Demonic Devourer ch. 127 (Patreon)

“Take cover” was a ridiculous statement to make, I realize. How can any of them do so when the landscape around us are either Titans or about to be ruined by them?

I suppose “survive” is a better command. Not that I expect them all to do so anyway.

Given the fact that Adrian is with fae—Sapphire’s self-proclaimed enemy—and neither he nor the fae are at each other’s throats, Sierra and I have missed out on a lot.

As long as Adrian survives, I don’t need the rest of them. Unlike Sapphire, I have no vendetta against the fae. In fact, our goals might be aligned, assuming they want her dead.

That doesn’t mean I particularly care if they survive or not.

I don’t have the time to worry about them. Adrian has gone from Category 2 to 3, and the item he carries in his hands resonates with so much power that it can’t be anything but the god-killing weapon Sapphire described—or, at least, a piece of it. The fae are Categories 4 or 5. If they can’t survive, that’s on them.

If Sapphire’s anywhere near the same plane as us, she has to be coming for us right now. She has the other Titans on her side, and I think Sierra and I have made it abundantly clear that we’re not particularly interested in joining them.

My musings are interrupted by the fucking moon falling on us.

Not the natural one, of course. Lya is nowhere near the size of the giant moon that sits further out from the planet, but it is still at least the size of a small continent. It only increases its speed as it falls.

Sierra moves us both. While my Crimson Storm is ridiculously fast over short distances, her pace is genuinely unmatchable when she gets a spare few moments to set up.

“Ready?” she asks me.

Always.

She activates her Vector Magic and Spatial Magic at once, shrinking the space ahead of us and increasing it behind. The propulsion that provides us is so fast that I swear we outpace light itself.

It may as well be teleportation. We move nearly two thousand miles in a fraction of the time that it takes a human to blink an eye.

Brethren, I greet Lya. Do you fight?

The only Titan I burn with desire to kill is Sapphire. The rest of them are obstacles at worst.

Lya answers by sending out a wave of killing intent so fierce that the air itself ignites in its path.

We reply in kind.

#

Lya has been alive for a very, very long time. Its ardor is great. As the last of the original nine to escape and the weakest, it chose a sedentary lifestyle, but one with great potential. The others need to wake to reassert their authority over their domains. Their power wanes if they do not feed frequently, and it wanes when they do wake.

On the other hand, Lya wakes less than once a century. Where it rests, thousands of miles away from the surface of the planet, it receives the unfiltered cosmic rays of the star that fuels the planet that is has always called home.

Across a millennium, it has gathered enough power to demolish everything that sits below.

Reality slips away beneath it. Disappointing. It had thought that its brethren would be more capable of holding their world together.

Then, the culprits present themselves. The two newest additions to their network, the Titans of Paradox and Balance. Not ones created from the shells of gods, but from the species of man, elevated until they are infinite.

The ones that will be consumed to send the true rulers of this world back into a time where they can make things right.

At first, it appears that all adheres to the plan that the original has outlined for them all. Lya’s brethren, awakened, rampage across the world. Billions are dead, their souls never escaping into the cycle of rebirth and hell. Instead, they fuel the reawakening, granting them strength.

Lya draws upon centuries of built-up power, propelling itself through the cosmos and back towards the cracking reality that its allies are on.

And then the first Titan dies.

It pauses.

Titans are not immortal. Not even the gods were.

Despite that, true mortals have never learned the ways of slaying. The only Titans that have fallen in the past millennium are artificial ones, deemed unworthy or unusable by Lya’s brethren.

This, however, is not a culling.

The one that dies is the sixth. Scintilla, once the god of the ocean, now the Titan of the Nameless Sea, flickers out into the infinite nothing.

Its energy swirls away, devoured by a single pair of beings. The newest Titans.

Lya decides in that instant that it will annihilate them both, regardless of the first Titan’s wishes. It has enough power to be a star of its own, and it refuses to let the death of an original pass.

They approach it, and one of them dares to ask it a question. As if Lya would choose not to fight. As if it would choose to surrender.

The Living Moon fills with power, shining bright enough to vaporize steel. Air disintegrates, turning into hot plasma.

Once upon a time, Lya was the god of the sun and the moon. Like the rest, it was forced to choose a narrower field.

Now, though, after so much time spent lying in wait, it can be the sun once more. Even if it is not the true form of the star, it shines brightly enough to scorch the surface. Hundreds of miles beneath it, continents die in a flash, burning in the heat of the Living Moon’s light.

It directs all of its power on the upstart. Lya’s nullspace is unusual. Its very existence is its nullspace, exemplified. The power it gains, recycles, and regains is its unique power. Nothing can stand in its way.

Lya creates a supernova a thousand years in the making right between the twin Titans.

They are not of the same monstrous form that the rest of its brethren have taken, Lya realizes. If it were not for its certainty that this attack will kill them, it may have even realized that was reason to be worried.

For while their forms were powerful, they are fixed, and there is nothing more flexible than a mortal.

The light burns the sky, consuming half of the planet’s atmosphere in instants. The weaklings beneath that did not burn to death begin to choke to it instead.

Yet when the light fades, the two newest are still there.

And worse, they are untouched.

They have engaged their own nullspaces, Lya sees. It didn’t even sense its clash with them, and yet they managed to activate an isolated instance of both of their nullspaces combined.

Within their sphere of influence, it’s as if nothing at all has happened.

Disappointment, Balance says.

