B3 C5 - Riding the Winds

On December 31st, 74 AFI, the first fragments of the entity formerly recognized as Earth’s moon entered an impact trajectory with Earth. First contact was noted by Asian satellite systems, but it was soon confirmed visually by in excess of a billion humans. 

Many first thought that it was the day beginning early. It was steadily growing harder to tell the difference between night and day. The moon had functionally exploded, but that didn’t mean that the fragments had simply vanished. Anything but. As they fell towards Earth, driven by artificially generated flux, they continued to reflect light at night. The night, now illuminated by hundreds of massive moon fragments that continued to take up more of the sky as they approached, had steadily grown so bright that it could be mistaken for day.

As such, it was easy to mistake the bright meteorite over the horizon for the sunrise. With tides fading and gravity-based magic that had relied on consistent environmental factors involving the moon going haywire, the average citizen was no longer surprised by what they assumed was magic revolving the Earth faster.

This was no such thing, however. A fragment of the moon containing about 0.2% of its mass entered the upper atmosphere two hours before the international date line would reach the new year. At over three hundred kilometers in diameter, even one fragment of this size hitting Earth would wipe out the supermajority of life on the surface. It was likely that most strategic or higher magicians would survive, with the potential for certain master-class magicians given a sufficient distance from the point of impact to do the same.

It entered the lower atmosphere above northern Australia. Most of the country had been depopulated already in the decades prior, owing partially due to a lack of powerful magicians to deal with the plethora of Gates and Towers opening across the outback but mostly to the aftereffects of New Zealand sinking. The repercussions of so many high-level catalyst events detonating across one country had carried on to the population centers in eastern Australia as well.

As such, there was no single government body with the firepower to deal with the falling fragment—at least, not in the area where it would fall.

That said, it was in the general interest of most governments to keep the human race alive, so a number of rapid response units were mobilized.

Having retreated to her own country to avoid the effects of the grey goo and the subsequent paragon-class spells thrown at the Aurian capital, Lila Adams acted in her capacity as one of Polaris’ two paragons to mobilize immediately. While she lacked the raw firepower that her counterpart did, she was the only one of the two who could move quickly enough to reach the falling meteorite.

With the trajectory of each fragment as strange as it was thanks to the machines driving them, the first fragment entered the atmosphere with very little velocity. Given how big it was, though, drag was essentially a non-factor. Within two minutes, it would make contact.

As such, the only magicians who could respond were ones who had already placed weapons systems in the area and extremely fast ones. Given the location of the potential extinction-level threat, the sum total of the response was significantly smaller than most would hope for. Four factions responded.

Lila Adams, paragon-class, represented Polaris.

The Phantom Trio, a set of three strategic-class magicians classified as paragon-class when they were together, represented an unincorporated East Asian territory.

A strategic-class electromagnetic weapon deployed in the open ocean had no official representation but was the work of the surviving conclave in Canberra.

The last responder, Tang Yu-Ming, represented nothing but herself.

She was also the last to act, waiting while the others exhausted their techniques.

The electromagnetic weapon fired first. Since that was owned by the conclave directly in the path of the impact, it had been prepared for quite some time now. None of their preparations for evacuation or fortification would be useful in the wake of a direct hit from a moon fragment. The weapon deployed a number of secondary, fuse-based items that adhered to the fragment and created a grid with which they deployed something akin to the maglev systems that had kept high-speed trains functioning in certain parts of the world.

The objective of this conclave was not to destroy it entirely, nor was it even to keep it in orbit. There was only a single strategic-class magician present here, and his power had been used to fuel the weapon—he was no engineer. Their primary goal was continued survival. To that end, this system was meant to propel the fragment away into the ocean while decelerating it. It would still trigger a tsunami that would lead to tens of millions dead, but it would keep them alive.

At least, if it worked, which it didn’t. Flux fields formed on the moon fragment itself, interfering with the process that the weapon was meant to perform. Though no seismograph could detect what was happening there, both paragon-class magicians observing saw monsters spill out of freshly formed Gates. They perished soon enough, but they lived long enough to disrupt or destroy the man-made weapon anyway. With no intelligence driving the electromagnetic grid, it had no countermeasures to basic attacks.

Lila Adams attacked second, arriving on the scene at seventy seconds left to impact. Her FCD, Excalibur, had activated to its fullest extent. She left a smoke trail kilometers long behind her, excess flux burning off the end of her casting device as she converted her momentum into another movement, soaring across the face of the moon fragment with a paragon-class spell that formed a cutting grid hundreds of kilometers long. Even with its magical resistance, the fragment had no defenses against a spell like that, and her movements cut it into a half dozen pieces.

The Phantom Trio struck fifteen seconds later, fully aware that each of those pieces was still large enough to cause the end of the human race on its own. Each of the three strategic-class magicians that composed the group cast a separate part of the same paragon-class spell—World Without Witness, a spell they had created after studying the aftermath of one of Sloth’s appearances in their own nation. It overtook a large portion of one of the pieces, forcing it into a kind of temporal stasis while also removing it from perception with a stealth-type portion, essentially removing it from the world. That piece would still impact the Earth eventually, but it was moving much slower now, and its impact would be similarly muted. Until then, it was for all intents and purposes gone.

