“By the nine hells, what’s happening now?” growled Garven of the North-Flames, a high-god of fire, and a general of the Shattered-Star Pantheon’s divine army. The deity was in his true-form, a humanoid pillar of orange and blue flame that stood upon, and was surrounded by, burning clouds of orange, blue, and gold.

Their enemies, the Lost Moon Pantheon were firing on something. Garven watched from one of the massive crystal prisms that served as the Shattered-Star Pantheon’s divine battleships. He was the rear-guard general and had been tasked with looking after their army’s logistical workers, supporters, and long-range assault. The spirits, transcendental-mortals, and gods who were too frail, or just simply weren’t suited skills-wise, for fighting in the vanguard.

A few hours ago, the Shattered-Star Pantheon’s army purposely allowed themselves to be drawn into the unfathomable and dangerous, chaotic sea. A space that was so perilously close to the even more anomalous, and unpredictable, grand nebula, that even the mightiest gods, immortals, and devils were wary of the place. They’d then released several hundred salvos of divine wrath. The damned Lost Moon pantheon had apparently had the same idea and fired their end-bringer missiles, and the dragons, the third party in this fiasco had filled the sky with enough primordial fire to cook away countless worlds.

Countless spheres and shards vanished in an instant, and the very void collapsed in face of the tremendous, violent, clashing energies at play. If the situation wasn’t messy enough, the chaotic sea then chose to remind all three armies of why even all the older gods and devils warned against running amok there. Something woke up. One, or perhaps two, of the unknowable horrors that dwelled in the dark spaces that lay between the spheres and shards, appeared from out of nowhere.

That was what Garven was seeing now. The entire face of the conflict had been set on its head, as all three armies were beset by the alien interlopers. The outsiders probably would have just retreated but some trigger-happy idiot had pulled the two eldritch beings into this fight making them the entire battlefield’s problem.

“Gah! What is...What is this? Why does it hurt? Can anyone tell me how we’re feeling from this bloody far away!?” said Garven. Still observing the field of battle. A look of pain and confusion crossed his fiery features as he felt a wave of….something...flow over him from countless light-years away. Slamming into him with such force that he could only react after the numbing terror had come and stripped him of something precious. Peeling away at his divinity like a tidal wave peeling the paint, fixtures, and concrete off a building. Stealing his colors away like he was a chalk drawing abandoned in heavy rain.

“I don’t know, sir...I...I think I’m dying, sir?” said Garven’s attache. Garven turned in confusion as he heard his subordinates' words. Confusion turned to horror as Garven saw that the man’s words were exactly so...A grim, flat, truth. The lesser-god seemed to be fading away, the divine energies that made up his body growing alarmingly faint. Garven’s subordinate was growing translucent as if they were using some kind of parochial invisibility spell. It could have looked like a prank if Garven couldn’t see the lesser-god’s flesh and organs crumbling and falling apart as they were forcibly made invisible.

Garven quickly did his best to remedy the issue, supplying his subordinate with divine energy, to keep them from simply poofing out of existence as they failed to meet the required threshold set by the cosmos. As he worked, Garven’s senses swept the battleground and he was shocked to find that both sides were doing the same thing he was doing. The rear-guard, and support, for the Lost-Moon Pantheon and the Shattered-World’s Dragon Kingdom were all busily trying to triage their weaker members.

Garven realized that the pulsing waves of...whatever it was...that came from the being of swirling nothingness and shining stars, were more dangerous than he’d thought. The entity’s power was able to attack divinity, infernal energy, and the auras of the dragons and the allied immortal-beasts. Even the angels weren’t immune to the entity’s assault, and the angels were generally shielded from most kinds of harm, due to their nature.

A number of the gods, devils, and fae on either side decided to get aggressive and attempt to bring the entity down. That turned out to be a calamitous decision, as all spells, sword waves, and beams of divine or infernal energy smashed harmlessly against a wall of what seemed to be made of pure impossibility. As if the very cosmos had scrunched its brow together and said “error”. The very notion of their being able to injure this entity seemingly having been listed as a statistical impossibility. Just as it would ordinarily be all but impossible for one of their number to be injured by a mere mortal. A realization that made a few of the divine and infernal combatant turn tail and pull away.

Those attacks were returned with a warping of reality that focused the nullifying waves into massive blades of unreality that cleaved and erased all they touched...Where before it was just the weakest fighters getting erased, now even the strongest amongst them had to fear having their everything voided and nullified. Then things somehow got even worse, as something happened with the nebulous black creature that nested near the center of the swirling nothingness.

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“I...I don’t like this. This whole situation smells off. That idiot Mordecai shouldn’t have brought us out here into the chaotic sea...,” grumbled Dilshad of the Drowning Euphoria, one of the generals of the Lost Moon Pantheon. She was a surprisingly somber person, for a goddess of excess, fanatical-happiness, and over-indulgence. She was currently in her human form, standing tall and leggy, with a slightly licentious air to her, that was more about what kind of god she’d become then anything to do with her core-personality. Her true-form wasn’t suitable for battle in the chaotic sea.

“Hm, I know what you mean...There’s...There’s something troublesome coming our way...I can sense my own kind…” said Yuval of the Endless Banquet, a demon-lord allied with the Lost Moon Pantheon. The horned-giantess stood at the edge of the craggy dead world that the Lost-Moon was using as one of their battleships, tugging the edges of her gaudy chef’s uniform closed as if to keep out the cold.

“You mean a devil?” said Dilshad. Wondering if they’d stumbled upon the territory of another of the hells, which would explain the extreme hostility that they were facing.

“No...Hunger! I can sense hunger. I can sense an appetite even larger than my own,” said Yuval point with her tail, a silver tail that looked remarkably like a kitchen fork.

Dilshad thought about what was being said and felt the urge to retreat. Dilshad was originally a younger sister to one of this universe’ weavers. A candidate to potentially serve as a weaver of the multiverse’ fate. Unfortunately, her future sight hadn’t been enough to allow her to become a weaver. Yet, she’d still possessed enough precognitive ability to climb to the ranks of one of the multiverse’s top two pantheons in record time.

“Okay, give the orders that we should prepare to make a retreat…” said Dilshad.

“Eh? Isn’t that a bit soon!...The higher-ups will have complaints,” said Yuval. Looking reluctant.

“That’s why I said that they should “prepare” instead of giving the actual order to retreat...Something tells me that we don't want to stick around here for too long…And the higher-ups’ will have more to complain about if the entire army ends up dead,” said Dilshad.

Yuval looked like she wanted to argue but she’d long ago learned to trust the dark goddess’ hunches. Sure enough, she didn’t regret heeding the orders she’d been given, because in the next couple of hours...a strange race of dark beings suddenly appeared, bursting free from the body of the hungry darkness. Beings armed with cannons that fired suns like bullets, beings that could warp space and create devastating singularities. Beings that wielded immense mechanical armors that could cut down even the mightiest beasts and war-gods.

To make matters worse, these dark beings and the swirling nothingness seemed to come to some kind of arrangement with the dragons and the beasts. That’s when the engagement truly went down the drain for the two pantheons. The gods and devils of the Shattered-Star and the Lost Moon were assailed by the divinity, and infernal mantle, stripping waves.

Their ranks were assaulted by an endless horde of shadowy monsters armed with the kind of technology that would normally result in a civilization wiping itself out by accident, or the heavens resetting the civilization on purpose. Meanwhile, the dragons were flying free wielding their claws, fang, and fire uninhibited. The two pantheons found themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place, and with the dragon’s assaults, only a slim minority were able to escape with their lives.