Chapter 446: Carving Into The Sky

Under the light of the stars, I was able to get my first proper look at the Blood God. The serpent was a mile, perhaps more. Scales the colour of dried blood, and one eye burning yellow and one ruined, and its body going down into the hole we had just made and still not ending, before its massive coils surrounded me in a ball of flesh and blocked any light from reaching me.

My heartbeat that had been accelerating had reached a feverish peak, and in this moment, everything in my head went silent, and I was brought back to the moment when I stood before an endless horde of demons as a mortal, and the only thing I had was my grit and the lightning flowing inside me.

There was a reason after all this time I was primarily focused on lightning... and it was because of all my powers, it was there for me when I had nothing.

I reached for the lightning that was always pooling in my channels, the passive current my body generated and stored every moment, and although I could not shape it into spells, since the seal on my soul prevented that, I could shape it into something else.

Inscriptions... the very language of magic itself. This world, this damned System, had locked me away from my Anima unless I pledged myself to a god... well, I was not having it.

Mages may be wrong about many things, but we were taught from the beginning that our fate lies in our hands.

The lightning gathered at my fingertips, and I began to carve.

∞

The time I spent inside the prison of the Sovereign was not wasted, I was able to come across a great many Scripts, and even create my own. The Seal on my soul was supposed to prevent me from doing things like carving Inscriptions, but again there was a limit to what the System could impose on someone like me.

I had long noticed that the System was unable to accurately judge my abilities. When I look at descriptions of spells, there were tags like High Anima Cost for some spells, but those descriptions were written for an average mage, and what did that have to do with me? I could call lightning for a thousand years and never run out.

Although I had no access to Anima, my channels could produce a stupid amount of lightning, and inside that lightning was the essence of lightning itself. It was this essence that I would use to power my Inscriptions.

This method was horribly inefficient, and it was the reason Inscriptions were mostly maintained with Anima, and not essence.

Inscriptions could maintain themselves and function by drawing the essence in the air, but they were many times weaker than Inscriptions filled with the Anima of a mage.

However, I could unleash massive amounts of lightning, especially in my titan form, and that would just have to bridge the gap.

The god did not care that I was drawing odd shapes in the air, its coils tightened around me, and at that moment the lightning from my fingertips vanished as the first Inscription completed.

Slick.

The Inscription flashed and then exploded in radiance, and burned itself into the serpent’s scales where my body touched them, and the effect was immediate. The scales became slick as oil, and the coils that had been tight enough to crush mountains began to slip.

I slid free, and the serpent roared in frustration, its head whipping around to find me. I was already falling, my massive form tumbling through the air, and I carved a second Inscription as I fell.

Harden.

The air itself seemed to thicken beneath me, and my fall slowed, then stopped. I hovered there, suspended by a rule I had written into the world, and I looked up at the serpent.

Instantly I sensed that something was wrong. Despite the amount of power I had pushed into the lightning, the Scripts were coming out too strong, and going quickly through what had happened in my head, the closest explanation I could think of was that the essence in the air was many times more abundant and perhaps more potent than in my own age, but this was hard to tell without my Anima and most of my spells.

I stamped on the air, shattering the Scripts around me, and fell for a few hundred meters before I landed on a mountain peak, my three-hundred-foot Adamantium form crushing the stone beneath me.

The serpent rose above me, its body blotting out the stars, and I could see the damage I had already done. Its scales were cracked in a dozen places, and black blood dripped from the wounds. But it was healing, not as quickly as me, though it was healing.

By the look of hatred and hunger in its eyes, I knew that there was no way to talk to this serpent even if I wanted to, and I sighed, then I looked at the part of the sky that was not covered by the flying serpent, and I saw that black clouds were accumulating, drawn by the sheer amount of lightning essence that my body was producing. The heavens were responding to me, whether I willed it or not... a storm was coming.

But I could not call the lightning with a spell. I had no Stormstep, no Lightning Edict, no Tribunal. The seal on my soul held those away from me. I clenched my fist... I would write the lightning into being.

∞

I raised my hand, and the passive lightning in my channels flowed down my arm, gathering at my fingertips. I began to carve into the air itself.

Gather.

The Inscription burned itself into the sky, a symbol that grew until it was the size of a mountain, and the clouds responded. Lightning that had been scattered across the heavens began to flow toward it, drawn like iron to a magnet.

The serpent lunged, its jaws open wide, but I was already moving. I had carved another Inscription into the air beneath my feet.

Push.

It took effect, and I was flung sideways, many times faster than sound, causing the god to miss and end up closing its jaws on rock. I crashed into another peak, shattering it, but I was already carving again.

Focus.

This one tightened the gathering energy in the sky, compressing it. The clouds turned black, then blue, then a white so bright it hurt to look at.

The serpent screamed in frustration, its body coiling, its tail whipping through the air, as it turned and tracked me, but I was already writing the next Inscription.

Descend.

The gathered lightning fell from the sky like the fist of a god. It struck the serpent’s back, and the creature screamed.

The impact was immense. The mountains around us shattered, and the earth beneath us cracked, and the air itself burned white. The serpent’s scales blackened and cracked, and the flesh beneath them cooked. I braced myself against the mountain as the shockwaves almost tore me off my feet.

Something was not right. There was something drastically different about essence in this era.

The pained roar of the god shifted my focus away from that mystery and back to it. It would seem that gods were not that easy to kill.