Heretical Oaths 17.4: Escalation IV (Patreon)

As I stepped back into baseline reality, the floaty high that I’d been feeling from the god’s influence dimmed a little. Most of it was still there, but the headiest bits faded into the background, the edges of my mood calming.

I’d demolished the place, I realized. There hadn’t been any other oathholders here, and I sure hoped there weren’t any stray innocents, because there was a twenty meter radius where there simply was nothing. I’d done the same thing before, albeit on a much smaller scale—there was a perfect sphere of a crater where I’d extended Inome’s domain out into baseline reality and simply removed a chunk of the city from existence.

The crater spanned nearly the entire street, and at the edges, there were areas where buildings had been half ruined, leaving their pristine exteriors exposed. For a moment, it seemed almost comical, but then those half-broken buildings started to fall in on themselves, collapsing into the crater and sending dust flying across the entire depression.

As the fruits of my efforts quite literally sandblasted me, I extended my awareness. I still retained the increased power that the liberal use of the domain and the memories that weren’t mine, which was nice, and that meant I could track the fleeing Church oathholders with my eyes closed.

Using a mass of unstructured magic so thick that it was nearly solid, I lowered myself to the bottom of the crater. Wouldn’t do to die from falling after all that.

The oathholders were going to live. Okay. That was that.

I wasn’t actively in the domain anymore, so I felt more like myself than the me that wasn’t, but the sense of detachment was still at full force. Apart from the spike of emotion that I’d managed on thinking of Jasmine’s sentiments, everything felt oddly muted, like I’d somehow managed to become less real by stepping out of the limited domain that couldn’t coexist with the world where everyone lived.

I couldn’t bring myself to care about the lives I’d spared, but I also didn’t feel the impulse to execute them for having tried to kill me, so I counted that as a win towards the goal of being the Lily that Jasmine thought I was.

The conflict in this city really felt so meaningless. Nobles, Church, they were going to fight it out and someone was going to come out on top. What reason did I have to care?

A god doesn’t care for the insects beneath it.

That was a scary thought to have. I wasn’t sure if that was me thinking or if it was the fragment of the broken god that I assumed I was carrying around as a passenger.

I didn’t know which option was worse.

Still, the fact was that there was a conflict, and I wasn’t quite a god yet so I couldn’t exactly just force everyone to fuck off and be done with it. I would maneuver myself and the one I loved into a winning position, at the very least.

But how to go about doing that? I’d just managed to scare off a batch of Church oathholders, save a few nobles, but I doubted that that was the sum total of the fighting that had occurred.

Well. If you could call that a fight, anyway.

While I’d been annihilating the Church force, there must’ve been Church-noble fighting elsewhere. How many of those had gone the Church’s way? The nobles?

More importantly, how many of them had we affected? I’d decided the outcome of one fight completely on my own, and if the rest of the group had chosen to fight another Church group, that might be two or even three total fights influenced by us.

There were definitely more fights than that going on. At multiple points in the city, smoke was rising, spells were screaming through the air, and buildings were exploding. With my expanded senses, I could feel hundreds of oaths committing to open warfare in the streets. Some of them were disappearing from my perception even as I watched, and a few of those were disappearing even when there were no other oathholders around them.

Mundanes. Almost all nobles were oathholders, since it was nobles that had the sacred knowledge on how to force the gods to accept the oaths that we made, so the bulk of mundanes were commoners.

And they were killing oathholders.

That, at the very least, gave me reason to smile. Jasmine, Alex, Lucas, Seb, a few others… they’d believed in the power of commoners, even the mundane ones. Believed that they were every bit as competent as nobles were.

I thought back to the differences in reaction time that the commoners and nobles had had when I’d been rescuing them from the Church’s ritual, and I could see the potential that the commoners had. People of action.

Better than the nobles.

I shook my head. It was an interesting thread to speculate about, but there were more immediate issues.

First, I had to get out of this crater.

I formed structures out of unstructured magic, the flow so quick to come to the tips of my fingers that it felt just like it had when I’d been in the domain, less like I was using a tool and more like I was moving a limb.

It should’ve been a little disconcerting, but it was too natural for me to care that much. I should’ve figured out I could’ve done this a long time ago.

The call had always been there waiting for me, hadn’t it? All I had had to do was accept.

I manipulated my raw magic as I walked, forming it into a wispy ramp for me to walk on. I rose to the top easily, casually pushing the structure upwards as I walked so I could move a little faster.

Regroup. That was my next priority. I couldn’t find the group I’d been with earlier, but I could find them easily.

A quick dip into my divine senses gave me their location with pinpoint accuracy, their oaths revealing more than they could ever convey with words.

