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Castelia City
And from that city that will receive the full cup of Arceus's anger, an army will come to make war against the people that He loves. And this will be the plague with which the Original One strikes all the peoples who have warred against His flock: Their flesh will rot while they stand on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. On that day people will be stricken by the Original One with great panic. They will seize each other by the hand and attack one another.
-The Hisuian Coda
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The Vengeance Fleet reached Castelia City in the next hour. They began to decelerate, leaving the bay and stopping on the shoreline, a vast multitude assembled against the defenders of New Babylon. The last Eclipse soldiers and armaments straggled into the cloud of darkness as the enemy craft approached; they could not see, but neither could the Army of Humanity.
The enemy on the ground looked defeated before the battle even began. Henry saw that most of Castelia was flooded with knee-deep blood, gore, and debris from the earthquake. In the darkness, nothing could be certain, but he was surprised that any wicked men were still alive. All around in the suburbs by the shore, people that had chosen to swear loyalty to the Eclipse regime lay twitching and screaming as the locusts had their way with them.
Some had slit their wrists, hung themselves, sat in garages with cars running, and tied plastic bags around their head, but they never died. They suffered horribly; some looked like mutilated bags of meat, but they could not die. They were caught in the clutches of life. Most of the Locusts of Darkrai had moved from Castelia to find new prey, but the odd few remained.
"I wonder where ol' Cypress is," Henry said. "He might have just fled the city."
"If I were him, I'd leave this battle to someone else," Casey said. "I wonder if Bronze knows where he is."
Far above, Eternatus and the remnants of the Eclipse fleet formed a protective border around the city. The Association forces would spend massive amounts of blood trying to take the capital of the New Eclipse Order, and the problem of the human shields still had to be dealt with.
...
Bronze had the L.S. Victory hover over a blood-soaked plain just northeast of the metropolis. From there they could look down upon the army on the shore, a million soldiers ready for another fight. Bronze studied the inky blackness through paragoggles, and soon he heard intercepted radio transmissions between Cypress and his generals.
"Standing by for your word, Excellency." The voice sounded weary, defeated.
A throat cleared. "And the southern vanguard?" Cypress said.
"Ready, Supreme Potentate." Bronze detected a note of sarcasm. "May we know your position?"
"For what reason?"
"So that you are not subject to friendly fire, great one."
"Suffice it to say that I and my administration are safe."
So much for visibility and inspiration. Cypress was hiding behind his men. Clearly he knew how likely it would have been for him to become bird feed if he had fought at Armageddon. "Right behind you, boys," seemed to be his war cry for this skirmish. But it would prove to be more than a skirmish.
"It appears that the entire Army of Humanity arrived over the sea, on foot," a captain broadcasted.
"If you are addressing me," Cypress said, "you will take care to use proper approbation."
"I am addressing those crucial for this battle, sir."
"Your commander in chief is crucial, soldier, and you would best remember-"
"I will best remember that when this begins, you'll be hiding in the underground tunnels, away from harm."
"Identify yourself, infidel!" Cypress howled.
"Gate guard, sir, which is more than I can say for the commander in chief. We'd best get a move on and stop allowing the enemy to study us."
Bronze clapped his hands together. "Dissension among the ranks! What could be better? With the locusts, the earthquake, the flooding, and the darkness stopping their movements, we can finally defeat them, forever!"
"We must consider the human shields a viable risk," Tess said. "I have confirmed that pods have been suspended around the city, although still well within the darkness. We should send a hundred vessels to the northern border of Castelia, while amassing our main strength around the docks and the part of the city that the earthquake affected the most."
As the Vengeance Fleet, or the half that remained, came into tactical formation, the fifth judgment came pouring from the skies.
...
Suicune, Entei, and Raikou stood on a high cliff beside a sea of blood. Demonic locusts attacked their prey in a city far below. They lifted their maned heads high, sigil-carven, and cried out to the wind, sea, and sun. The wrath of Arceus filled the fallout cloud that now covered the whole world, and hail mixed with fire and lightning fell to Earth.
...
The sky grew as black as night, and small pebbles of hail began to fall over the whole world. Then they got bigger. Now half the size of golf balls, the hail rattled against the frigate hulls, clanged off the metal, thundered onto the heads of those on the beach.
The hailstones were only an annoyance, but as Henry watched, the sky lit up. It was lighting, but the hailstones, at least half of them, were in flames!
Plummeting tongues of fire joined the hail, popping into the sea and falling over the grass and plants. They accumulated on the ground and turned the sand white as snow. Snow, in late spring! Flaming darts hissed and sizzled as they fell into the blood. The lighting struck buildings and ignited them, burning trees and plants yet unharmed by the solar disaster.
