Blood Shaper-Chapter 54Book 6:
There was no blood in the empty shell of a being for the greatest of Torotia’s vampires to ingest. Tainted energy flowed down his throat like a river of molten corruption, dripping with malice and hunger. Kay gained nothing from it, in fact he lost a bit of his own power and resources as he destroyed the fire pouring into him. The manner he ended the avatar was purely symbolic.
There was power in that symbolism, and the pitch-black outer shell dotted by profane mockeries of starts began to crack. Starting at the throat, which Kay had ripped out, tiny fissures began to form that spread like spiderwebs across the avatar’s body. The green pinpricks that sat somewhere beneath it’s skin dies as each crack touched them and the impenetrable darkness between each dot of loathsome flame somehow dulled. They ceased to be void and simply became broken bits of carapace, the remains of a shell meant to contain Hungering Void’s power. Larger bursts of the fire that was that power tried to escape through the crowing cracks, some trying to escape while others ineffectively licked at Kay’s skin in an attempt to burn him.
Kay stared down at the dying avatar dispassionately as it struggled to keep itself together. It’s head managed to stay intact as the rest of it shattered into shards that each began slowly fading out of existence. The conflagrative portal on it’s head that served as an eye receded into a single spot of disquieting light.
“This means nothing.” It hissed at him. “I am merely an extension of the unending hunger. Nothing will stop it. You and all else you know will be consumed.”
There was no point in taunting the thing anymore, not once it was defeated, but Kay couldn’t help himself. He rationalized it as trying to trick the being into revealing something useful, but in reality he just wanted to tear down the arrogant monstrosity one more time. “Then why are you so afraid of some tortoise that I saw?”
The green circle flared wider. “You saw him? That’s not possible! There isn’t-“ The sibilant voice emerging from the decaying head cut off mid word and the eye expanded to the size of a baseball. It flickered up and down Kay rapidly. “The scent. You smelled of him, but to have seen him? No, it is even deeper than that! Have you actually-“ The eye jerked directly to Kay’s face and somehow he read horror in the avatar’s gaze. “No! No! Not after-!”
The burning green ring inverted outward as it consumed the final remains of the avatar, growing larger in an instant until it loomed above Kay. The eldritch flame became a ring that enclosed a warped and twisted piece of space that roiled and flexed unnaturally. Through the portal Kay made out something massive, something that was once again beyond what he could understand not only because of it’s existence but because of it’s sheer size. Looking down at the planet ten times larger than Earth that was below him had momentarily stunned him when he’s ascended to see it in full, but whatever this was made Torotia look like a speck of dirt, or a single particle smaller than the naked eye could see. A fragment of the things potential noticed the portal, and through it, Kay. What amounted to less than a fractional glance at something that was disregarded an instant later to this being landed on Kay and it was almost enough to unmake him. Similarly to his recent glimpse into the fullness of the System, Kay both saw and didn’t see the thing it’s avatar had called Hungering Void.
There were a dozen things that Kay learned in that moment and a million more that eluded him. The otherworldly, inter-dimensional cosmovore that had created the vampyr as it’s puppets was somehow more alive than the System was. The System had felt like purpose and desire expressed through orderly motion and logical decisions. There was life to it in it’s own way during Kay’s momentary look into it, but he felt like he faintly understood what the System had once told him about it not being a computer, but such a description not being inaccurate. Conversely, Hungering Void felt like a ravenous animal, driven by instinct. It hungered, so it ate. There was nothing more to it than that, except there was. This thing was no mere animal, with no ability to reason or learn to become something other than what it was. Hungering Void had felt and come to know it’s own instincts, seen the destruction that feeding it’s appetite the way it did caused, and chosen to continue on the same path while fully cognizant of what it wrought.
It was a scourge on the full extent of all realities because it had chosen to be one.
In that split second of attention that it turned Kay’s way, he knew it’s annoyance at him for ruining it’s plans. What had started as the tiniest of inconveniences, a dust particle settling on it’s sandwich that it had to brush away, had become a much more aggravating obstacle. Normally Kay’s struggle against it would be ultimately futile. It cared little for waiting, to it a millions years was as unnoticeable as a second. It could wait out resistance, wait out defenses, wait out the knowledge of it’s own existence in the universes that it hunted. Eventually the memory that it was waiting to feed would die out, and then it would have it’s meal as the defenses made to hold it back were dismantled for a percieved lack of need.
But this situation was not like it’s previous hunts. This universe had a guardian unlike so many others. The System was as timeless as Hungering Void was and the System would not forget it. The drool-inducing connection that turned a single meal into an all you can eat buffet was also the limitation holding Hungering Void back from taking the first bite. The System knew it now and would never relax the defenses to keep it out. If Kay had not interfered Hungering Void could have used the System fragment it had corrupted to tear it’s way inside, but that chance was gone, and the cosmovore no longer had an eternity to wait and plot for another chance. The tortoise that it hated so much was coming for it.
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Kay didn’t know what the tortoise was and didn’t understand his connection to it, but he felt echoes of Hungering Void’s anger and fear when it thought of the tortoise. Those emotions, or the closest that such an otherworldly being could have to them, were something it hated to feel, and it turned that hate on Kay. The portal it had created with it’s avatar’s death wasn’t enough for it to break through and begin consuming the universe, it wasn’t even enough for Hungering Void to get a single, decadent sniff of the meal it wanted, but it was enough to erase Kay with it’s attention.
