Book 7: Chapter 2 (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 2 - Metamorphosis

“Even the mountain can be moved by the river that refuses to stop.”

- A Quassian Aphorism

These were not creatures that the formulae of simple steel could solve with a final, fitting end. They were beyond the clean arithmetic of blade through throat, hammer through bone, and blood spilled upon stone.

And they had come meaning to make an end of me.

Still, defiance beat strongly in my heart. It was a mean, ugly thing by then, but it was mine. I would remain as I was until I could do so no longer. I would stand on my own feet and my own ruin waiting before me, before I ever bent my neck to another god. It was the ultimate expression of life, the defiance of death. 

And I knew even this delighted the dark Goddess.

Iasis, that nuisance, floated about and through the air, all dark grace and poisonous patience. She moved as if the laws of the world were a courtesy she had long ago ceased pretending to respect. The simple temptation of giving in trailed after her like perfume. The ease of surrender. The sweet, honeyed lie that all I needed to do was accept her aid, and all this suffering would be given meaning.

Yet here I was, caught in a trap of my own arrogance. I had walked into this place believing that will, skill, and hatred would be enough. Perhaps, in most places, they would have been. But here, my magic was strangled, my true power was inhibited, and I was without any allies. The only saving grace was that the golden chains that had once held me had shattered. No doubt Cardinal Mauros could not both summon his angelic horrors and maintain the spell that bound me. He was all too mortal, and he had mortal limits.

“You had best make a decision soon,” Iasis laughed, her voice bright with mock warning. “The longer the Devas remain on this plane, the stronger they will become. All it will take is for you to say that you need me.”

What was it with godlings and their need for mortal affirmation? It was pathetic on several levels. They dressed it in worship, in faith, in covenant and divine law, but beneath it all was the same hungry need. Say my name. Admit my power. Kneel, so I may pretend I lifted you up.

My answer to Iasis was simple.

Unshackled from the hateful chains, I drove back into the Knights, an avalanche of breaking steel and frustrated anger. It was not quite that cool, ice-cold place of the Berserk, but it was close enough. Anger did not strip clarity from me. It gave clarity and focus, narrowed purpose. It sharpened the world to impact, breath, and balance.

An armored fist brained one Knight hard enough to crumple his helm inward. A kick crushed another’s leg at the knee and left him screaming beneath the weight of his own plate. The weapon in my hand was no longer the borrowed sword; that had become a twisted ruin of metal I had thrown sometime in the chaos. Now I held a warhammer in both hands, and even that could barely endure my Strength. Its haft groaned. It shrieked in torture each time it met shield, breastplate, or bone.

It did not matter. When it broke, another weapon of the fallen would suffice. If that one broke, I would take another. If my hands were emptied, I would use my fists. This place had become a butcher’s chapel, and I continued my terrible harvest beneath the gaze of heaven. More experience to add to the tally.

Unfortunately, no matter how many I slew, the simple mathematics arrayed against me told me I would not even gain a level. That, somehow, offended me more than my own arrogance.

It was then that one of the Devas chose to intervene, as if the spilling of mortals offended some delicate celestial sense of aesthetics. It struck at me, its sword appearing not as though it had moved, but as though it had always been there. As though the universe had simply corrected itself and placed death where my body was meant to be.

Yet even that was not enough. Between the remnants of Sage’s Sight and my own Improved Dodge skill, not to mention the fact that I was not weighed down in my heavier Adamantium armor, I evaded the divine attack by a margin razor thin. The holy blade, filled with white-gold fire, struck the stone floor instead of me. Rock burst upward in a spray of broken chips and molten dust, and golden light flashed across my armor.

You have learned Advanced Dodge (lvl.1)

Finally, a smattering of progress. Finally, meaning. Struggle had meaning when the world, however grudgingly, acknowledged it.

I smirked within my helm, fancying that I saw a flicker of annoyance cross the Deva’s divine countenance. Perhaps I imagined it. Perhaps I did not. Either way, the thought pleased me.

Now that I was freed from the debuff, the Werewolves seemed to me to move a fraction slower to my perception. Two of them, thinking me distracted, came in a pincer movement, one lunging low while the other went for my blind spot. Their claws scraped sparks across my armor. Their jaws opened wide enough to take my throat and half my face besides.

I simply backhanded one and drove an elbow into the other, and they hit the stone floor mewling in pain. They would recover, of course. But they could still feel pain.

