Brent Stinebaker
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II-45 A Theft of Death (I)
🕑 Added 2024-12-29 18:21:16 +0000 UTCThe Hound of the Withered Moon. Antediluvian of Death. A divine entity shrouded in layers of mystery, making it hard to distinguish truth from legend. But they did exist. And their line lingers to the present day.
The Inheritors have spent years capturing and gathering the progeny of the Withered Moon. Of all the great factions of the Fathoms, they alone hold most of Death’s Scions. The power of the Withered Moon is tied, somehow, to the Unfallen as well. The very corruption that fuels them, that lets them linger beyond death is something the Scions can wield.
The same connection compels the Legions of the Unfallen Lords to seek the absolute destruction of the Scions. At present, I have been tracking a specific Scion—a warrior called Vendrian. Better known to most people as Death’s Bastard. Right now, he is held by the Collectress, and is a part in her scheme to overthrow her former master, the Dying Queen.
I find him interesting for other reasons. For one, he isn’t consumed by madness or bloodlust yet. Instead, he seems quite averse to killing when he has the chance. I suspect that has something to do with his sword. Mourning, I believe he calls it. There is a shard of intellect there, something keeping his Mind intact, holding the Beast of the Withered Moon at bay…
-Journal of Sarah Moonscar
II-45
A Theft of Death (I)
There it was once again: Earth. The word on everyone’s lips, spoken over and over, almost to the point of being a mantra. Trespassers occupied a strange position in the ecosystem of the Fathoms, that much was clear, but there was also the vault and the Broken Samsara. Wei pondered how to proceed if he should fish for more information from the Embraced.
The Dying Queen was a System-host, too, after all. Perhaps her System revealed her other truths as well.
Wei watched as The Sacrifice dangled from tendrils of blood. More Spatial Essence was coursing through his body, pulsing like blood running through veins. Other signatures were on the cusp of emerging from within its flesh. The moment the battle restarted, they would be facing the weight of an army spawned from a single entity. There would be no time to waste. Wei would channel all his Class’s Essence in a blasting supernova to mask the deployment of his System. Now was not the time for risk, now was the time to ensure his enemy was dead.
“Earth, Earth, fucking Earth,” Death’s Bastard spat. Part of the globule hit a strand of the man’s own long and unkempt hair, but he barely cared. “I don’t know why you System fuckers are so fixated on the Trespasser world so much. Last thing we need is more Trespassers tainting our lives, twisting our fates. You tell your Queen that she can open her own throat. I’m done with you, and I’m done with this conversation.”
“Truly? You care nothing for revenge against the woman that enslaved you? That slew you—and used your death to take from your kin—”
The Bastard cut again. This time, his slash was accompanied by a guttural shout, and a gust of coldest wind. Wei saw the manifestation of his power again—that hound-like entity formed over his body. It lingered longer, lasting a full second rather than a flash. Looking upon its ghostly visage filled Wei with an ineffable dread. The kind that made his insides scream.
He remembered the first time he saw a wolf in the darkness as a child. He had been scared then, had held his spear tight, and kept his posture solid to stop from shaking. This moment reminded him of that. Except, it wasn’t the wolf the creature represented. It was the darkness behind the wolf; the possibility of what else lurked deep in the belly of ink-black night. The place where death resides.
Several of Wei’s disciples cried out and flinched back. The outpouring of Essence from the Bastard was overwhelming—it felt like his spiritual pressure had doubled in a moment. The air before him tore open, and a gust of unnatural chill began to bleed into the world, sapping at every droplet of Essence in the air.
The Embraced summoned something from its wounds in haste. Bloody tendrils wove the shape of a large blinking eye that covered the vampire’s entire body. It functioned as a shield, and when the Bastard’s blow hit, it shattered into shards of dust and glass. But Wei felt something more. Consuming. Draining. Every bit of the creature's vitality flowed out of its being and drifted into the Bastard.
It was as if he consumed its vitality through its destruction. His power simmered and grew, filling his spirit with another weight. The same weight as the creature he just killed.
see now? Do you seen why the dog
Is he—
“No,” the Shell said. That shouldn’t be a System. We would sense it otherwise. But this… this is something else. This is more than just a Class.”
"A silver wound fifty meters long tore through the air, leaving space itself flayed after the Bastard’s strike. The man was breathing hard, hissing hot gusts of steam from the attack, yet it wasn’t from exhaustion. Instead, his eyes were wide like that of a man on the verge of madness. Wei felt the Bastard’s sword gleaming bright with Essence. Enlightenment. Like it was bearing a portion of the Bastard’s sanity. In contrast, part of the Bastard dimmed, and his movements took on an instinctive, bestial quality.
