Chapter 524 - The Nature of Persistence (Patreon)

Abraham Micayne, destroyer of an entire realm, looked down on his greatest creation, wishing for everything he was worth that he could simply grab hold of her and enforce his Will.  However, the girl who’d once been Talia Nightingale was beyond his reach. Undead though she was, she’d become infused with pesky vitality, even a speck of which would fight his control.  And with as much life as she had flowing through her, he couldn’t even get a foothold. 

No - she was off-limits. 

And he railed against the limitations of his class.  Necromancer, he’d been called back in the Radiant Isles, but he’d never truly qualified for the class.  Yet, when his body had been destroyed, his passive, oft-forgotten skill came to the fore.  [Spirit Walk] was a wild skill, earned during the course of his necromantic studies, and it only had one purpose: to save the skill-wielder from death. 

When his body had been destroyed, his spirit had been ejected, and for a few moments, he’d felt agony truer than anything he’d ever experienced.  His ephemeral being had been ripped apart, shred by shred, and in only the space of a few seconds.  Panicked, he’d thrown himself into the nearest body – that of one of his lowly zombies. 

That had been an eye-opener, existing in that primitive creature’s body.  It was a monster with a singular purpose, and it had taken every ounce of willpower Micayne had possessed to force it to turn around and retreat from the battlefield.  One shambling step at a time, and he slowly left everything behind.  It was only after he’d traveled for more than a dozen miles into the wilderness that he managed to wrap his mind around his situation. 

At first, it had seemed hopeless.  He was in the body of a zombie whose lone instinct – to devour any living creature it could find – fought against him with every passing moment.  He couldn’t access his other skills, which would have made it much easier to control those impulses.  So, all he had on his side was his considerable willpower. 

It was not enough.

And for the next few weeks, he descended into the life of an untethered zombie, stumbling through the wilderness, killing and eating anything that crossed his path.  He fought it, but his efforts seemed for naught until, at last, he had a breakthrough.  Not through anything he did, but rather, via a chance encounter with one of the more evolved undead. 

Micayne took that opportunity, leaping from one body to the next.  It wasn’t easy, and once again, his still-wounded spirit took quite a lot of agonizing damage along the way.  Yet, when it was all said and done, he’d found a new, far more amenable body.  Only then did he embark upon the quest to improve his situation. 

One body after another, he used and discarded dozens until he’d found his way all the way across the continent and to the coast.  Once there, Micayne – in his zombified body – had snuck aboard a ship that he’d learned was bound for the Portal of Ascension.  Stowing away was easy enough, especially considering he didn’t have to worry about food, water, or air.  Still, clinging to the bottom of that ship was not what anyone would call pleasant. 

But Micayne was committed.

He had heard plenty of stories about ascension.  Most had come from Constance Nightingale, whose goddess had passed on plenty of information.  And he had latched onto that as his only means of solving his problem.  After all, he hadn’t exactly been pleased with his situation.  Grateful he hadn’t been killed, for certain.  But please?  Not at all.  So, he’d chosen to ascend and leave his life’s work behind.

His wife would remain dead, and even though he’d long since lost hope that he could resurrect her, finally closing that door had been quite a blow to his psyche.  But it was easier, once he’d detached himself from his body and, subsequently, the emotions that went with it.

He witnessed the battle around the Portal of Ascension from afar, though he almost perished once again when the demoness nearly killed the brute who challenged her.  However, the situation changed when a large, dark-skinned man leaped out of the portal and turned the tide of the battle.  After that, the demoness was killed, and, after a couple of days, the lone surviving humans had stepped through the portal, ascending to the next plane of existence.

Micayne waited for a few days before he followed. 

And it had been everything he’d hoped it would be, giving him a class called Arch-Lich, which allowed him to not only create a new body, but to also pass his teachings on to any followers he might gain.  But when he’d stepped into the Eternal Realm, he’d quickly discovered that necromancers – or Arch-Liches, as was his case – were not welcome.  He was hunted from the start, and his new body was destroyed dozens of times. 

But they couldn’t kill him.  Not without discovering his secret.

Soon enough, he managed to escape, creating a new body along the way.  That was when he’d met Catherine, who would become his finest pupil.  An aristocrat from birth, she was just bored enough to find a budding Arch-Lich to be quite interesting.  And through arduous effort, she had managed to transform her mundane Mage class into Lich.  From there, she and Micayne had experienced a rapid rise, largely due to the decimation of an entire city. 

It hadn’t been  the original intention.  Micayne had only wanted to take over a few palaces.  But one thing led to another, and with each kill, his army had grown.  He’d let the power go to his head until the entire city had fallen.  And he’d gained more than a city.  He had pushed himself forward far more quickly than anyone could have imagined. 

And that was before he and Catherine had discovered the city’s dungeon.

The next year was spent steadily slaughtering his way through the dungeon, one run after another, until he’d exhausted all it could give.  Only then did he hear of an entire kingdom of undead.  So, he and his army of zombies – along with Catherine and another student he’d picked up – set off through the wilderness, slaughtering anything in their path. 

But everything hadn’t gone perfectly.  Eventually, he and his minions faced off against a powerful monster – some sort of enormous toad that belched fire – that destroyed his entire army.  The toad had died, sending Micayne’s level even higher than before, but the damage had been done.  So, without any other corpses with which to build his army, he had been forced to resort to stealth.

