought oil and matches. “Behold, my fellow believers. The proof of the wealth that was denied to us all, trapped here in the old world because of your old beliefs! The proof that there is great opportunity in the Promised Land. In Aeon’s vision, the demonic continent is a promised land, filled with metals, gold, silver, and gems, and fertile land!” 

And the mistress of propaganda was soon back at the affair of fanning the flames of zealotry. 

“Now to prove that it is so bountiful that even this chunk of rock is worthless, come!” Hoyia had the rocks filled with unpolished gems to their temple and placed them outside. She touched it, and with the powers of her familiar, the giant gem-studded rock was shattered into thousands of smaller rocks. “Believers, those who believed and contributed to the expeditionary fund, over the next few weeks, you will be summoned to receive some of these rocks as a token of your faith.”

The same day, many nations  independently started their own demonic continent program. Greed was such a potent resource, perhaps more so in a world of scarcity. 

***

On Expedition’s Landing, the native zealots were able to expand further and deeper into the demonic territory, and they began to encounter stronger resistance from the demon champions that prowl the land.

This continent, the ‘New World’, was under the influence of demonic rule for centuries, and it seemed that the demon king had been around for a few decades. The truth of the matter was shrouded in poor record keeping and lack of a centralized way of checking when the last demon king had defeated the heroes. 

It didn’t help that not everyone got the ‘announcement’ when a demon king arrived, and for the existing priests of Hawa and whatever gods that would receive some notification, they were not really incentivized to record it or share that knowledge with others. 

Ebon, like many other of his peers, was here. This was the last of the demon kings among the peripheral worlds, for now. 

On some level, I wondered, perhaps, there was a narrative element to the [system]. That each of us domain holders represented a story. I looked back at my own journey and realized my rise to a domain was probably quite stratospheric. 

Was Ebon, therefore, missing the story that would elevate him to a domain? A tale of his journey that would cement him as one of us? In other words, if we looked into the ancient histories and myths of our world, could it be that Ebon needed a unique myth? For Edna, Johann, Roon, Kafa and Ezar, I wasn’t quite sure why they had relatively easier paths compared to Ebon. Edna, as a knight. Roon, as a sniper. Johann as a ranger. Alka as an explosives alchemist. Kafa’s claws, and Ezar’s fists. 

Is it because they had a clear focus? 

No. As Patreeck and my artificial minds digested the data, it didn’t seem like they had a particular focus, nor did they seem better designed. I could sense Ebon’s inner turmoil. With each battle, it still shook him. He was unsure whether he would make it. 

It was a familiar feeling. Both Roon and Johann had similar feelings when they were struggling to cross that final barrier. 

Ebon traveled alone, cloaked in protections to spy on the demon king. The demon king was small, relative to the other demon kings we’ve seen, but it thrummed with power. It was about the size of a beetletruck that we used for logistics and held two large perpetually burning axes on its two arms and had two black horns from its head.

It was, in other words, the quintessential demon lord, without the demonic wings. 

The demon king on the cursed continent of Twinspace seemed to have noticed Ebon’s presence.

“It sensed me.” Ebon said, as we spoke through my spiritual familiar. “And yet it does nothing.”

“It’s waiting for heroes.” One of the theories we had earlier was that the demon kings needed hero-souls to generate sufficient energy for their mining operations toward the core of the world. 

“Lumoof and Edna can take it.” Indeed, it may be on the slightly higher end of the demon kings from its energy signature, but two domain holders could hold it down. “It may suddenly attack us, if it doesn’t like our presence in its space. I should teleport out so that it doesn’t follow me.” 

The demon king was a presence we could sense even from far away, especially to my priests and mages who were attuned to how the demon king warps the presence of magic around itself. 

***

As it turned out, Ebon was right. Hoyia’s plan didn’t go according to plan, because about four months into the demonic continent’s expedition, the demon king began to move.

And it was moving quickly towards Expedition’s Landing.

“What- the demon king is coming our way? What jolted it out of its passivity?” Hoyia said, but tried her best not to reveal her underlying turmoil. “Wait. How much time do we have?”

“A day, maybe less?” The void mages working for her said. The way the demon king emitted void and demonic mana was something we could track. 

