The Death of Yuiria
The serpentine white dragon swims in the sky lazily, circling around you in a protective guard. Bolts of lightning spark randomly from its glittering scales, arcing to the earth beneath. Here they strike a magical shield, causing it to flicker alarmingly. There they land on the grasslands, starting a raging wildfire. The streets of the capital are starting to fill with people, gaping at the sight of the massive dragon, longer than their highest towers are tall, flying in the sky. Even in the face of their imminent doom they cannot resist the urge to gawk.
The attack comes, sooner than you would have liked. Floating platforms, each sporting a fair number of war mages, begin casting their spells. Bolts of every elemental variety pour towards you in a rainbow-coloured torrent of light. Your dragon swirls through the air and curls up in front of you. The spells splash against its body, slowly but surely chipping away at the beast’s form.
It roars, electricity bursting from its jaws in an ever-spreading cone. The lightning washes over the shimmering magic that protects the capital, the crackling streams of blue and white like rain pouring down a glass dome. The mages give pause as they wonder for a second whether they should reinforce the shields or put up their own. As the dragon distracts them, as you meant it to be, you begin casting your spell.
You spread your wings, feeling the tingle of latent power running through your naked flesh. The shields prevent you from directly transforming the entire capital into fuel for your spell, as you did at the ruins, but there is more than enough in the environment for you to work with. All around the capital, in the untouched lands unprotected by their shields, the very earth begins to crackle with electricity. Your spell transmutes even the most trodden dirt into luminous matter. The land breaks apart, eroded into pure energy that rises into the air in countless shining pillars. It is a stunning sight, and indeed the assault of the mages on your dragon has ceased, awe-stricken as they are by the spectacle in front of them. They would not be mages if they were not able to admire this feat of magic.
The pillars are swallowed up by the clouds above your head, which then begin to spiral, and darken, and bulge, like the distended belly of some bloated beast. Within that belly is an ominous white glow, shining so hotly that it can be perceived even through the black clouds. Rain starts to fall, the drops sizzling where they land upon your dragon; mild at first, and gradually growing heavier. The halo above your head is spinning rapidly, pulsating with energy that it is drawing in from your surroundings to replenish your own mana. You are taking in so much mana that it is turning the area into a magical deadzone - a place where the world itself begins leeching mana from all living things in order to compensate for the imbalance. But after you are done with this place, there won't exactly be any living things around to speak of so... it's probably not a big deal, is it?
By now, all the citizens of the capital can see, from behind the safety of their own walls, is pure, white light. They are encased in a cage of light, watching as the world beyond their capital is turned into nothingness.
You clench your fist, murmuring the incantation. The material earth will transcend and soar the skies; my will is the light of judgment that illuminates the world.
Strong winds buffet your body, the atmosphere turned into chaos in the wake of the devastation you have wrought. The pillars vanish, the last bits of energy joining the great, dazzling light in the sky that now shone brighter than the sun. It is complete, your strongest spell at the full extent of your power.
Their doom is sealed. Things could have gone differently if they had not decided to march an entire army to your doorstep, one filled with the political maneuverings of their own nobles. You have had plenty of experience with that back when you were human yourself; always, always there would be those who sought to use your power. You know full well the squabblings of the kings and nobles who looked at a hero and saw a political chip. The joke was on them, because you saw them as moneybags to sponsor your comfortable retirement from heroism. A few political speeches here and there wouldn’t have hurt anything but your dignity. But then the goddesses just had to get involved…
You gaze down on the capital, and the hapless souls within, and wonder for a second why it came to this.
Ah, that’s right. They tried to take your stuff.
Grahferde, and everything else that Rin conquered, that’s all yours now. She might have done a hackjob of things but from what you can see it looks like a very comfortable buffer for a luxurious existence once you manage to delegate the operations to someone willing to run the place.
So to start with, it’s better for you to warn everyone else what happens to people who try to take your stuff, so that they don’t get any ideas, so that they will whisper amongst themselves: “Look what happened to the last guy who got ideas!”
You raise your clenched fist and bring down Gigadyne from the heavens.
It falls, faster than sound, a gargantuan pillar of crackling lightning that engulfs the capital in blinding light. The displaced air blasts outward in an expanding, thunderous shockwave that is strong enough to rattle the walls of fortress Raguria, a fair distance away.
The capital’s shields are as paper before the might of your lightning, crumpling away as if they never existed. Whatever meager defenses the mages could have conjured up at the last minute are swept away with even greater ease.
The city dies.
Its people, its streets, its towers; none survive the spell. It is melted down to its foundations, and then deeper.
The twin rivers are boiled into nothingness.
At the end of it, there is nothing left of Yuiria but a cavernous, burning hole in the ground, deep enough that magma has begun boiling out of its bottom. The land surrounding it is equally devastated, torn to shreds to fuel Gigadyne and then further damaged by the blast of the spell’s impact. With your own hands you had turned what was once a beautiful, vibrant, and more importantly, commercially lucrative place into a desolate deathscape that is hard to benefit from. You scratch your head. Maybe, just maybe, it might have been a bit wasteful to overreact like this? You begin to wonder if you were in the right state of mind…
Something stirs your instincts – your halo shivers and you feel a slight chill run down your spine.
There, at the bottom of the pit where countless lives had just been snuffed out like a candle’s flame, rising from the lava unscathed, is a single figure.
The naked figure is that of a woman, though not particularly shapely compared to Rin... though in all fairness the demoness would easily rival any buxom barmaid you cared to mention in both quantity and quality. The wings, however, are what catch your attention.
Angel’s wings.
So the rumours were true. Methuss did have an angel trapped somewhere, and you have just found it.
The woman raises her head, and even though her face is obscured with long golden hair, unsinged even in close proximity to the flames, you can tell that she is looking at you. She spreads her wings. Then, she lets out a loud, piercing screech that utterly extinguishes the fires of the pit and stirs up the magma beneath her feet. The force of that scream reaches even you, high above her, and it batters the dragon you had summoned into glowing pieces.
And in that instant, you feel, for the first time in a long time, terror. A fundamental instinct that stirs your drive for fight or flight.
***
You decide to:
A. Fight. Bash heads first, decide later. You’ve finally found an angel and you’re not about to let her go.
B. Flee. You don’t want to take on an unknown angel without thoroughly researching her first. It’s enough that you know another angel exists.
C. You fight against your instincts and find your civility again. You are a gentleman, as naked as she is. Since you are on equal grounds, both hiding nothing from each other, there is no better time for a diplomatic approach. You try to talk to the angel.
***
You are a bit more energized than you would have expected fresh off casting an extremely powerful spell... somehow, you suspect that the death of countless people has something to do with it. There is nothing you can do about it now, at any rate, and the renewed strength flowing through you takes the form of:
A. An increase to your vitality and physical prowess. Minor increase to Vitality, major increase to Physical Attack and Physical Defense.
B. An increase to your mana capacity and magical prowess. Minor increase to Mana, major increase to Magical Attack and Magical Defense.
C. Improved offensive ability. Moderate increase to Physical Attack, Magical Attack and major increase to Agility.
D. Improved defensive ability. Moderate increase to Physical Defense, Magical Defense and major increase to Agility.
