Xiclotl Falls

Li slammed the bottom of his staff into the ground, but there was no quake. There was no explosion of magical power.

Just...

Stillness.

If Li had to find a word that described what he felt right after he cast his Ultima-class spell, then that was it. The world itself seemed to grow still in awe. The barren earth, constantly rumbling from volcanic activity, had ceased to shake, and the skies so riddled with violent winds churned up by heat had quietenend. Even Chi-You seemed to fit this theme of stillness, though his stillness was more against his will.

Li felt a massive surge of magical energy flow out of him. He felt lighter than ever, his vision blurring, the colors of the world around him slurring and mixing into a reddish black haze.

His thoughts became less clear, and there was a slight lapse in his thought. It reminded him of a foggy memory from a different life, when he had stayed up until the early morning to study for a test and his mind had just shut down with a little micro-nap, unable to stay awake.

Li steadied himself, his wooden fingers curling around his staff and leaning more weight against it. So this was the cost of an Ultima-cost spell. It was enough to almost make him faint, and it made sense – he could only ever cast one or two in optimal conditions within the game as well.

But it was proof that the spell had been cast.

"To be honest with you, I didn't know the spell would work," said Li. He looked up towards the sky. "How do I say this. It's a little too…cosmic in scale."

The heavens grew pitch-black. It was like the smoke and fire-choked skies of red had been a canvas that was dunked into ink.

Then a little speck of green became visible in that terribly black sky. A twinkling little thing: a star of green.

It started to grow larger. And larger.

The twinkle faded, and it became obvious that this was no far-off star.

The once tiny emerald shine had become a gargantuan green sphere that ate up the entire sky, and it only grew larger as time passed. 

It was not a star, but an asteroid.

Or, more accurately, a planetoid. Li raised his hands in the air, admiring what he had managed to conjure up. This was massively beyond anything he had ever cast in terms of scale.

[Xiclotl Falling] called upon the Green Planet Xiclotl, an abominable celestial body made up entirely of otherworldly and predatory plants, to aid its caller. And the Green Planet found no better way to aid its caller than to split a massive part of its organic body off and shunt it to wherever the caller beckoned. 

In this case, all those magical circles concentrated with Chi-You at the center were like a laser-sight guiding the planetoid's trajectory. The god was to be the subject of what could be considered a small-scale extinction event.

Li could hear the world rumble around him, and this time, it wasn't because of volcanic activity. It was because the gargantuan planetoid of carnivorous plants and vines and trees was tumbling through the atmosphere, its sheer gravitational force shaking the land.

Chi-You broke free of the [Root of Vulthoom] and stumbled forwards with a heavy breath.

"It's useless to resist now," said Li. He pointed up. By this time, the sky was entirely green. Waves of heat had started to coalesce underneath the incoming planetoid as it penetrated through the skies.

Chi-You laughed and dropped his weapons. They scattered away into golden dust. "You are right. I must admit, though, it was a good fight." He sat down and looked up; his six arms wide open as he too admired the sight of overwhelming power. "It seems I must yet train even more."

"You'll have another chance. So long as there's a corpse, I can resurrect you, given some time," said Li. "But you don't seem worried about dying."

"Hm?" Chi-You glanced at Li with cocked head, the flames on his horns flitting with the motion. "Oh, I did not tell you. Ah, how foolish of me, I was so impatient to battle you that I forgot. Well, you shall see soon."

The ground around them started to split apart, cracking and liquefying under intense heat as the planetoid approached. Light, bright and white, bloomed everywhere, blinding Li, and then the deep rumble of the world shattering started to echo. It wasn't like the rumbling of volcanic activity, this was far louder, far deeper. Li could feel it under his feet. How the very foundations of the land were shattering apart like fragile glass.

But there was no apocalyptic impact.

