The Subgovernor’s descaled flesh warped and flexed, and I sensed the shuddering waves of changes overwhelming him as whatever alchemical drug he had taken began to destabilize his exalted form when he pushed his new abilities past the brink. Black ram’s horns pushed out of his head and a third eye jutted its way to the surface of his forehead. His fangs lengthened and more pushed their way out of his jaw like a shark’s rows of teeth.

I charged, my intention to move and my actual steps occurring so closely together that they might as well have been one and the same, my acceleration beyond anything I had ever achieved before. My psychic augmentation was made irrelevant by the partial ascension gripping my body, I honestly couldn’t tell if the mental sorcery was active or not. It did not matter, Marias Maxion was going to die either way.

When my golden blade touched his wretched hide, there was a flash as brilliant as if night had turned to day, and the palace ruptured in the blast wave. The others were scattered, but Maxion and I were held in place by unnatural forces conjured by my will. He spat black blood, and a third of his chest was missing like it had been scooped out, the slick walls of the wound impossibly smooth.

His dragon’s head turned to me, and he grinned a demon’s grin and then his wound filled with knotted, gnarled muscle, veined and lumpy fat, and stretched scar tissue, a mockery of an Imperator’s perfected regeneration that had pulled me from the brink of death multiple times, but a corrupted version that could “heal” even divine injuries to an extent.

I stared at him implacably as he grew a diabolic face on his chest over his heart. It spit green acid at me, but the crimson flames that were a part of me now devoured the noxious spray when it hit me.

I brought my golden sword down point first on his waist, the resulting flash shattering whatever stone and metal structures still stood in the ruins of the palace. Maxion was bisected into two halves, and his top portion was crawling away from me. I followed the trail of black blood as he wriggled away, hunting my prey. He moved fast, but still I was taking my time, savoring this extermination.

His trailing intestines fused together and bloated, producing a long serpent’s tail behind him that periodically had offshoots of squid tentacles and centipede legs, he picked up speed and smashed through houses and villas and businesses as he sought to escape me. I jumped through the air, soaring like a meteor through the sky. Grav-accelerated Ravager rounds and Ember rifle shots impacted against my back and chest, but I felt no pain and my flight path was not altered anyway. I was both an unstoppable force and an immovable object.

When I smacked down on the sandy earth of Amatius, closely following my target, whipping waves of golden fire rushed out from the sand where I struck it, the grains fusing into glowing puddles of uncooled glass. Marias mutated yet again, violet crystalline scales appearing in spreading patches all over him while two more clawed arms pushed their way through his sides. He turned back to me, his long snake tail spraying sand as he whipped around in a crescent’s path, either tired or running or feeling emboldened by the horrors that were progressing in his cells and spirit.

With my fiery left fist and my sword that glowed like a splinter of the sun’s core, I beat the Subgovernor mercilessly, every hit I placed with my new blade sending out a brilliant flash of light and vaporizing hunks of his mutated body and every punch I landed releasing an explosion like six Ember rounds landing at once.

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Similarly to how Dio would let attacks sail through him when he was transformed to his windform, I found I could let the flame overtake me so that even his divinely charged dragon’s claws merely flashed through me. The more damage I did to him, the worse his warped physiology became as the substance he had taken sought to deliver the victory he was promised by Akhillos. His wounds filled in with hideous replacements of scarred skin and muscle that was covered in pockmarks like a plague victim and gaping pores that gushed with black blood. He was increasing in height, pushing upwards and upwards so quickly that I heard his bones breaking and muscle tearing as he stretched ever higher, and soon I was sure that in an upright position he was at least thirty feet. If he had had proper humanoid legs instead of his sinuous coils of a serpent’s tail, I would probably be a few feet short of his knees even with my seven feet of height. Welts and blisters were visible to me on his neck and face under his partially transparent violet crystal scales.

If he had gotten a chance to see what he would have become right before he popped that alchemical pill or injected the syringe or however he had done it, I wondered if he would have just accepted death rather than risk ruining his Silver’s perfect body for the brief chance of victory over Theseas Claudion and the rest of us.

Fused, skinless canine faces were squeezing through his gigantic scales and he looked at me with glowing eyes that had no human intellect or reason left in them. Only a beast and nothing more.

I flicked my sword of light in an arc, scarlet fire fanning out that crisped the backs of his four arms as he pulled them up in a crossed position to defend. Both of his heads roared loud enough to have punctured a Copper Imperator’ eardrums, and he reared back like a cobra to strike.

Casually, with instincts sizzling within me driving me to do it, I raised my golden sword with my arm stretched out and pointed it at him.

“Goodbye.” I said simply, with a god’s voice, and a beam of light as thick as my torso tore off his head.

Advancement lightning flickered around me as I made it to Silver, my flesh giving way to the crimson flame as tremendous changes took place within me. The red flames of Heracles turned white and then golden and I became more like a spirit than a man, just as Imperator part of me was being moved to Silver Rank, so was the divine genetic legacy I had received from my grandfather, though it was much weaker than his.

Weaker was a relative statement, the power I felt was not for anything that had ever been human to hold or comprehend, the risk of destroying myself even as I neared ever closer to my goal of Gold was like walking a tightrope. My senses expanded and I saw the universe much like a divinity of Heaven’s Peak would, images of every person and battle occurring on Amatius flickering through my mind and my piercing insight reaching past their bodies to see the truths of their souls. It became too much, and I collapsed back into flesh and blood from the raging power and blacked out.

…

…

I opened my eyes, groaning. Where was I? How long had it been? I thought to ask Alsig but then I realized I already knew somehow, the knowledge coming innately from within.

“Three days, thirteen hours, twenty-three minutes, fourteen seconds.” I whispered to myself. I had a perfect sense of time on this planet as well as my exact location in longitude and latitude. Was that from being a Silver or from the blood of the Regent?

I was lying in a scorched crater surrounded by a crowd of soldiers of all different Paths and allegiances, campsites and makeshift shelters all over the place in a ring around me, though they were kept back by a golden aura I was emitting. I realized it had prevented them or medical staff from moving me for three days and I dismissed it and stood.

The thousands of warriors surrounding me cheered, regardless of if they were House Fulvion’s, part of the Solar Guard that had cast me into shame, or even Amatians. I raised my right arm like I was back in the Red Sands arena on Sunburst Station and the army went berserk and swarmed me, lifting me on top of them like an Artisan singer crowd surfing at a concert. There was a hungry kind of devotion in their eyes that I saw when I looked to see.