“From his throne on Luna, the emperor watched as his empire burned, neither side willing to lay down arms.

As of yet, neither side had directly challenged the throne, but the archives spoke clearly about what happened to those who followed false gods. Enslavement.

The council and the emperor finally took it upon themselves to send out a decree stating that any follower of the false gods was unwanted and excommunicated from the empire's territories.

Anyone who chose to leave the galaxy claimed by the empire would be allowed to leave. Those who chose to stay would renounce their false gods or fall under the might of the emperor's fist.

Some of the less kind souls would point out that the emperor's decision did not come until the three Titans sent to the Andromeda galaxy suddenly returned.

Those who were even less kind would point out that the Tribune of the second Titan, upon establishing contact with the ambassador of the false goods to the imperial throne promptly proceeded to slay the entire delegation and their guards, proclaiming them traitors to mankind.

In the day following the incident, any worshiper of the new deities in the Sol system was put to the sword by the three legions that had returned.

By the time Emperor Corvus then came with his proclamation together with the heads of the loyal great houses the three Titans were already hunting the traitorous scum and weakening the false gods hold over humanity.

Emperor Corvus would be the last of his line to sit on the throne of Luna, none of the legions would swear fidelity to him personally, but rather swore an oath to the throne he occupied.

This became the tradition of the last imperial legions, at least until a worthy ruler one day sat on the throne of Luna.”

- Elistar Iscariot, Grand Magister during the second Kingfisher dynasty.

The cacophony of battle grew in intensity with each group of the former prisoners I passed, reaching a crescendo that threatened to shatter my eardrums. We were fighting inside the palace entrance. Damn it, where had they gotten the troops to push us back?

Giving Pip a short wave, I sped up, unlimbering my tentacles as I was moving at a full-out sprint.

Sabina and the cave bear were doing what they could to hold the intruders back, but there were eighth Awakened remdra wielding swords, axes and spears, trying to separate them from their support, which was paying a heavy price to keep the duo alive.

I saw a mantis person launching itself at an Awakened remdra that had managed to get on top of the cave bear, pushing them both into the crowd just outside the entrance. The mantis was torn apart the moment it landed at their feet.

The cave bear hardly noticed its savior as it was mauling a remdra on the ground, trying to get through its barrier.

Sabina was moving like the wind, just avoiding the worst of the attacks before countering with blazing swipes of her ax, but there were simply too many. I could see them boxing her in. Apparently, so had the former prisoners because they were getting ready to sally out and rescue her.

I was almost starting to feel bad about using them like this, but in the end, they had a chance at freedom, and more importantly, they were not my people. That didn't mean I wouldn't stop them from committing suicide in the next few seconds.

With my own chuckling battle cry, I activated Celerity, True Sight and Jump, turning myself into a tentacled wrecking ball as I tore through the five Awakened, chipping at Sabina's barrier.

Two of them died outright from the sharp, hard tips of my tentacles tearing through their bodies, crushing and cutting their way through the dense, Awakened bodies. The remaining three still had a barrier, so I used my momentum to send us into a spin and hurl them straight out of the palace entrance and into their own lines, sending remdras tumbling as they plowed through their own fighter.

Power filled my body as I took in the remaining two Awakened remdra. One is still being mauled, and the other one is currently trying to carve out a flank steak from the cave bear mauling its comrade.

I'll need that cave bear later, so I took issue with the latter's actions. The first was free to be mauled to its heart's content.

Wrapping my tentacles around its wrists and ankles, I brought my new training dummy within reach and started wailing at it with an oversized sword as it desperately tried wiggling its way free.

It tried using some sort of force or wind blade ability to cut me back, but I was smacking its head too much around for it to get its bearings. That may have affected its focus a tiny bit.

While the remdra and I may only be ranked one Awakened but in pure spiritual power, It felt like I was fighting a toddler. The few blades that hit my barrier barely registered. It was unfocused and untrained.

It didn't take much longer for its barrier to collapse, and when it did, I turned the remdra upside down and hammered it head-first into the ground repeatedly with my tentacles until it only had shoulders. More power entered my body as its spirit left this existence. Why didn't everyone get extra long appendages like me? It was great.

