bold of you to ask about my OCs
So, the fight was between two characters from the Aurora Moonrise continuity. Namely, it was Knight Commander Novus, the Living Crater, up against Vela of the Hadal Nebula.
This is a human fighting a comet spirit — which in this setting is about as fair a matchup as a raccoon fighting a human that had time to prepare — so I think when you grade on that curve, that this was a fight and not a stomp alone already counts as a victory for mankind.
Although, when you factor in that Vela forced Novus to use a technique he swore he’d never cast again, it’s kind of an ethical lost?
Actually fuck it, this is my blog, I get to talk about all the cheesy details.
I’m not going to describe the whole magic system, but the basic idea here is that magic comes down to how strong your will is. In this world, everything has a will, so a fundamental trick for hte adept is that you can amplify your techniques by combining your will with something greater.
The most common way of doing this is by attuning to the earth, since yknow, a whole planet has a whole bunch of will. One person can only really tap into a microscopic fraction of the planet’s power, but that’s still a whole lot.
Expanding your techniques with planet’s will is known as adding gravitas. This is basically literal — gravity is just an intentional expression of the planet’s will, so by adding gravitas, landing your hits becomes as inevitable as “what goes up comes down”.
And, for dramatic effect, you must chant what you want your technique to do. So if you wanted to add gravitas to swinging your sword, you might say something like, “Let everything that falls to earth by sundered in twain”.
In practice there’s two grades of gravitas, based on whether that wording is hyperbole. ⸢Gravitas Ictus⸥ is considered the mark of a powerful enchanter. It basically makes your techniques undodgeable, with the restriction that you must remain connected to the earth (i.e. feet on the ground) or you immediately lose this benefit.
But ⸢Gravitas Loci⸥ is the mark of an truly exceptional enchanter. First, you draw a circle in dirt (usually with a foot, sometimes using a tool), and then you attune to that circle, becoming one with it, allowing you to move it like a muscle. Like that, you expand the circle until it encompasses your target, and then you chant your desired effect.
And then, so long as you stay within the circle, you can target anything in the circle, and it will be just as inevitable as the pull of gravity. (And yes, at the highest level, this results in some Sukuna leveling Shibuya type shit — slashes are in fact the the first Gravitas effect you’d see in the story itself)
Now, for most, this is as high as it goes.
But that’s enough background, I’m saying all of this so you have a tiny bit of context for how crazy this fight gets.
Not gonna set the scene entirely, but the comet Vela was terrorizing a lakeside down when Novus and his army arrives to mitigate and distract the thing. (Damage control is the current established doctrine for dealing with the eldritch threat comets pose; only moonsingers are capable of banishing them, and the moonflower court was slaughtered down to the women and children about fifteen years before the plot started.)
Also, for context, the comet is admittedly a lttle bit winded at the moment? Because you see, this fight takes place in a sort of intermission/epilogue between books 2 and 3. The protagonist and her party confronted Vela at the climax of book 2’s plotline, and they went all out, using everything they’d learned and teaming up with a fireteam of powerful gemsingers they’d met along the way.
And they… fucking lost. Because, again, it’s a comet. All the redshirt gemsingers died, while the protag and her party managed to escape. (Mainly because the comet has a personal connection to aurora that isn’t important here.)
Anyway, the army arrives and Novus instructs them to probe and position the comet spirit with a tactical eye. The sweep of its wings cut down legions, its ice freezes the battlefield as it wields all the water of the lake in a massive coma, but the best of the skeleton knights managed to last a few seconds, exchanging a blow or two, and with enough of them to switch out, you can pull off a sort of rocket tag rotation with only a few casualties. Novus had enough men.
Of course, I haven’t said what Novus is doing during all of this. While his men do their best against the comet, he’s expanding his Gravitas Loci, carving it deeper and deeper into the earth, strengthening his connection as a massive trench emerges encircling the battlefield.
When it is complete, he exerts his will to command everyone — the army, the village — to evacuate at once. The comet doesn’t flee, of course, because it is the nature of comets to dazzle and destroy. They live to fight.
