Chapter 444: The Blood God

I stared at the hand in my grip, mostly because it was still moving. The fingers twitched, the talons flexed, and the black blood that dripped from the severed wrist hissed and smoked where it touched the stone. The god’s hand was alive, even separated from its body, and it was trying to claw its way free of my grasp.

"Ugh... that’s disgusting."

I tightened my grip, pouring lightning out of my palm, and crushed the thing, and I let it fall to the ground and looked up.

The cavern was in chaos. The ceiling had partially collapsed from the impact, and massive slabs of stone were still raining down. The soldiers who had survived the warband and the shockwaves from our fight were screaming, but their voices were ending, as no mortal could survive here.

I flinched from a particularly pained scream and looked at the crystal in my hand that was blinking. It seemed to be drinking the souls of the dead. What in the world was this thing?

And somewhere above, in the deep pit where my lightning had buried the god, he was pulling himself free. I could hear him, even from this place. The sound would have been terrifying, if I still had the capacity to be frightened in that way.

I could hear the hiss of his breath through fangs and this low, rumbling growl that felt like it was coming from something much bigger.

Suddenly, a pained cry emerged from the ceiling, and I saw something fall from the hole, and focusing on it, I could see that it was the body of the god falling amidst the wreckage.

It tumbled through the air, trailing smoke and blood, and crashed into a pile of broken stone and shattered corpses. Dust rose in a cloud, and for a long moment, there was only silence.

I pulled myself to my feet. The wound in my chest had closed, but the memory of it lingered, a dull ache that pulsed with every heartbeat. My blade was on the ground a few feet away, and I drew it to my palm while I walked toward the fallen god.

There was no way he was dead from just losing his limb, but that cry at the end was suspicious... did I break him by mistake? That would be... disappointing.

The cavern was a ruin. The blast from my lightning had carved a trench through the field of bodies, scattering corpses like leaves. The ceiling had collapsed in places, and massive blocks of stone had crashed down, crushing everything beneath them.

The god lay at the center of it all. His body was facing away from me, but I could see that it was broken, scales cracked, limbs twisted at angles that should not have been possible. His back was a ruin, torn open by the force of my lightning, and I could see the bones beneath, charred and smoking.

I could not hear any sound from him, not even a heartbeat, and I frowned when I reached him. Going on one knee beside him, I turned him over... and the body was hollow.

The flesh had been torn open from the inside, as though something had burst out of him. The ribs were splayed outward like the petals of a flower, and the cavity where his organs should have been was filled with a strange, fibrous material that glistened in the green light.

It looked like a cocoon, a husk that had been shed.

I stared at it, my mind racing. He had been worn, like a suit of clothes, by something else.

"What the..."

The words died in my throat as a shadow fell over me, and a cold wind came with the scent of blood in it, and it caused my long white hair to flutter like snow.

∞

I turned slowly, and I saw a serpent’s head, as big as a hill, rising from the wreckage of the cavern. Its scales were the color of dried blood, and its eyes burned with a yellow fire that was not fire.

The body continued upward, into the darkness above. I could not see where it ended. It simply went on, and on, disappearing into the ceiling that had been shattered by its emergence.

The serpent’s eyes found me.

"Oh..." I said.

The mouth opened. It was wide enough to swallow a tower. The teeth were the size of trees, and from that mouth came a voice that sent a rumble throughout this broken cavern, and I was sure it could be heard for miles.

"I am Raktanāgeya," it said. "Blood God of the Naga Tribe."

The words pressed against me, heavy as mountains.

"And I shall devour you."

∞

The serpent roared, and this sound was a wall of force that hit me like a physical blow. The air itself turned to blood, thick and red and burning, and it slammed into me with the weight of an ocean... I could almost taste the power of Laws in what had just hit me.

I was thrown backward. The crystal slipped from my grip, and I clutched at it desperately, but I could not hold on. It spun away from me, tumbling into the distance.

The blood wave carried me through the field of bodies. Tens of thousands of corpses were swept up in the tide, and I was swept up with them, tumbling and turning and drowning in the red.

I hit something. A pillar, a wall, that damned altar- I did not know. I only knew that the world had become a blur of pain and blood, and that I was still moving, being carried by the force of the god’s breath.

I screamed in pain and anger as I was carried for miles by the wave of blood. I had walked through this cavern for hours; now I was flying through it, borne on a wave of blood, and the wave was not slowing... in fact, it seemed to be growing.

The blood was a flood. It filled the cavern, rising higher and higher, and I was beneath it, drowning in it, and the blood was burning.

It was not even blood. The power of Law inside it echoed with the will of the serpent, and that was the force that was pressing down on me, trying to crush me.

I tried to scream, but the blood filled my mouth. I tried to move, but the current was too strong. I was a leaf in a hurricane.

All I knew was that I was being carried at impossible speeds, and then the wall hit me.

"Crack... Boom!"

I slammed into something solid, the wall of the cavern that the warband and I could not reach even after hours of walking. The blood rushed past me, continuing on, flooding the rest of the cavern, but I was pinned against the wall, gasping and choking and bleeding from a hundred wounds.

The serpent’s body followed. It filled the space before me. The head had been hundreds of feet behind me, following me as I was swept by the tide of blood, and its body stretched on and on, a wall of scale and muscle that seemed unreal, as if it had no end.

So... this is the true glory of a god... Raktanāgeya. Blood God of the Naga Tribe.

I understood now: the thing I had fought before was just the shell it used to walk around in. This was its true body.

The blood receded, leaving me in a puddle of red, and I slid down the wall and landed in a heap on the ground, gasping at the pain of having nearly all my skin flayed off.

Then my status screen vibrated.

Adamantium Titan: 149 → 150 (Sovereign)

[+1 Unattuned Law Shard]