Chapter 452: The Ink of Ruin

As the blade pressed against me, I did not stay to find out if I would be able to hold out. I was nowhere near the amount of power that the god had access to. I wrote Speed on my own chest, went up through the opening in the ribs with lightning behind me, and came out into the night with the corrosive blood still smoking off me.

I was greeted by the loud crack of the chains around the serpent shattering to pieces as the blade tore itself out of the serpent’s side, spun once in the air, and flew back into its jaws.

I looked at the body of the god, at the mile of scale and blood and flesh, and the landscape devastated for miles and shrouded by a growing black cloud, and my mind was trying to pick apart the puzzle of how to kill it.

I could not slice through its heart, which was a problem, because that was its seat of power as far as I could tell. The power of a mage was in their soul, but a god seemed to centre its power inside its body.

There was too much power inside its heart, and there was the issue of that weapon. The serpent had no issue cutting itself to pieces if it could get to me... or did it?

I could heal ridiculously fast too, even regrowing lost limbs, but all of that mass came from somewhere. For me it was my Anima and Marrow, which, once exhausted, took time to refill.

The same thing had to apply to this god. Everything it grew back had to come from somewhere, and it had lost a lot of its body in our battle. So the way to win had always been there before me. I had to slaughter it faster than it could recover.

This was now a battle of endurance.

Rotating the pen to point at the serpent as it tore free of the last of its bonds, I began.

∞

I will not pretend the next part was elegant. Real battle never is, and I made no attempt to seek understanding in it, just pure carnage. Every scrap of Anima that I could pull from my soul was poured into the pen, even when it hurt so much that it felt as if my soul was on fire.

I drew a line of severance down its left side and a slab the length of a village fell away. I drew a second one beside it before the first had finished falling, and a third, and I flew down the god’s body drawing lines as fast as my hand would move, and behind me the flesh came away in long strips like bark from a felled tree.

The strips fell into the valley one after another, still twitching, and the scales on them rattled when they hit the ground, a sound like the chattering of a thousand teeth.

Blood rained from the cuts I was making, and it fell on the earth, burning through it and turning the rocks to glass, and soon the whole valley floor was a sheet of red glass with the meat of a god heaped across it.

The serpent fought me through every moment. It broke the chains of earth again and again, and then the chains I made from its own stripped flesh to tie it down, and I wrote more.

It made a surprising move and rolled onto me, and I felt the bare ribs of its stripped side close around me like the fingers of a fist. I put both hands against two of them and pushed until one gave way with a crack, and I climbed out through the gap and kept drawing. It swung the blade across its own back to reach me, and the blade cut through its body and nearly beheaded me before I held it back with a Script, letting the red edge grind against my line while my other hand kept cutting.

And through all of this, the god kept healing.

Its flesh rose up behind me wherever I had been, pale new mass that rapidly filled with blood before rising over the bared bone, thin and pink as a newborn’s skin. The first time I turned round and saw a stretch I had stripped already half-covered again, I wanted to laugh and weep at the same time.

So I went back and took that off too, and I did it faster.

My greatest advantage was that I could pin the serpent against the earth and stop it from rising into the sky, and from using its blade more effectively. This forced the serpent to cut into itself just to reach me, and it did not matter how many chains it destroyed by shrugging or with its weight. I just kept creating more.

It became a race. It healed, and I cut. The newborn flesh came up and I peeled it off before it had thickened, and then I peeled it before it had finished rising, and soon my hand stopped feeling like my own and started feeling like part of the pen.

I stopped writing words. The lines themselves were the Script, one after another, each one dividing flesh from bone, and somewhere in the middle of it I understood that a Grandmaster Engraver had no real need to write words at all.

[Inscription: 120 → 129 (Sovereign)]

[Skill: Flesh-Scribing (Legendary) acquired]

I did not stop to look at what I had gained. My mind had become nothing but the task before me.

When the regrowth slowed, I almost did not notice it. I saw it happen on its flank, a stretch of ribs I had stripped that stayed bare for three strokes, then five, then did not cover at all. I had no energy to cheer for my progress. I just kept going, shutting my mind against the cries of the god.

∞

When the first ray of the sun began to tear its way through the clouds, the lower half of Raktanāgeya was bone.

Half a mile of its spine lay across the glass valley, every vertebra as big as a farmhouse, with the ribs standing off them in two long curving rows, white against the red. Around it the meat I had taken lay in piles so high that some of them had their own shadows.

And the bones were still moving...

The spine rolled from side to side. The bare ribs dug into the glass and pulled, dozens of them in sequence, dragging the skeleton along. The tail, which was only a whip of vertebrae now, lashed out and caught the side of a hill and took the top off it.

There was nothing left on those bones to move them. I watched for a long moment, and then I looked closer with Eldritch Perception, and I saw the marrow.

Every bone in that skeleton was lit from inside, a deep red glow at the centre of each vertebra. The god had pulled its vitality back into the marrow, the last place I could not reach with my Inscription, and it was moving the bones with nothing but spite and anger.

I knew that fire. Mine had burned out and come back to me tonight when I was cut in two... It did not stop me.