Blood flowed in a circle beneath the feet of gods brought to a pit in the sky and the god slayers that had destroyed Yaldabaoth on high only minutes before. David smiled warmly.
“A greeting for the new god. How quant.” But his visitors did not bow, nor speak, for their tongues found no need of anything but silence. Xevis spread his hands apart and David was torn in two but the pieces did not find themselves torn aside. His flesh was split as though by two invisible hands that spread themselves outside him, but as the flesh was ripped apart like jackfruit it closed back up as though there had never been a wound.
His smile did not fade.
“I’ll forgive you if you bow.”
But they didn’t. From behind Aphelion teleported a mechanical fist through David’s torso, who gloated in return, “Don’t you know I can absorb you through my skin?”
Aphelion smiled in return and whispered a sweet nothing, “Then do it.” But David already knew Aphelion had no organs to absorb, so he twisted his torso backwards on his spine and drew a fist to tear the robot-man apart, but his fists were erased in the act of swinging.
Zorvilon opened his frenzied eyes to the sound of clamor and blew himself once again apart. So what if the battle was over? His mind was alight in torment he could not contain. Flames rose above his former hometowns. His former lovers found themselves burnt to a crisp. His skin melted and congealed like oh so many pork-rinds. His hunger rose sharply at the thought, and was unable to be suppressed in the thoughts of revenge at last returned to his mind in the clarity of recognition.
He knew those faces in front of him— those bastards had robbed him of the empire he had built up over a thousand years. They would surely pay for their insolence in showing themselves here. His flames poured over them all as Aphelion cursed at the fact much of his body easily conducted heat, as though he had plenty of techniques to cool himself the sensation was very unpleasant.
But before Zorvilon’s fire could superheat Aphelion’s thermally conductive body, Xevis tore the sky apart to reveal an inky black nothing between them. The fire washed over it and to the sides as though split by a wall in the absence of space, however David took the opportunity to finish his spinning arc around a broken spine and take another swipe at the billion-dollar man, this time successfully splitting his torso in half.
Nothing came out. There was a smooth gliding sensation as though through butter, but the unflesh knit itself back together as though welded or snapping a joint in place. Aphelion laughed quietly, inaudible through the sound of roaring fire, but visible on his thin painted lips. The words on them were equally trivial to read.
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“You can’t beat me.”
Quorus laughed his way to a thousand thrones as they made way for his legions and bodies that had appeared all too suddenly for defense among the cities and courts of cities with high walls altogether unbuilt for this kind of battle. It was not pitched. It was not difficult. Defenders found themselves butchered by his legions, and the strong found themselves cut in half from behind by an instant movement of a god through his legions unbound by flesh. An army led by an invisible hand bound to an eye on high whose omniscience was rivaled only by the god whose power no longer ran through the veins of the defenders formerly tasked with protecting their homeland.
It was not the most popular form of magic, but it was one of the strongest. Blood magic required training the self and soul. Godhood entailed both specific and highly-taxing requirements, loss of self, extreme risk, and generally narrow powers. Divine essence, however, was everywhere. Those who could wield Yaldabaoth’s blood could magnify themselves far beyond their natural strength by calling on him to restore the world by annihilating their enemies— returning them to the state their matter had been in before birth— but now? Now there was no power left to call on. Now there was no force left to multiply. Most archons trained in blood magic, but it wasn’t uncommon to channel Yaldabaoth into one’s techniques on the side. Even the gods often found themselves supplementing their godhood with His. But now? Now there was only him, only Quorus and his army of a thousand selves.
High stone walls may as well have been torn apart. Castles built eons ago to withstand Yaldabaoth’s battle against what would become the Covenant of Ancients found themselves occupied by foreign powers for the first time in centuries. Quorus walked into a throne room some two-thousand feet high built entirely of some magic crystal or another, whose banners hung hundreds of feet below and blew in the wind to form some kind of flag to project power visible all through the ringed city below. He burned them in passing, and butchered the guards on all sides with knives through the cracks in their plate armor at the neck.
There was no need to use the crack, of course, but just because one is armed with a spear there isn’t an inherent need to dull it by going the long way through the torso. In every kill Quorus took on more strength. He could capture the legions of the damned for his own personal army, but this would be too slow and needlessly taxing on his attention. It was much easier to expand only a few ten or hundred bodies at a time and much less annoying to do it with the living. At least then they would retain some measure of autonomy. In this way he simply captured their souls and added them to the collective. With every passing second hundreds more joined him, and a dozen other throne rooms fell.
But the one his current knightly puppet slowly walked into like butter was special. It had been the coronation room of Zorvilon’s thousand-year empire. Quorus had wanted this for so long, but had been denied. He would not allow this injustice to last even a second longer.
A king sat upon the throne and demanded to know what the random enemy knight was doing in their throne room, a question directed as much at his royal guard as to The Hidden Emperor, but there was no satisfactory answer. But the answer was known. Quorus had spared this last monarch not out of a sense of mercy or justice, but so he could have the pleasure of taking his crown to sit upon this most coveted throne in a dawning act of violence to coronate an empire to last a thousand years longer than necessary to ascend out of this tiny planet soon unable to contain the new being within it.