World Seal, Ch 29: Fighting Blood (Patreon)

Asenya was inside the realm of Blood.

That meant his plan to destroy his avatars and come back when he was stronger wasn’t the best solution.

He needed to know more.

He wasn’t sure if he could find this Blood Realm again so easily. It was in a turbulent part of the Seal and felt like it floated around here. The next time he tried to find it, it might be in a completely different location.

Given the size of the Seal, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Khaes had probably found it through a bloodline connection with the Path of Blood, or perhaps he had a beacon inside.

If Asenya was inside, then it was a massive stroke of luck that he’d intercepted these two Voidborn.

Perhaps fate was turning in his favor.

Blood’s skeletal hand that was clasped around his avatar suggested that might not be entirely the case, but he’d take what he could get.

Most importantly, Asenya was at the Sixth Evolution, and if she had been trapped here….

How was he supposed to get her out?

As he quickly considered the possibilities, he set his avatar in the Void to thinking about how to find this place again and how to leave a beacon of his own here, even as he looked at Blood’s avatar in front of him.

The avatar was massively powerful.

It had bent space to seize him. Its hand hadn’t expanded in size, but it had grabbed his avatar’s neck and streams of blood-red runes were flowing around his body, originating from where it was resting.

Blood looked like the same height as him now, which meant that his grip was compressing space. His avatar’s size hadn’t changed, but the dimensional space around him had been compressed to match Blood’s grip.

The skeletal hand seemed to be a conduit for the avatar’s power, so perhaps if he disrupted it...ideas rushed through his mind as Blood’s hand tightened.

His grip felt like worlds were crushing down.

Dimensional forces tore at Sam’s body under the demon’s command, trying to compress him into a smaller form, while white runes and Blood energy stabbed at his body, attempting to force their way through his skin to reach his essence.

He could feel the hunger in the demon.

It was a consuming ocean of thirst ready to drink down the world.

It was barely contained by the avatar’s structure and the laws of its being. The sword and the facade of armor meant nothing. They were just shapes floating above the desire.

That the demon could speak so clearly showed an insane level of control.

His True Dimension Body resisted the assault, but it wasn’t easy. His newer racial abilities helped as well.

Variable Stellar Force meant the pressure had no real effect on him, while Strength of the Void meant his own strength broke the dimensional energy around him.

Enduring Star, the upgrade to True Dimension Body, gave him incredibly sturdy resistance to most forms of damage, especially dimensional and elemental. The demon’s Blood affinity didn’t fall into those, but the pressure from the artifact hands did.

Void Mind kept his own mind free of influences, leaving him able to think clearly, while Singularity pulled this space of the World Seal around him, using it as a shield.

Dimensional fragments began to spin around him, gathering under the force of Dimensional Stabilization as he wove them together, and runes poured through his awareness as he studied the energy around him, looking for flaws in the avatar’s control.

“Your blood will tell me the truth of it all,” Blood growled as he raised Sam’s avatar into the air. “I will know what you did, how you did it, and then I will take it for myself. I will strip whatever remains of that spark from your blood and use it to restore myself. With its help, this avatar can become a real form, a second true body.

“Before you die, you will tell me how you found it and where. Shattered Skies refused to hand over that spark to anyone...she had some private plan for it that she never shared. It is only appropriate that it returns to me now, a gift from her grave.”

Tendrils of blood energy swirled around him like blades and stabbed toward Sam, heading for his shoulders, knees, stomach, heart, and eyes.

They crashed against his defenses with an explosion of force, nearly tearing Sam out of the avatar’s grip, but they made no progress.

Just in front of each of them, small dimensional shields rotated.

Each of them was like a glittering silver disk made up of dimensional energy and starlight. Fragments of the World Seal were fused into them and shone like diamond, giving them a stability beyond what Sam could manage on his own.

Even so, they couldn’t completely stop the assault.

The pressure of the blood energy radiated through a strange dimension of its own, partially bypassing the defense. It felt like a dozen swords were piercing into his avatar.

The assault tore open gashes across his body and his avatar’s eyesight disappeared as its eyes were destroyed by red spikes.

Fortunately, in most other places the wounds were shallow.

Starlight and silver flames roared out of his avatar’s body, raging around the wounds as his energy worked to reconstruct them.