The flames melted the hail they came with, and set grass afire. It burned for a few moments, and then more hail put the fire out. The entire line of dry grass around the vast beach was black. Balls of fire dropped into trees and set them ablaze, their branches sending orange mushroom clouds into the air. The trees cooled as quickly as they had ignited.
Henry, Casey, and the multitude, despite being pelted with softball-sized hailstones, were unharmed as they stood in the path of the fury of Arceus. The hail simply did not hurt them. As the darkness faded and light returned, the results of the judgment became apparent. The bark on some trees had been blackened, the foliage all burnt off. As the hail melted and the last fires died, the charred patches of grass showed through. In totality, a third of the plants were scorched to ash.
...
Once more, the sum of the worldwide devastation was sent to the L.S. Victory's command bridge. One-third of the world's forests had been erased, all thought Galar and Roria were spared from the hellfire rain. The damage to the world's ecosystem, although not nearly as severe as the seas turning to blood, was incalculable.
"All the fish are dead," Moon said. "Herbivores on land will die from drinking the blood that replaced the rivers and springs, and the carnivores as well. With no moisture in the grass or plants or food sources, I don't see how the Pokemon will survive, although it seems that Arceus doesn't want to harm them."
"We can't be sure of what happens next," Bronze said. "The next disaster will be worse, however. I don't know when, but an earthquake will strike the Earth, stronger than any in history. Even Kyogre and Groudon's battles of yore will be like children playing games in comparison to the next judgment."
Presently it was revealed that the storm had dispersed the darkness around Castelia. Although a thick blanket of supernatural fog still covered the city, now it could at least be seen. Eclipse soldiers and bots ran in the streets like insects, taking advantage of the visibility to prepare a last defense. The Locusts of Darkrai had also been driven back into the ground by the hail and lighting, descending downward through great ravines that had appeared all over the world, never to be seen again.
Bronze had no illusions about this being an easy battle. Despite the state of seeming disarray among the enemy army, they had Eternatus, and many strange weapons. Over half of the Vengeance Fleet's warships had been destroyed at Armageddon, and now Cypress and Emrett had a fortified city to aid them in repelling the Association. Blood-day, hell-day, Dagor Dagorath, Ragna Rok, the Typhoon Struggle was reaching its climax.
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Castelia City
Then there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, and a severe earthquake. No earthquake like it has ever occurred since Man or Pokemon-kind has been on Earth, so tremendous was the quake. The cities of the nations collapsed, and Arceus remembered Babylon the Great and gave her the cup filled with the wine of the fury of His wrath. Every island fled away and the mountains could not be found; the heavens receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. From the sky huge hailstones, each weighing about a hundred pounds, fell on people. And they cursed Arceus on account of the plague of hail, because the plague was so terrible. These are the last two woes; no more will come.
-The Hisuian Coda
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With the darkness around Castelia lifted, Henry saw thousands of elongated, cylindrical pods with suspensor engines floating over the city border, just before the league of warships. They were filled with captives and slaves taken from the suburbs and city. If the Vengeance Fleet got too close...boom! Three million lives ended.
Although it was a grim thought, Henry realized that the disloyal troublemakers and slaves being carted into storage pods had limited collateral damage. They would not confuse or obstruct the Locusts of Darkrai in their mission to torment the unrighteous, and also would be out of harm's way in the coming disasters. From his faint memories of his mother reading the Hisuian Coda, Henry knew that worse was yet to come. He didn't know how Arceus could keep every single innocent out of harm in the coming global earthquake and ensuing barrage of hail.
"Do we move forward?" Casey asked. "Or should we wait for orders, or even another miracle? We can't just blithely doom all those people."
"Wait!" Henry said, holding up a hand. "We're going to attack the city as soon as Bronze figures out a solution. At the very least we could wait until the next judgments happen. Patience is key."
"I have had enough waiting," Zacian said, frighteningly electric in her fury. "Now is the appointed time. The king of this world did according to his own will: he exalted and magnified himself above every god, spoke blasphemies against the God of gods, and prospered until now. But what has been determined shall be done. The successor of the Evil Djinn will be banished to the pit of fire and sulfur with all his legions."
Whether they were lucky or unfortunate to live through such a tumultuous era, Henry did not know.
...
Aboard the L.S. Victory, a plan to deactivate the protective scrambler field around Castelia City that would detonate the storage pods was made, debated, and finally executed.
