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Chapter 150 - Solar Storm
🕑 Added 2020-09-29 15:45:05 +0000 UTC
"The solar storm is approaching." Senka gestures at the large screen, which appears to be dimmed so that we can look in the direction of the Sun without going blind. It shows the bright disc in the center and a slightly less luminous bloom emerging from it.
"How long do we have?" Distances in space are very hard to gauge, especially when it involves objects of incredible sizes. Perspective and relativity are key - something Exla likes to fool around with when she makes herself larger or smaller.
"It's the classic school book problem of two moving trains." The doll girl shrugs. "Do you want to know how long we have until we fly into it if we just punch it? Or how long it takes to get to where we're parked right now?"
After getting back to the Queen Pelomyx, I returned to the bridge for a status report instead of immediately continuing the journey. Explosions in space can turn even nuts and bolts into deadly projectiles, and there were plenty of those in the destruction of the scouting fleet.
"Both?" I'm not sure what either means for what I have to do.
"Well, this ship can fly at about twice the speed of an average solar storm. If we go straight at it, we'll meet in about an hour." Senka begins to explain, her blue eyes staring at me with a less than amused glint in them. I don't know what has her so cranky, but she proceeds to give me the answer. "The solar storm has no mass. Laser distance measurements don't work, so all I can do is approximate the value."
"What does that mean?" She seems to be beating around the bush a little.
"This might be a little hard for you to understand, but these are velocities far beyond what humans have achieved in your time." Suddenly, the doll girl's attitude changes to a condescending one, but I can't really argue against that. I don't understand technology too well, let alone astrophysics. "Regardless of whether we wait here or fly at it, the storm will be too fast for anybody to react to."
"If this ship can fly twice as fast as the solar storm, why don't we just match its speed?" I scratch my head and ask with a shrug. Even I know how relative speed works, so this sounds like a good idea in my book.
"How would we do that? If we let the storm get close enough, we might get swallowed by it. If we stay too far away, we won't accomplish anything." But Senka tears down my idea with narrowed eyes.
"Alright now, don't bully senpai too much." Exla finally comes to my help after listening to our back and forth for a while. "We may not be able to tell our exact distance from the storm, but we can just backtrack toward Earth at a slightly lower velocity. It will catch up with us eventually, and then senpai can do her thing."
"That sounds reasonable." I agree with the cloud girl, but get a glare from Senka.
"That's quite irresponsible. If you fail right above Earth, there won't be a second chance." She complains.
"Well, that's true regardless of where we do it." Smiling wryly, I glance around the command center. Everybody is listening, but I can tell that they don't understand what we're talking about. Still, they're aware that if I can't do it, nobody can.
"You just need fast reaction speed, right?" Tahiri suddenly floats up to us and asks. "As long as the Imagination Engine is active, I got that covered."
Because of all the science recently, I forgot about the usefulness of the Imagination Engine in such a situation. We're facing a natural disaster, not a technological application. And with the Imagination Engine, Tahiri is a living force of nature herself. She can turn herself into lightning while maintaining her consciousness. And as far as I know, lightning is quite close to the speed of light.
"That still leaves the issue of knowing when the solar storm will be within the range of your gravity." Senka crosses her arms and asserts. She may come across as abrasive, but it's her own way of covering all our bases so that nothing unforeseen happens. I'm quite thankful to her for that.
"Why not send a drone out to three hundred thousand kilometers? When it gets destroyed, its signal is cut off one second later. At that point, the solar storm will take about eleven minutes and seven seconds to reach us."
Everybody turns around at this suggestion to find Kleihn standing at the door with grease staining her cheeks and a complicated-looking tool in her hand. The sudden attention takes her aback, and she shrinks under the gazes of so many people she knows are akin to gods.
She learned all those values from Exla over the past few months and from fiddling with the technology on board of the Queen Pelomyx. The gremlin maid is truly a technological genius who might only be second to Alverost himself.
"Why didn't I think of that?" Exla slaps herself on the forehead after she has seemingly run the calculations in her mind. "That's more than enough time to match our speed with the solar storm."
"Can you use your gravity on something as far away as the moon?" Senka suddenly asks me, causing me to blink my eyes in bewilderment.
"What does this... oh." But when I begin to ask, I realize what it is that she's getting at. Distances in space are ridiculous, and when fractions of the speed of light are involved, it gets even worse. About three hundred thousand kilometers is how far light travels in a single second. It's a little less than the distance to the Moon. "I'm not sure. But I think it's better if we're closer."
"How close?" With an eyebrow raised, Exla wonders.
