Chapter 50: An attack
Then his System flickered.
A red notification appeared in front of his eyes.
[Warning.]
Ethan stood at once.
The party continued behind him, loud and careless.
A second message followed.
[Long-range detection detected.]
His face hardened. The System never used those words lightly.
He looked at his status interface and saw that nothing was there. No monsters. No divine energy. No Imperial signals.
Then he felt it through the soles of his boots.
A faint vibration.
Not an explosion.
Marching.
Thousands of feet hitting the ground in rhythm.
Ethan turned toward the eastern horizon. The darkness looked empty.
Then one of the watchtowers burst into flame.
The celebration stopped cold.
A horn blew once. Twice. A third time.
Soldiers froze mid-drink. Karisa ran from the command tent with her sword already drawn. Marcus appeared behind her, rifle up, eyes sweeping the night.
"What the actual hell just happened?" Karisa demanded.
"Eastern watchtower!" a guard shouted. "It’s gone! Like, completely gone! It was there one second and then it was fireworks the next!"
Then another explosion lit up the southern ridge, causing the ground to shudder and sending the crowd into a panic.
Ethan’s eyes narrowed.
"That’s not an attack."
Marcus looked at him. "You don’t think this looks like an attack?"
"...they’re testing the perimeter. Poking for soft spots. Classic."
Karisa’s face changed. "How many?"
Ethan closed his eyes. He let the lightning course through the earth. Suddenly he could feel every movement, thousands of footsteps, thousands of heartbeats, metal, magic, divine energy. It was all swirling together in a massive, churning torrent.
His eyes snapped open.
"Too many."
Marcus swallowed hard. "How many people are we talking about here, Ethan? Can you please give us a number, for my heart’s sake, before I have a complete panic attack?"
Ethan stared into the dark. "At least thirty thousand."
Silence hit the group harder than the explosions.
Karisa’s face went pale. "That should be impossible. The fortress only fell today."
"Impossible," Ethan quietly agreed. "They shouldn’t even know where we are. Unless someone left a trail of breadcrumbs the size of a mountain."
Then another horn split the air, deeper and longer than the first, and it was answered by hundreds of others.
Outside the boundaries of the village, the night was coming alive too. Torches of fire were sprouting up on the tops of hills in the distance. Soon, banners of the Roman Empire were waving in the air, thousands of them.
"Karisa, they mobilized in a matter of hours. How did the Empire manage to bring an army this size to our doorstep in such a short amount of time?" Karisa shook her head. "Hours."
Marcus lowered his rifle a fraction. "The fortress fell a few hours ago. Hours."
"Exactly," Ethan said, his voice low and steady. "They didn’t find us on their own."
His eyes flicked back to the giant sleeping form. "They followed him."
A roar tore across the valley.
Spark’s eyes opened.
The clouds in the sky above the camp were twisting into knots. Lightning was flashing down to the ground around Spark.
Some of the soldiers were looking at their weapons, as if expecting to have to use them. Others were dropping to their knees. Yet others were running off in every direction.
Spark slowly raised his massive head. His eyes blazed like a raging storm locked up in glass.
Ethan looked to the other side of the valley. At first, he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Hundreds of Roman soldiers were lined up in perfect rank across the hills. But as he looked closer, he realized that they weren’t moving.
A huge, armored carriage was making its way through the Imperial army ranks. A bunch of priests were walking alongside it. Everyone was carrying enormous, silver chains that glowed with divine light.
Karisa followed Ethan’s gaze to the divine silver chains and crossbars. "Oh, look. They brought the fancy jewelry. Restraints."
Marcus looked down at the chains. "They can hold it? I bet Spark treats those like party streamers."
"Not for long," Ethan said, as he felt the power of the divinely imbued metal radiating from the chain. "Those are only going to slow it down for a while, in order to give the Empire time to deal with the creature in a more controlled manner. Classic Olympus style."
A horn blew again, and an Imperial commander stepped out in front of his troops. As he began to speak, magic amplified his voice so that everyone in the valley could hear him.
"By order of the Roman Imperial Senate and under the authority of the Olympian Pantheon, the creature designated Typhon-Class Divine Threat is to be surrendered immediately!"
