Chapter 823 – Heavenly tapestry (Patreon)

Phoebe honestly hadn’t expected the war to progress to that point.

She’d thought that it would be decided by a smaller conflict, such as the battle in the Camelot province over a decade earlier, or that Percy would have rallied enough allies to storm the Divine Root’s castle after giving away precious resources like candy for a couple of years.

Apparently, she’d underestimated the pettiness and short-sightedness of the Great Houses. Millennia without a path to divinity had dulled their ambition and blinded them to the possibilities that Percy represented. The fools would rather eliminate him to preserve their worthless status than risk their position at the top of the noble families.

In some ways, Phoebe found Machaon more worthy of respect than his reluctant peers.

Sure, the selfish bastard was willing to drag his whole planet into the gutter for a shot at divinity, but at least he wasn’t spineless enough to settle for weakness when second cores and powerful mutations were on the table. Had Percy invented the Aurora Dew or his Cradles before the plasma mage had committed his heinous crimes, Phoebe was certain that Machaon would have joined the Red-born’s cause even faster than Periphetes.

Regardless of how the deformed patriarch had managed to rope the rest of the noble families into helping him, Phoebe knew that she would finally have to intervene.

She wanted to push the boy, not kill him. The fact that Percy and Micky could already compete with multiple demigods was more than impressive, but it was unreasonable to expect the Lone Wanderer to defeat over a hundred thousand mages by himself.

‘Just a little longer,’ she kept telling herself as she watched the battle unfold.

She was sitting on a giant mushroom on the fourth level of the Fungal Spire, hiding herself from the mortals’ senses. Percy could probably detect her if he focused his Saint’s Sea on her, but he was too busy and had no reason to scan a random mushroom.

Percy couldn’t possibly win, but his spells could still evolve when pushed to their limits. This was the last great challenge that Phoebe’s protégé would face on his home planet for a very long time, so she didn’t want to rob him of the opportunity to grow.

The boy had been trying to contact her for years, but Phoebe had chosen to maintain her distance to prevent his training from turning into a farce. Even if he suspected that she would ultimately jump to his rescue, the danger would feel more real if she wasn’t constantly hovering over his shoulder.

The truth was that she was even more eager to talk to Percy than he was. She wanted to ask him how the hell he had managed to steal the Void Decree, how his artificial advancements worked, whether his upgraded mutation could be spread to the rest of humanity, and where he had found two more Rings of Sacrilege.

Alas… patience was a virtue, and Phoebe’s patience was currently being tested more than it had been in hundreds of thousands of years.

‘Twenty-five percent. That’s my bottom line,’ she decided. ‘If the hive’s population drops below that number, I’ll jump in and execute those pieces of shit myself.’

The nobles had some gall to think that she would let them off after massacring millions of Starry Wasps and threatening the very survival of the hive. If deferring Machaon’s punishment for so long had given the mortals the impression that they could get away with anything, they were in for a rude awakening.

Letting Remior’s elixir output take such a massive hit wasn’t ideal, but it wouldn’t take the bugs too long to recover by cosmic standards, and they would still produce more nectar during their recovery than they had before the changes that Percy had brought to the Fungal Spire.

Other than the boy’s training, the only good thing to have come out of this stupid war had been the artificial hive. Phoebe was curious to see how far they could take that project. Perhaps Percy and his familiar would be willing to work on it after the war if they weren’t too pissed off at her.

Just as she was considering how to placate him, something shifted in the wasps’ movements, giving her pause.

Percy leapt off a mushroom located even higher up the mountain than she was and flew into the swarm. The bugs opened a path for him, revealing a colossal wasp that looked nothing like the rest. The indigo glow of her crown spilled into the rest of her carapace and had nearly covered half of it by the time the tiny human landed on her house-sized head.

Spotting the Starry Queen at the heart of the swarm, the Whites and Violets launched all their spells at her in an attempt to destroy her and Percy both.

