Mercury Nova Book Four

By Odette C. Bell

Mercury is about to find out everything is a lie. Everything he once believed and, critically, held dear.
B'Anna will have to fight with her newfound powers, but she’ll be battling an old war. When she discovers those responsible for destroying her home world, she won’t back down.
But the end of this tale will demand more than action. Mercury and B'Anna will be forced on a journey into the heart of the gods. Only together can they survive and drag the rest of the multiverse with them.
From the Guardian station to an Underside base and across the multiverse, war will rage. But all battles eventually come to an end....
...
Mercury Nova follows a down-on-her-luck guardian and a cold-hearted god fighting to understand the past. If you love your space operas with action, heart, and a splash of romance, grab Mercury Nova Book Four today and soar free with an Odette C. Bell series.
Mercury Nova is the 3rd Supreme Outer Guardian series. A massive, exciting, and heroic sci-fi world where the day is always saved and hearts are always won, each series can be read separately, so plunge in today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Odette C. Bell
• Release date: May 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215039984

Book preview

Chapter 1

Mercury

I was about to lose B’Anna, just when I’d found her.

I was about to lose everything, in fact.

Nothing could save me from this god. For Baal wasn’t an ordinary god. Nothing about any of this was ordinary.

Baal was meant to have died, meant to have disappeared over 500 years ago.

Now he was back. With a sword up against my throat.

I couldn’t see that, couldn’t watch the tip flashing toward my neck. My attention was locked on B’Anna.

She fought a god I didn’t even recognize.

Everything came crashing into place. My worst nightmares were proving to be true. The Underside had the ability to create gods. If B’Anna had spontaneously figured out how to ascend, it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that the Underside could do it too.

Everything… everything was over.

But if it was truly over, tell me this? Tell me how, as Baal snarled, sliced the sword toward my neck, and struck B’Anna’s Peacekeeper, I somehow survived?

I knew the comparative strength of Peacekeepers. I’d been living on a Guardian station for six years. They were indeed incredible energetic beings. But they had limitations. They were, at the end of the day, mortal.

You tell that to B’Anna’s Peacekeeper. Somehow when she had risen up to the level of a god, she’d dragged the Peacekeeper with her, upgrading it into an energetic being the likes of which I’d never been able to imagine. Now it shivered and settled down against my shoulders, moving close as Baal hacked away at me.

It didn’t matter – wouldn’t count. Every blow drove the Peacekeeper closer to me, but it didn’t crack its energetic carapace. Yet.

B’Anna didn’t have anybody to protect her. She still wore her armor, correct, but there was a limit to what it could withstand.

The god she fought sliced both of his swords around. The tips glowed with this innate black force. It looked as if someone had gathered together the base power inside a black hole, all of those contracting forces, all of that pull, then they’d settled it into the tip of his weapons. Even as B’Anna tried to dart back and dodge, I could see as her body was sucked forward.

We wouldn’t have a chance unless we found a miracle. I was fresh out of those. We’d glimpsed the higher realm – I’d even seen the king atop his throne. I’d never reach it, though. It was too late. We’d spent too long in gate space. We weren’t oriented anymore. Even if we somehow managed to shrug off the double scourge of these Underside gods, we wouldn’t be able to reconnect to a gate and escape.

B’Anna, I roared again, but Baal wouldn’t let me get distracted. He thrust his large rippling body right in front of me. Sweat – or something – glistened across his bare shoulders.

He had this mark on his chest, and it burned, blazing just as brightly as his sword. It was a fire that appeared to know itself, and in knowing itself it knew precisely what it needed to keep growing. Its power level amped up with every second.

There was a limit to the amount of energy one could access in gate space. It was a pocket that you couldn’t get to without gates. And gates, though they traveled through it, did so so briefly that they couldn’t really deposit any energy into the system. This was a long-winded way of saying that the amount of force that originally had existed in this gate space was about what you got today. You couldn’t keep extracting it from somewhere, couldn’t keep feeding it to your weapon like Baal was doing now.