I ended it just in time, since the one evicted by the brave mantis and the three I had sent back to their friends were getting ready to lead a group of troops against us again.

“Where did all of these hostiles come from? Any word from the battle at the edge of the cavern?”

For a moment, all I could hear was the pained breath of the cave bear; it had really taken a beating.

That it could stand up to Awakened at all was incredible. A pack of half-turned wolf shifters were swarming around it, applying salves and badges, but I knew how fast shifters could regenerate. Unless you filled them with silver or cut their head off, it was pretty much game on a few minutes after having their appendix removed if they had enough food or access to another energy source.

“After you used the legendary ability, almost all the people in the palace came out and drove the lizard people out of the plaza. We drove them back to the floor-to-ceiling pillar over there.

They only had a few hundred left when the lizards came swarming out of the pillar. Some came and drow us back, but most went to join the battle at the edge of the cavern. I think they are human. We were too far away to see, but I'm almost positive I heard some shouts in Imperial coming from them. Sadly, there was no time to find a better vantage point, so I can't be sure.”

With a thought, I sent the voidling that was keeping guard at a very special door to scout out the edge of the cavern where the main battle was taking place. Hopefully, it was Murktown coming to the rescue, so I had a chance to find my way back home again.

The remdra was still getting in place to rush us again, but since I had learned to whip my tentacles with an incredible force, I regularly sent one out to snap toward the enemy, creating a loud crack. It seemed to make them reconsider their mortality, for a bit at least. Besides, I would not allow them to come this far into the palace again.

“What house do you belong to? I thought I knew all legendary ability wielders in the empire, but I can't place you. It has to be a powerful one to afford an ability like that.

More importantly, have you been moon-struck? You can't use a legendary ability without your support group, not at rank one, at the least. You almost died, you…you…you annoying man.”.

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Afford? If she knew it had been given to me as an afterthought by two beings I was starting to suspect were demigods, I'm almost positive she would have an aneurysm, especially since it was just a stupid application of a rank one ritual that most weak abilities could overshadow. I had just used it in a way it never was intended to be used and promptly paid the price for my stupidity. Had I been alone when I did it, I would no longer have been among the living.

Not to say, I hadn't noticed the imprinted ones growing in power by a lot as the enemy was about to find out. The Thunderclap ritual was not one of those. I should probably slot it in when I get more space. It had proven its potential.

“I doubt you would have heard of my house anyway. I'm from the Kingdom of Aeruborg. It doesn't even share a border with the empire any more. I think you are a lot further from home than you think, Sabina. We can discuss it later.

They seem to be ready for another push. Please take our big and hairy friend back to the hall for some rest and food, and make sure no one steps out of the palace if you would. I don't want any distractions for this next trick. It's stupid enough as it is, and I would prefer to stay among the living.”

For a moment, I thought she was going to argue with me, but something I said must have convinced her I wasn't suicidal, probably the part stating I was not.

“Very well, I do owe you some goodwill. Do not be mistaken. We will discuss your recklessness when this is over. If you get yourself killed over some heroic, hare-brained plan, I will personally seek out the leaders of the desolated eastern lands and have your spirit brought back so I can tell you how reckless you were.”

Now, that was a commitment to rubbing it in I had not encountered before. Points to Lady Sabina for that one.

“Believe me, I have no plans of dying today, or anytime soon for that matter. Hopefully, this won't take too long.”

With that, I walked towards the enemy, who had been the start of our short disagreement. I wonder what Pip is doing.

I had come to realize that my rituals, at least the ingrained ones, not only grew with me, but some reacted better with a little infusion of my domain.

This would be an invaluable experiment to see how widespread and how large of an amount of my domain power empowers and possibly changes any rituals it has an affinity for.

Tearing open the rift in my domain like a scab over a never-healing wound, I let it flood me, settling like a blanket on top of my own spirit power. The powers churned and fought until they intertwined in a thread made of pearlescent white and dark, dark enough to eat the light.

