Chapter 328 - Mercy (Patreon)

Chains lashed at Zeke’s shoulders as he barreled forward, but he was undeterred. With his body encased in metal – or perhaps his it had become living metal – the whipping chains were little more than an annoyance. Still, he could feel a slight tug on his mana – as well as his vital energy – every time they made contact, and it was steadily getting stronger. Meanwhile, every passing second made his enemy stronger, both from the leeching effect of the chains as well as his ability to absorb ambient energies from his surroundings.

Eveline had been right. It would only take Dáinn a recover his strength enough that he would easily overwhelm even Zeke’s enhanced defenses. Thankfully, though, [Triune Colossus] didn’t take more than a trickle of mana to maintain, though switching its form would require quite an expenditure.

“I love how the Oppressor just gives you these little tidbits of knowledge,” remarked a still formless Eveline from inside Zeke’s mind. She did so at the speed of thought, so Zeke had no trouble understanding her statement between long, lumbering steps. “Just shoves knowledge in there and makes it feel like you knew it all along. And they call me the evil mind demon.”

“Just shut up,” Zeke replied. Never before had he wanted so badly to absorb some demonic energy, if for no other reason than to drown out Eveline’s voice with the pure aggression that came with the attuned mana’s corruptive influence. But with pure mana powering [Triune Colossus], her thoughts felt clearer than ever before. “I need to focus.”

“Sure, sure. I’ll just sit here. Doing nothing. Have fun.”

Zeke suppressed a mental sigh as he continued to thunder forward. The dwarf’s spikes suddenly flared, and in the space of a single of Zeke’s steps, the blood on the floor erupted. If Zeke would have had time to think, he might’ve expected to feel the grasp of a hundred hands trying to stop him. However, that wasn’t what happened. Instead, a single, massive, bloody hand burst forth from the ground. Zeke tried to dodge, but the thing’s palm was even bigger than his enhanced height, and his momentum pushed him forward along an inevitable path that took him right into the enormous hand.

He hit with thunderous force, driving the impediment backwards, but only a few feet. It felt like running into a brick wall, and before Zeke could recover from the shock of his momentum suddenly stopping cold, the hand’s seven clawed fingers wrapped around him before he could extricate himself.

Then, it squeezed.

Metal crunched as Zeke’s arms were pinned to his sides. He’d never been inside a trash compactor, but Zeke had to believe it felt something like being crushed by that massive hand. Blood rushed to his head as he struggled to break free, but his efforts were all for naught. The hand was too strong. The grip too firm. He couldn’t escape. Nor could he endure.

“You know, if I weren’t shutting up, I might remind you that you do have the ability to alter that skill’s nature,” Eveline said, her mental voice languid and unconcerned. “But I’m too busy being silent to give advice.”

Zeke suppressed a mental sigh. He hadn’t forgotten the nature of his newest skill. There were three forms, just like with [Cambion’s Awakening], and with similar strengths and weaknesses. However, he’d chosen not to switch because it would take an incredible amount of mana. If he had to guess, he could only do so thrice before he ran completely dry. Then, he’d be a sitting duck.

“Better than being dead,” Eveline supplied, her statement unhelpfully obvious.

The other issue was that only one of the forms would give him what he needed. Activating it with earth attuned mana would probably help him survive a little longer, which would only prolong his suffering. Pure mana was similarly insufficient to the task at hand, a fact that was proven with each crushing second within the hand’s grasp. No – if he wanted to escape, he needed to use the abundant demonic energy at his fingertips.

Seeing no other way, Zeke initiated the switch.

Mana drained out of him as he felt his body begin to shift, and demonic energy flooded into him in a river of corruption. His body grew thicker. Stronger. The crystalline spikes on his shoulders, arms, and head grew longer, thicker, and even more jagged. His metallic muscles bulged with augmented strength, and his conscious mind retreated before a wave of pure aggression.

Fury sang in Zeke’s every thought as he flexed. The hand trembled with effort, but it held firm. Without his rational thoughts cautioning against it, Zeke embraced [Cambion’s Awakening], fueling it with even more demonic energy. Explosive strength erupted inside of him, and what damage the massive hand had managed to inflict healed in an instant. Zeke barely even noticed. Instead, with all that power at his disposal, he once again tried to escape.

This time, the result was different.

With a burst of power and a roar of pure fury, Zeke threw his arms out wide. The hand collapsed, exploding into a shower of blood that flew a hundred feet in every direction. Zeke fell to the floor, his knuckle crashing into the ground and cracking the suddenly visible tiles. The shockwave dissipated, and the pool of blood came rushing back in to slosh against his ankles as he straightened to his full, fifteen-foot height.