They weren’t nearly enough, though. Even amongst paragon-class magicians, there were tiers of power. Lila, who had only achieved that status recently, and the Phantom Trio, who were only paragons by technicality, didn’t have the raw capacity to stop something this big. Low-end paragons could depopulate cities with ease, yes, but their destructive capacity just wasn’t enough to destroy over a hundred quadrillion metric tons of material.

Tang Yu-Ming acted with less than thirty seconds to impact. She had seen quite enough of the efforts of the others to understand they would not be able to succeed. The strategic-class weapon, ironically, was the most likely to succeed if it went unimpeded, but it was out of charge.

It had been three years since Envy had last made her appearance, and she had grown quite a deal since then.

As the other paragons fled, she stepped forward, shadows rising from the ocean around her and exploding outwards to cover an expanse large enough to reach multiple parts of the falling fragments. Given the fact that they had been cut, they were now spread over an even larger amount of space than they had been originally, which meant that even a Sinner couldn’t cover the ground necessary to get all of them. Not in the time span she had left, at least.

Envy didn’t particularly care for stopping all of them, though. She just needed to prevent a large enough portion of it from reaching the Earth to prevent the eradication of mankind.

More important to her, however, was the ability to finally use the magic she had obtained through her sin.

The shadows rising were not the extent of her power. Each of them spread far enough to cover a city, and from within those rose techniques—including some that were very familiar to the only witnesses to the scene.

The conclave watched as hollow, shadow-filled copies of the grid they’d created reestablished themselves across the accelerating fragments, then as criss-crossing lines segmented them apart.

Hundreds of other spell effects filled in more and more of the fragment, slowing down or entirely stopping pieces, but the magicians in the conclave never got to saw it. A chunk of lunar rock a kilometer wide impacted the ground less than five kilometers from their location. There were no survivors.

Envy had gotten what she wanted from them. There was no reason to let them live when they could no longer provide value.

Despite multiple impacts, the Sinner did stop the majority of the fragment from hitting. The pieces she held in place above the ocean were massive enough that they pulled water upwards, an independent gravitational pull forming.

“My part is finished.”

Shadows crept across the pieces, information entering her mind.

“Now. What is there to see here?”

#

Envy’s point of contact was the first one for humanity, but it was far from the last. Over the course of the next day, almost every single paragon made contact with another fragment. With the sheer number of active fragments and the difficulty in stopping each one, the supermajority of a sovereign nation’s forces were required to participate as one. In many cases, they left their own country almost entirely undefended while they worked to slow, deflect, or destroy the fragments.

During those moments of vulnerability, nations collapsed. Not every sovereign body had magicians powerful enough to actually contribute to the one cause that should have united humanity as a whole. 

Many of those remaining figured that with the correct magicians on hand, the situation would eventually resolve. Most decided that whether or not they died, they wanted to take what they wanted in the days or hours before oblivion. Some were paying back blood debts, and others just wanted someone to hurt.

Regardless of their reasons, it was an undeniable fact that every single nation destabilized. Even the ones that weren’t participating felt the impact of the potential impact events. With nations left undefended, rebel groups and hostile forces alike took advantage, leading to chain reactions of neighbors initiating their own contingencies.

Fighting over resources would not stop for the end of the world.

Within the first day, there were thirteen separate extinction-level threats averted. Not all of them were the same size of the first fragment—one was larger, while the others were significantly smaller. 

Sinners were involved in preventing six of them from falling when national defenses failed, but the others were pushed back through collaboration between the paragons of multiple nations. Organized responses based on hastily-built plans were sufficient to weaken the impacts enough to only kill millions, not billions. Multiple were even capable of either freezing the movement of the fragments, with two separate cases resulting in broken pieces of the moon hovering in semi-stable orbits three hundred kilometers from the surface.

There were casualties. There were a great deal of casualties. On the first day, sixty percent of Lingdao’s surface area was wiped clean, stopped only by a massive shield structure planted in what had historically been the Great Wall of China. An errant chunk five kilometers wide broke up when it hit the time bubble in Middle America, the debris of which sent shockwaves throughout the entire East Coast.

Auria was affected, of course, but mostly by widespread environmental effects and preparations. With information slowly filtering in from other countries, the surviving factions in Auria and its surrounding countries prepared themselves for inevitabilities.

Syl and Incarnate, recognizing what was happening, did not participate in preparations for further international war. They had long since calculated the projected trajectories for the fragments, and they knew when it would be their turn to do something more than protecting their surroundings. There was no Auria to protect anymore, not really—it was already a wasteland, and that was before anyone accounted for the dust storms and flux-enhanced radiation brought on by the impacts and the previous Cascadian incident.

They had been waiting for this. While their own weapon was near enough to completion for it to be functional, they had a much better opportunity to seize.

On January 2nd, 1:02 AM Aurian Standard Time, Sylvester Auria was one of seven people aboard a stolen shuttle aimed at low Earth orbit.

Within two hours, they landed on a fragment of the moon frozen in stasis.

Initial analysis revealed a surface ripe with Gates and technology to learn from, with just one problem.

A Polarian flag was already planted there.