Chapter 363 - The Stifled Sword VII

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Dear Diary,

We finally made it into a big city. Ms. Olga said its name is Vel’irrin. All the cities in this country have Vel at the start of their names. Apparently, it’s supposed to mean moon blessed in the local tongue, but no one actually speaks it anymore so she doesn’t really know for sure.

Oh, and apparently Ms. Olga is super important. People ran out to see her as soon as we got in the city, and they took us to this super big building with lots of expensive stuff inside. Ms. Olga said it was one of her three shops. She wants to add more, but she can’t because the queen is a greedy jerk. Lina says that Ms. Olga only says that because she’s a merchant though.

Dinner was really fancy today. Ms. Olga said that it was also really expensive, and that apparently the fish we ate cost as much as my house. I got really scared when she said that, but she said it was okay.

Her house is really comfy too. This is the biggest bed that Lina and I have ever slept in.

Lia.

___

The sky was turning red. Inch by inch, the sun sank beneath the horizon, leaving a chilly breeze that marked the nearing of fall. The clouds were sparse, with so few of them decorating the heavens that the castles were clear to see. Even from beneath the treeline, Sylvia could track them with ease, watching each as it headed north and slowly evacuated the nation.

Their enemies were yet unaware of her presence. She followed from fifty kilometers away, moving at the same pace as the castles that dotted the sky. Her excuse to the others was that she was exercising caution, but it really just stemmed from her lack of decisiveness.

Even confronted with the set, she couldn’t decide on the best course of action. She wanted to wait for Claire, even as Panda went from concerned to panicked to annoyed beyond belief. Despite visibly fuming, he kept his mouth shut, perhaps trusting that she was not simply truly waiting around. Alas, he was mistaken. She only continued to stare, thinking through an endless cycle of what-ifs as she plodded her way north.

She didn’t commit to intervention until the first surge of magic swallowed the ship that everyone was aboard. She was a little too far away to see the light of the explosion. Its crimson shade blended in with the evening sky, but the rest of her body experienced it in full. The shockwave violently shook her body, loosening much of the shed fur hidden within her coat. It was so loud that she had to shut her ears in a bubble just to mute the deafening roar.

The battle was beginning and her allies were sure to lose. There was no longer a choice for her to do anything but step in. Such was reality at work.

A reluctant frown crossed her lips as she propelled herself across the forested terrain. She didn’t say a word to any of the others, nor did she bother to bolster their speed. Krail was right. There was no point in their inclusion. Her buffs would certainly help them, but to extend such a generous hand would be no different from direct intervention. That was why she had lied to begin with. It was a bid to discourage them, albeit one that had only ended in failure.

She cleared a kilometer every two seconds. She didn’t zig around the trees or zag past the wildlife, opting instead to phase through it with her body on a different plane. Just one minute later, and she was in range of their detectors—in range to see the clam that had fallen from the sky.

Sylvia thought very little of him. He was rude, and she didn’t like the way he always tried to hide his intentions, but she decided to lend him a bit of a paw regardless. With no chant or explicit action, she formed a three-layered magic circle and vaporized his opponent with an arcane bolt. She had half expected his armour to survive, given how tough the others had made it seem, but the crystal was as gone as the man it guarded. Everything touched by the spell was instantly turned to dust.

The rest of the Cadrian army reacted almost immediately. Likely giving up on defence altogether, they immediately shifted into a reckless, all-out attack.

Warriors of all shapes and sizes descended from the heavens in the blink of an eye. They poured from the walls like a torrent of arrows, propelled by their legs and wings. They cut through the air and aimed straight for the fox. Her straight-line movement was easy to predict. Many Cadrian fighters landed perfectly on target, only to join the trees and wildlife in phasing through her form.

They hit the ground instead, often butting heads and turning each other to paste. Their slower aides came down shortly after and equipped them with their weapons and armour. They had all the same items that had accompanied them, during the ambush they had launched in town.

But against the fox, it was all irrelevant.

In the first place, they were only able to attack because she released their geises. There were still a few hours left until they left the country, and had they still been in place, her orders would have compelled them to depart if they showed defiance.

Bards were unique among the caster types. Unlike traditional mages, who could speed up the rate at which their words were said, bards had to maintain a steady rhythm that a strike team could easily bypass. Sylvia, however, exposed no such weakness. Physical, magical, or artifact-based, nothing they tried had any effect at all. She could have easily ignored them but she was annoyed enough to deny their continued existence.

The half-elf stood up on her hind legs. She pressed a hand to her chest, sucked in a deep breath, and slowly started to sing. Her voice permeated the air. It filled the ears of the unwilling each time she waved her magical baton.

