by Simon Archer
“Guess this makes sense because Aphrodite was pretty damn hot,” I said as I wiped my brow with the back of one hand and used my godly powers to get a better idea of the planet’s composition.
Thankfully, there wasn’t a lot of poison in the atmosphere. I’d been worried there would be lots of acid and whatnot like Venus was back home, but fortunately, this planet just had a lot of carbon dioxide.
“Alright, lungs, don’t fail me now,” I said as I accessed my godly toolbar and selected the skill Capture Atmosphere. Like most all the skills in my Godly toolbar, the cost was based on what I was trying to do. In a world where there was literally almost a hundred times as much atmosphere as there was supposed to be, stealing some turned out to be relatively easy because it only took eighty percent of my Aura to do it.
So I cast the spell and inhaled. As I felt my lungs expand to nearly monstrous proportions, I kept feeding Aura into the spell for two reasons. One, I wasn’t sure where the air was actually going, but I’d always assumed it went into some kind of pocket dimension that required Aura to keep open. The second reason was less obvious. See, I only wanted to inhale carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor, so I had to use Aura to filter out any other pollutants.
After all, my body was a temple.
Even though I was a god here, the constant use of Aura combined with inhaling for a long period of time caused me so much strain that I collapsed onto my knees. It was strange because, even though I didn’t need to breathe here, I just desperately wanted to exhale all of it and take a few normal breaths.
I knew deep down that this was just my weak human body trying to work in a way that didn’t make sense for a godly body, and I’d also done this hundreds of times in the game, but there was a realness to it now that I wasn’t prepared for.
Even still, I pressed on, inhaling like I was Superman and there was a fire in desperate need of putting out while keeping my eye on the gauge in the left corner of my vision as it filled up.
At a quarter of an atmosphere, my vision started to blur.
At half, I was shaking so violently, I thought my bones would break.
At three quarters, I was sure I’d explode and get splattered all across the surface of the planet.
And at ninety percent?
Well, my vision went back, and as I was about to collapse onto the ground from exhaustion, I suddenly felt a pulse in my godly tether.
“You can do it, master,” Queenie said, and though her voice was nothing but a sound in my head, the belief in me that she had was enough for me to grab hold of the rocky earth with my hands and push myself back into a sitting position. “Just a little more.”
I knew she was right. If I pulled this off, I would save us months, if not years of effort.
So, it had to work. No matter how much it hurt.
So, I sucked with everything I had, inhaling so hard, it would make Kirby proud.
And then it was all inside me. It happened so suddenly, I didn’t quite know the where and when of it all. One moment, I’d had my eyes on the gauge while Queenie screamed encouragement. The next, well, it was just done, and I was full in a way I couldn’t quite explain. Even still, the pain of it was maddening to such an extent that I knew there was no way I’d be able to teleport back to my planet.
Fortunately, though, I didn’t have to do that. As I collapsed to the earth while focusing on not releasing all the air I’d sucked up, I felt Queenie’s hand on my cheek.
“It’s okay now, master,” the ant queen said as she knelt down beside me and pulled me into her lap. “Let me do the rest.”
As I nodded, she picked me up and leaped into the air. While I knew we were racing through space with mind-numbing speed as everything sped by in a big blur of light, it still felt like forever because I was trying my damnedest to keep my lungs from exploding.
“We’re here,” Queenie said, and as we touched down on the surface of Ares, I realized I’d been so focused on not dying, I had completely lost track of where I was.
Not that I cared though because releasing the breath I’d been holding for the better part of my life was the single greatest pleasure I’d ever experienced. Afterward, I couldn’t do much more than sit there while Queenie held me tightly.
“I can’t believe you did so much with a single breath,” Queenie said as the air whooshed out of me in a rush that ripped across the empty landscape of Ares. “I knew you were powerful, but this…” She gestured across the horizon. “It’s beyond all imagining.”
“And this isn’t even my final form,” I said with a laugh after the last dregs of carbon dioxide vacated my lungs and joined the planet’s fledgling atmosphere.
