The moment the notification flickered across my vision, the Join script screamed. It was as if the entire room was beginning to implode, as the script I had just written reached out and found every inscription in the room, and it began to drag them toward itself.
The walls groaned, and the dense, layered scripts that Seed had spent thousands of years carving began to tear loose from the stone, one by one, pulled into the orbit of my single script.
"Elric!" the fox shouted. "What’s happening?!"
"I have found the answer!" I screamed like a mad crow, as the Inscriptions tearing from the wall began to swirl around me like a storm of light, every script at once, thousands of them, colliding with the script in front of me that was beginning to glow like a star.
The scream from the colliding inscriptions was haunting. Containment cut across Flow, Hardness burned through a hundred words I had no names for, all of it dragged into one screaming knot around me by a word that only knows how to say connect.
The barrier in front of me shattered. I did not know if it was because all the scripts inside this room had been seized by Join, or if it was collapsing after the demon had exerted enough force, not that it mattered anyway.
Sad came through it, his body much smaller, but his appearance was no less terrifying, and the damned demon glanced at the swirling script in front of me, and then he grinned.
"Where else can you run, boy? I told you I would eat..."
I looked at the thing that had eaten my mind for three months, and I no longer listened; I simply let go of everything I had been holding in for a very long time.
∞
This storm in front of me was breaking down... Join was a powerful Inscription, and it would have disintegrated in an instant when it dragged so many Inscriptions into itself, and only my Anima pouring furiously into it could keep it stable, but even that was not enough.
The demon was spewing out its usual rubbish, but I had no time to listen to it, because I was truly at my limit holding this Inscription together, and its irritating voice was not helping matters, so I just threw the storm at it... Let us see how this bastard liked it.
I pointed with my lightning pen, and thousands of the Sovereign’s scripts held together by Join blasted towards the demon like a mountain fired from a cannon.
The space in front of me ceased to exist.
Forty feet of what I suspected were Celestial-forged wall, or as close to it as possible, went to white powder in the space of a blink. The floor peeled up and folded like paper in a fire, as the pillars that extended on both sides of the hallway snapped at the base and went sideways.
There was a loud groaning sound like metal and stone being placed under intense pressure as the gallery above came down in a slab the size of a house, and through all of it, riding the front of this wave of destruction went Sad.
I watched a Sovereign-tier demon get thrown down the nave like a thing kicked by a god.
It went through the first wall, then the second, and continued blasting through walls until it was too far away to see, and I could only track it by the destruction, a line of shattering that ran away from me into the dark, hall after hall after hall, the sound arriving late and enormous, wall... wall... wall... wall... a full second of the world coming apart in a straight line.
Somewhere out in the ruin, ten thousand vats rang like struck bells, and I stood in front of the wave of destruction, and not a single hair in my body was harmed.
My mouth hung open, and the fox who was on my shoulder reached across and closed it for me, and then she said something that I will not repeat.
"Yeah," I said, my hands were shaking. "I am going to talk to you about the language you are using, but not now."
∞
At first I did not notice it, but the fox was the first to point it out, "Oi, Elric, why does the air smell so fresh?"
I stepped into the wreckahge in front of me and looked around in amazement as my eyes widened in realzation... the pressing wave of darkness that cloaked the facility was gone... not entirely, but the wave of destruction that I had released had pierced through the facility like a hot knife through butter, and everywhere that it passed through was free of the underlying darkness that had been choking me since I woke up in this place.
"Well... fuck me!"
"Language, Elric!"
I had been suppressed since the day I woke in this facility. In every loop, Sad’s darkness filled my channels like silt in a river, and I had adapted, I had learned to fight at a fraction, to plan around the fog, to be clever because I could not be strong... and I had forgotten. I had genuinely forgotten what I was.
I had crossed a Tribulation that would kill a million Adepts; I had burned an army of demons to ash at Caelith Mourne. I had ten thousand and eight primary channels in a body that was mostly lightning already, and a reservoir of Anima that a Sovereign had looked at and called ridiculous.
And now I was standing in a room with no darkness in it, with a Script that could connect to any Inscription it could reach, and nothing was pressing on me.
I stopped being careful, and like a wolf, I looked up into the darkness and howled, and the Moon Fox joined me.
This was the cry that had silenced an army of demons, and now it had appeared again.
My body began to expand until I stood nearly twelve feet tall. My white hair rose in the air, held by lightning that now crackled freely across my skin, and I equipped Storm Bearer and Heaven Beast Tamer.
The Titles settled into me like a second skin, and I felt the power of the storm and the bond with the Moon Fox surge through my veins.
In the distance, I heard the cries of pain and fury from the demon; it sounded hurt and confused, and I grinned as I became lightning and vanished towards the cries of the demon, leaving the howl of the fox lingering in the air where I once stood.