[ Sacrifice
You have Sacrificed 1 [Moderate] Remnant of a Gold-ranked Swarmlord [1] / 1 [Major] Soulshard of an Ascendant’s Work [2]. Windfall bonus activated.
Reward [1]: Essence of a Gold-ranked Swarmlord now manifests around your body with tangible prowess for 2 hours and 40 minutes. All Iron-ranked Attributes raised by 15 Ranks, all Silver-ranked Attributes raised by 10 Ranks, and all Gold-ranked Attributes raised by 5 ranks for every battle encountered for the next 2 hours and 40 minutes.
Reward [2]: Soulshard link with host established due to presence of a different Soulshard of another Ascendant’s Work. Soulshard manifests as—
Re-evaluating…
Reducing…
Reward [2]: Ascendant Soulthread Affixed to manifested Essence of Gold-ranked Swarmlord for 20 minutes. ]
That had to be the longest singular message from the Weave I had received yet. I didn’t even get to read through the whole thing properly. Certain phrases, like “atomic dissolution” made my eyes go as wide as saucers.
I just did my best to commit it all to memory for later perusal because even if I wanted to ignore the ongoing battle and just actualize what I was reading, I couldn’t do it. Not with the new flood of energy blitzing through like someone had plugged my soul into a power plant.
If I had thought the Ritual’s success had turned me into a nuclear reactor, this latest boost had evolved me into an atom bomb. Or perhaps, my rewards from Sacrifice were adding onto the substantial power from the Ritual of War, which went on to raise my total buffs to ridiculous proportions.
Normally, that wouldn’t have been a bad thing. But right that moment, I felt like I couldn’t even control what was going on.
A thousand tiny bombs were bursting under my skin, within every vein, artery, and capillary, along every muscle fibre and tendon. My bones were less solid structures and more rods of pure, pulsing energy.
I was turning into a living, breathing embodiment of magical power. Literally.
It made me want to curse. This was exactly what I had been seeking to avoid by simply using Emulation. The core issue was losing myself into whatever transformation was gifted by Sacrifice, and I had believed that by focusing on a different Affix that I had finally learned, I could harness the power of my tribute without losing much of who I was.
Without going through an experience that was fundamentally incompatible with my physical being.
Except, I hadn’t counted on the stupid bug possessing something from an ancient Ascendant within it. A tiny piece, admittedly, but even that was apparently way too much for me to handle just then, according to what the Weave itself had determined.
Perhaps I should have been grateful that the Weave had recognized that I would have been vaporized alive if it had allowed me to attain the full reward of whatever Sacrifice had deemed correct. And even the amount the Weave was allowing me to channel was apparently causing my body to transform into pure magic.
It was almost impossible to maintain my shape as a human being. Fuck.
I was so busy just trying to tame the new burgeoning energy trying to shriek out of my body that I didn’t even notice the strange hologram around me at first. After a few moments, it grew impossible to ignore. I looked around because the strange aura was all around me, and at first, it fooled me into thinking I was losing the battle against my new, effervescent power.
But no, this energy was different. This was my first Sacrifice reward—the one that stated I was channelling the Essence of the Swarmlord or whatever the Weave had called the monster.
For a second, I wondered how much Emulation had played a part in my latest Sacrifice reward, and how much of it was Essence alone. Something told me that the reward that was manifesting would have been wildly different if I only possessed Essence.
Because the older Affix was the only thing that explained why the hologram—the external mana threads, rather—was taking the monstrous and deadly shape of the Swarmlord.
I shook my head. It really was the same spiny, mantis-shaped creature that had formed around me, partially translucent and constructed entirely from energy.
And wonder of wonders, it felt like a part of me. An extension of my body, of my very being.
Somehow, it was stabilizing the furious storm of energy roiling within and without me. This shell of constructed energy, this facsimile of a beast I had killed, was allowing me to channel the overpowering magic I had obtained through Sacrifice.
I didn’t even need to move any part of me to move the shape of the Swarmlord’s soul that had manifested around me. It brimmed with power, with the capacity for utter destruction, an outlet for the furious storm roiling around me and just wishing to blast out any way it could. Pure, eradicating destruction that I could now guide.
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
Enough. I had wasted enough time trying to get a grip on everything I had received. Whatever tenuous control I managed over my newfound power would be enough. Would have to be enough.
It was high time I shattered the Blight Swarm for good.
I smashed into the monsters from behind. There was no time to be fancy about it or even make any elaborate plans. I had power to obliterate, strength that threatened to run out if given enough time to do so. As such, I needed to make the most of things while I still could.
And I did.
Forget the bugs, my ferocious force took me by surprise. When I lunged into the monsters, I forced my way through several of them, my aura and the energy pulsing around me quite literally vaporizing away a good chunk of the monstrous army around me. Screams and shrieks rebounded all over the area, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was too busy killing.
The monsters died, one after another. Didn’t matter if I was facing a swarm of dog-sized wasps or mantises big enough to slice through tanks. My buffs had taken me to a level well beyond normal.
My punches cracked any and all shells and carapaces. I kicked monster corpses to shatter entire formations of their squads. If any came too close, I simply ripped them apart, blood and fluids spraying everywhere. It wasn’t just me roaring. The aura of the monstrous Swarmlord around me roared out enough to make the world shiver around me.
