Fomoria called on his Others and activated his sigil, he didn’t want to give the High Coin a chance to kill him without being able to react again.
“Just us, one on one.”
“Now why would I do that?”
“Don’t you want to see it?”
“I have long since run out of patience for people who decide that I must listen to them prattle on about their personal philosophy. Tell me what you mean in a concise manner.”
“I want to see what you can really do, and what I can really do.
My job so often sees me fighting people who aren’t worth my time. This is the curse of power, the gaps between us grow farther and farther. When was the last time you fought someone with real killing intent and matched them evenly?”
“A few months. Though evenly might be overstating my ability, as it was a two on one fight.
I’m going to kill you anyway, but, I might as well sharpen myself against you.”
The Others stopped casting their spells and moved away.
“I’ll start slow then, don’t want to thrash you too quickly.”
The two sides stared at one another, waiting for the slightest twitch that would denote the start of an attack.
A blizzard began to roll in; the mild winter would end today.
When a snowflake passed in front of Fomoria’s vision, the High Coin rushed forward, his movements silently cutting the air.
Fomoria barely dodged, losing the tip of his middle finger in the process, though it regrew with the black bone of the weapon sigil.
The man stabbed at him, who leaned into the attack, taking the blade through his heart but landing a punch on the man.
Fomoria thought that it felt wrong.
The man’s limbs twisted as he rolled across the ground, and Fomoria rushed forward by shooting fire behind him and removing friction.
But when Fomoria reached the man, he moved like he had no bones, his arm cracking like a whip and cutting off more of his fingers that regrew with black bone.
The man skid across the ground, his hands digging into the ground until he came to a stop.
“A good start. But, I don’t much care for the audience. I’ve hidden bombs across Kor, if your men don’t leave to find them, I will set them off immediately. If they go, they will have 20 minutes to find them.”
“Bullshit, you couldn’t have had time to set them.”
“Moved them into the city with merchants that you assumed were safe. They’ve been sitting for days already.”
The Others were sent away, worst case, he would call them back and use another body to fight.
Fomoria walked slowly towards the man and he modified his body, adding two small vents near his shoulder blades along with a tail and the extra eyes he gained from his study of Adina.
The man kept his blade sheathed, enchantments aided in quick draw attacks.
“My name is Drachma, and I don’t think that I’m going to die today.”
“Many men have had the same thought before they met me.”
“Let’s dance.”
He drew his blade and from 20 feet out, Fomoria barely dodged once again, but he didn’t lose anything this time.
It took an instant to close the distance between them, and Fomoria threw another punch, this time backed by aura, and what the man had assumed was a miss was instead a direct hit as the punch extended past his body.
Drachma rolled with the strike and jumped back.
Fomoria could regenerate limbs in moments, he was fast, physically powerful, and his magic was dangerous at close and far range, mixed with gates that could open without any warning, and so how to fight a man with so many options was half of the battle.
No matter how physically strong a man might be, if they kept getting caught up in his tricks they wouldn’t win in the long game.
Thrash had learned that lesson the hard way, the same could be said of Helik and Sholl.
So instead of trying another counter attack that would lead to Fomoria just powering through and landing a solid blow, he backed away.
He knew that he was faster than Fomoria, and his sixth sense was good enough that he couldn’t easily be taken by surprise, so he just had to drag this out until his time limit was reached.
Fomoria came out of a gate behind Drachma and was split in two, but because he added spin to himself he was split horizontally, and while internal organs were important, they weren’t that important to Fomoria.
He puppetered his lower half to kick the man in the shin, leading into a combo where he then punched the man from above, though he had once more reacted to the punch by rolling his body, and thus his shoulder was bruised instead of torn off.
The man, adverse to unknown dangers, fled again, not pushing the advantage he had because he was worried about if he actually had one in the first place.
This caution was well founded most of the time, but not in this moment.
Fomoria ordered his lower half to jump to his upper, and he was whole again.
He felt it again.
“Are you truly human?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You don’t feel human when I hit you.”
“Now why would you say such a thing? You could hurt an old man’s feelings.”
“I feel metal with your flesh, I’ll just need to peel back your layers.”
