Reincarnated Into Destiny Universe - Volume 1 Chapter 35 No Thanks I'm Just Looking.

(Day 196)

Since his Flight of the Photon had already been modified to be larger on the inside, all Isaac needed to do was to add a holding area for the captured Hive. After doing so, it didn’t take long for him and his team to round up the necessary Hive enemies.

The six Guardians gathered together in the hangar early the next morning. After going over their plan of action once more, they all set off towards the Helmouth on the Moon.

Arriving at the platform on the lip of the Helmouth, Isaac had all of the Hive transmatted directly onto the platform. The unlucky Hive were slaughtered the instant that they were freed. Isaac and his fireteam watched as the green energy flowed out of the Hive’s corpses and covered more and more of the strange markings.

Once the entire platform was aglow with the Hive energy, Isaac had all of the remaining Hive sent down at the same time. Easily slicing through these last few Hive, the crew watched and waited as that green energy began spreading out from the lip of the Helmouth forming a path stretching towards the center of the Helmouth.

The green energy path continued extending inwards, until it had reached the exact center of the Helmouth. Once the green energy reached the center, a solid carved stone like path began forming within the green energy.

Isaac and his team waited anxiously on the platform, as the last few feet of walkway was formed. The six approached the end of the newly completed path and Isaac looked at Wraitheon.

“Alright, buddy. You know what to do, right?” Isaac asked, as he put his hand underneath Wraitheon palm upwards.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got this.” Wraitheon responded, as he deactivated his passive levitation and fell into Isaac’s upturned palm.

Isaac held Wraitheon out over the edge of the Helmouth and let him go, sending him free falling into its depths. Wraitheon continued falling in complete darkness for nearly thirty seconds, before he started to get a sense of what was below him. The readings he was getting from below him were truly disturbing and, as he started to get a visual on where he was about to land, he reactivated his levitation and slowed his descent.

‘This isn’t good. This isn’t good. No, this isn’t good at all. Crap, I need to get out of here.’ Wraitheon thought, as he quickly reversed directions and headed back towards Isaac.

A couple of minutes later Wraitheon arrived back at the edge of the completed bridge and briefed the crew on what he had seen.

“Ummm, so you know how in the game the first part was swarming with groups of Thralls that were mostly behind the character if they kept moving forward? Well, it ain’t like that down there. You’ll see when you get down there. There’s practically an ocean of Thrall down there. They’re packed in so tightly that they can’t even take a step forward. On top of that there are at least a hundred Wizards floating above that ocean of Thralls. I’m really not liking this one bit.” Wraitheon reported.

“Damn, I wasn’t expecting this to be easy but, when you add the weight of darkness and the larger size into the equation, this really doesn’t look too good.” Isaac crossed his arms and gripped his chin, as he thought for a moment.

“Well, it looks like we won’t be finishing this mission in one day, like we did with Atheon. Crota obviously knows we’re coming and more than that it seems as if he’s acknowledged our power. He knows that we have the power to defeat him and he’s pulling out all the stops to ensure we don’t make it into his Throne World.

“For today, we’re just going to probe the first area and clear it out. We’ll check out the bridge at the end and then we’ll return to Earth, recover our Light Charge, and then come back tomorrow to see if they’ve respawned all of their minions.

“If they have, then we’ll have to make a seriously thorough and detailed plan on how to break through each section, while using as little Light Charge as possible. If they haven’t, then that might mean that Crota is running out of minions or, at the very least, he knows it won’t do him any good to put them in our path just to get killed and possibly make us stronger.

“With that being said, we’ll make that plan anyways, just in case they’re onto us. For now, however, let’s head down there and start clearing them out.” Isaac explained his plan.

Following Isaac’s lead, they all dropped down, into the Helmouth towards The Stills, as a group. Wraitheon had already measured the distance of the fall and the layout of the landing zone. He had sent the information to all of the other ghosts and they were ready to signal their respective Guardians when the time was right.

Upon receiving Wraitheon’s signal, Isaac initiated his Fist of Havoc landing mightily on the ground directly beneath them, killing all of the Hive within a ten meter radius.

As Ferra and Koren received their ghost’s signals, they also activated their Fists of Havoc but at slightly different angles. The two landed just outside the radius of Isaac’s ability and wrecked their own devastation upon the helpless Hive.

A mere second after Ferra and Koren executed their abilities, Bravo, Daniel, and Laurel landed their own Fists of Havoc on the enemies in front of them.

Having created a cone of destruction nearly forty meters long, the team now had room to move and were quite satisfied with their handiwork, despite that familiar oppressive aura of darkness descending even more heavily upon them than it had previously.

With the Weight of Darkness slowing down their movements, they continued their slaughter using every weapon in their arsenal. Despite not being terribly bothered by the Weight of Darkness in the beginning thanks to LAMP, as the fight slogged on, the cost of maintaining their normal speed became excessive.

Bravo, Daniel, and Laurel were using the passive levitation, from the Kinetic Subclass, to engage with the Wizards. Isaac, Ferra, and Koren were on the ground dealing with the Thralls. By the time the cost increase of the levitation was becoming too excessive, there were only around a dozen Wizards left and so the ground team also took to the air and they quickly dispatched the remaining Wizards, before all of them returned to the melee on the ground.

The crew was constantly throwing out Solar Grenades in random directions. It didn’t even matter where they threw them. The grenades would inevitably kill at least a dozen Thrall, if not more. They all continued their mass slaughter, while making their way past the various pillars that led the way to the entrance to the Throne World.

