Chapter 102 — The Smile of the Goddess
The smoke dissipated slowly, like a veil of
mourning torn by an invisible hand. It rose in thick, heavy, dark billows, carrying with it residues of glowing ash and fragments of shattered magic. These particles of mana floated in the void, flickering with a final, agonizing brilliance before dying out permanently in the darkness. The air had become unbreathable, saturated with a pungent odor of molten stone, calcined flesh, and energy consumed down to the absolute wire. The silence that fell over the arena was deafening, almost spectral, disturbed only by the distant groaning of marble structures that continued to collapse and by the short, wheezing breaths of the rare survivors cowering in the shadows.
Seth stood alone at the center of this desert of vitrified debris. His body, pushed to its absolute limits, was a portrait of war covered in sweat, soot, blood, and burns caused by the backlash of his own magic. Yet, he remained standing, anchored to the ground. His red flames, now appeased after the tempest, danced softly around his fists like embers, stubbornly refusing to die out. Far off, through the residual mist of sulfur, a familiar silhouette began to take shape.
Reynard.
The young dragon was there, alive. But his entire body conveyed a state of profound shock. Covered in dust and bloody scratches, he breathed in ragged gasps, his chest heaving rapidly as if he had just barely extricated himself from the maw of a monster. His gaze, usually so proud, was riveted on Seth, oscillating between total incredulity, boundless admiration, and an instinctive fear of the monster his friend had become.
"Seth...?" Reynard whispered, his voice trembling, cracked by the dust. He took a step forward, stumbling against the fragment of a pillar.
"Did you... do this...?"
Seth nodded slowly. His muscles screamed in pain, but his face remained as calm as stone. His voice, when he spoke, was hoarse, worn out by the titanic effort:
"Yes. I don't know how to explain it, but at the moment of the strike, I managed to feel your energy over there, despite the dimensional wall separating us. It was like... a thread."
Reynard stood petrified. He passed a trembling hand over his forehead to wipe away a mixture of sweat and soot, realizing the terrifying truth.
"If I hadn't felt the distortion of the attack coming a fraction of a second before impact... I wouldn't have been able to dodge in time. I would have been vaporized. You're truly a lunatic, and I can't believe it. The evolution of your power is becoming completely anomalous... How is this possible? You weren't at this level just a few days ago... or rather, is it the fact that you trained for only two months that made you this strong?"
Seth sketched a tired smile, tinged with bitterness.
"I'm just glad you're okay, Reynard. And to answer your question, honestly, I don't know. But I imagine it's surely due to my training."
Suddenly, a rattle of pure hatred rose from the ashes. Seshomarû, his body horribly burned, his fur calcined and reduced to tatters, was crawling on the ground in human form. Refusing to accept his defeat, he managed to push himself up onto one knee, his eyes completely bloodshot.
"This time... I'll finish both of you... I won't let you leave this place alive...! I am Seshomarû, the strongest man in the world!"
But before he could gather even the slightest spark of magic, a voice rang out. A voice that was simultaneously calm, melodious, and possessed of divine authority.
"That is enough now."
The air froze instantly, turning into an invisible prison of ice. The residual flames died out all at once. The remaining soldiers and surviving spectators held their breath, crushed by an unseen force. Reynard's eyes dilated. Seth stiffened instantly, every fiber of his being tensing under the effect of a monstrous aura that had just manifested. It was an overwhelming presence, infinitely superior to anything they had faced up until now.
Vaeris appeared.
She floated with an unreal grace above the calcined ruins, like a divinity descended from her thousand moons. She was immaculate. Not a single scratch, not a trace of dust or blood sullied her pristine silk dress. Her long white hair waved lazily around her, carried by a mystical wind that her mere presence generated. Her face bore a soft, almost maternal smile, but it held a cold cruelty for anyone who knew how to read her pink eyes.
Seth stared at her without blinking, but with a visceral wariness.
"You finally decided to show yourself... Vaeris."
Reynard, clenching his teeth to keep from buckling under the Goddess's magical pressure, demanded in a tense voice:
"Send us back to our dimension. Now. Your bullshit game is over, we have nothing left to do here."