She closed her eyes. It was too late to evacuate, and she didn’t want to waste all her efforts. “I suppose things have been going too well for me, hasn’t it?” Hoyia smiled and did her best to put on a brave front. “Well, let’s see what this demon king’s got.” 

She did her best to arrange for the mages to view their battle, with what little preparations they got and readied the rest of the forces for battle.

“My fellow zealots and faithfuls of Aeon.” Hoyia gave a speech as the leader of the Twinspace operations. “It seems that our faith has drawn the envy and anger of the demons, and now, the demon king itself is headed this way!”

That caused an audible gasp throughout the rest of the zealots. Their power levels were far too low to defeat the demon king. 

“But fear not, this is all but the will of the heavens. I have called on Aeon’s warriors to help us, and I too, will take the battlefield with my compatriots.” n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

***

Hoyia stood with the Level 140s who were there with her. Most of them were ready, as well as they could be. But the fight against the demon king on Mountainworld was still fresh in their minds. 

“Go and make a name for yourself, Ebon.” I said. A myth. A legend. Perhaps that was what they needed. 

The demon king’s presence was unmistakable to all those present, and without the domain holders to shield them, the zealots from afar trembled. These were believers who had never faced something as powerful as the demon king. 

Hoyia held my greatstaff in her hands and was first to launch a set of blessings for the rest of her team. The few mages and druids in the team followed soon after, and the battle was on. 

I watched as the Valthorns flung themselves towards the demon king. They were afraid, but they made the leap anyway. In the eyes of zealots, they could not falter now. 

The domain holders were somewhat nearby and watched. 

“A part of me thinks we should intervene.” Edna said. For her, watching her friend Ebon try and try again just worried her. Each time, just like Lausanne, Ebon tried harder. More. Better. “But we shouldn’t. We shouldn’t.”

Edna was trying to convince herself. It was something they all were. They couldn’t steal the fight from those who aspired to join their ranks. They could not rob them of the ladder that they had used to climb to their level. It was hard for each of the domain holders who had friends amongst those who were the level 140s. Like Lumoof, who considered Hoyia a peer, as one of the Decarches. Or Alka, who worked with many of the mages and alchemists present.

They watched them struggle against the might of the demon king. It was too much for them, even if all their equipment and tools gave them protection and shielding. Things that allowed them to tank a strike from a demon king.

The ax of the demon king slammed into Hoyia’s greatstaff and flung the matriarch far away. She slammed into the fairly new wall of Expedition’s Landing. The zealots gasped, but matriarch Hoyia emerged in a cocoon of hardened wooden roots. She lived, even if injured. 

“I am fine!” She roared, defiant. 

Ebon and the rest of the warrior Valthorns launched powerful attacks repeatedly at the demon king, and they dealt some damage. But just like Edna, it was miniscule. Weak. 

Their attacks only lightly injured the demon king, even with all their power together. All their attacks are barely able to overcome the innate regeneration of the demon king. It would take a lot more than this. 

And yet, the demon king somehow sensed or perhaps, was drawn to Hoyia’s greatstaff. It gave chase and tried to hunt her down. 

“Is this the point we step in?” Edna looked. There was too much uncertainty, but Lumoof touched her shoulders and held her back.

“No. Too early.” Lumoof cautioned, but I knew in Lumoof’s heart he steeled himself for a real loss of life. Someone would die, in order for the rest to advance. That was how it was in the past. Maybe it would be the same here. Maybe it’s Hoyia. Maybe it’s Ebon. Maybe it’s the dwarven mage Blackthorn. Maybe it’s the others who he called friends and colleagues. 

Edna shook her head. “You won’t stop me from preventing deaths. I will leap right in there if I feel it.” 

Ebon and the few warriors stepped in and tried to stop the demon king from charging in Hoyia’s direction. Maybe it sensed her weakness. Maybe it was the greatstaff. We don’t know why it chose Hoyia as a target, but the rest of my Valthorns blocked the demon king’s advance.

“No, you are not getting to her.” Ebon said as his weapons tried to chain and hold down the demon king. His sword cracked as he traded blows with the demon king’s burning magical axes. He had gotten quite good at digging deep into his soul for the last dregs of strength and stamina. A part of him grew tired of it all, and he was prepared to let it all go to achieve the next step. 

