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Era’s End 6 – Unity in Grief
🕑 Added 2025-07-25 16:58:56 +0000 UTCIzha’s new form shambled forwards. The peace of mind that had been forced on John was wiped away. Observe was his first attempt at an action. Something inside his brain refused to actually go through with the skill. “Let’s stay afraid of the unknown, shall we?” the duality of madmen suggested.
The unified right arm of the human host rose up, then sliced at rapid speed. A shockwave went through the room, the elementals parting in its path. They were quick enough. The Mandala Sphere was not. The object was sliced through in an instant, the core destroyed, the Possession undone. Pieces of metal clattered to the ground.
‘At least it’s just a replacement sphere this time,’ John thought drily. The unserious tone was partly a coping mechanism. ‘How do I approach this…? Best start with this!’
John did not believe in half-measures when he faced such an entity. Now that Izha was putting his strongest card on the table, it was only appropriate that the Gamer did the same.
Swinging his fist, John loosed a fire bolt from Purgatory. The flames were supposed to deal extra damage to Lorylim, but extra damage at this level amounted to fairly little, especially when the source scaled with Physical Stats and came from a summoner. No matter, it had just been a preamble to John pulling the ripcord to Arcane Ascension.
The enchantment on Purgatory let him, once on a 30 minutes cooldown (under the stipulation that Rising Annihilation was fully stacked) cast a spell as if he had spent three times his maximum mana to do so. That number was 116’874 MP. His go to spells for this were Mana Chain and Arc Lance. He chose Unstable Arcana this time around.
The sphere of silver appeared in front of him. It did not pulse, since there was no enemy in range. It simply hovered there, a basketball sized sphere of gleaming argent. John grabbed it.
An Unstable Arcana pulsed once every 0,5 seconds for a maximum number of pulses equal to each 200 mana spent on the spell. In other words, this sphere had 584 pulses in it, which was almost 5 full minutes of consistent damage pulses.
It did also have one more feature that came in handy during situations like this.
‘We fight this carefully!’ he warned everyone. ‘No elemental dies.’
‘’’Yes!’’’ all of his elementals responded as one.
The Creator Puppet led the advance. Inkaryl in both hands, it inched one foot forwards, then pulled the other one ahead. Sigmund’s head was twitching. He had lowered the sword. Was he fighting against Izha’s influence? Was Izha getting used to the new extensions of his nervous system? Was it all just a ruse?
Inkaryl extended its blades, then pulled them back in with the sound of a metallic heartbeat. The blades changed from the red of fire to the deep purple of gravity. Extra oomph was John’s favourite usage of that weapon. When he was surrounded by his elementals, the last thing he needed was more magical damage. Raw kinetic force would do it instead.
It helped that the Creator Puppet was already engulfed in an aura of ice. Courtesy of the Ascendant Golem Infusion, John’s second body benefitted from Aclysia’s Monster Girl Perks, including the Ascension ones. It was diminished to 25% efficiency, but it was still a constant area of attack aura, coming alongside the dusting of Black Ice on the edges of his weapon.
Neither were going to be a decisive factor in this fight. Little advantages added up, however.
John was straining against his own desire to bring violence to this murderer. Now that Izha had stopped taunting him, he found it slightly easier to hold that hatred back. His blood was still rushing much faster than it usual, but he felt in control of himself. He was fighting the way he was best at: methodically.
When the aura of glacial winds touched Sigmund, the conjoined creature came alive. An aura of green gusts surrounded the Contender, amplifying his speed. In an instant, he was before the golem. John raised Inkaryl. The long grip of the weapon took the impact of the strike. Knees buckled, the humanoid form of the Creature Puppet sinking halfway to the ground.
It wasn’t just that Sigmund’s strength had increased with the fusion. The swing came alongside a telepathic wave, emphasizing the natural reactions that the body had to blocking a strike to the point of inefficiency.
A mechanic once outside of John’s body was no longer a psychological factor.
The Unstable Arcana pulsed. Arcane energy washed harmlessly over the Creator Puppet, only to move across the fused monstrosity’s skin and armour like a silver flashfire. A Mana Chain emerged from a rippling portal to John’s left, brought about by the Perk that added a weakened version of the Skill to every explosion that struck at least one target.
Sigmund shoved the Creator Puppet back. A swing of his bio-sword shattered the piercing head of the Mana Chain. The motion turned into a whirl, his cape of bellowing shadows obscuring his form and swallowing the series of ranged attacks launched at him from the sides. Lightning, fire, and thrown rocks all disappeared.