Vaeris let out a light laugh a crystal-clear, melodious sound, yet deeply vicious, which made the atmosphere shudder.
"Send you back? Already? Oh no, my little ones... I cannot do that. I want far too much to add you to my collection. You would look so lovely in my garden... Two humans from elsewhere, so full of surprises, so gorged with potential... It would be a monumental waste to let you leave so soon."
Reynard placed a hand on the hilt of his still-burning saber, his brow furrowed.
"What collection? What are you talking about?"
Vaeris's smile widened, revealing the glint of a predator amusing herself with her prey. She raised a slender hand with perfect nails. With a simple gesture, she projected a magical illusion into the air: a three-dimensional, luminous map of her dimension.
To understand the situation, one must grasp the exact nature of this dimension. Vaeris's domain is not a linear world, but an immense dimensional sphere that the Goddess has arbitrarily segmented into five distinct realms.
For her own amusement and to rule over her subjects, Vaeris separated these territories with barriers of illusory space and magical portals, making everyone believe they lived in isolated worlds.
By unleashing his ultimate attack, the Infernal Blaze, Seth deployed such a magnitude of power that it overheated the interdimensional channels. The fire literally traveled through the portals, acting like a blown fuse. By burning the connections, Seth instantly annihilated the first and second domains, forcing the physical fusion of the rest of the dimension.
"My dimension was divided into five small realms, connected by portals that I created for my own entertainment," Vaeris explained, giggling as she pointed her finger at the areas of the map that were fading away.
"In reality, all of this is but one and the same dimension, a single toy in my hands. My dear Seth, you have just calcined two of my domains in a single blow... but look closely. There are still three left."
The map vanished in a crackle of purple sparks. The Goddess fixed her heavy gaze upon the two warriors.
"You are going to stay here to play with me. To entertain me. I want to see just how far your limits can stretch... and the exact moment you will finally break."
Seth and Reynard crossed glances. Despite the exhaustion numbing their limbs, despite the pain and the sweat, a synchronous spark ignited in their eyes. Their respective energies the red fire and the dragon's aura began to rumble in unison, awakening for the second round.
Seth narrowed his eyes, his gaze piercing through the geometric distortions of the luminous map that still hovered in their minds. Despite his exhaustion, his brain was working at full capacity, connecting the clues, the laws of magical physics, and the structural anomalies he had noted since their arrival.
"It's a macrocosmic optical illusion," Seth began, his voice growing firmer as the puzzle pieces locked together.
"It's like having a single, unique physical dimension, but engineered in a way that prevents you from seeing the whole thing at once. Your portals don't link distant worlds, Vaeris. They create artificially partitioned spaces, like airtight bubbles inside the same dimension. You and your children can move freely through them because your magical signature natively diffuses through these membranes."
He took a step forward, pointing at the debris of the arena.
"All the dragons of this realm possess this innate capacity for spatial shifting. They pass from one bubble to another effortlessly. And that's where your stroke of genius lies, Vaeris: you made them believe they were traveling across a single, continuous dimension, when that was entirely false. You fragmented their reality to better control them, masking the true geometry of this world from them. It's terrifically ingenious. As for me, I felt from the very start that there was something abnormal... because the density of the ambient energy wasn't uniform."
Vaeris remained silent for a long moment, her pink eyes fixed on the young man. Then, a genuinely impressed, almost melodious laugh escaped her perfect lips.
"You truly are fascinating, Seth. Your analytical genius is absolutely remarkable for a mere mortal. Rare are the humans who manage to decode the secret architecture of my domains so quickly."
Seth shrugged with a detached modesty, though a thin layer of sweat broke out on his temples.
"It's nothing more than the concrete application of the advanced spatial magic and dimensional mathematics courses I read back in Etheria."
Reynard turned his head toward Seth, completely in shock, his mouth half-open.
"Beneath your look of an impulsive idiot... you're not just a strategist, you're a absolute mad genius..."
