The Greatest Sin [Progression Fantasy][Kingdom Building]
Chapter 294 – These Are (Not) Your Skies

Fortia stepped forwards to block Allasaria’s path, arms crossed and head tilted back so that she would be looking down her nose at the taller Goddess of Light. “I’ve only now just realised what you want to do.”

“I want to open the Gates, Fortia.” Allasaria said flatly. “There is no other way.”

“You would be consigning Arda to another five centuries of vassalage.”

“I would be consigning Arda to a tomorrow.”

“So you’re just going to give up and call for help immediately?” Fortia asked but Allasaria did not play in her games. She counterattacked with her own scathing response.

“Why aren’t you fighting Neneria right now?” Allasaria said coldly and Fortia felt a chill run down her spine. That was a question she didn’t want the answer for. It wasn’t that she was afraid of death, but Neneria? Who would voluntarily risk their eternal soul? And just as Allasaria asked the question, Allasaria gave the answer:

“Coward.”

Anassa stared at the sorcerers as they came crashing down upon the enemy forces once again. They had given her the needed respite from micromanaging several dozen individual copies of herself and Anassa felt her energies start to recover slowly, although it wasn’t at any great speed. The ethereal energies rushing into Neneria had grown so wide that now two Anassas were needed to maintain the protective barrier around the woman which did not help either. She wasn’t rested by any definition of the word, but her sweating had died down and she wasn’t panting like a damn dog anymore.

Maybe it was the break from exertion or maybe it was that nostalgic satisfaction at seeing the sorcerers she had trained herself come to her aid. They had launched themselves out of the two Raptor jets and they had descended upon the White Pantheon forces like an avalanche. They painted sorcery onto reality like true artists, utterly decimating the army surrounding them. Anassa did everything she could to catch her breath on the break, even as Fer and Maisara still duelled on the ground.

And then, midway through the night, when the sorcerers pulled back behind Anassa’s crimson and opaque barrier to shield themselves from the sporadic potshots taken by men obscured by the dark, Lyca flew up to Anassa. The Goddess of Sorcery stared down at the… well, she supposed he was a man now and not a boy anymore. He wore the classic black uniform of Imperial Sorcerers, although Lyca had dropped his coat to the ground and undone most of the buttons on his shirt. If they weren’t in a battle, Anassa would have taken him to the beating fields. But they were in a battle, and the man was pulling his weight. He pulled out a small metal tube, small enough to just about fit in his palm and looking like a tub of mints, from his pocket. “Goddess Kassandora told me to bring you this once night fell.” He said shyly. “It’s…” He trailed off, and Anassa realised how quickly he was talking. “Well, it’s my fault, I’ll take responsibility but in the battle, I got to assisting the others early. My apologies, my fault entirely, for not bringing it sooner. I should have and I’ll make sure to follow orders immediately next time.”

“What is it?” Anassa asked as she took the small tube and looked at the packaging: MisseM. Crimson eyes went from the packaging to Lyca. The man, with his dark hair and unshaven beginnings of a beard, launched into an explanation immediately.

“I have no clue.” Lyca said it so honestly that Anassa could believe him. A set of artillery shells exploding against Anassa’s shield, that another Anassa supplied with power, silenced them for a moment. Lyca continued the moment the sound passed, the pupils of his eyes wide. “But Goddess Kassandora told me to tell you that if you get tired, to take one. She said it should take about twenty to thirty minutes to kick in but from our experience, it’s thirty to fifty.” Anassa stared at the little packet of MisseMs.

“And Fer doesn’t need any?” She asked.

“Apparently, from what I’ve heard, Goddess Fer does not get tired.” Lyca responded immediately. Anassa looked at him, he was sweating even though the night wasn’t particularly warm, but he seemed sharp. His responses made sense, and they were instant too.

“I assume everyone has taken one?” Anassa asked.

“All of us. Ela felt a bit sick but I felt fine. I don’t know about Fleur and Ed, but my team is fine.” Anassa sighed and put the packet of MisseMs into the pocket of her dress. She wasn’t tired enough yet to need these supplements or whatever they were. “You’re dismissed.” She waved Lyca off and watched the man dart back to his team.

Apart from receiving the MisseMs, the night went by without incident. They lost a few men to bullets that burst out of the darkness, but her sorcerers truly did not seem to get tired. No matter how long the night went, they moved as if they had just arrived to relieve Anassa and Fer. The Goddess of Sorcery fondled the packet in her pocket as she watched them. Frankly, apart from the sweating, the red cheeks and the wide eyes, they were sharper, they were faster and they were obviously more imaginative. The only critique Anassa could possibly give against them was the fact that every now and then, one of the sorcerers would fire a beam of sorcery either into the vacant air or the desolate ground. It was a slow grind, but once the standstill took-over and the battle lines formalized, then neither could the untiring sorcerers push out against the masses of lone soldiers submerged into the darkness of night, nor could the soldiers push through Anassa’s shield.

And then, dawn came.

And just as Fer had said: Dusk, Dawn & Dawn, Kassandora had not disappointed. Dawn came and with dawn, Kassandora’s air force crested the horizon. Silhouetted by the sun, they were like black arrowheads fired from an ocean away. Anassa let out a relaxed breath as she felt the din of artillery slow down slightly. No doubt whoever the commander was on the other side was reorganizing the forces and trying to pull the heavy guns away from the planes. Maybe spread them out.

How much success that commander had, Anassa did not know. It couldn’t have been too much though, Kassandora’s black planes started to swerve and pull away, each one heading in its own direction. The large planes, with huge wings that had several engines each fixed to them, broke their column. The bomber at the front slowed down, the bombers in the rear sped up and they made a row of planes flying side by side.