I couldn’t deny my eyes or my senses. And I imagined the Peacekeeper couldn’t, either. Because even though it had been upgraded to a level never-before-seen, there was a limit to what it could withstand. Unlike Baal and his sword, it couldn’t extract more power from the environment. It could give, but it could not take. And as Baal roared, spittle flying from the fangs of his mouth, he sliced his sword down and struck it across my shoulders. It was a flat blow that managed to achieve maximum contact between the blade and my Peacekeeper. I didn’t have the time to appreciate I’d referred to it as my Peacekeeper. As the sword landed down, I could feel it crack. It stretched first as if invisible hands stretched it thinner so the blow could do more damage.

Baal roared again. The flaming force that covered him shot up to his eyes, encircling the irises.

His lips ticked up once. As they snarled over his clenched teeth, he roared, This is the end of the line, Mercury. All of the old gods will be swept away. Only those who understand where we have always been headed will be able to survive what comes next.

I waited for him to continue his diatribe. If you allowed an Underside god to get going, they’d never stop. They wanted you to know how wise they were, how unique their philosophy had become, and precisely why they were worthy but you were not.

Baal apparently didn’t have the time. As the sword sliced toward my back again, I realized the Peacekeeper didn’t have the time either. Another blow, and all of the power it would have achieved by leveling up would be unwound.

I roared and threw a hand out. It was both to stop the blow but to move Baal to the side so I could glimpse B’Anna again. I could hear her, but each one of her grunts and successive screams was getting further and further away. Maybe somebody was lengthening the space between us, and maybe that was a very poor way to try to understand gate space. Distance became irrelevant because it was programmable and malleable.

Whatever intelligence ran this place got to decide where two distinct points were in relation to one another with every new second.

If you have always lived your life in the same material space with the same physical rules, that sentence would have probably blown your mind. The point was, even though technically I had been able to see B’Anna and I could just hear her echoing voice, it wouldn’t last. The longer we were separated – the longer it took until I touched her again – the less likely it would be that I’d ever find her.

B’Anna, I roared as I threw my hand out. I didn’t understand how to wield Sparky. Heck, I didn’t even understand why I still referred to him as Sparky. That was B’Anna’s name for an ultimately complex being that, if it did possess intelligence, had it on a level so far separated from my own, I shouldn’t be able to comprehend it.

Regardless, it wasn’t a power I was used to wielding and was so different from my usual god force, I felt like I would need an eon to perfect it, let alone learn how to wield it properly even once. I’d managed to throw a blast of energy out toward B’Anna, managed to save her from that new god’s attack, but all I’d done was gain the element of surprise. Surprise was now lost. As I forced my hand forward, I realized it was the same hand I’d damaged back in the sacred library.

You would think now I had absorbed Sparky – or he had decided to reside within me – that he would’ve fixed my hand. I… had no idea what exactly was going on. It continued to flicker in and out of existence, though at least now it was predictable. There was precisely a second when it existed, then another second when it did not exist, and the pattern was repeated without pause.

Maybe there was a limit to what Sparky could do. Maybe he’d only ever been a stopgap measure. He’d brought me some time – and I’d wasted it. Or maybe whatever was going on with my hand could be used. When I failed to produce an attack large enough to force Baal back, I threw my left hand forward. It was just as it disappeared. The sword sliced through it without injuring it – for there was nothing to attack. But a split second later, it reappeared. It was on the other side of the blade. I ensured I twisted my wrist to the side so it wasn’t split through.

As my fingers reappeared, I twisted.

I focused on channeling both Sparky and the Peacekeeper into my hand to protect it from the fire. I couldn’t do it forever, and neither did I have to. I only needed to protect myself for one second – then my hand disappeared before it could be injured.

I’d once heard some ridiculous saying from Frost’s old world. If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I had no idea what lemonade was, but the principle was clear. All things can be adapted to, and all problems can be capitalized on.

I capitalized on this, all right, as I let a throaty roar rip up from the center of my stomach, blast into my lips, and echo out. I hoped B’Anna heard it, hoped she realized it meant I was coming.

For too long in this messy tale, I’d been kicked down. For too long, I’d been forced to watch without acting.

I would not put up with that for a single second longer.

My hand reappeared. By that time, I’d forced my wrist down to the hilt of the sword.

I watched Baal’s eyes round, the milky dark depths of his pupils spasming as he realized something strange was happening. But it was too late. I thrust my nonexistent hand on the hilt, and when it appeared once more, I grabbed and twisted. Only having to focus my energy every other second meant that when my hand disappeared, I could recalibrate, then force it back, always gathering more information about the fire that fed the blade.