“I cannot even imagine what that would be like,” Queenie said as she stroked my brow with one hand. “But I think you’ve done enough for now.” She smiled at me. “For now, you should rest. You’ve spent a huge amount of Aura, and it will take time for you to recover.”
“You know,” I said as my eyes started to close on their own because I was suddenly ridiculously tired. “I think that’s a great idea.” I reached out and squeezed her hand. “Would you mind staying with me while I sleep?” I smiled up at her. “I’m pretty comfortable.”
“I would like nothing more, master,” she said and then kissed me. “Sleep well.”
4
“My liege,” Gobta’s voice echoed in my head, awakening me from my slumber, and as my eyes slowly opened, I realized I was still in Queenie’s arms, though she was asleep as well and had cuddled up next to me. “I have good news and bad news.”
“What is it?” I replied while stifling a yawn so that I wouldn’t disturb Queenie.
“The good news is that I may have solved our water problem,” he said in a way that made me think there was a major problem because he didn’t sound very excited about it.
“And what’s the bad news?” I asked as I extricated myself from Queenie’s arms and then covered her with one of the blankets I’d gotten when we were on Bazaar, Jane’s world. I knew intrinsically that she didn’t need the blanket, but it still seemed like the right thing to do. Sure, the planet had become warmer, especially since I’d added atmosphere, but it still hadn’t acquired quite enough solar radiation to hit a temperature level I wouldn’t classify as deadly cold.
“The bad news is that it seems to be guarded by a giant space kraken.”
I’ll be honest, it took me a couple of seconds to parse what he said properly.
“Did you just say the water is guarded by a giant space kraken?” I took a deep, carbon-dioxide-laden breath. “Like as in a humongous alien squid?”
“Yes.” Gobta didn’t explain further, so I did the obvious. I used our godly link to look through the Hobgoblin King’s eyes and found myself looking at a glinting icy meteor hurtling straight for Ares. Only this wasn’t just any meteor because it was the size of a small planet and had tentacles reaching out through the ice and swatting at the air like it was looking for something to eat.
“Fuck,” I murmured as I teleported to the Hobgoblin King and stared at the thing with my own eyes, and even though a bunch of information popped into my head, I didn’t quite need it to understand what this was.
“So as I said, good news and bad news.” Gobta looked over at me. “Shall I prepare the troops?”
“Yes,” I said even though I wasn’t sure it would matter because this thing was a Tartaran. They were basically giant monsters that lived in space and consumed all that came near it, and they had the annoying habit of showing up at the worst possible times.
I knew from the game that, deep within that icy meteor, we would find a tooth-filled maw capable of biting a moon in half with ease. I knew because I had seen it happen more than once.
“As you wish, my liege. I shall get Queenie as well, and then perhaps we can figure out how to deal with the monster.” With those words, Gobta sped off, and I let him.
Sure, I could have just resummoned Queenie to my location or teleported to her, but I
needed time to think. While the Tartaran’s name was light yellow, signifying it was within a couple of levels of me, they were always way more powerful than their level indicated.
Still, there was always a way to beat this thing. Unlike normal monsters that could be defeated by depleting their health and Aura, Tartarans could only be killed by locating their weak spot, a glowing chink in their otherwise impenetrable armor, and exploiting it. Otherwise, no matter how much damage we did to the creature, it would just regenerate. The problem was that the monster’s Achilles heel wasn’t immediately visible, which meant it was within the huge ball of ice rocketing toward me.
“I suppose the first thing we need to do is figure out where the weak point is,” I said as I focused my vision on it, but just like in Terra Forma, my godly abilities didn’t seem to work on the monster. If they had, I could have looked through the ice and found what I was looking for, but unfortunately, I just couldn’t. That was rumored to be because they were actually some kind of Eldritch abomination from some kind of other-worldly dimension, but whatever the reason was, it didn’t change the facts.
