Chapter 57: War Form
Damon possessed only two abilities.
"The first," Cillian observed, "is mind control."
The creature’s form, a network of countless brains strung together by pulsing veins, was not only horrifying. It was functional. This structure represented the perfect physical expression of a living being that shared one endless sea of consciousness. Every thought, every flicker of emotion, was linked through this lattice of flesh and nerve.
And from this structure emerged its first ability, the power to dominate minds.
But, as Cillian quickly noted, mind control and thought control were not the same.
Mind control was a magical ability, an external interference that severed one’s connection to their own body. Victims of this magic could still sense something was wrong; their consciousness rebelled even as their bodies obeyed. The strong-willed might even resist or break free, their souls flaring in self-defense.
Thought control, however, was something else entirely. It was not an intrusion, it was a reprogramming.
Unlike the cruder form of domination, thought control did not seize the body; it rewrote the mind itself. It altered memory, twisted perception, and reshaped self-awareness, all without the victim realizing anything had changed. To those caught within it, every word, every action, every monstrous deed would feel natural and self-chosen.
As a creature born of infinite thought, Damon could project an immense mental field. a sort of "brain world" that spread through the mists of the Endless Abyss. Anyone who came into contact with this field had their cognition rewritten by Damon’s will. They would carry out its desires unknowingly: perhaps sparking massacres, performing dark rituals, or assassinating those Cillian marked for death, all while believing it was their own will guiding them.
Cillian chuckled at his own dark thoughts
Once a mind was fully rewritten, its sea of consciousness was absorbed into Damon’s collective mind, indistinguishable from all others.
Cillian watched this process unfold through his divine perception and nodded with quiet satisfaction.
"With Damon," he said softly, "the Endless Abyss will save centuries of effort in future invasions."
This ability was a nightmare for worlds bound by order. He could already imagine the chaos it would breed, the mistrust, the fear, the madness. No one would be able to tell if the person beside them was still sane or had already been rewritten by Damon’s influence.
And worse, they would not know if they themselves were already lost.
"The second ability," Cillian continued, "is computation."
Compared to its first gift, this one seemed almost mundane. Yet its implications were infinite.
By linking countless minds through its network, Damon had created a collective intelligence of unimaginable scale. Its processing power dwarfed mortal comprehension. No formula was too complex, no experiment too intricate. Damon could calculate anything, predicting battles, analyzing laws of reality, even modeling divine phenomena within moments.
Cillian tested its range briefly, his eyes flickering with divine light.
Its capacity, he estimated, surpassed his own. It rivaled the computational power of a mid-level god.
Its ability to parse rules... was faster than his.
"Impressive," he murmured. "And scalable."
Unlike the gods who refined their power through divine fire, Damon’s growth depended on devouring minds. To expand its computing potential, it would need to capture and integrate countless living beings into its collective sea of thought.
The scale of such a task was staggering, an astronomical number of lives. Even the Endless Abyss, with all its hunger, would struggle to supply so many souls. But Cillian was not concerned. He did not need Damon to consume endlessly, only to function as his perfect instrument.
"Good..." he said quietly. "Even if this ability lacks the elegance of the first, it has its uses."
With Damon, he now possessed the equivalent of a god-tier supercomputer, one capable of simulating battle outcomes, analyzing divine systems, and processing data beyond mortal or divine reach.
He smiled faintly. "And unlike ordinary machines... anyone foolish enough to touch Damon will simply become part of it."
A faint whisper interrupted his thoughts.
"You... lied..."
Cillian turned. The sound came from a nearby brains, one of the old high officials who had once led the corrupted civilization. Its voice was weak, trembling, soaked in despair.
"You lied to us... you said you would heal us... but instead, you enslaved us..."
Cillian stopped, then slowly approached the writhing brain. His eyes glimmered faintly, not with pity, but with curiosity.
"Oh," he said softly, "I almost forgot. Your minds also contain the reverse-ascension equation I need."
He rested a hand upon the surface of the trembling brain.
"But no," he continued, his tone calm, almost gentle, "I didn’t lie to you. What you’ve become is the result of my treatment. You’re whole again..just in a different form."
He leaned in slightly.
"When you ignored the cries of the lower races, when you sought to rule all and call yourselves gods, when you pursued eternity while others suffered, you should have expected this outcome."
Cillian’s hand closed, crushing the brain effortlessly. The light within it flickered out, and the last trace of that consciousness faded into the endless hive of Damon’s mind.
In that moment, streams of information rushed into Cillian’s awareness, the coordinates of the planes once colonized by the Hayes clan. Thirty in total.
Most were shattered beyond repair, their civilizations long gone. But their world cores, their divine remnants, and their resources, all of it still remained.
To Cillian, it was a pleasant surprise.
A collection of spoils waiting to be claimed.
He lifted his gaze toward the rifted sky of that dying world. Somewhere beyond, a battle was raging, a mythic creature tainted by the abyss clashing with two others of divine rank.
Whichever side prevailed would determine the fate of that plane.
"If it wins," Cillian said softly, watching the chaos unfold, "then this world will fall into the arms of the Endless Abyss."
His eyes narrowed.
"And if it loses... then its path of corruption ends here."
The war with the Hayes clan, and with the fallen god Gideon, was drawing to its end.