Normally, the spell dropped the planetoid to deal massive area of effect damage, but it also implanted the Green Planet's essence into its impact zone, replacing the crater it would inevitably carve out with an eldritch forest fertile with the monstrous plants that made the alien planet up.

Instead, when the light faded, Li found himself in somewhere entirely different.

A throne room that had deteriorated with the ages. It was a circular room lined with five thrones of stone. The ceiling was a rocky dome that opened at the top, revealing a night sky centered with a lonesome moon bereft of her usual entourage of stars.

Moonlight streamed in from the hole, lighting up the room in a gloomy, pale, spotlight. The thrones had weathered and eroded, their once marvelously carved edges rough and chipped. Each throne had unique insignias carved upon their backs. An axe, staff, dagger, sun, and moon in order.

The thrones circled around a basin of water upraised by a chipped pillar of marble. The water swirled unprompted by any force, and it reflected the moonlight through a pale sheen sparkling atop its surface.

Li looked beside him, where Chi-You had been, and found the god's body there. It was evident he had suffered the full brunt of Li's attack. His bronze body had charred, the metal warping and twisting at odd ends. The bull's head had incinerated entirely, leaving behind just the mechanical and metal body that reminded Li of an empty shell.  

Li gave the war god an acknowledging nod.

Using an Ultima-class spell was all or nothing. Either the spell annihilated the opponent, or the caster was left with very little mana to fight back.

Li could have fought Chi-You regularly, but it would have involved dipping down to dangerously low health levels, constantly healing from a range of 10-50% health to abuse his powerful racial passive [Call of the Wild] that constantly summoned creatures to aid Li when he was below half-health.

All the while, he would have tried to cycle through the various acts of the [Black Beauty].

This was how he usually fought in PvP. Whittle enemies down with status effects at first, and then dance with them at low health, abusing his druidic healing to constantly straddle the half-health point to push out as many summons as he could. 

If he could amass enough summons, then he would shapeshift himself into a powerful creature and cast a mass [Dire Frenzy] to savage the enemy. If the enemy was good at clearing his summons, then he would try to stall to Act 4 of the [Black Beauty]. 

However, Li had no guarantee that Chi-You didn't have more new moves up his sleeve. If Li flitted around at low health, there was a chance he might have gotten instantly killed with a single mistake or unforeseen attack. So he gambled it all to end everything in one massive attack, and it had paid off. 

Chi-You had been the very first opponent in this new world that had given Li any semblance of a challenge, and for that, he had to respect the god and his unyielding attitude. 

For now, though, Li would have to wait until his mana recharged before he could resurrect Chi-You.

Unlike in many other games, resurrection was an extremely rare mechanic in Elden World. Specialized priests needed to cast A+ ranked spells just for a chance at resurrection, and for a non-priest like Li, the only way he could enact the same phenomenon was to cast [Methuselah], another Ultima-class spell which he had no mana for.

So Li took in his surroundings in more detail.

The entire room was imbued with a permanent sense of lifeless gloom. Everything was a shade of grey or black. The marble floor had and faded into a dirty gray. The stone walls building up the room were a muted grey, devoid of color, the intricate carvings once etched into their bodies long since faded away.

The only strong color in the room came from the water in the basin. It wasn't just that the water reflected the white moonlight above, the liquid itself was white like snow, but strangely, that ghostly whiteness seemed to fit in with the soulless greyness of the rest of the room, perhaps even accentuating it. 

Li knew where this was.

This was actually Valhul, home of the gods, fitting the description of the place in the game.

Except, it was similar only at a surface level.

The Valhul of the games was an otherworldly paradise. A throne room where the gods thrived, their glorious thrones shining with radiant energy, the marble sparkling white, and the stone walls reflecting the multi-colored energy from the thrones and refracting it into a lightshow of iridescent brilliance.

The moon did not shine like it did here, but instead an eternal sun stood proud in the sky, casting a gloriously bright and yellow light all across the room, lighting up the basin in the middle – the Well of Souls – with not the sickly pale shine of moonlight, but a layer of shimmering gold sunshine.

