[God of Judgment: What on earth is going on?!]
[God of Ten Thousand Circles: Please send reinforcements as quickly as possible! I'm losing my mind. Why on earth are those monsters swarming here?!]
The Empyrean Council was an organization formed by an alliance of multiple deities.
The moment the incident occurred, the place where they could contact and speak with each other the fastest completely boiled over.
The planet currently being raided by the Great Devourer's massive army was named Brog.
It belonged to a civilization named Universal Wheel, and the deity ruling over it, the God of Ten Thousand Circles, was anxiously posting on the deity forum, pleading with his companions for help.
[God of Ten Thousand Circles: Brog is the Council's massive factory and the core of our supplies. If this place is destroyed or captured, I won't be the only one to suffer. You all should be well aware of this.]
The Mid-to-High-Tier Deity, the God of Ten Thousand Circles, was certain he could not escape this crisis on his own. Therefore, he warned that if they did not receive help, the entire Empyrean Council would suffer losses.
Indeed, his words were not false, as all kinds of industrial goods were continuously supplied to the entire Empyrean Council from their civilization, which had developed through a combination of magic and machinery.
Moreover, Brog was the most important territory owned by this Mid-to-High-Tier Deity.
If Brog fell or was destroyed, the Empyrean Council would suffer considerable losses, but the God of Ten Thousand Circles would face an almost irreversible demotion of his Divine Status.
[God of Ten Thousand Circles: Where are the First Seat and Second Seat? Save me!]
Within the Empyrean Council, which was gathered from numerous deities, there was a strict hierarchy, and those who could truly be called high-tier deities were few and far between.
The God of Ten Thousand Circles anxiously searched for the deities with the highest Divine Status within the organization.
If those haughty, overbearing deities in the Council did not make up their minds to help, it would be absolutely impossible to defeat the Great Devourers currently swarming in.
[God of Judgment: Calm down. This happened too suddenly; it is impossible to dispatch forces immediately.]
[Goddess of Mist: Weren't the ones who provoked those Great Devourers from Ionia? Why on earth are they coming to attack us?]
The problem was that even if all the deities of the Empyrean Council gathered for a meeting, it would still take a lot of time.
Although they were an alliance united as one, deep down, calculations of their respective interests, gains, and losses were indispensable.
A grand cause, high-sounding reasons, and shared principles were all well and good.
However, in the end, the most important thing was that they themselves did not suffer a loss.
[Light of Dawn: I checked. Those monsters definitely have intelligence on the Fifth Seat, who is colluding with Ionia!]
Since all the deities harbored such thoughts in their hearts, responsibility naturally needed to be clarified.
Most importantly, who exactly had provoked the Great Devourers and caused them to attack the Empyrean Council?
One deity mentioned Ionia, which had recently attacked the territory of the former Goddess of Light Association that was occupied by the Great Devourer.
Among the factions allied with Ionia, one also belonged to the Empyrean Council.
The only way for the Great Devourer to obtain information was through them, so the other deities argued that the deity who had provided this opportunity should bear the greater share of the responsibility.
[Lord of the Azure Sky: W-Wait! Even if I was involved in that matter, when I first brought it up at the meeting, this wasn't the reaction I got?!]
The Fifth Seat, who was singled out as the culprit, was startled and tried every possible way to lessen his responsibility. Only then could he minimize his losses.
Everyone argued endlessly like this, looking for common ground, compromising with one another, and eventually making a decision.
For intelligent beings, especially a gathering of high-tier deities, this was an entirely normal process.
In fact, in such an urgent meeting, as long as the meeting itself did not collapse and could barely proceed, it was enough to prove that the Empyrean Council was a fairly well-established coalition.
However, no matter how hard they met and discussed, at this very moment, a world was being devoured by the swarming army of monsters.
◆◆◆
“Currently, no support from the enemy forces has been detected,” Celia whispered softly.
