Now that I knew what I was subconsciously doing, I started to notice the slow drain of ethereal. It was only ever one or two points a second, instantly replaced so I’d never really notice it, but it was there. I tried messing with it, trying to push more ether into what I was doing or use less, but I couldn’t do either.
We arrived at the sight of another gluttony of Void Spirits. Once again I charged in, cutting through them with my weapons and abilities before they could acknowledge or react to my presence. The little crystals of thought dropped to the ground and I summoned them with Telekinesis, putting them into my storage pouch. I tried using Void-Dragon’s Armory on them and I could alter them, but without the System to tell me what they were, I had no idea what I was working with.
I looked at the souls searching for familiar faces. I caught a glimpse of some I recognized but most I didn’t.
“Who were you?” I asked.
“Mordred?” a horse voice spoke.
“Rejiah!” Ormias said, his soul rushing forward and pulling up his twin brother.
Rejiah’s presence told me who all these souls were: this was from the battle against the World Bosses.
“Ormias?” Rejiah asked. “You need….” Even without the need for a body his voice was weak. “You need to run.”
“It’s ok Rejiah,” Ormias said. “Mordred killed the things eating you.”
“No…he didn’t,” Rejiah croaked out. “The big one is…coming back.”
“Mordred you need to get out of here,” Voidra said her voice panicked. “One of the ancients is headed your way.”
I staggered as something analogous to a wall of sound hit me, smells, colors, sounds all pressed on my senses as I stumbled backwards, holding my head.
A great sound shook my soul. The ground rippled as something moved within the darkness of the Void. It advanced forwards and the souls I had gathered fled before it. Clarent sparked to life in my hand as I straightened my back.
“Run Guinevere,” I said.
“No, not-” Guinevere began.
“I’ll be right behind you,” I said, interrupting her. “I just need to slow this thing down. Now run!”
Guinevere only hesitated for another moment before running back the way we had come.
“You’re not running away, are you?” Ares asked.
“What does it mean to run away in a realm with no real concept of physical space?” I asked. “We kill this thing or we die.”
“You’re right,” Voidra said. “But death is the more likely of those two options.”
The ancient void entity got closer and closer, the space around it vibrating just from its presence, but the closer it got to me, the more its vibrations had less effect. I could feel the ethereal energy drain from me more and more as my sense of reality struggled with the un-reality of this Lovecraftian god. I couldn’t tell what it was, how it manifested itself. The minor void entities were thoughts, but they were like books; this creature was like a great library.
Its “fist” impacted the ground and it shattered into a thousand pieces. I activated Storm Fall and soared into the air, twisting around the bit of nothingness that was its body. I slashed with Clarent but the Ancient didn’t even react to the attack.
“How do you kill something like this?” I asked.
“It’s a living idea,” Karnen said. “How do you kill an idea?”
“I don’t need to kill the idea,” I said as plan started to form. “I just need to keep it from changing, I need to impose reality on it. Ares how much ethereal do I have?”
“Three-million-eight-hundred-forty-three-thousand-one-hundred-seventy-one,” Ares replied. “And your regen rate is seventy-six-thousand-eight-hundred per second.”
The Ancient lashed out not just with its body, but also its mind and I could feel my soul start to erode as it tore at the concept of who I was, trying to unravel me. I was flung back, hitting the concept of the earth I had imposed in this place and shattering it beneath me.
“Spend all of it,” I said.
I pushed out and the ethereal which had refused to answer me before came out in raging flood. The Ancient paused, its movements slowed. Its massive size began to shift, shrinking down, its unknowable form transforming into a rough humanoid shape. It looked down at its arms and its fingers curled and closed again and again.
“Interesting,” The Ancient said. “It has been eons since the gods dared to fight us, even if you are a weak specimen of one.”
I could finally understand the entity, but its words were like sledgehammers against my mind.
“I will have to consume you like them to keep your taint from corrupting this place,” the Ancient flashed forwards and I blocked the swings of its sword with Clarent as it drove me back with each titanic blow of its weapon.
I hadn’t destroyed the Ancient with that release of ethereal, but I had made it into something that might be killable. I wasn’t interested in getting into a verbal banter with an eldritch god, but its words were intriguing and also showed this things perception of reality was off.
