Demonic Devourer ch. 125 (Patreon)

A Fae Realm, somewhere

Sapphire has not been this angry in decades. Centuries, perhaps.

She should have foreseen it. It is not in her nature to be sloppy, but perhaps it is to be arrogant.

Her plan hinged on her and the other Titans being the only ones to remember the existence of the weapon.

Yet someone else evidently has.

Angel 1 strikes at Sapphire as she works through her chain of logic, and she bats it aside.

The angels are powerful, yes. The others are giving her brethren trouble.

Sapphire has always been a cut above the rest, though, and her escape from her divine body was no different. While many of the other Titans are only capable of manifesting themselves as island-sized beasts, Sapphire has enough control to maintain a form more suitable for her needs.

“Your existence wounds reality,” Angel 1 rumbles. It sends a wave of scouring light forward, devouring the souls of the fae it was meant to protect.

Not even a moment of hesitation, Sapphire thinks. She will never hold a shred of respect for her captors, but she can admire the angel itself, at least. It recognizes the impossibility of saving the fae that Sapphire has dismantled, choosing instead to condemn their souls to the primordial void.

With how unstable the worlds are right now, it is nearly a certainty that the recapture of fae souls is not possible. None of those that she tore apart will be harvested for use in future angels.

1’s attack reaches her, and Sapphire flickers it away. Just as the fae she took apart no longer exist, neither does the attack. She eliminates cause, leaving behind only the effect.

On a good day, 1 might be able to challenge her. Even as they are right now, she’s not capable of eliminating it in a single blow.

But today, Sapphire is filled with fury and need.

She will tear apart heaven and hell to find the remaining half of the weapon. This she swears.

In the meantime, she will prepare for the worst. The weapon is one of the few items that she is incapable of sensing across time and space. Sapphire is a logical being, at heart. There is every possibility that somehow, whoever found the other half destroyed it.

If that is the case, then there is a need for recreation. Sapphire does not need the weapon to function as it did when the fae used it to threaten her existence. She just eneds it to work.

Angel 1 is one of the longest-lasting fae creations. It possesses materials and power that she cannot fabricate herself.

1 is not her killer. It is barely even a roadblock.

Today, the most powerful angel alive will help her destroy its creators, whether it wants to or not.

#

The Second Circle

We spend all of a single millisecond before angelic light tries to scorch us.

Frozen in the moment, my first instinct is to carry on as we have and find a way to kill the angels—the easiest solution, of course, is to get close to them and activate our nullspaces.

But there’s something different about this hell. Rather than a simple ambush, I get the sensation that we’re getting closer to these angels’ home turf. Their plans stretch beyond the simplest idea of throwing attacks at us until we fall, I’m sure.

Even if they aren’t, I’d rather not take the risk, especially not when we can collapse a world instead.

As the two of us dodge and weave through the angels’ web of attacks, I Devour the hell.

This isn’t going to end the way the angels want it to. I refuse to allow it.

Sierra, bless her beautiful heart, understands exactly what I want to do, and she infuses my authority with her own, granting my Devour the power it needs to eliminate the hell.

For the first time, something rises to fight against it. This is the hell of the Fallen Angels, and whatever effect it has on the area, it empowers the angels enough that they actually manage to slow me. Their angelic skills latch onto my demonic ones, and there’s an aspect to their authority that defies everything I know about angelic skills.

Fallen Angels. That’s the name of the hell. Something about the shadow of this Titan’s nullspace must be empowering them.

The Titan of the Fallen Angels is silent, unlike many of the others. What’s the difference? It must not be one of the original nine—that, or Sapphire was lying, which is eminently possible—because angels didn’t exist until after the

They know what they’re dealing with. According to Sapphire, angels are part of the mechanism that holds the worlds together, the fae’s answer to the ongoing backslides in reality.

Since the Ninth Circle, Sierra and I have done nothing but burn and break the hells we’re in. I can feel it in the way that they have a measured, careful response to the skills I can use—they know what we have to offer, and they have ways to counter it.

At our current level, most of those methods are trivially easy to dismantle. The bulk of our opponents range from Category 3 to 4, which would have given me trouble before Sierra and I created our nullspaces.

Devouring Marie was a fantastic first step towards restoring our nullspaces to full power, but they’re still recovering from the devastation she inflicted upon us with the Aspect of the Founder. We’re not going to be able to simply run them over with the sheer power we have to offer.

Ascend, I suggest.

Sierra doesn’t disagree.

The angels have created a web of attacks, each of them intended to home in on us and activate any number of esoteric effects. Alone, they’re pathetically weak. Together, they might actually be able to manage to land a true hit—and there is true power here in the mix.

Somewhere in the Second Circle, I can feel Angel 13. A Category 6.

I don’t know how we’ll match up against it right now, but I know that that kind of power is not something I want to face when neither of us are at our full power.

