Hoshi no Amaterasu

[Amaterasu]

“Again! Lean, grab, step left, disarm, subdue… yes! Tomaru... and back to the base position.”

Fiara wiped the sweat from her forehead as she stood up and took a simple stance where she was standing, while Amaterasu adjusted her gi and stood back up. Both were dressed in the simple robes, a combination of white trousers and shirt-like tops held together with a colored belt, as was custom when practicing martial arts. The young kami was practicing under Amaterasu’s instructions - and with her as the “attacker” who she was to defend against.

The instant that she was back on her feet she stabbed the knife prop towards Fiara’s face, who reflexively repeated the sequence. Lean to the side, grab the wrist, step out of the way, disarm the attacker, get them on the ground, all in one fluid sequence. In three seconds flat, they were on the ground with Fiara holding her in a submission grip. Once more, they stood up and Fiara readied herself. This time however Amaterasu switched things up: she feinted an attack, dropped the knife into her other hand and landed a painful hit against the girl’s ribs. Of course, the knife prop was little more than a piece of wood shaped to vaguely resemble a knife with no cutting edge or stabbing tip whatsoever, but it still hurt.

“You’re getting better, but you’re preparing to defend against an attack that you assume I’ll do”, Amaterasu explained. “Don’t let repetitiveness become a habit… are you okay?”

“Yeah”, Fiara said. “Might leave… ow, a bruise, but I’m fine.”

“Let’s leave it there for today then. We’ve been at it for almost two hours anyway, long enough. You can do the cooldowns on your own, right?”

“Of course. But what about you, Mother Amaterasu?”

“I wanted to meditate to finish the foundations I’ve begun yesteray, that’ll be enough cooling down.”


It had been almost three weeks now, since the Omnilium Storm and the resulting establishing of Kyuden, the palace. Three weeks which, for the four of them, had been very busy. Urist was out every night using maps and complicated measuring tools to determine their exact location and map possible locations for quarries, farms and wells, coming back in the mornings to sleep during the day. Oki had taken to scouting the area after they had unanimously come to the conclusion that the Omnilium Storm might have been seen, and attracted the attention of potentially unsavory individuals. Fiara had gotten Amaterasu to construct a larger version of the Mobile Dataverse Device she’d acquired from that troll a while back, that remained in one place, to browse the Dataverse with and keep herself updated. In her spare time she’d taken up combat training: the feeling that she could have done better in Dante’s Abyss, that she could have survived, was like a thorn in her side. And so she trained, like right now.

And Amaterasu? She was using her new Prime powers to their fullest. She didn’t feel worried about accidentally overstockpiling Omnilium again, especially not so soon after having let everything out, but Hoshi was in its infancy, and like an infant it was small and vulnerable. It needed to be built up, to be strengthened and defended. Over the last three weeks she had continuously summoned for hours a day, as long as she could before her concentration broke. Then she took a little break to recover, drink some water and eat something light, and did it again, from sunrise to sunset.

Her efforts soon bore fruit. Careful planning and mapping of the area with Urist’s help ended with Kyuden at the center of a small town. She smoothened the roads so man, beast and cart alike could navigate them with ease and designated districts for commerce, residence, religion and one for traveling merchants that she named the “Port district”, for lack of a better word. She filled the districts, starting with homes for the residential district, then numerous other buildings: for the commercial district, an inn, a few shops, small warehouses and the like. For the religious district, a large temple taking inspiration from both shintoist and dwarven places of worship with plenty of room left to make it an interfaith establishment where other religious groups could practice as they liked, and a Hall of the Dead for the eventual deceased to be laid to rest. For the Port district, several warehouses of varying size and larger roads for carriages to traverse, plus an inn with high-capacity stables. She made sure that one end of that road would border Kyuden so that she could later implement a large Origin Mirror for merchants to teleport directly to Hoshi.

In the design plans she ensured to leave a few squares and plazas, some near the large roads, some more quiet and snug between the buildings. A few of them she decorated with stone statues as she had seen in Dwarfholm. More importantly for the city that she aimed to have one day, a city with a bustling trade economy, she left one particularly big road to form a straight line from where the city gates would be to the palace, to create a trade road where merchants could place carts and tents to sell their wares in without needing a fixed shop. Once more using Urist’s expertise she also drafted a sewer system to go under Hoshi and evacuate all the city’s wastes, which it would inevitably produce, into massive pits underground where the accumulated sewage could have its Omnilium extracted, or be retrieved as compost for farming.

