Chapter 1041 — Rolling Forward

"Rest assured, I never intended to do any such thing," Amon broke the silence only after Miremina finished speaking. "I know those risks, and I know that dangerous guardian even better. Frankly, I have no desire at all to face her—even you were nearly captured by her, and I, who have lain here three thousand years, am even less... suited to running. I am merely curious. I wish to understand that neural network better, to know how it truly operates. I have a feeling that perhaps the third path those humans seek lies deep within the neural network."

The courtyard fell quiet for a time. Miremina seemed to sink into brief thought, and a moment later she broke the silence: "So you decided to take a step forward only after hearing that 'ideal' Gao Yang Cecil described—do you truly believe he can find a path that lets mortals and gods coexist safely and without hidden peril?"

"Safe coexistence without hidden peril? It is far too early to speak of that... Even Gao Yang Cecil himself, at present, only believes that a third path exists. With all his optimism, he would not dare draw a conclusion like yours," Amon seemed to carry a hint of a smile. "But I do believe he will work hard and produce results. Before those results come, doing a little more observation is no bad thing—is it?"

"That way of putting it is quite worthy of agreement—but do you truly have no other purpose?"

"Other purpose? There is one, as it happens," Amon said softly, and a long sigh was carried in his words. "To be honest, after learning of all the changes that have taken place in the mortal world, lying here... really is quite boring."

Really boring...

Miremina watched Amon quietly, bound to the broken earth—perhaps the other had indeed spoken the truth, but she could not understand it, for she could not share in the feeling of what it was like to be sealed in one place by the Voyagers' legacy for three thousand years.

Freed from the bonds of her divine station, she could run freely in this endlessly vast place, could in a single breath run from the Defiers' courtyard to the deepest reaches of the Gloom Realm, and occasionally wander in the Shadow Realm as well—she was not bored in the least.

At that thought, the dust sparkling with starlight rose around her once more, and then she suddenly turned and bolted off like a gale.

Amon watched quietly the direction in which Miremina had vanished, motionless.

"(Gods' curse words)..."

...

On the continent of Loren, where humans and the other various intelligent races held sway, the wheel of history was rolling steadily onward, and the development of civilization was advancing along a path never seen before.

And upon another continent far to the north, the progress of civilization had been stalled there for one million eight hundred and seventy thousand years—until now, when its jammed wheel had once again begun to turn. Or rather, it had been given the chance to turn.

The gods had vanished.

The cradle vanished.

The shackles that had bound it for a million years, and the eternal shelter, were gone as well.

The land was free — yet for the first seventy-two hours of that freedom, everything in Tarronde simply lay still and dormant. The victors crouched in the scorching dust and let the howling wind blow in from the distant sea; no one cheered this victory, and no one could step forward to record this turning point in history.

On the shattered eastern coast, in Agondor, now utterly destroyed, and in the blazing rift that ran the length of the continent, the dragons who had survived the battle and the countless war machines now permanently out of commission all came to rest together, strewn like lifeless stones across the ruins of Tarronde.

With no new orders issued and no tasks that had to be carried out, most of these Omega terminals simply halted, motionless. Only now and then did a dragon take flight, or some surviving transport machine cross the dust-clouded sky, delivering the last of the supplies to every corner and sustaining the lives of the final survivors on this continent.

This stasis lasted a long while — until the gales from the sea scattered the dust clouds high above, until the elemental rift at the continent's center slowly closed, until the great fire of the City of Gods burned itself out. Only then, at last, did new movement come from deep beneath the earth, at the heart of Agondor's ruins.

Peal after peal of rumbling rose from the depths: the surviving power systems were driving certain critical layers of armored shielding. A faint trembling spread through the ruins, and buried machinery rumbled as it shoved aside the heavy layers of soil and the collapsed buildings. One corner of Agondor's ruins caved in while the central area bulged upward, unnaturally — the commotion went on for a full minute before a gap was finally forced open in that expanse of ruin.

A gigantic claw of cast metal pushed aside the broken columns of the temple, clambered outward, and little by little drew after it a thick, powerful limb, a bizarrely shaped torso, and a head that glowed with red light.

After that laborious climb, a singular "dragon" — nearly two hundred meters long, of a kind never before seen on the soil of Tarronde — finally crawled out of the ruins and climbed to a high point in Agondor.

Even in the dragon nation, where implant-modification technology ran rampant, "he" was unquestionably a creature beyond anything the dragon race could have imagined.

The dragon's body was almost entirely composed of inorganic matter — metal and the like; layer upon layer of heavy alloy armor and high-strength polymers served as his scales and skin. In the seams of his shell, wandering lights glimmered, and within, countless micromachines seemed to be ceaselessly at work. Yet this dragon was no pure machine-being either: part of his chest armor was an irregular, transparent structure, and through the polymer shell one could see unmistakable flesh, organs, and organic fluids. The fleshly organs and the metal devices were fused together — yet it did not look like the implant technology once prevalent in Tarronde, but rather as if... these organs had "grown" into this shape of their own accord.

This dragon's bizarre form was not the work of implant modification — he had been born this way.

With heavy tread, this strange-shaped dragon crossed over the roof of the former Supreme Council, over the plaza of the upper sanctuary and the wreckage of the lifts. He came to a "cliff" formed by a heap of half-melted broken walls, and there he slowly crouched down.

The war machines still able to move, and the dragons surviving nearby, gathered around him one after another, massing before him as if waiting for the next command.

But Omega only raised his head, rather clumsily controlling this unfamiliar body pieced together from steel and biomass, and gazed quietly into the distance.

ta observed this world, filled with curiosity.