Chapter 766: Gugalanna
A deafening bellow rolled through the void.
It slammed straight into the depths of Tom’s mind, and his entire mindscape shuddered. For a second, the world swam around him.
He looked at the reward for the Eleventh Trial and was utterly dumbfounded.
A bull? His reward was a breathing bull statue? What was this supposed to be?
Yet there was something strangely familiar about this golden and blue thing. Tom frowned, racking his brain as he tried to figure out where he had seen it before.
(Image)
Suddenly, the Eleventh Palace lit up, and a name appeared above the bull.
The moment Tom saw it, recognition struck him.
"Gugalanna?" His eyes widened. "Yeah, it looks exactly like the one from Fate/Grand Order."
Tom stared at the bull in disbelief.
Gugalanna, the Bull of Heaven, the Hurricane Inanna.
In the legends, it was the greatest of divine beasts in Mesopotamian Mythology, a heavenly scourge the chief god Anu had granted to Ishtar, goddess of Venus. Its very existence was a storm, and wherever it walked, calamity followed.
It didn’t need to eat, and it didn’t need a real body. As long as the sky existed and the winds kept moving, Gugalanna could gather a form out of the storm again and again. The bull was only the shape it showed the world. The tempest was what it truly was.
In Sumerian mythology, once Gugalanna descended, the land suffered seven years of famine and ruin, enough to overturn an entire world. It was also said to be the strongest divine beast of all, able to hold its own against the primordial goddess Tiamat for a short while. Unfortunately, at the crucial moment, a certain unreliable goddess went and lost her bull.
The twelve zodiac signs came down from ancient Greece, but the Sumerians had been watching the stars long before that, and Gugalanna was the origin of Taurus.
The reward was absurdly good.
The catch was that what he got was only a cub, and it would have to grow by devouring weather disasters. That wasn’t a hard condition. Tom knew exactly how unreliable the weather was these days. Today it was a once-in-a-century super typhoon. In two days it’d be a once-in-a-thousand-years storm, and a bit after that, some unprecedented record rainfall.
The weather never gave anyone a break, and Gugalanna would eat its fill.
And if that somehow wasn’t enough? Couldn’t he just make some disasters himself?
Mooooo!
Gugalanna bellowed again, sounding a little impatient this time.
"Okay, okay, I know you’re excited," Tom said, exasperated. "Stop yelling. And when you come out, behave yourself. If you wreck my city, you’re getting locked here forever."
"Moo~"
The mighty Bull of Heaven instantly turned into a whipped puppy.
Tom burst out laughing. Who would have thought the Bull of Heaven, a beast that made even the high gods go pale, would ever get this docile?
With a thought, a beam of spiritual light shot from between his brows and straight into the clouds.
In an instant, the air above began to boil. Fierce winds tore across the ground, and enormous energies ground against each other.
The day had started out perfectly clear, but now clouds piled up along the edge of the horizon. Black thunderheads rolled and stacked at a speed that broke every rule of meteorology, slowly twisting into a vast vortex. Dull thunder rumbled from deep inside the clouds, and even the surrounding mountains trembled faintly.
Tom had said he’d received a cub, but what he’d really received was a fundamental law. He had released the concept behind the name Gugalanna back into the world. From now on, the sky would build its body for it, and the storms would become its flesh. Only when it reached the limit of its growth would it become the true god of calamity, the embodiment of every natural disaster.
A shift in the sky this huge didn’t go unnoticed. The people looking at houses in the outer district were alarmed and had no idea what was happening.
Tom spotted Andrew, Cassandra’s father, in the crowd and gave him a quick heads-up. Only then did Andrew realize all this was Tom’s doing.
"Everyone, this is Mr. Riddle doing some magical research," Andrew told the group. "I don’t think today is a good day for viewing properties. Why don’t we reschedule?"
The wizards were startled to hear it, but they went along with it. Sure, they could have stayed and watched what happened next, but what if Tom lost control and they got caught in the blast?
Still, the prospective buyers felt a lot more reassured, and their resolve to buy in Dalaran only grew.
