Chapter 730: Monthly World Ending Event
Chapter 730: Monthly World Ending Event
The Time Dilation ratio of an Exceed Cave was one to one hundred. A single day outside was a hundred days inside. It was one of the last things John explained to the family after the four of them had gone, standing under the Virion Iridant Tree with the elders gathered close, and he said it the way a man delivers good news and bad news in the same sentence.
"So do not sit around counting hours," he told them. "They could be in there for months of their own time before your first week passes. And when they come out, they will come out changed. That is how the caves work. You send in your strongest, and the sky gives them back to you sharper than you remember." He paused, and his voice lost some of its ease. "In the meantime, the rest of you have a problem. The kingdom stands in the upper layer now. And the upper layer collects its rent."
That was how the Regalons first heard about the monthly world-ending events. John laid it out plainly, without softening it. Once every month, the upper layer itself came under attack. Something vast broke in from beyond its borders, tides of monsters and worse things, and every kingdom on the leaderboard was bound to the defense. There was no sitting it out. Participation was the price of standing on the main stage, and the next event was two days away.
"You are not ready in the way I would want you ready," John admitted. "But you are Regalons, and I have watched you fight, and I would rather have you on a wall than half the kingdoms above you. So here is what happens. You march with me. My army holds the line, my Sovereigns anchor it, and you take the ground I give you and you hold it. Nothing more heroic than that. Hold your ground, and let the layer see what 378th looks like."
The family took the news the way they took everything, which was as work to be done. There was no panic in the pocket world over those two days, only motion. Weapons came out of storage. Formations were drilled on the open fields under the tree. The old fighters who had survived the bottom plane walked the lines of the younger ones, correcting grips and stances, and Big D sat at the center of it all like a rock in a river, taking reports and giving orders in his cracked old voice.
Marcus ran the war councils. Natalia and Kayla organized the ranged lines and the support formations. Hiroshi and Maya took the vanguard units through their paces until the drills looked like the real thing, and Aryan and Silvester handled logistics with the grim thoroughness of men who knew that battles were lost in the supply lines before they were ever lost on the field. Nobody said out loud that the four strongest of them were gone into the sky. Everybody built their plans around it anyway.
On the morning of the second day, the Regalons marched out of the pocket world in full force for the first time since the ascension, and the sight of them stopped even John’s veterans for a moment.
They came out in ordered columns under their own banners, thousands strong, armor catching the strange upper-layer light. The survivors of slavery and the nine castles and the trial walked in those columns, and there was nothing ragged about them anymore. They looked like what they had become, a kingdom of the top four hundred, and John rode out to meet them with something warm moving behind his eyes.
"Look at you," he said to Big D, and left it at that, because anything more would have embarrassed them both.
His own army was already assembling across the plain, and it was a thing out of a nightmare and a legend at once. Monsters beyond counting stood in ranks that stretched past the horizon, ordered and silent, and above and among them moved the ten Monster Sovereigns in their true forms. Rexion’s galaxy-scaled coils lay across a whole hillside like a mountain range that breathed. Pymon rode the high wind with lightning walking between his wingtips. Terravax drifted overhead, slow as weather, its forests dark against the sky, and Very hung near the front lines with its mask turned toward the far edge of the world.
The march took the better part of the day. The defense line, when they reached it, ran along the rim of the upper layer itself, a border of broken land and dead sky where the world simply stopped, and beyond it there was a darkness that was not night. It moved. Even from a distance, it visibly moved, like the surface of a sea seen from a cliff, and every Regalon who looked at it too long felt something old in their blood tell them to look away.
"That is where it comes from," John said, riding along the Regalon column as they took position. "Once a month, that dark pushes in, and everything living inside it pushes with it. The layer’s kingdoms hold the rim. The top six Empires run the whole defense. They divide the rim into territories and assign them down the leaderboard, and the stretch we are standing on is mine to hold." He turned in his saddle and pointed along the broken ground. "And that stretch, from the twin spires to the dry ravine, is yours."
It was a modest length of the rim by the standards of what John’s own army covered. It was also, every Regalon understood, the first ground the kingdom had ever been trusted to hold on the main stage, and they moved onto it like it was already theirs.
The hours before the event had a strange, taut quiet to them. The Regalons dug in along their stretch, ranged lines on the high ground, vanguard units forward, healers and support staged in the hollows behind. Marcus walked the whole territory twice with Big D, marking kill zones and fallback lines. Natalia stood on one of the twin spires with the wind pulling at her, watching the moving dark, and Kayla climbed up beside her, and neither of them spoke for a while.
"Almond and the others are missing this," Kayla finally said.
"They are three months deep into their own wars by now, if that ratio holds," Natalia answered. "Trust me, they are not resting either." She smiled slightly, without much humor in it. "Knowing them, they would be insulted that we thought this was the dangerous half of the family."
Along the rim in both directions, other kingdoms were taking their own ground, banners and armies of every kind stretching away into the distance until they were only colors on the horizon. And spaced along John’s territory like fortresses that could think, the Sovereigns settled into their positions. Alfred sat alone on a low hill, small and black and utterly still, and somehow the ground around him felt like the safest and most dangerous place on the rim at once. Chronavael walked the rear lines slowly, and where its hooves fell, time rippled, and the monsters it passed stood straighter.
As the light began to change, John came to the Regalon lines one last time. He did not give a speech. He rode slowly along the front rank so that every fighter there could see his face, and at the end of the line he stopped beside Big D and looked out at the dark with him.
"It will be loud," John said quietly. "Louder than anything you have stood in. The first hour is the worst, because that is when you learn what the dark sends, and it never sends the same thing twice. Hold your stretch. If you break, my monsters plug the gap, and there is no shame in it, half the kingdoms on this rim get plugged every month. But I will tell you honestly." He glanced down at the old man, and there was that steel under his smile again. "I do not think you will break. I have thought that about very few kingdoms at 378th."
Big D looked out at the moving darkness for a long moment, and his old face folded into something that was not quite a grin and not quite a snarl, an expression that had watched the family survive everything the three layers of a merciless world had thrown at it.
"We didn’t climb out of chains to break on a wall," he rasped. "Let it come."
Far out past the rim, the dark stopped moving like a sea, and gathered itself, and began, all along the edge of the world at once, to rise.