They were nearly a full kilometer away now and moving fast. I raised my eyebrows. They were using a Caël oath’s magic to move fast, but to what end? It didn’t look like they were—

Ah. Behind them, another oath moved, and I could sense enough of it to tell that it felt wrong. There was already a difference between the artificial oaths of most of us adventurers and the more ‘natural’ oaths of the Church’s Chosen, but this was like seeing the former crudely cut up with a knife and nailed to another being.

Altered.

It’d been a minute since I’d fought them, but I doubted I wouldn’t be able to take them in my current state.

I just needed to get there first.

My domain beckoned to me, and I stepped into it, my body entering the realm of ruinous darkness as I did.

[APPROVAL]

The message came sudden and unexpected, its source both within me and all around me, images flashing through my mind, and I found myself comprehending the deluge of ideas far more coherently than I had done once upon a time.

The broken god would be with me. Why it had chosen me to latch onto over the more experienced, far more powerful Nishi, I had no idea, but it had.

Then again, was Nishi still more powerful? If I stretched my senses out as hard as I could, I could almost feel his influence way off in the distance, a plethora of oaths all stitched onto him like a ragged old quilt that had been mended too many times.

He was strong. I knew that. He was far older than he appeared, and an old man in a position where people died young was one to be feared. Still, he might’ve had connections to more gods than I could count, but who needed a portion of a god’s power when they could just be the god?

You’re getting off track again, I reminded myself, realizing that I’d already managed to navigate most of the way through the kilometer. I placed my exit point above them, ensuring I wouldn’t accidentally kill them all if I let a piece of my domain slip out upon rematerializing.

I appeared twenty meters in the air, and I started falling.

Just two nights ago, falling had been a serious issue, one that I had had to take drastic measures to address. Now, though?

I made myself wings of ruin, and though I didn’t quite manage to fly, nor did I fall. When I hit the ground, it was on my own terms.

When I rejoined them, the Altered was already dead. By the looks of it, it… might’ve been an eagle or a lizard at some point. It had elements of both of them, with a scaly body and wide feathery wings that were now streaked with its own blood. Dull green patterns inscribed across its back and feathers had probably once shone with the power of its oath—a Ditas one, interesting—but none of that light was there anymore and one of its wings was completely missing its feathers and flesh, revealing charred, blackened bone beneath.

“Was that you?” I asked Jasmine, pointing at the fire.

It was a bit of a non sequitur, I had to admit, given that I had just landed into a group of five other people, but—

Hold on. I hadn’t noticed it earlier, probably because my mind was preoccupied with other parts of itself, but hadn’t we started off with seven?

Alex, Lucas, Jasmine, me, Lord Rayes, Fleur… Orchid. Orchid wasn’t here.

“It was,” Jasmine said. “Father gave me a power boost, and Fleur allowed us to evade it and gave me the speed to strike it down.”

“Good,” I said, nodding. “Good. Uh, where’s—“

“Orchid left,” Jasmine said. “Unfinished business, apparently.”

I sighed. “Alright.”

That gave a why, but I kind of wanted a where. I peered across the city, and I found him.

“Huh,” I said. “He’s with Kyle. Seb, too. Interesting.”

The three of them weren’t alone, either. Around and above their current position were oathholders. Artificial ones. Nobody from the Church was with them.

Kyle had gone to help with evacuation, and Seb had left the night before in order to take care of his own problems. Neither of them should’ve been engaged in a fight with people whom I presumed were nobles.

“What’s happening?” Alex asked. “You find where he went? He wouldn’t say, and it wasn’t like any of us were going to stop him.”

“I still say we should have killed the traitor,” Fleur cut in, cold as ice. “He may be revealing our House’s plans even as we speak. Father, I knew we should have not—“

“We have no plans,” Lord Rayes sighed. “Fleur, please. Have some faith in your fellows, be they noble or commoner.”

She made a noise halfway between a snarl and a huff of annoyance, crossing her arms and refusing to speak more.

“Anyway,” I said, ignoring the awkward exchange that had just taken place, “all three of them are engaged in a fight with a bunch of nobles.”

“Huh.” Lukas didn’t have much more to add beyond that. “Now that’s something.”

“Nobles?” That word piqued Fleur’s interest. “Which ones?”

“I don’t know. Care to find out?” I had the capabilities to bring us there in under a minute, I was fairly sure. There was no place in this city that could evade my grasp. “There’s a lot of nobles there, for what it’s worth. A dozen, maybe two dozen oathholders.”

“It may be necessary to save their lives,” Jasmine said, frowning. “I believe in their power, but to go against that many…”

“Alright, I’m going,” I said. “If you don’t want to come, say it now.”