Stopping a few metres back, Sigmund turned his head left then right. Izha had to know what John had available and the reason why he was not risking his elementals. There was the true reason, that the sword that Sigmund wielded was capable of permanently killing them. There was also a mechanical reason.
The two intertwined to make the elementals the most attractive target for the nihilist. What the mind reader knew, John could imagine. His mind raced to every conclusion that Izha would arrive at given the intel he himself had. Although the Gamer had no doubt that the telepath himself had plenty of intellect, that intellect was warped by his particular brand of insanity and stretched physical form. Izha must have relied on John to outplay himself, to accidentally come to a strategy that he could not counter.
John did not come to any such outcome.
“You will not win this fight,” John declared.
Izha’s voice came from the walls, gleeful and hollow, “I have already won. I win. I win. I win.”
“You keep telling yourself that.”
Sigmund moved again, charging at the only viable target he had. Of the six present elementals, only one was slow enough to catch reliably while low enough in Endurance to dispatch swiftly.
Stirwin growled and stood his ground. The wide-open jaws of the crocodile patiently awaited the opportunity to strike, even as their enemy executed a rapid strike downwards. Izha was banking on Sigmund’s speed. John pushed through the impulse not to intervene that the telepath tried to force on him.
The sword cleaved into Stirwin’s shoulder. John asserted his true desire over the outside force on his mind. Magus Step carried him next to Sigmund. The sphere in his hand pulsed regularly one final time, before it was crushed between the Gamer’s hands.
If reality had run on a computer, the GPU fan would have suddenly gone into maximum whirl. 582 remaining pulses all followed the singular one that had triggered a blink earlier. Unstable Arcana was an AoE spell. Individually, its effects were weak against singular targets. As one nearly solid wall of silver, it was a devastating and highly reliable close quarter attack.
The combined magical energies were enough to have a cumulative kinetic effect on Sigmund, launching him backwards. The front of the creature was turned into a crisp, the gap that Salamander had made in the armour a silver-sparking pit of charred meat and bone. Mycelial tendrils emerged to knit the gap back together.
Sigmund coiled up, then leapt to the side. After the light of the explosion had faded, the light of 583 Chains of Babylon spawning followed. They appeared within a ten-metre radius around John, ripples that marked where the dimensional anchor for the chains was located. Immediately after them spawned one more Chain of Babylon from the Punishment Chain Perk.
‘Sadly, that one has a 30 second cooldown,’ John thought.
The Mana Chain from that first, regular pulse launched at Sigmund first. A miniscule amount of time later the 582 others followed, filling the chamber with an overwhelming cacophony of chains rattling. John marked Sigmund with the Focus Vision from his contact lenses, to assure he remained able to see the enemy even as the conjoined creature became the centre of an onslaught of arcane might.
Arcane might that he matched with raw physical prowess. All of that silver, all of that mana, was shredded by a storm of sword strikes. John and the elementals had to focus on dodging the multitude of waves the powerful motions of the Contender caused.
John dared to pour half his mana into the creation of more Chains of Babylon, weaving them into the unified barrage to break the rhythm. Magus Step and then Skitterstep took him invisibly to Sigmund. Left fist clenched, John swung at the Contender with a Remnant Strike. All of the mana he had expended burned inside the Technique. The damage it would deal would be incredible.
Izha was not a strategic genius, but he did have the body and the mind to react to such direct attacks. Even while he tore apart the last of the Mana Chains, the conjoined creature managed to sidestep the first blow. The Remnant Kick swifty followed, but the mutated form leapt over it without issue.
Even teleporting, John was struck in the shoulder before he was properly out. His MP took another hefty hit. Quickly, he disabled Particle Skin. He was more willing to play risky with his HP in these circumstances.
With Remnant Strike and Kick on their 1-minute cooldown, he had no way to get his MP back with Arcane Rejuvenation. Izha hadn’t done him the favour of spawning in disposable bodies to stack Secret of Mana either. He was now limited to his regular MP regeneration. While impressive, this was exactly the kind of fight where that resource had to be rationed carefully.
‘Which means I am not using this spell anyhow,’ John thought and pointed a finger at Sigmund. “I am the master of the current of magic.”
The incantation crossed his lips fluidly. System provided mana surged through his being, summoned forth from whatever layer of his Gamer powers provided the rule breaking powers of his Overclocks. A window flared up for a split second.