The moment the Great Devourer's surprise warp succeeded, they deployed the warp-interference technique they had recently fully mastered in reverse, attempting to block enemy reinforcements.
However, no warp attempts by the enemy were detected.
This remained the case from their first attempt at a large-scale warp up to the moment they clashed head-on with the Brog Defense Force, which was desperately resisting in orbit.
The Great Devourer space species gathered around the Abyssal Palace received orders transmitted through the hive mind. They formed neat ranks and charged, engaging in battle with enemy ships equipped with massive rotating saw blades.
“Those monsters are charging...”
“The outer hull has been breached!”
The Hive Motherships, capable of transforming between navigation and defense modes, broke through the enemy's artillery fire and plunged their proboscises into the ships' outer hulls.
The Chronos units, deploying their massive Disintegration Cannons, concentrated their fire to shoot down one defensive space fortress after another.
“It seems that mechanical dragon is their core weapon.”
During this time, a mechanical dragon composed of countless saw blades and gears, with a massive cylindrical body that stretched out long, resisted by extending hundreds of gun barrels from its body to fire shells.
Hestia, who was piloting the Abyssal Palace, became interested in that colossal body and the powerful firepower radiating from it.
“Therefore, as long as we destroy that, the enemy's space defenses will collapse in an instant.”
Under Hestia's will, the Abyssal Palace, which had been surrounded and protected by hundreds of individual units, plunged directly into the battle.
Hestia could feel a massive amount of energy, drawn from her body in real-time and intensely amplified by divine power, gathering at the tail of the Abyssal Palace, which resembled a curled-up slug.
The tail of the vessel split open, and a light cannon gathering immense energy discharged.
The beam of this light cannon was as thick as an ordinary spaceship, and the output power of its bombardment was incredibly potent.
“Just like that.”
Watching the Abyssal Palace's bombardment strike the mechanical dragon, causing a portion of it to shatter and scatter fragments into outer space, Hestia could not help but smile.
Controlling such a massive body with her own hands, feeling its every movement.
And the sheer exhilaration of winning a war with it—these were things she had never experienced back when she was a goddess.
Her flushed face was proof that she was completely immersed in it.
In fact, this could hardly even be called a real war.
The Brog Defense Force resisted with all their might, but their resistance seemed as pale and powerless as holding a stick against a raging tsunami.
The forces guarding space were virtually wiped out, and now all that remained was the trembling, defenseless planet.
“The enemy's reaction is slower than expected,” Elise evaluated, not feeling particularly moved.
This was a battle between an attacking force sent out with all the Great Devourer's might—which had already devoured and developed dozens of territories—and a force on the level of a single planetary defense army.
From a computational standpoint, an overwhelming victory was only natural.
That is, assuming the enemy did not receive additional support.
Brog was undoubtedly an important territory; there was no way the Empyrean Council would abandon it.
Therefore, Elise had assumed from the very beginning that they would engage in a fierce battle with swarming enemy reinforcements, but the enemy's reaction was slower than anticipated.
An entire day had passed since they first made the large-scale warp, yet the enemy had made no move whatsoever.
“Incompetent, pathetic, weak.”
Based on this, Elise judged the deities of the Empyrean Council to be incompetent and weak.
However, Hestia, listening to all of this, did not think so. “I do not think their reaction is slow. It is just that for beings like deities, their scale is simply too massive to mobilize quickly.”
Hestia had once been allied with the Empyrean Council, and she firmly believed they were doing their best to respond.
In fact, her prediction was not wrong.
For even at this moment, they were fiercely debating, assembling, and preparing to dispatch forces.
This was exactly like the situation Hestia herself had faced when she desperately recruited mercenaries and reinforcements to resist the Great Devourer as it occupied her territories step by step.
“It is just that... the colony's decision-making and mobilization are simply too fast.”
This was something that those who had belonged to the colony from the very beginning, like Elise or Kerrigan, could not fully appreciate.
On the contrary, it was those like Celia or Hestia, who had belonged to other factions before joining the colony, who could strongly feel one of the colony's greatest advantages.
