Chapter 90 - Ninety: The Last Night VII

Chapter 90: Chapter Ninety: The Last Night VII

I opened my eyes.

Purple and brown. Two mismatched eyes staring down at me from six inches away. Cold breath on my face.

"Good morning, darling~" she cooed. "Ready for another round? I was just getting—"

I kicked her.

"KYAAAH!!"

A full-force kick to the sternum with both legs that launched her off my body and sent her flying across the void like a ragdoll. She tumbled through the nothing, arms flailing, and hit whatever passed for a wall in this shithole dimension with a crack that echoed for way too long.

I sat up. Stretched my neck. Rolled my shoulders. Cracked my knuckles one at a time, left to right.

"Man." I scratched my chest. Looked down at the body I was wearing. Skinnier than I remembered. Weaker. The mana channels were a joke. But it was mine... Ours?... Whatever. "It’s sure good to be back after a long time~"

◇◇◇

Ghost mommy came back at me like a freight train.

Her pretty face was gone. What replaced it was all teeth and claws and screaming fury, her spectral form expanding, her hair whipping like black tentacles, her eyes burning violet and gold in the dark.

"HOW DARE YOU TOUCH ME LIKE THAT! YOU’RE MINE! MY TOY! MY—"

I snapped my fingers.

Crimson chains erupted from the void. Dozens of them. They came from everywhere and nowhere, each one forged from dark red light that pulsed like a heartbeat.

They wrapped around her arms. Her legs. Her torso. Her throat. Her horns. One looped around her tail. Another caught her left ankle mid-kick.

She thrashed. She screamed. She tried to go spectral, phasing her body into ghostly mist the way she’d done a hundred times before to dodge and weave and slip through walls.

The chains held.

Her mist form flickered. Solidified. Flickered again. The chains tightened every time she tried.

"What— WHAT ARE THESE!? LET ME GO! I AM THE MISTRESS OF THIS—"

"Those are the Weeping Blood Chains." I yawned. "As long as anything bleeds, they will hold it~"

"I DON’T BLEED! I’M A GHOST! I’M—"

I stood up, stretching my arms over my head. "Yeah, don’t bother. As long as something bleeds... has ever bled, will ever bleed, contains the concept of bleeding... they’ll hold it." I smiled at her. "Being a ghost doesn’t help. You still remember what blood was. That’s enough for them."

She stopped thrashing. Her eyes were wide. Both of them. The violet was doing something it hadn’t done before... it was shrinking. Contracting. The pupil thinning into a slit. Fear response.

"W-what—" Her voice cracked. The mad glee was gone. Something underneath it was starting to show. "Darling, what are you—"

"Ugh." I made a face. "Please don’t."

"You’re my darling—"

"Nope."

"You ARE—"

"Nuh uh."

"You’re... you’re not him." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "You’re not my darling."

"Yesn’t."

"...What?"

"I’m him. I’m also not him. It’s complicated." I stopped two feet away from her. Close enough to touch. Didn’t bother. "Short version? I’m what’s left of the guy who used to own this soul before it got recycled. Long version’s boring and you’re not going to live long enough to appreciate it."

She stared at me. The chains pulsed.

"That’s... that’s not possible. You can’t kill me here! This is MY world! I am this place—"

"Yeah, see, that’s the part I wanted to talk about." I stopped in front of her. "Whoever built this dream, he did a good job. A whole realm. Very impressive. Seriously. Higher-dimensional architecture, custom physics, time dilation, the whole package. Somebody then handed you real power inside of it to use you as a catalyst."

"What... what are you?" She looked at me with fear.

I smiled. Her chains rattled.

"I’m a blood deity. Well. Sort of. I have mastery over the concept of essence itself. Blood, life force, soul energy, mana whatever you wanna call it. It’s all the same current flowing through different pipes. I’m not a direct god of it. More like..." I tilted my head.

"Regardless of that... Here’s the thing about lust rituals." I tapped my chest. "What do you think you’ve been eating then feeding to this world?"

She didn’t answer.

"Essence," I said. "You’ve been farming essence. Life-force. Vitality. Lust. it’s the stuff that runs through everything living, and it’s the stuff you’ve been sucking out of this body for weeks."

Her mouth opened. Closed.

"That’s why those chains work on you, by the way." I pointed at the crimson links. "You’re a ghost. You think you’re beyond physical. Beyond blood. But you still exist, don’t you? You still feed. You still feel. You still cum when a dick is inside you." I shrugged. "If it exists, it bleeds. If it bleeds, I control it. Simple as that."

I turned my back on her. The chains held. They’d hold until the essence ran out of her or the dimension collapsed, whichever came first.

