The New Dark Lord: Book 3- Chapter 20 (Patreon)

Silenos Shaiagrazni just sort of disappeared as the creature- whatever it was- hit him. Hexeri braced herself for the wind of its impact, but none came. Even the sound barely did. Wrong, distorted, but without quite any distortion. It was like the poorly recalled memory of a sound heard decades, even centuries in the past. Something spoken of time and time again, mutated by retellings. 

Everything here was like that. Wrong, in a way that made her skin crawl. But the impact, that was realer than any she’d seen before. Shaiagrazni was blasted off his feet, all however-many tons of him, and whipped high into the air.

Neither her, nor Ensharia, even had the chance to act.

High above, the caster was at least making a nuisance of himself. In moments the Demon— Hexeri guessed— was engulfed in flames, shrieking and thrashing around. Shaiagrazni clung onto it, twisting his grip and bringing himself away from its maw. A useless effort. Another maw just sprouted up right before the spot he was climbing to, locking onto him anyway as tendrils burst from the thing’s belly.

No, entrails. Its guts had claws and teeth, acid-tipped fangs that sunk into Shaiagraznian armour and gouged down into the flesh to leave bloody foam oozing out. Silenos Shaiagrazni screamed in pain. Then he and his enemy smashed down into the ground.

The shaking of earth underfoot was like a distant memory too.

Ensharia lunged ahead before Hexeri could, much to her chagrin. The paladin was actually her equal on a physical level, and seemed to have none of the self-preservation that slowed others down in combat. Granted, it also dragged her right into the path of a tendril as it tore off one of her pauldrons and acid-scarred the flesh beneath. Her mace smashed the tip off while she stumbled back from yet more attacks.

That was when Hexeri’s arc of shadows thudded into the thing’s side and dug in deep. It squealed like a stuck pig, a sound that only grew louder as Shaiagrazni brought his shield down hard into its mouth. 

The mouth closed around it, and took his arm off with a single crunch of armour-plating and viscera. Shaiagrazni stared at the stump which had once been his limb. Surprised, Hexeri thought, was the strongest emotion in him, far outstripping pain or agony. Probably he’d not considered that a thing could exceed him of all people by so great a margin.

Her shadows kept splashing down into it as a rain of jagged splinters, digging deep and settling under its flesh. Trailing minute lengths back to her fingers. Hexeri grew them within it, then pulled hard and expanded them all at once. 

The Demon was tugged back just in time to miss its second bite, and Shaiagrazni helped it on its stumble away from him by aiming his cannon-arm at the thing’s leg and firing. Hexeri winced, seeing the limb fall apart but…Not rightly. It were as if the matter of this thing’s body simply refused to fully interact with any other. Fog, almost. Collapsing back in to partially reform even as it was broken apart. Not healing so much as failing to even register its own damage.

Some of it, at least, stuck. Perhaps that was the function of will. Hexeri threw some more into her next fusilade of darkness.

Another tendril came for her, broke as Ensharia’s mace smacked it down. Then Silenos was leaping, flying with the beat of sprawling wings, and coming blasting into the Demon’s back from above. Again, the damage seemed ephemeral to it, and its focus turned now to the paladin. It was halfway through lunging for her when Shaiagrazni’s great bulk came down atop it, his whip-like tail tangling its own tendrils into a knot and his cannon pressing hard against the back of its neck.

If it had interacted with the blast as it should have, Hexeri thought the thing might have been decapitated in truth. As things were it merely roared and twisted around, body actually reshaping to face Shaiagrazni as its limbs thrust back and dug into him. Blood and pus burst from his body in a dozen places and he fell back beneath it, mauled like a mundane man beneath the weight of a bear.

Hexeri could do nothing but continue her attack as Ensharia closed to aid him.

Between the two of them chipping away at it, and Shaiagrazni keeping it ensnared within a melee against the only one able to even slightly weather its savagery, the Demon actually seemed to slow down. Hexeri wondered at first whether it was her imagination, nerves fraying at the thought. But, no. Its weakness was growing, slowly like a tumour, but growing nonetheless. They just needed to maintain the pressure.

Snapping filled the air, grotesque and a thousand times more real than any impact-shock Hexeri’s ears had received. The sounds of Shaiagrazni’s body breaking down, she realised. Her efforts redoubled, she threw every ounce of magic she could muster into the Demon, one javelin of darkness followed another, ripping chunks from it, slowing it more, weakening it.

But not as fast as it weakened Shaiagrazni. Moments later she saw the Fleshcrafter’s arms fall limply to his sides, watched the Demon rear up in triumph, and stared helpless as it brought its countless limbs down into his torso.

For the second time, she heard a sound with perfect clarity. Silenos Shaiagrazni’s chest simply caved in, ribs burst apart. His upper and lower body became separate entities, and the man’s gore spurted so high into the air that it would have reached his war-form’s head even if it were standing upright.

Instead it rained down across all of him at once, painting his broken form while it lay twitching. As the Demon stepped back, Hexeri’s dread reached a crescendo. Its eyes flitted from her to Ensharia, considering, pausing. Then it turned, and flew away. 