And within the quiet that followed, Cillian could already feel the next gate of his domain opening.
——————x——————
And at the bottom of the Endless Abyss, Cillian sat upon his bone-forged throne. He closed his eyes, and his divine fire pulsed faintly within his chest, a silent flame weaving unseen threads across space as he dragged the Hayes Clan’s mother world into the heart of the Abyss. It was the same world where Damon now resided.
While Damon was not born from the Abyss itself, it was shaped by its breath and madness, so it was capable of existing freely within its depthless chaos. Still, Cillian had to be cautious.
The Endless Abyss was not gentle, its twisted rules could easily fracture Damon’s realm, scatter it into drifting fragments, and fuse it into the greater chaos. If that happened, Damon’s mind would dissolve into the collective madness, infecting every demon and abyssal lifeform nearby. The entire region could be consumed by his expanding consciousness.
While Cillian guided the mother world downward, the Abyss itself moved on its own, the greedy thing pulled upon the thirty planes Damon had conquered their broken remains spiraling toward oblivion. The black-red vortex of the Abyss expanded like a colossal wound, swallowing everything: the continents, the skies, the creatures, even the laws that once governed those worlds. All were torn apart, restructured, and baptized into corruption. Soon, they would serve as new territory for the endless swarm of demons.
"I didn’t expect the yield from these worlds to be this rich," Cillian murmured, eyes opening faintly. From his throne, he gazed across the endless darkness and saw the worlds being consumed one by one. Their remains glittered like dying stars. "Thirty planes in just two weeks... not bad."
Most of the Hayes world had been stripped barren, reduced to toxic wastelands by the clan’s weapons. The air in them was poison, their oceans sludge, their soil turned to metal dust. Life had long fled those places, but such conditions meant nothing to the Abyss. Compared to its depths, even poisoned worlds were delicacies.
A faint smile touched Cillian’s lips. In the past month alone, he had devoured less than ten worlds through. Now, by sheer chance, he had inherited more than thirty, all offered up by the fall of what could barely be called a god.
"It’ll take at least a week for the Abyss to consume them fully," he said, tapping the throne’s armrest with one finger. "That’s fine. I’ll use this time to improve our methods of war."
His gaze swept outward, across the Abyss. Instantly, everything under that gaze, demons, horrors, and abominations alike, began to tremble. Even the oldest entities knelt.
Cillian had noticed something during his last campaign: the Endless Abyss, powerful as it was, fought like a beast from an older age. Its means were brute, its methods ancient.
While could crush most worlds through sheer force, every invasion required him to bring the Abyss’s true body down upon a realm, a slow, cumbersome and risky act.
Only then could his armies pour forth and finish the destruction. It worked, but it was inefficient.
He needed something more elegant. A way for the Abyss to spread without moving. To infest the cosmos through its spawn.
"The Abyss itself doesn’t need to move," he said. "What if it could wait, and still consume through its children?"
The idea felt strangely possible.
But there was a problem, the crystal walls of worlds.
Each plane, no matter how weak, had its own crystalline boundary, its rule-system. Even a minor world possessed its own protective layer. To fully consume one took time. The last thirteen worlds he devoured had all been part of a shared plane, bound together by a single wall. That was why he had managed to drag them down so quickly. If not for that, even his divine fire would’ve been slowed for days.
"The demons can taint the enemy’s soil, but they cannot carry the Abyss itself into the heart of the world."
He muttered, leaning forward.
He thought aloud, his voice echoing through the void. "Could each demon bear a fragment of the Abyss... a spark of its essence? Could they serve as living anchors, spreading the Abyss wherever they go?"
He paused, then shook his head. "No. They’re too weak. A single demon would collapse under the weight. Unless it were endlessly replenished, even the strongest would eventually die."
"What if I gave them authority?" he half mused. "Opened a small portion of the Abyss’s control to them..."
His frown deepened . "They are not gods. They cannot wield divine fire, nor sustain a mobile anchor. The burden would annihilate them from within."
The air around him darkened further, and for a long moment, the Abyss was silent. Cillian sat still upon the throne, fingers resting on his chin, mind racing through endless possibilities. The Abyss’s own breath flowed like mist between the broken bones that formed his seat, here, time had little meaning.
He had no solution yet, but that didn’t concern him. The thirty worlds would take days to digest. He could afford to think.
Then, several days later, as he reclined upon the throne and roasted an Abyss Rabbit over dark fire, something small and trivial happened, something that changed everything.
A demon had returned from battle. Not just any demon, but the four-armed abyssal creature that had gotten the co-ordinates of the Hayes home-world, this single deed had earned it the attention of the Abyss lord himself.
And now, it was time for its reward.
Cillian paused, lowering the skewer in his hand. His gaze turned distant, his mind stirring. "A reward..."
He leaned back on the throne, the flames casting shadows across his face.
Perhaps, he thought, the solution to his problem would not come from the divine , but from the demons themselves. If the Abyss could evolve its soldiers into extensions of itself, if even one demon could carry a true fragment of its essence, then the Endless Abyss would never again need to descend.
It would naturally spread.
Cillian smiled faintly, his divine fire flickering to life once more.
And far above, at the borders of the devoured worlds, the four-armed demon began to scream.