And pain, I could deliver. I took pleasure in it.

The Angel cast in the likeness of a woman formed a mace of pure auric light and joined her brother in assaulting me. Together, they herded me with a sequence of blows I could not simply dodge or evade. Their movements were too clean, too certain, too unburdened by mortal hesitation. They fought as though violence itself had been written for them in some divine script long ago, each strike a line of law, each feint a commandment.

She aimed a blow at my head, and I, against all reason and instinct, blocked hard with my dagger. I expected the weapon to shatter. I expected its broken pieces to whistle through the air.

It did not.

Zariyah the Dancing Blade, even slumbering, still possessed a power all of her own that had been born in her madness. She caught the mace of raw light and held. The impact rang through my arm, up my shoulder, and deep into the meat of my chest, but the blade did not break. Light screamed against its edge. Sparks fell like golden insects and died upon the stones beneath us.

The Angel looked stunned, as if this was not the result it had expected from a mortal thing. In that heartbeat, as I ducked beneath its compatriot’s two-handed sword, I punched her with a clean blow to the sternum. And, bound to this plane, physics did the rest.

My fist sent her crashing into the wall in an ungraceful tumble of wings and light. Stone cracked behind her. Dust fell in pale curtains from the ceiling. For a moment, all her beauty was reduced to impact and mass, and there was a savage comfort in that. Divine or not, if they were forced to wear bodies here, then bodies had rules in this universe.

The blow awakened something in me. It found the spark of defiance and fed it into flame. I was close to something. A path I had forgotten. A shape of myself I had left behind.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Iasis almost pouting at my display of raw might. She had wanted my need. Instead, she saw only more stubbornness, more violence, more refusal. On some level, my soul knew I needed only a little more before my cup was full.

As the Angel I had struck rose again, seemingly unharmed, the third Angel—or Deva, as Iasis had named them—called to something in the song of magic. Something made of the raw stuff of Mana and obedience answered. Seven lances of light formed in awful petals around it, arranged in a half-circle as it chanted in a tongue not meant for mortal ears. The sound of that language crawled across my bones. It did not merely speak. It judged.

Seven wings for seven virtues, or seven sins for me to judge.

Then it pointed at me, and time itself seemed to freeze.

The faces of mortal men and monstrous Werewolves were caught in the space between breaths. I saw terror there, hate, and forlorn surrender. A few even wore the vacant awe of men who were witnessing the mandate of heaven. Once, such a heavy cocktail might have been sweet nectar to my senses. But, then the lances of light smashed into me.

There was no dodging this. No evasion. No defense. The attack did not travel so much as arrive, and when it arrived, it arrived everywhere at once. I burned. How I burned.

I felt my soul flayed by something vast and pitiless, the dirt and weeping pus of a thousand accumulated sins judged in a single instant of eviscerating light. It was not fire. Fire was honest. Fire consumed what it touched and left ash behind. This was worse. This was an accusation made from judgment and heat. It peeled through armor, flesh, memory, and my own pride. And everywhere it passed, it found something to condemn with the stamp of agony.

For the first time since I had come into this world, I saw my Health drop below half. The burning forced me to my knees in a parody of prayer, and the humiliation of it was almost worse than the pain. Almost. My gauntleted hand struck the stone hard enough to crack it, and still the light drove me lower, as if heaven itself meant to grind my face into the floor in obeisance.

With that abject humiliation came agony enough to swallow even my rage.

But pain comes with a certain clarity. It is an abstraction of thought that either turns one toward some higher purpose or reduces one to an animal. Sometimes, it does both. Sometimes the difference does not matter.

Still my Health fell. And kept falling. It overcame my Regeneration completely. Worse, the agony bypassed my Improved Pain Nullification skill, sliding through it like a knife between ribs. There was no dignity in it, only the raw fact of suffering and the stubborn, hateful refusal to let suffering be the final word.

You have learned Improved Pain Nullification (lvl.3)

Thought and sense became different things. Things to be put in a box and examined later, now that the skill had improved. The pain did not vanish, but it became something that could be catalogued. Something that could be studied. Counted. Stored away. Yet it still came, wave after wave of mind-rending torture, each one trying to take my sense from me and leave only a kneeling thing behind.

Then, just as I began to think my mind might unravel, realization came to me. The goblet was finally full.

I could walk the path once more. The Path of Carnage.