“Blood is the origin of all things,” the avatar growled. “It does not matter if your avatar is made of starlight and dust. It is you, and your blood echoes here. Even if you do not wish to, I will make you bleed. You will follow my Truth.”

He raised his other hand as he weaved an enchantment of threatening red runes. They hissed like living things as they sizzled amidst the chaotic energy.

Sam’s avatar was blinded, but he could still see with his aura, and his second avatar hanging back could see everything perfectly.

“Blood is blood,” the avatar said with a force that resonated across the dimension, making the realm wall behind him shudder in response.

“Stars, light, it does not matter what it looks like. Titans bleed with silver blood, and that also obeys my command. What you are will exist here, as it will anywhere I wish you to be.

“Blood Is Truth.”

His words echoed out with the force of the Sixth Evolution, bending reality to his will.

His body became paler as some of the energy he’d gathered disappeared, but the World Seal shook around him.

The red realm surged with power, like a conduit supporting him, and the skies began to swirl into a vortex around him and Sam.

Crackling changes began to force themselves onto Sam’s avatar.

The starlight that made up his avatar thickened, turning denser by the moment as particles of light and dust forced themselves together. The chaotic energy of the Void warped as it condensed with it.

Starlight and flames turned liquid, until the energy that was pouring out of his avatar was running like water.

Then it turned denser, draining energy from him as it began to take on the quality of true Titan blood. Silver essence bubbled inside of it as the streams of power began to resonate with his vitality.

“I control bloodlines,” the demon growled as he continued to force the changes on him. “It was my power that created Asenya, my work! She should have served me as my daughter, one of my own descendants, but she betrayed me when she took your side.”

He shook Sam in his hand like a ragdoll, old rage igniting within him as he spoke about the past, but then he dragged himself back to the present.

“You will pay the price for that, as other Titans before you did when they fell at my hand. Your essence will help to restore my strength, and then I will finally be able to break out of here and finish what must be done. The war will begin again.”

His attention was fixed on the blood flowing from Sam’s body, which was almost the real thing now.

“It does not matter if your avatar doesn’t have real blood,” he snarled. It obviously wasn’t going as quickly as he would have liked.

Even with Blood’s higher-evolution advantage, Sam’s innate resistances were making it difficult to change him quickly.

“Within my domain, blood appears at my command. All life and energy becomes blood, which follows me. This is the Truth of Blood.”

The avatar shook him again and the forces bearing down on Sam redoubled.

He could feel the avatar’s Truth connecting through dimensions, seeking out his real body. It was trying to merge the blood in his avatar with the blood of his real form.

If he let that happen, it would be the same as if his real body was held in this demon’s grasp.

He could already feel the energy of his main body shifting, being drawn toward the World Seal and this dimension.

All of his avatars were connected to him, which was how essence and experience flowed, and now that conduit was being reversed by Blood’s power.

There was a natural resistance to that conduit being commandeered by someone else, which combined with his innate strength as a Titan to slow the process down, but it was still slowly happening.

If he let it, then in a few moments, his real body would be here and Blood’s power would have an even greater pull on his blood.

Disaster would follow.

That wasn’t something he could allow. He had to take control of the channel.

His attention flickered back to his main body, where time was flowing faster. It was already the following morning, not long past dawn.

***

He was sitting on the dais in the middle of the Hall of Transcendence. Silver flames and starlight surged around him as his eyes blazed.

The three moons were still full in the sky, but heading toward the horizon. They hung low and bright, dimmed slightly by the early dawn.

They would set in another hour.

His attention was distant, fixed on the chaotic region of the World Seal where his avatar was trapped.

Contending against a higher Evolution was difficult, but he had to try. There was too much at stake in this battle.

Not just his own life if he allowed the demon to have its way, but the defense of the world, finding Asenya, and more.

It all hung in front of him, waiting for him to live or die.

Fortunately, he had resources of his own.

His mind was fixed on the battle, as were the efforts of his avatars, especially the one in the distant Void.

That avatar had a base out in the Deep Wild on an asteroid. It was currently covering the walls of its hall with silver runic script in a frenzy of enchantment, creating and destroying runes in a blaze as it worked through possible spells for this battle.

