A battle on the spiritual plane is far more difficult than one in the material world. However, due to the imnse disparity in scale between the combatants, the tattered soul fragnt—splintered from an incomplete whole—shattered the very instant Jenkins decided to end the fight.
The process of a soul shattering is invisible to the naked eye, but because their minds were connected, Jenkins felt as though he had "witnessed" the entire process of a small piece of glass being crushed underfoot by a behemoth like himself.
Deprived of the guidance of its soul, the colossal chanical monster underground lost all control. Its increasingly frenzied tentacles tried to scour everything from the surface. For a mont, the demigods nearly lost their grip, almost allowing the thing below to break through to the world above.
"Williams, do sothing, quick!"
Jenkins heard soone shout on the wind, and he called back in a booming voice:
"Hold on a little longer. It'll be over soon."
He stomped his left foot down, released the cane in his hands, and launched himself into the air. This was no flight, of course, just a powerful leap into the sky propelled by his own imnse strength.
From his high vantage point, the entire space of the Mysterious Realm was laid out below him. The tallic tentacles were like festering sores growing out of the city, now writhing in their final death throes.
Given the Difference Engine's nasty habit of installing self-destruct chanisms in its creations, Jenkins made no attempt to seize full control of the gigantic tal body.
Suspended in the air, he felt the wind, the mist, and the smoke, once again allowing the phantom of a colossal steel tree to materialize behind him.
After the layered trials of the nine-story tower, he felt he had co to understand many things more deeply. In this world, nothing was a perfect opposite. So long as it existed in this world, it possessed the potential for harmony and balance.
All things can coexist, but a world where only one thing exists is surely a mistake. The Difference Engine had taken the wrong path. Of this, Jenkins was more certain than ever.
The phantom of the tal tree behind him grew more solid. The powers of life, death, and the un-living, un-dying machine showered their brilliance upon this small, confined world. It didn't matter that he was left with only four abilities, unable to fully utilize the [Principle of All Machines] or the [World Tree Seedling].
He was gradually shedding the shackles of the Enchanter system, escaping the constraints that this spell-slot-like transcendent frawork placed on its most powerful mbers.
Carried on the wind, motes of chaotic-colored light scattered to every corner of the city. As the light particles rged with the earth, the tentacles, and the bodies of the people within the Mysterious Realm, the tremors on the ground gradually subsided, and the tears in space were slowly nded.
The wild dance of the tentacles ceased. They retreated through the openings in the ground, back into the depths, while the black smoke and gray mist slowly dissipated in the wind.
The moon erged from behind the clouds. Nolan was slowly returning to a state of peace. The twenty-four demigods returned to the edge of the square, watching as the double-helix structure of tallic vines—a thing like a mountain, like a tree—clinging to the plaza slowly retracted downward as if ti were reversing.
The two elents had been coiled together. Now, as runes on the vines and sigils on the tal surfaces flickered, they scraped against each other, unwinding circle by circle.
When the last vine had withdrawn into the cracks between the flagstones and the final tallic filant had receded into the large hole in the center of the square, sealing it shut, Jenkins descended from the sky, bathed in the moonlight.
Of course, this wasn't flight either, rely a controlled glide with the help of the wind.
When Jenkins's feet touched the ground, everything in the Mysterious Realm, save for the clock tower destroyed by the cog-man's self-destruction, seed to have returned to normal, as if the preceding events had been nothing but a dream.
But a closer look revealed it was no dream. Innurable gray, green, and bronze motes of light danced in the night sky. Nolan's signature acrid sll lingered in the air, impossible to ignore. In the dark heavens, black lightning flickered incessantly. And the whispers, imperceptible under normal circumstances, grew louder now that the battle had subsided.
The light of the two moons gradually dimd, as if in fear of sothing.
"It's finally becoming a Calamity Beast."
Jenkins stood in the center of the square and let out a long breath. Papa Oliver and the others hurried over. Chocolate ran up as well, leaping into Jenkins's arms.
"Is... is it over?"
Nearly everyone was injured. The demigod from the Church of Ocean and Exploration, who wielded a trident, had to be supported by others just to stand. But at least they were all alive. The greatest pressure, just monts ago, had been on Jenkins.
"Of course it's not over," Jenkins answered Mr. Gilbert, then looked around. The "citizens" of Nolan had reappeared in the square and on the streets, but the white portal to leave the Mysterious Realm had not.
"I defeated the humanoid avatar created by the Difference Engine, and together, we defeated its primary combat body. Now, all that's left is its main core."
"Then where is this main core?" the old gravedigger asked hastily. The coffin on his back was now missing its lid, and his usually dapper beard looked as if it had been singed. The left sleeve of his coat was gone, and there were bloodstains on his right chest, but his eyes still shone with a light that defied his age.
"Patience. Let's wait for it to complete its transformation," Jenkins said, pointing to the sky from the center of the square. Normally, the sky in a Mysterious Realm was pure darkness, making it impossible to observe the stars. But this realm was exceptionally unique; it had not only moons but stars as well.
"It is among the stars."
Everyone present was a demigod, each with their own understanding of the cosmos. Following Jenkins's gesture, they imdiately discovered the secret of this strange starscape. Sothing was lurking among the stars. It was an indescribable thing, almost one with the dark backdrop of the night sky, yet it breathed and shuddered with the shifting of the stars.
It was a slumbering calamity, an ascending calamity. From the very beginning, it had been dormant in the starry sky above their heads. Now that the clouds had parted, they could see this behemoth completing its final apotheosis in the heavens.
Jenkins's Eye of Reality was no longer needed. With the naked eye, they could observe the unnamable entity's circulation of spirit with the entire Mysterious Realm. With every tremor, it grew stronger; every rhythmic pulse signified an increase in its power.
Even more crucial was the profound, abyssal darkness that made one afraid to look directly at it. At the center of the vast entity hidden in the stars, almost directly overhead, a black vortex had appeared in the night sky. It was concealed within the deep background of the night, terrifying, despairing—one could use any negative adjective to describe its effect on people.
But it was also heavy, so heavy that it seed on the verge of plumting from the sky, pulling the space of the heavens down to rge with the space below. This was the root of everything, the sin of the 18th Epoch, the most terrifying creation humanity had forged in the sa breath as its civilization.
It was as if countless tentacles were dancing in the star-filled sky, as if the very secrets of the stars were being torn asunder by that unnamable thing. The profound, the terrifying, the unknown—all sin had gathered in this patch of sky above their heads.
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