"Now then." I cracked my neck one more time. "I’ve got a body to return, a timeline to rewind, and a cosmic artifact to waste on your bullshit little fuck-dungeon." I looked over my shoulder. "Any last words before I erase the last few weeks from everyone’s memory?"

She said nothing. The violet eye was still shrunk to a slit. The brown eye was leaking tears again.

"Cool. Didn’t think so."

I raised my hand. The void started folding.

I reached into the space behind my own soul... the pocket where you keep the stuff you can’t afford to lose and can’t afford to use... and I pulled.

Something screamed on the way out.

◇◇◇

It landed in the middle of the nothing with a sound like a cathedral bell dropped down a well.

At first it was just light. A ring of it, spinning, throwing off sparks that fell upward. Then the ring became teeth. Then the teeth became gears, thousands of them, turning inside each other in paths hard to follow. At the center, an eye with no pupil and too many rings opened halfway, looked around, and found me.

It stopped turning.

Every gear locked at once. The sparks died mid-air.

"Yo!"

"...No."

The voice came from everywhere in the void.

"No. No, no, no. I was sealed. I was placed. The custodians put me beyond—"

"I’m happy to see you too buddy."

"You—" The rings shuddered. The whole construct pulled back a foot, like a dog that just realized whose house it wandered into. "You can’t be. You cannot be."

"You’re being a little bit of an asshole. Not even a hello?"

"The Blood Fiend Venerable." It said the name the way you’d say a diagnosis. "You were destroyed. Millennia ago. The gods themselves—"

"The gods themselves what?" I leaned in toward the eye. Close enough that my reflection sat in the middle of it, pale and skinny. "Killed me? Sealed me? Chopped me into pieces and scattered me across nine realms? Tossed me into the River of Reincarnation and hoped I’d come back as something harmless?"

I grinned.

"How’s that working out?"

The gears started turning again. Backwards. Fast. Panic-fast.

"This is a violation. You have no authority to invoke me. My custodianship was transferred. My bindings were rewritten. I do not answer to—"

"Look down."

It looked down.

The crimson chain was already around its central ring. It had been there since the moment it manifested. I’d put it there while it was still screaming about seals.

The eye went very still.

"Shit... When did you—"

"Before you finished your first sentence." I patted the ring. It flinched. Machines aren’t supposed to flinch. "You’ve got a lot of very impressive protections. Custodian bindings. Divine locks. Authority checks." I shrugged. "And again, you didn’t even say hello, are you even happy to see me back?"

"Are you really asking me whether I’ll be happy to be back at the mercy of a murderous sociopath like you?" It said sarcastically.

Behind me, the succubus made a small noise.

The artifact looked at her with disgust. "She reeks of you... Must you rape every woman you meet?"

"Believe it or not. It’s the other way around this time."

"I don’t really buy it and... That creature," it said slowly. "That is why you called me? A dream-parasite? A borrowed catalyst in a third-rate lust cage?" The gears ground. "You would spend one of my activations on this?"

"Yep."

"Do you comprehend what I am? Do you comprehend the cost? I have four operations remaining before my core collapses. Four. In all of existence. Wars have been lost because no one could reach me. Pantheons have fallen waiting for—"

"Three."

"...What?"

"You’ll have three. After this one." I flexed my fingers. "Yeah, it’s a waste. It’s like using a bazooka to kill an ant. I’ve thought about it. I’ve made peace with it. Let’s go."

"You would burn an irreplaceable—"

"She took weeks off my body," I said.

The void got quiet.

"I was asleep. Buried under a hundred layers of conditioning inside a soul that doesn’t even remember my name. And she still managed to steal weeks." I looked back over my shoulder at the chained thing with the shrunken violet pupil. "You know what that means? That means someone supported her somehow. who knows about my current vessel. And until I find out who, I’m going to be very, very generous with my resources."

I turned back to the eye.

"Spin."

"...Specify the anchor point."

"Last moment I’m certain the kid was awake. Actually awake. I can’t call the specific space-time point, but you have Chronos’s third law. You can figure it out."

"That anchor is imprecise. The charm’s onset is smeared across a temporal gradient. The margin of error is—"

"Then overshoot."

"Overshooting increases the cost by—"

"Overshoot," I said.

The eye held for one second. Then, finally, it began to turn.

"Acknowledged. Reversal authorized under duress. Logging protest."

"Log whatever you want."

The gears hit full speed.

The dream folded in on itself, and then the fold folded, and then there was a sound like the world inhaling.

I felt the body start to slip out of my hands. Getting lighter. Getting further. Somewhere on the other side of it, a kid was waking up with no idea what had just been done on his behalf, and no memory to feel guilty about.

Lucky bastard.

"As soon as you wake up, get the fuck out." I said, to no one in particular.

Everything went dark.