Even with a preconstructed town this big it occupied a laughably small surface of the plateau. In every direction several kilometers of flat, snow-covered area remained, more than enough to eventually expand for things such as a leisure district, a Colosseum she was planning on using to see if the trolls would have their lust for battle satisfied that way, parks, crops (though these would require replacing a lot of the hard rock with soil and building greenhouses or other means to ensure that the climate was not an issue) and generally space for museums, guildhalls and of course embassies and military barracks. Come to think of it she would also need to organize things such as a firefighting force, guards and a court for law enforcement - and laws! -, someone to take and dispose of garbage that couldn’t be washed away with the sewage… ahh, this was complex. But Amaterasu took these things not as problems but as opportunities to learn and improve. She was going to be responsible for nothing less than a town, maybe even a city some day, after all.

Back to the present, Amaterasu descended into one of the sewers that she had left the other day and took a meditating pose, to resume where she had left off. To extract Omnilium was an easy process, easy to get carried away in fact, but she needed to be careful. Just like the other day when she had almost collapsed a handful of buildings due to disrupting their stone foundations: foundations that she was now rebuilding with meticulous care. She counted herself lucky that the process of Omnilium summoning allowed her to integrate new rock into the existing environment as if they’d never been apart, which enhanced the solidity of the entire construct. But to rebuild what she had destroyed before took longer and needed more careful concentration than simply brute-force extracting Omnilium, especially if errors could possibly set her back further yet, or injure her if she caused a cave-in that dumped a few dozen tons of rock and collapsing houses on her head. As a result it took much longer and got much less done.

When the new foundations stood her stomach grumbled audibly and her legs felt sore from having sat cross-legged for that long. She climbed to the surface and checked past the artificial sun to see how far into the day the ‘real’ sun was. Mid afternoon already?! No wonder she was hungry. Fortunately Fiara had saved her some of the day’s lunch - steaming hot rice with roasted vegetables. Very nice. In a corner of Kyuden’s kitchen she sat down with a plate and chopsticks, and ate until she was full.

Just as she was cleaning up the remains a low hum in her sleeve alerted her to that the Wover Tear sought to speak with her. Ah, the artefact that Tearen had left behind… she felt a little bad for neglecting it. She freed up some space on the table, removed the artefact from where she hid it, took it out of the silk bag it was in, placed the bag on the table surface and bedded the orb on it. Then she laid both hands on its surface. “Have you called for my attention, Wover-sama?” she asked.

The response came promptly, and did so not in words but in images and memories. They filled Amaterasu’s mind, and all were centered around one individual: a young woman known to Tearen as Jade Harley, and now to Amaterasu as well. A trustworthy Prime that was active here in the Frozen Fields, and would be worth speaking to regarding Heaven and Earth. As almost a side note, a Communicator number plopped into her mind.

Though only a split second passed in the physical world the Kami felt like days had gone by. She shakily withdrew her hands, then shook her head and placed them on the orb again. “You have my deep gratitude, Wover-sama, for this information. I shall make sure that it is not squandered.” This time the orb remained silent. Amaterasu withdrew her hands and, with the same great care for the incredibly valuable orb, returned it into the silk bag and hid it in her sleeve again.

A power that can kill the greatest of evils… the strongest, most dangerous Prime in existence. She shuddered at the thought of what such an unseeming item could do if its existence became known to the wrong people. Right now, excluding Omni and perhaps his entourage, only four people knew of the orb. How trustworthy were they? Could Urist possibly…? No. She shook her head. To question the dwarf’s integrity was inexcusable. He was as trustworthy as Oki and Fiara.

But what about Amber and her friends?

What about the powerful Primes out there? What about the innumerable Secondaries that lived everywhere in the Omniverse? Who among them could be trusted, who couldn’t? Who would sell her out and who was an agent of the enemy?

Was there any way to ensure that someone was well and truly trustworthy?

Could she even guarantee to herself that she wouldn’t break under torture if captured by an enemy, and spill a secret? Or have her mind invaded and memories torn from it?

Perhaps her sleeve was not a safe hiding place for the Wover Tear anymore.

