"Hold on. I've still got one question."
Standing on the back of his shivering mount-bug, Caelus tilted his head back toward the pitch-black figure throwing punches and kicks at empty space in the void — like a boxer warming up in some gag anime — and shouted:
"I've still got one question!"
"Hi hi~ And what would that be?"
The voice flipped to a tone of innocent curiosity. Aha stopped the ridiculous warm-up routine at once and struck a head-scratching pose, despite the fact that where a head should have been there was nothing at all.
"This friend of yours..."
Caelus put on a thoughtful look and pointed a finger at the other being keeping a delicate distance from Aha — that stately, purple-skinned, distinctly alluring big sister.
"Is She really here to help you?"
The most beautiful and holy of Xipe's faces dipped slightly, eyes half-closing, and turned upon Caelus a gaze brimming with tolerance and tender affection.
"Be one with me, live as one with me, be with me... in [Harmony]."
The three aspects of the goddess spoke in turn, their voices like interwoven hymns, converging at last into words that drew the soul in and would not let go.
As She spoke, motes of light like crumbs of starlight drifted down, floating weightlessly toward Caelus.
Caelus pulled his eyes away from the sacred spectacle and locked back onto Aha.
"Aha. Translate for me. What does Harmony mean."
In an instant Aha whipped out a clown mask painted with a woebegone frown and slapped it onto the place where a face should be.
"Aiya~ Does that need translating? She already said—"
"I told you to translate it for me."
Caelus's voice climbed, carrying a pressure that was practically thuggish. "What! Does! Harmony! Mean!"
"No translation needed! It's just Harmony!"
Aha spread those hands made of massed shadow.
Caelus jabbed a finger at Him, biting off every syllable, his voice near a roar:
"Translate it out loud for me — what the hell does the goddamn Harmony mean!"
Counselor Ha's figure twisted and shook violently, His gestures growing wildly agitated, like a street performer backed into a corner, His tone grinding through clenched teeth: "Harmony is the Aeon made of a whole lot of harmonious celestial worlds and a whole lot of clustered living beings, She's the concordant and benevolent Lord of Merit and Hymn, got it? Clear enough for you?"
Every word landed like something He'd hurled down with all His strength.
"Oh~ So that's what Harmony is."
Caelus drew out the last syllable, understanding dawning on his face. "In that case..."
He raised a single finger and delivered his interrogation of the soul:
"This mediating, merciful, kind-hearted big sister Harmony — is She going to stand on our side, the side wrecking the universe?
"Even if you tell me you sold your ass to Xipe, I don't believe She can break free of her Path's prime motive force and stand with us."
"Eh~!"
Hearing this, Stelle — perched on her little plastic white pony — poked her head out with the slow-dawning look of someone catching up several beats late. She raised one finger and pointed at the tip of her own nose in confusion, her pink-blue eyes full of clear, limpid bewilderment.
"Wait, so we're the villains right now?"
Herta dumpling: "..."
Ruan Mei dumpling: "..."
Screwllum: "..."
The silence of three geniuses was practically a soundless scream.
You've already ruined seven-eighths of the living universe. What do you think?!
"Fine~ As expected of my dearest friend."
Aha scratched His head with bashful embarrassment.
"Xipe isn't actually here to help us. She's here to help Ena."
"So this brawl is actually 4v2v1?"
Caelus folded his arms, fingertips drumming against his biceps.
"Hm? Didn't Aha already say so? It's a 3v3 free-for-all."
The words were barely out of His mouth before the war of gods erupted.
"Order is the warp and weft of all phenomena, the linchpin of the cosmos! That which stands in defiance is chaos's abscess, and by absolute edict shall be — excised."
Ena, the Aeon of Order, whose grey-blue form seemed woven out of a hundred million precise mathematical formulae and absolute decrees.
What He sent down was not divine might but proscription — invisible chains of Order sought to coil around, define, and bind every source of chaos: Oroboros the Voracity and Tayzzyronth the Swarm King.
Wherever the chains passed, the boiling sea of blood and the tides of insects seemed carved apart by an unseen grid; even the raging particle streams fell, for a moment, into prescribed orbits.
"Will that masters transmutation — Amber Lord, thou hast ever borne a burden too grave."
"The Voracity. By rights, to be slain utterly."
The colossal Amber god answered the invitation of His ally in Order.
The vast amber hammer in His grip, condensing endless starlight, rose and fell; each descent boiled away swathes of Oroboros's sea of blood and checked the speed of its spread.
BOOM—!
A roar beyond any living creature's range of hearing detonated out of the blood sea. The whole ocean seethed under that single hammer blow, and a fragment the size of a galaxy was blasted loose by the unmatched force.
