Viral strode up the mountainside at a leisurely pace. The slow walking speed had grated on his nerves. That issue had been compounded by losing his lock on Vulcan’s essence signature. Essence signatures could change, though it was rare. He had forced it on lower tiered individuals, but the process was notoriously difficult on anyone with a robust soul.
Did Vulcan know that he was coming? Viral had to admit that the main branch brat being afraid enough to hide was a pleasing thought. His foot came down, converting the few feet around it to viscous glowing liquid. Regardless, Viral was here, and what did he find, a primitive tribe of barely human savages.
Nations like this were not uncommon. A group of people would get fed up with their government for various reasons and rush off into unclaimed land. Most of the time they failed to realize why it was unclaimed. They called their kings greedy and then did not put any forethought into why fertile land would be ownerless.
Still, some of these people survived the inevitable monster waves and carved out their own section of the landmass. Either their civilization would birth a legend, or it would inevitably fall. The lifespan of nations was not determined in years, but by how many consecutive powerhouses they could cultivate.
Viral snorted as he looked up at the wall carved straight into the mountain. It most likely stretched around the entire peak. These people had survived due to engineering. Then they didn’t even man the wall. Not that a guard would have made a difference.
Placing a palm on the wall, Viral pushed some flame essence from his dual kern into it. The stone started glowing in an ever widening ring until the softened stone could no longer support its weight. It took less than a second for the wall to collapse in a gooey mess. Stepping through he found himself in a giant crater.
Looking out across it, Viral could make out a few villages, though only three looked inhabited. Yes, it was a nation on the decline. Maybe a civil war. People who abandoned their home country due to ideological issues tended to split due to a similar issue after a few generations.
Viral nodded, this was a good thing. He could search the two cities on the east and north first, before taking the central city where most of the population should be. His metal and fire sense covered about fifty-five miles in every direction, but that was not enough to get a feeling for the whole mountain top.
It was enough for him to feel a dense source of the essence he was searching for beneath a small hamlet a few miles outside the nearest settlement. Activating his anima he utilized his movement technique, crossing the twenty miles to the hamlet in a few seconds. The savages pointed up at the flaming rent torn through the sky.
“Vulcan! Show yourself!” Viral yelled. He was a grand sovereign and that came with many perks, including robust vocal chords that allowed him to yell at savages from a distance of several miles.
No one answered. The stupid people here just gawked up at where he was standing on air. He wasn’t, he was using a combination of forces to anchor himself relative to the ground a hundred feet below. He felt his temper flare up. If Vulcan wouldn’t dig his way out, Viral would just have to dig his way in.
Flames coated his hand. A spear of molten metal coalesced, so hot the air around it started igniting. Viral was already raising the ambient temperature by around a hundred and twenty degrees, it spiked another fifteen in the few miles surrounding the construct. People started fleeing. If they escaped, Viral would let them. The beast master’s experiments needed food after all.
Annihilation and persistence were packed into the construct, delaying the true release of energy and essence. Viral did not want to kill Vulcan, hurt him yes, he still needed the arrogant emperor. Tier eight, he should be able to survive a tier eight attack, even if this took him by surprise.
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“Ready or not, here I come,” Viral ginned and threw the spear where he sensed Vulcan.
A bar of white hot metal punched through the ground, turning a good portion of the hamlet to lava. The spear struck the pocket of Vulcan’s essence, Viral braced for the angry tier fifteen to drop his his essence cloak and attack him. He closely felt the spear travel and the earth melt with his senses. It broke into a cavity underground, a latrine, judging from what else was in the room. The room was filled with Vulcan’s essence, but Vulcan was absent.
Viral blinked. No Vulcan. Had he spent a few months walking across this forsaken plane just for his quarry to escape? His anger swelled, he needed to kill something. The spear detonated releasing an explosion of flames and molten metal laced with the force of annihilation. If it had been above ground, people might have drawn comparisons to the explosion over Hadrid’s lab. As it was, lava bulged and waves of molten earth collapsed the tunnels weaving through the dirt like an ant hill and destroying what was left of the hamlet.
It did not satisfy him. Vulcan glanced down at the panicking city just a few miles away. Ah, that would help. Taking a step, Viral appeared over the city, before dropping like a meteor into the charred remains of the central home. Some kind of tribal chief once lived here, fitting that his city would soon look the same.
A savage dressed in white robes with red trim ran up and yelled at Viral. He raised an eyebrow, the man spoke Skeric, though with a less refined accent and pronunciation, “What are you doing here, how can you fly?”
Viral decided to play with the poor fool, “I am a god, savage. Do you not recognize me?”
Every backwoods had a legend or myth that revolved around fire, this one did not disappoint. The savage’s face paled, not disappointing Viral. He fell to the ground in supplication, and words of praise left his mouth. At least that is what Viral thought he heard, even his perception struggled to handle interpretation when the subject’s mouth was filled with gravel and ash.
After a few unintelligible words, the now filthy man said, “Great lord Furnace, please forgive us. We were too weak to truly serve your champion. We failed and lost him to your halls.”
So it was a religious civil war. That was atypical unless another cult moved in on the first’s turf. The power of the cult was usually related to the power of their deity. With all these tier zeroes, a person in the first stage of the hero realm would look like a god. Vulcan was probably leading the winning side.
“Which god were you defeated by?” Viral asked.
The man flinched, this Furnace must be an unforgiving deity, “Not a god, a silver demon lord. He has sent silver devils to command his army and has defeated us. Please, defeat your ancient enemy and save us.”
Viral smirked, did these people not even have metal armor? Vulcan had started an industrial revolution and these people thought it was a demonic incursion of some kind. Viral wondered what they would do if they met a real demon. The legalistic bloodthirsty things would likely run mental rings around the savage until he was worshiping them instead.
“Do you think I would leave my people to die at the hands of my enemies?” Viral tried to modulate his voice to sound sympathetic. Unfortunately, it was not a skill he bothered to practice much. He experimented on children in his free time, which has a tendency to stomp any humane feelings out of a person.
“No, my god,” The man’s face broke out into a smile.
“Of course I would, the strong rule, the weak perish,” Viral placed a hand on the man’s shoulder. The savage panicked, but he had no time to do anything before the heat from Viral’s palm started boiling blood and cooking meat to charcoal. Two seconds later a pile of ash and bone fragments rested before Viral.
“Now for the city,” Viral muttered. He had the information he wanted. Vulcan, now known as a demon lord was leading the other two cities, he did not need this one anymore.
His kern started pumping out gallons of molten metal, compressing it into a point, not dissimilar to how those with fire kerns would compress their flame constructs. The orb of white hot metal floated between his palms. When it held nearly a percentage of his kern’s essence, he added combustion.
The building blocks of the world shattered as combustion forced the metal essence to expand against Viral’s influence. All the contradictory influences proved to be too much. The metal sphere detonated, it would have created a mushroom cloud, but Viral did not want to kill the rest of the people with a rain of sharp metal before he knew where Vulcan was. So he contained it. It was an anima technique that could compact detonations into a beam. He liked to use it with a cannon, but this would work just fine.
A pillar of fire, radioactive air, and molten metal bathed the other cities in Viral’s thermonuclear attack.