Two hours later a safe was installed. Several meters below the deepest sewer line running under the palace, lined with solid steel walls and a massive door, with a numerical lock as she had seen in Dwarfholm once. It looked elaborate and complicated, but the truth was that it was a fake. The door’s hinges were fixed, the handle and code to open it were dead-end movable pieces with no mechanism behind them, the entire door just looked like one but in reality was part of the wall. The only way to get inside, short of using some sort of destructive force great enough to break through the solid steel walls, was to extract the Omnilium from it. This vault Amaterasu filled with all sorts of valuables that were easily conjured using more Omnilium: coins and ingots of gold and silver, necklaces and amulets, rings and bracelets, golden statues, scrolls of parchment with all sorts of imagery depicted on them, pieces of jade, chests of wood and metal containing more gold, a few Noh masks, a couple of cupboards with elaborately decorated ceremonial swords in them, and most importantly a large rock throne in the back with a rock statue sitting on it. She placed a jade crown on the statue’s head and a locked strongbox in its hands that contained a fake journal whose contents were loosely based on her adventures in Nippon. She spent an entire hour summoning words onto its pages and making it sound like a really valuable piece. A lot of the contents were embellished or straight-out lies, but she left out the really important things. That journal, presented and secured so well, was to be the bait. If someone broke into this vault despite all her protections they would see the journal and steal it believing that they’d made off with the most prized of her possessions.

Now to conceal the Wover Tear in plain sight. She summoned nine tripod stands made of wood that she put onto an empty cupboard’s top, and placed eight orbs into them: white, red, yellow, green, blue, indigo and purple. The ninth one, the one between the red and yellow ones, was enchanted: as soon as the artefact came near it the illusionary enchantment turned its black surface orange - as it did for her fingers, actually. This way it blended right in with the others for anyone that couldn’t see its supernatural power. However, as she took the Wover Tear out of its silk bag and held it in her hand, the Prime turned artefact handed her one parting gift: like a closed box, a recollection of all his memories and knowledge of the Omniverse cleanly packaged so as not to overwhelm her mind then and there was passed into her mind. It drove tears to her eyes.

“I cannot express my gratitude enough, Wover-sama”, she whispered. “I wish there was another way but you are our trump card, the one thing on which everything depends. If I lost you, if you fell into the wrong hands, it would be catastrophic. For that reason I cannot risk carrying you with me any longer… but be assured, I will return.” Then she eased the orb into the tripod and let her fingers linger on its surface for a bit longer before she withdrew them. He had nothing more to say and neither had she. As she withdrew her hands from the enchantment field they returned to their regular colors, but the Wover Tear remained orange.

She climbed out of the vault and summoned steel to stuff the entrance she had left to enter and exit. From this angle the big statue was eye-catching and the aligned nine orbs were barely noticeable. Just as intended. She climbed back to the surface and emerged in a corner of the formal garden in the middle of Kyuden. The entrance was a big hole in the ground, one she filled with a big rock. Placed like this it blended very well with the garden’s overall architecture, so much that none would suspect that there was a secret beneath unless they checked. Of course, that was all just the most basic of protections. It was but a matter of time before someone that knew where the vault was located would break into it. She would need to be very careful.

Sitting under a tree in the garden, she prepared the final deception: into her hand she summoned a new sphere, one looking exactly like the Wover Tear: its black color, its size, its weight, everything corresponded exactly to the orb she had been carrying with her for a while now. She even poured a little extra Omnilium into it to make it radiate some bogus magical aura. That fake artefact went into the silk bag which in turn was placed into its hiding place in her sleeve. Even Fiara, Oki and Urist would be none the wiser. As much as she hated hiding such an important detail from her friends, she saw no other way to protect them.

By the time she was done it was evening already. She raised her head just in time to see Oki approaching. “Amaterasu! What are you still doing out here? We’re waiting for you with dinner, Urist has made a dwarven specialty.” He held a hand out, which Amaterasu happily accepted.

“I’m sorry, I was a bit exhausted from summoning so much today.” She let him drag her to her feet.

“Don’t strain yourself too much. I know this is important for you but to overwork yourself is going to come back to bite you in the long run.”

“I know, I know. So, you were saying that Urist made a specialty for dinner?”

“Oh, yes! Roasted lamb with dwarven beer or something, it smelled delicious when he pulled it out of the...”