Ragnarok

Chapter 23 - Chaos

The Traveler watched with chilly amusement as the Earth system struggled to respond to the army of comets and asteroids that the titanic planet had brought in its wake. Some of them had been cloaked by the planet's probes, for just this occasion. The Traveler wanted to see how these self-important apes reacted to crisis. If history was any indication, it would not take them long to fall to infighting.

The Traveler was somewhat surprised by how swiftly the defenses swung into play, but then reminded itself that the self-styled Gods were no doubt coordinating their response. Using technology they had reverse-engineered from Ragnarok's own probe, which had fallen down to the blue-green world below so long ago, no less.

The colonies at Titan and the other moons of Saturn easily repulsed the objects that headed their way, delivering relativistic slugs at precise angles to either deflect them or shatter them into small enough pieces that their electromagnetic shields could handle the impacts. 

So it was on the moon they called Triton, which circled above Neptune. Uranus was largely uninhabited, so its robotic satellites simply danced nimbly out of the way and allowed the debris to be sucked down to the icy depths of the sideways planet. The probes turned all their cameras upon the upcoming impact; perhaps the upcoming collision might knock the axis back into alignment with the ecleptic, or on some other trajectory entirely.

Pluto weathered the blows stoically, throwing up great blasts of icy dust and frozen rock, suddenly flash-boiled to molten heat in seconds. Its atmosphere began to sublimate, creating a titanic hurricane between itself and Charon. The plain they called Mordor grew ever darker, highlighted with the red flames of Pluto's bombardment.

These had been mere previews of the real show, however. The greatest concentration of debris was headed right towards the second largest gravity well in the entire system, a planet that happened to be facing right into the oncoming storm. Jupiter, and with it, the oncoming spaceship. What was it they were calling it? Oh yes, the Sephirot. Some primitive god-tree or some such. It focused its attention on the ship, waiting to see whether it would survive or perish.

The Traveler concluded that the little ship's chances were slim, but not impossible. Let us see what you can do, little apes, the Traveler noted in its logs. Even the greatest pilots of the Ormarr Imperium would be hard set to survive a meteor storm like the one headed for you now.

*     *     *

Micah only had a few moments to be amazed at the new powers that Avril had somehow gained; he thought he knew all the special abilities in the game, yet even he didn't recognize that sword-beam she'd just used. And blowing away meteors, some of them the size of entire dome-cities? He definitely needed to make sure Mjolnir hadn't suddenly gained any new abilities, with the new expansion. He certainly hadn't heard of these wolfman invasions before now. Related to that Fenris beast, no doubt.

Then more of the beastmen were upon him, and he grunted as he swung Mjolnir in a killing arc, blasting them aside with a sound like booming thunder. They hurtled out into their fellows, clusters of them plummeting out into freefall, but there were dozens more oncoming. They had a disturbing similarity to the Necrophages, now that Micah thought about it, and this time he wasn't inside twenty tons of nigh-impenetrable armor.

"Stand back, friend!" said a clear, female voice back and to his left. He obeyed without a second thought, ducking and rolling backwards as a wall of blue flames lashed out from Kitara, Hiro's virtual assistant. The raging fires consumed the shrieking werewolves, maddening them so half of them ran off the edge.  The phoenixes in her robes were blazing red, and Thorin averted his gaze from the hellish yellow spheres of her eyes, as she summoned another wall of fire. This one stayed stationary, barring the balcony entrance from the howling wolves outside. For the moment, anyway.

"Back inside," she said sharply, her delicate hands drawing arcane sigils upon the air. Thorin didn't argue, but hurried back, making sure to stand well clear of the doorway by the time whatever explosive spell Kitara was weaving went off.

Inside was a scene of slaughter; Tyrion was standing at the doorway, his huge battle-suit taking up the entirety of the way through. Fur-covered bodies piled up in front of him as he laid waste with his gigantic war-axe, each swing tearing a bloody swath through the oncoming horde. Anything that managed to get inside its radius got hurled bodily back through the portal by Tempest's precise daggers and martial arts strikes, or by Lilith's explosive fireballs. One of them exploded a little too close to Tyrion's face and he stagged back, cursing. "Dammit, Lilith, watch those things!"

"I was trying to get you out of the way, dearie," Lilith replied, just as Vladimir opened his eyes and seemed to vanish in a golden streak. Tyrion was nearly knocked off his feet once again, by the air rushing back in after the lightning-fast champion of Heimdall.

A flurry of strikes from the massive Russian and the way was clear, for the moment. Yeshua put his hand on Tyrion's shoulder, speaking a quick prayer to Odin, and the charred armor returned to normal, the warrior's wounds sealing shut. He nodded his thanks, then followed after Vladimir, along with the rest of their guild.

*     *     *

Kurorei came online with a jolt. All manner of alarms were going off inside her mind, as a meteoroid the size of Australia had just appeared, as if by some malign magic, directly above the Sephirot. From the feel, the pilots were already accelerating hard, but she wasn't sure it was going to be enough.

Immediately information and processing power flooded into her, and she ripped her way out of her harness, launching herself despite the tremendous acceleration towards the cockpit. She got to the door and extended a liquid metal hand, bonding momentarily with the locking mechanism and manually overriding the lock.

The copilot threw a glance back at her. "Nobody's supposed to be up here--"

"Orders from the Overminds. I'm to assume direct command." She extended her right arm, and immediately wire-thin tendrils of silvery metal shot out, connecting directly with the wiring of the ship. The acceleration grew even greater, and she was forced to magnetize the bottoms of her feet to keep from sliding backwards.

"We're exceeding estimated limits ..." the pilot groaned, as even his roboform was beginning to show signs of stress fatigue. A human would have been long dead under this much pressure.

"Won't matter if we don't get out from under that monster hammer that's above us," Rei snapped in reply, angling the ship downwards towards Jupiter. If she used the giant planet's gravity to help her accelerate, she could buy a bit more time ... just a few seconds more ...

With a tremendous wrench, the Sephirot suddenly went into a spin. Rei felt as though her own left arm had been shorn off; it must have been the wing, struck by some of the surrounding debris. Kurorei fought for control with every bit of will that she had, not caring if her circuits melted and her crystal bones shattered, as long as she did not let the ship be destroyed.

This mission MUST succeed. So decreed the Emperor, and so she obeyed.

Finally, Rei began to stabilize the ship, balancing it delicately on its side. Then a tremendous amount of turbulence nearly sent them plummeting down into the sea of clouds below, but Rei almost welcomed the tortured atmosphere's thunderclap, for it meant the meteor had fallen behind the ship. With barely 10 meters to spare, at that, Rei noted ruefully. She disengaged from the computer after a few more seconds' thrust brought them out of atmosphere, where the ship's self-repair systems could set about rearranging the remaining mass around the central pod. Miraculously, the damage had only been to the wing.

"Looks like this Sephirot is a one-winged angel, now," Kurorei noted to herself ruefully, as she turned to walk back out to the silent chamber, though the pilots did turn to give her a pair of shaky grins and a thumbs up. All the rest of the clones had slept right through the excitement. She couldn't wait to hear what Micah had to say about this one.

Thinking of Micah made her remember the struggle in Valhalla, and her consciousness jumped back to Asgard, so like the planet that had almost been this body's final resting place.