"Most likely too close." I admit, realizing that my idea was quite flawed. I only practiced gravity magic for a bit, lifting the desert all the way to the horizon and making it swirl about in the air. That kind of distance is nothing compared to the size of the entire planet, let alone the solar storm. I have no evidence that I can extend it to the size of the entire Sun. If things go wrong, this could mean the end of Earth.
"Well, whatever the case, you just have to do it." Senka declares in an assertive tone that leaves no room for doubt. I can appreciate that she's putting her trust in me, for better or for worse. In reality, I guess it's more like resigning herself to the fact that the fate of the world lies in my hands now.
I sigh, close my eyes, and remain silent for a moment. My mind replays how I went from juggling a silver plate to lifting millions of tons of sand within hours. I'm a Cosmic Horror, the offspring of the closest thing to a true god from another dimension. A few stars or planets are nothing compared to what my mind should be capable of.
"Yes, I'll do it." I open my eyes and proclaim, no more doubts in my mind. Do or die; there is no try. And I don't intend on dying here.
"The first drone has cut out!" Tahiri announces before my mind even registers that the alarm on the screen has begun to flash. She wasn't boasting when she said that she had reaction speed close to that of light.
We lined up three hundred drones one thousand kilometers apart from each other to gauge the exact speed of the solar storm so that the Queen Pelomyx can match it.
"Second one." The God of Storms states slightly under two seconds later. She's pressing a button the instant she notices the alarm. Senka and Exla are then using the speed of lightning and the delay due to distance to extrapolate the values we need. "Third."
After twenty-four of the three hundred drones we sent out have disappeared into the storm, the doll girl jumps from her seat. She must have come to an answer.
"As predicted, the solar storm is traveling at the maximum speed that plasma can travel in the vacuum of space." She explains, but nobody, aside from Exla, has any idea what that means.
"I can match the speed of the Queen Pelomyx to a margin of error under point one percent." The cloud girl adds, which makes more sense to me, at least. It may seem like a tiny fraction, but when these velocities are concerned, it's huge. "If we're too slow, this gives us several hours before the solar storm catches up with us. If we're too fast... well, nothing happens then."
"Several hours is good enough." Finally, I respond after understanding the calculation. I should be able to conjure a gravity field in under half a minute if things go as planned. Of course, that's never guaranteed.
"This is overwhelming." Rolan comments while looking at his own display. He has been staring at it since we started the sounding drone operation. It shows the dimmed Sun and the solar storm that now covers the entire screen. It's a little under a light second away, but its size already surpasses human perception.
"Are you sure you can stop that?" Gram asks me without averting his eyes from the screen. Halthor is on the other side, and Svanhild turns to look at me with unease in her expression. For the humans who have only reached the domain of Chosen Knights, this is far beyond their understanding, let alone capabilities.
"Do you doubt me?" I ask snidely. He and the other humans were there when I declared that I would do it regardless of how impossible it might seem.
"You couldn't stop the moon, could you?" But help for Gram arrives from an unexpected place. I turn around to find Kamii scrutinizing me while maintaining her usual expressionlessness. I can tell that she doesn't seriously doubt me but just wants to mess with me.
"That was the me from three days ago." Replying with my head tilted back in feigned haughtiness, I respond in absolute confidence. "I've grown since then."
I'm not showing off for nothing. Everybody in the command center and the maids throughout the ship are anxious about this doomsday event. All their hopes rest on me now, so if I were to express even a hint of nervousness, their morale would plummet.
"I believe that is quite true." Aurelia joins the conversation with a knowing look at me. She's one of the few who somewhat understand what I really am. And after facing Chaos-Juzual and Mataku on the Moon, she has an even better grasp of the truth. My progenitor, the Outer One, is an unfathomable existence beyond the limits of this dimension. I've reached a point where my mental capacity is growing exponentially as if to match my true capabilities after learning about them.
"Do you mean the width of your waist?" Asoko pokes me in the side with a grin. Luckily, I've been keeping my body a mixture of several genetic templates, none of which are susceptible to tickle attacks. Otherwise, I would have squealed in surprise and ruined my cool image.
"You're not one to talk, auntie." Uten and Saten unexpectedly come to my aid and appear on Asoko's two sides. "Judging by how much you've been eating every day, if you were human, you would look like Kouratua by now."
I snort at the mental image that this comparison conjures into my mind. Aurelia turns her head aside and suppresses the urge to laugh. Most others in the room don't understand the joke since they never met the God of Gold, but they can tell that Asoko was at the butt end of it.
"Who is this Kouratua?" She asks with a frown.
"Just know that it wasn't flattery." I reply, then burst out laughing when I imagine Asoko's face on the rotund god's body.
"Now I really need to know." Putting an arm around my shoulder and pulling me into a headlock, my other half complains.
"He looks like this." The twins transform their bodies and seemingly mix together to take on the appearance of the God of Gold. He towers over everybody in the command center except for Korenga, who watches the skit with amusement.
