Chapter 493: Demon Titan

I was fighting in a near trance-like state. Most of my attention was focused on how my Laws were integrating with my spells, and in this way my understanding of lightning grew. That was one of the primary reasons I had chosen Lightning Arcanist as my second Title beside Demon Slayer.

To bring my soul up to match my body, I had to reach Sovereign, and the path to that level of power lay in the Laws of lightning.

The Pale Matron suddenly pressed against the seals with greater force, and I felt the pressure in my mind like a hand squeezing my skull. I gritted my teeth and poured more Anima into them, and the pressure eased, and the distraction cost me.

A Thull larger than the others, older most likely, its hide scarred by forces that even its regeneration could not undo, broke through my web and reached me before I could write another Script. Its claws caught me across the chest, and I felt Adamantium skin crack before it sealed again in less than a second.

I did not flinch, and I caught its wrist and held it while it tried to pull away. My grip was Adamantium. Even without taking my titan form, my base strength surpassed this Thull, and the sheer amount of lightning running through my body was stun-locking the demon in place as it poured through its flesh and tore apart its Abyssal shield.

I looked into its furious yellow eyes and smiled. “You are the first one to touch me,” I said, as I memorised the scars across its skin. “I will remember you.”

I reached into my soul and pulled on the Law of Sharpness that lived in my Inscription Pen, and the Law answered.

A line appeared on the Thull’s chest. It was not drawn by any physical instrument, but by the concept of division itself. The line deepened, and the creature came apart along it, its body separating into two perfect halves that fell away from each other.

It did not die immediately. It hung there, in two pieces, its eyes registering surprise, and then the Law of Flesh that I had woven into my own body reached out through the connection and drained the life out of both halves.

“So, that works,” I muttered, as my understanding of my own Laws deepened. Lightning Arcanist made it easier for me to touch and understand laws, and I was seeing the benefits as the battle continued.

[ Stored Essence: 1,398,906 → 1,415,991 ]

I turned back to the fissures and raised my hand.

“Come on,” I said. “I have not even started yet.”

Above me, the sheer amount of Anima pouring out of my body had begun to draw a storm. I knew that any mage above Adept might be feeling the weight of my presence across the continent by now, the same way I had once sensed the power of the Sovereigns.

Perhaps there would be other unwelcome parties later. Those complications would be dealt with when the time came.

∞

The battle became a symphony.

I used Lightning Edict to write Scripts in the air, and Loom of Lightning to weave threads that cut through flesh and chitin like paper. I used Heaven’s Verdict to call down golden spears of judgement that shattered Abyssal shields and burned souls to ash. Now and then Lightning Tribunal fell from the storm clouds above, and I held back from using that one much. I did not want to draw the attention of heaven and create a new complication in my killing field.

I used Stormstep when I needed to move, though I did not need to move often. The seals held me in place, and my spells did not require me to.

I was a weapon of mass destruction that happened to look like a man. In the past my soul could not be stretched to its full purpose, or my flesh held back my lightning. I no longer had those restraints, and it did not matter that I was holding back the Pale Matron from taking flesh. I would not be denied.

I was a being who had killed a god, and these demons were not gods.

[ Stored Essence: 1,415,991 → 1,434,000 → 1,452,906 ]

The pressure from the Pale Matron was increasing. My seals might keep her countless eyes closed, and they were not perfect, and inside that space I could feel the wall of flesh edging closer to my consciousness with every passing moment.

The bet was to kill enough of her children to push me past the threshold and open my sixth Earth Gate.

“Thou canst not hold me forever,” she hissed. “I am eternal…”

I gasped as the weight on my consciousness multiplied, and I froze in shock as the pressure climbed. Without any hesitation, I cut off my Anima to one of the seals and poured everything I had into maintaining the other two.

The fifth barely lasted a second before it was destroyed, and the Pale Matron surged against the last two, and without splitting my Anima three ways, I could hold them a little better.

[ Warning… Fifth Seal Broken. ]

∞

I had stalled her awakening, and the fissures around me for miles tore open again, wider than before. The space beyond them was something I could see into now, and I could not see much. Just an expanse of pale flesh.

I was expecting greater demons.

Instead, those weird glowing demons that had stayed at the edge of the battle, and still died easily to my lightning, began to pour out in greater numbers than before.

They were creatures of pure light, their bodies translucent, their forms shifting and flowing like liquid radiance.

I did not know their purpose. They did not attack, and they did not fight back when I killed them, and I had simply started calling them watchers. They were not worth much essence either, ranking somewhere around a three-horned Narghul Sorcerer, and I had always kept a close eye on them.

Maybe something had been missing all along, because when the fifth seal broke, the watchers changed.

They stopped moving as individuals and stopped watching, and they began to converge on the Thulls and slam into their bodies.

The process was not gentle. Dozens of them, then hundreds, hit the Thulls like comets, their bodies dissolving into light that wrapped around the Thulls and sank into their flesh, and the Thulls began to shriek in pain before their bodies exploded into a mound of flesh like an egg, hanging in the sky, each one a hundred metres tall.

Dozens of Thulls and hundreds of watchers, fused into a single mass that radiated demonic pressure like a burning sun.

I unleashed Lightning Tribunal and destroyed dozens of the eggs, and more were being made faster than I could destroy them, and then the eggs began to hatch, and the first abomination came out.

It was massive, larger than the egg it was being birthed from, and a flood of yellow birthing fluid poured out of the broken shell. Its body was surprisingly beautiful, seen from a certain angle.

The demon that emerged had taken the shape of a man, with glowing bat-like wings that seemed to be made of solid light, and what ruined the image were the dozens of eyes that covered its armoured body and glowed from within.

Dropping out of the sky, standing at least fifty feet tall, it reached the ground, and the earth shattered as if it were made of glass, and the abomination sank into the crater it had made. Then it climbed out, and the ground shattered again.

I felt the weight of it through my Space Resonance. This thing was not just physically heavy. It was spatially heavy. Its existence pressed against the fabric of reality, and reality was buckling under the strain.

The great eyes covering its body looked at me with an intelligence that felt impossibly cold and old.

My Eldritch Perception swept through my soul and touched my Demonology at the peak of Arcanist, and I was surprised by the notification that arrived in my head.

[ Demon Titan detected. ]

[ Threat level: Peak Class Five. ]

Fuck. This was a Sovereign-Tier demon, the equal of a Minor God, and the earth was shaking as more eggs tore open and more Demon Titans dropped out of the sky.