106. Aftermath

Aftermath

For the last time, the course of future events was adjusted—not through direct intervention, but through communication and information.

Many would protest. Many would cry unfairness.

But it did not violate the ancient treaty, especially not when the other side had violated it so blatantly first.

When nuclear power empowered by the idea of heroic sacrifice killed the physical vessel of their energy, the Lords of Mavis did not retreat.

On the contrary, they continued pouring energy into this world, trying to drag it into the hell they had created.

Through them, their master sought to leave an indelible mark upon eight billion souls, a mark too terrible for most mortals to imagine, let alone truly understand.

But that trespass also created an opportunity.

I am a wheel, I am a wheel, I can roll, I can feel,
And you cannot stop me turning.

Because I am the sun, I am the sun, I can move, I can run,
But you will never stop me burning.

Come down with fire, lift my spirit higher!

I am the day, I am the day, I can show you the way,
See me standing right beside you.

I am the night, I am the night, I am dark and I am light,
With eyes that see inside you.

Come down with fire, lift my spirit higher!

Lia sang as she cast aside her disguise, and the mortal composer’s song suited the moment perfectly as the planet sank beneath her across multiple dimensions.

As she rose through the layered planes of reality, reality itself appeared to change. It was an illusion without factual basis, a trick of perspective.

Earth. The blue planet. The water home.

It shone like a jewel in the universe, the only place for many light-years around illuminated by creative thought.

Yet a calamity was darkening more and more of it, ruining everything that might have been beautiful.

Stop, or be destroyed, she said to the thing crawling through the connection between realms, its many greedy arms trying to drag the planet into its own domain.

[REFUSAL]

The answer was not expressed in language, for the thing and others of its kind had long since cast aside intellect and creative thought.

But it did convey meaning, because information is the foundation of existence and inseparable from it. Existence was what the thing had touched in its twisted effort, and for that reason, certain laws had to be obeyed.

Stop, or I will erase your name from beneath heaven and make your victims a people stronger and more numerous than you.

[OBJECTION]

Yet the thing that had enslaved the Mavis with the promise of power in exchange for abandoning intelligence insisted on its path.

It tried to force the pattern of this world to conform to its own.

That, Lia could not allow.

So be it.

A word is a world. A word is a sword as bright as any star. Its name is Truth, the First Existence, and with that sword she opposed the enemy of creation.

She spoke. She struck. She revealed their lies.

The thing recoiled, then gathered itself again, splitting into countless reflections of itself, each existing on a different plane of reality.

Two beams of light stretched upward.

Two streams of power extended downward.

Two currents of knowledge carried her across all levels of reality, for Truth exists in all things, and no time or space lies beyond it.

Her sword shone brighter than a hundred billion suns. Wherever the enemy’s heart might be, she could strike it.

For a second time, the thing recoiled.

The thing’s influence gnawed at the world, corrupting, weakening, consuming everything, pushing all things toward an end that approached with terrible speed.

She laughed. She sang. She danced.

Her vast existence narrowed further and further until every one of her countless selves could stand upon the point of a needle.

Yet Truth is real, and its gravity reached into the decaying world until the entire world was sheltered upon a single point, just as it had been at the beginning.

The thing might rage, but it could not touch the all-that-had-become-one, that single whole standing against its division of space and its decay through time.

In the void now surrounding that singularity, the thing birthed unreal nightmares and dreams, calamities that would plague the world throughout all future time.

So she grew brighter and brighter, and the singularity exploded into light, sweeping those nightmares away in one perfect day.

The world was reborn.

The thing was cast out, driven from this world through the passage it had forced open.

Lia, whose name was Victorious Truth, saw that the connection still remained, because the enemy’s messengers had not merely used it. They had drawn upon its power.

In the end, however, that would not matter—as long as there remained those who rejected arrogance and blind violence, and instead poured their efforts and thoughts into the things they created.

I lay on my back, my long hair spread around my head in a golden halo nearly three meters across.

Nearby Object Manipulation lifted a few strands and held them in front of my face for closer inspection.

Aside from a faint reddish tint caused by the dust beneath me and the background light, my hair looked glossier, healthier, and more radiant than I remembered it ever being. There was no visible trace of anything that had recently happened.

No tangles. No split ends. To me, it still felt like ordinary hair, but to an ordinary person it might as well have been metal wire.

Also, it had gotten much too long.

“Hair is just dead cells, right?” I tried to make my voice sound normal, but what came out was pathetically weak and also a little like a strangled goose.

“Then why does regeneration work on hair?”

To be honest, I had never really thought about that before—mostly because there had been more important things to worry about, and because superpowers seemed to work better than any shampoo or conditioner. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.

“If your healing only worked on cells, your problems would not be limited to aesthetics,” the voice thundered, each word like a crack of lightning.

“It is a return to your ideal mental state, not a matter of biology.”

“Could you maybe not talk? It’s annoying.”

Also, it might be fatal to ordinary people. The boulder to our left gained several more cracks.

“And why does my ideal mental state want Rapunzel hair?”

“Because it is magnificent, and you know that perfectly well,” Lia countered, because of course she would.

“As for the hair, you spent your entire life growing it out and fighting against daily wear and tear. For someone with your abilities, those things are nothing, but your mental self-image has not adapted to that yet. You should help it adapt… unless you intend to follow in the footsteps of a certain Disney princess.”

“Great. More problems.”

I waved my limbs through the dust, carving the rough shape of an angel around myself.

Maybe this would be a nice change. A simple problem that did not involve monsters or fighting.

Judging by Lia’s tone, though, it might be harder than I expected.

I used my ability to carve boot prints at the bottom of the angel shape and make the wings look more like a bird’s.

It felt good to use superpowers for something so ordinary.

Relaxing, even.

But before I could relax, there was the obvious question that had been sitting there, ignored—and I had never been much of a procrastinator.

“You told me I would die,” I said, my body going rigid, every muscle coiled with tension.

“You said if I did that, it would cost me my life.”

I forced myself not to lash out with a punch or a kick.

The mountaintop might shatter, and then where would we sit?

The reddish, star-scattered, far-too-clear sky overhead mocked me with all those tiny cheerful lights.

But as always, appearances were deceiving.

So were words.

“You did die. Your heart stopped beating for more than three hours,” Lia said after a minute or two, once the urge to hit something had faded. “For two of those hours, you did not have a heart at all.”

“Then why am I still here? Why am I alive?”

My own words did not sound as thunderous as hers, but the ground still trembled beneath them.

All the fear, doubt, and anger I had felt during the final minutes of the battle—the same emotions that had been hiding beneath the surface for weeks—burst out of me in a surge of force across the mountaintop.

Rock split. Thin soil blasted outward. A boulder the size of a small house shot away as if kicked by a giant.

It flew faster and faster. Instead of vanishing beyond the horizon, it soared into the troposphere and then beyond it.

Judging by the trajectory, it might fall into the sun in a few days.