A Space Oddity

by J. J. Pavlov

  "How small Mundia looks." I reply while levitating a curtain of gold dust, trying to shape it into a single contiguous form through my mind alone. So far, all I've been able to achieve is a liquid-looking band floating around me, aided by the low gravity on the surface of the moon.

  "Yet it holds vast lands and millions of lives." Aurelia replies in an equally longing tone as if itching to return.

  "Billions." I'm not sure about Mundia, but it seems about as big as Earth. In my world, there were over seven billion humans. So I don't doubt that there are at least two or three billion on this planet when counting the demons and demi-humans like elves and dwarves. Going by all lives, including animals, I wouldn't even be able to estimate a number that gets close to the truth.

  "It is frustrating." Aurelia suddenly admits, her voice in my mind sounding distinctly miffed. I turn to look at her, finding that she's staring up into the star-studded sky. "It took me many years to learn to control gold. Transmuting it was something my parents gifted me with."

  She can't seem to grasp magic of any other affinity. Karina and I both tried to teach her, but even with catalysts and chanting spells, she was unable to cast any magic. Meanwhile, I've already gotten to the point of controlling gold with my very will - something that took her well into her teens to even get started on.

  "I always thought I was exceptionally talented." She concludes her self-doubts and looks at me.

  "I'm... different." I don't know any other way to appease her. As an existence from outer space, as well as a soul from a technologically more advanced world where I was exposed to magic concepts through fiction, I have a distinct advantage. I'm closer to the Old Humans than I am to any other being on Mundia.

  "You do not have to comfort me." Aurelia closes her eyes once and breaks out into a smile that makes my heart skip a beat. She's beautiful no matter what, but when she genuinely smiles, her charm goes through the roof. "I am still the Golden Queen."

  But when that smile turns into a haughty, self-satisfied look, I lose my concentration and scatter the gold dust I was controlling as I suppress the urge to laugh. She laughs, she cries, she's cute, but most of all, she's still the woman that stood up to the gods.

  "I think I've fallen for you." Despite my wording, I speak without thinking. But I'm not one to be easily flustered by letting my feelings slip, so I don't let it show on my face. What point is there in hiding them?

  "That is the natural course of things." Nodding with an even more satisfied expression, Aurelia cracks a joke for the first time. I burst out laughing when I see her sticking out her modest chest and proclaiming with such confidence that me falling in love with her is a matter of course. But when I see her frowning, I realize that she was serious.

  "And that's why I love you." I double down on my confession and give her a warm smile. In our battle, she was the epitome of pride, but ever since she told me of her past, she has been brooding over things on her own. Seeing her like this feels more natural.

  "You two know that I can hear you, right?" Karina's voice suddenly announces, and I look around to find her. But it seems that she's talking from inside the cube. All mental communications are indeed going through her, so it's not surprising that she would overhear everything we're talking about.

  "I'm not afraid to proclaim my love in front of witnesses." Declaring with my hands on my hips, I take a page out of Aurelia's book and stick out my much larger chest. The Golden Queen looks at me in surprise but then breaks out into laughter as well.

  My mind goes blank when I see her letting go and laughing in such a relaxed manner. It could be just my wishful thinking, but maybe that's an expression she hasn't shown anybody in centuries. And I got to see it, here in the middle of nowhere.

  I really have hopelessly fallen for her, haven't I?

  "Please come to the bridge." Karina suddenly speaks into our minds while I'm doing magic sparring with Aurelia. It sounds urgent, so we exchange a glance and quickly get moving.

  It doesn't take us long to make it to the command center of the cube. The galactic witch is brooding over the only switched-on small screen in the room. The last time we were here, none seemed to be working, so maybe she managed to restore one just now?

  "Zeke and the others are on the move." Without greeting us, Karina gets straight to the point. That's the real name of Kael, the Lord of the Sky. In other words, the false gods are up to something.

