World Seal, Ch 30: Titan Rising (Patreon)

The spear blazed in Sam’s hand as he looked at Khaes and Yeria heading toward him.

Alone, this single avatar was weak, but he could hold them for a moment.

The attack had made them cautious.

His domain spread out, as limited as it was from his avatar, and clashed with the Avatar of Blood’s power, trying to push it back in a tiny area around him.

Runes streamed through the air, blazing silver and elemental ones locking together to resist bright red runes with sharp edges and curving lines.

The chaotic energies in the region crackled as they were torn apart by the clashing laws.

At the same time, he continued drawing in dimensional fragments of the World Seal, linking them together into a massive shield.

His awareness turned to the relic and his main body that was gathering energy from everywhere.

He was coming.

And Silvas was coming with him.

***

In the Hall of Transcendence

From his spot at the outside of the crowd, Reben stared into the sky where a massive storm of the High Artificer’s power was expanding.

Everything was glowing with silver light, like a flame burning from within. Stars of power floated through his vision, mixing with currents of moonlight and rising upward.

Beyond that, the entire sky was burning with green light from Silvas as the moon filled the sky. It was a dozen times larger than usual, a giant emerald world falling down on the mountain peak.

Streams of emerald fire were looping across the horizon, like it had turned into an angry sun.

It was so close it felt like he could touch it.

It felt like a dream.

He just wasn’t sure if it was a nightmare or not.

A band of iron around his chest made it hard for him to tell if he was holding his breath or struggling to breathe. A sputter of air came out of his lips, and he decided the second one would be smarter.

Otherwise, even at Level 399, he might pass out soon.

He looked toward the body of the assassin, that idiot who had tried to kill the High Artificer.

The corpse was in two pieces, barely even recognizable.

He’d watched as the man won the auction and walked toward the dais, and he’d shaken his head as yet another one of the winners tried to talk about themselves before being freed from the World Limit.

If the Titan were interested in their histories, he’d have asked about them. It was obvious he was here only to do a job. Otherwise, he would have run the auction himself and talked to people more.

When that assassin had raised the spear and suddenly tried to kill him, Reben had stared in shock. He’d almost leapt forward to try and intervene, but he was afraid that the Titan would think he was in on it too.

His help hadn’t been needed anyway.

The fool died in an instant, torn in half by his own spear that the High Artificer turned back on him.

Then the Titan had seized that spear and reforged it into some type of glowing crystal that looked like moonlight, which he’d hurled into the distance.

That moment was trapped in Reben’s mind.

As that spear left the Titan’s hand, it seemed like heaven and earth were revolving around it.

For some reason, the Titan’s power had been rising even before the assassin tried to strike. It was like the assassin had been an afterthought, someone trying to interrupt a moment that was focused on something else.

Reben shook his head. He wondered if the assassin had time to realize how little he meant before he died.

Whatever the Titan was focused on, it came together when he hurled the spear. That meant all of this power was about something else.

The High Artificer had proved his power already, so whatever he was dealing with now was magnitudes greater than the assassin.

That was what terrified him.

What could threaten this Titan that he needed to call on powers like these and change the skies?

The High Artificer was so tall that his head brushed the clouds, which were swirling around him in a vortex. His eyes were focused somewhere else, as if he were looking through the world.

Mana and elemental powers were flooding upward from the mountains and the valley below and converging in the sky around him.

Reben hadn’t known what an Astral Titan was until he saw the images at the beginning of the conclave, and those had shown them as distant and powerful figures.

He’d thought they were like ancient warriors and smiths, a race of old giants with skills that he might be able to achieve one day if he tried hard enough.

Looking at the High Artificer now, he was finally aware of how very wrong he’d been.

The Titan was a force of nature, a golden god who had walked out of the mists of time.

Reality was bending to his will.

It felt like Aster Fall was crumbling around him, like the dimension was unable to contain the forces at hand.

