The dragon's harem

Chapter 2075: A Figment Of Madness

Myno, she, it... that thing, it wasn’t alive. She was created, not born, before the dawn of time as the first vessel of destruction. Space didn’t exist, and time wasn’t a thing. Life and Death weren’t even an idea.

Myno was a boiling mass of supercritical mass, always on the verge of blowing up into a nightmarish demonic flood that consumes, destroys, and tears everything apart. She was destruction incarnate, the one today we call Kali. The only reason anyone would refer to her as a she instead of it was because every single incarnation of her afterward was a woman until Kali, who is alive today.

So, when she showed back up as a mass of pure darkness, Nyar knew that it wasn’t her but just the abyss itself taking form in her shape. If he were here to attack Arad, he would already be thinking of a way to get the hell out of here.

The black mass of demonic energy moved, lifting what looked to be an arm, and when it did that. Cain felt something inside him snap. Out in a remote, peaceful world, an elderly mad man was walking through the streets of a tiny village, mumbling to himself just as he did every day for the last decade.

The old mad man fell to his knees in a burst of pain. He screamed so loudly that the entire village heard him, and when they looked, they saw him clawing the skin of his face off as his eyes burst from their sockets, his entire skin melted, his head exploded at the end, painting the ground black.

In another city, several crazed people died the same way, their screams shaking the windows as they died, burning by demonic power.

Cain jumped back, feeling the endless mad brains, he is connected to burning one after the other. Myno... Arad and the abyss weren’t trying to kill him directly; they were trying to burn his intertwined web of brains that he uses to power his divinity and magic.

Myno was grabbing hold of his own mind, tracking it back to those individual brains he infected with madness, and then violently burning their souls into demonic ash. What the abyss was doing to those mad souls was the same as grabbing a man and bursting all of his bones at once.

Their goal was simple, and it was to find Cain’s soul in that sea of minds and burn it.

"Do you know that having your soul burned like that is the most painful thing in all of existence? Your very nature is being torn apart. It is unlike the pain of wounds and injuries." Cain jumped back, dodging a storm of Nyar’s tentacles. "Say, Arad. Do you see those men? How did they claw their faces and eyes out? Do you know why they did that?"

As Myno didn’t reply, Cain explained.

"At the moment their souls start burning, the pain of that alone brings their sanity back, and since they cannot endure the agony, and because it cannot even pass out, their only instinct is to claw their faces, trying to mask the pain with another pain. But that doesn’t work, and the pain grows so intense that their brains explode from the rising blood pressure."

Cain flicked a finger and sent a massive fireball hurling toward Myno. "A human heart cannot generate enough pressure to do that? It will absolutely do it when forced by that extreme agony."

CRACK! But at that moment, when Cain was distracted, staring at Myno, Arad stabbed him through the heart from behind. It was all a distraction to get a sneak attack in. Arad knew that even with the abyss’s power, he didn’t have the knowledge or skill needed to drive Cain away, so all he could do was stall for time.

By allowing the abyss to infect and take over one of his incarnations to go on a rampage and distract Cain, he managed to use his void presence to wipe away all the traces of his existence and sneak a stab at Cain.

Cain looked back with a smile. "You think a stab to the heart can finish me off?"

"Of course not." Arad growled, and from his back, a flood of darkness burst, swallowing them both into a sealed ball of pure darkness.

As Cain and Arad disappeared into the black hole, Myno melted back into the abyss’s floor, and Nyar’s avatar growled. "The fool... Baal is going to kill me." He disappeared as well, leaving Merida alone in the now devastated battlefield, looking at the lonely black hole spinning in the air.

The black hole was now stable, floating a hundred meters above the air with an effective range of ten meters. Anything that gets within that range becomes affected by the black hole’s infinite gravity and is sucked in, but anything outside that range remains unaffected as if the black hole isn’t there at all.

It was only stable thanks to Arad’s will over it, and Merida knew that she could not jump in to help Arad. If she did, the gravity would tear her apart and kill her before she could even touch the black hole.

Five seconds had passed since the battle started, and only now did the demons of the layer realise the amount of damage that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Thousands of them began flocking toward the battlefield, and Merida had to actively warn them about the black hole so they wouldn’t get too close.

Six seconds passed, and Arad sighed inside the void, staring at Cain with a frown. "How come you aren’t dead?"

Cain looked back at him with a smile. "Of course I won’t die. I’m just an idea, a whisper of madness." Cain could easily move through Arad’s crushing void as if it were nothing, and that wasn’t by sheer strength or divine power.

Looking at Cain’s glowing blue eyes, Arad slowly realised the true nature of this nightmare, and it made him shiver and made the scales on his back stand up. Cain was already dead a long time ago; his body was erased from existence alongside his divinity when he went mad and lost the overgod’s title.

"Collective consciousness." Arad growled, and Cain smiled. That was the true nature of this ghost. Cain wasn’t a person, but a figment of something that once was a thing; even after death, he still lives within everyone’s minds as a ripple of madness.

Arad immediately tried to sense the space around him, and it was as he expected. There was no one there; no one had come with him into the black hole. Cain, the man he is seeing in front of him, doesn’t exist in reality.

Arad held his head. "You’re inside my mind..."

"Everyone has a bit of madness inside them, and that’s me." Cain started walking around Arad. "When I went mad, ages ago before I even became a divine, my existence started shifting toward something abominable. I grew old, stronger, and then became an overgod... all only helped to expend my life, but slow down my evolution."

Arad glared at him. "Evolve into an abomination?"

Cain shrugged. "No, I’ll not become such a weak pest. I’ll become like you and Nyar, a higher being." His body started shifting and twisting as if he were a fading illusion, and then he laughed.

"AO... you are a higher being of reality... Nyar is a higher being of nightmares, and I shall become the higher being of madness. This is how our kin reproduces."