Theoretically, we could restore ourselves by having me Devour the angels and the hell around them, but they have linked together into a network that is more than the sum of their parts. As things stand right now, fighting them simply isn’t a good idea.

Making it to the First Circle isn’t much less of a challenge either, especially when the web draws tighter with every passing second. I have to Trueshift the both of us down to near molecular sizes to make our way through the tiniest gaps in angelic power to keep us from taking too much damage.

Practically this entire hell is enveloped with their power right now, and every fraction of a second we spend in it is an eternity for them to wear us down until there is nothing left.

Working under these conditions is difficult—but it’s nothing near impossible, and we’ve done the latter enough times.

I will take us, Sierra says. Keep us alive.

“Gladly,” I say when I Trueshift us back into beings with functional vocal cords

My connection to my nullspace is damaged, and its effects are unpredictable, but I draw on it anyway, forcing broken connections back together with all the power I have.

We will not fall here.

#

A Fae Realm, falling

Adrian feels as if his entire world has been turned upside-down enough times that he’s not sure which way is up anymore.

He knew that the fae were practically untouchable creatures before, but now he knows why. Until a few hours ago, he thought that the fae king had manipulated the system to create a weapon out of him, but that’s changed too.

It makes so much sense in retrospect. Adrian is glad that at least one of his suspicions has been answered—why use a Category 3 to attempt to kill Titans that were a hundred thousand times stronger than him?

Because, the fae answered, they weren’t doing that. Adrian was a glorified metal detector searching for a weapon, not the weapon itself.

At least, that’s what he has pieced together over the course of the last half a day. Not that he’s had much peace to do it with.

The fae shed realities like a snake does skin. Part of the issue, as he understands it, is that the reality that holds the first and strongest of them is hidden behind so many layers of protection that not even the inhabitants of Root’s Angelic Tower are capable of getting there easily.

And there’s a monster after them.

Sapphire Clearwater, the same half-elf who built the force of nature currently known as Evelyn Carnelian, passed through the 51st floor of the Angelic Tower less than an hour after he left it. The fae with him say that there are ancient angels built from the bones of their greatest heroes pursuing her, but given the increasingly grim tones in which they speak, Adrian figures it’s not going well.

Every last one of the fae he’s with is more powerful than him. The weakest one is at the peak of Category 4—and yet, their first response to the news that Sapphire is pursuing them was to run.

That does not particularly fill him with confidence for his survival.

The “weapon” doesn’t even look like a weapon. It’s just a sphere. Yes, he can feel the power when he tries to pass his mana into it, but that’s only in the abstract sense that he simply doesn’t have enough to fill it—not even close.

From their conversations, he has a vague idea of what the sphere is supposed to do when united with its twin, but as far as he can tell, those are just stories.

“Are we planning to actually use this at any point?” he asks. They’ve been in this particular pocket of reality for nearly half an hour, which he thinks might be a record.

“It will kill you if used alone,” Lyriel replies. “The legends spoke of a weapon of two parts.”

“To be clear, this is the same legend that said the weapon was gone and destroyed, right?” Adrian asks.

The fae stares at him. At least, he thinks it’s staring at him. The lack of a face makes it hard to tell, but he certainly feels perceived.

Suddenly, the entire group of fae that he’s been glued into tense. It’s not subtle at all—they’re horrible at controlling themselves.

“What is it?” Adrian asks, his question forgotten. “Is she coming?”

“We discovered elements of our oldest fables were inconsistent,” Lyriel says after a while. “Many of us believed the weapon’s pieces still existed. You proved us correct once, traveler. Sapphire Clearwater has just done it a second time.”

“One hundred thousand dead,” another fae says. “Or worse.”

“Insignificant,” Lyriel replies. “There are two entities that mattered, and both are gone.”

“Broken gods, can someone explain this to me?” Adrian says, annoyed. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I can’t see across realms or whatever it is you do.”

“We see all the realms,” Lyriel says. “Always. To answer your question: Angel 1 has perished. Sapphire Clearwater holds the other half of the forgotten weapon.”

Adrian’s heart drops.

“Ah, fuck,” he says.

“The schedule moves forward,” a fae says. “We must prepare for activation, complete or not.”

“The activation that will kill me,” Adrian says.

“In the face of every being that is and ever was, one life means nothing,” Lyriel says. Despite lacking eyes, Adrian feels as if their gaze is boring into him. “Traveler, would you prefer a death that matters or a death of cowardice?”

Adrian shakes his head. “I’d rather not die at all. But if those are my only choices, I think you already know.”

“Good.”

The realm shakes, just like the Tower did before.

It doesn’t stop.

The fae make a dissonant sound, their voices blurring into one as each of them launches into an incomprehensible dialect of a language that is not Adrian’s before, abruptly, they fall silent.