It was studying all the laws and runes it could see from Blood and the World Seal, working them into one enchantment after another as it tried to find the right combination to turn the tide.

The Avatar of Blood was a higher Evolution than him, but it was still using laws and his greatest advantage was his ability to see them as runes.

It let him search for flaws, to see contrasts easily where a different element could counter a particular rune, to compare enchantment forms to see what would be the most effective.

It was the language of the Void bending to his will as his domain interpreted it as runes.

Many of the runes from Blood were completely new to him, but he had seen others before from the weaker Outsiders who used the same path of power.

Seeing it now in the hands of a true master of the energy was illuminating, even as it came closer to killing him.

If he allowed the demon to fully convert his avatar starlight into his real blood, then when his avatar was destroyed, it would be the same as suffering those wounds on his true body.

His blood would spill out in the World Seal and be absorbed by the demon.

His old insights from fighting Blood Outsiders surged to the front of his mind as his understanding of Blood leapt upward.

He had to find a flaw in the spell and break it, something to exploit.

At the same time, that wasn’t enough.

He needed to try and kill this demon if he could, to break its hold on the area so he could look for Asenya.

His attention was split into 14 parts that worked together across his avatars, tearing apart the problem from every angle as he worked on solutions.

With his Intelligence over 70,000, a single one of his mental divisions could work at lightning speed. Ideas flew like starry meteors as runes and enchantments spun in his mind.

With a flicker of command, he sent two of his avatars in a streak of silver light toward Silvas, the Moon of the Forests who warded against the Demon of Blood.

The moon was his closest ally in this fight against Blood. It was its nature and what the wards on it were designed for.

Fortunately, it was still full in the sky.

That would help, but he needed a way to bring its energy closer.

It was focused mostly on the main dimension, but if he could get its attention in the right way, he might be able to direct its power into the World Seal. His avatars could be the conduit for it and lead it straight to the Avatar of Blood.

At this point, he couldn’t destroy that avatar even if he wanted to. It was seized too strongly by Blood. Breaking it apart would just make it easier for him to absorb it.

Dozens of plans were formed and broken apart, then recombined in new ways as others were generated, all of them coming together at once as moonlight surged around him, rising higher in spiraling bands of force.

Purple and blue were there as well, marking out the presence of the other two moons in his aura, but the green of Silvas shone the brightest around him, mixing with silver flames and starlight.

The dais around him, the silver lines of enchantment in the relic that ran across the mountains, and the peaks of the mountains began to burn with silver light.

The relic’s core spun to life, flooding the area with energy as it absorbed the trace aura from the full moons, and then it channeled its power along its connection to him, attempting to stabilize the dimensional space around him and block the demon’s draw.

It was aware of the threat and actively trying to defend its Architect.

Surging bands of moonlight rose upward from the plateau below the Hall of Transcendence as the crown of Sky’s Descent came to life.

Flames and starlight surged upward in a pillar that began to rise to the heavens.

The massive change in his presence in the hall didn’t go without notice, but people were caught up in the flow of the auction.

The Level 399s were also too used to being immune to danger, and they didn’t pay as much attention to the rising power as they should have.

It was impressive, but to them it was similar to what he’d already done in creating the scrying mirror, so they just looked over with curiosity as they waited for his next demonstration of power.

They didn’t understand the threat.

His grandparents wrapped up the auction they were holding and then pointed toward him, sending the most recent Level 399 over for release from the World Limit.

The man walked toward Sam with a relaxed smile on his face. His features were rough and his hair was dark blond. It looked tangled in the early morning light and slightly washed out as if his vitality wasn’t high enough to support him for much longer.

Perhaps he needed more Constitution.

His looks were average as far as Level 399s went, without the Charisma that marked most of them with a glowing elegance. He must not have invested much in it.

Instead, his movements were simple and unadorned, but extremely fluid, betraying an extremely high Agility attribute. Some warriors chose that path, so it was nothing out of the ordinary.

In his hand, he carried a long spear like a staff.

It was a strange artifact that glimmered with dark runes along the length, and clearly of Outsider construction, but Sam was too busy to pay close attention to it.

He’d seen a hundred different Outsider artifacts at this point in the auction and most of them were broken remnants. This one looked more complete, but it didn’t make an immediate impression.

