Chapter Text
“When we first discovered the ability to completely override how objects move and control them at our will, I stood at that table and argued to destroy it outright. But they all disagreed. They wanted to retrieve it, but then someone stole the technology in transit, started the Rising Islands incident and lifted ten thousand islands from the ocean floor into the sky. He sought to chain everyone and everything under his command.”
“I stared at the people at that table with disappointment. Decided to drop out of the army for good and do this my way.”
“The only reason that those wings built by Daedalus melted mid-flight was that they weren’t built well enough. We had advanced flight technology for that, but even that could fall apart. I sought to engineer the best wings there ever were and use it to destroy Rising himself.”
“Photon manipulation had come to a point where at extremely small scales, light could actually be stopped and solidified into a sort of colloid that could be shaped as long as the right conditions were continuously met. I initially wanted to gather as much as possible and shape it into the wings I would wear in my fight, but that fell apart as that required tremendous energy. Instead, I decided to think like an architect; distribute the load among several floating turret-like solidification units. This resulted in a stable wing, and when I took to the skies and fought Rising, people began to see hope in that wing.”
“It was then that Project Fallen Angel had begun.”
- Celestine’s autobiography
——-
At sunrise, a coastal city in Japan had seen the reckoning first.
A rumble that shook the earth itself, followed by a snap, or a heavy crack. Thousands of metric tons of rock were lifted into the skyline. The mass glowed a faint indigo at the edges. This would later be the telltale sign that objects were under Rising’s control, but at the time, people passed it off using ridiculous explanations, one including ozone particles interacting with the high energy outputs and creating the faint glow.
As people watched, muttering exclamations in Japanese, the flat rockbed seemed to shift and morph, as chunks of stone rumbled up from the base, reshaping themselves as they went into pillars or slopes or slabs of stone. Eventually, structures shifted into place, and something resembling a building was formed. It looked like it was torn straight out of Greek mythology, a completely reformed Parthenon of unexplored boundaries and new horizons.
Just not in a good way.
The newly-formed floating island began to shift closer to the coastline. Fifteen hundred miles. Fourteen hundred miles. Thirteen hundred miles. People realized what was happening, way too late, and started retreating.
Ten hundred miles. Nine hundred miles. Eight hundred miles. A loud blast emanated from the island. Then another. Lines of indigo shifted towards the island, seemingly out of thin air, and the very atmosphere felt charged. The rattling of heavy chains echoed through even the farthest prefectures, and everyone in the land of the rising sun had woken up to it.
Five hundred miles. Four hundred miles. Booming thuds shook the land, originating from clamps attached to massive chains, all formed from solidified air. This was Rising’s first true display of his powers; many called it the Rising Islands incident. Sadly, the plural in “Islands” stood for what was about to happen next.
The chains rattled again. Screaming became but a backdrop to these rattles, which preceded a snap. The chains were now tight; whatever the Prime Island was about to do, it was going to do it.
Then, slowly, the ground was lifted. Pavement buckled, some buildings fell, but the chains didn’t budge and the crust did. The ground itself let out a groan like it didn’t consent to being lifted out of the ground by tethered chains. Screaming had now cut off abruptly as blossoms of rock had popped up all over people’s feet and engulfed the victims. It felt like an earthquake. But there was no earthquake. In fact, Rising was watching for that; he made sure to freeze every particle of air on the bottom of the crust to act as a doorstop.
It wasn’t natural. Japan was being lifted out of the tectonic plate system.
Soon, the whole country fell silent. No one screamed. No one made so much as a whimper. Only the sound of chains grinding against themselves made any appearance, as a persistent, annoying grating. Then, Japan was pulled into jumping distance from the Prime Island. It was bathed in that same indigo glow that covered the Island, locked into place. Then the rock eggs that enveloped the Japanese floated into Rising’s lair, hung on normally-sized versions of the clamp chains used to pull over 37 quadrillion metric tons of solid mass out of the planet’s neighborhood. This was akin to a “trophy” to Rising; the encapsulated, trapped, yet alive citizens of the countries he took. It was disgusting even to the most deranged people on the planet. The surface of the Earth was scarred by the gaps he left in it.
Then, one by one, archipelagic countries were lifted out and rearranged into the horrific beauty of Rising’s collection of islands. The Philippines went out next. Then Indonesia and Malaysia, then Singapore. Then he took chunks of countries, or countries themselves if they were small enough. He took the coastal area and then some of China. Ripped out Taiwan from the magma. Took Florida along for the ride.
This was Rising’s way of saying hello, by the way. The way he was going to say goodbye was much, much worse.
—
Rising sat in a throne of stone. It was cobbled together from cooled magma taken from the first country-sized victim he took for himself. In front of him hung the first victims of many, all hanging from the ceiling of the Parthenon recreation built from scratch. His later victims couldn’t fit into the Parthenon, so instead he started hanging them on the underside of the country’s crust, as a warning to anyone who opposed him.
He sensed an unfamiliar, photon-covered presence. 100 feet. 200 feet. He was right above the cloud ceiling and no one would ever reach him. Even if they reached the edge, they wouldn’t reach into the Parthenon; their servants would deal with the intruder. They weren’t coming inside. And if they did, Rising would just pull the entire Rising Supercontinent into an altitude of 1000 miles while flicking the opponent off the mass of rock. Nothing would be wrong.
Then an explosion resounded through the building. A ring of 32 metal crystalline objects appeared from the ceiling, swirling about while a pillar of light cast a bright circle in the middle of the hall. Rising stood up.
“Someone wishes to challenge me? They have dug their own grave,” they muttered. “Who dares enter the Hall of Physics-Unlimited Colonization?”
“Terrible name for a really important hall,” a feminine voice noted on the other side. “You sure you named it that?”
Rising scoffed. “It sounded a bit tacky, I’ll admit. But that’s because I’ll kill you in it and rename it after you. May I have your name?”
The voice said nothing. Instead, a slender figure dropped down the hole in the ceiling and landed. The crystals responded, slowly revolving around them until they formed a pair of elegant wings.
The figure looked up. “Soldier Solaris. I’ll rename this tech after you when I kill you after this. Yours?”