The Hundred Reigns 218: The World of Ruins (12) (Patreon)

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He had become tyranny itself. The Lord of Dark incarnate. 

His size now surpassed that of even Asterion. Wyrmscales coated in Overlord metal covered nearly every inch of his body, and a great dragon’s tail sprouted out of his back to sweep towers to the ground. His claws were death’s edge, his four blood-coated wings a hurricane’s cradle, his tyrant’s crown a tower of black steel. 

A reptilian head had sprouted from each shoulder; the left one belonged to a great and fearsome dragon with a maw of fire, the right to a sinister serpent oozing lies. A demonic visage with burning eyes and sword-teeth had grown out of his chest. The four were one, bound unto him. 

The archfiends who had gathered to greet his ascension were still there with their crystal baubles, but his aura had slain everyone else present. The elves, the elementals, and even the plants at the chasm’s edge had all perished; their souls twisted into shadows, their corpses animated by his magic to serve. 

There is no freedom, only disobedience. 

The Overlord spirit in him no longer spoke to him through vague feelings and suggestions. Simon could hear its whispers clear as day in the back of his mind, promising him destruction and domination in equal measures; telling him that it was his destiny to rule all of time; past, present, and future! 

He only had to take a look at his expanding domain. Though Mardok had been granted dominion over Frightwall during his lordship, the castle was Abraxas’ Domain, a creature of fear whose bricks were nightmares and its moat a flood of tears. It would engulf all of Brimir in time. Its fortifications would encircle cities and oceans alike, and its towers would rise to break the barrier holding hell’s fury from the heavens above. 

In time, Simon would climb them to reach his rebellious slaves on the moons and torch their gardens. Entire generations would live and die inside continent-sized rooms, their souls trapped to serve as his prisoners and slaves for all eternity. Mortals would have no choice but to submit to an eternity as his faithful slaves. 

This was the Overlord’s will.

I… this is not me… Simon tried to anchor himself and focus, fighting against the darkness clouding his mind and judgment. It’s… too much…

Was a person still themselves when drunk or under narcotics? Simon’s situation was not so different. A part of him remained awake, but the alien sensations and the power high rushing through his mind made him feel like something else entirely; something great and powerful.

He could no longer tell where he ended and the Overlord spirit began, if such separation had ever existed in the first place. His very thoughts looped back to the absolute conquest of the universe, the abject suffering of his lessers, and the utter annihilation of any who dared to defy him. 

However, there was discord in the harmony of his being. Flames of draconic selfishness burned his face from his left without warning. 

Fire and Mythic damage! Regeneration activated. 

The power involved would have incinerated lesser beings, but Simon’s metal skin healed faster than the flames could melt it away. He didn’t even feel pain, only anger as he turned to glare at the attacker: his own dragon head. 

“Mine!” The creature snapped at Simon, the ghost inhabiting it unwilling to accept his sun had set. “My Class! My power! Mine!”

An annoyed Simon grabbed the unruly dragon with his hand and tore it off. Gargauth’s skull went flying into the chasm and the acidic blood surging from the stump melted the stone beneath them, but a new head swiftly grew to replace the old one. It tried to snap its jaws at Simon again, who held it in place by the horns. 

“Your transformation is more intense than young Balzam’s,” the snake head on the right hissed with a voice that was both male and female. It was the first, the oldest, and perhaps the wisest. “You nonetheless inherited all our unique gifts. A dragon’s resilience, a serpent’s regeneration, and a warlord’s cunning make for a potent combination.” 

“My fool of a child has his head too high in the clouds to appreciate the situation, Mardok.” 

That voice was the one that snapped Simon out of his power trip and back to reality. He looked down at the face in his chest, and though it had become one of metal rather than flesh, he would have recognized his father’s visage anywhere. 

His predecessors were reborn through him, each a face of the Overlord archetype. 

“Stop wasting time and spend it well, Simon,” his father admonished him with scorn, his baleful, fiery eyes glaring down at the insects before him. “The experience is here for the harve—”

Simon stabbed both of his eyes for his impudence with his thumbs, and though he felt his father’s pain through his chest and the wounds healed quickly, the cry of pain that followed did fill him with joy. Both his human spirit and the Overlord one had acted as one. 