The edges of his vision were bending under the force of starlight and shimmering with runes that strained at his mind when he looked at them.

That had to be the Titan’s domain.

What did I get myself into by coming here?

Reben muttered the thought at the back of his mind, too frightened to even bring it to the front.

He wanted to break through the World Limit, but he didn’t have the funds to win one of the auctions, so he’d stayed to watch instead, hoping that the price would drop.

Now his view of the world was changing.

In one sense, it was worth it to know that the world was grander than he’d ever imagined, but more importantly, he was absolutely sure he never wanted to see something like this again.

It wouldn’t be so bad to retire to a nice mountain somewhere.

He had a few good years left. He could spend them with decent wine, maybe a garden, and see if any of his great-great-something grandchildren were around to visit.

That decided it for him.

As soon as I get out of here, I’m building a cottage on a mountain.

He looked around for a better place to hide, and then began to edge his way through the crowd, heading for one of the pillars that defined the hall.

The Titan had built that, so if he could get under it, it might keep the moon from crushing him if it came any closer.

As soon as he got under it, he let out a trembling breath as he tried to slow his heartbeat.

Others around him had the same idea, all of them scrambling to get away or to form groups where they thought they would have better protection.

Here and there, he saw mighty figures of the Boundless Alliance and Cabal, but their reactions were just as horrified as his.

Perhaps for the first time in their lives, or at least in the last few centuries, they finally understood what it was like to be outclassed so severely that it wasn’t even possible to imagine how to bridge the gap.

It felt like the Titan’s power was going to break the sky.

So this is a Primordial race.

They were all starting to understand what the Titan had meant when he told them about the early races, and about the dangers that still existed in the Void.

There were some things in life you had to try and avoid, because if you didn’t they would crush you without even noticing you were there.

That was what this was.

Whatever else happened today, this conclave would go down in history as marking something that hadn’t been seen since the dawn of time.

The day Aster Fall saw a Titan rise.

***

Sam reached out to Silvas, the elements, and everything else within range of his power, gathering all of them to himself.

He needed all the elemental energy he could get. With his domain and Stellar Conversion, each bit he gathered was fuel for his spells, vastly expanding his essence pool.

A storm of aura and elemental energy roared around him, accelerated by his domain. Runes flowed through the world in oceanic currents, filling the sky.

It would only take a few more moments to gather as much elemental energy as possible to take with him.

The main support he needed was the moon, and his two avatars were there swiftly expanding the enchantment to link into the ward.

He glanced down at the assassin’s body, but then he incinerated it in a wave of silver flame.

He would find Vastes for a reckoning later.

He’d heard of the Lord of Wind and Water before from the bellisagi that tried to kill him so long ago.

It seemed like he hadn’t given up yet.

He didn’t pay any more attention to the rest of the attendees. The wards were active on the hall and the relic, and those would be enough to contain anything they tried to do.

He could have searched through the attendees to find troublemakers, but there were over 20,000 of them who had come to the relic.

Even though he could get their histories from the World Core, it wasn’t worth the effort.

Hundreds if not thousands of them had criminal backgrounds, especially the Boundless Alliance and the Cabal, which made up the bulk of those at the auction.

Even with their backgrounds, most of the attendees had been scared straight by his initial display of power. The few who still harbored some intent were unlikely to act on it, especially now that the sky was changing around him. He didn’t have time to sort through all of them and pay special attention to the ones most likely to cause trouble.

They weren’t powerful enough for it to matter.

As the elemental storm built, a word roared from his lips like rolling thunder, calling to the powers around him.

It was full of aura and flame.

Silver stars appeared in the sky, bending the energies to his domain and organizing them as part of the Silver Void. The world’s energy bent as it began to flow toward him in a river.

Elemental energy condensed into bright silver flames that flowed around his body.

Then he teleported away.

Behind him, an avatar swapped places with him to maintain the enchantment, creating a conduit that linked the moon, the relic, and him.

A moment later, he arrived at Portal and leapt through the gate, heading into the World Seal.

