The last bastion of Earth

Johnson woke up in the morning like usual and made his way through the bastion towards his

position on the outer defense walls. He had spent the entirety of his life on this wall, never

managing to work his way out of the first line of defense, not that he had particularly minded. He

did not wish to be near the so-called heroes. He had the displeasure to meet them up close,

when he had to clean up one of their rooms, after the “stress relief” they had been provided by

the council of the bastion. He could still vividly remember the corpses that had been

dismembered with their limbs randomly placed around the room. He could still smell the stench

of the blood of these corpses alongside the smell of decay. He had briefly met the “hero”

responsible for this, while cleaning up. A dwarven woman, who had claimed that the program

that had gifted them their immense power also sometimes brought out the worst in them.

He never believed her.

Sometimes he wondered why he was even defending this bastion. It was a gathering place of the

mad and broken. And he was not yet either. He turned around to glance down the 37 other

circles of walls that made up the bastion. Their design became more and more deranged as it

grew closer to the heart of the bastion, since these were the newer walls. Johnson was not even

sure how the bricks of the twelve last walls were made. They seemed to have a certain level of

sentients, at least this was how he saw them from the distance, with their constantly shifting

stones. The architect of the bastion was Orlando Avergrand. Like so many other architects and

scientists who had gone mad, he had turned his gaze upwards towards the Sky. He was just one

of the few people who didn’t try to murder everything around them, including themselves. This

had allowed him to draw up these unhinged defenses.

They even extended far beyond the reach of the outer wall with underground tunnels filled with

magic imagined by another magician who had gone mad. Johnson finally arrived at his post. He

picked up his wand. Another invention of another mad scientist. He, at some point, had begun to

play a game with his fellow guards on who would be the first to spot an object which was not

designed by someone who had gone mad due to the Sky. They had started the game sixteen

years ago and had not determined a winner. His wand was a standard version given to all of the

magician guards of the outer wall. It was made of a metal which coiled around some kind of

liquid that somehow always stayed inside of the coil. The wand only allowed a single spell in

existence to pass through it, a basic bolt of mana. Although to be fair, the power of that bolt was

frankly insane.

Johnson sighed and observed the world outside of the walls, in preparation of another anxietyfilled day.

Another day in wait of the monsters of the Sky to finish the last of the fortress outpost

which were modelled after the twenty third wall. Then they finally arrived. He let out a slight sigh

of relief, since the wait was over. He could not even make out what these monsters looked like

due to the distance, but Johnson knew that if he ever saw one up close, that he was already a

dead man walking.

Then a voice traveled through the air, unfiltered by the mana shields of the bastion due to its low

volume. It was a voice which was disturbingly beautiful, far too cold to belong to the beings of

Earth yet at the same time it carried emotions that shouldn’t have been possible for of a monster

of the Sky. “We will begin our attack two minutes after this speech ends. I will offer a final mercy

to you. I will allow you to kill yourselves. For those, who are determined to stay here and fight

until their last breath has been drawn, for the Sky which is observing and for the Earth”

The voice changed at the mention of the Earth. The voice expressed a hatred and disgust at the

word which seemed to push the language Johnson had learned to its limits, before it continued

“Witness my Perfection. Witness my Beauty.“

Johnson listened to the last two sentences echo through the bastion, knowing that not a single

person here would kill themselves. They were all too mad or broken to actually care enough for

mercy, including Johnson himself. He knew that he must have gone mad at some point, probably

after cleaning up the “stress relief” of a hero. He no longer believed he deserved any kind of

Mercy. He began to aim his wand at the monsters which were still waiting outside of range.

The stations were being all filled, the heroes were preparing themselves for the upcoming fight,

the guards of the inner walls all readied themselves for the moment the wall before theirs would

fall. The entire bastion was on high alert. Two minutes passed without a single death happening

in the bastion. The monsters began to advance.

Johnson shot his first mana bolts when the monsters came into range. He noted that they had

somehow avoided all of the magic defenses underground. As he shot his magic, he quickly

noticed that not a single bolt hit. A whole in the mass of monsters would always appear where

his shot would have gone. Then when the monsters were only a kilometer away from the outer

wall, Johnson hit a shot. Before he could even properly register this fact and celebrate, the shot

got reflected and was launched back with even more force. It blew up Johnson’s head and

created a scorch mark on the wall behind him.

He was the first death of this battle, although many would follow him shortly after. The Children

of the Sky were moving according to calculations that seemed to predict every last detail. And

not a single Child missed a single step in these calculations, as if they had been created with

this purpose in mind. The first hole in the outer wall appeared ten hours after the start of the

battle. Sixteen hours after the start, the last Ezlix guarding the outer wall fell. The twentieth hour

after the start, the outer wall had been completely destroyed and the Children of the Sky

retreated back out of the range of the Ezlix. Not a single Child had been harmed during this

process.

The Creature knew that it had the luxury of time. The Children of the Sky would not become

anxious no matter how long they waited. The Ezlix in comparison could never recover this wall.

They had decisively lost the first battle for the bastion. The Creature already knew when the first

of the special Ezlix would abandon their observation duty in favor of relieving their stress. The

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second battle would happen at that moment, only 317 hours of waiting until then. The Creature

obviously didn’t just wait; it began to lay traps underground with the help of some Children, as

that would be the final retreat option of the Ezlix. In addition, it commanded that the energy

system that had been set up underneath the surface would be taken over.