As the snow fell it melted on contact with Fomoria’s body.
He and Drachma had been fighting for five minutes, an eternity in a real fight between two people who could perceive time more slowly due to their own speed.
Fomoria’s body shouldn’t have been so hot, but with each attack he lost bits and pieces here and there, since he knew that losing an ear or a hand wouldn’t hurt him much.
Everything he lost was being replaced by black bone, but he hadn’t even realized it.
Each part that was lost did however make him faster, stronger.
After ten minutes, half of his body was made of this black bone substance, and it began to grow further, replacing flesh that was still healthy.
Fomoria laughed as he rushed in again, moving faster and hitting harder every moment.
“HERE WE GO, THIS IS THE FIGHT I WANTED.”
Drachma began to laugh as well.
“I MUST ADMIT, MERCENARY, I NEED TO BLOW OFF SOME STEAM.”
They moved around the battlefield, leaving ruin and laughter in their wake.
As both men struck and feinted and countered and so on and so forth, then Drachma cut both of Fomoria’s arms off, and they were both replaced by the black bone.
“LET’S KEEP GOING, LET’S-”
He felt the shift in the air, and he moved back.
Fomoria’s body was now almost entirely made of that black bone, a tipping point was reached, and in mere moments, would be crossed.
It roared, blowing away the surrounding snow.
It seemed to be having issues breathing, they were slow and heavy.
Drachma wasn’t sure if he should push or not.
He knew as much about Fomoria as someone could, and he knew that he wasn’t an endurance fighter against single targets, but he had already gone above and beyond what he thought Fomoria was.
He thought that the king was about to vomit, but instead black flames shot at him faster than he expected.
Drachma ran into the forest, but it just barreled through the trees without a care.
Hiding behind a tree, he readied himself.
When it burst through, Drachma cut its head from its body.
Yet more than what should’ve been death throes, the body continued to fight with real intelligence.
Its head grew small limbs like a spider and returned to his body.
There was some distance between the two men, the body had landed a good scratch, and Drachma’s blood fell to the snow below.
Drachma saw the look in the nine eyes, Fomoria barely in there, his job was almost done, and he needed to remove his limiters to finish this.
The metal flesh started to reform itself, and his armor became more angular in shape, shifting through means that Fomoria couldn’t understand.
It didn’t see what happened, but suddenly it was being tossed through trees.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Another blow came from the right and they were back out in the open plains.
The next blow was barely stopped by Fomoria opening a gate and redirecting the first back to the man, but it bought him only an instant.
Why he hadn’t used his sword, Fomoria couldn’t understand, instead he punched and kicked until his entire body was black and blue.
The more he was hurt, the more the black bone replaced his flesh.
When there was nothing left of his original body, something inside of him changed.
It caught the next strike and spun its fist around, tearing Drachma’s arm from its socket.
When it tried to thrust its hand through his chest to finish him, the limb phased through.
Dracma had activated his emergency recall, and faded into the wind.
It stood there in the snow, its arms hung limply at its sides, barely a thought ran through its mind.
The Others became worried, they knew something was wrong, but they also felt that they needed to find and remove the bombs before they did anything else, because that is what Fomoria would do.
And once they were done, they went to where the prime had been fighting.
The blizzard had grown so fierce that it was hard to see more than a dozen feet in front of him, but the Others all had a link to their progenitor, and they made their way through the snow without issue.
For well over 20 feet around him, there was no life left, all was being burned away by the intense heat that he was putting off.
“Fomoria? Did you-”
It moved forward in a flash, reducing the head of the Other to nothing.
The Others tried to flee, but if this thing was going to react to only outside stimuli, then they decided it was better to just warn the Others and accept that they would need to be put in new bodies after this thing killed them.
If it got into Kor, well, they’d rather not think about that.
The Others knew that they were working on a time limit, the weapon sigil, if left alone, would burn up his soul.
“So, what do we do?”
“First thing, I think that we should cool down the area. The blizzard is helping to maintain his body temp, but he’ll hit critical mass if we leave him alone.”
“He’ll die before that happens.”
