‘Shit! We can’t stay here!’ Percy mentally exclaimed. ‘We’ll be crushed into minced meat!’
‘What’s the alternative?’ Tiberius asked, his features contorting into a grimace. ‘We won’t survive out there either!’
Percy’s mind raced like a galloping horse as he tried to come up with a solution. He and his host had no way to shield themselves from a collapsing internal world, nor the deadly spells of the Concept mages, but the two threats were fundamentally different.
The internal world was finite, leaving them with nowhere to go but through the rifts, while outer space was boundless. They just had to move away from the gods to avoid getting hit. The problem was that the deities’ battlefield stretched for hundreds of kilometres around Julius’ corpse. Tiberius would never manage to cross such a vast distance without getting caught up in a stray explosion.
‘We need to push our exit point outside the warzone before we emerge,’ Percy told his host. ‘Make sure we don’t get cut by the spreading rifts and let me worry about the outside world.’
Aware that they were almost out of time, Percy pushed his primary and secondary domains through the crack once more, enveloping the god’s body. Julius didn’t look that different from Tiberius and the other mortals, though the golden plates coating his flesh appeared a little smoother and glossier. The entire left side of his body – skull included – was scorched black and melted toward the middle, leaving no question as to how he had been slain.
Percy was honestly surprised that the damage wasn’t more extensive given the sheer size of the divine spells that had likely struck the fallen deity. If even a sapient’s flesh grew this tough upon their apotheosis, Percy could hardly fathom how powerful the body of a divine beast would be.
‘I hope Julius isn’t much heavier than a mortal,’ he thought as he tried to propel the corpse away with explosions of willpower.
Unfortunately, there were no objects or even air to push against, once again hammering home how inhospitable outer space was. Percy had to discard small chunks of his domain to produce the necessary thrust, which forced him to take short breaks between bursts to recover.
At least his plan appeared to be working. While Julius’ body weighed a dozen or so times more than Tiberius’ and was capable of remaining relatively intact even after getting hit by literal mountains, it was still lighter than a Green beast, making it relatively easy for Percy to accumulate momentum. The problem was that they still had a lot of space to cover before it would be safe for his host to exit the rift.
Enormous explosions kept going off everywhere around the flying corpse, releasing scorching waves of heat that singed Percy’s very mind and forced him to continuously retract his senses back into the unnatural portal. If that wasn’t bad enough, the shockwaves kept pushing the god’s body in random directions, making it impossible for Percy to pick where to go. The fact that his host was frantically flying within the internal world to dodge the spreading cracks only made peering out of the rift even harder.
‘How much longer?!’ Tiberius demanded. ‘This place has already shrunk to a third of its size, and I’m having trouble tiptoeing around the distortions!’
Percy gritted his borrowed teeth, realizing that they would have to exit in the middle of the battlefield after all. Between certain and almost-certain death, the latter was marginally preferable.
Just as he was mentally debating whether it was worth delaying for another handful of seconds, a giant asteroid slammed onto the front side of the corpse, crushing what was left of the fallen deity’s bones into powder.
Percy shuddered upon picturing the grim fate that his host would have suffered had they emerged from the rift a moment sooner. At the same time, he realized that the enormous meteor that had struck them was a literal godsend.
Julius’ face was still plastered onto the uneven surface of the flying mountain, getting carried out of the battlefield at a great speed. Better yet, Percy finally had something solid to push against with his domain, using it as leverage to propel the corpse away even faster.
The boundaries of the divine battlefield weren’t fixed. The warring deities were constantly drifting wherever the tide of the fight carried them, meaning that there was no clean demarcation where Percy would consider himself “safe” from becoming collateral damage. Still, it became clear that he would have to settle for “safe enough” when one of the spreading cracks inside the internal world tore into the side of his host’s torso, leaving behind a narrow but deep wound that barely missed his left lung.
‘Oh well… whatever happens happens.’