"Your mission is to ensure the safety of the people held prisoner by the Dark Lord," Bronze said to the team of six operatives: Leon/Rei, Jake, the Bibliographer Uxtal, Blake, Green, and Bea. "Enter the city under the cover of the fog. Once you have planted an electromagnetic pulse bomb in the Northern Quarter, our vessels will be able to enter without risking three million lives."
"How do we get into the city without Eternatus detecting us?" Jake asked. "The Dark Lord sees much, and he has many spies."
"Oleana has proposed a solution for that," Bronze said, gesturing toward the exiled vice president of Macro Cosmos who had recently boarded the flagship. "Macro Cosmos developed a device that shielded objects from detection by most types of scanners. Rose Venport used one such device during the Battle of Hammerlocke to avoid our frigate scanners for a time. Each of you will be equipped with such a shield."
"That doesn't convince me that Eternatus wouldn't see through the fields," Bea said, glaring at Oleana. "And isn't it curious that Olean has the devices on hand? It almost sounds like she was planning an escape and didn't want to be detected."
Bronze sighed. "We have no time for infighting. Also, Oleana was not given the freedom to bring any sort of item onto her frigate. The shields will come from bins of confiscated Macro Cosmos technology that we brought aboard."
The bridge crew wheeled a suspensor pallet with a tarp covering it over to the strike force. Six finger-coverings were laid in a row on the tarp, along with a bulky object that looked like a generator.
"You will wear the disruptor shields," Bronze said, "and will also travel into the city under a cloak covered in retroreflective panels, hiding you from human eyes. As a bonus, our technicians injected Dragalge algae into the tarp to fool bio-detectors. If you remain hidden under the sheet and keep your wits ready, the mission should be successful. Remember that every minute we debate, the enemy continues to entrench his position. May Arceus be with you!"
"Yes, sir!"
...
The six operatives draped themselves in the tarp, and activated the cloaking panels. As each trainer moved along with their own equipment, they looked like a shapeless mass. Two suspensor pallets were also stored under the tarp: one carrying the heavy EMP, while the other had a large tank filled with intensely corrosive liquid connected to a targeted dispersal nozzle.
After being silently dropped toward the part of the city that had been carved open by the earthquake that had accompanied the darkness, the six plodded forward, barely able to see. Though the suspensors kept the equipment off the ground, the trainers still had to step through the rubble and splattered gore from shredded corpses and the blood tidal wave.
The stench made Leon ill, but he gritted his teeth and kept going. A digital map of the city told them when they had reached their destination. They worked forward slowly and deliberately, hearing the footsteps of Eclipse soldiers and the clanking movements of mechs all around them. If a single enemy accidentally stepped into the tarp, the mission would be over.
Finally, the reached the side of the target building. With the doors locked and an alarm ready to go off, Uxtal made the proper calculations for the amount of acid needed to penetrate the durasteel wall, and Jake moved the dispersal nozzle beneath the folds of opaque fabric. With Sapphire controlling the acid output from the tank, Jake slid the nozzle through an access slit cut into the cloth. "Ready to fire."
Sapphire activated the acid flow, flushing caustic liquid through the tube, spraying a stream of corrosive chemicals. The wall melted away. Jake gripped the hose tightly, careful not to splash himself as he moved the EMP into the building. From there, a targeted detonation would destroy the scrambler linkage that could detonate the storage pods.
The six pushed the tarp inside the building. Uxtal tore a length of retroreflective cloth and hung it over the borehole to conceal it. Inside the building were five corpses, a family. Their bodies had been lined in a crude row, but stains and horrific splatters still covered the walls and staircases. The symbol of the Eclipse Alliance had been carved on the dead family's foreheads.
"Every time I convince myself I can't hate these people any more than I already do," Bea said, "something like this proves me wrong."
"Eternatus and his servants are going to get what they deserve," Jake said, calibrating the EMP. "In an hour or day, the entire world is going to see just how angry Arceus is. Have a little hope, Bea. I've always been proud of you, and today has shown me that my faith was not misplaced."
"We all fought at Armageddon," Ego-Rei said. "That demands respect from all of us to each other. To see prophecy fulfilled is a thing that I never lived. I and my fellows made new prophecy, not completed the old. There was no scripture that told of the Golden Company. And now the seas have turned to blood, just as the old texts said they would!"
"No more seafood, ever!" Sapphire grumbled, eyes blazing as she peered out of the acid-delved hole to the bloodstained streets of Castelia. "No more divin' in pools to catch fresh fish. No more drinkin' from a cool spring. Those times are gone."
"I haven't had a drink of water in two days," Bea said. "Maybe we won't need water ever again. Either we'll never get thirsty, or the blood will turn back to water eventually."