Still, he deigned to grace other beings present with his attention and looked at the lesser demons who had surrounded him in the throes of terror. Their diabolical instincts, heightened by his Unquestionable Ruler Perk, told them they ought to grovel; yet they dared commit the ultimate crime. 

They dared to stand.

He had ordered them to submit or be destroyed, and they would not kneel. 

“Your Majesty?” Shin-Mastemo inquired, with both of his voices filled with dread. The Overlord spirit deemed anything that wasn’t a scream or an abject plea an insult, so Simon struggled to even listen. “Are you… are you in control?”

The Overlord answered with a fiery glare. 

A volcanic eruption’s worth of flames poured out of his three eyes at the false priest. The Water Megalith immediately generated a tsunami’s worth of water to protect the fool, only to evaporate at the mere touch of his hellfire. The blast struck Shin-Mastemo and smashed against the edge of the Great Chasm along with it, causing a massive chunk of land to fall into the screaming Abyss below. 

“No one questions me, Mastemo,” Simon said, the darkness inside his soul whispering the words to his lips so he could make them his own. “No one.”

He would not repeat himself. They would surrender or they would be destroyed. 

A disobedient madness seized Asterion, and he dared to resist. “Elemental Chaos!”

The Minotaur called upon his subverted crystals, and the other so-called archfiends lent their power to the mix. The four crystals glowed with stolen light and borrowed darkness, their combination twisting the might of the elements themselves into an apocalypse worthy of a Tier X spell. A tsunami, a hurricane, an inferno, and a landslide, each capable of annihilating a city surged in his direction from all sides.

Simon dismissed them all with a wave of his hand. 

A massive Chaos Wave erupted in a tidal wave of miasma that returned those feeble attacks back into the raw energy they sprang from. His malevolence struck the megaliths and shattered them to pieces in four cataclysmic explosions of pure mana. The feeble prayers fueling their existence went silent forever, the light within them extinguished. 

“Impossible…” Isfet muttered in fear, only for Mardok to glare at her with Hellfire Gaze. She let out a scream of pain as her jester outfit caught fire. 

“Annoying insects!” Gargauth’s head briefly forgot his grudge against his fellow Overlords and turned to the demons in paranoid fury. “You are not even worthy of joining my hoard!”

His maw fired a beam of light which had ravaged so many cities during his reign and attacked Exodeos. The fear of nothingness attempted to cancel out the attack with his annihilation attack, but the sheer power of the blast overwhelmed and swallowed him in light.  

“You dare challenge me, bull?!” Simon unfolded his wings in his rage and lunged at Asterion to bring the bull to heel. His speed was that of a snake, his grace that of an experienced dragon, and his grip stronger than iron.

He grabbed Asterion by the back of his head and smashed his skull into the ground. 

Simon wouldn’t stop there, however. He continued his flight across the ruins of Illusea and the Darkwood that covered it, drawing a canyon’s faultline across the island with Asterion’s face. His aura withered and rotted all that it touched, reducing trees to dust for him to step on. 

Asterion dared to resist the inevitable and elbowed Simon to free himself. His strength was great enough to shatter castle towers, but the Overlord’s scales belonged to the strongest of dragons. Simon slammed him into a growing hill of fortifications, then stomped his head under his foot.

“Stay in your place, my lesser half,” Simon said, the words coming out of his mouth before he could even ponder their implications. He simply couldn’t even contemplate de-escalation. Every slight was a death sentence, and any compromise an unbearable humiliation. 

He had become absolute tyranny, which left no room for anything beyond its own perpetuation; and he couldn’t act any other way. 

Pain surged in his foot as two lights glowed beneath it. Beams of unholy light burnt through his flesh, forcing him to pull back. Asterion immediately rose up and struck him with his Devil Fist straight in the face. 

Medium Physical and Mythic damage! 

The blow was enough to throw him slightly off-balance, but his wounds had already started to close before the second hit came in. Simon grabbed Asterion's horns and forced him back, until the two foes could glare at each other.  

