“Thrust forward and destroy his heart. Then reach up towards his head… and use just enough power to erase his soul.”
A concise enough command that Niven felt could not be easily misinterpreted. Since he wasn’t sure how Apollyon could damage the soul, he opted for a blanket statement with a vague condition. Having just been chided about not giving commands without a set limit, his command reflected that but… he didn’t have enough understanding to be any more precise.
And Apollyon did not disappoint. It seemed it knew when to be difficult and when to give him a little room. Or maybe he was due for a lecture afterwards. Niven didn’t know, nor did he care. He only looked forward to returning to his body again.
Soon enough, the scene on the screen before him changed. There was movement, but not synced with the rate at which Niven usually perceived the world. Although it might seem like it - from kneeling awkwardly in one moment to suddenly standing up and striking forward the next - the fact that Albern did have the slightest reaction to the attack was enough of a clue that he was still seeing the world through Apollyon’s eyes.
From the eyes of a higher power. From the perspective of a being who should never have gotten involved in a fight so trivial, a duel between ants. And he was allowed to watch firsthand just how easily someone like him could be stamped out. Someone even stronger than him, even.
Tier 3… Tier 1… It did not matter when the gap was this wide.
Yet, Niven hadn’t derived any joy or any inflated sense of power. He knew none of this was his. If anything, this glimpse only heightened his paranoia.
Though, at the moment, it was perhaps more important to think on how this applied to him instead. He had Apollyon, and threats beyond his ken were best left to it. As such, he returned his mind to the scene itself, capturing it with rapt attention.
LVL 57 Human Slain.
Base EXP: 570
Achievement Multipliers:
[SR] Class - Blood-Anointed Priest: 5/3
[R] Subclass - Threadweaver: 1/1
Over Level Kill: 57/11
Special Bloodline (Diluted Noble Blood: Othos): 21/10
Class Multipliers
Unique Weapon: 13/10
Different Method From Last Kill: 7/6
Total experience: 570 * 5/3 * 1/1 * 57/11 * 21/10 * 13/10 * 7/6 = 15678.9 EXP
Level Up! You are now Level 12
+1 Str, Con, Dex, Int, Wis rewarded due to Class: Weaponmaster
+1 Free Point rewarded due to Class: Weaponmaster
Level Up! You are now Level 13
+1 Str, Con, Dex, Int, Wis rewarded due to Class: Weaponmaster
+1 Free Point rewarded due to Class: Weaponmaster
He glanced at the System prompts and put them to the back of his mind. Those things could be considered later. Right now, he was more focused on what he had just experienced.
It was a weird feeling - watching Apollyon control his body under his instruction.
There was a degree of separation between thought and action, a small yet unscalable channel that had to be bridged by voicing out what he wanted to do, and then receiving no direct response.
No tactile feeling when the hand pierced bone and entered flesh.
Nothing when he raised his arm to split Albern’s upper body in two.
No feeling at all. Only the image conveyed the knowledge that the deed had been done.
He wasn’t able to capture how Apollyon extinguished the other party’s soul after severing their body, but it had been clean and direct.
The process was so seamless that Niven wasn’t even able to glean a single clue. It was as simple as the cleave from an executioner’s axe falling upon a hapless, mundane criminal.
Perhaps it had purposely concealed its methods, though he was rather skeptical of this idea. While Apollyon was prone to hiding itself from him, this wasn’t like one of those cases.
If it wanted to obfuscate everything, it wouldn’t have reminded him when he only proposed a physical attack and just did the extra bits in the background, or none at all, letting him taste his folly firsthand.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The more likely reason was that he had been too vague with his instruction, and therefore, chose the most straightforward approach… But a straightforward approach for it had to be so streamlined that mortals like him cannot even perceive it.
Regardless, the end is the same whether he understood or not. The existential threat before him was gone for good.
Now with Albern dead, Niven could feel his body start to return to normal.
It was almost like waking up from a deep dream, every portion of himself sluggish - most of all his mind.
At this point, it was like there were two sides to his psyche: the one here, with Apollyon, and the one that had just woken in his body’s brain.
A rather indescribable sensation that was a mix of clarity and grogginess coupled with two threads of thinking running in parallel. Although to say they ran in parallel wouldn’t necessarily be correct, either, as one crawled like a snail and the other sped forward like light itself.
However, Niven knew how to reconcile this massive difference. He had followed the thread that was the soul-link to get here, and it was most likely the way to get out, as well.
The bridge between them had never left his side. However, as he turned around to get back, Apollyon called out to him.
“Allow me to send you out. I doubt you want to wait much longer. Your mood tells me that you are already sick of this place, right? I’m sad to receive such a poor review.” Apollyon mourned jokingly. “Off you go, then.”