The duel strands of power ran through my spirit body, following the laws that had been set down since the beginning of this time, Forming a set of shapes and lines that I knew only made up a part of the multi-dimensional set of rules that I could only see the very edge of. It was not enough to understand them, at the least, but enough to understand that they held meaning.

As my spirit body set up the way the power was meant to move, my physical body became a canvas.

The power churned through the same twists and turners it had been prescribed to do. Carving and deepening the channels I had been slowly etching out over the last few months, and for the first time, I truly let both sides of my power move through me as they were meant to. It filled me with potential far beyond what my meager beginnings had shown me so many months ago when I woke up in a grave. It also brought me intense pain and immense pleasure as it was cutting its way through me.

Nothing lasts forever, and I am quite happy it didn't because the torture of being held in place by my spirit as the powers that demanded its spot in my physical body as it rearranged things and settled in place was something I could live without going through for the next couple of years, if not for always.

I stood there for a moment as the pain and pleasure faded. It stretched out into a small eternity until even the faded sounds of battle again could be heard over the galloping beat of my heart. All of me was focused on forcing the wild gallop into the familiar rhythmic thumps.

No wonder the Magi had been so secretive. They followed a set of rules that were so different from those using engravings and ability crystals. Even The Book, my ability was merely a tool to teach a child to walk.

Rituals such as Celerity and Jump were never really intended for me to use on myself; they were meant to help me understand how to force a temporary boon on someone else. For me, increasing my speed was a matter of sending the correct instructions to my core, or if I wanted to increase how far I could jump, I needed instructions for that. No wonder I had been tearing my body apart using such basic rituals. They were never meant for me to begin with.

It was too much to take in at once, so I just accepted that I was a lifelong fool and decided it was for the best to deal with it fully over the coming years. While my revelation didn't bring me an enormous influx of power, it allowed me to use the power and energy I had much more efficiently.

Feeling for any immediate changes I needed to be aware of, I opened my eyes only to see steam rising from my body and quite possibly the worst smell I had ever encountered enveloping me, almost suffocating me.

At the same time I was making sense of things, I heard a gasp from somewhere behind me. I had to agree. This smell was nothing if not to gasp at. Good thing I had a target-rich environment to share it with.

The four Awakened remdra and their army stood before me as if awaiting my approval to come knocking. Yes, my hubris was not going away with my growing power, that was for sure…and there it was, the smile I had been waiting for.

Chuckling at my own foolish thoughts, I reached for my power and sent them into the darkness.

Unlike most of my rituals, Darkness had been with me for a while now, and it had a rapport with my domain, something I had not seen how to take advantage of until I had seen how my different strands of power reacted with each other and the world around me.

More than a thousand remdra were trapped in the globe of darkness that stretched along the front of the palace entrance.

Some simply stood, occasionally turning their heads; others were attacking their peers, and quite a few simply lay down or were spinning around in a circle on the ground, attacking anything they came into contact with.

They had lost more than their sight. They lost their ability to discern gravity, rational thought, sound and directions. Forward became sideways, up became down and friend…there were no friends in the primordial darkness of the void. With a thought, I sent my voidlings to join in the fun. They had no trouble navigating the globe of darkness.

Would I have dared trying this on a human army, or even a goblin army. No, absolutely not. At best the ritual was stretched to thin to have any effect, at worst the backlash from the ritual failing would have rendered me unconscious something that was happening already far to often to my liking. At best I could hope to affect ten to fifteen humans or maybe forty goblins.

That aside, It worked and it didn't take long until I was receiving a constant string of tiny moths of power from those slain by my voidlings or the ones who simply stopped living, their hearts giving out, or they simply stopped breathing. It was a strange malady I put on my foes, but sadly, it was not as efficient against Awakened, if at all.

While patting myself on the back, I was hit with a blue-white beam coming from the hands of a remdra and a much more powerful stream of fire from another one. The two other remaining remdra were already running towards me even as I was thrown back towards the palace.

Admittedly, it had hurt my ego more than my barrier or my nano thread cloths, but that didn't stop a gasp of pain from leaving my lips as I thudded into the palace wall.