Pouring every drop of willpower he could muster into the unstable rift, Percy forcefully widened the opening enough for his host to crawl through. Before exiting, Tiberius shot the corpses of the other Green-borns one final, solemn glance. The spreading cracks had shredded them into even more pieces, making it impossible to bring them out.
Percy felt a pang of guilt for not thinking of storing his host’s friends in his spatial seal back when they had still been relatively intact, but it was too late to do anything about it.
Slipping through the portal, he escaped just in time to feel the god’s internal world collapse along with his body, releasing a violent shockwave that rattled Tiberius’ bones. Since Percy had already established that sound was incapable of crossing the void, it had to be a ripple in the very fabric of space that had nearly pulverized them.
Scanning the spot that the deity’s corpse had occupied a moment prior, Percy only found a single object nearly small enough to fit in his host’s palm: a dandelion-like plant with a stem that branched out into a pair of mint-coloured pappi.
Realizing that the affinity-changing treasure was all that had remained of not only Julius’ internal world and body but also the corpses of the other mortals, Percy couldn’t help but swallow hard.
‘I suppose it’ll grant the air affinity to a maximum of two people,’ Micky speculated. ‘One for each consumed pappus.’
Percy mentally nodded. It was probably the affinity-changing treasure with the fewest uses that he had ever seen, and he doubted that it would last for longer than a week. It wasn’t all that surprising, since the duration and number of charges were correlated with the strength of a deity. If anything, he should consider himself lucky that Julius’ death had even generated one, since Kassorith had mentioned that it wasn’t guaranteed.
Snatching the magical plant, Percy stored it in his seal for now. He still wanted to participate in the auction if possible, so the treasure might not even last until his return to Remior. If Tiberius or his remaining comrades wanted it, Percy wouldn’t mind giving it up, but that was a problem for later.
‘Come on. We’re not safe yet,’ he said, releasing multiple bursts of willpower to propel himself away just like he’d done for the corpse.
The good news was that Tiberius had inherited the inertial frame of the fallen deity, so he’d been flying away from the centre of the battlefield from the moment he’d emerged from the rift. He was also much lighter than the god, so Percy had an even easier time accelerating. Only once did a giant fireball fly toward them, but the mountain-sized projectile that had carried them this far luckily shielded them from the deadly spell.
Once Percy and his host were far enough, the former exhaled in relief as the latter reoriented himself to watch the battle while drifting backwards, clearly anxious to know whether his people would survive.
The gods were too small to make out from that distance, so Percy could only tell that the fight was still raging on due to the flashes of azure, orange and brown mana littering the void.
‘Which ones are yours?’ he asked.
‘Water and one of the earth users,’ Tiberius replied.
‘Did none of your gods ascend with composite affinities?’
‘Some of our most talented demigods are given affinity-changing treasures nowadays, but that wasn’t an option a hundred thousand years ago – when our mentors attained divinity.’
Percy nodded in understanding. Saying nothing else, he discarded chunks of willpower in the opposite direction to slow his host down, so that they wouldn’t drift too far away from their only means of leaving this place.
Around half an hour later, the orange flashes died out completely, indicating that at least one of the remaining bandits had either fled or been killed. At roughly the same time, the azure flashes also happened to grow scarcer. The deity with the water affinity was still alive, but they must have been injured seriously.
Estimating that the fight would conclude one way or the other within the next few minutes, Percy began accelerating toward the battlefield again, hoping to get noticed by the allied gods.
When the remaining deities stopped producing spells, Percy and Tiberius worked together to fly even more quickly toward them, releasing indigo bolts of lightning from their own core to hopefully capture the gods’ attention. It would be a disaster for Percy if it was the space bandit with the earth affinity who had survived, but even getting captured by a hostile deity might be better for Tiberius than being stranded in the middle of nowhere.
As seconds turned into minutes without anybody coming to pick them or the affinity-changing treasure up, the worst-case scenario started looking more and more likely. An hour later, Percy and his host were forced to accept their grim reality: they were alone in outer space, billions – if not trillions – of kilometres away from civilization!