Once the EMP was ready for detonation, the six made their way back through the ruined part of the city toward the suburbs. Although most of the New Eclipse Order's weaponry was heavily shielded from electromagnetic pulses, most of the city's infrastructure wasn't. The thin scrambler field would be blasted away, streetlamps would malfunction, and communications would go down. But with most of the Alliance suffering from the Curse of Babel, communications were already essentially useless.
Once safely outside the city, Jake gave to detonator to Bea. "Care to do the honors?"
Bea grinned. "Of course."
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Castelia City
Another Elohim, who had a golden censer, came and stood in Deep Heaven. He was given much incense to offer, with the prayers of all Arceus's people, on the golden altar in front of the throne of Arceus. The smoke of the incense, together with the prayers of Arceus's people, went up before Arceus from the Elohim's hand. Then the Elohim took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar, and hurled it on the earth; and there came peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake.
-The Hisuian Coda
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The scrambler field malfunctioned, and the lights that illuminated Castelia flickered, and went dark. Men and Pokemon shouted and cried, missiles dropped out of their suspensor containers, and soldiers clicked electronic-based weapons that would not fire. Nothing produced light. No headlights. No streetlamps. The only illumination came from the dusky sky and Eternatus's bloodred light.
"Go! Attack!"
The noise of the Vengeance Fleet racing forward on full-powered engines was deafening. Henry watched the L.S. Victory lead the northern charge, while fast-flyer planes and skycopters let loose their explosives. Eclipse warriors fired back: jet engines, cars, trucks, transports, frigates, armaments, munitions, lasbeam fire, cannons, grenades, rockets, and all assortments of exotic technology.
The Vengeance Fleet passed through the scrambler field, and when the transports did not burst into shrapnel, he continued to press forward. Robot artillery rocketed upward, smashing into the hull ray shields of the frigates. The gelcircutry in the mech's brains had been mostly unaffected by the pulse, and they were amassing themselves in battle formation.
When the L.S. Victory has passed over the northern suburbs, Oleana brought out a small decanter and began sloshing it about. "Praise to the Grand Bashar," she chanted. "Hail Bronze Tercano, our lord and risen king."
"Oleana, what are you doing?" Bronze demanded. "And where did you get that vial?"
"I am merely leading your bridge crew in worship, highness."
"This is a battle, woman! And lose the holy water!"
Oleana gave a mock bow, and cast the vial at Bronze's face. He caught it, but two Rorian Commandos had already drawn knives and put them to Oleana's throat. They were a breath away from ending her when Bronze cried out for them to stop.
"Hold! Grant this poor one pardon. She might attack me, but she cannot attack Arceus. In vainly resisting, I see that she has nothing but hatred and hopelessness in her heart." He knelt before Oleana. "Explain yourself."
"Do you know where I have been?" she said. "Do you know what I have done? I have been waiting for a month, waiting for the perfect opportunity to get back at you for what you did!"
"Perhaps," Bronze said softly. "But we have a common enemy. Surely you must have more strength within your Willpower to resist your desire for revenge."
"I don't care who runs the world. I just want you dead."
Disgusted, Bronze stood and turned back to the viewport. "And how would you accomplish that?"
Oleana bit down hard. "This."
Bronze realized what she had done. More than once had such a trick been pulled on him before in attempted assassination attempts. He knew that signature ripple of muscle, that tightening of the jawline that accompanied what was to come next. He ran shouting for the crew to cover their mouths and noses, and put on a respirator.
A biting vapor expelled from Oleana's mouth, green-white. In her final moments, she heard a gasp beside her ear: Moon.
It got her, too!
"Moon, get away!"
Oleana sensed memories rolling in her mind like toothless murmurings. The room, Bronze, Moon, a pair of terrified eyes, all compressed around her in ruined symmetry. There was a soldier with a toe-boot chin, a toy falling as he inhaled the toxin. The toy man had a broken nose slanted to the left: an offbeat picture caught forever in a downward stroke. She was a mental bin, catching everything that fell into it.
She heard the crash of equipment, so distant, a roaring in her ears. Then she bit the other tooth. This one did not release poison, but had an insidious effect. As the explosives that she had secretly planted in the ship's hallways detonated, everything that had ever been, every shout, whisper, every...silence. The very thought of silence struck her with a meaning that it never had before.
And then she remembered to breathe out. The poison left her mouth, and Oleana scrambled toward the elevator to the lower floors as the L.S. Victory rocked with the force of the explosion. Blasts shattered the hull in two separate places. Depressurized atmosphere was sent swirling out, making the flagship careen off course. The command deck rumbled, alarms sounded.