Thought you’d be stronger, Paradox adds.

Paradox flashes forward in a burst of blood, and her nullspace stays where it is. Lya redirects its power to focus on the Titan once more. It will kill this one properly this time.

Except, when it reaches for the power, it’s not there.

Paradox shines a bright shade of pure, flat black. Its Demonic Star devours reality itself, illuminating it with the eldritch light of the unfeeling void beneath that which exists, and it absorbs the supernova like it’s a child’s party trick.

For the past thousand years, Lya has known power. It has known the sensation of growth. It has known joy, even, when it chooses to awaken and annihilates a country.

It has almost forgotten what it is like to feel fear.

Paradox and Balance strike as one, and it remembers.

#

00:20:01

T-05 expires. Its body falls towards the planet.

00:20:02

[DATA LOST]

#

The fae around Adrian see the writing on the wall as he does. Unlike him, thankfully, they have the capacity to do something about it.

As Evelyn and Sierra skyrocket towards certain death—whether that’s for them or their enemy—the fae grab onto Adrian and send him hurtling into yet another pocket reality.

“There isn’t time,” Lyriel says. “You have to begin the process now.”

“To be clear, this is the process that is going to kill me because I don’t have enough power?” Adrian asks. “Will it even work if I give up my life?”

Lyriel gives him an expression that he thinks is the faerie equivalent to a shrug.

Fantastic.

“You may be able to begin the process,” Lyriel says. “Your life may prove sufficient to fuel it to the point where we can acquire an alternate source.”

“That feels real fucking great, let me tell you,” Adrian says, but he accepts the weapon anyway.

The world is ending. Even this pocket dimension they’re in is actively degrading, its connection to the anchored reality fraying.

Although he’s never had a particular sense of compassion for his fellow man, Adrian has always wanted to leave his mark .

If that comes in the form of sacrificing himself so that the mortal species of the world—and, hells, the worlds themselves—can breathe just a while longer, he can accept it.

“Tell me what to do,” he says.

The fae give him directions, but they all boil down to the same thing.

This weapon deals with time. The reason his concept of waves can affect is because, in some fashion, the fae or gods that fashioned this weapon treated time as a wave. It’s a tenuous connection, and his power is low, but the fae around him are every bit as dedicated as he is to getting this effect to work. More, if possible.

All of them except Lyriel gather around Adrian, and they begin to chant.

“Sorry, what’s happening?” he asks the one fae that actually talks to him.

“Their knowledge is my knowledge,” Lyriel says. “We will not let your sacrifice be in vain.”

Their chanting increases in pitch, and Adrian realizes what they’re doing as he sees the first cracks pass through their bodies.

He’s not hte only one who plans on giving his life up here.

Power flows into him, foreign and fae and wrong, and he accepts it all.

Adrian closes his eyes and draws on his concept, hoping beyond hope that they were right, that sensing its presence means he can actually use this weapon.

He’s exhausted. The last day of his life has been nothing but chase after chase after chase, and he has barely had a chance to rest.

But the end of the world won’t wait for him to recover, so he draws deep within himself. He draws from the beings around him, fae that are more powerful than he could ever hope to be.

Although he does not know it, his exhaustion helps him. His mind, addled and tired as it is, can interpret his concept in ways his conscious, cautious brain would never.

Adrian applies the concept of waves to the weapon and tells it to work for him.

It’s unyielding at first. This weapon has not been used in millennia, if the stories are to be believed, and it will not be so easily persuaded into use again after so long.

But bit by bit, Adrian convinces it he is kindred. The device utilizes the endless waves of time—his element, if only by interpretation. The weapon is fae—but his magic is fae now, too, provided by the dying beings around him.

After a minute that seems to last an eternity, he breaks through the boundary and finds a gaping, empty hole.

Not a hole, he corrects himself. That’s the wrong way to think of this.

This is an ocean bed, and it is completely dry.

As he pours the fae mana into it, he realizes what that emptiness must be.

He has a waterfall to pour into the drought, but he needs a full ocean to power it completely.

Adrian grits his teeth, and the fae around him stand their ground.

They will not be broken here.

#

Killing Titans, I’m beginning to realize, isn’t a uniform process. In order to eliminate Scintilla, we had to eliminate every last piece of flesh it had. That was almost as easy done as it was said. As it turned out, when I could Devour pieces of it to boost Sierra’s nullspace, we could override its Nameless Sea and tear it apart bit by bit.

Lya is a different story. Its true existence is curled up deep within the Living Moon, spreading its tendrils to control the rest.

I dive through the rocky layers of the moon like water, parting stone with my bare hands.

It poured too much power into a single attack. Sloppy.

Demonic Star carves me a path, and my nullspace finishes the job.

I drink in the Titan’s fear as it dies.

The most powerful beings on the planet, and they fear us.

As they should.

#

Three worlds away, Sapphire watches, her half of the weapon in hand, and she prepares.

Soon, everything will coalesce. Her golden opportunity is coming.

Her plans are in shambles. There will be no perfect fusion of Titans.

She will have to be enough. It will have to be enough.

The boy is capable of opening the conduit to the weapon. When Paradox and Balance return, they will be able to fuel it.

And by extension, they will fuel Sapphire’s half.

All she needs to do is enter at the last second, so she watches and waits.

Everything is coming together.

Sapphire, Titan of the Forgotten Realm, finishes annihilating the last pieces of the fae realm she resides in and smiles.

Victory will be hers.