He only glanced at the man as he entered his vision. Between one thought and the next, he sent a flicker of will to his grandparents, silently commanding them to stop the auction.

It would have to wait.

As for this fellow, he flicked a strand of attention at him to release him from the World Limit, which took barely any effort, and then ignored him.

The power around him continued to rise as the dais glowed with brilliant starlight. The aura of the moons was gathering swiftly, turning into a vortex around him.

“Lord Artificer,” the man said with a slow smile on his face as he stopped in front of Sam, unaware that his words were passing by Sam’s awareness like the chirping of a cricket.

He glanced at the gathering energy, but he didn’t react. He seemed to think it was part of his release from the World Limit.

He also noticed Sam was looking away, and like most of the attendees, he wanted to say a few words before leaving. Most of them talked about their plans for the future, hoping the High Artificer would give them advice.

This one seemed to be the same.

“Before I hand over the payment for this blessing,” he said as he tried to get Sam’s attention. He held up a small spatial bag full of elemental crystals for his payment.

“I have to tell you how much I admire your actions. Truly, Transcendence is a great blessing for the world! You are a legend of Aster Fall herself, a great benefactor!”

He raised the artifact spear in his hand as he smiled more broadly.

“And now, I bring you greetings from an old friend, one who has sent this spear to you as a gift. Allow me to show you the enchantments it holds! It is a true wonder!”

The man poured his mana into the spear in a current of dark shadows, and the runes on it began to glow dimly, radiating with Outsider energy that was strangely familiar to Sam.

It was the same as he’d sensed once before, in the artifact that Micas Hastern had used to devour the auras of the relic.

But this one was much more powerful.

Its presence alerted Sam, drawing a fraction of his attention away from his effort to weave a stabilizing enchantment against Blood.

His true body’s mind snapped back to the present as he studied the spear.

At the same moment, the man raised it into the air and shouted grandly.

“This gift comes from my mentor, the Lord of Wind and Water. Accept it and die!”

With his final word, the runes on the spear blazed to life as the man poured his vitality into them and hurled it at Sam.

The spear roared like a dark dragon as it headed across the dozen feet separating them, crossing that fraction of space in an instant.

The runes spun, devouring ambient mana in the air, and the entire length resembled a black bolt of annihilation hurtling across the distance toward Sam’s heart.

A growl of anger rumbled across the hall as a golden hand flashed out and wrapped around the spear, seizing it by the middle.

Everything stopped.

Starlight pressed heavily on the hall, covering everything with a shimmering silver layer.

The attendees turned to look toward the dais, their expressions turning pale as they saw the assassin and the spear. Then they turned paler still as they saw the massive amount of energy

The spear hung there, trapped by a force that could crush asteroids into dust and shatter dimensional walls. The runes on it screamed in protest as they tried to flex against the restraint, but a wave of silver light pressed down on them, forcing them back inside.

In an instant, the spear was quiet, completely suppressed by Sam’s domain.

The assassin’s eyes were just beginning to widen as Sam’s hand lashed out, seizing him by the throat. A deep-level Analysis followed.

Herug Geanin. Human. Level 399. Wraithblade-Silent Hand of Death.

An adept assassin in the service of the Cabal and Vastes, the leader of the bellisagi race who is known as the Lord of Wind and Water, which is the title of his main class.

Herug was raised by the bellisagi as a child and served at their headquarters for his formative years over two centuries ago.

When he became an adult, he took up the bellisagi’s main occupation as an assassin, his humanity allowing him more freedom among civilized races than it did his adopted clan.

Since then, he has served Vastes’s will.

The analysis included enough details that Sam understood the assassin’s background, as well as what he was doing here, but the main thing he felt was rage.

He glared down at him, wrath bubbling in his veins like sun’s blood. His muscles swelled as Titan’s Wrath activated naturally in response to his anger, boosting his Strength even as it drew power from his Agility.

It was an old ability, one he’d learned long ago. It was originally an instinct of the early Titans, something to help them stand against the beasts of the Void.

But right now it wasn’t the best choice.

He needed it to obey his will instead.

