Amazon Apocalypse 7: Chapter 80 Part B (Patreon)

With sword and spell I struck at a nearby B-Grade. One Sunlight Spear through the chest was enough to pin him for a moment, and Sharky made quick work of him from there.

It was a good thing I had him watching my back, because there were a dozen more gods closing in all around me. I lifted my sword overhead. Mana coated and extended it, this time just to the size of a building instead of something capable of cleaving through mountains.

I swung, cutting through two B-Grade gods at the waist. But my sword came to a sudden and clanging stop when it struck the shield of an A-Grade. The other gods used that moment to swarm me with fists, weapons, and magic. Sharky turned to bat them away with his massive tail. Though most of these gods were far larger than humans, Sharky was still larger than all but the biggest A-Grades and could swat most of them aside.

That cleared the way enough for me to bring down a constellation's worth of mana bolts overhead, and they came down like rain across the battlefield. Each did little damage on its own, but the multiple afflictions the spells carried would nip away at the puppets' health until eventually they were destroyed.

But how long would that take?

I grimaced as I saw the scale of the enemy. Ahead of me, Seraphyne and Jade were both fighting with all their might, yet they hadn't made it to the rift. As it was, just fighting our way to that portal would be a challenge and a half.

If the Godhollow Faith Devourer wasn't fighting us itself, it meant that it was doing something more important than preserving its minions. The only thing that could be more important than saving its army of possessed gods would be pushing itself to S-Grade.

If that were true, the entity was far closer to reaching S-Grade than I previously believed. We couldn't afford to take our time at this and wait for my spells to whittle through an army.

Then another light blossomed in the sky, and this time it wasn't from one of my spells. I looked up, and several of the puppet gods did too.

My radio came to life, and a call I'd been waiting for buzzed through.

"The fleet is in position. Permission to fire, Emperor Carter?" said Legate Asimi, voice crackling on the other end of the line.

"Sharky, take me to Jade and Seraphyne!"

Sharky swam upward, jumping in record speed. I arrived at the side of the two women and laid hands on them both.

"Both of you, come with me!" I yelled as I pulled the two of them onto Sharky's back and into the Shadowrealm.

"What is this, Carter? We need to get to the entity before it reaches S-Grade. Time is of the essence!" Jade said, still waving her sword.

"Something special the guys in Crownhill cooked up the last time we were attacked. Wait and watch." Then I flicked on my radio and addressed Legate Asimi. "Granted! Throw everything you've got at them."

The first magitech missile struck with the force of a nuclear bomb, because that was exactly what it was. The B-Grade hit with it was shredded to bits of ruined flesh in an instant. Even from the Shadowrealm, I could see the destruction. But that was just the start.

If I was going to green-light the construction of magitech nuclear bombs, I sure as hell wasn't going to just build one.

A hundred more nuclear explosions followed the first, each powerful enough to level a city. Hundreds more followed. I remained in the Shadowrealm until Asimi told me the barrage was over, then Sharky, Jade, Seraphyne, and I all emerged under what used to be the sun.

So much dust had been thrown up by the nuclear barrage that the sky was a blackened haze. The bedrock and lava we'd been fighting on had turned to sand, which had then hardened to glass.

Instead of light from the sun, the entire area was illuminated by a massive firestorm that raged in all directions. I could feel the radiation in the area eating away at my body, not that radiation on its own could put down anyone on this battlefield.

One by one, the undead gods that survived started to pull themselves together. What had been an army of more than a hundred was now scarcely a dozen.

"Well done, Carter. Now, let's finish this!" Jade didn't waste so much as a breath.

She planted a foot on the skull of one of the humanoid gods trying to pull itself together, and with a stomp she crushed its head to paste. Another, she skewered through the back with her sword and pinned to the ground.

Seraphyne also attacked. Overhead, the same magitech drone I'd seen her use against the Void Leviathan spun to life and rushed an A-Grade. One of the surviving A-Grades rushed her with a clawed hand. Before it grasped ahold of her, Seraphyne reached into her sleeve and came free with a laser sword, which came to life with a buzz in her hands.

When I'd seen such swords before, I'd always thought they were more a tool than a weapon. But the way the laser sword danced in her hands had me thinking otherwise. She wielded the weapon with skill that could only come from years of careful training.

When one red-skinned demon like the Demon of Wrath I'd slain came for her, she swung, deactivated her weapon to bypass his block, then activated it again to skewer him through the throat before nimbly dodging backward and blasting him with threads of golden light that threaded through his soul. The undead god died to a sudden stroke a moment later, blood oozing from every orifice.

No A-Grade should die so easily. The only thing I could figure was that Seraphyne had attacked and destroyed his fate itself, and without his fate the undead god was doomed to die.

Sharky and I threw ourselves at one of the remaining A-Grades. A creature made of eyeballs and spinning wheels from some bizarre religion of one of our many worlds came for us. It was more powerful than anything else I'd faced so far, but I had Sharky with me now and this thing had taken a few nuclear missiles to the face already.

