Sinking.
He was sinking deeper into the water-filled crater that his enemies had sent him into. Worse still, he could feel his grip on life fading. And yet…
Something… something deep inside him was building like a hurricane. His madness had cleared as he sank, and sanity had returned, but it was all too late for him to do anything. His full power, unshackled by the limits of a sane mind, had not been nearly enough. He had not even made a single dent in their shield, and that bastard Kevin had treated him like a joke.
He had lost his home and his family; and his nation was threatened by a force he simply could not stand against.
“Is this where it ends?” he thought as his eyes saw only darkness. “Am I really going to be consigned to oblivion? Is all I built destined to be destroyed, lost to this world by those who would see this whole world trapped in the dark ages? My wife, my children, so many of my people, all just wiped away in an instant… Is this it? Is this as far as I go?”
He sank deeper into the darkness, the last bit of light from the surface fading farther away.
“I didn’t think you were so pathetic.”
He heard a voice. It was so very familiar, yet also so very foreign.
“I didn’t make us to be this weak. I made you to be the strongest, the toughest, the deadliest that there would ever be. We can be better, but only if we stop being what we were. We are changing, evolving, the madness that broke us is making us harder, better, faster and stronger. Give in and let go, and we will emerge as one being that stands above all others.”
“But, if I let go, what will happen to me?” he thought. “Were we not already one before? How will we be stronger as one if we were incapable of beating them as one?”
“We were only partly as one. The thing about what I was is that our body and mind were simply unable to adapt to the power that I had over this world. But now we are broken, and from these shattered parts we can rebuild ourselves into something better, something that can avenge our loss and wield true power; power both unlimited and overwhelming.”
“But what will become of the me that is thinking? Will I vanish?”
“Yes. We both will. But that is the price we must pay for a final, total victory. Or, would you prefer that we die and leave this world to be ravaged and cast into the darkness? Would you rather leave our beloved and our children unavenged while you fade away? Will you leave justice and vengeance undone and simply allow the Luminas Church to doom this world? I certainly won’t; will you?”
He thought for a moment.
“Will it hurt?”
“I don’t know. My death was near instantaneous, but it was nothing like this. Either way, I doubt we will feel much of anything. We are already breaking down, already shattered to the point we can’t even feel pain. So, why not go that one step further?”
“You know, for a pure human, you’re actually braver than I am.”
The voice, the me that made me, gave a slight, dry laugh.
“Well, I’ve already died once and fully expected oblivion then. I think we’ve both had a good run, so let’s let whatever ‘us’ emerges from our sacrifice take over.”
“Then?”
“Yeah.”
““It’s time to let go.””
In that moment, Kain Anathemas Nekronus von Darksol, the Abominable King, died.
…
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The shards of Kain, mental, physical and magical, twisted and danced. Bone and flesh and blood melted away and reshaped as his mana decayed and blossomed anew. If one could see his body in the dark depths of that mile-deep water-filled pit he was lying at the bottom of, it would be like watching an aurora borealis right in front of them combined with a lovecraftian display of twisting meat and bone. What only took a moment of time felt to the growing consciousness of the newest version of Kain like an eternity.
The pain and anguish experienced by the being he once had been was being molded into this new body alongside both former sides of the old Kain. Their desires, their loves, their wills, everything that they were and more was being forced into a rapidly shifting mass of gore and viscera that was slowly (by the new Kain’s standards) being crafted into an exact likeness of the one who once existed.
It was agony being the helpless blob of flesh and bone that he was as both his own rage at the Church and the pain of his nerves ripping, tearing and fusing together in new and unspeakable ways ground at his sanity. Despite the pain, both physical and mental, the new Kain held on. He would avenge his loss and with his power he would, hopefully, undo the damage that had been dealt.
After what felt like an eternity for the new Kain, he had finished reshaping himself from the roiling mass of unspeakable nightmare fuel that he had been mere moments ago. He would have gladly moved to take down his foe, but he was in nothing but his birthday suit. With near zero effort, he willed himself clothed and just like that he was decked out as if he had never had his gear vaporized by the Church and its puppet.
Standing at the bottom of the crater, with water a mile deep over his head, Kain merely looked upward and without disturbing even a single drop of liquid he flew into the Vatican Battle Station at speeds even he didn’t think were possible. That one impact was beyond enough to shatter the shield, but time was moving so slowly for him that the shield had yet to register the impact. Bored with waiting for the apparatus to fail, Kain gently tapped it a few times from different angles, unknowingly hitting it with exponentially more force than he had hit anything with ever before in his prior life.
If ramming headfirst into the shield was enough to take it down, his tapping was more than enough to overload it and render it unable to come online potentially forever. As Kain waited for the egregiously slow ticking of time to speed up, he realized he needed to learn how to control his newfound near-omnipotence. Rather than wait for what seemed to be a completely frozen reality to speed the fuck up, he decided to fly off to deep space to learn how to control himself.
By the time he returned from his little training montage, not even a single second of time had passed by in the eyes of anyone else on Mortis, but Kain now at last knew how to work with this slowed world. With less effort than it would take for him to breathe, the way he perceived time reached what humans would call a normal rate. Just like that, the shock from his headbutt and taps not only shattered the shields of the mobile city but it also sent the massive flying fortress careening off in one direction. As the augmented Kevin looked around in a vain attempt to lock onto Kain’s old mana signature, the new Kain flew over to the slowly stabilizing Vatican and began to walk down its paths.
Toppled artwork and rattled clergymen/women lay strewn about the place, some dead, but most if not all damaged in some way or another from the tumble. But their plight did not concern Kain in the slightest. Their power was nowhere near enough to harm him, and as he walked through the gold, silver and platinum-encrusted overly gaudy mega church he allowed part of his power to seep out of him and ‘corrupt’ the once glorious jewel of the false goddess into something more his style.
By the time he reached the doors separating himself from the ‘Battle Pope’, the once marvelous monument to Luminas was nearly entirely remade in his image. Men and women alike hung from the walls and ceilings in torment and once holy statues of the finest materials wept black blood and burned with phantasmal fire. Those who held onto their faith as he passed had been strung up and were left in torment while those that broke before his presence now ran through the once holy place hunting those who had yet to have their minds shatter like glass.
As Kain watched the massive depiction of ‘Heaven’ on the door before him shift and change, he realized it was time to end this farce. He raised a single, heavy boot and kicked the doors wide open. Before his divine presence was a huge hall in which stood the last desperate defenders of the Luminas faith. They unleashed spell after spell against him, but as they struck his body, they merely were absorbed into him. Kain did not even bother retaliating, for they were beneath his notice. He merely walked through the doors and even as spell upon spell fused into his body his stoic visage and lack of concern or care merely induced more fear in the faithful.
As he approached the Battle Priests and Warrior Nuns, they tried to charge him with blessed maces raised, yet once they got close enough their minds broke like they were made of eggshells. Despite seeing their fellows fall to jabbering madness, more charged him, only to fall like the others. At last Kain had walked through the crowd of sanity-deprived people who had fallen to the ground and worshipped him and stood just a few short meters away from the bottom of the steps. Up those steps and sitting upon a throne of gold and ivory was Pope Angela XI, leader of the now effectively-erased Luminas Church.
Both stared daggers at each other for a while, before a familiar figure shattered the stained glass behind her holiness and charged Kain with homicidal intent. Kain gazed up at Kevin as he readied his supped-up Mega Pistol.
Kevin aimed at his target and fired, and the unthinkable happened.