Fleur looked torn for a second, like she really wanted to throw my words in my face, but she nodded.

Nobody else explicitly said they didn’t want to go, though Lord Rayes did say something that might’ve been important, and then I brought us into the domain.

Each time I did it, it got progressively easier, and this time was no exception. It was almost like I was just walking in and out of a building in baseline reality at this point. Where others opened a door, I broke reality, shoving us into the domain of ruin and bringing us back out the other end inside a noble’s mansion.

“…power of a god,” Lord Rayes said at some point during transit. I only caught the tail end of it when I saw Jasmine walking over to him to talk.

“Don’t worry about it,” Jasmine replied, whispering to match his volume. “Lily is Lily. I trust her.”

Despite everything, despite the thick layer of nothingness separating my feelings from this world, Jasmine’s words still pierced straight through that veil, sprouting a warm feeling in my chest.

We all came out the other end, thankfully. I also managed to keep the domain from leaking into reality, which was much more of an accomplishment than anyone acknowledged—to be fair, I was pretty sure that none of them had had to deal with the logistical issues of becoming divinity before.

“Don’t attack!” Lukas shouted, putting his hands in the air. “It’s us!”

He’d started speaking before we were even fully out of the domain, which was pretty impressive. Of the gathered group, it was only him and Jasmine that weren’t caught off guard when we materialized back into reality.

We were inside a noble’s hall. Not the main hall—it was too small to be one—but a dining hall nonetheless, with all the opulence that entailed.

On one end of the hall, we gathered with our three allies. On the other, an array of six oathholders stood in formation, ready to attack or defend as necessary.

“Gods above, you scared me,” Seb said. “How did you do that?”

“Explain the situation,” I said.

“Well,” Kyle said, flipping a knife around in his hands, “things are a little complicated. Actually, they’re not. See, Seb here apparently got burned by House Alzaq before, and our friend Orchid was nearly assassinated by his family.”

“Okay,” I said. “This is House Alzaq, then?”

“Indeed it is,” Kyle said. “And those over there are the House’s private military. They seem rather keen on preventing us from getting to the leader.”

“They can’t be allowed to continue like this,” Orchid ground out. “Cycle of violence and power ends here.”

Ending violence with violence. Now if that didn’t sound familiar, I didn’t know what did.

“I assume you want these guards dead.”

“Or out of our way, if possible,” Kyle said.

“Kill them,” Seb snarled. “Kill them all.”

“Murder should be the last answer,” Jasmine cut in, her words quiet but firm. “Unless you believe them that serious a risk.”

Orchid didn’t speak, but he nodded his head towards Jasmine, acknowledging her words.

“Fine,” Seb said. “At least let us kill the fuckers who tossed me onto the streets.”

There was a story there, but I didn’t care enough to ask.

“Not killing it is, then,” I said, and I stepped forth, dipping myself partially into my domain.

Six oathholders turned their attention to me. One of them cast a spell forward, and I felt it out midair as it flew. An Und oath, casting a Ceretian oathstorm variant that aimed to turn the ground into a substance that would prevent me from gaining any traction on it.

A cute spell that might’ve given me trouble once, but to me now it was less than nothing. I didn’t even have to focus to rip the spell apart, and I tossed back a variation on the same spell.

With Inome’s power and its fractured memories, I could cast Ceretian spells quite easily. Doing it with ruin did change the effect, though. Rather than turn the ground beneath my target’s feet to a sticky substance that would’ve prevented them from moving, the ground simply annihilated itself, dropping them down to the story below.

A second blast did the same towards a fair chunk of the rest of the floor, and then that was all of them fallen to the level below us.

None of the oaths winked out, at least, so it looked like I was doing alright in the whole nonlethality regard. That did, unfortunately, mean there were still six oathholders ready to continue the fight. There was a decent drop between floors, but it certainly wasn’t enough to put them out of commission for the time being.

No matter. It was annoying, but they would fold to us like everyone before them.

I reached out, a hand outstretched in dimensions that weren’t our own, and my divinity moved with me.

Tracing the oaths that were in this area was a simple task. Just beneath us, I could sense the signatures of the six that I’d just tossed down there.

Removing their oaths was a little less simple, but no more difficult for it. All I had to do was seize that connection myself and snap it, ruining the strings that propped these puppets up, and I left them with a shattered husk of the power that they’d once had.

All that power had to go somewhere, and for a moment I thought that it was going to me, but of course it wasn’t. Nobody would interfere on a god collecting its follower’s power, not even another god. Not even me.