The Ancient was fast and if it had a rank I would have put it at Demigod or above. The sword slashed up my back and I felt the piercing sting of agony. I hadn’t experienced pain like that since I’d unlocked Wrathful Meditation and it nearly broke my will to fight.
“You aren’t alone,” the Shadow growled. “Unleash us.”
Void Asura activated and Ares used my spear to block the next attack. I spun and drove Clarent through its chest. It staggered backwards, one of its hands going to its chest.
“Unexpected,” it said.
I opened my mouth and roared using Helheim’s Scream and Voice of the Chasm; bits of the Ancient went flying but it stood unmoving. Our blades clashed again as we began a furious onslaught of attacks. I had to thank Arthur; if I hadn’t been forced to hone myself to a razor’s edge, I wouldn’t have lasted a minute against this thing.
We moved back and forth as it destroyed the ground and my mind recreated it. The Ancient surged forwards, breaking through my guard and grabbing me around my neck. I slashed and cut into it, slicing right through its arm, but it didn’t fall away, the concept of missing limbs not something this entity understood. My soul started to erode away, and I could feel my energy draining into it I struggled but couldn’t break free. I felt my energy drain and then touch… something. Something powerful.
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I grabbed it and pulled. The Ancient tried to pull back but now I had a hold on it, both physically and mentally as I dragged it towards me. I screamed as golden energy hit me.
“Stop, that’s Celestria!” Voidra shouted.
“What?” I grunted but didn’t stop pulling on the energy.
“It’s the opposite of the void; it’s pure reality to the void’s pure thought. If you take that in, it will destroy you, turn you into a single thought made manifest, frozen in time,” she said.
“There’s no choice,” Karnen said. “He can’t reverse it now. Feel it, the energy wants to consume him.”
“There is still one thing we can do,” Ares said.
I screamed again as the energy I was taking in burned and twisted, but then my ethereal attacked it. I sucked it in, starting to consume and compress it, but there was too much to handle. My soul was too fractured and broken to hold it, the hole Kalesa had torn in it still a gaping wound. Then I saw those pieces of myself, the ability she had given me then ripped apart, never to be remade. I couldn’t fix them, but I could use those broken fragments.
Taking the shattered pieces of my soul, I pulled them into the vortex of energy. The Ancient began to scream and if I had ears, they would have bled. I kept pulling on the energy and feeding it into the roiling internal storm in my center.
“Find something to do with that energy,” I hissed through clenched teeth.
“Looking,” Voidra said. “I have an idea and it’s a risk, but you’re dead either way if it doesn’t work.”
“Do it,” I ordered.
My soul burned and my body began to glow since I was only a soul in this place. The pain increased but I couldn’t stop feeding on the Ancient. Then…
Void Asura, (Rank: 35): You have created a symbiotic instead of parasitic relationship with the spirits inhabiting you, through the use of an ability token you have changed this ability to make it somewhat compatible with the System. Through manipulation of your mana and stamina, they have created a third type of energy and can use it to manifest through your body and interact with the world.
Void Armor: You gain immunity to Void & Soul damage. The spectral arms created by the spirits residing in your soul when manifested appear armored, the armor has hardness 35 with an additional 1 hardness per twenty points of Spirit you have. Current hardness 44.
Void Edge: Your attacks while this ability is active deal Extreme Void damage and bypass 28 levels of hardness.
Void Soul: Like the beings of the void, you feed on the souls of others to grow in power; you Ethereal regeneration is increased by .05 and your max Ethereal is increased by 5 for every creature with a soul that you kill permanently.
Void Arsenal: You are able to bind 5 weapons to your soul letting you store them there and summon them and dismiss them at will. If you lose your weapons, they are transported back into your soul vault to be resummoned later.
Void Matter: You are linked to Void body and soul and are able to make the void manifest physically. For the cost of 10 ethereal, you can create 3 pound of Void matter, the matter will degrade overtime while outside of the void.
Void Shield: Time, space, and reality are not constant laws in the Void; when you take damage you can expend 100 ethereal to change the outcome of time and reality to negate all the damage taken in the past 7 seconds. Cooldown 50 seconds.