‘Every word I speak can be known by everyone in an instant, and the Queen can make accurate and rapid judgments and decisions. In this process, there is no redundant or inefficient behavior.’
When Hestia first connected to and used the hive mind, seeing her own opinions shared with everyone in an instant, and Elise judging and deciding on the merits and counterarguments of those opinions in just a few seconds, she had trembled with intense excitement.
When intelligent beings harboring their own self-awareness and desires gathered, conflicts of opinion and opposing values were inevitable.
And the more they respected and tried to accommodate these differences, ironically, the slower their decision-making would become.
The same was true for deities.
Even deities could not completely ignore the status, counsel, and advice of their servants.
Even a goddess who had once been the core of blind faith could not look after everyone, and sometimes even she herself could not be certain.
‘If only I... If only I could have done what the Great Queen did in the past. If I had done that, I...’
Hestia looked at Elise, feeling a mixture of intense jealousy and awe.
Recalling the days when she did not trust her own judgment and posted questions or sought advice on the Divine Net forum, she felt utterly useless.
The Queen, or rather a ruler, was ultimately an existence that had to rapidly guide the colony using her own calculations and judgments without a single shred of doubt.
Of course, her judgments could also be wrong.
The Great Queen did not understand all things in the universe, and the information obtained within the hive mind was not always the correct answer.
However, if billions—no, now tens of billions—of individuals entrusted everything to that judgment and acted as one.
The power to turn the impossible into the possible, and to turn mistakes into correct answers, was being created in real-time through that collective action.
[God of Ten Thousand Circles: This is not just a problem for our Empyrean Council! The evil forces of the Outer Gods are spreading everywhere!]
“They have also begun to take formal action. They probably feel that their own strength is not enough, so they are trying their best to gather allies.”
Lin Miao confirmed that the Empyrean Council was seeking factions on the Divine Net forum that could contend against the Great Devourer.
While dispatching reinforcements to the endangered Brog, they were also inciting other factions to attack the Great Devourer's territories.
Once they went on the offensive, their defenses would naturally weaken.
This matter could absolutely not be ignored.
In truth, a large portion of the Great Devourer's nest forces had been dispatched elsewhere, and the territories they needed to guard had increased by dozens.
“Accelerate plan execution,” Elise advanced the next plan without hesitation after receiving Lin Miao's warning.
She warped the main force, including the Abyssal Palace, to other planets once again, continuously launching attacks.
Attack was the best defense, and this applied equally to them.
Although there were various issues required for sustained combat, such as nutrient replenishment and troop reinforcement, Elise was not worried.
Because the all-weather space nest, the Abyssal Palace, was conceived and manufactured precisely to solve all of these problems.
The soldiers returned to the interior of the Abyssal Palace to replenish nutrients and repair damaged parts, while the countless nests inside continuously produced and replenished lost troops.
“You didn't get to play an active role this time, but there will be plenty of opportunities,” Hestia said, her lips curling up slightly as she looked at Meliodas from her bio-chair, where she was providing everything needed in the process.
Although the clash with the Brog Defense Force was a victory in their first battle, other enemies would surely be on their guard, so the upcoming battles would only grow more intense.
Just like Kerrigan, who was sulking because she hadn't been able to participate in the battle, there would be plenty of opportunities to perform and establish military merits.
“Begin the ground war.”
With that, most of the space forces, including the Abyssal Palace, warped away once again to attack, but the ground war was not yet over.
Completely capturing Brog, constructing nests, and annexing that land into the colony's possession.
It was Celia who received Elise's instructions to carry out this process.
“...I will accomplish it.”
Staring blankly at Brog's approaching atmosphere, the masked Celia murmured to herself.
In truth, that was more of a whisper to herself than a response to Elise.
Celia could not deny that the fire of passion, which had gradually grown accustomed and dimmed after her assimilation with the colony, was reignited by the new competitive landscape.
Rate on N.U.
