Cycle of Sealing detonated, the burning flames of Rage transforming into a red cloud of destruction, hell-bent on slaying Iora, even if it meant breaking Dei to do so- but his Potential node stepped in, and a familiar scene played out as it had last time.
The node released some kind of invisible field of energy, providing an “Opposite charge” to his Rage, which seemed to growl for a moment before relenting. The Rage suddenly condensed and struck the multicolored bismuth-like stone with a flash bright enough to leave an afterimage in his mind’s eye, along with a deafening thundercrack that nearly stunned him.
The node of Potential shook violently, gradually brightening to the point that he had to squint before suddenly cutting out as his soul was no longer able to visualize the scene, the conceptual light too complex for him to even picture.
He felt heat wash through him, the darkness outside his body suddenly bending and contorting as the Celestial elemental’s influence was pushed away.
Minutes passed as the vibrations emanating from his core built until he feared it might destabilize his soul, several memories becoming hazy and distant as they were thrown out of sync with those before and after them until it suddenly just… stopped.
His Potential stilled, he felt the light cease, and every part of him locked back into place. He took a centering breath.
The shockwave that exploded outwards, his body coming undone at an atomic level, leaving absolutely nothing.
His awareness expanded the moment the Rage broke through the surface of his soul; just as before, he knew that if he wasn’t able to reel in the mana, he would detonate in an immeasurably destructive suicide attack.
He flexed everything that he was, gritting his teeth and digging his heels to contain the blood red flames exploding out of him.
The Rage tore at everything, grappling with the space on its way forward with a single-minded desire to kill. If one could see inwards from the outside, they might even hallucinate humanoid figures crawling forward, screaming for blood.
The expanding red sun would spell apocalypse for a small section of the Spirit Realm, if not for the singular white glowing core pulling with every fiber of his being.
Dei was stretched thin, drawn and quartered by his own power. Agony and determination filled his mind, his will alone the only opposition to a thousand furies.
He felt the weight on his chest of the rope tied around him, the earth that shifted under his footing, the rabid beast he was linked to kicking up dirt behind him in its attempts to lunge forward.
His drowning mind hallucinated the scene with perfect clarity, and he did not have the mental faculties to question it.
He was never meant to become a manifestation from this much mana- it was too much for him. The bounds of Cycle of Sealing were already stretched thin, and this mana was a trial to prove he deserved to hold the power; even with the mana was containable, he would have been hard-pressed to even slow his own destruction.
This was the same effect he’d suffered beneath the first time, wild mana he could not tame. He hadn’t even held a fraction of his current mana, and it’d damaged his soul severely enough that even with System intervention, his Identity was obliterated.
Yet failure was never an option. There were too many relying on him, too much he hadn’t done. With his first death, he refused to pass away because of how unsatisfying it would have been, to allow his last mark to be betrayed, weak…
Nothing.
His entire life, amounting to…
Nothing.
Everything he’d ever done.
Nothing.
What would happen if he perished now? Who would be left? The Gem Dwellers would die, Clever, Fendrascora, and his family caught in the middle.
Aloran would be left without a following, being cut off from the Physical plane to likely never be heard from again.
Ashvorn… what would they do? Surrounded by demon-kin with nowhere to go, they could very well die.
Perumah? She would live, but he knew her, she would move on. She did not hold Love, not yet, and may very well decide to delay the connection so as not to cripple herself emotionally until she’d all but forgotten about Dei.
If he lost here, he would be just as he was before. Nothing.
Despite the impossibility of his task, Dei took a step forward, pulling the beast with him. It fought and thrashed, but he took another, the reactor of power surrounding his soul contracting ever-so-slightly.
There were too many relying on him, too many he would leave behind, too much he’d left undone.
He took another step, the snapping and popping of the sun intensifying as it condensed.
He’d done nothing but fight and kill since he was reborn. Could he not leave a better mark upon the world? Show not only his hatred, but his love as well? His friends knew him as someone who would slaughter to protect them, to shield them from the world, and they loved him for it, but he was more than a killer.
He wanted to grow flowers with Fendrascora, conduct more experiments with Clever, bicker with Perumah, and be there for his family. He wanted to live.
His Kindness, no matter how miniscule its power might seem compared to his Wrath, gave him the strength to take just one more step.