"You should not be laughing, Onee-sama." Hestia comments, and I blink my eyes at her. She's wearing a rare sardonic smile on her lips, and her red eyes are focused on me as if I were prey. "Even when you were acting like a human in the academy, you ate for two. Recently, that has more than doubled."
"Et tu, Hestia?!" I can't believe that the fallen angel, of all people, would stab me in the back like this. She laughs and sticks out her tongue playfully.
"You eat even more than Korenga." Tokomaha gives me the finishing blow.
"What was that about cosmic hunger, sister?" Asoko pulls me close and sneers.
"Five minutes and thirty-three seconds to contact." Exla's voice announces through the speakers of the command center and the rest of the ship. It pulls everybody's attention back to the world-ending event approaching us. When the solar storm is within twenty thousand kilometers from us, the Queen Pelomyx will match its speed, and I'll get to work outside the ship.
"How far out is the storm?" I quickly get into serious mode again, and the others who were fooling around with me do the same.
"About one hundred and fifty thousand kilometers." Senka answers as if she had the number ready.
"Switch to the outside view." Upon hearing that answer, I request of Exla without looking at her. The cloud girl presses a few keys on her console, and the big screen turns blindingly white. Everybody covers their eyes, but I stare at the phenomenon that will end the world if I fail without blinking.
"Sorry about that." Exla apologizes while turning down the intensity of the light with a filter.
"I think it's good that everybody knows what we're up against." Senka comments, garnering the attention of the entire command center. She then turns to me, directing everyone's gaze onto the one person their hopes rest on. "No pressure, but if you fail, it's the end of Earth."
"Yeah, no pressure, alright." I ruffle her black to white gradient hair, and for once, she lets me do it without grumbling. Then I look across the faces of everybody one by one, showing them my absolute confidence with a fearless smile. "I'll go and get ready."
"It's time, senpai." Exla speaks into my head as I stand on the place that could be considered the bow of the Queen Pelomyx. My vision is filled with the solar storm, its overwhelming size hard to truly grasp. "Are you sure you can stay out there?"
"I'm anchored in place." I glance down at my feet, or rather the tentacles they have turned into that are clinging onto the hull of the ship. "And inertia doesn't seem to affect me much anyway."
The inertia dampener of the Queen Pelomyx only operates inside the ship. I still don't understand how it works, but it means anything on the surface that isn't part of the ship will be thrown off in an instant when it accelerates.
"Alright, get ready then. Three... two... one!" Exla finally agrees with a sigh and counts down the seconds to ignition. On one, I feel a tug at my feet that travels up my legs and into my body. But aside from that, no much happens. Distances and velocity in space are already hard enough to tell, but as a complete Crawling Chaos, I don't feel any acceleration.
"So, did it work?" I ask through the comms. The solar storm still looks exactly the same as before, but if we weren't moving, it would hit us within a minute.
"Something's wrong." Comes the cloud girl's alarmed response, and I listen intently. "We're moving at atmospheric speeds."
"Diagnostics were all green." Senka's voice joins the channel. "Tahiri specifically checked power and engines for damages."
The doll girl is referring to how the God of Storm turned herself into electricity and traveled through the entire ship to check for broken cables after the missile hits.
"How much slower is that, Exla?" I ask while keeping my gaze on the solar storm. It might be nothing more than an illusion, but it feels like the wall of light is looming closer than it did before. Even if it were only around three seconds away from reaching us, it would still be a distance of over a thousand kilometers.
"We might as well not be moving at all compared to the storm." Exla's grave voice replies. That means less than a minute now. My heart sinks, but I quickly catch myself.
"Then I'll just have to stop it before then." Keeping my emotions under control, I announce in absolute confidence. It really is do or die now. Before, we had accounted for many opportunities to go with trial and error, as we could have maintained our speed relative to the solar storm for almost a whole day before it would reach Earth.
Raising both my hands, I stare at the luminous wall before me and project my image of a gravity well forming there. I don't know how deep the storm is, so I'll have to maintain the spell until it's all over. With the new time limit and the pressure of everybody I ever cared about dying if I fail, this situation feels more real than ever.
But no matter how I try to imagine it, nothing happens. The storm is still over twenty thousand kilometers away, so maybe my range limit means that I can't do anything about this after all. Nobody else has any hope of accomplishing what I was trying to do here, but that doesn't mean I will naturally succeed at it.
No, I can't think negatively. Everything relies on my imagination; I just have to go far beyond my previous limit in one leap!
Shutting off my senses for a moment, I go inside my mind and search for a solution. Then I grasp the largest form I can imagine without entering the realm of the abstract. That's not the Moon or planet Earth. It's not the Queen Pelomyx or the massive battle sphere that Alverost brought to Zohigal.