And ahead of them, the jets pulled ahead. Half shot off towards the ground, while the other half sped up towards the white-painted UNN planes that were still trying to do strafing runs against Anassa and her sorcerers. Anassa had seen the planes engage each other in the Invasion of Kirinyaa, she had seen them dance in the air, she had seen them pirouette and spin in the air, she had seen somersaults and rings.

And now, the planes did nothing of the manner. The screaming of jet engines was overpowered by the howling of missiles. Anassa saw the tubes mounted underneath the wings of each plane, two on each wing. The planes slowed down for a moment, those missiles released. They had a mere instant of free-fall, and then their own engines engaged.

Like brushes painting colourless white streaks of smoke in the air, they dashed across the cloudless blue sky of dawn. They chased like rabid wolves. Howling and wild, with sharp bends and turns that would have ripped a human apart. Some of the White Pantheon jets ran from them, some of accelerated to speeds that would have escaped even from Anassa, and some attempted their own dance of evasion.

And the first missile hit. Anassa blinked in awe at the fireball. At the flaming wreckage falling down from the sky and towards the ground. At the hundreds of other pale trails in the sky.

The second missile hit.

The third.

Number four and number ten.

Twenty fireballs in the sky.

Forty.

Sixty.

And the UNN’s air force, which had been such a headache for Anassa just moments ago, now was gone. Eviscerated and blown apart by homing missile. A squadron of planes turned to circle north, they moved like agile sparrows, turning and twisting in the air and flying hire to avoid the guns that were shooting at them from the ground.

Anassa was about to give her own sorcerers an order to support when she saw the row of huge bombers. With four engines each and a massive wingspan, they were closer to flying boats with wings rather than planes. Anassa squinted as she looked up and she saw bomb-bays slowly open on the undersides of those planes.

And she watched the bombs start to drop in sequence. One by one, each bomber must have released more than a hundred of them. They whistled through the air as they tumbled down. Whistled like high-pitched flutes being played with nothing but utter fury. And then those whistles were smashed apart. One explosion marked the beginning of the bombing.

And the rest of the bombs followed in a line. As if a carpet of napalm jelly and orange fire was being unfurled on the muddy ground around them. Anassa watched from the surface, where she saw the flames grow past the height of a house as they roared upwards. And another Anassa saw it from the air, where she watched a rug of flame be rolled out onto the ground. The fires cracked, they pushed up hot air, and then they hid themselves behind the filthy black smoke of napalm.

To the south, to the west and to the north. The huge bombers operating in packs of seven each, slowly started to angle away and return east, to the ocean. Anassa watched in awe, she even let the main barrier that shielded her, the sorcerers, Fer and Maisara from the artillery above die for a moment. Nothing was firing right now anyway.

Oh. Maisara. Anassa almost forgot about the Goddess of Order fighting against her sister. She looked down at the ground and rolled her eyes. Both Fer and Maisara stood some distance away from each other, and both were watching the flames with gazes full of awe. Anassa gave herself a wicked smile. Fer would not like her kill being stolen, but frankly, if she didn’t want her prey to be hunted right from under her nose, then she should not give breaks like this.

Anassa snapped her fingers.

Lightning flashed. It arced sideways across the sky, a great spiderweb of silver string that made the light blue sky of daytime seem almost dull in comparison.

Anassa snapped her fingers and instead of attacking Maisara, a barrier once again materialised around her. Tighter, more condensed, Anassa kept her hands outstretched as she made sure to include her sorcerers in the protective bubble.

It had gone up at the very last moment possible, the next instant, Anassa felt electricity impact her barrier and spread out as it diffused out onto the crimson sorcery. From the angle it had hit her shield, she knew that if she was even a few heartbeats slower, that blast of lightning would have struck her square on.

A dozen KAF planes started falling to the ground. Unlike the UNN planes hit by missiles, these did not explode nor did they make any magnificent plume of tarry smoke on the way down. Instead, they simply fell like any other great chunk of metal. A few of the pilots managed to activate the ejection seats, the glass casing of their cockpit hissed, burst, and the pilots themselves shot from their doomed cocoons.

And as the jets of KAF started slamming into the ground, each one exploding into a searing fireball, that Anassa saw where the lightning had come from. She had worked it out before, but the visual was a confirmation that turned solid gut instinct into stable certainty.

Zerus, Sceo, and Alkom descended from the sky. The God of Lightning in a blinding, pure white shawl hemmed with blue. The old look of Great War battle dress, not the new White Pantheon shawl. Alkom wore a shawl of orange and gold, Sceo a complex dress of blues that looked like velvets weaved by the winds.

Sceo guided the wind with her hands. A single finger spinning by her side started to make the dust a mile below her spin in the same fashion, as if it was the beginnings of a tornado.

Alkom raised his arms, his orange shawl turned red as it was bathed in the searing heat of the sun. A ball of fire rose out of his palms and started to expand above his head. It was only the size of a dog right now, but Anassa had seen him during the Great War, the man could call forth a star in a matter of minutes.

And Zerus, in his white and pale blue. His eyes crackled with lightning and electricity danced across his fingertips. He floated in the air as clouds started to condense around his back. They boomed with ear-splitting thunder, they turned dark, and they sent cascades of lightning forking down to the ground.

Zerus’ voice boomed so loudly it made the thunder into a mere supportive choir. “These are not your skies.”

Neneria closed her eyes and took heavy breathes. She did not bother looking outside anymore, this soul of storms around her had become difficult to manage. It wasn’t merely a case of leading all the souls to her now, it was a case of making sure they managed to find sanctuary within her heart quickly enough as to not block the entry for others.

Out of her own sheer curiosity, she counted how many the Legion had drafted over the past three days:

Twenty-three million.