“Savagery!” the Embraced moaned. They rose beyond the end of the silvery wound, untouched but trembling. The creature they summoned was nowhere to be seen. Vanished into the silver gouge the Bastard left upon the world. “What a pitiable creature. What a vulgar reaction.” It turned its attention to Wei. “Do you see now? Do you see why the dog must be put down. It has no sense. It is driven to destroy, to bleed and wound the very world. But you can solve this problem. You can deprive the Collectress of her tool, if you would only bring your System to bear… This is what it was created for. Justice. Enforcement. To ensure the other hosts were protected.”
“How interesting,” Wei replied dryly, “that wasn’t what I was told.” He grimaced slightly at the vampire’s open mention of his System, but the Bastard didn’t react. Perhaps he was too lost in the madness to hear. Perhaps he didn’t care regardless. The young master sent a message to his disciples, telling them to stay ready, to keep together.
“She will see you rewarded,” the vampire breathed, holding out his long fingers. “She can give you more power, the means to—”
“If there is anything she has that I desire, I will simply take it,” Wei shot back, now truly offended. “She thinks that she can wound me, torture and defile the lives of me and mine and simply bribe me for my favor? Like I am the dog here?”
The young master chanced another look at the Bastard and shivered. The hound-beast fused with his being glowed with plates of lunar armor. Its head sprouted a long snarly snout of metallic ivory, and the rest of its flesh sported dense clumps of fur between ridges of smooth white. And from the Bastard’s blade came a soft pulse of energy. Wei observed it fully for the first time.
Mourning: Blade of Life-Drinking Lv. 110
“110?” the Shell exclaimed, surprised. Was this the Bastard’s true power? A weapon akin to Wei’s Eidolon, but awakened somehow? With its own Class, its own levels?
“Light protect us,” Garret muttered as he stared at the Bastard. Wei’s disciples were more unnerved by their supposed ally than the vampire spawn by this point.
“The light is not here,” came a high but stern voice. It sounded feminine but strong. Tired as well. And most of all, it echoed from the blade itself. “The time for talk is over, vermin of the Leech-Queen. Begone from this place. I give you this one chance at life. Begone, or I release my hold, and let my brother ride forth to feed his birthright.”
“Ah, and there she is. The Twin of Life to counteract the Bastard of Death. But bound to your brother’s blade. The one he used to kill you. The one you remained trapped in, holding yourself back from crossing the horizon of death—”
“Enough of this. Wei!” The suddenness of the sword's proclamation caught Wei off-guard. “Are you with us?”
The young master only blinked. “I—Yes! Drowned Sky Sect! To arms.”
“What a pity—” the Embraced was interrupted again. This time, by another slash of silver, followed by a blast of celestial radiance. Whatever else it had to say drowned beneath the battle’s din. A wall of bloody tendrils sprouted out of the ground and formed a protective barrier on the Embraced’s behalf. As it did that, Wei sensed it suddenly blinked to another portion of this sanctuary.
It was teleporting. The entire nest must be like a spatial rift for it. Damnation. But Wei could still sense its Essence, follow its signature. At the same moment, the surrounding blood clamped down hard around the Oathbearer’s protective corridor— but failed to crush it. Several of Wei’s disciples groaned as their Essence trickled across Reference Circuits, feeding reinforcement ciphers. The hordes of Scablings, Sanguinauts, and other horrors came forth. But the first wave shattered into shards of ashen ice as the Bastard galloped through them, cutting wildly through the onrush like a blade through silk.
“Oathbearers!” Wei cried. More horrors erupted out from the nearby veins. Monsters came flooding into the gap Wei and the Bastard made earlier, but the young master held breach. Fangs and claws shaped by mystical scabbing crashed against his dim shroud of ash, but the young master countered his foes. He Deconstructed blows. Destroyed Scablings. Rekindled more of his celestial flame, and blasted the oncoming horde back with a flaring of his Empyrael Wrath. A clearing formed in the havoc. A space created at the vanguard by the Bastard cutting his way through the vampire-spawn by the hundreds with each stroke, held by Wei’s disintegrating might, and the supplementary volleys of Skills and attacks from his disciples. “Get this hallway moving. The enemy is a teleporter. Rafael. Find a way to disrupt their movement somehow. The rest of you, man the defenses. Hold the horde. Agnesia. Let your flames sing.”
But the girl didn’t need to be told twice. Slower than Wei and the Bastard though she was, the girl was ready, was already charging forth by the time the words left Wei’s lips. Black-gold fire poured forth from the jaws of her draconic avatar, and Wei felt the sting of her destruction mingle—and then completely subsume his.