After nearly an hour of Thrall mauling, they could just barely make out the end of the Thrall Ocean. This would have been a relief to them, if that Thrall ocean hadn’t been littered with Hallowed Knights, Wizards, and Ogres.

Isaac had, of course, warned them not to use up all of their Light Charge, since he suspected there might be a bigger surprise waiting for them at the bridge. They were all inwardly feeling grateful for their leader’s foresight, when they witnessed the scene before them.

As they had killed, killed, killed, and killed again over the past hour, they never stopped being surrounded by Thralls, because those remaining would immediately fill in the gaps of their fallen brethren. The size of the Thrall ocean, however, continued to shrink as they moved towards their destination. As soon as they had eliminated the first hundred meters of Thralls, The other Thralls in front of them had rushed to surround them, once more. This created an edge to the Thrall ocean that traveled several meters behind them, while the rest of the ocean continued to stretch out endlessly before them, until now.

With the end of the Thrall ocean finally in sight, each member of the crew targeted one of the more than twenty Hallowed Wizards and summoned their Arc Staves soon followed by rippling torrents of Arc Energy. This managed to clear out a large portion of the remaining Thralls along with several of the Knights and Wizards.

At this point, they all gathered around Ferra and rushed towards the bridge activation platform. Ferra dropped a Solarium, in the middle, that covered everything except the last foot of the platform’s edge. Leaving this space open so that it can absorb the energy from the Hive corpses, everyone except Ferra threw out a Kinetic Grenade and then took advantage of their Light Souls to exit the Solarium.

Already having an approximate idea of how strong the Ogres were, they quickly determined their threshold was around 24 BUDs and began Focus Firing on each Ogre one after the other. While the others were Focus Firing on the Ogres, Koren was in the middle of a large swarm of Hallowed Thrall and Acolytes. He was using some as chitin shields, while grabbing others and throwing them towards the Solarium.

Ferra, on the other hand, was utilizing her Solar Whip to drag Hive into the Solarium’s walls and burning them alive. She focused primarily on the remaining Wizards, while also snatching up any Hive that looked like they might take her teammates unaware.

Fifteen minutes after they had initiated their assault on the bridge activation platform, they were all completely tapped out of Light Charge and were using the last of their Fusion Rifle ammo reserves to fuel a fast firing, flame flinging, death dealing final assault with their Vex Mythoclasts.

As the last of the Hive finally burned to ashes, Isaac began to take stock of the situation. The bridge had been built several minutes ago, all the Hive were dead, and the Weight of Darkness had disappeared. They waited there patiently for reinforcements or for the bridge to dissipate but nothing happened.

After an hour of sitting around twiddling their thumbs, Isaac decided that nothing was going to happen and, if it was, it wasn’t going to happen while they were there. Using the Light Charge their ghosts had acc.u.mulated after the dispersal of the darkness, they utilized their Potential Energy to propel them back to the top of the Helmouth.

“Well, that went about as well as I expected it to so let’s head back to Earth and spend the rest of the day topping off our Light Charge and acc.u.mulating Motes of Light. We’ll come back tomorrow and either do the same thing or prepare to move forward into the Throne World, depending on the circ.u.mstances.”

———-

(Day 197)

Isaac and his fireteam returned to the Helmouth the following day and Isaac once again sent Wraitheon down into the Helmouth. They were all currently waiting for Wraitheon to return from his scouting, when he suddenly flew up out of the hole he had been dropped into earlier.

“So what’s it look like down there, buddy?” Isaac asked.

“It looks like a hole.” Wraitheon replied.

“What the…you know what I mean, you freaking smart ass.” Isaac retorted.

“Well, let’s just say that, if you run out of Light Charge by the time you get to the bridge this time, you’ll have nobody to blame but yourselves.”

“Nice! So it’s clear then? No reinforcements, respawns, or recently created abominations?”

“Not that I could see. Also, I think the Weight of Darkness might be gone as well.”

“Sweet! That means we can get back to the bridge almost immediately!” Daniel interjected enthusiastically.

“Hmmm…that certainly would expedite our trip back to the bridge but, if the Weight of Darkness is genuinely gone from that place, that might mean more trouble for us further ahead. I was curious yesterday when the darkness seemed to disappear entirely, as I was certain it was a feature of that particular space. Now that you’ve confirmed that it hasn’t returned, I’m thinking that it might show up in a really problematic area.

“We can talk about that later, though. Let’s get down there, confirm Wraitheon’s report, and then we’ll cook up a nice juicy scheme-a-rooni to tackle the next two sections.”

With those words, Isaac and his fireteam headed once more into Helmouth’s depths and gathered around the bridge activation platform. After taking several moments to go over a multitude of contingency plans, the crew finally picked themselves up and walked across the narrow bridge that led to platform on the other side that was bathed in a blindingly white light. The source of this light was exactly their destination, Crota’s Throne World.

After convincing Eris to remain silent during the fighting and to only bother them if she had important information, they all took their time walking slowly through this odd space that separated one world from another. This gave their ghosts plenty of time to suss out any secrets they could about the nature of these Ascendant Realms, as they were called.

As Isaac and his fireteam passed through that blindingly bright light, it felt as if they were walking on sand and walking through an impossibly thick fog. They were all happy to have emerged on the other side, staring at an expansive open space that had a greenish black sky. That greenish black sky was also seemingly an abyss that separated the structure they had arrived on from the structure on the other side.

They arrived on a tiered free floating balcony that was positioned across from another free floating balcony and the two were separated by the greenish black sky abyss. Isaac made a note of all of the details of this space and, after confirming that everything was as they thought it would be, he led his team over to the balcony’s edge.