The tip of John’s finger sparked. Six rays of light formed a star shape, which collapsed into itself the instant it was born. An unnatural regret overcame the Gamer in that instant. He moved his hand slightly to the side before he could act against it.
The Disintegration Blast was shot at an odd angle. Sigmund turned his body out of the way easily, the attack flying through where his shoulder had been. It was a silver streak, leaving behind a black vacuum and the sound of air slamming back into position. Where it struck the wall, the Cyclostone that had, so far, been essentially unmarred by all attacks simply ceased to exist. A perfect 2-metre wide circle was carved into the wall by a projectile no wider than a knitting needle. Only after reaching a depth of more than four metres did the spell finally peter out.
The conjoined creature seized the moment. Rushing forwards, the Contender’s fist slammed into the Gamer’s face, breaking his nose and rattling his thoughts. “YOU DESERVE NOTHING!” Izha yelled from the walls. “ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! YOU DIE WITH ME! PROVE ME RIGHT!”
The Creator Puppet launched an Elemental Bolt at the Contender’s back and activated the Grasp of the Elements Skill in the same instant. Sigmund tanked the Bolt, taking the chance to ram his fist into John’s stomach first. The Suit of the Chosen held out strong, preventing the corruption-seeped limb from penetrating his skin. It did not prevent the impact from rupturing a few organs.
The intact hand of Izha reached over its host’s shoulder. It gripped John by the forehead. A horrid torrent of memories, his own and others, slammed into John’s character. A corruption almost as horrid as that of the Lorylim attempted to take root in him, a rewriting of who he defined himself as.
It was a sloppy attempt, a raw bombardment of images and concepts without a clear aim. A pulsing headache developed while he observed the manifold deaths Izha had accepted and facilitated. The nihilist let John know exactly how much enjoyment he had taken in revealing the truth about Remus to Romulus, especially the manner of doing so. He showed John the horrors that the soldiers in the outer perimeters were facing. A hundred thousand lesser bodies had been put on the march to wipe out every last member of the coalition and Izha was there for so much of it. He was shown Chemilia impaled upon the horn of a Synapse creature.
Izha dug deeper, utilizing the time he had. He was scratching at the walls of John’s mind, found a crack and spilled inside. He drew out more than surface thoughts and looked for everything he could exploit. The first thing he found was the contemplation of death, the contemplation of how far John was willing to go in the pursuit of his hatred.
The Gamer tried to shove out the telepath, only to be overpowered completely. His mind was not his own, subdued in a way that not even drugs could compare to. Izha drilled into the concept of death. ‘Your parents, dead, your soldiers, dead, your civilians, dead, all because of me. All because of you.’ Izha went deeper, dredged forwards a fractured mental image that consolidated into the one death of all that John admired the most.
He was no man of any particularly impressive looks. He was well built, as Abyssals and especially Abyssal fighters tended to be. Shoulders on the broad side, short, dark hair and brown eyes. He was somewhere in his mid-twenties or perhaps early thirties. “Just let him in,” the phantom of the named soldier said.
John had thought he had been at the pinnacle of rage. He had been wrong. The loss of his parents had been shackled by grief, mingled with regret. This desecration of the memory of Mark, the Gamer could not meet with anything else but pure, unadulterated wrath. Any barriers broke down inside him, pushing the telepath back to the surface in an instant. A flash of surprise went through the shared mental network.
The Elemental Grasp activated. Gravitational powers pulled Sigmund to the floor. The elementals shook off the collective daze induced by Izha’s invasion. The six entities all descended on Izha, bombarding him with attacks. John took an immediate step backwards, severing the physical contact.
“YOU DO NOT GET TO WEAR THE SKIN OF THOSE THAT SACRIFICED EVERYTHING!” John screamed.
“WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT SACRIFICE?!” Izha screamed back from the walls. “MONSTERS LIKE US JUST ACT AND ACT AND ACT! WE TURN THE WORLD IN THE NAME OF THE IMPULSES WE CANNOT DENY! OUR BROKEN DREAMS ARE THE MORTAR THAT BINDS THE BROKEN BODIES OF OUR VICTIMS”
“You are a monster,” John growled. “I’m just human.”
Sigmund tore away the elemental trap. The conjoined creature raised his sword, to kill John once and for all. The Gamer moved back with Magus Step. Sword raised, the puppet had already begun chasing him before he moved.