Smoke rose from my body as I gently loosened myself from the shallow Alucard-shaped crater on the wall. Why didn't I have any weapon systems yet? A few nicely placed tungsten flechettes in the foreheads of my enemy would have stopped all this foolishness.

Dodging another wave of fire that scorched the outside of the palace, I sprinted towards two of the remdra Awakened that had drawn swords as they came towards me. The two remaining stayed further back, sending me presents in the form of beams of super-heated gas and particles and waves of rolling fire. However, at the speed at which my mind and my body were moving now, It may as well have been throwing buckets of water. Damn, I could do with some water.

Summoning one of my few remaining remdra blades, I deflected the downward stroke of the rightmost one and kicked the lefty in the kneecap, sending it howling to the ground as I moved past them.

Another three volleys of scorching fire and a plasma later, and I was removing the fire thrower head with my tentacles as I worked on the beam shooter's barrier with my sword. Forcing it back into the dark glove where its brethren were dying by the hundreds.

Even the death of these Awakened didn't grant me much power anymore, not like in the beginning, where even goblin spirits gave me a marked increase in power.

We may all be at rank one here, but I was a heavyweight fighting a group of featherweights. Dangerous if I got caught by all of them, but spread out as we were. It was more of an execution than a fight.

The barrier of the remdra I was hammering at finally fell as I crushed its head with the dull edge of my blade. Another moth of power joined my hoard.

Instinct made me flinch to the right, awaiting a stab. Not bothering to turn, I jumped forward into the dark glove and twirled as I hurled the metal bar that had once been a sword at the remdra behind me. Summoning a spear as I landed, swung out behind me and had the satisfaction of sending the remdra into the ground.

Spotting its companion gently limping towards us, I gave myself eight seconds to end this fight as I two brought the tip of the spear with a two-handed blow towards the one that was scrambling to get up from the ground.

It managed to dodge, but it was left out of balance, still crouching when the shaft of my spear slammed into the side of its head, sending it down into the ground again.

Momentum, if you stop at the blazing speed we fought at, you would die. It was as simple as that as the tip of my spear pierced the face of the befuddled remdra on the ground, sending another speck of power flowing into me.

The final one had worked past its limp and was almost upon me.

With a flick of my wrist, I sent the spear hurling into a crowd of remdra who was still standing inside the dark globe. One died outright but managed to force three of them together, which resulted in claws raking at flesh and teeth tearing at anything they could catch.

Summoning one of my last remdra axes, I started walking back towards my last Awakened opponent on this field of battle. Letting its blade whistle through the air, moving in an ever-changing pattern of aggressive stance as we got closer.

Effortlessly changing the path of the oversized weapon as I dodged the remdras slash to the left and came up with an ax in full motion, crashing against the Awakened barrier. Twirling it around itself, the ax head bit into the remdras wrist, sending its sword flying.

Not waiting any time, I bound it from each side with my tentacles and grabbed a hold of its head. I wanted the piece of shit to suffer.

Its barrier buckled as I pulled and pulled until it gave out. The eyes of the remdra darted around its double-lidded eyes in panic as my grip only increased in strength. Then I was holding a head while its body was squirting blood, still enveloped in my tentacles.

I still do not know why, but I felt it was an appropriate response to the pieces of shit attacking me. Too bad I couldn't get a hold of an untekhi Awakened. It would have been so much sweeter.

Since I was facing the palace entrance, I immediately noticed the occupants flowing out of the palace.

I spotted the cave bear, covered in linen that was colored in the red of healthy blood. I saw Sabina leading a contingent of kobolds, and even Pip was coming out accompanied by thirty or forty of its species.

Onward, they came until they were merely a few dozen steps away from me. With a casual fling, I sent the head and the body in two different directions, and I gave them all a wide smile.

Behind me, the globe of darkness ended as abruptly as it had come. Remdra lay sprawled along the ground; a few were frozen while standing. Most kept looking confused around themselves, but several hundred had already fallen.

The occasional glimpse of my voidlings could be seen as they came out of a shadow only to rip out the closest throat or to pierce an eye.

I felt the crowd of my allies coming up to me and then past me as their voices rose in a dozen different languages, all demanding blood.

It was a good day. A day good to slaughter the enemy.