“Mardok,” Asterion cursed, his eyes glowing with unholy light. “I should have known you wouldn’t accept death so readily.”

“Do you see the foolishness of your cause now, brother?” Mardok’s head let out a hissing laughter. “There is no escape from what I have created. Our rule shall never end.”

“Let me show you a vision of your future,” Balzam’s face added, his eyes glowing with malevolence. “None shall escape the slaughterhouse!”

Aspect of Balzam activated Crown of Pain. 

A fiery halo of screaming faces appeared over Simon’s head, illuminating the night and striking fear into Asterion’s heart. 

“Yes, we will devour you, as was our design from the start,” Mardok’s head taunted his sibling. “And then you shall remember nothing.”

It was a lie, a deceitful attempt at sowing strife and demoralizing their foes, but Simon was beyond caring either way. His power demanded to be unleashed upon those who had destroyed the world he sought to rule, that he brand Asterion like a cow or destroy him for his impudence. 

I’m… Simon tried to focus the best he could in spite of the darkness overwhelming his mind. I’m… in control. 

A flood of biting flies and a beam of cosmic energy hit him in the back, breaking his concentration. Asterion’s eyes unleashed another of his gaze attacks straight in Simon’s face in the form of unholy light forged from the last dreams of dying men. They struck Simon with otherworldly power and threw him back for good measure, sending the Overlord stumbling. 

Heavy Soul and Light damage! Instadeath negated by Unyielding Essence!

“Now, Shin-Drazil!” Asterion shouted as he hurriedly warped away.

Simon regained his footing just long enough to hear the sound of thunder above his head. He looked up to see Shin-Mastemo flying above him with his staff raised to the sky. The very clouds appeared to reshape themselves into a massive urn of dizzying size, tipping over towards the earth below.

A flood poured out of it, straight onto Simon’s head.

A veritable sea fell upon him in a torrential flow. Countless gallons upon gallons of liquid crushed him under a waterfall bigger than anything nature could ever conjure and brought him to his knees. 

Massive Water damage!

Scornful anger swelled in Simon’s heart, his mind set on murder. An Overlord did not belong on his knees, yet the crushing weight pouring on his shoulders forced him down. He needed more strength from the Abyss itself. 

“Darkbound.”

The power of evil flowed into him, and the hill became a mountain. 

He grew and grew until the crushing waterfall on his shoulders became little more than a drizzle. The earth shook beneath his gargantuan weight, and his hand reached out to the sky to crush the urn of clouds above his head. The once-gigantic Asterion now barely reached up to his knees, and the likes of Mastemo had become no bigger than a mosquito.  

So Simon swatted him away like one. He backhanded the fallen Cleric with his house-sized fist, shattering the feeble shields he put up to defend himself with and then sent him hurling across the horizon.

More bugs attempted to sting him. Exodeos and Isfet flew at him, the former sending a wave of energy attempting to strip him of his buffs, the latter unleashing a torrent of flying vermin capable of devouring an army of men whole. 

He shrugged them both off. 

You have ignored Exodeos’ Grand Reset. 

It was the battle with the empowered Nodens all over again… except Simon was the archfiend, and they were the pigs willingly offering themselves to the killing floor. 

“You fools,” Mardok’s head said, his neck now the length of a road and his eyes two blazing stars. “You derive your feeble strength from the fears of mortals, while ours derive from the darkness itself.”

“Victory is assured, so long as we do not fight among ourselves,” Balzam said, glaring at Gargauth. “Will you behave, lizard?”

“I will devour all three of you after exterminating these vermin,” Gargauth replied as he opened his maw of abyssal flames. “This world belongs to Gargauth!”

Simon’s two serpentine heads fired two apocalyptic beams at once; one with Hellfire Gaze, the other with searing dragonflames. Isfet fled by turning herself into a swarm of flies dispersing in all directions while Exodeos attempted to cancel out the attack, but there was no escape nor relief. The searing flames vaporized them both and left their crystals to fall onto the earth below. The beams went on to tear the land asunder, vaporizing the small lakes left in the wake of Shin-Mastemo’s attack and ripping apart valleys into canyons. 