He forced it to become hotter, to flow with his will, and he channeled the energy of it into the spell around him. His body became fluid again, responding to his command, and his hand lashed out, seizing the assassin by the neck.

“Herug Geanin,” he growled, “your life is forfeit.”

With that, he flipped the spear around in his other hand and swung it in a whistling arc like a staff. There was so much force behind it that the air compressed, turning into translucent currents.

As the spear struck him, Herug exploded into a rain of blood and bone as he was ripped into two halves.

It looked like a sword blade had swept through his stomach.

His upper and lower body barely moved around the path of the strike, but the edges closest to where the spear passed were disintegrating from the force.

The runes on the spear flared as they sensed the free energy and tried to devour it, but Sam’s domain forced them to be still again. A layer of starlight trapped them, preventing them from absorbing a single trace.

The entire exchange only took an instant and Sam held onto the spear as he turned his attention back into the Seal.

It was lucky that he had more time out here than inside the Seal, but even so he couldn’t spare any more effort to deal with the horrified expressions on the attendees’ faces.

They clearly thought the power erupting around him was in response to the assassin, not to a much greater emergency, and Sam had no reason to disabuse them of the notion.

Around him, his power rose to the skies as a torrent of starlight surged upward, both from him and from the relic.

The peak of Sky’s Descent erupted in a fury of power as it was matched by similar forces from Sun’s Rest and Winter Peak. To those watching, it looked like the night came alive as silver suns dawned on all three mountain peaks.

They looked like blazing crowns, an echo of the Alignment of the Moons.

Shouts of surprise carried across the valley and from the streets of Highfold as people looked upward, pointing as their mouths opened in shock.

Inside the Hall of Transcendence, it looked like a silver sun had dawned around everything, filling the area between the pillars with a blazing brilliance.

At the center of it, Sam’s form stood on the dais, surrounded by a swirling storm of power that continued to rise. His aura swelled, growing stronger as he drew on the full force of his essence.

Lines of dimensional stabilization flowed out from him, anchoring his bloodline and his body as he fought back against Blood’s pull.

His own domain crushed down on the area, altering laws and slowing the draw on his blood. At the same time, he forced his essence into the spear in his hand, using brute power to overwrite the commands inscribed into its enchantments and to force it to obey him.

He needed a vessel to carry the moons’ aura into the World Seal, and this would do.

He just had to rewrite part of the Outsider enchantment on it, and then it should work.

He scanned the spear in an instant, analyzing its complete structure, and his avatar in the Void swiftly began to redesign an enchantment that would work to control it.

Runes flared around him and poured through his eyes like a river as he looked through his avatars in the World Seal, studying the Blood energy that the demon was using as he looked for the best way to sever it.

In the Void above, his two avatars arrived at Silvas and set foot onto the moon’s green surface. A moment later, they reappeared again in the moon’s heart, where they swiftly sent out a widespread net of starlight that connected to one of the vast chasms full of Silvas’s aura.

Then they teleported again, arriving at one of the ancient pillars on the moon’s surface that controlled the ward against the Demon of Blood.

Essence roared around them as they swiftly laid out an enchantment of starlight that connected their aura to that of the pillars and to the vast supply of aura in the cavern below.

Then they turned their attention to Sam, opening a dimensional channel from their hands to his main body. Through that channel, a direct path to the moon appeared.

He’d considered this plan a little while before to create a channel from the moon to the relic, but the size of the dimensional channel was too small to charge the relic quickly and it took too much essence to sustain it, so he’d written it off as he looked for a better plan.

Now, however, it would serve his purpose.

The channel connected to his main body, and then he opened a second channel from his main body to the avatars inside the World Seal.

A grim smile crossed his face as he felt his avatar in the demon’s grasp beginning to collapse. His main body was aching in response as he felt a force crushing down on him.

Silver threads of blood began to erupt from his skin, pouring upward and disappearing into the World Seal.

All of his avatars followed suit, their bodies beginning to bleed at the same time. Even with the help of the relic and his own domain to suppress the demon’s Truth of Blood, it was difficult to withstand the force.

He only had a few moments.

Despite that, his eyes were bright and burning like a star.

The Demon of Blood wanted to draw energy from him, but when it arrived, it wouldn’t be what he expected.