"A sorry old place, isn't it?"

Li could sense another divinity behind him. He turned, his staff in his hand. A woman stood there, although she wasn't quite entirely humanoid. From the waist up, she looked perfectly human, with perfect being the right word choice.

All her features from her prominent cheekbones to her full and bloody-red lips were sculpted to precise proportions that would make any mortal man fall head over heels for her, and yet there was a sense of eerie artificality to her. Maybe it was her unnaturally pale skin, but she seemed too perfect, as if a doll crafted for the sake of beauty and nothing else. 

From the waist down, her body was serpentine, the coils of her snake-like tail curling underneath her to give her support. The scales, all iridescent like rainbows, showed off ring-like patterns with spots in the centers, making it seemed like countless eyes were dotted all about her.

"I recognize you as well," said Li. "You're Zahaka. Goddess of Insight."

Zahaka bowed, the ends of her form-fitting robes fluttering. Her hair, black and full with some coiling their ends into snakes, swayed from side to side.

"Correct," said Zahaka. She raised her head again, flicking her hair back. She waved a dismissive hand towards the ruins around them. "I must apologize for this. I have been engrossed in my study, so I have not been able to keep the throne room clean for centuries. And the others, well-"

She glanced at Chi-You's corpse with a bored expression. "He is far too obsessed with training to do anything else. Khonsu spends all his time torturing the constructs I fashion for him lest he goes mad, and Helius, ah, it is much too sad to speak of his situation."

"And Noctus?" said Li. He knew that though there were officially four gods, Helius was a two-in-one package. Helius was a sun god that represented life, light, and goodness, but his twin brother Noctus was his opposite, symbolizing dark, death, and destruction.

Li had a particular interest in Noctus as well because the god also had the potential to be an Old One.

In fact, though the first run of Elden World's campaign was a generic fantasy plotline which involved fighting with the gods to defeat the demons, subsequent cycles of NG+ shifted the storyline into something far darker, involving Noctus turning into an uncontrollable Old One and summoning eldritch entities and influences for the players to fight off.

Hence why there were so many Lovecraftian references within the game.

Surely, such a god would understand Li the best and potentially provide answers to his struggles.

Zahaka frowned as she crossed her arms. "Faring far worse than even his brother, languishing in a prison of his own design. But ah, the foolish war god awakens again."

Li looked to Chi-You's corpse and saw as it levitated upwards. Golden streaks of energy started to coalesce around the damaged parts, smoothing out the metal and growing out the bull head.

"Now, that was a fine fight!" said Chi-You as he rotated his six shoulders. "I must thank you, Old One, for the challenge. I've had no such excitement in nearly five hundred years!"

"Because we've grown much too tired of your constant harrassment. It seems for the better part of eternity, it has been 'duel me' or 'when will we duel?' from you," said Zahaka. She noticed Li's confusion at Chi-You's resurrection despite the fact that Li did not have a human face to read expressions on.

"Gods such as ourselves are unable to die in Valhul, no matter how badly we beat or skewer each other," she explained. 

"Duels are a warrior's lifeblood." Chi-You snorted. "How else must we pass an eternity here? There is nothing like the thrill of battle to keep the mind steady. And what is there to lose? It is not as if we will perish."

Zahaka gave Chi-You a disapproving glance, her snake-like eyes narrowing. "Fine. I will admit that the first few hundred years, fighting was entertaining. But there comes a point where it is more annoying than exciting, and the time is spent much better innovating a way to, you know, actually leave this prison."

"I worry not about such a trivial matter, as I have my full faith that your genius will find a way!" said Chi-You with a triumphant nod.

Zahaka smiled at how much Chi-You believed in her, and yet the smile had twinge of sadness to it, and it made Li understand that she had not found a way to leave. 

"Now, wait just a second," said Li, getting the gods to turn to him. "Prison?"