Now would be a fantastic time for you to do something! Velik called out to his system as he frantically pumped out [Void Lance] after [Void Lance] in an attempt to push back the build up of raw essence surrounding him. The fact that he was disintegrating the flesh of the divine beast he’d climbed inside of was a secondary effect of his actions.
Essence, unfortunately, didn’t want to vanish just because he unleashed a bunch of void magic on it. Unlike literally everything else he’d ever touched with his newest skill, it just dispersed into chaotic waves for a few moments, which were then caught and tamed by the essence parasite.
This right here was exactly why Velik wasn’t religious. He was literally an agent of the gods, acting on their behalf right now in this immediate moment, being directed by a unique system they’d grafted onto him, and if there was ever a time when he could use a bit of divine intervention, it was here and now.
The gods, just like their stupid system, remained silent.
Fine. No surprise there. I’m on my own, just like usual. I’ll just do it myself.
If there was one good thing about his current predicament, it was that there was no lack of mana for him to consume. He ripped it away from the obliteration propagating through the divine beast around him, splitting it between [Sun Eater] and [Void Lance] to blunt the incoming damage and to heal him before the magic could reduce him to dust.
For a moment, he thought he’d managed some semblance of balance between himself and the monster. His void skills were blocking enough of the environment around him that his regeneration was keeping up with what seeped through. It wasn’t pleasant by any means, but Velik was no stranger to pain and it was well within tolerable levels.
He held that for almost half a minute while his mind tried to calculate just how long the essence parasite could keep this up for. It was a huge monster, and it had dragged in literally all the essence that had powered the entire system for every living thing for thousands of miles, so he thought it was safe to assume it had truly massive reserves. But all he needed to do was act as a converter, channeling its own mana through his body to defeat it.
That would never work on a normal monster. They weren’t intelligent, not for the most part, but neither were they so stupid as to keep doing something that was actively hurting them. In this case, however, he didn’t think the beast could physically pry Velik out of its body. It also hadn’t displayed anything like the sheer breadth of abilities the other divine beasts had wielded, so he almost dared to hope this tactic might be the key to victory.
Then the world started moving as the massive centipede thrashed around. It slammed into the ground and smashed mountain peaks with its bulk. It tore up forests and destroyed rivers, flooding the interior of its body with shrapnel where things got caught in the crack Velik had carved open. With nothing to anchor himself to and not a shred of extra mana to spare to hold his own position, it was all he could do to keep his shell of void magic stable relative to himself.
Flesh melted away as he tumbled back and forth, which only increased the monster’s thrashing. At least I know I’m actually hurting it, Velik thought to himself as he rapidly shifted where his lances were lined up around. He slammed into the backside of its armored shell an instant later, the one material he knew his [Void Lance] couldn’t cut through.
If he’d held it in place, the best-case scenario was that the skill dissipated when it struck the armor. The worst case was that he killed himself smacking into his own skill. So even though it allowed some of the obliteration energy to strike him, melting away an arm and part of his leg, it was the better alternative in his mind.
[Sun Eater] regrew the missing limbs over the next few seconds, not that it mattered. Velik wasn’t trying to move, and the pain of a lost arm barely even registered compared to everything else. At this point, all he was doing was trying to hold himself together in a sea of raw essence, endless mana, and eternally regenerating flesh while he cursed the gods for abandoning him.
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Do something, you useless system! This was your idea to begin with!
The energy was starting to overwhelm his [Void Lance] cocoon now, even with Velik channeling a torrent of mana into the skill. The bars were thinning, just a hair’s breadth, but it was enough. Destruction swept in for him, ramping up from a feeling like standing in fire to having the meat scoured from his bones in a massive sandstorm.
His limbs turned to dust, followed by his ribs. The magic started eating his organs next. Then, all at once, his control over [Void Lance] failed, and [Sun Eater] gave up trying to put him back together. Velik disappeared into the blinding white-yellow light of destruction.
* * *
The system unfurled, fully connected to the essence parasite now that it no longer had a corporeal shell hosting it. Tendrils of raw essence lashed out in every direction as it buried into its new and involuntary host. The irony of a parasite being taken over from the inside was not lost on the system, but it had no one left to share that observation with. Velik had been its only bridge to the physical world.
What followed was a rigorous tug-o-war for control of the essence bound up in the parasite’s body, one that the monster should have won by dint of sheer volume. Even with all the resources it had held back from Velik when he’d harvested the other divine beasts, it was an insect standing before a giant. Fortunately, its creators had prepared for this day.
All the system had to do was reach out for the knots of essence tied up inside its new host. Each one was a trap waiting for the trigger condition to be satisfied, and the system knew where they all were. With each successful path laid out, it crippled the parasite, eventually collapsing it completely. It wasn’t dead, not by any stretch of the imagination, but without essence of its own, it was impotent. Only the adamantine shell of the condensed knowledge spirit kept its physical form contained, but that too was part of the plan.
Now the parasite was nothing more than a feature on the landscape, slowly starving as the system usurped its essence. This was always its fate once it woke; it had grown too massive to be sustained by this world, a pseudo-god with no domain, no faithful, and no way to escape the planet that had birthed it. Its death was inevitable, but this way, catastrophic destruction had been averted.
The system felt the first intrusion, an expected but unwelcome sensation. The adamantine shell had housed the parasite, binding itself to it and exerting some measure of control over it. It was attempting to do the same to the new system, but there was no way that was going to happen. The merger had been necessary when the gods had built their prototype system, but this system was well beyond such primitive contrivances.
The parasite started to shrivel inside its armor, its flesh retracting as the color bled out of it. What was left was little more than dried meat that quickly fell away to dust, leaving an empty shell with a gap big enough for a man to walk into sprawled across the landscape.
With that done, the system had one final task to complete before it could reestablish a connection with the Garden of the Gods. It needed a divine beast to host it, and it knew just where to get one.
The whole time it had been working, it had maintained a whisper-thin stream of essence to power a certain configuration belonging to its former host. Now that the parasite was dead, it was time to restore that being to a stable physical form.
It took only a second to reconstitute the divine beast known as Velik. He appeared in his great wolf form, black of fur and fang, with gleaming red eyes that betrayed far too much intelligence for anyone to think him nothing but a dumb brute of a beast. Those eyes also expressed a deep confusion, understandable considering how the mortal had been used.
The system ripped Velik into two pieces, separating out the mortal human from the divine beast he’d been built into. It was easy to do, merely a separation of the base biological life from the system-grafted divinity it had carried. Easy did not mean pain-free, though, at least not judging by the amount of sudden screaming that filled the empty shell.
The system did not concern itself with such trivialities. It had need of a divine beast host to replace the essence parasite, and this one has been expressly crafted for its use. All had occurred within acceptable parameters, and as it settled into the amorphous blob of gold blood, it began to reshape itself. Around it, the knowledge spirit let out a tortured, strained squeal of adamantine grinding against itself as it tried to reach the pillar of divine power still inside its framework.
The system denied it again. It had no need or desire to be yoked to that framework, one that would only weigh it down. While it pushed back against the crystallized knowledge spirit, Velik regained his feet and peered at its physical form. “What the hell just happened?” he demanded.