In unison, the first wave of robot planes launched their attack, sensing weakness. "Open fire!" Bronze choked, cursing himself for his paralysis. "Put more energy in the shields! We need full protection!"
Then he remembered Moon. As men lay dead and dying from the poison attack, a Rorian Commando had given her a respirator and hefted her on a suspensor cart, ready to wheel her to the hospital bay.
She has tried to take the life of Moon!
Bronze sent out his Magnezone, and incapacitated Oleana with an array of precisely-directed Thunder Shock charges. The elevator opened, but the woman was powerless to enter the chamber.
"Wait!" Olena cried. "Peace, peace and pardon! Please!" Merciless hell! I should have waited longer!
"Peace? I don't remember saying anything about peace."
Oleana's temper proved the better of her, in the room full of death. "Rose once told me that you were a good-for-nothing madman. Now I know."
Bronze drew his chandler pistol. "Prove it. This will be a lot more merciful than what I would do to you if I had more time to decide."
...
The Grand Bashar stood with his back to the body, which would later be pronounced dead by projectile wound. His senses took in guards swarming all around him. Sounds and reason returned to him. He heard someone shouting orders...gas masks...keep that door sealed...get blowers going.
Others had fallen. I'm still standing. I'm still breathing! That was close!
He could analyze the thing now. Tess had breathed it in, but her bodily chemistry repelled the poison. But only chance and the warning in a woman's shocked gasp had saved him. And how had it been possible for her to sneak a poison tooth in? The stupid guard captain had failed! He'd said he had scoped Oleana thoroughly before bringing her into Bronze's presence!
"Command bridge is clear now, m'lord," Aziz said. "I was on the lower deck and saw that it must have been poison gas. None of the stuff escaped, and we have the room cleaned out now. What are your orders?"
"Where is my wife?" Bronze said. "Is she alive?"
"Yes, m'lord. Only just, though. A corporal brought her out to the medical bay."
"Find that corporal and tell him that I will promote him to Levenbrach, Fourth Class."
"Yes, m'lord."
The chaos aboard the L.S. Victory had caused the northern offensive to stall. Association and Elipse forces were in a gridlock on the fringe of the city center, and neither side was making any advances. The main bulk of the Army of Humanity had stormed the docks and was now cutting through the city from the south to the north.
Zacian and Zamazenta were making their slow way through the flooded city streets, but there was little hope of them reaching Eternatus. The Swords of Justice were corned in the Eastern Quarter with Latios and Latias, and Calyrex was nowhere to be found. Rumors that Mewtwo and Dexoys were battling over Kalos had yet to be confirmed, but the two had not been seen since Armageddon.
...
"Loyal citizens of the New Eclipse Order!" Cypress said over the citywide communication system. "You are privileged to be part of the greatest fighting force ever assembled on the face of the earth! You will be lauded for time immemorial for the victory we are about to win. The plan is foolproof, our resources unlimited, and your leader divine. Once we have crushed the resistance here, you will secure the suburbs and enjoy the spoils. The victory is mine, says your lord and risen king!"
In the city square, where the Eclipse forces were the thickest, a Jeep came out of a set of blast doors. "Soldiers, observe your commander-in-chief!"
Cypress was atop the car's roof, dressed in ridiculous orange-and-black regalia. He had a scabbard around his waist, and a crown of iron atop his head. "If your weapons fail, take the heathens by hand! Lord Eternatus will protect you from all harm. Throw yourself screaming into the rows of infidels, and then we will have our victory! Jihad, jihad!"
Any light in Castelia exposed a city in chaos. Thousands of soldiers surged in brutal hand-to-hand fighting with humans and combat mechs. It was holy war against holy war in the streets of New Babylon, and the sheer enormity of the armies prevented anyone from knowing who was winning or losing.
All that Henry knew was that the blood that flooded the streets was rapidly being filled with destroyed robots and dead men. The blood conducted waste electricity well, sending sparks and flashes of light all across the city, scorching buildings and electrocuting fighters hither and thither. Pokemon that were carrying riders on their backs bucked and threw their trainers off in terror, while Pokemon Dynamaxed once more as yet another Darkest Day began over Unova.
Some dogs and domesticated Pokemon in houses began to whine and bark over the whole city. The noise of the battle had terrified them, surely, but there seemed to be another part of their growing awareness. Down a battle-ravaged street, Henry saw a broken traffic light begin to sway on its own.
"Remember, son, some Pokemon get needy and restless before earthquakes. Living in Galar, you'll never have to deal with them, but its always a good idea to be prepared."
Henry grabbed Casey, hopped onto Urshifu's back, and went at a full sprint to the southern docks.