When Novus chants, it’s to cast an eruption technique. Glass shatters, every stone in every walls explodes, the waters of the lake instantly evaporate to so much mist. There is a roaring sound and bright fire and the entirety of the zones comes undone.
It’s enough to strip the comet of her wings, ruin her hair, crack her perfect crystalline being. It’s enough to merit an alien flexure you might call a smile, to mutter “cute”. It’s enough to do what even the protagonist could not: make the comet stop holding back, just a little.
And then the fight itself begins. Novus’s attunement to the earth lets him fling around bits of debris, but the comet controls the mist created by the lake’s vapor. They throw punches that could crack mountains, throwing each other hard enough to carve trenches where they land, all that anime shit.
It’s enough to surprise the comet. Comets are beings of pure light, frozen in water, eternal and divine. And this is just a fleeting bit of mud. It’s not impressive — but it is curious. But, after a few minutes of this back and forth, Vela has sated her curiosity.
Maybe the comet starts gathering clouds to charge some energy blast, and that’s when Novus reveals his trump card.
Remember when I said gravitas loci is as good as it gets? That’s more of popular misconception, the limit of current knowledge in the kingdom of Extola. The truth is, you can go even further beyond. And Novus might be the first person who’s put that into practice.
He uses ⸢Gravity Shift⸥ — though a more proper term might be Gravitas Ascensionis. He chants:
“Let everything which once fell rise anew, like the grasping hands of man reaching for heaven.”
It’s an inversion of all the other gravitas techniques. He rises up to meet the comet in the air — he is flying.
Like that, the third phase of the fight is a midair battle, Vela fighting with thundering clouds and light-based attacks while Novus is flinging around exploding skylands. The battle takes them higher and higher into the atmosphere, even into the ionosphere, where Novus, a mere humans, needs the willpower to endure insane radiation and temperature.
Battle is a true expression of will, and in this climatic phase, Novus knows Vela, and Vela knows Novus. It’s a dazzling display, a spectacle, and yet, it’s somehow incomplete. Vela can feels that Novus is holding something back. Remarkable, for a bit of mud to keep up with a comet without even using their full potential, but while Vela fought to have fun, she still fought to win.
Perhaps Vela is pushed hard enough that she has to start pulling out abilities uncharacteristic for her — tricks she learned from fighting the protagonist, for instance.
But the key blunder is that Novus eventually flies too high. He was never going to win like this: comets come from outer space. He put up a good showing, but of course Vela would have the ultimate advantage up here.
Remember how the restriction on ⸢Gravitas Ictus⸥ is that you have to remain touching the ground, and for ⸢Gravitas Loci⸥ you have to remain within the circle? for Ascensionis, you can only ever rise. Which is to say
The effect ends when you fall.
So Vela lands an axe kick that sends Novus careening down to the ground. In this, he’s more like an meterorite than a comet, burning up on reentry.
It’s here that a chapter would end, and the next chapter is flashback of Novus’s life story. He wasn’t always a knight, he wasn’t even a fighter, but an poor academic, a struggling inventor. He studied gunpowder. Maybe he wanted to create fertilizer, but discovered something more explosive along the way.
The immortal crown of Extola was interested in his inventions, and would fund him if he focused entirely on bombs, weapons research. He got training as an enchanter. He got training as a skeleton knight.
He didn’t like fighting and killing, but the crown kept him fed, and soon his reputation for deviously lethal bombs was deterring anyone from challenging the crown. He was preventing war! (He was cementing imperial hegemony).
Then the Moonflower Court Massacre happened. Suddenly the realm had no defense against comets or other metaphysical threats. But of course, the Moonflower Court wasn’t the only place where the secret arts of the moon were studied.
There was a island shrouded in enchanted fog, where lived an isolationist people who had mastered expanding their will with the ocean tides rather than the earth.
Advisers suggested that an attempt to conquer those islands would result in a massive loss of life; with the rising of the full moon, the islands’ secretive enchanters might actually eclipse anything the kingdom had to offer. But of course, they were isolationist and kept to themselves.