Behind him, all of his available avatars followed. There were eight of them, including one he’d just reformed.

As soon as he was inside the World Seal, he connected to his avatar at Blood’s Realm and then reached outward. Dimensional waves roared outward from his hands as he forced apart the fabric of the World Seal.

Spatial forces howled as he locked onto the avatar’s position.

A moment later, a swirling silver portal appeared, snapping into place as the two sides connected. It was full of starlight, the same energy as the astral paths that connected the stars.

Even here in the World Seal, the light of the stars could travel, although it was bent in strange ways.

He leapt through the portal and an instant later he was in front of Blood’s realm.

His avatar was just now raising the glowing spear in its hand.

It had streaks of starlight wounds torn across its body as a result of Blood’s power, as did most of the avatars behind Sam, but now that the demon’s law was broken, it wasn’t bothering him.

Off to the side, Khaes and Yeria were heading toward him.

Their strength wasn’t as great as Blood’s, but they couldn’t be underestimated.

Ahead of him, Blood’s army continued to flood out of the gate.

They were blood elementals, but they had clearly been human once.

Now they might as well be zombies.

They were probably people that Blood had conquered in battle. Everything that made them up had turned to liquid blood, which was held together by the demon’s power.

Individually, they were weak, but as an army they couldn’t be underestimated.

Most were at the Third Evolution, but a few Fourth Evolution commanders could be seen here and there.

Comparing them to his memories, it was one of these Third Evolution blood elementals that he'd fought so long ago at the relic, before the first alignment.

It had been trapped inside the Hall of Sorcery by one of the old sects who had lived there, sometime late in the First War.

He took in everything in an instant as he stepped in front of his avatar.

Behind him, that avatar joined the others in an assault wedge. Lines of astral energy arced between them, connecting all nine avatars and him together.

Golden spears glowing with green moonlight appeared in all of their hands. Moonlight arced from them in swirling rays that wove together into an intricate emerald rune in the air.

A huge amount of the energy that Sam had gathered from the world poured into it, making it shine as bright as a sun.

It was even larger than the rune for Winter, its lines formed of intense emerald light and silver flames.

It flew upward, piercing through the sky until it disappeared into the World Seal.

Where it passed, a ripple like ocean water flowed outward, creating an expanding concentric ring.

At the point where it had disappeared, an emerald glow appeared that swiftly grew in size. It spread outward like a verdant dawn, and in an instant it covered half the sky.

The sky of the chaotic region tore open as an enormous green moon appeared inside the World Seal, hanging close over Sam’s head.

It was gigantic, covering the entire sky.

It pressed down on everything with a furious storm of emerald vitality.

In its light, the wounds on Sam’s avatars healed in an instant and his blood surged with force.

The moonlight aura that was always present in his essence poured energy through him, replenishing his essence like a rushing river.

It was the same as how the moons filled him with power during the Alignment, but even more intense.

At Sam’s command, the Moon of the Forests had come to the World Seal to face its ancient enemy.

It was only a projection of the moon, but with his help, the ward on it could lock onto its target.

This was why it existed.

A tide of moonlight flowed across the region, suppressing Blood’s domain and making his red elemental army stagger in place. Their bodies began to hiss and crackle, burning under its force.

Below the green moon, Sam raised the spear in his hand and hurled it forward.

Behind him, nine matching spears mirrored it.

Halfway across the distance, the spears turned into curving arcs of emerald lunar essence that tore into Blood’s army, slicing through the elementals like clay.

Explosions ripped across the army’s ranks, scattering chunks of blood in every direction.

The Avatar of Blood let out a shout of anger.

He wrapped one hand around the spear in his chest and bands of blood swirled around the spear, trying to seal it.

It was a slow process, but he kept at it as he forced himself to stand straighter.

As he did, he waved his hand through the air. An array of blood sigils appeared in the air. Their forms were spidery and angular, molded in the threatening lines of the Outsider rune laws.