It's Tokomaha. The size of spheres in space is hard to fathom, even for my human mind, with its horizons expanded by the view of a Crawling Chaos. I'm sure I will get there eventually but now isn't the time yet. Instead, the giant God of Growth standing on Earth as if it were a large boulder and stopping the Moon with her shoulders is the most massive comprehensible shape in my mind.
Returning to the present, I spread my arms and face the glaring brightness of the solar storm very quickly catching up to us. Then I imagine Tokomaha's size for a gravity well before me, into which the entire storm will get sucked. As I do so, something tugs at my mind, and I can instinctively tell that it's working even when I don't see an immediate effect.
Overlaying my vision with darkening filters until the luminosity is at a bearable level, I notice that a slightly brighter shape has formed in the wall of light. It looks like the little goddess, standing with her arms stretched toward the heavens. A warm feeling overcomes me for a moment when I realize that this is the second time the petite girl is saving our planet from a cosmic-scale threat - even if it's not in person this time.
Soon, the Tokomaha-shaped gravity well loses its form as it grows and swallows the solar storm before us. It continues to expand, reducing the luminosity in a massive circle around it while gathering it all in a small radiant sphere at its center. It reaches a point where I could look at the absorption area without any filters.
Time passes, but I realize that the gravity sphere isn't expanding any further and won't eliminate all of the solar storm. The Queen Pelomyx may no longer be in immediate danger of being swallowed by it, but all around us, the light passes us by. I only opened a large hole into it.
"How big of an area was that?" I ask through the communications device in my head while looking around. As I expected, it's a long wave rather than a wall; even now, the storm streams past us while the gravity sphere acts as a shield for us.
"It's hard to tell, but sensors beyond ten thousand kilometers around the ship show massive electromagnetic interference." Exla replies in a grim tone.
"So I only made a hole twenty thousand kilometers in diameter, huh?" Muttering more to myself than as an answer to the cloud girl, I look at the luminous sphere where the storm's energy and matter are gathering. A hole that size is at least enough for Earth to slip through, so I don't know why Exla sounds so grim.
"No, this is far from enough." As if having read my mind, Senka states in a grave tone. "It's truly hard to grasp cosmic scales, so I can't fault you for it. You might as well be attempting to hit a target board twenty thousand kilometers away with a hand-thrown dart."
"Huh?" I make in surprise. My mind was already entering celebration mode, but leave it to Senka to pull me back to earth.
"Do you know how wide the solar storm is? Assuming it doesn't grow after emerging from the Sun, which is about one point four million kilometers in diameter, you just opened a hole that's less than zero point zero two percent of the whole." The doll girl explains patiently. Lots of numbers make my head hurt, but when millions are put against tiny decimals, even I can understand the implication.
"Also, the hole is already closing again." Exla adds, causing me to spin around. Behind the Queen Pelomyx, the solar storm is flowing back together like a raging river that was parted by a rock. It's a wave of plasma with an irregular path, so of course, that would happen.
It was all for nothing.
"Damn." I look forward again and notice that the gravity field shielding us from the storm has started disappearing because I stopped concentrating on it. As long as it's still ongoing, I have to keep my mind on it and won't be able to try again behind us.
"Is this it?" I hear Svanhild's voice on the channel. She doesn't sound particularly filled with despair, but I'm sure that's because a concept as grand as the end of the world is hard to comprehend.
"Can't we do anything?" Gram mutters, bringing the appropriate level of graveness in his tone. Everybody besides me is powerless even to attempt standing up against this cosmic event. Their survival is guaranteed as long as we stay on the Queen Pelomyx, but it wracks them with guilt thinking that they can do nothing but watch Earth turn into a ball of fire.
Finally, the storm passes after a few minutes. It might appear to be a short event, but the velocity it's traveling through space at means that i8t equates to a length ten times the radius of Earth. Millions of degrees will be bombarding the planet for those few minutes, evaporating the oceans and erasing all life on the globe. Earth will become uninhabitable for who knows how long.
"It's a kill switch! Damn you, Alverost!" Exla suddenly exclaims. "Even in death, you're still a royal pain in the ass."
"What does that mean?" I ask while directing the sphere of condensed energy toward the Sun.
"We flew the ship at the maximum speed only once. It seems that it was programmed so that the moment we stopped, the switch would kick in. Now it won't start up again." The cloud girl explains, frustration and anger in her voice. "At atmospheric speeds, we'll take years to reach the Rhodos station. Or to return to Earth."
I stare at the solar storm that fills my vision behind the Queen Pelomyx just as it did in the front until five minutes ago. But for us, it might as well be as far away as the stars themselves.
Is this checkmate?