"That's not all, Reynard," Seth resumed, his gaze locked on the Goddess. "It was when Vaeris spoke from her palace, right before Seshomarû attacked me, that everything clicked. Her voice wasn't just a sound projection spell. I picked up the micro-vibrations of her telekinesis. She was manipulating the air in our bubble from an entirely different dimension, outside the system of the bubble I was in. It was at that key moment that I understood how to force her to show herself: I had to calculate the exact angle of impact so that my blow wouldn't just hit Seshomarû, but pierce the dimensional wall by following the reverse trajectory of her voice."
Vaeris crossed her arms, looking at Seth with a newfound interest, a look that was almost greedy and predatory deep within her eyes.
"An intelligence so sharp coupled with such power... It is all the more a pity. You've badly damaged my son, you know?"
Hearing these words, Seshomarû refused to admit defeat. Crawling through the ashes, his body calcined and panting, he used his last remaining strength to force himself entirely upright. His voice was nothing but a rattle of wounded pride and madness:
"I haven't lost yet! Mother, look at me! I can still fight! I will destroy them!"
Vaeris looked down at him. Her smile became infinitely soft, almost affectionate an attitude of a loving mother that made the scene all the more atrocious. For her eyes remained totally devoid of the slightest spark of humanity.
"It is of no use anymore, my son," she said in a hushed voice.
"The facts are there. You are less strong than Seth."
Seshomarû unleashed a shrill cry, his eyes bloodshot, the veins in his neck on the verge of bursting.
"No! It's impossible! I will win! I am your eldest son! Your blood flows in my veins! I cannot lose to a piece of human garbage!"
The Goddess contemplated him for a long moment, the silence weighing heavily over the destroyed arena. Her smile did not leave her lips for a single second. Then, in a flat, icy tone, the sentence fell with the lightness of a guillotine blade:
"You are of no use to me anymore."
She raised her right hand and, with a gesture of total casualness, snapped her fingers.
Seshomarû's eyes dilated, an absolute terror instantly erasing his rage. He understood immediately what awaited him.
"Mercy, mother... No... Not that... I beg of you!"
"This is the immutable fate I reserve for incompetents of your kind," she murmured.
Before the crown prince could make the slightest movement, his body was seized by magical convulsions.
A blood-red light erupted from his pores, his eyes, and his mouth. In a blinding flash and a sound of spatial vacuum suction, his immense silhouette was literally compressed, volatilized, and vanished from the surface of the ground.
At that exact moment, high up in the firmament of the dimension, a new moon made its appearance. A massive, blood-red moon, shining with a solitary and baneful glow, casting its scarlet rays over the ruins of the arena. Vaeris looked up at the newborn celestial body, letting out a sigh of aesthetic satisfaction.
"You are far more graceful in the form of a moon, Seshomarû. In any case, your existence had become deathly boring."
Seth and Reynard stood petrified, the blood literally freezing in their veins at this cold-blooded sacrifice. A shudder of pure horror ran down the young dragon's spine. Instinctively, their gazes left the Goddess to turn toward the immensity of the celestial dome, where thousands of moons of all sizes and colors shone, motionless and silent.
Vaeris followed their gazes, her smile widening at their mute terror. Her voice resumed its soft and cruel tone:
"You are beginning to understand, aren't you? All the moons that dot this sky... are nothing other than the crystallized souls of everyone I have one day judged to be useless, boring, or obsolete. My husbands, my lovers, my generals, my own children... In total, I have shared my life with more than 4,000 men. They were all my spouses, one by one, down through the ages. But every time the flame of my love died out, or whenever one of them had the audacity to disappoint me or attempt to betray me... I offered him eternity. I turned him into a moon. It is a far more poetic landscape this way, don't you think?"
The silence that followed was heavy as lead. This world was not a divine realm. It was a celestial ossuary. A monumental graveyard where every star was the corpse of someone once close to the Goddess.
Vaeris anchored her pink eyes glistening with a cold joy and divine madness onto the two survivors. She spread her arms slightly, her magical power beginning to saturate the dimension, making the earth vibrate beneath their feet.
"Now... just the three of us."
The Moon Festival had just entered its darkest, and most dangerous phase.
To be continued