Chapter 738 – Echoes (Patreon)

Machaon’s features would have twisted into a grimace if they weren’t locked in the shape of a single, even uglier expression. The regrown skin was fused with non-functioning facial muscles into a thin, scarred sheet of flesh that tightly hugged his skull.

His lips were missing, revealing rows of brand-new teeth that were permanently clenched into a frustrated grin. His hair and eyebrows had never grown back – nor were they going to, according to the healers – and even the cartilage of his nose had been replaced by a flat slab of skin that surrounded a pair of narrow slits.

The life mages that Machaon and his allies controlled had managed to regrow his missing limbs and recover their functionality, but they had lacked the delicate touch necessary to restore the patriarch’s handsome appearance. Unfortunately, the most skilled healers on Remior – the ones that Machaon might have hired under other circumstances – currently stood against him.

Unable to stare at his malformed reflection any longer, he struck the mirror with a violent burst of willpower, shattering it into sand and whipping up a dusty storm within his claustrophobic chamber.

Machaon had only ever used his immaculate appearance as a tool to further his ends. Such concerns were no longer relevant – only raw power was – though he’d be lying if he said that he didn’t find his monstrous visage unsettling.

‘As long as it doesn’t affect my strength, it doesn’t matter,’ he tried to convince himself amidst a coughing fit. ‘My ascension to divinity will fix my body anyway.’

Being confined to this rotting castle was arguably a bigger issue than his incomplete healing. Cracked, mouldy walls stretched everywhere around him, with tangled sheets of ancient cobwebs hanging loosely from the ceiling wherever he looked. Every step he took left a deep bootprint in the thick layer of dust that coated every square centimetre of the dilapidated building.

The servants had been busy trying to clean the castle, but the structure was far too vast to be tidied up within a month. Machaon wanted nothing more than to venture outside for some fresh air – it was the least that he deserved after the numerous agonizing procedures that he’d had to endure during the reconstruction of his body.

But he couldn’t. It wasn’t safe.

It had been thousands of years since anyone had dared to tell Machaon where he could or couldn’t go. Sadly, the Red-born had already proven himself capable of besting even a White-cored mage in single combat, so Machaon and his peers couldn’t afford to give the boy a chance to pick them off one by one.

The only way to protect themselves from a potential assassination attempt was to remain close to one another. Of all the properties that the three Great Houses jointly owned, the castle located near the north-western shore of the continent was by far the largest one. It was capable of housing over fifteen thousand mages.

The Divine Root had relocated to newer, more conveniently placed structures millennia ago, causing the sprawling structure to fall into disrepair, but it was currently the only place that could accommodate the entire alliance.

‘All of this is temporary. We just have to master the external part of the boosting art and squash that irritating fly.’

Percy was undoubtedly working hard to elevate his strength at this very moment, but Machaon was confident that he and his colleagues would outgrow the young upstart this time.

Nobody understood how the boy had managed to advance all the way from Red to Green in less than half a century, and there was no denying how impressive it was that the young noble had bridged the enormous gap separating his actual grade from the fighting strength of a White.

Still, there had to be a limit to the Red-born’s growth. Percy would have to stack multiple incremental boosts to keep up with Machaon’s looming spell upgrade. Even if the boy found a way to make up for the jump from Circulation to the Dance, the three patriarchs would just have to combine their strength to execute him.

More worrying than Percy’s personal growth was that of his coalition.

Those who had received the Red-born’s many gifts had remained tight-lipped about the most sensitive details, but some information had still leaked, despite the strict spectral contracts that the boy had imposed on his allies. This wasn’t an accident, nor a miscalculation on House Avalon’s part.

Archibald and his grandson had deliberately allowed word about the new cores, mindsets, mutations, and affinity-changing treasures to spread, because they needed to entice more noble families into joining them.

And it had worked like a charm.

Based on what House Asclepius’ informants had managed to piece together, at least three additional families had recently reached out to House Avalon and the Alchemists’ Guild, commencing a round of negotiations.

‘We can’t let that continue, or our personal strength will soon cease to matter,’ Machaon reminded himself.

At the rate things were progressing, the Red-born’s alliance would double in size within the next few months, quadruple by the end of the year, and expand to the rest of the planet before the decade was over.

Machaon and his fellow patriarchs would need much longer than that to complete the new spell, so it was imperative that they nipped the growing problem in the bud before it completely foiled all their plans.

But how could they prevent the lesser families from lusting over the genuine power that Percy promised them?