Void Soul: Your soul exists both in and out of your body, in and out of time, in reality and also not. While a soul exists, an entity is never truly dead.
Cost:
15 Ethereal per second
Cast Time:
Instantaneous
This ability should not exist, it will take 10x the normal amount of rank points for each rank up of this ability. Ranking up this ability does not advance any of your attributes.
I blinked in shock.
“Why am I seeing a System notification?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Voidra said uncertainly. “But we don’t have time to speculate.”
The Ancient struggled to break free but now that I knew what it contained inside it, I wasn’t going to let it go. It managed to bring its sword against me and our blades locked as I kept my grip around what passed for its throat. Our struggles threw us to the ground where we grappled for domination. The Ancient had around four or five arms but I wasn’t just one entity, and my own void limbs grappled and beat it.
There was no air to strangle out of its throat as I kept my grip and pushed myself on top, straddling its chest as I held it down and kept pulling out the energy. It wasn’t just the golden energy of celestria—something I didn’t even know why or how this creature contained—the Ancients own energy, its life force, all came with it as I started to drain it just like it had tried to do to me.
More and more ethereal poured out of me as I reinforced the reality of where we were. The shadow’s claws ripped off pieces of the creature as Ares and Karnen held it down. Voidra helped me draw more and more of its energy out of it. The roiling storm in me reached another breaking point and I screamed in two parts agony and ecstasy.
Void Asura, (Rank: 40): You have created a symbiotic instead of parasitic relationship with the spirits inhabiting you, through the use of an ability token you have changed this ability to make it somewhat compatible with the System. Through manipulation of your mana and stamina, they have created a third type of energy and can use it to manifest through your body and interact with the world.
Void Armor: You gain immunity to Void & Soul damage. The spectral arms created by the spirits residing in your soul when manifested appear armored, the armor has hardness 40 with an additional 1 hardness per twenty points of Spirit you have. Current hardness 49.
Void Edge: Your attacks while this ability is active deal Extreme Void damage and bypass 33 levels of hardness.
Void Soul: Like the beings of the void, you feed on the souls of others to grow in power; you Ethereal regeneration is increased by .06 and your max Ethereal is increased by 6 for every creature with a soul that you kill permanently.
Void Arsenal: You are able to bind 6 weapons to your soul letting you store them there and summon them and dismiss them at will. If you lose your weapons, they are transported back into your soul vault to be resummoned later.
Void Matter: You are linked to Void body and soul and are able to make the void manifest physically. For the cost of 10 ethereal, you can create 4 pound of Void matter, the matter will degrade overtime while outside of the void.
Void Shield: Time, space, and reality are not constant laws in the Void; when you take damage you can expend 100 ethereal to change the outcome of time and reality to negate all the damage taken in the past 9 seconds. Cooldown 40 seconds.
Void Soul: Your soul exists both in and out of your body, in and out of time, in reality and also not. While a soul exists an entity is never truly dead.
Void Sight: You can see the weak points in reality where the Void presses into the Material realms.
Cost:
17 Ethereal Per second
Cast Time:
Instantaneous
This ability should not exist, it will take 10x the normal amount of rank points for each rank up of this ability. Ranking up this ability does not advance any of your attributes.
I collapsed to the ground, the Ancient now gone. There was no corpse, not even a crystal; it had just ceased to exist as I consumed every last part of what it had once been. There was a burning in my soul and I felt at once more powerful than ever, and the weakest I had ever been.
“What was that?” I asked.
“It was the energy of the gods,” Voidra said. “I theorized that if you could use it with a bunch of the energy contained in rank points, along with ethereal and broken pieces of Dominion, you could push Void Asura to a higher rank.”
“How did a creature of the void even have pure reality in it?” Ares asked. “You’d think it would be poison to it.”
“It is,” Voidra said. “But something that powerful could contain it, slowly unraveling it over millennia, and feed on it. I think you just ate the soul of two gods.”
“You’re saying that Ancient has been digesting a god for…how long?” I asked, pushing myself to my feet.
“There are no stories or even legends of any god ever dying,” Karnen said. “And as powerful as they are, they couldn’t hide something like that. It either ate a god from another world, or the six gods who made the System weren’t really the first gods in Talba.”