Worse, as I extended my hand and tried to exert my godly powers on it to, I dunno, rip it out of the ice, my efforts failed, a fact made more annoying by the message that flashed across my vision.
Enemy resistance too high. Your spell has failed.
I wasn’t too surprised, but it was still annoying.
“Well, fuck,” I muttered right before Queenie and Gobta appeared beside me with almost sixty of my other creatures. There were several giants, dire bears, elite goblin warriors, and soldier ants, as well as a few other creatures, and as I surveyed my force, I couldn’t help but think that it wasn’t big enough.
Still, it was a lot better than having to take on the thing alone.
“What would you like us to do, master?” Queenie said as she narrowed her multifaceted eyes at the creature zooming toward us. That was an excellent question because as crazy as these things looked in Terra Forma, this Tartaran looked a billion times more massive and formidable in the flesh… and we hadn’t even seen its final form yet.
At the same time, because we weren’t in a game, there was a considerably larger space to deal with this problem outside the box, and thinking outside the box was my specialty. The main problem was that I needed more data about the thing. Every Tartaran was a unique entity, and so if you didn’t do some scouting, you were up shit creek.
“Let’s probe this guy’s defenses,” I ordered. “Queenie, direct your ants around to one side of him. Gobta, take the other. Just harass it, go for some fly-bys, see if you can prompt a response out of him.”
There was no hesitation from the mass of monsters arrayed out before me in the void of space. As my orders passed through Queenie and Gobta, my little army split into two clouds of god-Aura-infused beasts and arced through the vacuum toward the comet-sized kaiju. The Ant Queen was on the heels of her half of the army, dagger in hand, but Gobta hesitated a moment and cast a glance back toward me.
“And what shall you be doing, my liege?” Though it might have seemed like backtalk to a lot of people, I saw the glint of pure curiosity in his hobgoblin eyes.
“Hmmm…” My voice trailed off for a moment as I mulled it over, and then my Auric Sense picked up exactly what I needed. “Think I’ll just throw a rock at it.” I didn’t give the Hobgoblin King a chance to answer as I turned toward the nearby-in-the-cosmic-scale asteroid hurtling through space.
Despite the name, ‘space’ wasn’t as much of a void as advertised. There were tons of debris, space dust, and random crap littering the universe, and with my expanded godly powers, they were all ready for me to use weapons. In a way, it reminded me of the start of this adventure where I fought giant ants with rocks… this giant ant was just a planet-eating tentacle monster, and the rock was part of a planetoid. Still, while the scale changed, the principle was the same.
I teleported beside the asteroid as the first line of skirmishers descended on the Tartaran. I had already steeled myself for a barrage of drains on my Aura as those massive tentacles started to wipe out my forces… but it didn’t come. Through the tendrils of Aura, I felt a mix of surprise and frustration through Queenie and Gobta, and as I moved to intercept my intended projectile, I could see why.
Though my forces were doing a full-court press on the comet-sized creature, their assault wasn’t even bothering the thing. Savage ant bites, raking bear claws, a barrage of infused arrows from the hobgoblins, none of it was penetrating either the hide of the tentacles or the icy shell around the Tartaran. Even Queenie’s deft slashes and Gobta’s twin blades, Sparkle and Burningdeath, were barely even scratching it. Their attacks were like spitballs against an Abrams tank, probably because, according to my Godly Vision, the outer layer of ice on the Tartaran’s shell looked to be significantly harder and denser than the stuff just beneath.
But, that was fine because I had a plan to deal with that, and that plan would be a lot easier to pull off since the Tartaran didn’t care if we attacked it. The creature simply continued on its way through the solar system, waving its tentacles toward any object of significant mass to it to try to draw it in. The fact of the matter was that my monsters simply were too small to catch the Tartaran’s attention, even if they were infused with my godly Aura. While we weren’t getting anywhere, at least my guys and gals weren’t being torn apart and thrown back into Auric Limbo.