The numbers of my Status rose to astronomical heights—heights so vast they lost all meaning, no longer capable of conveying the power they were meant to measure. And with that path came an instinctive emotion beyond hate for the golden beings before me. Hate was too small a word. This was older and cleaner. More simple. It was reason.

With the first step, I became more, while becoming sublimely less. One step along the Path let me regain my feet, the pressure of this place falling from my shoulders like rain. Another step, and I could feel familiar old friends speak to me, even here, in this place of near-apotheosis. Not voices, not quite. Impressions. Hungers. Old echoes walking the corridors of my soul.

There was Death here aplenty.

The seeds of it had been sown by my fists, my feet, and my weapons. Men lay broken across the floor. Monsters had bled here and healed and bled again. The hall stank of hot metal, wet fur, ruptured guts, and bitter ozone. Now it was time to use the other aspect of my being. The power I was remembering with every step I took.

The roar of it erupted. A great circle of it. Improved Entropic Aura, the death of deaths made manifest and focused with clarity of my Path.

You have learned Improved Entropic Aura (lvl.3)

In answer to this great affront, the Devas came all at once, from all sides. They descended as golden lightning bolts, swooping upon wings of assumed justice. Their blades and maces and burning weapons carved luminous scars through the air.

On the Path, it did not matter in the slightest.

I backhanded one, slashed at another with my knife, and kicked the third, all in one smooth motion. They remained unharmed despite the force of my blows. I registered that fact in the heightened clarity of my Asura state. Their forms could be displaced, insulted by violence, but not yet truly wounded by it. Not yet at least.

I could not deal meaningful damage to the Celestials. Not with brute force alone. But I could still clear the field of the Werewolves and Knights. I could still make a ruin of every mortal fool who had thought this hall a safe place from which to watch me die. And Cardinal Mauros. And the Lord de Savant.

Yet, their sentence would have to be passed at another time. For they had fled. Gone in the chaos while I battled the Celestials with all of my focus. Fled, the Cardinal, the Lord, his remaining Knights, and foul-spawned daughters. Cowards all of them before my greatness.

Now I was locked in this hall in a battle for my life against this triad of the Divine. So be it. If the world had narrowed to three Angels, a laughing Goddess, and my own refusal to die on my Path, then I would make of that narrow world a battlefield.

I began to chant, meaning to cast the spell that would summon the shades of the dead to my side, but upon the Path, my voice felt awfully slow. Too slow by far. The words crawled when they needed to fly. Breath was a clumsy instrument.

So my hands formed the words instead. A gift I had learned from my time with Zariyah.

I call to you, those who stood behind or before. By the bond that joins us, one more time, one more glimpse of this turn upon the wheel. Become the shadows at my side. I am more than I was. I am all that I will ever be, my hands spoke.

The words came with understanding. True understanding flowed through me, through the power I sought to command. This was knowing with the marrow. Then, I released the spell by asking its name, and the souls of those who had died by my hand came to me.

Whispers of the Grave. Overboost.

You have learned Whispers of the Grave (lvl.3)

You have learned Overboost (lvl.5)

The Knights of House de Savant had escaped, but they had not brought their fallen dead. That was careless of them. Then again, men who fled from judgment often forgot what they left behind.

And the souls I had called forth once again needed vessels.

“Got yourself in another pickle here, Gil?” Elwin laughed, an insouciant grin plastered across his face. But he looked too pale, too thin around the edges, like a memory badly copied.

“These look worthy prey,” Enkidu declared, though something was missing from his booming voice. Some warmth. Some great, stupid, living certainty that had once filled every word he spoke. What remained was close enough to hurt.

I was no longer alone for they were with me. The shades of my friends who had fallen. The dead I had made. The dead who had chosen, or been compelled, to answer. In another life, perhaps, I might have wondered whether that made me monstrous. In this one, beneath the eyes of angels, I found the question tedious.

Upon the Path of Carnage there was only one purpose.

The summoned souls of the myriad dead found the corpses I had slain, bringing to them new life. Each reanimation drained a little more of my Mana until the dead were brought into a holy unlife and began to stir. Broken Knights rose with heads hanging at wrong angles. Split helms turned toward the light. Fingers twitched around fallen weapons. Corpses that had been meat a moment before were made to remember the shape of violence.

The Devas shrieked as if I had committed some grave sin.

Then they tore into the summoned Undead, ignoring me for the moment. Golden weapons carved through dead men. Auric fire poured into reanimated flesh. 