Lumoof looked at Edna. “It’s hard. I want to step in there as much as you. But they will be those who walk with us, and we must respect their determination to put their lives on the line.”

“I agree and that’s why I am not going to let them die because of it.” Edna said as an army of lesser demons descended on Expedition’s Landing. They were late, after all, these lesser creatures could not move as fast as the demon king. The zealots were not ready, but it didn’t matter. “Guys, do you mind taking out the small fries?”

The four combat-based domain holders, Roon, Johann, Kafa and Ezar naturally understood and moved to deal with the rest of the demons coming their way. The beetle titan, which was nearby, also quickly flew to intercept the demonic forces. With the four and a fleet of flying beetles, the Valthorns could focus their energies on battling the demon king, to the best that they could.

For Lumoof, Edna, and Stella, their eyes were locked on the demon king battling it out with Ebon and the others. 

“It seems to be drawn to Hoyia, for some reason.” Lumoof said as he flipped through his various types of vision. What was the demon king attracted to? Star mana?

We didn’t quite know. Maybe, it was the presence of priests as a holy existence. 

“Ebon’s being just as reckless as Lausanne.” Edna sighed as Ebon stood and blocked the demon king with all his might. He used a range of abilities so that he was slightly larger and increased his heft. 

“It worked for Lausanne.” Lumoof said. “Success becomes an example.”

The zealots were enraptured, as they watched the Valthorns do their best to hold back the demon king. They were mere level 30 to 50 warriors, and the demon king was an existence far above their level. 

Hoyia’s greatstaff glowed as she channeled my power. A weakened version of my roots tried to chain down the demon king. It didn’t hold it down for long, but the fact that the demon king needed to exert effort to break through those roots was a sign of her strength. 

The rest of the Valthorns attacked the demon king and managed to weaken it slightly. 

Hoyia tried her best to bless the rest of her peers and yet. 

A miracle.

The Greatstaff. My greatstaff, made from my soul, drew power from the [system]. 

The power released at this moment was immediately familiar to Lumoof and Edna. “This feels like the holy relics from Satrya.” Lumoof blinked. We’d seen the divine relics of Hawa and knew that they distorted reality in a certain way.

But relics were relics for their ability to summon divinity, and we would later discover it was this sort of relics that allowed the Champions of Hawa to stand up against the demon king invaders. They were, in other words, borrowing power through stored faith. Relics, as it turned out, were weapons of faith. The stronger the world’s faith was, the more powerful they became. 

That meant Hawa’s relics could draw on exceptional power on worlds where Hawa’s beliefs were strong, but on worlds owned by demons, they were no more than special artifacts.

In other words, relics were defensive weapons, mediums of faith of the world they existed in. A shame they didn’t exist in the far flung worlds where the people believed in gods. 

Hoyia, Ebon, and a few other Valthorns at the moment were suddenly possessed by divine fury. Their bodies glowed in a way that was simultaneously my power and not mine. Because it didn’t come from me directly. 

“Well, what do you know?” Edna said. “Hoyia’s decision to request for a relic has some merit after all. You clearly should ask Aeon to make more.”

“This didn’t trigger on Mountainworld.” Lumoof said. “What are the conditions for using divine relics?”

The demon king now suffered real wounds, empowered by divine might. 

“Fervor, zealotry, perhaps? If we compare Twinspace to Mountainworld, the immediate thought that comes to mind is faith. Given the existence of the World Faith System, there clearly is a reason why the old gods chose to move to it.” The knight responded. “I think you need to go visit that old god again to talk about divine relics and how they work. It’s not the power of the item itself, but what it taps into, and we should be able to do that too.”

The blessings of a relic brought the battle to a fairly equal state. The demon king suffered real damage, and incredibly, the damage dealt by divine fervor didn’t heal easily. The demon king couldn’t regenerate its way out of wounds. 

But the power of divinity eventually ran out. 

The relic was only able to sustain the blessing for slightly over an hour, but that was transformative. 

In our eyes, the demon king likely lost half its strength in that hour of pitched combat, while Ebon, Hoyia and the others were drained. 

“They’re spent. I think let’s clean this up.” Lumoof said.

Edna nodded, and the two domain holders walked in to finish the job. The demon king was slain a few moments later, and two new domain holders ascended to join their ranks.