Niven couldn’t muster a reply before he felt a force push him along the thread, his manifested mental body collapsing into that ephemeral will he was so used to.
In an instant, he had been kicked out of Apollyon’s soul space and returned to his own. The nothingness.
Nothingness save for that singular thread that he could now identify should he concentrate hard enough.
Niven spent the time his body needed to warm up by getting some practice in on finding it. Even if Apollyon forcibly returned the better half of his consciousness back to his body, it wasn’t able to accommodate it fully just yet. Since it was just a matter of waiting, he decided to not force things, otherwise it would likely aggravate his injuries and the net time he spent waiting would only increase.
Although he had found it not long ago, repeating the task was still not easy, as the soul-link was aggravatingly faint even as the sole entity within the void that surrounded it.
Perhaps he would find it easier with more practice, but for now, telepathy or anything close to it could only be used sparingly. Or at least when the situation allowed for him to spend what felt like minutes grasping it.
Maybe he would be faster later when he was less tired, but Niven doubted it. After all, he had just come back from coming into contact with it. The process was still fresh in his memory. Without that miraculous breakthrough right before he fully succumbed to Albern directing him, it was likely to be even next to impossible. Though that guess needed confirmation. Only tomorrow could tell.
After warming up his sleepy consciousness through the mentally taxing activity of finding the soul-link, Niven felt that his eyelids were finally responsive enough to open.
Finally back to seeing the world through his own eyes again, he first took in the scene before him.
It was a mess.
Albern was left only half his body intact, and it was slumped against him. Niven’s gloved hand - Apollyon - was also resting on it. He tried to look around to see what else remained, but the other pieces were too mutilated to tell what part they belonged to.
Niven let out a deep sigh. Not out of commiseration for his opponent who by all accounts had bested him, but out of relief. The ordeal was over. This was not the first time he had taken a human life, and it was unlikely to be the last.
Only, it was far more visceral than all the times before it. Transcendents were simply too resilient. There was no way of giving the other person a clean death unless the gap was large enough.
While it could be argued that such a gap existed here, Niven was not Apollyon. He could only direct it through his crude methods. It wanted him to do so. And he would learn to be better with time. But his current ability did not allow him to grant Albern that mercy.
He pushed the corpse aside and shook his arms and legs.
Niven knew that Apollyon utilizing his body to initiate that attack had not been kind to his muscles and tendons. There was no way his current physique could accommodate such an explosive burst in strength and action. More likely than not, it hadn’t even mobilized his muscles, only dragging it along through some form of puppetry he wasn’t able to see.
While he was assessing his injuries, Apollyon broke the calm.
“He was an idiot,” it derided. Niven knew that it was directed at Albern, but he couldn’t help but attribute it to himself, as well.
“He trusted his skills too much. He had too much faith in his god.”
Just like how he trusted Apollyon more than it would have liked. As a result, it led him here.
“He thought you were just another fool after seeing your level.”
Just like how he thought Albern to be just another priest. As a result, he was tricked and almost killed.
“Most important of all, he was a puppet master, yet he put himself directly in harm’s way. Even if you could be considered inconsequential to someone his level, making that kind of gamble is never in his favor.”
Perhaps most damning of all, but it also wasn’t an indictment on Niven’s ability. Due to Apollyon, he would always be at the forefront.
“And that is why you must always have a contingency. I can catch idiots like that off guard, but this trick will begin to work less and less the higher you go. Transforming weapons aren’t that uncommon a sight, just unheard of for those at the bottom.”
Niven nodded blankly. Why was it that everyone was so hostile? How could he know there would be a class that could control one’s movements through…
No. It was because of his new luck. Or it was Apollyon who scripted everything that happened. It was the one that directed him here, after all. It was also the one that raised the topic of replacing what he wore.
By asking for that himself, he had handed Albern a way to exercise his class on him on a silver platter.
However, before Niven could condemn it, Apollyon stated blandly, “It’s better to seek misfortune than to let it happen in a way you do not understand. Consider it to be in a similar vein to your role in clearing the native monsters back at your outpost. Giving your misfortune an outlet will make it so that it is less likely to bottle up and explode as a big ‘gift’.”
Niven sighed. This would be his life from now on. It was no longer a good idea to give others the benefit of the doubt. He wouldn’t have the fortune of meeting good people.
Only by looking at things from the perspective of cold calculation could he survive. At least in this way he would not be blindsided by a sudden betrayal. After all, he would have never trusted them in the first place. Or rather, the only trust he had was for them to betray. What a desperate world to live in.
“So what about all the others here? You mentioned slaughtering the village earlier. That was supposed to be a hint, right?” Niven asked. His mind, though still not fully returned to its original state, was perhaps clearer than it had ever been.
“Well, without a puppeteer… you can look for yourself.”