[Third POV]
The apocalypse had the deafening hum of torn drum.
Far apart from the burning surface of the Earth, the Infinity Castle was a sanctuary for the many defensless and innocent lives on earth. Billions of refugees sat huddled on wooden tatami mats as the endless corridors shifted and rearranged themselves, with each change expanding to accommodate the sheer influx of humanity.
Nakime sat on her elevated wooden stage in the centre of the castle. Her single eye remained closed in severe concentration. Her pale fingers moved across the strings of her biwa in a continuous, haunting rhythm. She may not be fighting, but she was like a guardian angel, her task being to bring as many humans to safety as swiftly as she could. Every note she played opened a portal on the surface, snatching civilians away from certain death and depositing them safely into the halls.
Chaos Corp medical drones hovered through the crowds, dispensing antiseptic sprays and automated stitches. Massive pallets of emergency rations and bottled water were stacked to the ceiling and the air smelled of sterile chemicals and human fear, although some of that might be from the unlucky ones that soiled themselves before she had rescued them. Nakime kept playing, just like she promised John, as she knew Earth could not afford an invasion of this scale with civilians in the crossfire.
Up on the surface, the Global Defense Agency was losing the sky.
Earth's secondary orbital defenses activated the moment the Hammer satellite went dark. Hidden deep within the Andes Mountains and the Swiss Alps, massive surface-to-orbit railguns breached the rock faces. They locked onto the descending teardrop ships of the Viltrumite Empire.
The railguns fired as hyper-dense tungsten rods shot upward at Mach twenty.
They hit the Viltrumite cruisers and shattered like glass against the alien kinetic shields. The pure-blood Viltrumites did not even bother returning fire. They simply flew out of their airlocks, accelerated straight down through the atmosphere, and tackled the mountains.
A single Viltrumite crashed through the peak of the Andes facility and the impact hit the underground bunker like an earthquake. The railgun batteries collapsed under millions of tons of rock as the automated defense grid went dark in seconds. Earth's anti-air capabilities were completely neutralized and the sky belonged to the invaders.
Deep inside the Pentagon, the air in the command center began to taste like sweat and cheap coffee.
Cecil Stedman stared at the sprawling holographic map. He had just condemned Task Force 'I' to the meat grinder and unleashed Sinclair's Super Reanimen. But the map remained a sea of hostile red.
"The Western hemisphere is bleeding out," a technician reported, his voice hollow. "The Guardians are holding the line, but they are getting swarmed. The East is completely gone. Viltrumite slave armies have touched down in Beijing, Moscow, and New Delhi."
Cecil ground his teeth. He turned his scarred face toward the other end of the holotable.
Neelesh Kumar stood there. The CEO of Chaos Corp was scrolling through a real-time casualty report on his glass tablet. His expression was detached and the boyish, polite corporate mask he usually wore had completely vanished.
"It seems are we left with no other option but to play dirty. Director, pull your remaining ground troops out of the Eastern hemisphere," Neel said. His voice was a flat corporate drone.
Cecil narrowed his good eye. "Why?"
"Because I am liquidating it."
Neel tapped a sequence into his tablet. Chaos Corp had not just built the global defense infrastructure over the last six months. They had buried themselves in the fine print. Literally.
Neel had concentrated on his ability Contract Creation, a Rare Ability that allowed him to forcefully enact the clauses and conditions of any contract he made. For six months, he had leveraged his one-year age-reversing pills to warlords, billionaires, and global dictators. They had all signed the paperwork and agreed to whatever terms he threw at them in exchange for their youth.
Now, Neel was collecting the debt.
He bypassed the United Nations' nuclear safety protocols and overrode the sovereign commands of fourteen different nations in exactly three keystrokes.
"Penalty clauses engaged," Neel muttered but despite that, he remembered the Sevent Voucher John used a few months ago.
[Servant Voucher]
|Epic Item|
A coupon that allows you to summon your own Heroic Spirit for free, the summoned heroic spirit depends on you as a person. The servant is bound to you in standard Grail War style and you possess 3 transferable command seals to give absolute commands to them. Cannot summon Divine Servants(Divinity above C or Explicitly a god) or Servants that qualify for a Grand position. Servant summoned cannot exceed the performance of an Elite Rank familiar.
Across Asia and Eastern Europe, hidden missile silos hissed open. The nuclear warheads launched and arced straight down, targeting the coordinates where the Viltrumite slave armies were swarming the cities.
The detonations were soundless on the monitors in the Pentagon but the visual was contrastingly biblical.
Atomic firestorms blossomed across the hemisphere as millions of acres of land were sacrificed in an instant. The shockwaves vaporized the enslaved alien foot soldiers, turning them to ash before their nervous systems could even register the heat. It was a scorched-earth policy executed from the will of a single man.
When the satellite feeds finally cleared through the radioactive fallout, the slave armies were gone.