The sigils shot toward the army and fused into the bodies of the blood elementals and the scattered chunks.

The blood writhed as it transformed into liquid tendrils, and then it floated through the air, reforming into the shape of the original soldiers.

“Blood obeys my command, living or unliving.” The avatar looked at Sam and growled, his red fangs bared. “Under my Truth, it is immortal. Soon, I will show you that truth. You will die and join the ranks of my army.”

He grimaced as he managed to get a solid grip on the spear for the first time. He let out a hiss of pain as his face contorted.

He began to draw it out as he continued speaking, his words uninterrupted.

Strangely, the pain seemed to make him calmer, and his posture slowly straightened.

“You and your avatars will be my finest commanders, carrying out my will as we sweep through your galaxy and shape it into a field ripe for harvest.”

Sam couldn’t let him pull the spear out, since it was the only thing restraining him at the moment, so he pressed forward.

The avatars in the formation behind him poured their energy into his effort. He waved his hand and all across the field thousands upon thousands of silver stars began to burn.

This area was filled with Blood’s aura, and as the silver stars appeared, they began to burn it.

Each flame was tiny, but as they burned the aura around them, they used it as fuel to grow.

“An all-encompassing flame?” Blood growled again. “You Titans are as powerful as ever, even at the Fourth Evolution. You are the only worthy race we have ever encountered as our enemies. You will still carry that as your badge of honor when you die.

“Raging Sea of Blood.”

The words bent reality.

He raised his hand again, and the sky behind him came to life.

A storm of blood rose up in spinning vortices like hurricanes, swiftly expanding until they were each thousands of feet wide.

The winds were made of liquid blood shaped into cutting blades and sizzling droplets of rain.

At his command, the blood hurricanes swept forward, covering half of the sky.

With that on one side and Silvas on the other, the sky was divided between red and green.

The storm crashed into the moonlight with massive eruptions of power. The dimension trembled as a rain of destructive blood and blades swept outward, covering the field below.

Everywhere the energy passed, the air turned sanguine. It looked like the world was dripping with blood.

When the droplets of blood hit the red elemental army, the soldiers increased in size and the color of their bodies became deeper.

Their limbs lengthened and turned into blades and halberds, long spikes, and hooked claws.

Where before they had been mostly human, now they looked like something out of a nightmare.

The hurricanes swept toward Sam like massive blades spinning in the air.

Behind them, the blood streaked across the sky was expanding like droplets in a basin, staining everything red.

It looked like this dimension would shortly turn into an ocean of blood. Then it would drown everyone inside.

And the face of that force, it felt like even the moon might be swept away.

Silvas was a Sixth Evolution ward, but it was only a projection here.

The silver stars across the field burned like brilliant diamonds. Everywhere they touched the blood, the reaction was explosive as silver flames swept outward.

The energy they were facing was of a higher tier, however, so they couldn’t convert it immediately. Instead, each star became a tiny island in the storm, a small point of calm amongst the fury.

Sam wasn’t fighting alone, however. As soon as the stars appeared, halos of emerald light from Silvas ignited around them, helping the islands to grow larger and expand more swiftly.

After the heart of each star, there was a tiny droplet of silver and emerald liquid essence, which was growing larger as the flames devoured the aura around them.

It wasn’t enough to stop the storm hurling toward him, but it broke up some of the force and when the blades reached him, they had only a fraction of their power left.

They shattered into shards as they struck an icy silver barrier. The surface of it glowed with ethereal blue runes.

Sam’s Cloak of the Ethereal Void blazed with power as it maintained the defense. If he had been facing anything less powerful, it would have frozen it in an instant, but here it was doing well enough just to block the attack.

The strain on it was heavy, but it had been designed for fights as great as this and more.

He raised his hand and swept it across the world in front of him. an inky black space opened, one filled with distant stars, and swept away the blood energy, hurling it into the distant void.