It started as the same sombre tone she sang when she crafted their fetters, but she gradually lowered her pitch and slowed her beat. The already gloomy notes turned darker and more depressing. The notes alone plagued the audience with a ceaseless trembling, while the melody robbed them of the will to live. But even that was just a brief introduction, a prelude to the encroaching death.

If their opponents could really track their abilities and read their magical signatures, then she needed to ensure that the records were thoroughly destroyed. That was why she summoned the puppet her great-grandfather had crafted and invoked the ability linked to her fourth ascension. The ultimate skill that marked her as an aspect. The reason that she was labelled as the progenitor of nightmares.

The class of its ability was rather unique for its rank. Most summoning spells could only call upon individuals that existed, and only with their explicit permission. That was why they were considered inferior. But Sylvia’s allowed her to beseech the false gods born of her strangest dreams and unleash them upon the realm of the real.

Alfred had only allotted her a single body. She could only summon one of the seventy-seven greater beings pulled from the outer edge of the world. But one was enough to fulfill her needs.

She chose the most suitable among them. Yrild-ikurh, painter of hellscapes and desecrator of dreams, was incarnated in his purest form.

He started as a single black stain upon the wooden mannequin, a faint splash of black dropped atop the center of its chest. But then he burst, tentacles crawling all over the figure with an eye at its center.

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The flesh only continued to expand. Growing like roots, his limbs swallowed the puppet whole before planting themselves within the ground around him. He quickly took on a human-like shape, becoming an embryo floating in an invisible womb with his umbilical cord attached to the world itself.

His eyes alone were already developed. The first ocular globe had vanished when his trunk grew from within it, but three more appeared in its place. One was on the frontal lobe of his head, one was on his shoulders, and the last was on his back, opposite the one he lost. Their bright white sclera stood to contrast his pitch-black flesh, and his piercing purple irises only highlighted his monochrome existence.

Sylvia had no divinity to offer him. Her status screen still showed a line of faith. And yet, the false god’s presence was heavy as the genuine article. The golden energy he radiated was undeniably divine; all those who looked upon his form had no choice but to accept him as one of the lords above for nothing if not the sheer terror he inspired.

His body split open, revealing a giant, toothy mouth which loosed a feral scream. The sound forced the Cadrians to their knees. Even the strongest among them was compelled to submit, to acquiesce to his authority and express their whole-hearted devotion.

Yrild-ikurh was the embodiment of compulsion and restraint. It was through those powers that he bent the world to his will, that he forced everything to look the way that it should through his all-seeing eyes. And that was why he was sided against all chaos incarnate. He was a fan of law and order. His laws. His orders.

Everything, everything that he observed would be remade its rightful way, and the soldiers were no exception. He grabbed them each with the hands that extended from his open jaw and gazed upon their spirits with the pupils buried into his palms. And in doing so, judged them in violation of the natural order.

One by one, he remade their forms. The first he changed was the rabbit afraid of the cold—if the cottontail was to be an affront to his species, then he need not be of the same species at all.

Yrild-ikurh removed his fur, turning him into a creature of molten skin with dozens of extra hands growing out from within his throat. The additional limbs were long, thin, and lined with eyes so he could fix even the smallest device. For the man, it was clearly a dream come true. He had always wished for more hands, more limbs with which he could perfect his artifacts like no other cottontail could.

Next was the man with the heart of a boy, the free spirit who loved to run in the wind and chase the distant sun as much as he loved to serve his country. He was only half mature, and that was why he was given stubby legs and a stubbier spine. It only reached halfway down his body, leaving the rest fully paralyzed so he hadn’t a choice but to drag himself forward on his tiny nubs. His brain was given the same treatment. One half was enlarged, while the other was shrunken, with the shape of his head warping to match.

And then there was the priestess. She truly believed, from the depths of her heart, that she was the voice of a god. And so he made her just that. He transformed her into an extension of his body, making up an extra set of vocal cords that would enunciate his words in the language of the barbarian folk. The process involved tearing her body into a thousand strands. It looked like she was dead, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. For as long as she was within his system, her life would be eternal.

So on and so forth, the transmutations bled throughout the crowd, with every member finding themselves with bodies adapted to reflect their greatest fears and their deepest desires. It was nirvana, true enlightenment the likes of which no mortal had ever achieved unaided. Having been remade in the image that the god impressed upon them, having been awakened to the truth within, they could only offer their prayer in thanks.

