Chapter 195: Lumi.
"There should only be one of you, what's going on here?" Sol righted himself holding on to HIM by his head while he heaved in his grasp helplessly. "Where did you come from?"
"No Godslayer should harm the sources of creation and destruction-"
"No Godslayer...?" Sol's eyes narrowed. "Are you implying that there are others like me?" He grimaced at her. "That's impossible, I'm the only-"
"What do you think happened to the one before you, who disappeared and gave you the chance to become what you currently are?" She asked and Sol's hostility visibly eased.
"You are not the first, and should you continue down this path you will not be the last either, release him to my care and I will spare you the agony of death by my hand." She lowered her gaze, unlike HIM who had eyes of blue, hers were the opposite red, burning with fury, and Sol could feel a massive difference in power from the two of them, her power was so many times greater than the one in his grasp that he immediately doubted his ability to fight and overcome her, but his anger was still very present, so he held the armless being before her like a ragdoll and gestured to him.
"Give me a real reason, if you're only threatening me then I won't listen to a word of reason from you, this thing; this bastard, has wronged me and gone after my loved ones repeatedly, what makes you think telling me to stop is enough?" Sol asked, boastig his powers as he squeezed down on LIGHT'S head.
"It doesn't matter who was what before I was, I'm the current Godslayer and if you think something like an empty promise can sate my anger then I'll go ahead and kill you both and then figure the rest out!" Sol roared.
"A step further, and your precious goddess, your slaves, that little maid and your friends, Arkadia and everything that resides in it; earth and everything you cherish will be swept away in one fell swoop." She narrowed her eyes at him as her light intensified, filling the void they occupied and washing away the darkness shocking Sol who was supposed to have full control over this domain.
"I have seen many like you who do not know the extent of the collective, living in your little worlds and considering them vast and endless, I am a being that transcends this small space you occupy capable of horrors beyond your wildest dreams, do not test my patience with your arrogance, Sol Vestic!!" She approached him, and Sol felt his bones begin rattling, merely looking into her eyes caused his skin to break into goosebumps and shivers.
She raised her hand collecting all the light she had commanded loose and holding it above her palm as a tiny pure entity.
"You are nothing special, just another cog in our much larger and more grand machine, so I ask you once more before I am at my wit's end, Sol, will you deliver him to me and let me leave, or do you truly wish demise upon yourself and your loved ones?" She questioned him calmly, and Sol bit his lips and lowered his hand letting go of LIGHT and hunching forward with a death glare.
"Thank you for your benevolence, Godslayer."
"Will you at least explain why?" Sol asked tiredly. "Ikaris has been a victim her entire life, he sought to kill her, to erase her existence because he fears our child, but why?" Sol asked, and she reached down and picked up LIGHT like a feather, tossing him over her shoulder.
"The answer you seek lies within the goddess you call Ikaris, within that child conceived inside of her, soon enough you will understand, soon enough." She answered and turned, walking away. "I will take care of this one, do not worry, he will never bother you again."
"Wait, who are you?" Sol called to her when it felt like each step put entire galaxies between them.
"For the sake of reference, you may call me Lumi, until we meet again, Godslayer." She answered, and within another step she was gone from sight and senses, taking LIGHT with her, as though neither of them ever existed at all, and left there in tbe beginning Sol stood staring at the darkness.
Without even realising it he spent hours there simply going through the interaction over and over again.
Cog in what machine?
Wasn't the multiverse the collective?
What else could there be out there?
She made it sound like the Godslayer was a mob in her eyes, something common where she comes from, wherever that might be, because even with his powers at full throttle he couldn't sense her anywhere within the observable and hidden realms through all the expanding realities.
She also called the multiverse "small".
Sol agonised over these five points of their interaction, over and over again, trying to make sense of them, but after accepting the defeat he had been bitterly served he closed his eyes and sighed opening them again in his lounging room where he found everyone quietly sitting, evidently worried. "What's going on here?"
"Master!" Arla sprung to her feet and tackled Sol before he could take another step, but this time he easily caught her and held on to her, looking at the rest who stared at him and sighed in relief.
"So, you didn't kill HIM after all," Dina placed her hand over her heart and slumped in her seat next to Ikaris. "I've been here worried I was gonna suddenly disappear into dust after you killed him." She admitted, and Usami opposite of her sighed as well and nodded.
"After Ikaris explained everything to us, I thought I'd die for sure this time." Usami chuckled and rubbed her forehead.
"What happened, is everything okay?" Ikaris looked up at him curiously, because not only was he completely calm, there was also an air of uneasiness to his presence since returning that made her feel the same as when he first told her about her father's constant interruptions and his attempts to remove her from the image."