With the precision, only possible to creatures of the Sky, the Children began to move as soon as

the special Ezlix had removed itself from the battlefield. This allowed the Children of the Sky to

close in on their second wall with the help of magic, without being detected. The battle was

shorter than the one before, even if the walls got further the Children pushed. This time, they

didn’t destroy the wall after they had killed all of the defenders but instead retreated behind the

wall. The Creature needed this wall to cage the Ezlix inside their bastion.

The next four walls were taken in a similar precise manner, with the difference that each one of

these walls were destroyed. There now was a stretch of almost five hundred meters, where only

the bodies of the Ezlix lied. The Ezlix began to realize that they had been trapped by their own

walls. Due to the panic slowly spreading through the minds of the commanders, they missed the

fact that twenty-one Children had gone missing. These Children fully took over the magic system

that permeated the ground, strengthening the walls and potentially harming attackers. Although

not a single harming spell had been launched, as the Children avoided all of the automatic

responses from the magic system and the Ezlix command couldn’t afford to waste it this early

into the fight since it would destroy the whole system. They wanted to wait for the optimal

moment.

This attempt on Perfection was severely punished, when the Children took over the magic

system. The Creature would not allow its Perfect war to be stained by such blasphemous

attempts at Perfection. The Children deactivated the entire magic system, since the traps

provided by this system could be easily stopped by the commanders of the bastion. With this

the walls were now weakened, and the Creature no longer had to plan the movements of the

army around the magic defenses. It made sure to send the Ezlix a fake signal through the magic

system to make it seem like they still had the option to activate it.

Now that it had a secure position within the walls, it began to enact the second act of its display

of Beauty. The Children of the Sky began to spread themselves evenly around the perimeter of

the bastion. After the Children were in position, they began to cast a spell. The spell took two

hours for the Children to complete, and it released a white fog that slowly spread across the

battlefield towards the inner walls. The spell was nothing impressive, if one understood it. It was

just a white fog that absorbed active spells and sounds unconditionally. It obscured the vision of

the Ezlix completely and the Creature planned to make it seem like a cloud of death. It had

created a single opening in the fog, but it already knew that the Ezlix would not take the risk, to

rush towards their own wall in a small line. Instead, they would escape into the underground.

To make the fog seem actually deadly, it was necessary to kill everything that touched it without

giving them an opportunity to report back any details. This was the most complex part of the

strategy that the Creature had devised. It was like a gigantic machination of the Sky in which not

a single Ezlix was allowed to touch the fog without forever dying or disappearing in it. It required

Perfection in control of the Children and Perfection in calculating which Ezlix touched the fog at

which time. And all of the kills had to be done without active magic, which luckily posed little

problem to the Children due to their Perfect design.

The main contributors for this act of the Creature’s plan were the Children which could invade

the bodies and the Children which used speed to kill. Both made it easier to kill while making it

seem like the fog was killing everyone. Of course, they could allow some guards to touch the fog

without instantly killing them, as long as these guards died before anyone could notice this. It

took only eight walls until the guards fled. Although they were willing to die in the fight against

the Children, this was a death to pointless for them especially after one of their “heroes” fell to

the fog in an attempt to stop it with their body. The Ezlix had all fled into the underground by the

time the fog had reached its ninth wall, leaving all of their interwoven and complex defenses

behind.

The final act of the plan could now begin. The Children of the Sky gathered near the entrance to

the underground which had been sealed. The Creature knew of the escape tunnels that were

build under the entirety of the bastion as a last resort. It had used the fog to cover the actions of

the slower and magically inclined Children, to seal up all of the exits by any means necessary. It

activated the magic system it had taken over to send a final message to the Ezlix in their own

language even if it despised it with its entire being “I now declare the final struggle of you vermin

over. We have infiltrated through your 13,852 escape tunnels. Put up a worthy resistance for the

first time of the fight.” The Creature had not spoken these words out of mockery or pettiness.

It waited as the Ezlix gathered in the main area as it offered them the best chances to defend

themselves against the “soon” arriving enemies. All of the final 197,789,293 Ezlix gathered in one

spot under them. Then the white fog rolled in from each of the escape tunnels and the entrance

to the bastion. The Ezlix soon realized that the fog was not poisonous, but their happiness soon

faded away, as they realized that they had to pick one exit and make a run for it as their physical

prowess stood no chance against the Children inside of the fog. But before they could even

decide on an escape tunnel, the tunnels collapsed. They no longer had magic supporting them.

As the collapsing underground came closer to the Ezlix, they realized that this was their end.

The battle ended with not a single wounded Child of the Sky and all of the Ezlix dead. The

Creature had shown its own Beauty and Perfection to the Sky.

The Children of the Sky did not take time to enjoy this victory as they could enjoy it after the Earth

had been removed from existence. Without any defenders left, it didn’t take the Children of the

Sky long to destroy the Earth part by part. The Creature could no longer contribute, as its attacks

would at best atomize the Earth which would not remove it from existence and its calculating

abilities were not needed for this process. It lost track of time as it watched its brethren slowly

eradicate the existence of Earth. An eon must have passed by the time the last piece of the Earth

had been removed from existence.

It witnessed the Sky in its full glory without disturbances for the first time. It turned out that it

was night everywhere at once. It watched as the now thirty-two faced moon alongside the stars

slowly faded out of view into a hidden space; the newest face of the moon depicting the history

of the Children of the Sky. The Creature looked at the other Children and realized that they would

be the last Children of the Sky, as they would never be needed again. And a peaceful sun began

to scatter its orange rays across the now clean Sky.