Well… Machaon, Theseus and Morpheus had already debated this topic and concluded that there was only one solution. Three Great Houses already stood against the Red-born, while only House Etna had openly joined him. But there were three more such families that had yet to pick a side.

That had to change – they had to convince the remaining Great Houses that Percy was more trouble than he was worth, and they had to do it before the boy’s coalition grew too powerful to care.

***

Phoebe walked along hills of freshly solidified stone, her crisp footsteps echoing across glistening sheets of obsidian. A couple of months ago, this place had been a flourishing grassland filled with life. Today, the transformed landscape was just a reminder of the cataclysmic battle that had been fought by figures approaching the pinnacle of the Colour realm.

She sighed.

The whole world probably thought of her as a monster. Neither Machaon nor Percy had bothered to keep their dealings with her secret, nor did they need to. It should be obvious to anyone with a functioning brain that the disgraced patriarch only drew breath because she had allowed it, and that the massive war that had engulfed the continent had been endorsed by her.

She had already made peace with that a long time ago, since none of this was new.

It was usually smaller families massacring one another over territory and petty grudges. The Great Houses rarely got directly involved, and the nobles never joined forces to form massive alliances with shared goals, but the mortals had murdered each other since before her rise to power.

She could have stopped it, of course, but she hadn’t.

It was a necessary evil. It was easy to spew rhetoric about how strife and conflict allowed stronger mortals and bloodlines to emerge, but Phoebe had personally seen it happen time after time.

Nobles kidnapped and raped one another to create more powerful strains of their bloodlines. Their weakest descendants inevitably fell into the crucible of war sooner and more frequently, leaving the mightiest ones behind to pass their lineage on and strengthen their families with every generation. The progenitors of House Avalon had probably started the same way, producing one of Remior’s most potent bloodlines and, eventually, Percy himself.

Phoebe was willing to let the continent drown in blood, and all the noble Houses crumble into dust if that was what it took to temper her favourite mortal into Remior’s greatest champion. Her only fear was that Percy might die in the process, but that was a risk that she had accepted.

The young man was resourceful and hardworking enough to keep growing even if she left him alone, but it was debatable whether he would have achieved the things that he had without the added pressure.

Would he have managed to hold his own against Deimos if he hadn’t spent months honing his skills against an army of bounty hunters? Would he have produced his Extreme spell if Hermes’ son hadn’t killed his familiar?

Would the Starry Queen have captured him if he hadn’t fallen unconscious near the base of the Fungal Spire? Would he have possessed the means to shove the disembodied deity’s soul inside a royal egg?

At the very least, Percy certainly wouldn’t have obtained even half the rewards that he had earned during his most recent trips to Thess’kala, the Vault of Magic, and the void tournament if not for his fusion with Micky.

Perhaps, his efforts would have still yielded acceptable results in due time – in a couple of centuries or millennia – but it was clear to Phoebe that allowing the Great Houses to go after him was by far the fastest way to maximize his potential.

The most recent battle was further proof that her gamble was paying off.

Everyone else had focused on the outcome of the fight – or what it meant for the future. That Machaon had been injured. That Archibald had been forced to relocate his family to the Fungal Spire. That Percy was working tirelessly to expand his coalition. That the Great Houses were trying to figure out the rest of the boosting art.

Phoebe, on the other hand, was more concerned about something else.

Reaching her destination, she stopped at the edge of the enormous chasm that the two armies had carved into the ground with their domains. The sea of lava that Machaon’s spells had created had cooled and solidified weeks ago, yet the grey ice beneath Phoebe’s feet had yet to thaw completely. Reaching down, she picked up a crystalline shard small enough to fit in her grasp, noting how cold it still felt.

Others might not think much of it, but that was because they didn’t understand the implications. They were shocked that Percy could hold his own against the patriarch of a Great House, yet Phoebe could clearly see that the source of the two mages’ strength was fundamentally different.

Despite Percy’s intricate spells and wide assortment of tricks, his mana was three grades lower than Machaon’s. The grey ice also happened to be the result of affinity fusion between a rare and a composite element – an inherently unstable combination.

Regardless of Percy’s strength, the crystalline patch shouldn’t have persisted nearly this long. Phoebe had been surprised when the boy’s mana had survived for multiple weeks after his battle with Deimos, yet the magical ice appeared to have lasted even longer this time.

Given Percy’s recent growth, Phoebe no longer harboured any doubt that he would eventually grow into a paragon, and even a powerful deity. However, a piece of unstable Green mana remaining frozen for over a month was an indication of something else entirely: the boy’s magic was beginning to passively impose itself upon the world, rejecting the very laws of existence.

The corner of her lips curled up slightly.