  "What are they doing?" I ask while trying to steal a peek of the glowing screen. It shows a seemingly endless string of green symbols falling from the top toward the bottom like rain, and I have no idea how anybody can glean any information from that. But Karina's next words instantly grab my attention.

  "They found out about your mother being a remnant of the Crawling Chaos that landed on Mundia thirty years ago." She says while turning toward me. "Alexander is moving his latest sanctum into Dominion airspace as we speak."

  "They're personally getting involved? What about the game?" I suppress the panic welling up inside me and ask, grasping at straws. According to Aurelia's story and Karina's explanation, Zeke wants to perpetuate the game of the gods and has forbidden any of the others from directly fighting in the battles between humans and demons.

  But really, who in their right mind would care about some game when they learned that something similar to the existence that nearly wiped out their old civilization is now the queen of the Dominion? If it were me, I'd do everything in my power to eliminate that threat before it grows too big - literally.

  "I do not have access to all of their communications, but they appear to have a plan that will hide their involvement." The Witch of the End replies with a frown. "I will send you back to Mundia now."

  With these words, Karina immediately floats out of the bridge, not even waiting for us to follow. I exchange a worried glance with Aurelia, and quickly walk after her.

  My thoughts are swirling in my head as I think about this situation. The false gods are making their move to kill my mother because they learned she's a being just like the one that nearly destroyed the world many millennia ago. But how were they blind to it for the past thirty years? How did they learn about it? Did Mithra inform them after all this time?

  We exit through an airlock without waiting for the decompression to be finished and get launched into the vacuum of the utterly dark moon atmosphere. Only the lights from the cube somewhat illuminate the immediate surroundings. There, Karina looks up into the dark sky, where Mundia's crescent is visible.

  "I can only drop you somewhere within the Dominion. Be glad that I will not miss the planet entirely." She comments before turning her head to me. Those words don't instill much confidence in me as I shudder at the thought of what would happen if I were to get launched past Mundia and into the depth of space. "You will have to get to Arkheim yourself."

  Her pronunciation of Arkaim sounds a little off, but maybe it's just what the city used to be called when she was still in the loop. In either case, I won't be able to find my way there because I have no map. If I land somewhere without any settlements nearby, it's going to be a repeat of the Khurut Sultanate!

  But before I can protest or at least ask for a map, our surroundings warp and snap back almost as quickly. I find myself suspended in space, in the middle of the debris field where I first met Karina, with the moon in our back now.

  "This is as far as I can accompany you." She's floating beside Aurelia and me, her hair flowing in the zero-gravity environment of space as if she were underwater. "Hold on to each other, or you may become separated."

  Aurelia unhesitatingly extends a hand toward me. I remember when we faced each other as enemies, and she was angered by the prospect of being touched by me. We have come a long way since then for her to show me an expression of confidence one would only share with a friend while gesturing for me to take her hand.

  Gripping it tightly, I squeeze it with a smile. We're heading to Mundia to take on the false gods together. It's a development I
wouldn't have ever been able to predict when I was launched from the planet more than two months ago.

  "Good luck." It's the last thing I hear before the debris field zooms past us, and we approach the half-illuminated blue marble that is Mundia. The speed we're traveling at means that we'll crash like we did on the moon.

  That's when I realize that we're going to be entering the atmosphere first. Everybody knows that things burn up in it unless they're adequately shielded. A flesh and blood human is sure to disintegrate completely, and that's what I am right now.

  I glance at Aurelia, who returns the look. We're outside of Karina's range, so we can no longer communicate through our minds. But I don't need words to be able to convey what I want to let her know right now; with a smile, I begin to make my mass crawl across her arm in the form of black tendrils.

  She blinks in surprise but doesn't shy away as I quickly cover her entire body with mine. Her extremely long hair is pulled into my pocket dimension, just like I did with Hestia's wings back in the Khurut Sultanate.