The dwarf stared at him in shock, muttering something about demons. Zeke barely heard him. With the corruption roaring through him, he only knew one thing: aggression. And it was telling him to destroy his enemy.

Zeke leaped forward, raising his hammer high into the air, and brought it down with every ounce of strength he possessed. Before it made contact with the dwarf, a nimbus of purple-and-black energy appeared around the emaciated dwarven prince, stopping Voromir. But the shield could do nothing about the massive momentum behind the swing, and Dáinn was driven into the floor. The shockwave carried the blood away, and the tiles crumbled as the force of Zeke’s attack tore a crater in the stone below.

But Dáinn was unhurt.

Shocked. Afraid. And more than a little confused.  But unharmed.

Zeke intended to change that.

He swung again, this time increasing his weight as much as he could. In the back of his mind, he knew that the increased strength that came with fueling [Triune Colossus] with demonic energy meant that Voromir’s weight was commensurately magnified, meaning that the hammer’s weight was assuredly measured in tons, rather than pounds. And with his racial ability to manipulate his weight adding to that, even his mundane swings could pack a great deal of punch.

Zeke brought all of that to bear, repeatedly swinging at the dwarf. As he did, more bloody hands gasped at him, but none were even as powerful as that first iteration. As such, they couldn’t even scratch his metallic skin. But neither could Zeke hurt Dáinn, protected as he was by that shield.

And the dwarf was only growing stronger.

Buried in the back of his mind, Zeke was screaming at himself to do something – anything – other than repeatedly bashing his hammer against the impregnable shield of purple-and-black energy. But the combination of fueling his two skills with demonic mana had sent him deeper into that pool of mindless aggression than he’d ever been before. He had all that power at his fingertips, but he couldn’t think. He could only act on pure instinct.

And his instincts told him to keep attacking the dwarf in the simplest way possible. So, that’s what he did, and to similar effect.

In the end, he was saved by Eveline, who’d begun shouting at him the moment he lost the ability to think rationally. Finally, her mental voice broke through, screaming, “You must stop! Switch! Please! You won’t last much longer!”

For some reason, that shouted warning reached the last remaining vestiges of his mind, and through an effort of willpower, he shoved his way through the storm of aggression and latched hold of his mana. Growling with the effort, he wrenched control away from the animalistic part of his mind and forced a switch in [Triune Colossus] while shutting off [Cambion’s Awakening].

It wasn’t easy.

The demonic mana felt like it had a mind of its own, and it didn’t want to retreat. But Zeke was too stubborn to give in, and over an agonizing few seconds, he held it at bay while he dragged earthen energy from the golems. It drained them dry, and they collapsed back into his spatial storage as [Colossal Legion] collapsed. But he managed to corral just enough mana to fuel another transformation.

This time, Zeke’s body grew even denser. Blockier. More dense. The jagged, crystalline spikes retreated almost entirely, and his horns completely retracted. By the time the transformation completed, Zeke’s body was half as wide as he was tall, giving him a silhouette not dissimilar from that of a healthy dwarf. Even though he was still fifteen-feet tall, he managed to look squat and stocky.

But he didn’t look at all human. Instead, he’d become a humanoid mountain of metal and crystal. More importantly, his mind became placid. Patient. And enduring. The moment the calm took hold, supplanting the flood of aggression, Zeke saw a path forward.

The bloody hands continued to splash against him, but he was as a mountain amid a rainstorm. He would endure. Dáinn screamed wordlessly, his body becoming less withered by the moment, and he thrust his own hand at the suddenly motionless Zeke. Spikes of condensed blood erupted from the pool, each one laced with tendrils of black power and humming with demonic energy. A hundred of them hit Zeke all at once, and from every direction.

He barely felt them. They were inconsequential. As if –

“You really need to focus,” Eveline interrupted his meandering thoughts. “You need to act. I know you feel a little…sluggish, maybe? No, that isn’t right. Calm? Something like that. I don’t know, but you need to push through or when this guy reaches full power…well, even this…won’t be enough.”