Finally, the beast slipped, crashing down under Dei’s assault. The sun cracked and collapsed inwards, pouring into Dei, changing him.
Unlike his first manifestation, every iota of mana used in the current one was sourced from Dei himself, carrying his Rights and his meaning. Rather than transform into a faceless humanoid, he stepped from the swirling nebula a blood-red man of flaming hair, eyes swirling with pink light.
Despite the burning emotions, he was completely calm. In control.
His eyes scanned the space around him, feeling the attention of the Celestial elemental. If not for it being a demon-kin he had no doubt he would sense fear.
Reaching out, he grabbed the walls of its stomach.
* * *
POV: Cistasaria
The Realm shook around her as she breached layer after layer. There were other fronts that needed guarding, the demon-kin’s constant assault on the Leviathans drawing their attention, but this was a task she felt duty-bound to complete.
Dei was her bond. When the System came to her that day to ask her of her Connection signature to use upon a new descendant, she took responsibility for him, at least partially. She put him on the path, marking him with her fate.
She’d watched when she could, and he’d continued to represent the signature of her Connection well, growing that one fragment of her Right into a near-complete set.
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When Aloran approached her, she wanted to take him up on it, but she knew she could not drop her vigil. The gaps would appear, and her siblings would not hold without her.
At least, until Aloran offered to cover the power difference.
“I will expend every drop of power I have to bless as many Leviathans as possible. You guard your Realm, do you not? Is that not providing Refuge for your Realm? The power increase will cover Cistasaria’s gap, if temporarily.”
She thought the idea absurd. Aloran was a new God, no matter the initial boost he’d gained from being tied to the Draconic Realm for so long, he would not be able to afford even two blessings. It was not so easy to impart a fragment of a domain on another God without crippling the sender, to do so one had to grow their domain, from the ground up, within the other God’s soul. It was not possible to grant another God an Achievement, as that would imply the sender was above the one being blessed.
Yet, he surprised them all by saying he could afford at least fifty blessings- then again when he actually provided eighty three.
Unfathomable, he could have done so much more with that amount long-term, which she pointed out.
“I don’t have long-term,” he insisted, “Dei dies now if he doesn’t receive help, and the situation with the Gem Dwellers degrades every hour.”
However he did it, whatever his reason, she was now bound by Contract to save Dei and guard the Gem Dwellers from further spiritual assault.
Sensing her location grow close, her body began to shift and crack as she traded her fins for claws, breaking through the final barrier and reaching out to the Celestial elemental with Dei trapped-
Half her Contract failed, she sensed it, leaving her obligated to repay Aloran a portion of his faith.
Fury and despair clouded her mind for a moment. ‘I was too late? Dei was already…’
Before she could even finish the thought, she heard the Elemental scream.
The pitch elevated when a massive red hand punched through the side, followed by another, then both pulled.
The Elemental’s side split open, and Dei stepped out.
She felt his presence, and knew he’d molded and now wore the corpse of a Rage Beast, the core of his self somehow tucked safely away within.
‘He’s not dead,’ she realized, ‘I failed because he doesn’t need saving anymore.’
* * *
He resisted the urge to absorb the demon-kin, as he knew it would only spell his death. These were not organic beings, their very existence was toxic to everything, and he could not treat the situation as he did the Dream.
Still, he was not helpless in the slightest. As he physically grabbed the concept, he saw that Celestial and Gravity were two different words for the same affinity.
The elemental fought, concentrating its manipulation on crushing him, but he was too… heavy to be contained any longer.
He tore a hole in its stomach, and the Elemental rearranged itself partially to ensure he left its body immediately rather than have to fight through its organs- likely deeming it a lost cause to try and trap him any longer.
The first thing he saw when he exited were the two shark demon-kin about to attack him, the second was Cistasaria, the Leviathan he shared a link with.
‘Is that why Aloran wanted me to survive? To give Cistasaria time to come get me?
‘It doesn’t matter, my grudge waits for no one.’
An ultrapowerful Identify branched out from him, striking at the sharks and the Elemental.
The Identify almost failed on the Sharks as their souls were elastic in nature, bending around every place the Identify struck them, just barely giving him enough information from the small scratches they suffered before his Identify slid off.
