Velik watched thousands upon thousands of undead speed off in every direction. They weren’t fast, not by his standards, but they were relentless and untiring. In a matter of hours, they’d spread across the country, aided by magic they somehow used without essence or a system. Portals opened up, cooperatively formed and maintained by cadres of skeletal mages, and infantry streamed through them.
He tried to ignore that niggling feeling in his head that he was unleashing a plague upon the land, that those undead were monsters and he needed to destroy them now instead of letting them scatter. The simple truth was that it didn’t make much difference.
It was going to be a wholesale slaughter when the humans lost their classes and levels and skills. If the undead stepped up to protect them, they might live. If not, then whether they were ripped apart by a monster or murdered by an undead was an academic distinction.
The undead army dispersed under the direction of the liches, and in less than an hour, he was the only one left above the necropolis, Accelit. He knew he’d heard that name somewhere, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember where. Rather than dwell on it, he banished the thought from his mind and returned his focus to the immense creature he could feel shifting underground.
The liches had placed all sorts of magical traps around it to slow down its progress so that they had time to evacuate, which apparently included the wards that had necessitated their trip to the surface instead of portaling directly out of the necropolis. Now that they were gone, though, there was nothing feeding mana into the defenses or reinforcing them strategically.
According to the elder lich, they would quickly break down and the whole process of the divine beast waking up would accelerate. It had only been an hour or so since the undead had started moving out, and already there’d been four tremors. That was twice as frequent as they’d been back when the liches were still actively trying to suppress the monster, and Velik expected them to only get worse.
He spent his time trying to reconnect with his LPS. The last he’d heard from it, it had spoken to him—or at least something had spoken through it—then it had fallen silent after keeping him from dying. There’d been so much essence released when Reisha died, not to mention all the essence he should have taken in from the thousands of monsters he’d killed since getting home.
The idea that it was completely broken, that it had burned up the last of its essence to help him recover, had crossed Velik’s mind, but he suspected something else was going on. He didn’t know how, or why, but despite losing access to the interface and system notifications, the essence configurations he’d saved were still functioning. That needed some amount of essence as upkeep, which had to be coming from somewhere.
None of his attempts to communicate with the LPS were successful. If not for the fact that he could walk across the sky as easily as ever, he would have thought it was gone. The only other explanation for his abilities staying with him was that he was doing what the divine beasts did, and since he didn’t know the first thing about raw essence manipulation, that seemed unlikely.
The tremors got more powerful and closer together, minutes apart at most now, then the grinding sound that accompanied them rose to a deafening level. Stone shifted against itself and the very mountain cracked. Landslides rolled down the slopes, devouring everything in their paths, but their devastation went unremarked. Velik had eyes only for the dark gulf splitting open before him.
Like a shell finally splitting open, the mountain collapsed into itself. Huge shelves of stone collapsed under their own weight and disappeared into the depths. Velik caught glimpses of the necropolis below, but then they were hidden away by a billowing cloud of dust so thick that even he couldn’t pierce it. It would be hours before the wind cleared it away, and by then, he was sure not a single building would remain standing.
Velik circled the growing rift, always moving, a bar of darkness tapering down to an impossibly fine point held loosely in his hand. The divine beast would emerge any moment, and he intended to strike the first blow. Without being able to see, he studied instead the pulsing threads of essence anchored to it. They twisted and writhed as the beast slowly climbed up out of the bowels of the world.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
The threads were getting thinner somehow, a feat Velik would have said was impossible given how fine they already were. He couldn’t deny the evidence in front of him, however, and the truth was that they were stretching taut. Soon, they would snap. He didn’t know what that signified, but he knew it meant something.
The system fighting for control, perhaps? This divine beast is breaking everything as it rouses itself from slumber. Why not the very system itself?
Essence flexed suddenly as a fresh cloud of dust surged out of the rift in the mountainside. Velik thought for sure that this was the sign that the beast was fully awake, that it would emerge into the open air and the battle would finally begin. He swung out wide, his grip tightening on his spear as he scanned the ravaged land for some sign of the target.
Abruptly, the millions of threads vanished, sucked below ground in a matter of seconds. Though he was no longer connected to the system and couldn’t feel it, Velik knew the truth. A fundamental law of existence so primal that he doubted anyone had ever considered it might come to an end had just been snuffed out. It was like gravity turning off or the sun disappearing from the sky.
And the gods really think I have a chance against something that can do that?
It was a good thing he’d decided to wait for it to emerge. Velik had considered going after it in the necropolis, but he’d rejected the idea because he didn’t want to fall prey to any of the traps left there. Now he was just glad he’d stayed topside so that he hadn’t ended up buried under a million tons of stone.
He probably could have clawed his way free of that eventually. He was strong enough to survive the impact and had [Void Lance] to bore through the stone, but it would have left him in a sorry state. This way, he was about as fresh as he could be for when the fighting started.
The pool of essence sat down there in that rift, swirling about in an ever-tightening pattern. With each passing second, it collapsed in on itself, until, like swallowing a meal in one big gulp, the essence vanished.
Shit. That’s not good.
Without the essence to help him keep track of its location, finding it in the dust cloud was suddenly much more difficult. It was preternaturally still, not making a single sound as far as Velik could tell. Admittedly, it wasn’t easy to catch sounds over the rumbling and grinding of a still-collapsing mountain, but he was starting to think that this particular divine beast didn’t do things like breathe or have a beating heart.
Maybe it’s also some kind of undead? That could make some kind of sense, I guess—an undead divine beast guarded by an undead civilization.
He realized his mistake a few seconds later, when a glint of metal cut through the billowing dust. It was only for a fraction of an instant, just a stray gleam that he would never have seen without so many stacked perception skills and raw stats, but it was there. Not an undead, he realized, a machine.
Angling himself for the throw, Velik heaved his spear down at the ground below. It cut through the dust, struck something metallic, and shattered. Undeterred, he rained down a wave of void splinters. They cut through the dust, eating it and giving him his first good look at the machine below.
He could see an arm, encased in what looked like blue-painted steel. It had to be at least forty feet long, maybe more. A moment later, he realized it wasn’t a human-shaped arm, but something with multiple segments. He revised his opinion from forty feet to at least a hundred, depending on how many segments it had.
It ghosted out of the dust with no more sound than the infinitesimally small grains of dirt pinging on its armored body. Mile after mile of divine beast appeared in a long, sinuous rope a thousand feet wide with legs a few hundred feet long each coming out of either side of its body. He didn’t even try to count them, but they studded the armored shell every fifty feet or so.
It’s like those machines out in the desert, he realized. It was alive, but had no essence signature in it. That should have been impossible. He’d just watched it pull in all the essence from the system not even a minute ago, but apparently the divine beast didn’t care about that.
One single leg was marred, pocked by the rain of twig-sized [Void Lance] he’d unleashed on it. It could be damaged, but compared to its monumental bulk, Velik despaired at the idea of utterly destroying it. If he wanted to win, he’d need to find weak spots and focus his efforts.
Of course, the essence parasite wasn’t going to just sit there and let him kill it. Before it even finished exiting the rift it had torn open in the mountain side, it reared up a thousand feet into the sky. Then it swung around to face Velik, revealing a relatively tiny mouth perhaps thirty feet wide between a set of massive pincers that could shear the top off a castle.
An explosion of light and sound erupted out of that mouth, heading straight for Velik.