Anyone who chose Dalaran at a time like this was already a wizard with a strong sense of danger. Before, Tom’s power had mostly been rumors, plus the odd strange spell. But now that they’d seen him stir the sky, there was no more doubt. If they lived in Dalaran, their safety was guaranteed. Even if war broke out with the Muggle world someday, this would be a safe haven.
The only pity was that the inner city wasn’t open for purchase yet.
With a touch of regret, the guests left Dalaran one by one through the public fireplaces. Andrew took one last look at the sky, which was growing wilder by the minute, and left as well.
Tom stood on top of the tower, head tilted back, watching the sky change.
Suddenly a graceful, strikingly alluring figure appeared at his side. Ravenclaw, in a long aqua-blue gown.
The moment she materialized, the wind howling down from high above whipped her long hair around and tugged her skirt against her ankles, until tiny magic runes surfaced around her bare feet and calmed the gale around her.
"Honestly, can you not sit still for five minutes? You just got done with the Leviathan, and you come back and stir up this much trouble."
She was scolding him, but her tone was full of teasing.
On the day the golden apple tree was transplanted, Ravenclaw’s body had finished growing and she’d been successfully revived. Her new body and soul still needed some time to settle in together, so she wasn’t quite at her peak.
Even so, she was a legend-class figure, and the gap between her and the so-called "kings of the age" was fundamental.
Ravenclaw watched the changes in the sky with the same curiosity. The clouds grew thicker and heavier, pressing lower and lower. The storm over land didn’t look as terrifying as the one at sea, but it still swallowed all of Dalaran and the nearby mountains.
Lightning cracked. Rain came crashing down, and the wind raced off into the distance.
Deep inside the vortex, something terrifying flickered in and out of sight. Even Ravenclaw felt her chest tighten, and she suddenly felt very small.
"This is a... natural disaster," she murmured. "Tom, is this really your handiwork?"
If she hadn’t seen Tom standing there so calmly, just watching, she would have sworn another monster like the Leviathan had shown up.
"Relax," Tom said with a smile, slipping an arm around her soft waist. "Remember my trial quest? Killing the Leviathan let me clear it by accident, and what’s happening now is my reward."
"A trial reward?" Ravenclaw had forgotten all about that. "So what did you get this time?"
"A bull."
Ravenclaw gave him a baffled look. Tom didn’t explain any further. She’d see for herself soon enough, and no amount of talking would do it justice.
At the center of the cloud vortex, a condensed mass of storm slowly sank and began to change shape. Two golden points of light flared up in the heart of the downpour.
The rain never reached the ground. Caught in the howling wind, it hung in the air. Clouds, lightning, rain, and wind blended together and gradually formed a colossal silhouette.
The golden lights grew a little larger, and now you could see they weren’t simple sparks. They were eyes. At first they’d been no bigger than candle flames, but as the storm drew in tighter, they slowly became a pair of eyes.
When those eyes opened, the disturbances in the sky paused for a moment, and the storm assembled the young body of Gugalanna in some strange, uncanny way.
A heavy breathing sound drifted through the air. It didn’t come from any single direction. It rose from every gust of wind and every wisp of cloud at once.
The sky was its chest, lightning was the beating of its heart, and its white pupils looked down on the earth. Within the storm, two tornadoes twisted into a pair of translucent lapis lazuli horns.
Ravenclaw was dumbstruck. She finally understood what Tom meant by "a bull."
In sheer size, the infant Gugalanna was smaller than the Leviathan, only about a tenth of it, standing roughly four hundred meters tall. But the sense of awe it carried was far greater.
No matter how huge the Leviathan was, it was still a mountain of flesh, and it never stopped being a living creature. The Bull of Heaven was a different matter. The gale was its roar, the downpour was its blood, the lightning was its footsteps, and the thick banks of storm cloud were its body.
The giant typhoon wrapped around its frame looked like a blessing the world had cast on itself, a safeguard to keep the world from being torn apart by this terrifying beast.
"Mooo~!"
The sound wasn’t loud. It was even a little childish. The calf in the sky threw back its head and let out the first true cry of a young beast in this world.
The Greatest Divine Beast had come.
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