The wound his opening move had caused was halfway sealed already. He couldn’t risk any of his elementals. Any damage he did regularly just was not enough to overpower the defences. He could outmanoeuvre Sigmund as often as he wanted; ultimately, there was only one choice here.
John would have preferred to keep this option for Tiamat. Between his seething hatred and the tactical situation, he was justified in using the very tool that Izha had equipped him with.
His intent was clearer than any command. The six elementals registered and followed his plan. Final worries found their outlet in the whispered words of the season elemental, “Please, stop where you have to.” Then, all six elementals coalesced in one spot.
It had been at the moment that he’d found his parents that all of their minds had synchronized. The windows that had opened in that moment a signal that the Class Challenge that he had been struggling with for so long had been completed, the current one and the follow-up immediately after. The final level of the Elementalist Class had been achieved, the final Perk had been taken. Three options had been given, but only one had ever been realistic.
Even Sigmund stopped moving when the entity was created.
Out of the impossible mix of essences stepped a woman with white hair. It was long and straight, hovering as if underwater and moving as if in a gentle wind. The inner strands of her hair were as prismatic as her eyes. The iridescent orbs that had no irises sat in scleras too white to still be called human.
Her skin was of a gentle, brown complexion. White body markings covered her, their shapes jagged and swirling, all of them coming together. She wore few clothes. An ornate band of white wrapped around her chest and a loincloth hugged her hips. She had a simple, feminine figure, was neither tall nor short, and resembled Gnome most of all in her dimensions.
A halo hovered behind her head, one ring crossed by seven lines. All of the world, it felt, spun around the axis of that halo.
“What is my purpose?” the Omni Elemental asked.
John swallowed the answer on the tip of his tongue. “Make him…” ‘Disappear’, that was the word he wanted to say most of all. He pushed off that final decision. “…harmless to me.”
Primera snapped her fingers. The sound cut through reality and slammed into Sigmund’s chest. The conjoined creature was flung back. “In battle all falls to the altar of-“
The chanting of the Contender came to an abrupt end. Primera appeared before him. She did not teleport, not in any manner that John was familiar with, neither could he say that he had seen her move. She was simply just in front of Sigmund now, grabbed his chin, and took it off. There was no ripping, no tearing, she simply removed the lower half of his face like it was a loose piece on a toy set.
Dismissively, the Omni Elemental tossed the flesh over her shoulder, as Sigmund built distance between them. He bombarded her with sword waves, each of them breaking against an invisible barrier metres around her. She did not prevent a few strays from going John’s direction, forcing the Gamer to hide behind the Creator Puppet for protection.
It was as much punishment as that body had been capable of taking. The Creator Puppet was cut in two. Only after that lifeline had been taken from him, did Primera act again.
Without a trace, she stood by Sigmund’s side. The Omni Elemental grasped the shoulders of the two conjoined men and began to pull. Izha screamed, with Sigmund’s mouth with the mouths on the wall, and with the mouth that was pulled off the Contender’s spine. Melded flesh tore, until Primera had fully separated the two. A stray wave of her hand was all it took for Sigmund to turn to dust.
John could not lie, he did feel a deep sense of satisfaction to see Sigmund die alone and in pain. It was a grim feeling, he had to admit to himself. It was also honest. For all the pain that man had caused him and his own, for all the death, this was the just reward. Within a few seconds, he was naught but dust on the floor.
Izha was left behind, dangling from Primera’s grip. He had no legs anymore, barely even a torso. He was a head, some chest, and an arm. She dropped him to the floor. “He is harmless now. He won’t waste anymore power on goading you.”
Turning towards John, she scanned him up and down. She approached with clear, malevolent intent. John kept a close eye on the clock. The five minutes were almost up. “Whatever you are seeking, you won’t have the time for.”
“Not this time,” Primera agreed. “I can comprehend, still.”
She bridged the distance between them, placed a hand on his shoulder, then disappeared. One moment she stood there, the next she shattered into six different lights that were then pulled away to their individual dimensions.
“You will suffer more before all of this is over,” Izha cackled.
Then Ehtra, Metra, Lyndell and Tiamat dropped into the room.
Comments
Zurich
Power word 'blank' in the form of an elemental, the best way a 6 element fusion could go. And I like the penalty, very fitting.
Nessa Bright
Wow. Big, perfectly well-established reveal. Incredible
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