It was not just the warriors present that were taken by his spell. He extended his hands to those within the sky, capturing all but the few aboard the capital ship.

Everyone was fixed, bestowed their rightful forms. And yet, their violations had failed to reach their end. Even though he had fixed them, even though he had made them whole and true, they refused to indulge in their purposes. The artificer did not immediately set off to tinkering, the man-child refrained from following his heart, and the priestess did not speak his thoughts. A set of ridiculous circumstances that he reasonably met with rage.

If they refused to make use of his gifts, if they refused to be who they truly were, then all that awaited was destruction.

His aura meant nothing in the face of an enlightened mortal whose joy and identity were set on the line. They should have sprung forward. They should have shown him their purpose. But they had failed. In Yrild-ikurh’s eyes, the only individuals deserving of dreams were those who would take every chance to grasp them. No one else was worthy, not of chasing dreams, nor of the resources they wasted.

That was why he took their souls away.

He ripped them straight out of their bodies. It was no basic soul rend. His process was seamless and without any of the resistance that a mortal spell would have certainly produced. It was like the souls had wanted to leave their bodies, like they wished for nothing more than to offer themselves to atone for their sins and violations. Acknowledging their goodwill, the god brought them to his chest and returned them to the flow.

Had he been allowed autonomy, he certainly would have upped and left in search of more mortals to test, but the fifty-second outer god was as bound as the rest of his peers. So he had no choice but to enact his master’s will.

Raising just one of his hands, he crafted a singularity, a speck of perfect darkness that grew as it ingested everything in its immediate surroundings. The clouds were ripped from the sky. The trees were ripped from the earth. The stones and boulders were lifted like pebbles and dragged within the abyss. Even the plates that supported the continent were eager to answer his call, but he denied them with a shake of the head and saw their advances rejected. If not even the world could resist, then there was no way for the warships to put up a fight. Two motherships, four destroyers, six dreadnoughts, seven carriers, and thousands upon thousands of bodies. Everything within a ten-kilometer range, everything but the two exceptions where Sylvia’s wards were bound, was sucked right into the hole and completely erased.

There was no evidence remaining. Every single document, observation, and functional mind within the fleet had been swallowed without a trace. All of the stray evidence was gone, save for that which was atop the capital ship.

Having done his duty, the deity faded. He abandoned his shell, returning his soul to his true body upon the final frontier. The puppet that he had possessed was not entirely broken, but it was cracked enough by the need to sustain him that Sylvia considered it expended. She teleported it back to Alfred’s lair whilst waving her wand again.

Sylvia breathed a sigh as she wiped a paw across her brow. It was covered in sweat. She wasn’t quite out of breath, but she seated herself on the forest floor and gave her circuits a chance to cool. The process lasted for five seconds before she nearly jumped out of her skin.

Panda appeared in the crater beside her, hands behind his back as he carefully examined their surroundings. It was like he had come out of nowhere, even though she had carefully kept watch.

There were no portals to warp him. The many forces in their surroundings remained completely untouched, devoid of the violent turbulence that even the gods would leave in the wake of their movement. And yet, there he was, standing right in front of her without a care in the world.

“You killed the wrong goddamn ones,” he said, with a grunt. “You were supposed to roast the fuckers on the goddamn mothership.”

Sylvia shook her head. “I’ve already done my part.” She stood up on her hind legs and gave her back a stretch. “The rest is up to the others.”

___

Pain and darkness. The two feelings that enveloped her body slowly faded away as her vision was eventually restored. Light danced across her eyelids, one ray at a time as she became aware of her form again.

She needed a few extra seconds to fully right her consciousness and draw her mind out of the sludge. There wasn't much to her essence, but it took a while for her to put it all together. Its nature was too discombobulated, scattered across the many elements contained within. But with some difficulty, she extracted the few she wanted to see.

It took nearly seven seconds for her eyes to fully adjust, for her to find herself aboard the familiar ship, standing just outside the door. The interior was entirely chaotic. Even the stone floors gave way beneath the pressure of the battle.

Wordlessly, she opened the door and entered the foyer, her hands already twitching as she recalled the mission’s parameters. It took a moment for her to scan the manor, to take in the structure and pinpoint the people within.

It took her a moment to locate them all, to find the exact direction that she needed to go before breaking into a run.

The halls were empty.

The maids and butlers had already retreated, with some in the safety bunkers and others evacuated away into the city. The regular troops, specifically the ones off duty, were rushing towards the manor with their armour already equipped. But they would make no difference. They stood no chance of contributing with her mind already returned.

It would only last an instant.

Porcius was dead. His followers were dead. She would kill them all.