It should have been horrifying, but I laughed. My minions had taken the threat. The laughter kept coming. A great, roiling thing, bubbling up from somewhere black and bottomless within. I was not done. Not yet. Not by half.

“It will not be enough, no matter how much you struggle,” Iasis complained prettily, still floating lazily through the air. “All you have done is buy yourself time.”

I knew better now than to strike at her and waste Stamina. Some part of my soul understood that she was nothing more than a projection. Gods did not risk themselves where mortals could touch them. To do so would strip away their so-called divinity, their mystery, their precious distance from the mud and blood of the world.

Still, in that moment, I wanted very badly to hit her.

But wants and desires were always secondary to necessities. And pride was not a necessity, so it too, was stripped away.

The armored shell I wore had reached its limit. It had endured claws, steel, and divine fire. Now it groaned around me, dented and split. The thing that resided within my arm stirred.

I had always placed a subconscious limit upon it. A leash, perhaps. But in this hour of great need, a little of that restraint peeled away. I thought it would form a shield as it always had done. Instead, it read my need, my intent, and flowed from my arm like living tar, sliding beneath my ruined armor and spreading across my chest, my ribs, my spine. It crawled over me with terrible intimacy, finding every rent in the steel, every weakness in the plates, every place where blood had warmed the metal from within. Then it began to grow.

The pressure built. Then the armor burst.

Steel exploded outward in jagged fragments, the chrysalis of my old protection torn apart from within. Something new took its place. The Mimic spread over us in a perfect suit of organic heavy plate, black and wet and breathing, alive in ways no forged metal had any right to be. It clenched around my body not like armor, but like a second skeleton learning the shape of my wrath.

A pulse beat through it. Then another. In the center of the new helm, something grew. Flesh and chitin and dark metal drew together, shaping an eye where no eye should have been. It opened.

Our senses flooded with new perspective.

The hall widened. The light sharpened. The angels burned like unclean wounds in the world. For a moment, there was no line between us.

We had become something more. We were becoming Cataclysm.

Yet, still Iasis delighed. Yet, still Iasis laughed.

With one hand, aided now by the many voices within, we summoned Greater Drain. It was a gamble, for the spell was costly if it failed, but we needed a way to keep my Mana from running dry. Need, properly understood and focused, had a way of sharpening though.

It came to us with all its murderous glee, a dark thing of midnight, hungry for the celestial servants of the Goddess. The spell stretched from me in tendrils of black intent, eager, vicious, almost joyful in its purpose. And, Fortune, that fickle whore, failed us. 

The tentacles of darkness struck a golden hexagonal shield summoned by the seven-winged angel and broke against one of its layers. The shield flashed with a lattice of divine geometry, each pane bright as a law written by a tyrant. Our spell shattered across it and bled away into sparks of dying shadow.

Seven and three. Auspicious numbers, we thought. But even auspicious numbers paled before the number one.

So be it. It was time to fully commit. We cast Greater Drain again, and again, and again, each spell turned aside by a layer of that golden shield. We cast, and cast again, draining our combined Mana reserves. The Devas butchered my Undead while I hammered at their golden defenses with a ravenous hunger shaped into the ebon magic of Greater Drain. There was no elegance in it. No grand duel of sorcerous refinement. It was attrition that stripped the shield of its layers.

Until finally, at last, a bond formed between us. And through that bond came a river of Mana. And not just Mana, but a glimpse of the Divine. The equations. The raw mathematics of what defined the thing called Holy. It flooded into me in bright, impossible fragments. Prayer as structure. Purity as violence. The lie of sanctity stripped down into mechanisms, ratios, channels, and intent. 

You have learned Great Prayer (lvl.1)

You have learned Holy Strike (lvl.4)

You have learned Purify (lvl.5)

I laughed again, a great peal filled with the stolen epiphany. Devas. Angels. Servants of the Divine. Whatever names they might claim, whatever light they might wear, it did not matter in the end. They were servants, but man was made in Divines’s image. And perhaps that meant they could bleed too. Or, at least, be unmade.

They shrieked as the spell, in its hunger, reached for the other two angels. More of their life-stuff flowed into me. It filled my Mana. Filled my Stamina. Filled my Health. The burning wounds in me cooled. The agony remained, but now it was only another thing I owned.

The board had been well and truly reset.

Now, all that I needed was a suitable weapon.