The rebels answered with shouts and curses.
"Go to hell!"
"Come and take it, you toga-wearing bastards!"
"Kill them all!"
Ethan did not move.
He paused a moment, then added, "However, the Empire recognizes that the creature itself may be contained."
His tone grew colder.
"However, the Empire recognizes that the creature itself may be contained."
Ethan’s eyes narrowed. Contained. Not killed. They wanted Spark alive.
The commander held up his hand. Behind him, his teams were dragging huge siege engines into place. Ballistae, armed with magical runes, which would be used to try and slay a monster of Spark’s size and power.
Karisa whispered, "They came prepared."
"No! They came prepared before the fortress fell!!"
Everyone around him went quiet.
Marcus looked toward the ruined eastern hills. "That means..." he started to say.
"...They knew," Ethan finished. "This whole thing was expected. We just played into it."
Reality hit all of a sudden. They realized that more than just a fortress was destroyed. The Empire, including Olympus, must have expected something to happen at the fortress.
Ethan’s hands curled into fists.
A voice called from behind. "Ethan!"
He turned. A young scout ran toward them, face white.
"Commander, I..."
"Don’t call me that," Ethan cut him off. "It makes me sound important. I’m not."
The scout barely heard him. "We found something."
"What?"
"People."
Marcus scowled. "We have plenty of people. You’re gonna have to be more specific, kid."
"Not rebels. Not Imperials." The scout was breathing quickly. "Strangers. They appeared after the fortress fell. Three of them at first. We thought they were spies. They were wearing weird clothes. They had brought with them objects that none of us recognized. They looked future-looking."
Karisa stepped closer. "Where are they?"
The young scout started to speak before collapsing into the breathless list of people they had found. "One was taken by Rick’s group. Another vanished into the forest. The third...we lost him. Poof."
Ethan’s eyes sharpened. "What did the captured one say?"
The scout looked horrified. "He said this world wasn’t supposed to exist. Like...at all."
Silence followed him, even from the distant lines of the enemy Empire.
Ethan felt a cold feeling creep into his chest as he thought of what else the scout could tell them. "What else?" he asked.
"Even when he was tied up, he would keep asking what year it was. Over and over again. He would look at us with this terrible fear in his eyes, as if he thought that finding out the year would be the worst thing that had ever happened to him."
Marcus slowly lowered his rifle. "That doesn’t make sense. At all."
"World non-existence isn’t our problem...at least not today."
The scout pulled out a piece of metal from under his cloak. It was smooth and rectangular, without any Imperial marks or Roman letters. There were no divine runes on it either.
Ethan took it.
And then the System reacted, the word in bold announcing the unknown presence of the foreign object that had just come into contact with it.
[Unknown Object Detected.]
[Origin: Unregistered.]
[World Classification: Unknown.]
His pupils contracted.
A second message flashed.
[Warning.]
[Foreign World Signature detected.]
Then another.
[Multiple signatures detected.]
Ethan looked up. "How many?"
The scout shook his head. "We don’t know. Could be dozens. Could be hundreds. The sensors are going crazy."
A flash lit up in the far distance of the sky. Then another. Then more and more. There were ten, twenty, hundreds of them. Points of light in the far distance of the world.
For one second, Ethan thought they were stars.
Then they began to fall.
These objects were shooting through space like missiles, scoring direct hits on a mountain, on a forest, on the Imperial Army’s rear. Many of them were being torn apart by the heat generated by their friction against space and bursting into flames.
The System flooded him with warnings.
[World Event detected.]
[Dimensional instability detected.]
[Foreign entities entering the world.]
[Unknown variables detected.]
[Warning.]
[The boundary between worlds has been compromised.]
Ethan’s heart hammered.
The First Fortress wasn’t just a building. It was a seal of something ancient, left behind by the First Son. Ethan had suspected that. Now he knew. The seal had been broken by Spark’s destructive power.
Marcus looked at him with a stern expression. "What does the System say? And please don’t say ’everything is fine.’"
Ethan didn’t immediately answer Marcus. He looked at Spark.