She stood in disbelief for a moment. At the horror of what she’d seen, at the fortune of her surviving it. Then her concern turned to Shaiagrazni.

Or what was left of him. Putting aside the sizable fraction of his body that had been outright severed, much of it was…Liquefying. Dissolving and bubbling before her eyes like ice pressed against forge-hot steel. Hexeri found herself heading to his side, hands hovering impotently around him, confusion surely written across her face.

Ensharia was beside her, just as useless. Both stared as Shaiagrazni’s eyes began to flutter around. Twisting, darting about. He blinked once. Then, she realised, his concentration hardened as his body started to reconfigure.

“Dear god.” Ensharia whispered. “What is he doing?”

***

Silenos watched the gaping morons with some satisfaction as he reconfigured his body. It made sense, he supposed. In all likelihood this was the first time either of them had ever seen a true wielder of the arcane enter such a state. In fact, given what he knew of the New World’s pitiable magic, it was unlikely they had even heard of what he was about to do being hypothesised.

He hoped it was an enlightening experience for them, because he certainly did not intend to do it again.

Two primary concerns were before Silenos, and either on its own would have been an issue. Both together may well have killed him. The first was the simple matter of biomass. Silenos, ordinarily, could overcome such a lack. There was an abundance of biological matter around he could draw on- subterranean lifeforms or bacteriological sources, or, failing all else, merely the endlessly inefficient process of conjuring it from raw mana. 

Here, that would eat into his already dangerously-depleted reserves and shorten the too-slight time he had before the Shallow Depths crushed his bubble of rationality and obliterated him. 

Secondly, he had to concern himself with the continued sustaining of his own life. With his body in such a mangled state, it was only deliberative magical exertion that kept his mind from passing as well. The former demanded utmost skill and precision from Silenos, the latter a good deal of concentration being diverted elsewhere.

He simply could not reconstitute himself while sustaining his life, nor could he afford to compensate for precision with raw power. So Silenos found another strategy. 

Within his body was a genetic code. This was nothing unusual, it was how bodies were formed and sustained. Silenos had long since copied off his own, and he put it to use now. Slowly, he formed embryonic matter in exact accordance with his own biology- making some choice changes to tissue density and nerve conductivity which would shorten the process of Fleshcrafting his disgustingly natural product into a suitably effective state. As he flooded the embryo, both with mana and matter to fuel its accelerated growth, he was able to sustain his cognition with only a bare exertion of will and magic.

“He’s…Oh god, he’s doing it. He’s…I think he’s healing!” It was Ensharia who said it, Silenos was dimly aware. A distant voice barely piercing the fog of his senses. Thought and sensibility were necessary for him, sensory input, for the time being, he could do without. If any hazards arrived that demanded his attention, they would either ignore him or he would die. He concentrated upon the processes of sustaining himself.

The body grew, undergoing weeks of progress within mere moments. Then years of natural growth in minutes. Far from being easy, it still demanded a considerable fraction of his remaining mana. A human body would consume around forty to fifty megajoules of energy in the process of growing. Silenos’ haste made this process a dozen times less efficient, his addled state perhaps halved that remaining efficiency. The exotic nature of his product quartered what was left. After several gigajoules’ worth of mana had been removed from him- enough to almost atomize a body, let alone assemble one- he was, at last. Complete.

Only one final step remained, to transfer his consciousness. Silenos did so easily enough. He unbound his cognition- his essence or soul as others would say- from the meat of his brain, then deposited it into the new vessel. Sensation returned as an instantaneous flood.

“I live.” Silenos announced, getting up with a grunt. Ensharia and Hexeri’s eyes were wide, almost disbelieving. 

“You…” It was Hexeri who had begun speaking, Ensharia seemed quite beyond words. “You…You…”

Silenos’ head tilted. Genuine confusion was the only reaction her stare invoked, it was one of the few things Silenos had encountered that truly baffled. 

“What is the matter?”

The Vampire took her time in responding, seeming to need a few moments more before she was finally able.

“What…Why are you a woman?”

Silenos looked down, tilting his head. His- her, now, Silenos supposed- body had been made for nothing so vitally as speed. She decided honesty was the most appropriate response.

“I cloned myself.” Silenos explained, making sure to use small words so the woman would understand. “In order to create a new body for myself as quickly as I could. This involved making a…” She did not know what an embryo was, Silenos realised. “The simplest, earliest form of a developing human’s body. These start as female until particular conditions emerge that change them to male. I did not wish to waste time or effort inducing those conditions, as I had other concerns, and so my body remained female.”

The vampire just stared, and Silenos wondered if she’d heard a word she said.

“Why didn’t you make yourself a man?” Ensharia cut in, looking even more confused than the vampire. So much so that she was only just now even asking. Silenos sighed.

“Because I do not care, I believe I have made my view of sex and its relevance towards a magic caster quite clear. Now stop wasting my time with these incessant questions.” It did feel strange to hear her own voice, now, so high had it become. Silenos mused on that as she began walking.

The women- her fellow women- followed after.