It became a crimson nebula that slammed into a dying planet, and the planet shattered like a fragile glass marble.
Yet the wreckage of that world did not scatter as basic mechanics demanded. A heartbeat after it began to spread, all of it collapsed inward again.
The reason was an eyeless serpent's head thrusting up out of the blood sea, its hide crusted with inverted scales, its enormous maw snapping wide in a colossal suck.
The debris was dragged in under a horrifying gravitational tear and became, in an instant, nourishment for the sea of blood.
Akivili — wearing Stelle's face — might be a bot, but She was still good for plenty.
Silver-white star rails extended from Her hands and ran clean through the battlefield. Not an attack: temporary paths, deftly deflecting the Swarm's endless waves of multiplication, guiding the aftershocks of Qlipoth's hammer.
"Embrace me. Be one with me."
Xipe's pale hand drew up rainbow-colored ripples, and the iridescence ignored every other front on the field, settling with perfect precision over Ena of Order.
Where the rainbow light touched, Ena's body of pure Order began to fall into disarray. The decrees, formulae and logic that composed His existence seemed to be resonated with, retuned, absorbed into a more harmonious melody.
He was being absorbed and assimilated by Xipe, irreversibly!
For the first time, Ena's voice — built out of a hundred million modal intervals — showed signs of being overwritten.
"Whoa! [Order] is getting assimilated by [Harmony]!"
The Herta dumpling cried out, her tiny body seeming to vibrate with it, then spread her little hands. "Okay, fine, that's not exactly a shock."
Bobbing in midair, she went on with a gossip-hungry excitement:
"I always knew [Order]'s disappearance had something to do with the War of the Aeons. Ugh! Shame that lot in the Family keep their mouths sealed tight, not a whisper gets out... I'd have quite liked to meet Ena in person, even if He is a bit of a stick-in-the-mud."
"Oh, Caelus, if I ever had to retell this piece of gossip, I'd definitely put it like this: Xipe, Aha, and you — the three of you got all tangled up together over this Tayzzyronth business!"
"You... never mind."
The Ruan Mei dumpling pulled her gaze off the Swarm King for a moment and gave her bestie — clearly deep in the terminal stages of infection by Caelus's abstract-brain virus — a long, meaningful look.
She shook her head, drew part of her attention back from the Swarm King and spread it across the other Aeons.
This spectacle of Aeons in open melee might not repeat itself in a hundred million years.
"Query: [Abundance]'s Aeon, Medicus — why has no trace of Him appeared?"
Cascades of data streamed down the holographic screens circling Screwllum.
"Don't bother waiting. He's probably not showing up at all."
Herta hopped over.
"Negative: there exists a possibility that 'Abundance' is related to 'Propagation.'"
Screwllum shook his head.
"I'll stake anything on it — right now He simply doesn't exist. If you don't believe me, how about a wager... Caelus, you in?"
Herta had meant to rope Caelus into the fun, but when she looked over, Caelus was up to his neck in work and had zero attention to spare for her little Aeon-studies symposium.
"What kind of fit is this guy throwing now?"
Bafflement was written all over Herta's small face.
"Faster, Broodmothers, birth them for me! All of you, birth! Mass the troops, mass the troops!"
"Boss! This is our chance, a gift from heaven! Start pumping them out! Don't stop!"
Caelus directed the Swarm to accelerate its Propagation through the biological neural network while hollering at the Swarm King all the while.
"...█hiss...Prop...██...agation...█hiss█"
Tayzzyronth's very existence was Propagation carried to its extreme. Within the domain of His being, the void itself became a hotbed of gestation.
While the blood sea corroded Qlipoth's amber, while Xipe's interference resonated through Ena's chains of Order, countless spawn — grotesque of shape, chitin gleaming cold — condensed out of nothing, tore free of their cocoons, and hurled themselves shrieking into the starry sky.
No attacking any Aeon. Just breed, breed, breed, breed, breed, dammit!
Propagation taken to its extreme counted as a form of attack in its own right. Preservation raised walls; the Voracity's blood sea grew and surged — in a sense, that was breeding too.
So Asta got to watch a portion of the raised walls and the creeping blood sea turn into bugs, bugs that then gnawed greedily at that same blood sea and stardust and converted it into more of their own kind.
"Hahaha, what a riot~"
Amid the melee of gods, Elation was pealing out laughter that rang through the cosmos — pure, unadulterated joy.
That laughter was a law. It was a phenomenon!
The whole galaxy seemed injected with a mad, delirious mirth.
Planets, moons, even drifting megaliths shuddered like drunks and let out deafening, weirdly humanlike peals of "Hahahaha"!