Normally he would open the Void Barrier to the true Void, but since he didn’t want to risk Blood escaping, he shunted it off into a subdimension instead, one where it would do no harm.

Instead of staying in place to block the continued attack, a powerful stellar wind sprang up around him. He disappeared in an eye blink as he moved to the side.

That was Stellar Wind, the new agility-based racial ability he’d just gained. It didn’t require more than the tiniest fraction of essence and was even cheaper than teleporting.

Arcs of astral energy poured towards him from his avatars as a brilliant silver spell took shape in the sky.

Together they created a formation that magnified his spells and he was able to draw on their joint essence pool.

It made up for part of the difference in power between him and the Avatar of Blood, but it wouldn’t last forever, so he had to make the most of it.

His cloak kept the blood winds off of him as he focused on the spell.

A moment later, the sky filled with silver flames as he called on the droplets of liquid essence that were being condensed by Stellar Conversion.

Each of those thousands of silver and emerald islands turned into a shining spear that shot toward Blood.

It was a rain of deadly silver stars, all targeted at a single man and the wall behind him.

The area around the avatar was once again covered in a roiling explosion.

He was staggered by the attack as scorch marks appeared all across his form, and his efforts to pull out the spear were interrupted.

At the same time, the dimensional barrier protecting the Blood Realm began to fracture.

Silver cracks appeared in the red wall, their edges burning with moonlight that prevented them from closing easily.

Explosions of blood mist rose up from the cracks in the realm as its energy was released into the chaotic region of the Seal.

Sam didn’t stop there.

As much as he could, he needed to seize the moment and use the moon’s power to damage this realm.

It was the source of power for the avatar and also the location where Asenya was trapped.

The bracer on his arm came to life with a shimmer of runes that floated above his skin, each of them slowly falling down into the bracer and then reforming in an endless cycle.

Two of the bracer’s enchantments activated, one after the other.

Astral Wind was first.

A wave of chaotic energy from the primal Void flowed out of the bracer, swiftly turning into a massive tempest that was nearly as large as the one Blood had summoned.

It crackled with multicolored energy from dozens of different elements, all gathered together into a force that could grind away nearly anything that stood in front of it.

This was the wind of the primal void, a condensed and more powerful version of the chaos winds that blew through the Deep Wild.

To Blood, it wouldn’t do much, but to the loose energy that was leaking out of the realm behind him, it was a different story.

As the Astral Wind swept forward, the bloody mist that was escaping from the walls and that had been broken in the sky by the moon’s aura was swept away like it was loose sand in front of the tide.

The decay of the walls accelerated as the cracks grew larger and more mist escaped.

It too was blown away and ground to nothing by the force.

Particles of loose energy were swept toward the borders of the region, no longer under Blood’s control.

Stellar Bombardment was next.

As the wind was still blowing, a field of silver stars flew outward from his bracer and turned into massive silver suns, each of them a tenth of the size of the moon above.

They burned in the sky with halos of force as crackling astral energy gathered around them.

They gathered loose elemental energy and the moon’s aura to themselves, converted it to their own, and then unleashed it.

A bombardment of thousands of silver meteors shot down, heading toward Blood and the realm behind him.

Each of them was as strong as the golden spears he had unleashed when he arrived, but this time there were a thousand times more.

Even for this realm, it would be difficult to resist that.

Blood let out a shout as he saw them, his calm disappearing. Fury returned to his expression, along with a dangerous determination.

He looked at the realm behind him and then another shout that bent reality ripped out of his mouth.

“Blood of the Eternal, Rise.”

The enormous realm that had been filled with cracks shuddered as it heard those words, and a swirling red mist filled the air as the avatar turned even paler.

The wall suddenly began to pulse. It started gradually, like a distant echo that was slowly accelerating, then it began to accelerate until the clear thump, thump of a great heartbeat echoed across the region.

Before the meteors could reach it, space distorted and the walls began to rise.

They had already been a hundred miles long, but only a hundred feet tall. Now it was like this was just the foundation.

