The light of infinite missiles filled the air, so multitudinous they darkened the sky.
Beams of scorching plasma shot toward us by the thousands, spearing through space to reach our location.
I drew in one sharp breath, and all slowed to a crawl. But, though the missiles were mostly stymied, their laser brethren were barely bothered. I didn’t have much time.
With all the strength and haste I could possibly muster, I reached out and gripped tight my companions, wrapping them up in an impromptu embrace, confining them between arm and chest, such that my flesh encircled them. I’d never tried this with other people before, but could only hope that luck might smile upon me, this time.
For once.
Flash Step.
Space rippled and tore, and the muscles of my arms tore right alongside it, and my bones trembled and cracked, and my tendons stretched and stretched and stretched and barely held.
And then we were away.
Leagues away, hundreds and hundreds of feet away, standing on the top of an empty skyscraper, watching the great and terrible explosion that lit up the night sky at the location we’d been standing not seconds prior.
“HEEEUUURKKK!”
Alyss fell to her knees, and vomited. Caleb staggered, moaned, and clutched his head, though he managed not to lose his lunch.
Perhaps, though, it was only because he no longer ate.
“Sorry,” I began, wincing, “I didn’t kno–”
“G–Gods!” Alyss shrieked through her nausea, her voice high-pitched and tremulous. “We n–need to run! We have to get the fuck out of here, now, right now, we c-can’t fight tha–”
“There’s nowhere to run,” Caleb cut her off, growling as he did so, fear apparently overwhelmed by a sudden and ravenous rage. “You said it yourself, didn’t you? There’s nowhere to run.”
He stared hatefully at the monumental goliath in the near distance, fingers twitching, a terrible radiance already starting to leak from the edges of his eyes. Dragon was moving, shifting, turning to face our way, but it did so at a considerably sluggish pace, so prodigious was its own impossible size.
Its many thousand Overseers, however, shot towards us without hesitation or delay.
It’d take them far less time to reach us.
“Our only option,” the warborn Immolator snarled as he rose into the air, seething with scourging light, “is to fight.”
“N-no!” Alyss stammered still, stumbling to her feet. “No, no, no, we can’t–”
“I think I have a plan,” I murmured, abruptly.
They both looked my way.
“I think I may have a plan,” I repeated, speaking softly, nodding slowly, pointing in the direction of the approaching titan.
“But I need a distraction. I need the space around its head clear of Overseers. Clear.” I turned to face the Immolator. “Can you manage that?”
“Oh,” he replied, his voice rumbling with that rich, cosmic tenor. “I believe I can.”
Glare clenched his fists, burst into stellar flame, howled a fervent battle-cry, and took off with the speed of a shooting star towards the hordes of miniature machine-dragons that thronged about their mother.
I turned to Alyss, who stared emptily at our departing Inquisitor, grasped her shoulder, and squeezed slightly.
“Alyss, focus,” I said, urgently. Blinking, her gaze flickered hesitantly my way.
“Your Nightmares can turn invisible, yes?” I asked.
Numbly, she nodded, fixating back on the rumbling behemoth which approached us, her face so pale it almost looked translucent.
“Good,” I replied, tensely twirling my sword before stabbing it the creature’s way, and circling it in the air. “Make a sphere of them around us, and take us right towards it. Right towards it. Not all the way. I just need to be close.”
I took a moment to glance into my inner sea. My reserves were already almost full again, but that last Step had taken a fair amount out of me. For this to work, I’d need to be as close as possible. As full as possible.
As strong as possible.
I glanced over at my companion sharply, who remained motionless.
“Alyss, now.”
The sorceress blinked once more, shook her head fiercely, and loosely gestured. Shadows enveloped us at once, first pitch-black, then turning to a more shimmering, transparent sheen. Slowly, we rose off the roof of the shattered skyscraper, and soared towards our adversary.
The flat-topped skyscrapers turned into a greyish blur beneath our feet as we raced forth with all the speed that the sorceress could possibly muster, her hands shaking more and more violently with every meter that passed us by. Whilst we flew, quiet and invisible, we silently watched our shared comrade, as he set upon the foe.
For perhaps the first time, the High Inquisitor held nothing back, glowing with a radiance like none I’d ever seen.
He had become a living sun.
He was so intense, so glorious, so bright it pained me to even look his way. He shone with a cosmic fervor so true and pure it raised spherical distortion for tens of meters about his person, turning the air warped and wavering, making his body seem to bend like putty.