Wei’s eyes widened as his celestial flames were tainted black in an instant. His power of Creation and Deconstruction remained, but his Concept Core of Destruction rattled within his glaive, unbalanced by a greater will.
A primal roar came from Agnesia. Her voice was not of a girl’s but a nightmare unchained, of a falling avalanche, of a descending sun promising to scour the lands queen. Wei’s celestial flames, already potent in terms of lethality, were magnified. Tidal waves of black and glow crashed through the treaded walls of this vampire sanctuary, curving around and past the Bastard, consuming everything else in its wake.
When the flames she stole finally subsided, a good third of the nest ceased to be, hollowed in a cone-like shape for five hundred meters.
Wei felt Agnesia’s spirit flare, her being fed by this act of unfettered destruction. Her Essence Level grew over and over. The young master was speechless. So was everyone else for that matter. Oathbearers missed swings with their hammers. Garret failed to grab his next arrow. Ellena’s eyes were as wide as saucers.
Agnesia, meanwhile, let out a wheezing breath and chuckled. “That felt good. I… I got a lot of levels from that?”
Wei broke from his stupor. This was… wonderful. It gave him options. Something to delay the vampire’s hordes even longer. “Right. Keep doing that. More flames. Keep them at bay. Everyone else support her! I’ll be back.” Before anyone could react, Wei manifested his scythe and cleaved the space in front of him. He blinked, right next to the Bastard, who was moving at a frankly frightful pace.
A chilling aura frayed the edges of reality around the—whatever actually was. Sickle-shaped cuts hatched from said aura, their shapes akin to a crescent moon, and the Bastard guided them with swings of his blade, sending them in all directions to shred through the vampire’s sanctuary. Everything his projectiles touched froze and then shattered into drained shards.
A Dilation-Echo pulsed through Wei. He twisted down in a burst of Divine Wind barely evading the hit. Well, if the man wasn’t actually a beast by this point, he was clearly fighting like it. “Bastard!” He cried again.
This time, the Bastard noticed him. And responded by swinging his massive blade of lunar bright.
“Brother! No! Stop!” awakened greatsword, Mourning, cried. But the Bastard was acting purely off instinct, and his instincts were geared toward killing anything that moved. Frightful. But predictable.
Wei blinked away from the attack with a quick slash of his scythe. There was no way he could have dodged at with just the Speed of his Class. The Bastard was just barely slower than the Graviton Brawler at this point—which meant Wei needed to approach him slowly and carefully. Treat this like a dance on the knife’s edge as well.
For what stood before him wasn’t anymore a Knight-Tier adversary than Wei was. No. What he faced was something far, far more.
“Calm!” Wei said. A Scabling burst out from a patch of blood that still remained nearby. Wei swept his scythe and shattered it without looking. He channeled a beam through a rushing horde of Sanguinenauts thereafter. A pulse of energy flowed into his Eidolon. Not far from the next Class Level either. “Calm. These are mere distractions. The Embraced is running, but I have their scent—”
But then Wei felt something else. A flood of Essence choked the surrounding atmosphere, and a new pressure ground down upon his. The Scablings shivered and spattered into inanimate blood. Sanguinauts plunged back into the red that spawned them. The nest itself shook and reverberated, while the tendrils that remained began to twist and merge.
The area around their armored hallway widened into a dome. A dome in the likeness of the Bloodgrounds. Far above though, a massive curving spatial rift flashed and awakened, and behind the quivering red emerged a gargantuan limb fifty meters long.
“And now, she graces you! For the Dying Queen offers a champion when faced with champions, and she will not let this slight go unavenged.” the Embraced’s voice weakened with every syllable, turning into a whisper near the end. “Oh, Mother of All and All to Be. Take from me my blood. Let me serve as kindling. Let your wrath fall, let the Souldrinker claim its due…”
From above, emerged a head. A head that resembled that of a massive mosquito, if said mosquito was created from thousands of human bodies stitched together. Their small naked bodies writhed and twitched as the Souldrinker descended.
Souldrinker: That Which Hollows the Heart Lv. 178
“Fuck me,” the Bastard sighed, pointing his sword upward. “Does everyone have a giant monster hiding up their ass in this place?”
Wei eyed the Bastard flatly. Look who was talking. “Evidently so.”
Comments
Dar-Angol
Mammal lemme tell you something, Ive read everything from Heinlein to Tolkien, Hammerslammers, 80s Cyberpunk, and I absolutely Love your difference of pace and content w the 2 stories, keep up the thing between Wei And Bishop, On a side Mepheleon reminds me of one of the helper Demons of Ains aol goan, another super character..