The real realm was appearing.

Massive red pillars rose out of the corners of the realm, piercing toward the sky. The space between them turned jagged and then filled with bone spikes as battlements made themselves known.

Behind that wall, the rest of the realm continued to rise into the air as an enormous outpost appeared.

Space was distorted in every direction, until the size of the realm seemed like an entire world to itself, somehow larger than everything surrounding it.

Beams of power shot into the sky and formed a dome for the world, which was quickly covered by bloody sigils the size of mountains.

They glowed as they linked together into a defensive shield.

Below that, plains, mountains, and cities phased into existence, appearing like they had always been inside, just hidden within a dimension of their own.

Outside the wall, it suddenly seemed like Blood was an enormous giant towering at the horizon of his own private world.

The most significant thing was a shimmering and opalescent crystal that appeared at the center of the realm, far in the distance. It was placed on a great tower all its own, like a mountain peak protected by everything around it.

Or imprisoned.

At the center of that crystal, it was just possible to make out the form of a woman with long silver-blue hair. Most of her body and appearance was concealed by the crystal, but some refraction of light made her hair shine like fire.

Tides of essence flowed around the crystal in Sam’s eyes, surging with powerful runes that flowed outward to the rest of the realm.

Tiny cracks formed on the crystal as energy flowed outward, but energy flowed back as well like a red ocean around it.

Arcane sigils for blood absorbed the energy from the crystal and pulled it outward to the realm, while at the same time they fused together the tiny cracks and kept it contained.

Asenya.

Her name echoed in Sam’s mind, even as the Stellar Bombardment landed on the realm’s defenses.

His breath caught in his throat and he let it out in a quick hiss as many things suddenly became clear to him.

Asenya was definitely trapped here and possibly unaware of everything happening around her.

It also seemed like she was a power source for this realm.

He didn’t know how Blood had captured her, but it must’ve been after the First War while she was searching through the World Seal.

Perhaps the real Demon of Blood had left strong defenses here, or a trap that had managed to overwhelm her.

If it had already expended some of its energy on her, it would explain why Sam wasn’t dead yet.

She might have stumbled on this realm and fought, forcing Blood to use up a lot of his stored power.

She had been injured at the time, as he’d seen from her memory in the Wild Tree, so she wouldn’t have been at her best.

As one of the main figures in the war and a being that the Outsiders and Astrals had created together, she would’ve been a primary target.

Even his avatar had seemed possessive of her.

Perhaps Blood had created a trap for her and never had a chance to use it until she came wandering by.

The view of the realm disappeared in a field of silver explosions as the meteors struck.

The dimensional shield shuddered as the blood sigils covering the realm dimmed and brightened again.

The opalescent crystal at the center pulsed with them, dimming in reverse as energy flowed out from it to empower them.

He studied the crystal and the laws flowing through the realm, taking them in at a glance, and then he looked at the avatar, his anger building.

He’d known Asenya was inside, but seeing her trapped in a crystal and her energy going to support a realm that she had opposed with all her being was too much. It stabbed at his heart.

His knuckles crackled as he gripped a new spear in his hand, and essence flared up from his bracer and cloak, swirling outward in rivers of primal runes.

Asenya’s appearance explained why the Avatar of Blood had been pale when it appeared, like it was already drained. It had also been reluctant to call on the power of the Blood Realm until it was wounded.

Perhaps Asenya had done something, a strike before she was captured. She wouldn’t have fallen easily.

It seemed like the avatar’s ability to recover was limited. Khaes’s blood had given it some strength, but not that much.

Silver flames crackled around him as they expanded in every direction, burning with a new fury.

The explosions from Stellar Bombardment finally faded away and he saw the avatar with its fangs bared.

It had an even better hold on the spear in its shoulder now and it was drawing it out farther.

The realm behind it was echoing with thunderous beats and the sigils in the sky were growing brighter again, surging with power.

The spear was hindering its strength, but now that the realm was awake, it was pulling it out more quickly.