Corrupted light spun around the wheeled contraption, like waves of destructive energy. Aegis of the Void deflected them. A Sunlight Spear distracted the wheeled entity, and Sharky's teeth found purchase on one of the lesser wheels.

I jumped clear as Sharky grabbed ahold of the wheel and spun, turning over and over in a death roll like he was trying to rip it apart. But the wheel was sturdier than most things he tried to kill in this manner.

I was in the air pelting it with supercharged mana bolts using Mana Arsenal. The effects of Soulchain Nexus had activated at the start of the fight, and I had reaped a huge array of temporary stat points from the deaths of all the other gods in the recent nuclear explosion. Each of my spells hit far harder than normal, and yet the wheel seemed to shrug them all off.

I needed to reach deeper. To use a trick only an A-Grade could. My mind went back to the power of transformation, which I'd been honing lately more and more.

I willed the enemy A-Grade to turn to dust. My titanic will fought against the puppet god, and in other circumstances my will would be found wanting. But here and now, the puppet god was dead, and I was alive.

Bit by bit, the golden rim of the spinning wheel god slowly crumbled to dust. Sharky used the moment to tear into the dead god, ripping what was left into shreds.

Soon, the four of us stood on a devastated and irradiated battlefield. We were in a crater miles deep as the cracked ground pooled lava around our heels. I was thankful the nuclear bombs had dug an arena for us, because without that the A-Grade attacks we were throwing around would have been even more destructive to my planet.

"We're going to have to knit that back together before the planet falls apart," Seraphyne said as she defeated the last god puppet. Behind her, Jade was chopping two more into bits and inspecting the portal.

"Falls apart?" I asked worriedly.

"With this much damage to a planet's core, the centrifugal force of its rotation turns the surface into space debris. It would have already happened to a smaller, weaker planet," Seraphyne explained.

Jade scoffed. "You System users never learned to classify planets. Worlds are alive, and I can feel this one fighting to stay that way even now. This world is a higher grade than most, thanks to all the A-Grade corpses here. The mana is already seeping into the environment and will form unrivaled veins of power throughout the world. Your planet will be fine, Carter. Just a little changed."

I didn't like the idea of my planet being changed. I'd seen what cultivators could do to themselves and others for a little extra power.

Then the magma at our feet bubbled, and a hand reached up to grab my ankle.

I jumped back by reflex and shot a mana bolt at it. I took to the air above the crater floor and saw several more taking shape.

"Ignore them. They're only lava elementals." Jade advised.

I scanned the biggest one of the lot, which was B-Grade.

"A-Grade corpses are like fertilizer on barren soil. I assume these are the sorts of changes you meant?" Seraphyne glanced at Jade.

Seraphyne gestured, and the buzzing drone overhead fired bolts of explosive plasma at several of the nearest lava elementals.

Jade nodded absentmindedly. She was already studying the rift leading to the Godhollow Faith Devourer. Any lava elemental that got close to her was vaporized by a whirl of light green energy that ripped it apart like a blade.

I tried to check my cell phone for Governess, but that was down. It probably had something to do with the earthquakes that were shaking the ground beneath me as more and more lava elementals emerged.

Luckily I still had my radio which worked when I flew out of the crater and pointed it at one of my ships overhead.

"Sakura, Bridget, Myrina, Reluna, Cyra, Eowyn? Anybody there?"

Several voices came back to me, and I picked Sakura out of the group.

"It looks like the planet is about to break apart, Carter! What's going on? Even from the moon, we can see the destruction," Sakura asked.

I grimaced. "The aftermath of an A-Grade battle. Tell everyone on the moon to stay put. Hopefully the people in the other cities who evacuated into pocket realms can make it. What's the status of our cities?"

"Evacuated, thanks to your early warning. But those keeping lookout outside the pocket realms are getting very nervous. I can't imagine how badly the cities that didn't take our warning have been hit," Sakura said.

Hiding in a pocket realm was really the only way an F-Grade could survive such a hellish landscape. Maybe this sort of apocalyptic battle was another reason the System handed such pocket spaces out like candy. They were the magical equivalent of bomb shelters.

"I understand the realm beyond this rift well enough. Seraphyne, can you counter its corrosive effects?" Jade asked.

"Already done," Seraphyne replied as barriers of golden light wrapped around me and Jade.

I put my radio away and approached the rift. And the thing that lay beyond it.

"Let's go."

<Note>

Alright, we're closing in on the end of this book now. Maybe one more chapter and an epilogue. Gotta say, I'm actually more excited for starting the next book than I am for writing the ending of this one, but maybe that's just because writing "the end" always makes me a bit nervous.

Anyway, the cabin renovations are going well. I got one of those starlinks with internet set up, but can't really sit down to write with all the asbestos blowing around. I've really got to finish that before my lease is up so I can live there a bit and write undistracted. Hopefully book 8 will come out faster than this one when I don't have that going on.

See you guys this week for the ending! I really wish I could do a chapter dump of all the ending chapters at once like I used to, but I'm just not writing fast enough to build up that kind of backlog right now. Hopefully next book.