Gods, he must be burning through Entropy by the boatload, I thought, my mouth hung open slightly. Even for an Immortal, this was…incredible. Surely, Glare couldn’t keep this Breaker state up for long.
But he didn’t need to.
Its effects were absolutely devastating. The Overseers that attacked him began to melt from the moment they approached, their hardened skin weeping tears of priceless alloy, slagged into a cherry-red liqueur.
Glare reached out with hands of rippling astrum, and pushed forth his light from within.
And it was glorious.
His lucent lances bore through space-time silently, poetically, untroubled by sound and undaunted by physical matter. They were the fury of the cosmos, the wrath of the heavens, the distant susurrations of ever-spinning pulsars, distilled somehow into quasi-physical form.
They lit up the sky, and the Overseers fell.
The tumbled by the tens, then hundreds, cleaved seamlessly in twain. Yet, despite their magnificent potency, Glare’s attacks could only come so quickly.
And his enemies were multitude.
He twisted around and about their attacks with an appropriately inhuman grace, a dexterity that only Godkin knew. He twirled and spun, pirouetted and redirected, dodged the detonations of countless missiles. He made it look easy.
He was born to fly.
And slowly, surely, he was whittling them down.
I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
The creatures swarmed about him, thick as flies, yet somehow, incapable of doing him meaningful harm. He stayed well out of the range of Dragon’s physical attacks, and so the behemoth was only capable of dispatching missiles, which he adroitly dodged, and lasers, which only made him stronger.
It was beautiful. Truly beautiful.
But it wasn’t enough.
Because the Immolator’s titanic adversary matched his rage.
YOU WILL NOT TAKE HIM FROM ME!
From on high, the gargantuan Dragon roared in defiance, and its massive, fiery maw opened wide.
The countless pulsating electric spines studding its back hummed and crackled with power, a lightning altogether different from my own, but no less terrifying.
A terrible, keening, high-pitched whine filled the air, as a purplish light lit up the very back of the creature’s throat, and angled at Glare.
Dragon screamed.
The whine reached its peak.
And the world went dark.
I heard Alyss cry out from beside me, felt us begin to topple from the air. For a split second, I floundered, blinded, unsure of my surroundings.
Then Draconic Blood kicked in, repaired my burst and sizzled eyes, and we stabilized.
Looking beside me, I noticed Alyss seemed remarkably uninjured, perhaps safeguarded by the chief Nightmare that resided in her soul. The both of us had been blasted back. I hadn’t even seen what happened.
But now, I could see the aftermath.
A yawning chasm had been carved through the concrete jungle, plowing through toughened steel, and splitting skyscrapers clean in two. It ran long and devastating, smoking, more than half a mile’s worth of pure destruction.
At the end of this brutal canyon, I could just make out Caleb’s broken, mangled form.
The Immortal Inquisitor had been reduced to but a burnt and blackened torso.
His face was just…gone. Seared to the bone. Eyes boiled, ears evaporated. He was bald, bereft legs, absent armor, and with a great and gaping hole eviscerating the left side of his chest, exposing a glimmering, glittering golden sphere that lay deep within.
His Core.
Alyss choked from at my side.
“He, he, he–” she stammered. “He’s n–not dead, is h–”
Her words were interrupted by the eruption of a great, golden sun that lit up the darkened, neon city, centered precisely around the spot where the Immolator’s freshly-made cadaver lay. It instantly liquified the few Overseers who’d chosen foolishly to follow Glare’s doomed descent, and carbonized the swarming Canadians for leagues around, flaring bright and beautiful, breathtaking…
But only for an instant, and no more.
Then it disappeared, leaving nothing behind save for a great and spherical hole of melted steel and asphalt, as well as an entirely healed but totally naked Caleb Conway.
Unconscious, but otherwise completely unharmed.
Dragon saw him, and howled with a renewed fury. The few remaining swarms of Overseers that stood guard nearby her took off towards him, doubtless intent on finishing the job.
“Alyss!” I boomed, gripping the sorceress tight by the shoulders, forcing her to meet my gaze. Her face was bright-white and frightened, shaking, but she did not shirk my grip, nor ignore my words.
“It’s now or never!” I declared, spinning up each of my Shards in my soul, feeling them surge with a tight, tense, eager energy. I turned to face the mighty Dragon, now frighteningly near to me, and directed her for one final time.