  Once I fully encompass her, I convert the exterior into dragon scales, which I layer over each other repeatedly, turning myself into a suit of armor. Although she can no longer see the outside, she doesn't struggle or try to get me off of her. She understands that I did this to protect her, even though she's most likely virtually indestructible.

  Moments later, the entire planet fills my vision much like that time on the moon. However, it seems that Karina's strange ability to zoom people across space without any feeling of gravitational pull has run out here rather than within the atmosphere.

  Then I begin to feel gravity act on my whole body and pull me toward the planet. Soon, the dragon armor heats up from the friction, as I - still covering Aurelia like an armored spacesuit - plummet toward the continent before us. The scales can withstand extreme heat, so it should be able to survive re-entry without a problem. Since I layered it just in case, I can shed the outer layers whenever they come close to burning up completely.

  But my worries are unfounded, as the friction soon lets up and we slow down to terminal velocity. That's when I realize that Aurelia is incredibly dense. I did swallow her whole before and all, but it didn't register at the time. And while gravity somehow does exist inside my body, my tentacles are very strong, so I didn't take notice of her weight.

  On the moon, I never had a reason to lift her, and gravity is lower there as well. But now, we're falling toward Mundia with a combined weight that far exceeds that of a person of our combined size. Our terminal velocity is much higher than it should be, and impacting the ground this way is sure to splatter me again.

  We're still high enough in the air that a blanket of clouds hides what exactly it is I'll be splattering on, but that's little comfort for me. I should take Aurelia inside me. Since the interior of my body doesn't care about the feeble laws of physics, I can take the Golden Queen's weight out of the equation, grow wings, and land on the ground before taking her back out.

  "I can feel the pull." Aurelia says, her muffled voice coming through the layers of dragon armor that I'm still surrounding her with. "So, we have returned to Mundia."

  Upon those words, her weight suddenly seems to decrease drastically, until I feel myself getting carried by her instead. Undoing my transformation, I slip off her and grow a pair of Fata wings, to find that Aurelia is floating under her own power without using any gold. Did she secretly learn from Karina? I didn't learn how to fly without wings.

  "Finally." She says as she comes to a complete halt in midair and looks down at her own hands as if feeling the power surge through her. She looks positively divine as she does it, her hair billowing as if still in zero-gravity. "I am in control."

  So she simply learned to manipulate the gold that makes up her own body. I wondered why she couldn't do it like with her hair, and why that wasn't enough to let her fly - or move in space as she did on the funerary boat. Maybe there was simply some mental inhibition that stopped her from exerting control over her flesh and bones in fear of bending them out of shape.

  Suddenly, Aurelia's form disappears in a flash of gold, and I stare at the afterimage with a blink of my eyes. What just happened? Did she get attacked by one of the false gods?

  But when I look around, I spot a streak of gold moving at an incredible velocity, performing impossible aerial maneuvers. She's now able to move at such speeds, coming all the way from being unable to even float when I first met her three months ago.

  She flies toward me and stops abruptly in front of me, a proud expression on her face as she looks into my eyes. That's one smug grin if I've ever seen one, but it's not at all vulgar when she's doing it. There's a distinguishable difference between a commoner and a true-born queen making such an expression.

  "Do you want-" She begins, but another voice suddenly echoes in my head and drowns her out.

  "Makoto! You're back!" It belongs to Senka, and it gives me a sense of déjà vu. But unlike last time, she sounds much more in distress. Wait, how is she reaching me here?

  "Wait, I just got a call." Raising a hand at Aurelia to put her on hold, which her frown indicates she doesn't take kindly to, I turn away as if physically entering a phonecall. "Where are you?"

  "I'm in Pontis Daemonis with Hestia and Dregana." Senka replies immediately. "The city is under siege."

  "Dregana? Wait... siege?" I can't follow what's going on, but learning that Hestia is in danger is reason enough for me to go there right away.

  "It's a full-blown invasion! The Alliance-" The doll girl's voice cuts out, and I feel that the connection is lost, just like that time when she infiltrated the academy and was discovered.