“You must’ve been made before Xol tried pushing the limits of the weapon sigil.
I don’t know what is going on, but if his entire body is made of that stuff…”
They had been talking in Fomoria’s office, and Anon sensed something was wrong, so she came in.
“Where is he?”
“He’s lost his mind and we’re trying to figure out how we can get him to come back out.”
“Maybe if I go there, he’ll be broken out of it by love.”
“You shouldn’t be involved. Maybe if it was Adina, but no, not you.”
These words infuriated her, but she kept her facade perfectly.
“Fine.”
Had they the full empathic abilities and sense of the original, they would’ve realized what she was going to do.
But these Others didn’t understand how Anon was envious and possessive.
It took her some wandering, but she followed her instincts and found him.
Each moment that passed more of the snow melted around him.
“HARLAN.”
It looked at her, its hand twitching.
It took one step forward, fighting back against something inside of itself.
A hand, alabaster white, reached out of the body, trying to hold it back.
“YOU CAN HEAR ME, I KNOW YOU CAN.”
A mouth formed, and spoke in a voice that she didn’t recognize.
“RUN, RUN AWAY.”
“I KNOW THAT YOU-”
She didn’t see him move forward, nor did she see the attack be blocked.
“Listen to the little voice, go away now, girl.”
Anon felt her skin start to blister and her hair burned from the heat emitted by him, so she left, returning to Kor to hopefully use her knowledge to find a solution.
Carmilla didn’t struggle much when holding back Fomoria, not until Mindkiller completely lost control of the body.
It threw a powerful punch, using aura to boost the blow.
The ground shook and shattered, Carmilla’s hands stung as she blocked the second blow.
She saw it starting to gather air for void flames.
Carmilla swept his legs and palm struck him into the ground, dispersing the air in his lungs and leaving a crater on the ground.
The black mist that was his chest was quickly reforming into a body.
“Harlan, if you are inside of there, listen to me. Wake up before you hurt someone, I know that-”
An attack came from her side, the body in front of her was a distraction.
Carmilla dodged the attack, despite her physical power born from both her blood moon vampirism and being a mage for 1600 years, she would rather avoid a fist fight with him.
She hit him with a blast of air, gaining some distance between them.
As it rolled along the ground, she cast her next spell, and the storm intensified.
Back in Kor, the Others argued back and forth about what to do.
Each of them had his independence, and without him to act as a singular leader, a power struggle was inevitable.
“If we just destroy that body, he will be forced back into one of the others in stasis.”
“Oh, yeah, sure, lets fucking kill him, that is sure to go well. How exactly do you expect us to be able to do that?”
Anon dropped into the middle of the meeting, bald, badly burned, being around Fomoria was like being inside an oven, and the force of Carmilla and it clashing sent shockwaves like bombs going off all around her.
“FUCK.”
They suddenly worked together as a perfect team like they should’ve been already.
Anon woke up 15 minutes later, and the Others all let out a sigh of relief.
This relief was then destroyed when a shockwave hit the city, and out the window they could see tornados forming that required some of the Others to handle.
“Is that Carmilla and him?”
“She should be impossibly strong, he can’t be that strong.”
“We’ve never really seen Carmilla fight.”
“It is theoretically possible that her strength is overblown, but-”
Anon cleared her throat.
“Please stop analyzing the fight. We must find a way to save my dear husband.”
“You aren’t even engaged.”
“But I know he loves me.”
“Is that why you came here looking like a roast ham?”
“Yes, I admit, he did attempt to kill me, but before that, he hesitated, so he must be there, and he must love me.”
The Others just shrugged, but it did give them an idea.
“Wait, if you brought Adina, I bet that she could force him back to his normal self. He’d never hurt her.”
“No, I must go back. Bring me firesteel armor with spells soulsmithed into it to hold back the heat.”
“If we let you kill yourself by going out there we won’t be able to live with ourselves.”
“You can’t stop me from-”
The Others bound her by making her shifting armor transform.
People were right to be afraid of them, as Fomoria actually had put a killswitch in every set that he made recently.
“If you want to be helpful, bring Adina here, otherwise, stay out of this.”