“Go! Guard our Inquisitor from harm!”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Alyss merely nodded, mutely, burst once more into pitch-blackness, and took off towards Caleb with all possible speed, clawing through thin air upon great wings of shadow. I closed my eyes, squeezed my sword, felt Fang rumble supportively within me, and moved.
Flash Step.
And then it was just me, and her.
Me, and DRAGON.
I hovered in midair directly right of the monster’s head, beset by a sudden and unbidden hesitation.
I knew what I had to do,
But I didn’t know if I could really do it.
I knew not where my boundaries lay. I hadn’t yet had the chance to test them. Only a fool chose the field of battle to discover their limits for the first time, yet I’d no other choice.
Dragon would not wait for me to be ready.
Sure enough, right on schedule and with nothing left to cloak my presence, I watched myriad sensors dotting the behemoth monster’s body light up. I watched eight red-orange eyes swivel to face me.
Slowly, ponderously, I watched its head begin to shift.
I looked down at my hands.
“Oh, my loyal servant,” I began, quietly. “Do you remember my words?”
“Do you remember what I promised you?”
The whine of gargantuan servos and mammoth pneumatic engines disturbed what would otherwise have been a veritably tranquil scene. I heard the roaring ignition of one thousand deadly missiles leaving their nests to race my way.
But I paid them no heed.
“You wished to be faster than the fastest winds,” I whispered, my voice now barely audible above the scream of engines and venting exhaust. “Swifter, than the swiftest steeds.”
I watched the missiles dance their way towards me. I watched them curve and twirl, spin and twist. I watched them wheel through empty, ancient air, lit by glowing acid rain. I watched as, from all up and down a body the size of a mountain, massive laser batteries locked onto my position.
I watched Dragon, locking eyes with the creature, flimsy flesh and blood greeting wrothful, ageless, primeval machine. It had no song, yet, all the same, I thought I saw something beneath all hatred. All the madness. All the pain.
A glimmer of sorrow, perhaps. Of grief. Of failure.
Of regret.
But I ignored that, too. There could be no compassion now.
“You wished to strike so quickly none would ever see our passage,” I breathed, my voice beginning to rumble, to increase in intensity, “So powerfully, as to shatter mountains with but a single blow.”
The laser cannons were lighting up. The countless missiles were a hand’s breadth away.
I screamed out in defiance.
“DO YOU REMEMBER?”
The air around me turned to thick, gelatinous syrup.
The missiles’ howling passage slowed to a creeping crawl.
From deep, deep within my chest, a lonesome voice rumbled back.
I remember, my King, it said. I am ready.
I could feel my Major Shard running strong, twenty-times acceleration. Nearly the fastest I’d ever dared go before. The speed that’d allowed me to destroy the Kingsguard.
It wouldn’t be enough.
It wouldn’t be nearly enough.
Flash Step.
A flicker of will, a flash of errant lightning, and I was in an all-new position, the missiles’ trajectory made suddenly defunct, the lasers aiming at nothing at all. I was beside the monstrous creature’s head, still, but much, much closer now.
So close I could gaze right into the million facets of its machine-forged, flawlessly-alloyed steel carapace. So close I could see the flow of fusion energy run across and along and through its many mechanical veins. So close I could hear the hum of its mighty engines deep within.
So close I could reach out, and touch it.
After all, what had I to fear? This was the crawling world. Here, only I was truly alive.
So I did.
I stretched out an arm, splayed my fingers wide, and pressed my palm against the Dragon’s skin, stroking gently across the polished metal. It was cool to the touch. Strangely, belatedly, I realized that this alloy wasn’t Entropic. It was mundane. Unenhanced, by Blessed or Blessing. Just as everything in this Dungeon had been.
I withdrew my hand, and closed my eyes.
How many times, this delve, had I promised myself that I would no more be weak? How many times? I’d meant it, of course. Each and every time, I’d meant it. I really had. But, how often had my vows proven true?
Even once?
Vox. The Warren. The Kingsguard. My Trial. Sovereign. Again, and again, and again I’d swore. Until the words, themselves, were meaningless. Until only the intention remained.
But, perhaps, it was finally time to no longer be weak.
I began to focus on my breaths. Everything began, and ended, with the breath.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I directed my own respiration, inhaling deeply. Patiently.
In, hold, two, three.
Out, hold, two, three.
I felt the still, slowed, antique air enter my lungs, cooled by falling raindrops, heated by mere proximity to the behemoth’s plasmic engines. I felt it sufflate me, swelling my chest, filling me with a desperate energy.
Right here, right now, I was our last hope.