“Traveler,” Lyriel says, its voice an octave lower than it was before, “we are running out of time. Return to the surface with us.”

“I don’t have much of a choice, do I?” Adrian asks.

“You do not.”

He extends a hand nevertheless, and he blinks out of this world with the rest of them.

#

Reality is much worse than he remembers. He has been in the Angelic Tower for weeks, and has subsequently spent all of his time dancing from fae world to fae world.

Adrian expected some level of destruction. After all, he’s heard that all of the Titans. Have awakened. That can’t happen and not result in devastation.

What he gets is far beyond anything he could have imagined.

He remembers his brief excursion into the malformed anomalous fragment underneath Ravendale. He recalls the void he saw there—the wrongness in the emptiness, the lack of order, the way it called to him.

That chaotic, primordial void is everywhere now. It runs through the air as if the corruption is a cloud, except it’s made out of nothingness instead of water. The land is overrun by demons and anomalies, and it’s only thanks to the constant shielding that the fae apply to him that it doesn’t stretch towards them.

It’s spreading, he realizes. The void’s tendrils smash through the world like reality is a paper-thin piece of fabric tearing apart at the seams.

They stand amongst ruins that Adrian doesn’t recognize at first, but when he sees the spire at the center of a blackened, shattered mountain, he realizes where they are.

“Is this Root?” he asks.

Lyriel nods.

He remembers the city being in a state of disarray after the final fight against Alexander Callen, but this is absurd. This—he can’t even identify it as a city, and as far as he can tell, there are no survivors but the anomalies pouring out of the chaos.

“What the fuck happened here?” he asks.

“The beginning of the end,” Lyriel says. “As the heavens and hells collapse, so too does our anchored reality. Our great achievement as a species was stabilizing the world with realms above and below. Below, two anomalies and the humans that failed to kill them devour the world. Above, Sapphire Clearwater wields the power of a Titan.”

“And so the world is collapsing,” Adrian says. He struggles to process that.

After years of traveling the world with Sierra and the late members of their experiment group, he still hasn’t built many human connections beyond his party. That dulls the statement, makes it harder for him to properly process the scale.

“So it collapses,” Lyriel agrees. “Billions have already perished. Billions more will.”

“And we’re going to fix that with a weapon?” Adrian says.

“Ideally,” Lyriel says. “When the conditions are right, we can use your life to return to the era of the fall and end the gods properly.”

“Except you have half a weapon,” Adrian counters. “Do you even know how this thing is supposed to work?”

“No.” Lyriel turns to face him, and a chill runs through his spine. “But you will.”

#

The Second Circle, collapsing

Our very existence degrades the fabric of reality. Our nullspaces violate fundamental laws of the world, and that invites the void to break through the thin facade laid above it.

I can see what Sapphire said now. The handiwork that built the hells is shoddy. Incomplete. If I came in here with a mind to destroy it, not even the angels could stop me.

Their attacks start, stop, begin, end, cease to exist, amplify, and disappear within my nullspace. Though the power I have to offer is limited, I’m growing to understand it better. Cause is separated from effect, which allows for that which is utterly impossible to occur. Stars are born and die in instants, attacks kill me and bring me back to life, and above all—they leave Sierra unaffected.

The angels can attack and attack and attack us as much as they want, but until I run out of power for the nullspace just large enough to encompass us both, she is untouchable.

Angel 13 appears.

No, not 13, I realize.

This is Angel 12, now.

Someone killed one above. A Titan, most likely.

The number of Titans in the network remain the same.

So they can be killed, and they’re not stronger than us.

Angel 12 spreads its wings, and a dozen angels die, fueling 12 with the power of their lives. It glows brighter, and I feel with bone-deep certainty that its attack will outclass even the ultimate last stand that 191 emitted.

Sierra drops us out of the hell before it can even begin.

#

Somewhere, nowhere

This time, we’re both intact enough and strong enough to guide our own way through the nothingness between hells.

We could go to the First Circle. I can perceive it easily—the closest stable anchor in this sea of chaos.

First Circle, negation, I say.

Agreement, Sierra replies.

The hells are collapsing. Even now, that anchor is beginning to crumble. More importantly, that’s the home turf of the angels. When we have the power to avoid a trap, we will.

Instead, we pass straight through the anchor, spending only enough time adjacent to it to orient ourselves, and we continue on.

As we travel, I sense the addition of a few more presences to the space between space.

The angels.

They’re not going to be able to catch up to us, but they can’t hurt us in here. We can’t hurt them, either.

Advance, I say, and Sierra agrees.

Together, we spiral past the First Circle to the final anchor, oh so far away. Just like the hells, it’s destabilizing, but we have business to complete there.

We need to find Adrian, and we need to find the fae’s god-killing weapon.

We need to kill Sapphire.

Two Titans spiral towards baseline reality, and the surviving angels follow.