A hardened spike of scrutiny emerged from the opening leading outside of reality, the mere fact that hungering Void was acknowledging Kay with even a particle of it’s being enough to obliterate him on contact. Space and time rippled outward from the spear tip of attention that coursed through the airless void like a shark chasing a seal. The very end of the sharpened point came to rest against his chest and Kay felt the eldritch horror’s scorn and derisive anticipation. It wanted Kay to know that he was so beneath it that ending him was as difficult as particles vibrating. It was something that just was, and once Kay no longer existed it would forget he ever had been.
A hand wrapped in a gauntlet made of blood slammed into place against the spike and five fingers wrapped around it. Touching it was like looking into the portal and seeing the twisted reflection of Hungering Void through the obscuring mists of reality, except a million times worse. Kay was a speck before a giant, no, even less than that! He wasn’t a single atom before a sun, or an electron beholding a galaxy, or even a quark gazing into the rest of a universe. He was nothing being confronted by something that was. Hungering Void’s disdain for him was natural, for who cared about something that was not?
The nothing clad in blood didn’t care. A blade rose up in Kay’s other hand and drove it into the skewer of annihilating intent. Blood brimming with stabilizing power, an energy that screamed that this reality and all that was in it existed, sharpened to a razor’s edge and engulfed in sheer stubborn belief that Hungering Void’s view of him did not matter cut a line into the spear trying to erase Kay. He trembled and shook with the level of exertion it took to move his sword a fraction of an inch while an overwhelming intensity tried to force the judgment of an alien creature that he didn’t exist onto him. There were moments where he almost failed, where his limbs stopped being or he started to fade, but he refused to give up, and the blade cut deeper.
A sliver more of Hungering Void’s attention turned on him through the portal, the being surprised that he still struggled, that he hadn’t ceased. The power trying to unmake him doubled in strength, and for a second Kay stopped being. He snapped back into reality so quickly a mortal mind would not have noticed he was gone, but for that brief length of time Kay was not. Drops of blood began to leak off of him and disintegrate from the proximity of the spike and somewhere where Kay still had thoughts outside of the struggle to be and to win he knew that if he didn’t win there was no coming back from this. This was not death, he would not regenerate wholly from a single drop of blood if the eldritch abomination made him vanish entirely.
That thought was just enough for his concentration to slip. Simply acknowledging that he could be erased by the immensity of what was looming over him, seeking to crush him, was enough for it to succeed in doing so. The blood, the armor, the Classes, Skills, Titles, and all else that was Kay simply ceased to be in the face of something that was at such a level that he was not. For a beat the eldritch being kept it’s attention locked on where Kay had been, then a beat more. Satisfied with it’s petty vengeance, it retracted the skewer of thought and attention back toward the portal.
It was not Kay’s unending will that won him the battle, although his resilient if fallible will did help him immensely. Nor was it the power of friendship, his connection to his loved ones, or even the help of the System. In the end, Hungering Void lost for the same reason that Kay had been able to meddle in it’s plans at all. Arrogant belief in it’s own infallibility.
When the tip of the spear pulled back Kay was again, and he struck instantly. In a single, polished strike of his sword he cut up into the tiny wound he had already made and severed the end of the spike from the rest of Hungering Void. The injury was nothing to a being of such immensity that it could eat entire universes. A skin abrasion that a human couldn’t even perceive was more of a wound than what Kay had just cut off of the abomination and yet it was the worst injury ever inflicted upon it. Every other wound it had taken, every scar left behind, had come from something that it considered and equal, or at the very least something Hungering Void could acknowledge as a lesser peer. It had never been hurt by something so far beneath it, ever.
Kay struggled to understand what was going on. He was beyond tired, had gone so far passed exhausted that he couldn’t even see it over the horizon, that he was struggling to from a coherent thought. There was no memory of it but he knew that for a heartbeat he had stopped existing, and coming back from that had sapped him of everything he had. On instinct he managed to drag the blood floating off of him back to his body and restore a bit of himself to something resembling functioning.
His eyes sharpened as he looked back up at the portal, then to the edge of the spear that had unmade him tumbling through space. He couldn’t see it or truly perceive it in any meaningful way, but he knew it was there. With forced casualness and open mockery he flicked it with a tendril of blood and sent it spinning back through the portal. His mind was a tangled blur that was barley able to form sentences but at the same time he felt open to truths and ideas from beyond where he stood. Bits and pieces of knowledge from universes and the greater reality beyond flickered through his head, and one of them had him leaning closer to the portal.
The words he spoke felt like they were coming from someone else’s mouth, but he knew that every one of them rang with undeniable truth. “That tortoise is a friend of mine. I suggest you start running, because he’s not very happy with you.”
Hungering Void rippled and twisted with rage on the other side of the opening and reached forward with wrath and ruin to forcibly rip Kay and anything near him apart. Kay didn’t give it a chance to get that far. His sword flashed across the portal and bisected it. The anti-eldritch power baked into his blood tore the portal into the space between spaces and severed the connection. The two pieces left behind slammed shut right as a million horrors were about to cross over.
The sword in Kay’s hand broke apart and in fits and bursts the blood joined back with his armor. Ever so slowly he turned toward the world beneath him and he began to descend back toward his home.
