Chapter 496: The Rules of Battle

There was nothing pretty about dying, and nothing pretty about battle. This loop had thrown me into the fire over and over, and what was coming out of it was a monster the like of which nobody had seen before.

I did not fear pain, or death, or loss. The only thing in my mind in moments like these was the next target. Demons, gods, Sovereigns, let them come. I shall kill them all.

I climbed out of that hole with a spine in my hand, torn out of a screaming Titan, a creature that could have broken a lesser world.

Not mine. I had reached for something to pull myself up with and found a length of demon vertebrae still attached to a pelvis, so I came out of the dark holding it like a flail, and the two waiting at the lip of the crater took it across their faces before they understood what was coming up.

One of them went down. The other took hold of the spine, and we fought over it like dogs over a bone, four hundred feet of me and fifty feet of it, and it was so much stronger than it had any right to be that for three seconds I was not sure which of us was going to keep it. My body was still healing, and my strength was not what it should have been.

Then I let go, and it stumbled, and I put the Death Stone against its chest and wrote Break a hundred times on the knuckles of my right hand. My Flesh-Scribing made something like that easy. Then I threw a punch at the spot where I had placed the stone, and the shockwave went out for a mile as a hole opened through its chest and out of its back, and the force of it tore through the earth for tens of miles.

The dead Titan sagged against my fist, and I threw it aside with a flick.

[ Stored Essence: 2,388,944 → 2,603,170 ]

∞

In a normal world, I had already done more than enough to open the sixth Earth Gate. The Hollow Avatar had said the heavens were broken, and in an age like this you were not given power. You took it.

If I had to walk over the corpses of a billion demons to take it, then I would.

I sneered as I pushed my newly regenerated jaw back into place. There was no skin on it yet, just red glistening muscle and bone, and my body was concerned with being functional rather than pretty.

I looked into the distance, and I thought the tentacles of the Pale Matron had shrunk, and I could not be sure. All this while the pressure on the seals was still there, and it was the increased rate of Anima flow in my titan form that gave me the strength to hold it back.

Still, I was running out. My body and soul had been brought to their limit, and the Death Stone was not helping matters.

I had no plans to die here. I had not yet given everything I had.

I moved towards my enemies, and two of them rushed forward to meet me, and behind them I saw that the Demon Titans were doing something different. Two took hold of each other at the shoulder and did not let go, and their flesh ran together like wax under a flame, and what stood up out of that was ninety feet tall with four arms and two sets of eyes that did not blink in the same rhythm.

I blinked and wondered why I had not seen that coming. What would...

Boom.

Faster than I could counter, the merged Titan brushed aside the two I was fighting and punched me in the chest, and I went up into the air as the ground shattered beneath the force of the blow.

I passed through my own storm and the red cloud. The air went thin and then cold and then stopped being air at all, and I hung in a black sky with the curve of the world beneath me and the eastern continent laid out like a map with a burning scar down the middle of it.

Without the earth to disperse the energy when I took a hit, one blow from a Titan had pushed me miles into the sky.

I hung there for five seconds, and in that time I looked at the world.

From that height I could see the four tentacles that resembled fingers reaching up out of a wound. I could see the Caelith, glowing blue with my own colour. I could see the ash field, which had been a province that morning and was now a grey scar four hundred miles across.

The shockwaves of my battle had carried much further than I expected, and I hoped that in the heat of it I had not killed anyone. I had sent the members of my camp two hundred miles away, and I had underestimated the range of this fight. I could feel massive presences at the edge of it, Sovereigns maybe, and none of them came any closer.

And I could see the demons still pouring out of the fissures at the base of those fingers, in numbers that had no business existing.

A lesser man would despair. My former self would weep. I had died too many times, and death had washed me of the moments when my heart broke.

I will cry. First I needed to kill.

∞

I fell, cloaked in Lightning Edict that suppressed every sign of my passage, and I came down on the merged Titan like a dropped mountain, and the four-armed demon folded flat under four hundred feet of Adamantium arriving at the speed of something returning from orbit.

The crater went down through ash and bedrock and into the hollow I had made earlier, and the shockwave took every Titan on that plain off its feet, and for a moment the only things alive out there were me and the Demon Titans.

I got up out of the hole with one of its arms, the only part of it still in one piece, and used it on the nearest Titan that had not regained its feet until the arm was gone, and then I used my hands and my lightning and tore the thing to pieces.

They kept merging. Three of them this time, and what came up was a hundred and forty feet tall with no face at all, just a wall of eyes from shoulder to shoulder, and it hit harder than anything I had faced all morning.

A strange thought came to me while I was fighting it. If this had been the Titan I met at the start, I might have lost, even fresh and uninjured.

It broke my left leg at the hip, and tore my right arm off at the shoulder and ate it, which I did not expect, and then it got both hands around my head and began to squeeze.

I could feel my skull beginning to cave in.

So I let it squeeze. I reached up with the arm I still had and put the Death Stone into one of the eyes in its chest, and I poured every bolt of Lightning Tribunal I had into its body until it lit up like a golden star and collapsed into ash.

My skull was still in one piece when its hands came off me. I spat blood to the side and came to my feet. Not one part of my body was free of injury, and I was grinning.

[ Stored Essence: 2,603,170 → 3,104,882 ]

Any time now, I was going to kick down the damned gate.