The Villain's Story

Chapter 945: The power of man.

How powerful is a nuclear bomb, exactly? Just… how powerful is it?

What is the greatest invention of destruction created by human hands capable of? What is the extent of it’s power? What is the range? What is the deciding factor? What is it, even?

A nuclear bomb is simply an invention, created to alleviate man’s fear of the other man, and to serve as a shield, as well as a throne. It is the hammer through which man dictates law, obedience, and cruelty upon another.

It is the ultimate weapon.

There is a moment, it is impossibly brief, cosmically… indifferent. Between the world as it was and the world as it would never stop being. A seam in time so thin it could not be measured and so absolute it could never be crossed back over. The bomb does not announce itself. It does not build to its conclusion. It simply decides, in the language of physics rather than intention, that everything within its reach belongs to it now.

And then it speaks.

No, it roars.

It begins as light.

Not the light of morning or the light of fire or the light of any star that has ever been named or wished upon. Something older than all of those. Something that predates the vocabulary built to describe it. A light that does not illuminate so much as replace, that does not show you the world so much as erase it and substitute something in its place that has no interest in being looked at and does not care whether you can bear it.

For a fraction of a second the bomb is the brightest thing that has ever existed in this corner of the universe.

Brighter than the sun it borrowed its physics from.

Brighter than anything the darkness of the surrounding night was equipped to survive. The night does not dim, it vanishes.

Abolished wholesale, without ceremony, without the slow grace of dawn. One moment the stars existed and the next moment there was only this, this searing, absolute, magnificent and terrible whiteness that pressed itself against every surface and left no shadow anywhere because there was no direction from which it was not coming. It was everywhere, and nothing could stop it.

Those who saw it be used before and lived described it differently. Some said it was beautiful. Some said beauty was the wrong word entirely, that beauty implied something made for human eyes and this was made for nothing and no one, least of all the fragile, blinking creatures standing beneath it. To the Soldiers on the Fleet, to the Generals on the mothership…

It was their heritage, their pride, their magnum opus! The greatest creation of man.

To Elijah, the Fire Dragon high in the skies to the side of the Mother ship, it was beautiful. It was perfect, it was something he yearned for, but that was the dragon side of him. The human side of him cowered back, afraid of the thoughts that were blooming in his mind. But the man could not overcome the dragon, slowly, he started to shift closer, and closer, until Agri himself had to intervene and stop.

[Supreme Dragon of Fire, Agri, praises the might of the weapon.]

To Kazikato, The Dragon of Shadows and death, the blinding light was an itch he could not scratch, an irritation beyond any explanation. The shadows that made his body, that covered his bony visage trembled with fear, and shrunk back. Kazikato was the same, he retreated, hiding behind the mothership.

[Primordial Dragon of Death, Ariel looks on in silence.]

Ariel was with him, but she was watching the light in the distance with silence. She did not blame Kazikato for hiding, for at his level, with his affinities, it was understandable. That was a weapon that would decimate Kazikato if he ever came into contact with it.

To Alan, it was the same experience as with Kazikato. His eyes looked on in silence, trembling at the appearance of the light. All that confidence, all that arrogance, disappeared in an instant. His body recoiled, his affinities of Darkness, Ice, and Shadows were being affected. His shadow ran up his legs and hid under his uniform, afraid of the light.

Alan inwardly mocked himself for ever thinking that he could withstand that. That was something impossible, not unless he passed through the gate of transcendence.

[Supreme Dragon of Ice, Lanesha, is surprised.]

[Supreme Dragon of Chaos, Suleras, laughs.]

Both Lanesha and Suleras watched through his body, and Alan had a feeling Kulak and Valus were there as well. It was kind of vague, but knowing those two dragons, they wouldn’t announce themselves if it wasn’t necessary.

They weren’t the chatting type like Lanesha and Suleras.

However, everyone who watched the spectacle, whether it be man or dragon, agreed on one thing.

It was unlike anything that had come before it. In the entire long, violent, inventive history of human beings finding ways to destroy one another, in all the centuries of blade and arrow and cannon and bomb, nothing had ever done this. Nothing had ever reached down into the fundamental architecture of matter itself and said enough and meant it on this scale.

And that was not even the end of it. The blinding light that vanquished the night, the fierce shock delivered to everyone hundreds of miles away… was not the end of it.

The fireball came, appearing like nothing natural ever could. An infernal vortex even Elijah would find hard to match with all his power. A vortex that drew everything within, and burned everything.

The temperature at it’s core was something ridiculous, requiring scientific notation to express. A number so large it didn’t feel as if it was a measurement, but theology instead. A divine act of a godly being.

Or rather, the cursed act of a demonic terror, one that was man itself. The greatest terror of man rained down on a continent.

Harrison was right in a certain sense, claiming that man was an even greater demon than the one that hailed from the Abyss. After all…

Man was the only demon deluded enough to believe he was an angel.