Only one possibility made sense. Baal must have figured out how to open a continuous gate in gate space. There was only one way to do that – only one real new advantage the Underside had. Fate warnings.

I couldn’t feel one, but did that matter? If the Underside had hold of this technology, if they’d essentially made their own, they could’ve also removed the part that allowed gods to feel the warnings. Or perhaps the gate warning was so very small, I couldn’t sense it yet.

I’d find out the full details later. For now, I channeled myself in a way I never had. I felt like I gathered up the essence of my being, grabbed it in my hands, wrangled it until I was holding the equivalent of a thousand oceans, then forced it forward into the tips of my fingers. I had a single second to rip the sword back, but that was all I needed. I yanked. It spiraled out of Baal’s hand, and the second it did, I heard something crack. It was like a strand of energy, no, a strand of spun glass. There was this definite shattering sound. And it was more than a sound – it affected Baal directly. The light that had expanded over the blazing tattoo on his chest dimmed. It reminded me of a large body moving in front of a once-bright star.

It’s just that this large body intended to stay, and it was time for the star to dim forever.

I had to lurch back, putting some much-needed distance between me and Baal. I had to time the move with my disappearing hand. But I managed to catch the hilt of the sword. As it fell into my grip, the metal thunking down against my palm, I swore I could hear a song, and it was endlessly dark. It was like giving the multiversal space of voice. Not the space around the stations, but the deepest stuff that no Guardian had ever traveled to – that few gods dared speak about.

The only equivalent an ordinary person could think of was the furthest reaches of their subconscious mind. If you gave that great shadowy force a voice, it would sound exactly like this. Unnerving, grating, hissing sounds filled my mind until I wrapped my fingers harder around the hilt. I had to bring my other hand up to do that, lest I dropped the sword every other second.

I also had to learn to channel Sparky better.

When you don’t have time to figure something out, just throw yourself headlong into the task. Or chest-long, rather, when it came to me.

I forced my torso forward, opening out from the shoulders. I tried to connect to Sparky as best as I could.

B’Anna had promised it was possible to communicate with him. He didn’t have a voice that I was aware of, so I spoke in the language of mere presence and fundamental need.

Sparky’s power surged when I needed him most, and he helped me hold onto the hilt of that sword, twist it around, and finally use it. I sliced out. Energy spiraled along the tip of the sword, rushed over the rest of the blade, pulled fire from some unseen source, and thrust it forward.

Baal didn’t have time to dodge. As you already knew, the dynamics of this space weren’t reliable anyway. You could try to flip to the side, but there was nothing for your feet to push against, no wind for your body to spiral through.

My blow struck Baal right on that flaming chest tattoo. It cracked one of the lines closer to his clavicle. Strands of magic-like force started to unwind. I thought I’d seen Baal’s eyes wide previously. Now I was certain that the skin all around them cracked. They looked like eggs emerging from some sack. He roared.

I twisted the sword around. I didn’t like its weight – not just how it felt in my hand, but the sense of moral brokenness that came with it. I didn’t know exactly what this sword had killed, but it had certainly killed before.

Ignoring that and the dark sense it brought with it, I kept it in both hands, twisted it, forced the tip forward, roared, and slashed the tattoo.

The Fate Warning gate must be located in the middle of it. Because now I had cracked it, I could feel the warning. It was almost impossible for me to go against the urge it triggered in me. You were trained as a god – over and over again – to recognize and follow Fate Warnings. You were told it was the only way for the multiverse to hold on to its fragile peace. And if you couldn’t accept that as a fact – and you ignored a warning anyway – you were punished. All of that knowledge was embedded in my body. And even though my same body had been through the proverbial ringer, my hands still bled with that message, and my mind still shook with it.

I somehow found the strength to ignore it anyway. I stabbed the sword forward. Baal crossed his arms and tried to form some kind of barrier – but it wasn’t quick enough. The more his tattoo unraveled, the more I could see there was a live gate right there in the middle of his chest. If I’d had the time, maybe I would’ve appreciated it looked a little like my own torso. Or at least what it had looked like before I had absorbed Sparky.

But while the hole in my chest had been just that – a fatal injury – lodged in Baal’s chest was a powerful permanent gate that shouldn’t be able to exist in this space.

There was no point for a