I couldn’t fail again.
As I gradually exhaled, I felt it depart me, replacing heat and passion with a cool, calm, cold certainty. I was not the boy who’d entered the Burrick Maw, who’d faced down Blessed bandits on his own. I was not the Forsaken who’d journeyed to Talos unprepared, thrust roughly into a world of which he knew nothing. I was not the Trigger who’d so foolhardily entered the Agoge, forced to fight alone against an inevitable fate.
I’d struggled, I’d suffered, and I’d survived.
I wouldn’t fail again.
Never again.
My breaths came deep, and rhythmic, and steady.
I was ready.
I started to Accelerate.
//21…22…23…//
I drew back my right, dominant hand, fingers curling, tightening into a white-knuckled first. Fang was but a Minor Shard. I couldn’t use him for this.
I flexed the muscles in my arm and shoulder, feeling them bunch and strain. Feeling Marble stage fibers ripple underneath my flesh. I pointed my fist firmly and definitively towards the creature’s mammoth mechanical skull.
“Give me everything,” I boomed, my words thick with Entropy, my soul thrumming in my chest so powerfully that it deafened me. “Everything you have.”
By your will, my Major Shard responded, its divine speech transcending mundane hearing, it shall be done.
//25…30…35…//
As it spoke, I felt the power surge.
I felt my veins bulge and my arteries blister as lightning raced down and through them, filling them to the brim, drowning them in arcane potency. I felt my muscles swell painfully, the very cells within them venting excess energy, the micro and macromolecules that populated them vibrating in place, unable to contain this extent of overwhelming potential.
I reached what I’d thought to be my maximum, and passed right by it.
//40…50…60…//
The living lightning breached my skin and burst forth from my vessels, forming a writhing, wriggling, rippling shroud of pure crimson electricity that smothered me, that bathed me in ozone and plasma.
Draconic Blood roared from within my chest, filled with all the Entropy I could stuff into it, working in tandem with the song itself to hold my disintegrating form together, the foundation upon which the impossible might be.
Normally, the backlash I faced from such striking at such speed was mitigated by my Marble body and my Brute Blessing, but this…
Would I even be able to survive this strike?
“YOU ARE NOT MORTAL!”
My primary Blessing shrieked at me from within my memory, beating me senseless with my own dismembered flesh, shattering bones and pulping organs with each devastating strike.
“DO NOT FIGHT LIKE ONE!”
Wisdom, perhaps, from the mouth of the deranged.
Still, I wouldn’t be able to keep this up for long. My Entropy reserves were disappearing before my very eyes. My body was barely holding itself together. At this rate, I’d be out in seconds.
But I wouldn’t need seconds.
I wouldn’t even need one.
//70…85…//
I was in a daze.
In a trance.
I was no longer me.
Acceleration had embodied me, the two of us joining in an eldritch union of brutal power and glorious purpose. Our body was a pulsating mass of pure Entropy, a pupating mess of flesh and bone and bloody electricity.
In this moment, we wanted the same thing. In this moment, we were one being.
We were absolute power, and we were blistering speed.
We raised our eyes, and felt the heavens rumble. We heard the tempest rage up above. We saw the darkened clouds ripple and shudder, dispensing countless fulminations of rich, red lightning. Pealing out our glory from on high.
And it was good.
“LET THE SKIES BOIL!” We screamed in ecstasy, as the storm became us. “LET THE MOUNTAINS FALL!”
//MAXIMUM//
//OUTPUT//
//100//
The world around us froze.
The rippling shawl of living lightning that covered us crept like little caterpillars, ever so slowly, across our flesh. The crimson lances of lightning dispensed by the storm above had stopped still mid-descent.
The air was thick, heavy. Our mind was blurry. It was difficult to think, to move.
With all our strength and all our will, we pushed our right hand forwards.
We watched with amazement as the skin peeled off our traveling fist, pulled and stretched in sluggish ripples by resistance to what surrounded it. We watched as the muscle below it followed suit, stripped from the bone, but felt no pain.
Not a bit.
Our nerves were too slow to conduct it.
Little fingers of bone, scoured clean, wrapped in strings and tassels of lightning forced their way through frozen space at a scarcely-slowed pace.
A Marble-stage Blessed produced perhaps ten-times the striking force of a peak-physique, mundane human. A Marble-stage Brute produced perhaps ten times again that, at least. We were all those things, accelerated to one-hundred times normal speed.
The very tips of our skinned, flayed fist scratched the exterior of Dragon’s armor.