Level 75 Overlord Perk: Dreadful Aura VI (Active): Anyone affected by Terror within your aura’s range suffers a crippling debuff to all stats, regardless of the source. Terror effects within your aura’s range will also ignore Resistance.

A pity Simon had already slain Exodeos once before. The rush of a new level hardly compared to the feeling of omnipotence that pervaded Simon, but he wished more nonetheless. More. More. 

His nine eyes turned on Asterion. 

“You leave me no choice, Simon,” the rebellious archfiend declared. Immense power born of the fear of death itself materialized around him in a demiplane where flesh withered in seconds, and the end was a certainty. Asterion drew upon his Domain to engulf his master. 

But he lived in Simon’s world now, and suffered at his mercy. 

Asterion’s Domain collapsed before it could even take form. The truth of the matter became clear when the ground beneath their feet turned into bricks and stone rather than burned trees and smouldering lakes. Hills became riddled with hallways and corridors, the woods turned into walled gardens, and fortifications grew like cancer to mend the wounds of the land. 

Frightwall had become the world. 

“I am as far beyond you, as you are beyond mere common demons,” Simon declared as he summoned his scepter and transformed it into a hill-sized mace. “Here is a lesson you shall not forget.”

He brought forth his Underworld Hammer down on Asterion and smote him unto the earth. 

The sheer blow shattered the floor into a fiery pit. A volcano erupted at the point of impact, spewing lava onto the expanding city-sized carpet. An earthquake cracked the ruins of Illusea apart, and a volcano arose in its center. It spewed pyroclastic smoke and fire into Simon’s face without harming him, a wicked smirk stretching on his lips beneath his helmet. 

A lake of lava remained when he raised his hammer again, and Asterion was nowhere to be found. He must have been pushed deep into Brimir’s crust to suffer its warmth. 

“He is still alive,” Balzam noted scornfully. “We must destroy him at once.”

“He will return soon enough,” Mardok replied dismissively. “That bull is too stubborn to give up. He is a prisoner of his own limited nature.”

“What an indignity, to share my experience points with you three,” Gargauth complained. His maw attempted to bite Simon’s throat, but he swiftly grabbed the head with his hand and kept it in place. “Return me my due at once, thief! It is the will of Gargauth!”

“Do you see the power at your fingertips, Simon?” Mardok whispered into his ear. “You are the Miasmic God now. You have the strength to eradicate those who would threaten your subjects, to abolish death and suffering, and to bring peace to all.” The snake smirked a ghastly grin. “Would you truly surrender it?”

No. 

No, Simon wouldn’t. How could he abandon this might? How could he deny the overwhelming power which had chosen him to wield it? However destructive, it could be used to save the world, to reshape time into an ideal future as he saw fit; all guided by his benevolent will. 

“The power will fade in two to three weeks, but think of the damage we can do during that time,” Mardok mused, his baleful gaze turning to the sky. Frightwall’s towers were crashing against an invisible obstacle keeping them from the dark reaches of space, but they would soon drill their way through it and to the moons above. “How about we bring down the sky?”

“Your…” Simon rasped, his mind struggling to form sentences that weren’t orders, boasts or taunts. “Chronicles… Where?”

Gargauth’s answer was quick and final. “Never!”

“Mine is with an old friend unlikely to relinquish it…” Mardok hesitated. “I could ask him to do so, but it was a gift, and the journey to damnation matters more than the destination. It is in struggle that the cruelest of souls are forged.”

Balzam’s eyes looked up to his successor. “You already have mine, you fool of a son. You simply lacked the guts to read it through.”

What? Simon struggled to understand the meaning behind his father’s words when something caught his attention on the horizon. 

A great piece of land was flying straight at them. 

Simon recognized Helel’s floating dominion, albeit smaller and less luminous. An army of machines, fiends, dragonkin, and wyvern-riding undead escorted it like cows hurling themselves at the killing floor. Simon caught a glimpse of Lotan among them, and he sensed other rebellious archfiends nearby. 

The Dominators had come to challenge his might. 

“Look at that,” Mardok said with a dark chuckle. “More victims.”

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