Through the channels he’d opened, he called on Silvas. He touched the ancient ward with his mind, showing it images of the demon in the World Seal, and then he pulled, demanding that it follow him.

A massive wave of forest green moonlight erupted from the moon.

It was like a meteor from the heavens descending as it exploded through the night sky, barreling downward like a shooting star toward the peak of Sky’s Descent.

The size of that blast was as large as the peak itself.

As it arrived, Sam’s form grew to meet it, until an 800-foot tall Titan stood above the mountain, reaching upward to seize the green bolt of lightning that was falling toward him.

That energy warped in his hand as he commanded it to fill the runic channels he’d just carved into the spear.

His domain raged around him, bending natural law and forcing the energy all around to flow in accordance with his will. The artifact in his hand crackled as the black runes burned off of it and the structure beneath melted like it was thrown into a forge.

Silvas’s energy fused into it, and under the command of his domain and Stellar Conversion, it hardened, becoming a new material.

Within an instant, the entire spear turned to glowing green crystal.

It was like a condensed shard of the moon itself, formed from a material even purer and of a higher grade than the aura crystals in its caverns. Runes burned along its length, each of them a legendary command for Moonlight and Destruction.

With a deep breath that covered miles around him and pulled in all of the power he’d summoned, Sam raised the spear and hurled it down along the channel he’d formed to his avatars.

A massive green comet tore through the domain of the World Seal, piercing through dimensional barriers like a stellar needle threading the Void as it descended.

Within an instant, it arrived.

The half-crushed avatar in Blood’s hand suddenly smiled as it looked up at the demon. His eyes were blind and covered in pouring silver blood, but his lips stretched wider into a grin.

“You want to use a Law of Blood against me?” he asked. “Then let me show you the Law of the Primal Void.”

His hand reached out into the air, wrapping around the spear as it phased into existence. It was formed entirely of green crystal with blazing silver and moonlight runes burning along its length.

The World Seal howled in response as the force of that spear disturbed it, shaking the chaotic mix of energy like a tsunami had just crashed into it.

Then he drove the spear straight into Blood.

Blood’s attention was completely fixed on the law crushing Sam and his grip on his throat, and he only had time to look up in shock as the spear tore into his chest.

The world in front of Sam’s avatar exploded.

His avatar dissolved into starlight in an instant, destroying itself as the moonlight severed Blood’s control.

The area where Blood was standing turned into a volcanic eruption of Silvas’s power. There was nothing but forest green light extending in all directions for miles, so dense it was like an emerald sea.

Then it slowly faded away, thinning out in one spot after another, as patches of the Blood Realm wall appeared. The chaotic energy of the dimension was sparser now, driven back from the wall, and it was easier to see its borders as it stretched for over a hundred miles into the distance.

The green light receded farther, dissipating into the World Seal.

The bone gate into the realm appeared, and then in front of it, a hunched over figure with a green crystal spear stabbed through his body.

His form was no longer bright red, but pale. It looked as if all the energy had been washed out of him.

But he was still standing.

He let out a low howl of pain as he reached up to touch the spear embedded in him, but as soon as his hand touched it, there was a sizzling hiss of burning flesh. Pale red mist evaporated from where his hand met the shaft.

A similar trail of pale mist was rising up from where the spear was embedded, and his hunched posture showed how much pain he was in. He couldn’t even stand up straight.

But that didn’t stop his attention from turning to Sam’s avatar that was still present

Sam’s heart was calm, even as new plans began to spin through his mind. He had hoped the spear would kill Blood, but he hadn’t expected it.

It was good enough that it had wounded him.

Blood looked around, locating out the forms of Khaes and Yeria. They were hiding beneath a red and orange shield of power nearby.

They’d been thrown away by the blast, but it had been very focused, so it hadn’t done much damage to them.

“Be useful for once in your lives,” Blood growled at them. “Kill him.”

He  grimaced as he waved his hand, and the bone gate behind him spiraled open. A moment later, red warriors began to march out of it, one after the other.

They looked like bodies made of blood, souls trapped by his power and now following his command.

Within moments, there were hundreds of them.

Sam took a deep breath as he stretched his hand out. A golden spear appeared in his grasp, its form outlined in glowing green moonlight.

“You will not be enough.”