That in and of itself fed into my growing plan, which meant it was time for step two. Throw a giant rock. I reached out and touched the huge hunk of space debris, and as with all the things in my solar system, I knew everything I could ever want to know about this discrete entity from its composition, mostly silicon-based rock and iron ore, to its density, average for its structure, to its total size, approximately a hundred kilometers.
Not that I needed any of that information to know it was perfect for my purpose, which was to wreck some shit. With a deep non-breath, I activated Aura Infusion on the godly level and let my power flow into the entire asteroid. The blazing azure light of my Aura burst out through the rock as my fingers crunched into the stone.
As I reared my arm back, I couldn’t help but marvel a little as the entire asteroid moved with me. Even with all I had done on this godly plane, it still was pretty damn amazing. Still, now wasn’t the time to gawk at the might of my godly powers because I had a monster to kill.
I swung my arm in a large arc and pushed forward with my power, adding a bit more forward momentum to my throw, before I flung the big glowing stone. It rocketed off, a perfect dead-on shot toward the tentacular comet monster, and thanks to my godly strength, it was going too fast for the wildly waving tentacles to intercept it.
You know how everyone goes on about the whole ‘irresistible force’ and ‘immovable object’ thing? Well, the moment when my Aura-infused asteroid hit the Tartaran, I got to witness the realization of that phrase first-hand and in startlingly clear God Vision.
An almost blinding explosion of Aura, rock, and ice flashed across the starscape, all in the dead silence of vacuum. The resultant shockwave, a bow wave caused by colliding particles of energy and space dust, threw my army of minions back like so many rag dolls, and even as far back as I was, I was pushed back through space. Numerous little pings raced up my spine as various members of my forces took bits of Aura here and there to tank damage from scattered debris, but like I’d expected, no one was blown away completely.
As I righted myself, I focused my Auric Sense into the brand new mini-asteroid belt I had just created. No system message meant that the Tartaran was still alive too, a fact immediately confirmed by the massive tentacles that swept through the cloud of debris, knocking chunks of ice and stone aside as the Tartaran burst back into view. I could tell from the golden blaze in its now-revealed eyes, each the size of a small city, that it was super pissed.
Now that the impact of my asteroid throw had shattered the frontal section of the ice that had encased th
e creature and I could see its body, it was plain that this thing had fallen down the ugly tree and hit its face on every branch along the way. It was also plain that Gobta’s first assessment that this was a space kraken wasn’t too far off, at least for the parts of the thing I could see. A black, shiny beak that could eat Detroit dominated the center of a mass of tentacles that really had the freedom to spread out, and unlike a normal squid, its four eyes were mounted equidistant around that beak. A maze of sparkling spines created a deadly forest around those eyes, and the rest of its form, what would be the helmet and fins of a real giant squid was still shrouded in a comet’s worth of ice.
Unfortunately, I didn’t see the obvious glowing red weak point all Tartarans had. We had to dig deeper, break away more of the shell, and now, we had to contend with the fact that it had more freedom of movement. The only upside was that I had just created a bunch of extra ice debris to harvest later… and on top of that, my godly senses detected numerous cracks and flaws the stellar impact had created in the beast’s icy shell.
As much as I was hoping to get clear to the weak point in one go, this was what I actually expected. Which was precisely the last puzzle piece I needed to complete my nascent plan.
“Everybody okay?” I sent out over my godly link, even though I already knew that my forces, Queenie and Gobta in particular, were, well, okay.
“Yes, master,” Queenie’s voice was a bit groggy but brightened up a moment later. “That was an amazing attack, master! Once again, you amaze me with your strength!”
“Indeed,” Gobta chimed in, “but as effective as that was, I don’t see that this provides us a path to defeat this monstrosity.”
“You’ll see,” I promised, but before I could dispense with the plan, the cosmic kraken surged forward through space, out for my blood. Mile-long suction-cup covered tentacles rocketed out with startling speed, and it was only by the fact that I was such a relatively small target that I didn’t get scooped up in the initial rush. One slashed by me so close that even though there isn't any wind in space, the sheer mass of the thing passing so close sent me ass over teakettle.