For less even than an instant, we saw the metal warp, and shiver.
Then the backlash hit.
~~~
Alyss shuddered and groaned under the ruthless detonation of a seemingly unending tide of missiles, desperately protecting her companion’s yet-unconscious form.
Her Entropy was almost exhausted. Her servants had all but retreated to the confines of her soul.
Please, Taiven, she begged. If ever there was time for you to pull off one last miracle, it would be now.
For a single moment she glanced back, distracting herself from the barrage assaulting her to observe her Hero’s so-called ‘plan.’
He was…levitating in the air.
He was right beside the massive abomination’s head. Alyss couldn’t quite make out what exactly he was doing. It seemed like he was looking down. At his hands. Contemplatively.
Then Dragon noticed him.
Alyss watched myriad disparate locations all across its behemoth body lit up. She watched one hundred thousand missiles and lasers fire in perfect unison. She wanted to scream out at her friend to run, to somehow get away, but she knew it was no use.
He was still looking at his hands. He was too far away to hear her. She knew, in her very bones, that this was the end. Countless projectiles raced towards him, but Hero paid them no heed.
Suddenly, the skies above him began to rumble.
To roil.
To rage.
From within the depths of Alyss’s ghastly soul, she heard First’s voice come soft and rapturous.
Such power, it whispered. Such beauty.
Its awful voice was rapt with awe.
Behold, my Master, it gurgled. Behold the strength of royalty.
She watched Hero retract a fist, and narrow his eyes.
Behold the crowning of a King.
Hero’s whole body stuttered for a moment.
Then Alyss Nycta saw red. A great and angry scar of crimson, that split the darkened skies in two.
Time seemed to slow.
First, came the force.
The windows in the spire-like buildings around her shattered in a great cascade.
The buildings, themselves, crumbled, dissolved, fell apart like tissue paper, great chunks torn out of them and hurled leagues in every direction.
But all was silent, for the shockwave traveled faster than sound, moving through space and time like an invisible bubble. It burst what remained of her flimsy barrier with contemptuous ease, and grabbed her tight.
She felt herself lift off the ground.
She felt her Marble-stage bones tremble worrying. She felt her skin start to peel back, and blister. Shadow Form made her quasi-invulnerable to physical attacks, but this…this was something else.
Something mighty.
She heard First shriek with exertion as it fought to hold her body together, the monster’s best efforts barely enough. She felt the ripples of cascading force echo about her ethereal innards, nearly making her pass out.
Then, came the sound.
KRAKK-THOOM
It burst her eardrums, and she heard nothing more at all.
She watched, deafened, as the terrain whipped by her at a dizzying pace. Her mind was a jumbled mess. She couldn’t seem to think straight.
She heard First call upon the sum total of its brethren Nightmares, rallying them together to spread arms of creeping shadow wide, to arrest her momentum before she splattered against something solid.
And it worked.
Her servants stopped Alyss in midair, cradling her tight, allowing her to stare up at the blood-red sky.
At the abominable working of the man she called her friend.
Taiven’s entire rightmost side was just…gone.
It was a bloody mess, a massacre of tangling tendons, torn muscles, and ragged skin. He was missing an arm, a leg, half a chest, and near enough half a face. But he was already healing.
And he was smiling.
Smiling a gruesome, savaged grin that was half flesh and blood, and half stripped-clean bone. Smiling down at his handiwork.
At Dragon, collapsed upon the ground.
She lay there, spasming, moaning mechanically in pain, having flattened the buildings for leagues about her. In the throes of her agony, she ravaged countless more.
She’d been decapitated.
Her mechanical maw was destroyed. Gone, just gone, like Taiven’s right side. Nothing remained of it, save for a messy twirl of wires and twisted metal. The mutants around them, those not liquified by the sphere of force, were routing, wailing as they did so.
Overseers were falling, deadened, from the sky.
From a pile of rubble not too far away, she saw Glare arise, roused from unconsciousness. Apparently, the shockwave had been insufficient to damage his Immortal form.
Alyss gaped at him, but he paid her no heed.
He looked out, surveying the battlefield, and nodded. As if he’d never once doubted that Taiven could bring her down. He cracked his neck, shook out his shoulders, and snarled.
And let out one final, animal, whoop of rage.
Glare rocketed into the sky, lit up like a sun, and poured rays of blistering heat down onto the decapitated enemy of all humanity.
Melting it, and everything around it, down to shapeless slag.