Phoebe would have blocked the barrage if she hadn’t noticed the shift in the Commanders’ willpower. Wasps of all sizes rushed to shield their ruler with their own bodies as the domains of the strongest bugs reinforced all of their carapaces and formed a mountain-sized cocoon.

The sky flashed with colours as deafening explosions shook the entire province. It was only after the smoke cleared that everyone could see how the apocalyptic barrage had barely peeled a couple of layers off the formation’s outer shell.

‘How are they doing that?’ the titaness wondered.

Stacking multiple domains over one another wasn’t difficult, but the sheer coordination that nearly forty thousand Starry Commanders had exhibited far eclipsed anything that the swarm had shown previously.

Inspecting the cocoon more carefully, Phoebe noticed that Percy’s willpower was very different from how it usually was. The range of his domain had grown by dozens of times, spreading itself extremely thin. It was so weak that Percy would struggle to pet a cat with it, but it clearly wasn’t supposed to be very powerful by itself.

If Phoebe likened the boy’s domain to a giant, three-dimensional canvas, the Starry Commanders’ domains were the pieces of a grand jigsaw puzzle that were placed on it. Percy’s willpower merely guided that of his subordinates, allowing him to instinctively control their domains like his own. Each wasp’s willpower couldn’t stretch very far, but there were enough of them layered over one another at every single spot to make up for the weakness of Percy’s own domain, giving him enough power to match his exceptional range and control.

‘The willpower at the core of it isn’t just Percy’s, though it feels like a different domain from the one he shares with Micky,’ Phoebe realized. ‘Has he done it, then? Fused his soul with the wasp as well?’

As if to answer her question, the spinning cocoon rose higher, releasing violent gusts that blew the clouds even farther away. Day turned into night as the sunlit clearing above the mountain was replaced by a starry sky that looked vaguely familiar.

Phoebe obviously recalled helping Percy and Micky create the constellations of the grey human and the greenish-blue crow to separate their memories, though the projection of their mindscape that now bathed the entire region in its magical starlight looked much richer than she remembered.

She guessed that the crow’s constellation had changed colour when Micky overcame his depression, and the appearance of the wasp’s constellation wasn’t very surprising given the circumstances. However, this was Phoebe’s first time seeing all the smaller shapes.

Having read the changes in Percy’s Status, she guessed that the pink, orange, light grey, and greyish-red figures represented Percy’s different varieties of clones, while the midnight blue shapes and the indigo wasps represented Micky’s sentries and Nephthys’ proxies, respectively. The tapestry was surrounded by a vast spherical network of crimson stars that gave the glittering patch of sky the appearance of an artistic mural.

‘Are they projecting their mindscape directly into our heads using the concept of Illusion? This ability must have come from the wasp, since I’m pretty sure that Percy has never studied that branch of mind magic,’ Phoebe speculated.

The nobles stared at the aerial formation looming over their heads with awe and fear.

Uncaring about their reactions, the cocoon transformed once more, this time assuming a humanoid shape. At the same time, the human and wasp constellations above the swarm blended into a similar form. Even though Phoebe knew that she wasn’t the target of the swarm’s ire, a chill rolled down her spine as an enormous figure gazed down at the foolish nobles.

At over four kilometres from head to toe, it hovered next to the Fungal Spire like a second mountain. Its thin – almost skeletal – body was mostly black, though it was mixed with an ominous crimson hue due to the relatively small fraction of wasps that had infused their carapaces with ruby powder. The red glow was most prominent where it spilled out of the giant’s orifices: a gaping, toothless maw hanging wide open between and below a pair of sunken cheeks, and a trio of cavernous eye sockets.

The clearly terrified humans pelted the wasps with even more spells, though their joint assault barely knocked a few thousand bugs out of the tight formation. The swarm’s collective buzzing intensified and turned into a deafening howl as the giant figure leaned closer to the ground and tried to grab a fistful of Violets with its clawed hand.

Ironically, the nobles resembled insects more than the construct literally made of wasps…