"Well..." Sol raised Arla off himself like a cat and put her to stand on her own and then walked over to his personal seat and rested raising his head when the elf quickly leapt across his lap and cuddled against him, causing Dina to almost laugh out while Ikaris sighed in amusement. "Arla, are you okay now?" He asked, and she curled up even more as her expression sobered up.
"Twice in the same day, master, twice I almost died, and twice you saved me, I do not feel strong today, not anymore, it feels like I am on Arkadia again, everything is happening out of my control, and I am spiralling into madness because of it, I do not want to fight another war." She explained how she felt, and everyone could wholly agree with her sentiments, Ikaris was powerless in the face of the source of creation, and everyone else couldn't even perceive him, the only factor that had saved them was Sol's presence.
"Hopefully you won't have to, Arla." Sol closed his eyes and rested his hand on her head gently, and then looked up at the others. "But, there's a chance something terrible does happen in the near future." He spoke up and Ikaris held her belly on instinct forcing him to look away from her.
"What did father say?" She asked, and Sol stared ahead and huffed out a concentrated puff of pure gold mana.
"He didn't get the chance to speak, a short while after I cornered him in The Beginning and confronted him, someone else showed up-"
"Showed up? Isn't that place your domain which should be inaccessible by any kind of normal or even abnormal means?" Dina asked surprised, but went silent again when Sol looked at her for already interrupting something clearly important. "...Sorry."
"Another source showed up, far stronger than Him Above All, stronger than me..."
"By what length?" Ikaris stared at his expression noting the lack of confidence as he spoke.
"I can't guage her power properly, not only is she far more powerful, but she hinted at something that's been eating at me," Sol stopped petting Arla after gaining their undivided attention.
"The observable as we know it, most definitely isn't the only one, there are others out there, others like you, Ikaris, others like Light and Darkness, other multiverses, and possibly, other beings like myself."
"Is that even possible?" Ikaris asked in disbelief. "The whole theory of a multiverse is it's unending size right, endlessness in every direction and infinite realities, if it is infinite then how can there be more?" She asked while everyone else remained still, watching Sol raise both his hands while the lights went out.
"There is no rule anywhere that states more than one infinity can't exist in tandem, I've never thought of it like that, but what if there's an infinite individual infinities, how do we make sense of something so vast?"
"Can you even?" Usami stared as small dots started appearing above them via his conjuring. "At some point what we look at becomes so unbelievable that our sense of reason refuses to understand it."
"The multiverse we reside in expands by the second, I feel it, I sense its power and vastness, it feeds my strength just as much as I observe it; it grows endlessly...
For every breath we take another universe explodes into being, every day that passes several new realities are born, innumerable and uncountable like all the sands in every dimension; ever-expanding, I've never once tried to look beyond it, and I doubt I even can without being as powerful as Lumi."
Sol clasped his hands and the dots started shrinking, painting a larger picture as they formed structures similar to the pillars of creation the closer they got to each other, but then even those pillars disappeared as dots as he continued to shrink everything, leaving Ikaris and the others staring embaffled at the vastness of what they had never once perceived or imagined.
"This is the multiverse, every star you see is representation of a universe in and of itself with a brain-melting distance between it and another, making physical transit between them impossible without teleportation."
"The essence of infinity is endlessness, no positive or negative, just endlessness in every direction, how does someone who resides within an infinity look on the outside?" He asked watching everything condense over and over forming more clouds, more systems, more galaxies made of universes entangled together.
"It's like asking an eagle that has ever only known the limits of the sky to fly through the void and kiss the sun, never once perceived, never once attempted."
"Look at the size of that one..." Usami stared as she saw Origin, even though several billion universes had already been condensed Origin was still capable of swallowing them all, but then that too became small, taking the epicentre of his diagram as he continued to force the perspective wider in order to catch a glimpse of the edge of infinity.
"Maybe I'm looking at it wrong, after all." Sol stopped. "Maybe there's another approach that I'm missing, a third factor that I haven't thought of yet."
"Well you have been Godslayer for a very short while, Love, there are bound to be things yet revealed to you, maybe soon enough..." Ikaris answered him and she saw realisation dawn on his face.
"Soon enough?" Sol conversed with himself in private.
"That's exactly what Lumi said." He though while looking at Ikaris and thinking of her pregnancy.
"So, does our child hold some kind of information, or is she the key to understanding?"
"If that's the case, then why did LIGHT want her dead, he clearly knew more than he led on..."
And why did Lumi take him away?