He didn’t have long left.

Once the spear was out, the avatar’s strength would return, and it was enough to control everything in this region.

It was weakened and not as strong as its old self, but it was still at the Sixth Evolution.

If the Demon of Blood was Level 699, and his avatar had half his strength, it was around Level 600.

The only reason Sam wasn’t dead yet was because of Silvas and that spear.

The avatar had already resisted his best strike from the moon and his artifacts. His ability to unleash more power in a short window was limited.

The tactical decision was to retreat and find another way to rescue Asenya, but he couldn’t leave without some form of success.

At the very least, he needed to make sure this realm didn’t disappear somewhere that he couldn’t find it again.

If he couldn’t beat it with direct force, then he would have to beat it with intelligence.

With the realm awakened, the Law of Blood was surging, which gave him an unprecedented chance to analyze its runic structure, the avatar’s energy, and the other forces at play.

He compared them all to his own avatars and what he knew about the Path of Blood.

He could see minute traces of Asenya’s blood inside the avatar now, either from the old battle with her where it had absorbed them or because of her connection to the realm.

Perhaps this entire Blood Realm still existed because Asenya was trapped inside.

Even if she was incapacitated, as a Sixth Evolution being, her passive regeneration would provide enough energy to keep a realm like this operating.

The avatar might be keeping her alive inside for that purpose and occasionally draining her energy.

That meant if he could figure out a way to remove Asenya, then even if she wasn’t awake to help him fight, the realm might crumble on its own.

The avatar’s source of energy would go with it.

At the same time, he didn’t want to make the realm use too much energy, since it might injure her.

His avatar in the Void came up with dozens of plans, sorting through them one by one as he studied the blood runes and the laws of this place.

Before even an instant passed here, he made his choice.

His attention turned away from the avatar as he looked at Khaes and Yeria, who were hiding from the Stellar Bombardment.

They’d been flying toward him before that, following the avatar’s command, but they hadn’t had a chance to reach him in the waves of attacks he’d sent.

The ocean of silver flames around him expanded, connecting with the droplets of silver and emerald essence all across the region.

Even in the short time since he’d unleashed it, Stellar Conversion had continued and gathered a massive amount of energy.

Some of it came from the blood elemental army, which had been torn to pieces by his attacks. The stars had gathered up that loose aura and burned it as fuel, converting it to something more useful.

As they saw the power rising around him, Khaes and Yeria froze in their advance, hanging back as they began to weave red and orange defenses around themselves.

Khaes’s eyes were narrow, while Yeria looked wild as her hair flew around her, interweaving with the sigils of orange essence she wielded.

As usual, they were working to protect themselves before anything else.

There was only a moment left before the avatar extracted the spear, but it was enough.

Streams of silver and emerald essence roared through the sky as they gathered around him. They spun through the formation of his avatars and turned into a luminous field of starlight that spread outward, locking down space and isolating Blood’s aura.

The spell was augmented by his domain, its effectiveness rising as he pushed aside Blood’s influence.

Then he raised his hand and pointed at the two of them.

His bracer flared to life as the remaining essence in it gathered into a translucent silver sphere, which looked like a tiny world of its own.

More than a million points of essence flowed into the sphere until it shone like a new-born sun.

It left his hand in a blaze of light, a silver star streaking across the distance.

Khaes’s eyes widened as he saw it coming, but Yeria only snarled, her features contorted with wild emotion as she leapt toward it.

Glowing illusions and crazy ghosts appeared around her, fading in and out of existence, sometimes tangled with her long hair or hanging onto her horns.

The sphere swept over her, and when it passed by, she was gone.

There was only a silver sphere heading into the distance, which began to curve as it headed back to Sam.

A tiny version of Yeria was trapped inside, compressed in a miniature prison.

It was the Void of Silver Runes, a miniature dimension all its own. It was one of the abilities he’d enchanted into his bracer.

