Board & Conquest 125: Flyswatter

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The fateful hour was there, and Kronos had come knocking. 

“Why?! Why did that old boomer pick my territory of all places?!” Hel complained so loudly it hurt Wepwawet’s ears. The gods had gathered in the classroom to meet with Miss Athena for their final preparations for the Fourth Incursion. “Why my Mortis?!”

“Everyone gets their turn eventually, Rotface,” Ishtar replied with little to no sympathy. “That’s life. You remember what life is, yes?”

“But most of my army is in Verglane for the operation!” Hel protested. “My best Champions are half a world away! My civilization is undefended! My pretty, beautiful ghosts are all in danger!”

Is it me, or is she actually starting to care for her mortals now? Wepwawet thought. It was a far cry from her behavior one year ago when she treated most of her population as expandable. I guess the job rubbed off on her.

“We can still teleport them in a pinch,” Epona replied, her back straight like a bowstring. “Others can volunteer in your place to spare Mortis from certain destruction.”  

“I can unfortunately confirm that Beelzebub has indeed volunteered for the Fourth Incursion,” Miss Athena said with a grim scowl on her face. “I have tried to deny him his participation, but he seems to benefit from a special status that prevents me from kicking him out.”

As we feared, Wepwawet thought as he reread the System notification. The maximum number of participants for their side had been set to three, ensuring Beelzebub would at least help take down two gods with him. But we knew the risks from the start. 

“The rift’s location doesn’t change anything,” he told Hel. “We’ll proceed with the plan. We have bled out Beelzecuck’s troops as much as we could, and all his core assets are now gathered in one place. We’ll never have a better opportunity to take him out for good.”

“And if we fail?” Hel snapped back. “What if he escapes or if we mess it up with my troops stranded on the goddamn moon? What then?”

“Then…” Wepwawet sighed. “Then we’ll have to draw straws and send two volunteers to their doom. If we can’t remove Beelzebub in time, then fighting him and Kronos at once guarantees near-certain defeat, so our scouts should focus on gathering information on his deck so someone else can lead the next team to victory.”

“What about our grades?” Anansi pointed out. “You’re asking for two of us to knowingly fail?!”

“Because he’s pessimistic!” Sun Wukong took it as a challenge. “We can win two-on-two, I’m sure we can turn the odds around!” 

“It is not impossible,” Epona conceded. “Thanks to Artemis, Miss Athena, and the Greek Pantheon, we have relatively in-depth knowledge of Kronos’ strategies.”

“While our grandfather has updated his Miracles to keep up with the current meta, he has consistently been using beatdown, machine-focused decks since mortals turned against him in ancient times,” Miss Athena explained as she waved her hand and summoned a list of cards Kronos was known to play. “Unlike Tiamat, he is also a relatively good general, if old-fashioned and inflexible. You can expect combined arms operations from his monsters. Moreover, his powerful Providence lets him alter the flow of time for both offensive and defensive uses.”

“He can turn back time?” Anansi choked in outrage. “What kind of overpowered Providence is that?! How can we defeat someone who overwrites his own defeat on a whim?!”

“Kronos cannot turn back time, since he embodies both its all-devouring hunger and stasis,” Miss Athena clarified. “What he can do, however, is slow it down or move it forward. This lets him summon young, weak monsters, and then artificially age them into much stronger variants that would have cost him more mana to call. Alternatively, part of the reason he uses machines is that it lets him age enemies to death while his artificial minions better weather the march of time.” 

Wepwawet recognized a few Miracles from the list popular in the B&C metagame, like the infamous Transient Blossom hand trap or Primordial Being Summon, and powerful mainstays of Artificial-focused strategies like Limit Break or Mechamorph.  

He’s going to use a competitive deck, Wepwawet thought grimly. Where Whiro and Tiamat favored brutal, yet straightforward tactics and Hastur surprised them with an out-of-the-box strategy, Kronos was set to strike them with a metagame-worthy challenge. Kronos is going to be a significant step up in difficulty. 

Kronos’ strategy might be predictable, but his toolkit was solid and versatile all-around so there was no perfect counter to it. 

“Given this information, Hel might actually be an excellent counter to Kronos since her undead would shrug off his Providence,” Ganesha said after reviewing the deck list. “My golems and Wepy’s dragons could resist it too.”

“His Providence is only half the trouble,” Epona noted. “His deck and army are extremely versatile. We will need teams with great synergies and whose players can quickly coordinate.”