There were a few bumps along the road, especially when it came to infiltrating the city itself.  However, he’d managed to take advantage of an already-ongoing conflict between two factions, which allowed him to set up in one of the disused portions of the town.  From there, he’d begun to build his forces, one zombie at a time. 

And he’d discovered that they had very little defense against his control. 

More, each one he converted counted as a kill, which made sense, considering that, once he’d finished, there was nothing left of the person they’d once been.  The only thing they retained was a durable body that depended on their levels.  Everything else was gone. 

Micayne had found an absolute treasure trove of leveling energy, and he’d used it to great advantage as he swept through the undead city.  With every converted zombie, he progressed a little closer to the peak.  He had yet to reach that lofty level, though he had shot past the supposed bottleneck and attained level ninety-one. 

But everything had gone wrong the moment that brute showed up.  It had actually taken Micayne quite some time to realize that it was the same man he’d encountered in the Mortal Realm.  Now, he seemed to favor a sleek, metallic form, though Abraham had seen him let it fall away, revealing a muscular and athletic man that only vaguely resembled the half-armored monstrosity with which he’d tried to make peace.

Regardless, as seemed to be the man’s only purpose in life, he’d wrecked Micayne’s plans, destroyed his army, and killed his followers.  That last skill had taken most of the city, too, atomizing everything in its path.  If Micayne had been back on Earth, he’d have thought someone had detonated an atomic bomb.  Yet, there were enough differences – not least that such things didn’t exist in the Eternal Realm – that he knew that wasn’t the case.  It was a skill.  A terrible, terrible skill.

Micayne’s body had been destroyed, of course, but that was nothing new.  It was never meant to be anything but a fragile and temporary thing.  He’d retreated to his base of operations outside of the city, where he’d immediately inhabited one of the other bodies he had already prepared.  Then, he’d gone searching the blast zone for anything interesting. 

And that was precisely what he’d found when he encountered Talia Nightingale. 

During Micayne’s reminiscence, she had continued to eviscerate the hunk of meat that he’d been wearing.  It came apart easily, but despite her enthusiasm, she clearly didn’t enjoy tearing it apart. 

He briefly wondered what she got out of such destruction.  Was it purely catharsis?  Or had she gone feral?  He would have loved to observe her for a little while longer, but the agony of being a spirit without a body was beginning to affect his ability to think.  So, without further observation, he flitted away. 

As a spirit, he couldn’t move very quickly.  Complicating matters was the still-mounting pain.  He still hadn’t reached a crescendo, but when it did, Micayne knew he would run the risk of being lost, his spirit dissipating into the ambient mana.  He’d come close a few times over the years, and it was a situation he certainly had no intention of repeating. 

He pushed himself faster, racing across the ruined city until he reached the river that flowed alongside it.  He followed the body of water downstream until he reached a small warehouse at the very edge of the city.  It was miles away from the graveyard that had been the epicenter of the skill’s explosion, and yet, it did not escape unscathed.  The roof had been partially ripped away, and the stone walls looked on the verge of collapse.

But fortunately, it had survived, as had the bodies inside.

Micayne flowed through the wall like it wasn’t even there, then located the next body in line.  He entered it, using his skill [Locorpus] to take control. 

He sighed.

“That did not go as expected,” he said as a cascade of emotions washed over him.  As a spirit, he felt nothing.  He was entirely analytical.  Yet, the moment he took control of one of his carefully constructed bodies, he was forced to feel everything.  The weight of his failures pressed down upon his shoulders, threatening to crush him into the ground. 

The only cure was to keep moving forward.  To keep progressing.  If he did that, he may one day be capable of completely detaching himself from the burdens of his physical form. 

It was a lofty goal.

And yet, he thought it was possible.  He only needed to reach a high enough level, to develop his skills to such a degree that his spiritual existence wasn’t so agonizing.

But for now, he needed to figure out what he was going to do about Talia Nightingale and her hulking protector.  That man had destroyed a city, and far more thoroughly than what Micayne had managed to accomplish.  How many had he killed with that single skill?  Tens of thousands, at the very least.  Maybe far more.  After all, Micayne had not managed to turn every single person in Darukar.  Indeed, there were pockets of resistance that had remained hidden.

They were all gone now.

Dead.  Just like everyone Micayne had ever loved.  Now, Catherine had been taken from him, too.  She had been a poor replacement for his wife, but she had been a nice distraction. 

He shoved those thoughts out of his mind.  They were useless.  Instead, he focused on his next move.  Clearly, he would need to leave.  Not only had he been robbed of his purpose for coming to Darukar in the first place, but even the death-attuned mana was gone.  He wouldn’t rebuild his army here. 

No – he would find somewhere better.  Because while having an undead population on which to prey made things much easier, there was nothing to say that he couldn’t work with a living city.  He’d even learned some valuable lessons about keeping out of the public eye. 

Yes.  He’d lost, but it was just a singular battle amidst the war of a lifetime.  He could rebuild.  And he would grow stronger for it.  By the time he took control of his other spare bodies and began to march them out of the warehouse, he was already beginning to see the bright side of the entire situation.