But walking out of the glassed craters were the pure-blood Viltrumites.
The nuclear fire had not even singed their pristine white suits. They brushed radioactive ash off their shoulders and looked around, seeming mildly annoyed by the inconvenience, as if they had just walked through a light drizzle.
Deep within the shifting, labyrinthine corridors of the Infinity Castle, Jason was having a miserable afternoon.
[Image Here]
The Saber-class servant was lounging on a plush silk cushion he had personally stolen from Neel's Office, swirling a chalice of imported wine. All around him, the endless wooden halls hummed with the unsettling slides of Nakime's pocket dimension. Billions of dirty, panicked human refugees were being deposited onto the tatami mats every few seconds, ruining the quiet aesthetic Jason had spent the last six months cultivating.
"Can someone quiet those peasants down?" Jason yelled, waving his jeweled chalice toward a passing medical drone. "I am Jason, the rightful king of Iolcos! I did not sign up to stay in a glorified fallout shelter with the common populace! Where is Master? I need to lodge a formal complaint about the lack of proper vintage!"
The drone ignored him, whirring past to tend to a child with a fractured arm. Jason scoffed, sinking back into his cushions. He was perfectly content to stay exactly where he was. The surface world was currently a two-fronted apocalyptic nightmare, and Jason had zero intention of risking his immaculate blonde hair for a planet he didn't even rule.
Up in the Pentagon, Neelesh Kumar watched the satellite feeds as the radioactive dust settled over Eastern Europe. The nuclear strikes had vaporized the Viltrumite slave armies, but the three pure-blood officers walking out of the craters didn't have a single scratch on their white uniforms.
Neel looked down at his glass tablet, pulling up the digital interface for John's Command Seals.
"Conventional weapons are a depreciated asset," Neel muttered to himself. He looked at the asset registry for the Infinity Castle and found Jason's name sitting at the very bottom, flagged as a non-essential resource. "Paid time off is officially over, parasite."
Neel pressed his thumb firmly against his arm as the red geometric glyph flared and dissolved.
"By the power of the Command Seal," Neel ordered, his voice almost joyful. "Get to work."
In the Infinity Castle, Jason was mid-sip when the red light of the Command Seal enveloped his body and the space beneath him vanished.
The next second, the air temperature skyrocketed by four hundred degrees as Jason slammed face-first into a pile of jagged, irradiated glass. The luxury cushion was gone, replaced by the choking, ash-filled atmosphere of a nuclear crater in Eastern Europe where the air tasted like copper and burning sulfur.
"Gah! Cough! What is this foul stench?!" Jason shrieked, scrambling to his feet and wildly swatting at the toxic ash raining down on his fabulous white and gold cape. "Where is my cushion? Which one of you insolent mongrels forcefully moved me to this garbage dump?!"
His dramatic rant was cut short by the sound of heavy air pressure shifting above him.
The three pure-blood Viltrumites hovered in a tight wedge formation, looking down at the strange, screaming human with disdain. They had just survived a multi-megaton detonation. To them, this blonde man looked like an insect that had crawled out of the rubble.
"A human," the lead Viltrumite scoffed, his thick mustache twitching as he cracked his knuckles. "General Thragg did say this planet was odd. Rip his arms off."
The Viltrumite broke the sound barrier, diving straight down like a kinetic missile.
"Eeeek!" Jason screamed. It was a high-pitched, pathetically genuine sound of pure terror. "Medea! Heracles! Somebody, save me!"
He scrambled backward in panic, tripping blindly over a chunk of melted asphalt. That clumsy, cowardly stumble was the only thing that kept his head attached to his shoulders. The Viltrumite's supersonic fist grazed the empty air where Jason's chest had been a millisecond prior, impacting the ground and shattering the bedrock into a jagged sinkhole.
The shockwave tore Jason's cape to ribbons and sent him tumbling across the sharp glass. He skated into a crater, bruising his ribs, his heart hammering against his chest like a trapped bird.
The Viltrumite pulled his arm out of the crushed stone, turning a cold, murderous gaze toward the groveling Greek hero.
In that moment, the certainty of immediate death hit Jason's brain.
The whining stopped instantly as the frantic panic drained from his face, leaving his eyes dead, cold, and hyper-focused. The unique skill of the Captain of the Argo activated. When things were peaceful, Jason was an insufferable coward; but the moment his back was pinned to the grave, he becomes a completely different person.
"A frontal assault without basic scouting?" Jason sneered, his voice suddenly dropping its dramatic pitch, carrying the sharp weight of a seasoned military commander. He rolled through the debris and drew his gladius. "Idiots. You think you can look down on the King of Iolcos? You think I walk around without a Vanguard?"
He raised his bronze sword toward the soot-choked sky, his magical circuits flaring to life.
"Come to my aid, my legendary ship! Astrapste Argo!"
[A/N]:
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