Then one day, a girl from the island, child of one of the islands’ esteemed moon mystics, finds herself lost at sea, and is rescued and generously provided for by the kingdom. The islands’s mystics can scry and discern her whereabouts, and of course demand the kingdom give her back.
But she has potential as a moonsinger, a art now only known to the island. This girl might be the the only hope Extola has of restoring the Moonflower Court. Perhaps they dress it up in more diplomatic language, but fundamentally, it’s jealousy.
All of this is to say: war seems inevitable.
And Novus had seen enough war to hate it, to pride himself on preventing it. A war with the mystic islands might be more ruinous than any he’d witnessed — what would he do to prevent it?
In his desperate search for an answer, he found the technique that he’d go down in history for discovering and employing. a Persona Canto is a special technique so tuned to a the a person’s individual will that, even if others could imitate it, only one enchanter is capable of using it to its full potential.
The full potential of Novus’s technique was sufficient to prevent the war.
For this, he was awarded many accolades, elevating him to status as Knight Commander over the entire skeleton legion.
And he swore to never use that technique again.
The flashback ends, and we’re back to the action.
Novus shakes the earth where he lands, obscured by fire and dust.
To onlookers, it seems the battle is over. Novus did the impossible, flew up and banished the comet, but falling to his death must have been the tragic price.
The army advances on the crater that might be his grave, hoping to ascertain his condition. As they get near, though, they feel terrible chill creep up. they are illumed in a light from beyond the stars.
Vela descends, comet tail like a river of hair behind her. Dimmed, but not dead from her fight. Soldiers back up in terror, and the knights ready their enchantments.
And then Novus struggles to his feet.
“You must tell me what you are, before I destroy you. What accident of creation granted a stone so much power? I can almost see you.”
“Do you ever wonder” — Novus is coughing up blood, voice weak gravel, like sand — “from what well it is you things draw your strength?”
Vela hadn’t, and Novus laughs.
“I suppose curiosity is a human virtue. You aren’t human, and never will be. You exist only to dazzle and destroy. And yet, we do have something in common, you and I. Dazzle and destroy,” he repeats, “But to dazzle, there must be someone there to witness you, find awe in you, remember you.
Tell me, comet. What does it mean to have power? To use it? How do you recognize it? I think I understand this, in the way only your kind can.”
A mad smile, and he regards all the men gathered around him. “Power is about impact. Leaving an impression. Putting a dent in the universe. I’ve turned cities into mass graves. I’ve made the earth itself tremble for miles beyond. I’ve put out mountains like candle flames.
But I’m not and will not be the strongest — just the first. Mankind’s hands will reach ever outward. There’s a price, but it’s worth it. When — no if it all ends, then it won’t be with a whimper.”
And he casts that technique.
⸢Persona Canto: Meteor Heart Explosion Pulse.⸥
“I just hope something beautiful can emerge from this crater I called a life.”
And then the world is glorious, terrible light.
What does his technique do? It’s a self-sustaining chain reaction. A magical flame that ignites the blood itself. One person explodes, and spreads the flame to several others. Life itself is the fuel.
To prevent a war, Novus destroyed an island. (It was dazzling.) It left an impact, a crater in the earth. Where does a comet’s power come from? Where does the power of Gravitas come from? The earth itself. Rather than becoming one with it as men do, comets prove their might, seize their strength by shaking the earth. Novus isn’t a comet, he’s just a man. But, as Vela said, she could almost see him.
Novus could survive the thermosphere; he can endure his own technique. but none of his men share his constitution. So when he uses that technique, the army becomes his weapon.
Vela is incinerated with all of the fury of life and soul spent.
What’s lift is a pile of shattered ice crystals and light fading. A whisper that might be her saying, you win, good fight.
Novus staggers onward, crawling to somewhere to nurse his wounds, gasp for breath and strength. That was his last trick. If that hadn’t worked, he’d have lost.
Who won? You decide!