I hadn’t paid sufficient attention to this before—of course I hadn’t, wasn’t it obvious that this was happening?—but now I could sense the collected power of the oaths closing up, flowing away through realities to find the gods that they originated from.

“Let’s go,” I told the rest of the room. “Where are we going?”

“The top floor,” Orchid said. “My family’s meeting room.”

“Through the stairs on the west side,” Seb said, then he paused. “The side that you just removed the floor from, I might add.”

“Top floor,” I repeated, and I rose.

All that separated me and the oathholders above us were thick floors and air. If the strongest containment spell the Church had couldn’t stop me, why should something so simple as gravity or so weak as a building do so?

Ruin propelled me upwards, and I left beind something approximating a staircase for the rest of the party to follow. It was a bit paradoxical, forming something out of magic that was only meant to annihilate, and there was a beauty in that birth from destruction.

I broke through the floor like it wasn’t even there, erasing a chunk of it large enough to On this level, there were another dozen oathholders, each of them bearing the Alzaq insignia.

“Anyone important here?” I asked.

I didn’t get a response from the adventurers who actually had a stake in the fight, so I shrugged and tore away these oathholders’ oaths as well and—

[DISAPPROVAL]

[PROTECTIVENESS]

Ah. The others. I should have known. A deep, visceral hate spiraled through my gut, but I tamped it down. I was young yet, and my form was incomplete. In my current state, I wouldn’t be able to compete against my old nemeses even if they were dozens of realities away.

The oaths still disappeared, but I knew that doing that process again would likely result in more retribution than I could defeat at the moment. The gods did value their oathholders even if those oaths were not from ones that they had Chosen.

That was fine. I’d done what I needed to do. Nobody on this floor was going to be able to act against us.

“Top floor is the next one?” I asked.

“It is,” Seb said, the first one to make it up the wispy staircase I’d provided for them. There was a primal glee in his voice. “At last.”

I really couldn’t care less.

Once again, I tore through the ceiling above us, and once again I used unstructured magic in such quantities that it was thick enough to walk up.

The top level was structured a little differently. I came up in the middle of a long table, demolishing its center as I did so, and the oathholders here attacked immediately instead of waiting to assess the situation.

Someone with a Ditas oath and a sharp blade struck at me as I ascended into the room, but what good was a swordsman without his sword?

I ruined the blade before it could make contact with me before turning towards the man who’d attacked.

A noble, obviously, his face pale and his stance unsure. He looked vaguely familiar. Had he been on the team that House Alzaq had arranged?

“Chrysanthemum,” Orchid said, clambering out of the hole I’d formed. “What are you doing?”

“Orchid!” Chrysanthemum—oh, I remembered him now, he was one of Orchid’s dickhead brothers—exclaimed, his face lighting up. “Glad to see you, brother. To answer your question, we are winning.”

“Winning what?” Lord Rayes asked.

Ah. Everyone was up now. Nobody had attacked after Orchid had come up, but the appearance of the others was met with tension from the Alzaqs.

“Of course you would seek the answer,” Chrysanthemum said, his smile turning nasty. “I assure you this, old man: when all is said and done, it will be House Alzaq that survives this battle.”

I sighed, manifesting more magic. It was child’s play to surround myself with it now, and I did just that before staring at Chrysanthemum with death in my eyes.

“Answer him,” I said, and the noble stumbled back.

I summoned more unstructured magic, surrounding him and us, and shouts and attacks from the rest of the room answered me.

I didn’t care. These were nobles, not soldiers, and if I could easily shrug off the efforts of the latter, the former barely even registered. None of the attacks made it through my barrier.

“I’ll fucking kill you myself,” Seb snarled, drawing a knife and pointing at the captured noble.

“Wait,” Jasmine said. “He has information yet to give.”

Chrysanthemum laughed, a crazed sound that seemed to regain him some of his prior confidence. “You’ll never win.”

“Neither will you,” Orchid said. “Someday, somewhere, you will fall and fail to recover, and if I have my way, that day is today.”

Orchid’s brother dropped to his knees, but he kept smiling. “Maybe. But it shall be with the satisfaction of knowing that the failure to our family is already dead.”

Orchid tilted his head, considering his sibling and then he stepped forward and kicked him into my magic.

Chrysanthemum died screaming.

“I can’t say I would’ve done that,” Jasmine sighed. “But I understand. He tried to kill you, right?”

“Can you let me speak to the room?” Orchid asked. “I have a request to make.”

I shrugged and toned the magic down, removing the barrier. Spells came flying our way again, but it was a fruitless endeavor.

“To every one of you who chose to betray your own family!” Orchid shouted, the pain it caused him apparent but not stopping him. “Answer us and die.”