Wepwawet nodded and outlined his plan. “Nine of us remain, which makes three teams.” He pointed at the various players in turn. “Epona, Anansi, and Hel have highly interlocked armies through the Southern Alliance and are right next to the rift, so they can form one team. Ganesha, Artemis, and I have been a team since childhood and extensively know each other’s decks, so we can form a second team. This leaves Horus, Ishtar, and Sun Wukong as the final trio.”

“Demons fighting alongside snakes and angels?” Ishtar mused. “Now that would be the amusing combination. Our enemies would think the gates of both heaven and hell had opened up if they weren’t unthinking machines.”

“We’ll have the worst synergy of the three groups,” Horus replied with a scoff. “But at this point I guess we’ll have to improvise.”

Sun Wukong grinned at the idea. “Great, that’s what I’m best at.”

Miss Athena observed the class with a faint smile, though it didn’t last long. “Before you leave, there are two things I must tell you,” she said. “The first is that I am very proud of you. No matter the outcome of your next battles, you have all grown and matured into gods willing to cooperate and put their pride aside for the greater good. It is a lesson many of your parents failed to grasp, and it gives me hope for the continued prosperity of mortals across the multiverse we oversee.” 

Coming from a goddess of wisdom, that was quite the high praise… yet Wepwawet could see the growing scowl on her face. 

“However, I fear your greatest challenge is yet ahead,” Miss Athena warned them. “We have continued to review the edits Beelzebub and his Titan masters have added to the Elphion System and found a disturbing change. It seems the enemy slipped in a modification for the Final Incursion.”

Of course those cheaters would have one last trick up their sleeve. “What kind of change?” Wepwawet dared to ask. 

“We aren’t certain yet. It seems to allow a change of format for the Final Incursion at the cost of the attacking Titan suffering a considerable penalty of some kind.” Miss Athena observed each of the students one after the other. “However the fight with Kronos might go, my intuition tells me your final battle will not be far behind him, one way or another.”

Anansi audibly groaned. “Horus, remind me to send a letter of thanks to your mother for the mess she put us all in.”

“You are one to talk,” Horus replied with a snort. “But I will be the first one to tell her that, I can assure you.”

“Now is not the time for recriminations, not when we’re in the final stretch,” Wepwawet declared. “We have a little less than forty-eight hours left before the Fourth Incursion. Let’s complete Operation Flyswatter before that deadline. If we fail… if we fail, we’ll try to pick the best duo and pray for their victory.”

Every minute counted. 

—-

For the first time since Beelzebub graced their city with his presence, the entire lunarian population of Lune had gathered around the Overmind’s reliquary. Slave taskmasters, engineers, and alien mages alike observed the spire from roofs and bridges. 

No one in their right mind would miss this momentous occasion. 

The Overmind’s reliquary opened, its spire splitting in four, the panels forming its top widening like a blooming flower. All of Lune rumbled with a telepathic pulse as the apex of the lunarian species manifested, its gargantuan body encased in a colossal, reinforced tank filled with orange fluid, the base connected to the city’s key infrastructures by wires and blackstone machinery. 

The Overmind pulsated inside. 

A gargantuan amalgamation of lunarian brains fused together across the eons, the Overmind could rival even the Wyld’s kaijus in size. Grey colored with crimson blood vessels and mechanical spikes growing out of its ‘body,’ the entity opened its single, cybernetic eye to gaze upon its civilization. Though the streets of Lune appeared to remain unnaturally silent, waves of telepathic conversations and rejoicing rippled through the air. 

If only these fools knew, Beelzebub thought as he observed the situation from his Idol, that they worship a puppet. 

One of the forbidden Miracles those godly fools of the Nexus had banned was the aptly named Rank 10 Change of Mind, which allowed a deity to outright override a single creature’s free will, ignoring its immunity to mind-affecting effects. One of the first things Beelzebub did when he sabotaged the Elphion System was to slip the Ritual back in, complete the quest to unlock it, and then cast it on the Overmind to secure his control over lunarian society. 

None of these creatures had even suspected their dear spiritual guide had been compromised, because no lunarian could even fathom the idea that any creature—not even a god—could mentally dominate the apex of their society. They simply assumed that the Overmind had decided an alliance with Beelzebub was beneficial to their civilization, or that it was subtly manipulating the Lord of Flies. 

Beelzebub, unfortunately, had to repeatedly cast Change of Mind each day on the Overmind to prevent it from breaking out of his control—or else he would have already cast it on that cursed Wepwawet’s Champions and told them to go destroy their master’s Idol—but it was a cheap price to pay. 