They tore loose from orbits held stable for hundreds of millions of years and, like marbles flung by an invisible hand, hurtled at random into the Aeons on the field — Qlipoth's hammer, Ena's chains, Oroboros's serpent head, the bot Akivili's Silver Rail, even Xipe's rainbow light.
On a finer scale, the concept of Elation bred within every atom. They leapt in excitement, collided in exhilaration, releasing anomalous radiation and energy until the physical laws of the region turned deranged and unstable.
Aha moved like a circus performer, weaving and dancing through fireworks of Destruction, and His goal was perfectly clear.
Tides of chaos blocked Qlipoth's hammer as it came down on the Swarm King, and blocked Ena's chains of Order as they tried to bind Him.
He was protecting Tayzzyronth.
For no reason other than that it kept the fun going longer and made the show better!
"This is way too chaotic!"
"Damn it, I knew the second Aha stuck His hands in, things would blow up!"
The Herta dumpling stamped in place.
On the chaotic battlefield, Ena and Qlipoth pressed a joint assault on Oroboros and Tayzzyronth.
Xipe focused on devouring and assimilating Ena. Oroboros brawled with Qlipoth while never once forgetting Its buffet, snatching mouthfuls of the Swarm whenever the chance came.
Tayzzyronth paid attention to no one. He just bred, relentlessly.
Swallowing the matter and energy of the surrounding Aeons whenever an opening appeared, and turning it into more offspring.
Aha played the cosmic-scale prankster, wildly sabotaging every attack Ena and Qlipoth aimed at the Swarm King.
Akivili threaded through the crossfire, keeping the powers of Order and Preservation functional.
This region of space had become an arena for the prime motive forces of the Paths.
Every boom of the great hammer, every ringing snap of the chains, every shriek of the Swarm, every act of the Voracity's devouring, every resonance of Harmony, and that omnipresent deranged laughter — all of it reshaped the bedrock of reality, proclaiming the terrible essence of Aeonic power, enough to set ten thousand worlds trembling.
This time it was for real: even the Great Dao itself was being ground into nothing!
The melee dragged on a very long time — half an Amber Era — and by then the Swarm had spread across nine-tenths of the living universe.
Order was on the verge of total assimilation by Harmony; Ena looked ready to become one large puzzle piece set into Xipe's body.
Oroboros had perhaps eaten Its fill, or perhaps grown sleepy.
At some point It withdrew from the battlefield and vanished, and there was no telling where It had gone.
With that, the shape of the battle changed.
Qlipoth, Xipe, Akivili, and [Balance] HooH — who had arrived long ago but stayed hidden in the dark — four Aeons in all, encircled Tayzzyronth.
And in the middle of that suffocating supreme standoff, Aha was bouncing around.
"Hang on. What happened to the 3v3 free-for-all?"
Caelus paused in issuing orders through the neural network.
The known living universe was already blanketed in Swarm; all that remained was the stretch of cosmos where the War of the Aeons raged, where the backwash of combat ran so violent that ordinary Swarm evaporated the instant they entered.
"Heheheh~ Looks like it's turning into a 5v5 matchmaking lineup."
Aha let out a cheerful string of giggles and skipped straight over into the ranks of the four Aeons opposite.
Grinning, He pointed at Qlipoth, Xipe, HooH, and Akivili in turn, then tapped Himself smugly last of all.
"Plans never keep up with changes! Now it's a 5v5 deluxe ranked match!"
Then He swung His head back toward Caelus's side, pointing down the line, His tone as bright as someone introducing guests at a party:
"Your roster's not bad either! You've got adorable Tayzzyronth, my dear friend you, your adorable other half, and your sweet companion! Five on five, fair and square!"
"Hold on, is there something wrong with your math? Isn't that five against four?"
Caelus looked thoroughly unconvinced.
"Wait! I'm fighting Aeons?!"
Asta went completely blank, pointing in disbelief at the tip of her own fair, adorable nose.
"Aiya, aiya, don't panic!"
Aha waved a hand with the air of someone who had thought it all through ages ago.
"My old friend Ena hasn't fully exited the stage yet. He counts as half a body on your side right now."
"Besides, my darling Akivili is, at best, a high-grade knockoff bot at the moment — power's heavily discounted!"
He paused, then clapped His hands together hard.
"Aha! I've got it! For the sake of absolute fairness—"
Aha yanked both hands apart in the void, as though tearing open a rift of raw data, then flung something through it like a rag doll. With a thud, a Herta puppet AI in a maid outfit landed in front of them.
"Look! One powerhouse bot teammate from the Dunce Society, courtesy of me~ And now!"
Aha planted His hands on His hips and nodded in satisfaction.
"Now it's 5v5~!"
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