It was burning up, its body of void bone began to pop and crackle.
It knew that it would die if it got much hotter, so it tried to think of how to purge it all at once and deal with the bat that bothered him.
It moved impossibly fast, leaving a crater in its wake and sonic booms formed around it on the way to her.
It felt her blood splatter over him, her hear her screams, and then he was struck by a bolt of cold lightning.
It couldn’t understand how she could make illusions that were so realistic, perhaps it was true blood magic it thought.
Carmilla didn’t feel strained by what she was doing.
A few drops of blood and her life magic made what would appear as perfect copies of her body that she was using to lead him where she wanted.
When the Others had warned her, they said to just monitor him, since if they fought then surely nothing good could come from that.
But now that it had come to that, she wanted to get him as far away from people as she could.
She didn’t understand what it was doing, it had curled up on the ground, and her fear was that it had reached whatever critical mass was.
The Others refused to tell her what it meant, but if they were worried about it, then she was as well.
The bone body cracked, and her fear was then that Fomoria was actually going to die.
Until now that hadn’t been something she thought would happen, since he always found a way out of things.
What happened instead was all of the heat was pulled inside.
It began to shake, it knew that it was dying, but it didn’t want to, it just needed to let it out safely.
Its organs were already gone, cooked and then replaced by the black bone.
This body had no clear weakness, as it discarded physical laws to the point where it didn’t need a brain or a heart, it was a body of shifting bones with a soul and mind.
Instead of this mind, he slept.
Micheal, Mindkiller, whatever name he felt like at the time, tried desperately to wake him.
The heat was gone, and the cracks started to seal, but more grew around his neck.
Black flames edged with red burst from around his head, giving him an ethereal mane.
The area suddenly grew much hotter, the cold air mingled with the heat, moving up and down until tornadoes formed one after another.
Back in Kor, Anon had been placed on the couch, and the Others had gone back to arguing.
Fomoria was someone who held certain deeply held beliefs, but other things changed by the day, leading to each Other having some differences in opinion.
Two factions began to form, one who believed that the oldest Other should be the leader, and another that believed that the youngest Other, who was closest to the present progenitor, should be the leader.
Amber kicked the door open and Mercedes followed behind her with a glare that was no less fierce than Amber’s bombastic entrance.
“WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON IN HERE?”
“Fomoria has lost mind because his entire body has been replaced by void bone.”
Anon’s body was bound, but not her mouth.
“One of you, explain what she means.”
“He was fighting against the leader of the enemy forces and then something happened, he lost control of his weapon sigil.”
“What are you doing about it?”
“We are trying to figure out who should be the leader.”
“I’ll do it. Now, what are the options?”
The Others shrugged, it was a fine enough way to decide what to do.
“Either we ask Camilla to destroy that body entirely and hope that he goes back to one of his other bodies and that whatever is wrong with him doesn’t follow, or we convince Anon to bring Adina here.
If Anon was enough to make him hesitate, then surely she could get him to come back to his senses.”
“He gets hot when he uses that magic, can she safely approach him?”
“Maybe? He keeps getting hotter, but if she casts the right spells and wears an armor, I’m sure she can.”
“So, the problem is you risk his life, or hers. How many of you would rather just kill him and hope for the best.”
“Right now we are 80/20 split on the subject.”
“That somehow doesn’t surprise me. Fucking suicidal idiot.”
Amber had what she thought was a really good idea however, and it solved Anon not wanting to feel inadequate compared to Adina and the danger of getting near all of that heat.
----------------------------------------
Drachma was rushed to a healing center.
His body fought against the nanoscopic machines as they rushed through his bloodstream, stemming the flow to the stump where Fomoria, or rather, that thing which was his body, tore his arm off.
He chuckled to himself, he and it weren’t really that different.
Every time either of them got injured, they’d cast aside the flesh they were born with and replace it with something else so they could get an edge in their next fight.
Both, if they understood one another, would consider the other a fool.
What kind of man gives up his own pleasure and power for people who would never really appreciate what he was doing?
What kind of man would use great power for nothing but his pleasure, letting himself be enslaved to money?