Go on, Beelzebub telepathically ordered his thrall. Amuse the gallery. 

The Overmind let out a telekinetic pulse and then gracefully lifted its prize into the air right in front of its eyes: the remains of Thoon the Betrayer, freshly teleported from Elphion for symbolic desecration and destruction. Beelzebub could taste the relish of Lune’s alien population at the sight of their hated enemy. Lunarians were too cold for jeers and displays of open emotions, but the clapping of their mandibles made their glee clear. 

Yes, rejoice, for soon I shall be rid of you all. After spending a full year dealing with this mortal species’ entitled approach to life, Beelzebub was more than happy to shed them alongside this buglike prison of a face. One last spectacle before the finale. 

The Overmind gazed at the floating corpse of Thoon with its crimson gaze, gathering power to vaporize it in an instant… only for a puff of smoke to surround the remains.

The change happened in an instant, so quickly Beelzebub’s divine senses almost missed the transition. The Betrayer’s rotting exoskeleton shrank in an instant, its bones turning into wood, a mane of ape hair falling over its carved face. In Thoon’s place was now a small monkey puppet clad in a jester costume with jingly bells and a single piece of wood dangling from its chest. A small note was carved on it in a terribly written variant of the archaic script of the Chinese Celestial Bureaucracy.

‘Get Dunked On!’

A single thought echoed across the entire population, straight and simple. 

Huh? 

And then Beelzebub’s mind buzzed with alarms. 

His Influence covered all of Lune from his Idol’s promontory, so he immediately detected dozens, if not hundreds, of Champions suddenly teleporting into Lune all over the city in a single wave. Their infestation assaulted his senses from all directions, rising from the depths of the mines in which he kept his slaves safely pacified to the spaceport and ship factories. The Overmind picked up on an intrusion through the teleporting network as an eon-old connection was suddenly awakened. 

Signature identified: Thoon. 

Explosions rocked Lune all at once, and the crater trembled.

Blasts echoed all across the lunarian capital and its key centers, including Beelzebub’s own Idol. His Emergency Forcefield Prophecy immediately triggered and raised a barrier of immaculate light around it, protecting his anchor from what would have been immediate destruction. Other areas were far less lucky. Bridges collapsed, towers crumbled, and even the Overmind’s spire wavered.   

Entire districts shattered as monuments suddenly grew in their place, pushing aside existing buildings. A castle of ice, a giant colosseum, a massive sword of light, a cauldron oozing slimes… all bearing the mana signature of different gods.

Those bastards were making a last-ditch effort to kick him off Elphion before the Incursion!

“The city is under attack!” Beelzebub telepathically signaled to all of his lunarian Champions across the capital as he hurried to organize a defense. How?! How did they manage to pull this off?! Was this retaliation for yesterday’s strike?! How did they– 

Wait.

Beelzebub focused his senses on the monkey puppet, which had now fallen onto the blackstone pavement due to the Overmind losing its telekinetic focus. Its jinglebell crown matched that of that cursed trickster Sun Wukong, whose Providence let him shapeshift Miracles, Champions, or Artifacts into a copy of another with the same Rank. If he had claimed Thoon, then… 

Then that traitor was still alive!

“Lockdown!” Beelzebub ordered the Overmind as he began to cast offensive Miracles to intercept the incoming Champions. “Put the teleportation network on lockdown!”

The Overmind immediately obeyed, closing all teleporters and leaving lunarian agents on Elphion stranded there. A meager sacrifice for Beelzebub, and which immediately halted the flow of newcomers… until the giant sword began to summon more. 

Even worse, Beelzebub noticed movement in the moon’s sky. Dark blots appeared over Elphion, revealing themselves to be a swarm of flying saucers aiming straight for Lune. 

But I destroyed the facility! Did they have a backup fleet?! Beelzebub glared at the snow castle, which he knew belonged to that bastard Set’s son. He could feel the aura of the Champions he had fought in Promesse inside. This is all your fault, isn’t it?!  

It had all been a trap to lull him into a false sense of security and then strike with full force with that traitor’s help. One way or another, this would be the decisive battle. 

Well, you’ve miscalculated, you rabid wolf, because now all of your Champions are on my turf and within reach of my Influence, Beelzebub thought as he sent one last telepathic order to the Overmind and its machinery. You don’t have two days. You don’t even have one. 

“Warning: Gravity Engine set to maximum capacity!”

Every minute counted. 

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