Amidst the storm of blood spikes, Zeke shook his head. Urgency just felt so unnecessary. So pointless. He would endure what needed to be endured, and acting hastily would simply –

“Use [Cambion’s Awakening] with demonic mana!” she shouted forcefully. Zeke’s mind snapped into focus, and without even thinking, he embraced the skill. The corrosive mana once again flooded into him, wreaking havoc through his channels. Explosive strength suffused his body, but more importantly, the aggression seemed to counterbalance the placidity that came with the earth-fueled version of [Triune Colossus]. Suddenly, he could think clearly. Eveline gave a mental sigh, saying, “That was the point, idiot. Now, do something with this guy. We’ve got a lot to discuss.”

Zeke wanted to reply, but he couldn’t spare the time. Already, he’d wasted too much, and he needed to end the dwarf before he became an unstoppable threat that could wipe him off the face of Hell with a mere thought.

With two separate types of mana flowing through him, Zeke embraced [Unleash Momentum], weaving his braid of twin attunements through the skill, holding it all together with his runecrafting Will. With so much power at his fingertips, Zeke felt almost like a god. But he knew he couldn’t control it for very long. The disparate powers were already starting to protest, and even the more stable version of his braiding technique could only hold them at bay for so long.

The moment [Unleash Momentum] was ready, he let the skill loose with a heavy, sledgehammer blow that fell like an avalanche upon the dwarf.

And the world exploded.

Blood was vaporized.

Columns of flesh were torn asunder, the stone to which they’d been anchored crumbling. The roof cracked and erupted like a volcano. And the walls exploded outward. In the space of an instant, the entire top level of the Spear of Desolation was destroyed, leaving only a small area around the dwarf still standing.

When Zeke blinked his way back to awareness, he realized just how close the roiling sea of flames were. And how far below him the ground was.

More disturbingly, he saw that Dainn was almost entirely unharmed.

And he was laughing – a wheezing cackle of resigned disbelief.

“So…much…power…in the hands of a child,” he rasped, lying prone in a small crater. Zeke stood over him, the lip of the crater reaching only to his waist.

“How are you still alive?” Zeke muttered, his voice the rumble of an earthquake.

The dwarf didn’t answer. But then again, he didn’t need to. The moment Zeke focused properly, he could feel the raging energies flowing through the glowing spikes. It was then that he realized their true purpose.

They were keeping him alive.

“The shield is gone,” came Eveline’s mental voice, sounding as if it was a mile away. “You know what to do.”

And Zeke did. As necessary as it was – the dwarf was still healing at a visible rate, and he would soon recover completely – the idea of what he had to do was surprisingly disturbing. Dainn was an objectively bad person. He’d meddled with demonic forces, and he’d doomed his people to existences that could really be called living. However, he had done so in an effort to save them. Would Zeke have done any differently? Maybe. Probably not.

“But you can handle it. He couldn’t,” Eveline said. “The demon is a part of you. You paid the price.”

That was true enough. In that timeless space between realms, Zeke had endured enough torture to fundamentally change his very being. But Dáinn had made no such sacrifice. Even his crucifixion was woefully unequal to the price Zeke – or any other demon - had paid.

“He’s an opportunistic thief,” Eveline stated. “Nothing more.”

Zeke bent down and, seeing that hist attack had, indeed, destroyed the shield, gripped the first spike between his thumb and forefinger. It felt like a nail next to his overlarge hands. He ripped it free and, even as the dwarf screamed and squirmed, Zeke dismissed the spike into his spatial storage. One after another, he repeated the action until, finally, he tore the last one away.

The dwarf sagged, losing every ounce of energy. His body shrank in on itself, and he let out a rattling sigh. He rasped, “End it. Please…”

“It would be a mercy,” Eveline stated.

Zeke couldn’t disagree with that assessment. Dáinn was already dying. Zeke could feel it. He could see it with his own two eyes. Without the spikes to sustain him, and with his regeneration being incomplete, he was already doomed. If Zeke had been in the dwarf’s condition, he might’ve been able to recover via [Cambion’s Awakening], but Dáinn had no such skill at his disposal. Ending his life would save the dwarf days of suffering.

Resolute, Zeke once again hefted his hammer and swung. The dwarf’s head exploded like an overripe melon. But when Zeke pulled his weapon back, he saw that the blood was trying to wriggle back into Dáinn’s body. So, he swung again. And again. It took four attacks before he received a notification that he’d killed the dwarven prince.

Then, he sighed and climbed out of the crater, where he collapsed onto his knees and finally released his skills. Even as his body shrank, Zeke’s shoulders sagged, and his breath came in ragged gasps.

But he retained consciousness, and aloud, he said, “You need to tell me what’s going on, Eveline. The whole story. And I want to look at you when you do.”

“Uh…that’s going to be a problem…”