The sphere settled in his hand and his fingers tightened around it, sealing Yeria’s essence away as he strengthened the dimensional barrier that was keeping her trapped.

And then he crushed down, the full force of his Strength of the Void exerted onto the prison. With his Battle Aura, his hand had over 110,000 Strength behind it.

A cracking sound like ice was shattering echoed out from inside his grip, followed by an explosion that nearly tore his hand apart.

Wild dimensional energy and spatial cracks blasted outward, battering his fingers as a storm of silver fragments and contained space blasted away.

Trails of stardust and fragments of orange runes were mixed into them, their forms shattered and mangled.

When he opened his hand, there was nothing left except a cloud of swirling mist. As it spread outward, it broke down further, disintegrating into the wild storm of essence around him.

“No!” Khaes’s roar tore across the space as he stared wildly at where Yeria had been.

He looked crazed, his eyes moving from where she had been standing beside him a moment before to Sam’s hand and the spreading cloud of spatial destruction.

“You!” he shouted as he turned to Sam. “Die!”

Veins of blood energy surged across his skin as he let out a loud howl of insanity. A whirlwind of slicing red blades formed around him, spreading outward like a berserker wave.

Sam ignored it as he gathered the energy from Stellar Conversion and the power of his avatars, and then he reached out toward Khaes.

His hand was a massive golden mountain stretching across the distance, each finger a mighty peak. It was only twenty miles between the two of them and he covered the space in an instant.

Where his hand passed, a dark rift of chaotic space opened. Within it, silver stars burned in a realm of their own, some large and some small.

Then his hand closed around Khaes, covering him completely.

Space shattered in his grip, turning to fragments of spatial edges and spinning fields of dust.

At the center of that grip, Khaes resisted for a moment, his body trembling as his domain exerted itself against Sam, but then streams of blood began to rise upward from his skin.

The field of blood blades around him shattered first.

Then cracks began to spread across his body as his veins swelled.

His body distorted.

Then the cracks spread across his skin as his chest collapsed inward, his ribs snapping. His arms broke next, and then his legs. Then his entire body began to twist inward as the force tore it to pieces.

Sam’s grip closed, sealing off the view of Khaes, but he could feel the last fragments of the demon’s energy exploding against his palm.

Under the pressure crushing him, there was nothing left but a boiling mist.

His hand opened. Both it and the Astral Rift faded away, leaving only a line of distorted space behind.

At that moment, the avatar was just drawing the last part of the spear out of its chest.

Sam gave it a long look, along with the realm behind it.

Then his hand swept out once more, grabbing a fragment of blood energy from the realm that was filled with Asenya’s essence.

Then he looked up at Silvas.

Behind him, the avatar that was here first stepped forward, bringing with it the fragments of dimensional space that it had woven into a shield.

A wave of his hand gathered all of his remaining essence, the emerald aura from Silvas, and all of the elemental energy that he could manage from the region.

Then a massive wave of Dimensional Stabilization flowed out from him, fusing the fragments of the World Seal he’d gathered into a binding chain around Blood’s realm.

He locked it down into place, binding it not to just this region, but to the fundamental laws of the World Seal and the regions that Asenya had created.

He didn’t trust his own power to contend with Blood’s Sixth Evolution Truth, but he did trust hers.

The chain locked around the Blood Realm, sinking anchors deep into its foundation, and then it sank similar anchors into the World Seal, binding it to the closest subdimension, so that it wouldn’t be able to move easily.

Then he looked at the Avatar of Blood, who was staring at him and the chains in a fury.

“I am the Lord of the Silver Void. We’ll finish this soon.”

With that, Sam, the projection of Silvas, and everything else he’d brought here disappeared in a streak of silver light.

Including the essence from Khaes and Yeria.

Behind him, a howl of anger rose up from the Avatar of Blood as it finally pulled the spear free.

It was so great that the realm shook with fury as an ocean of blood crashed against the dimensional walls, filling the region with a horrifying storm of power.