[Demon-Kin: Estimated level: 500 by all standards]
[Demon-Kin: Estimated level: 500 by all standards]
They were strong, the peak of mortality and of the same quality path as his own.
[Demon-Kin: Estimated Level: 550 by normal standards, 560 by yours]
The elemental, on the other hand, was not only divine, but held an even denser path than his. Despite that, he knew he was stronger than all of them. Demon-kin were hollow, nothing to sacrifice, nothing to give, and he burned through everything to maintain this shape. This manifestation was temporary, and he knew he had to end the war before he ran out of time, because he would be crippled for months, perhaps years once it was over.
“Go,” Cistasaria said as if reading his mind, and he was happy to oblige.
She would handle the Spirit Realm, especially considering the layers she couldn’t enter were gone now. He would conquer the Physical.
He pushed upwards and the Celestial elemental briefly tried to hold him.
A spike in his emotions caused him to lose control, and a fully powered backhand struck the creature.
It fragmented instantly, its body turning to shrapnel as he accidentally tore a massive swathe of land apart killing… countless beings. It was horrific enough to make him reel, as he wondered what would happen if he lost control near the Gem Dwellers, yet he found himself simply not caring
He clamped down on his Rage before it could blind him further.
Iora was his target, he could not let himself lose sight of that.
The elemental was not dead, its different pieces reforming into its same general shape while demon-kin poured free of every one, likely the same demon-kin that were meant to ambush him if he’d gone to its internal world.
He wanted to stomp them to pieces, to cut loose, but he could do that in the Physical Realm.
The forcefulness with which he rose through the layers left cracks, but it was a far-cry from the utter destruction of the initial collapse.
Passing through fourteen, he saw how the different demon-kin had started to “Stack” on top of each other, reaching upwards into the open space.
Layers one through thirteen were gone, nothing to hold them up, but there was still something there, the idea of an open space.
Where layer nine would be, Dei felt more than saw four terrifying presences approach for a moment, stopping almost instantly.
The hollow staffs, commanded to let him through? He didn’t know.
In the eighth layer, he sensed the reaching tendrils of the Shamanic staffs, many of them lightly tapping at his form in a sort of greeting to ensure he was not insane. Whatever he looked like to them, he could feel the hesitation towards letting him through, yet they still did it nonetheless.
Things must have been desperate to allow a calamity like him through.
Around layer six, he noticed the strings begin to change direction, many of the staffs, pushing him towards one in particular- a white sparking one that held a mildly familiar scent.
Iora.
The very second he recognized it, he lost control, tearing upwards. He barely even realized that she’d already been moved far away from the Gem Dweller Capital. It was arrogant of him to think he would maintain his composure for even a moment.
When he sensed her stop somewhere above him, likely choosing to stand and fight, he felt himself smile with feral glee.
Though he could’ve simply phased back into the Physical world, he chose to shatter the boundary with his arrival, an explosion of fire accompanying him.
There, a small distance away, he finally laid eyes upon Iora.
He didn’t see that they were deep in the raid lines or that she’d managed to attract most of the stronger demon-kin, nor did he see how they were the only ones outside of the city any longer, all of the Shamans having fled to the city and chosen to hide.
All his tunnel vision found was the same old, wrinkled face that’d tortured him as a baby, causing such immense agony that his very soul broke under the pain, and would have ended his second life almost as quickly as it’d begun if Soul hadn’t stepped in to save him.
He felt the snarl on his face, and was glad his family wasn’t here to witness what came next.
He would repay her for every pain he’d suffered since the day she cast him out of the village.
* * *
POV: Iora
“You are given one final objective,” she heard from Justin, and gritted her teeth in rage and indignation. “Survive under Dei’s assault long enough for him to regain control over his mind. You are slated to be hollowed either way, though I suspect he will complete the process in our place. I do not believe he will kill you easily or quickly.”
His cool, uncaring tone grated at her nerves.
‘I was right!’ she thought ‘Why can’t they just see that? I wasn’t wrong! I did nothing wrong!’
It did not matter. She was a Shaman, and to resist her call to duty would be a shame incomparable to any other.
Yet still, she could only scream her truth into her mind, the only observer a foreign entity that watched with anticipation.