  "What is it?" The Golden Queen has crossed her arms in impatience. She's not used to being made to wait for somebody to finish talking in her presence, as everybody would focus on her alone.

  "War." I mutter as I look around, trying to discern where I have to go to reach Pontis Daemonis. But then I remember that Karina told me the gods are on the move to attack Arkaim. Could they have learned about my training on the moon, and this is a diversion to keep me away? How would they know that I can long-distance communicate with Senka? And I doubt I'm even within their sights, as Maou-mama is surely still far more powerful than I am now.

  "As I was asking earlier, do you want me to carry you?" Unlike her smug expression from before, Aurelia now looks completely serious. Extending a hand toward me, she suggests that with her speed, we'll arrive in no time. "I know the way to Pontis Daemonis as well as to Arkaim. Where do you want to go?"

  Leaving aside my surprise at her words, I stop to ponder. Where to go is truly the bigger question.

  Chapter 95 - Gathering Storm

  It has been one moon since Rolan and the others left. In that time, Kamii's physical strength has grown to the point at which she can openly wrestle with other ajura warriors. Chandra is still just over the mountain, but she can already see the summit from where she's climbing.

  With physical strength comes increased power in her cursed arm as well. It appears that the force of her first hit gets doubled each time she strikes again within a short interval. Even when she doesn't use her full strength on any subsequent swings, they still apply all of the stacked power.

  These days, she doesn't even get more than five hits in on anybody before they're sent flying by the impact. It effectively resets her curse counter as she has to chase after them then. But since it's only her right arm, she's incredibly predictable.

  Her training with Chandra has been to reduce that predictability by practicing with a weapon in her left hand. She's physically strong, but to catch an opponent off-guard with the explosive speed stemming from that strength, she's wielding a dagger now.

  Of course, the opponents she faces in the sparring ring all know where the real threat lies. But somebody who has never met her may be misled by her right arm's appearance, thinking it's a useless weight that the little dark elf can't utilize. By drawing their focus to the dagger,
she distracts from the much more dangerous weapon that is her crab pincer.

  "Incomin'!" Suddenly, an ajura's voice echoes across the top of the butte, causing Kamii to look around in surprise. But Chandra doesn't let that opportunity slip by and delivers a punch right in the little dark elf's face that sends her spinning to the ground.

  "Focus on the fight in front of ya!" She roars with the enthusiasm of a teacher who has found an exceptional student. In the past moon, she has dedicated most of her free time to Kamii, to the chagrin of those like Mukasura, whose favorite pastimes are to spar with the Ajura boss. But one can't blame her for being drawn toward somebody whose potential seems bottomless even now.

  "Sucker punch..." The little dark elf pushes herself up from the ground and glares at Chandra in accusation.

  "That's just usin' an openin'." Crossing all three pairs of her arms, the Ajura boss declares as if teaching a lesson. "So, what's incomin'?"

  "Already about to land, boss." A male ajura with fiery red hair announces with a shrug. His name is Batamira, and although he calls Chandra the same way all other ajura do, he's actually her grand-nephew.

  The sound of wings beating draws everybody's attention toward the sky above the longhouse, where a lone figure descends with the sun in its back. Nobody can tell who it is, and it seems to have been a deliberate way to make an entry.

  "Do you ever do anything other than fight, Chandra?" A female voice emerges from the winged figure that lands on the roof, addressing the Ajura boss in a familiar tone.

  "Eat, fuck, sleep." The latter replies with a grin as she counts the things she does outside of sparring matches. "Gimme a war, and I'll show ya how valuable that is."

  "You never change." The woman remarks wryly and jumps off the roof. Basked in the shadow of the longhouse, her appearance becomes visible. It's a demon with bluish-gray skin, long flowing purple hair, and a pair of large curved horns grows from her forehead. Her form is clad in a skintight black leather outfit, which accentuates her curvy body and her immense chest that surpasses even that of Kamii's little sister.