Those crazy words left my mouth as a whisper, but they carried through the chaos of the battlefield like a blade through silk. I had felt him before I saw him, and it was not just the familiar pressure of his presence, the weight of his ancient soul pressing against the edge of my awareness, but the scent of the Moon Fox that I could perceive in his blood.
Aurora had given up the core of her being to keep me alive, a loss that should have been debilitating and permanent, but as she said to me before... we always cheat, and Vrakth would be a way for me to cheat fate once again.
He was coming through one of the larger portals, and I noticed that of all the three horned sorcerers here, only his shadow construct was a crown.
I forgot about my Eaarth Gates, and my eyes were only on Vrakth alone. He had not seen me yet, as he was still orienting himself to the battlefield, but I knew that if I released the hint of the Moon Fox in my blood, he would sense it.
I reached for him, and the air between us ceased to exist. Stormstep carried me across the battlefield in a flash of lightning, and I rematerialized directly in front of him, close enough to see the confusion flicker across his six eyes before they found me.
He did not recognize me, of course he didn’t; the loop had reset, and the demon had no memory of the eleven loops where we had fought, where I had died and died and died again, learning his rhythms, memorizing his weaknesses, carving my understanding of him into the bone of my soul... Ah, good times.
But I recognized him. Even without moving his body, I could see the way his crown pulsed before he attacked; I recognized the subtle shift of weight before he lunged, and that tiny hesitation in his shadow construct’s movements that only came when he was focusing on a new target.
I had fought this demon more than I had fought anything else in my life, but I was not the same boy who had died to him eleven times. It was a shame really, and I wondered if he had anything more to teach me.
"Vrakth," I called out, using my knowledge of demonology to speak their language, which caused my soul to feel pain, as if I was being stabbed with hot needles in my eyes, but I did not flinch, "I’ve been waiting for you, with the hopes that you will remain... you. It is a good thing you have not changed, hehehe, a very good thing."
His six eyes narrowed, and I could see his mind working as he considered what I could be. He was an ancient demon who had seen many wonders, and it was almost impossible to shake his mentality with words alone.
I wondered what he was seeing when he looked at me. Was he seeing the light of an Arcanist’s soul, and the power coiled beneath my skin like a storm waiting to break, or perhaps he must be able to sense the Moon Fox?
"You," he said, and his voice was a low rumble, like distant thunder. "You are not of this place."
"I’m not," I cocked my head to the side. "And neither are you. But here we are, two strangers on the same path. A path that I am going to walk alone."
The demon would be a fool if he did not recognize the threat for what it was, and he was not a fool. His crown flared, as his shadow construct grew teeth longer than swords and lunged for me.
I laughed as I stepped forward into the shadow construct, and I let it pass through me. My body had become lightning in the instant before contact, and the shadow construct tore through empty air, its momentum carrying it past me.
I rematerialized behind Vrakth, my hand already wreathed in tribunal lightning. The golden light blazed as I drove it into the base of his spine, where his crown anchored to his body.
He screamed as my hand closed around the core of his construct, and my lightning tore through his soul, and I felt his Abyssal shield buckle under the pressure of my attack.
I pulled my hand back and stepped away, taking the core of his construct and absorbing it into my channels. If I had kept on for a while, I would have killed him, but that was not why I was here. I needed to break Vrakth, both physically and mentally, to give the Moon Fox inside him the chance to escape, but before then... I vanished and turned towards the other three horned... let me clear the field a bit.
∞
I appeared in front of a three-horned sorcerer, and perhaps because he had nearly a hundred of his kind behind him, and their goddess was awakening, he looked at me like I was prey, sneering,
"Cattle," he whispered in a sickly voice, his shadow-construct trailing from his side like a shadow that had learned to move on its own. He was speaking the common tongue of my world, and this was both fascinating and disturbing. "You run loose from the pen, and you think that makes you a wolf. Khaaz vel’tarakh. You are meat that has not yet been held to its place. Have you not been told that the heavens are now silent?"
"I’ve been told a great many things," I smiled. "None of them have stuck with me; I guess I am just too stubborn for my own good."
While I was speaking, I had been gathering a vast amount of charge behind my chest, flooding my channels with Anima and converting them into golden lightning, and yet with Lightning Edict surrounding me, there was no indication that I was already gathering a stupid amount of power.
However, I saw something shift in the eyes of the demon in front of me; there must have been a sign, perhaps a subtle shift in the soul spectrum I could not sense, a change in temperature, or maybe a demonic spell that I was not aware of, but I knew that I could no longer gather power, so I just released it all.
A lance of pure golden lightning erupted from my chest, and the demon in front of me was already moving, but it was too late. The beam passed through his head and the top portion of his chest as if they did not exist, and it continued to cut through six more three-horned behind him.
I spread my hands wide and rapidly rotated my body three times, dragging the golden beam of lightning with me, and that motion sliced through nearly a hundred three-horned; their souls could barely scream before they were fried to ash.
I released my threads to harvest the materials I needed for the upgrades of my channels and casting Stormsteps. I vanished, reappearing in front of Vrakth, who was still suffering from the loss of his shadow construct. "Sorry, where were we? Ah, you were attacking."
[ Stored Essence: 85,140 → 185,770 ]