I combined my physical aggression with my Aspects to cause a massive upheaval.
Everywhere I went, Field Manipulation, Siphon, and Infusion ensured that the ground had ruptured. Broken, jagged rocks ranging in size from tennis balls to washing machines all took to the air. With them went up the bodies of all the dead monsters. The bugs, killed by me or the defenders, all rose up like cannon shots ready to fire.
It was surprisingly easy to then create subsequent fields between the debris I had picked up and their targets with more Field Manipulation. They really did fire like they were launched from cannons, minus the ear-shattering bangs.
Some of the rocks were big enough that the artificial fields created on them drew the targeted bugs at them instead of shooting at the monsters. It was still mostly effective.
Entire swathes of the Blight Swarm were simply eradicated at that.
I was channelling Flare too, creating a blanketing field of warmth over everything around me. Farther off, I kept it trapped with Concentration and Capacity, while closer at hand, I let Flare take its natural course and incinerate everything in little explosive geysers.
It wasn’t easy, but I ensured that too much of the heat energy didn’t envelop the temple further off. Good thing no one had jumped into the fight. It gave me freedom to let loose.
Gave me room to hold nothing back.
As it was, I didn’t even need to physically kill half the bugs I reached. A huge, armoured roach swung down what looked like a massive club made of bone, but it never reached me. I had drawn up far too much Flare with Manifestation, before bursting in a column to fire all its heat into the monster. It vaporized as its superheated innards exploded.
Illumination was there too. I was already shining way too brightly, so it wasn’t like I needed any further assistance in that regard. But when the black threads came at me from the bugs, I used Reflection to send them all spearing back.
But it wasn’t just the abilities and capabilities I was familiar with that helped me tear through my enemy. The Soulthread reward manifested in a strange but recognizable way too.
Threads of black but edged with bright gold-white, much like the reflections I caused when the bugs tried attacking me with their dark tendrils, lashed out from me. They were almost alive, eager to act like frothing hounds on the hunt. The merest flicker of my will was enough.
One lifted finger, and a dozen of the glimmering strands pierced through a huge, spider-legged beetle before ripping out all its innards.
A jerk of my head, where I intended to block an incoming attack from a scything mantis, only made me see how a storm of threads turned the creature into a salad of literal mincemeat and blood.
I was untouchable. Unstoppable.
Unfathomable.
I wasn’t paying attention to how much I destroyed. I didn’t care about the collateral damage just then. All I sought was the utter annihilation of the Blight Swarm. All I wanted was to push the fucking insects back.
After I had shown myself to be capable enough to deal with whatever bullshit they could throw my way, they had upped the ante again. The Blight Swarm had sent in bigger, stronger monsters, thinking to overwhelm me. Surely, the Work of an Ascendant would squash just one puny human, no matter how uppity he seemed at first.
Yeah, well, fuck the Blight Swarm.
I tore apart everything in my path. Whether it was with my bare hands, or through the extended reach of the Swarmlord’s solid, manifested aura, whether it was with crushing Gravity or vaporizing Flare, whether it was the reflections of their own powers crashing back into them again. I pushed and pushed and pushed.
They would die. They would be destroyed. Even if I had to uproot a good chunk of Ring Four to do so.
At one point, I was floating high above the battlefield that was formerly my new hometown, over a mile from the temple. Formerly less because everything had been destroyed in the war against the Blight Swarm and more because half the town was floating up alongside me.
I knew I wasn’t going to be able to channel power like this anytime soon after this day was over. So, I made the most of it that I could.
The power of Ring Four, the literal weight of it, crashed onto the Swarm. Burning debris, a meteor shower of light and fire and shattering power. Through the middle of the fighting, even as I had been battling against the oversized bugs, I discovered I could use Gravity Orbs to fasten larger sections of the debris before moulding them to better shapes with Granular Control.
Shapes much better suited to receiving Field Manipulation on their flatter surfaces. Not exactly aerodynamic, but I wasn’t here to win Design/Build/Fly.
Of course, I wasn’t floating there on my own.
The bug monsters were shooting through the sky at me. I cursed them and fired dozens of my raised projectiles at the bastards to knock them right out of the air.
I had also attached gravity lines to the explosive pockets of overbearing Flare I had gathered with Manifestation, Concentration, and Capacitor. Just like the physical projectiles I had raised from the ground, the pulsing little spheres glowing like tiny suns were another devastating ammunition in my airborne arsenal.
Bomb Ring Four? I laughed. I was going to show them what real bombing looked like.
The tidal wave of overheated, burning debris slammed into the remaining monsters in a tsunami of destruction. Everything screamed. Not just the hapless monsters I targeted, but the air itself, the ground cracking and shattering under the stress, everything screamed. I wasn’t sure if my own voice was adding to the din or not.
Energy burned through me at such a rate, I felt like I was a living power plant. A human version of a volcanic eruption. Every breath crackled, every pump of my heart poured out gallons of pure magic.
It felt like for just a moment where I wrought such massive destruction, I turned into a literal embodiment of mana.
The impacts of the Gravity Orbs and the little sun-bombs—Flare Orbs?—sent out a blistering storm of light everywhere. I didn’t even see any of the bug monsters. They just got obliterated before my eyes could even register their presence in my general vicinity. The only reason they existed in Ring Four was to be wiped out from existence.
And then it was over. The burning, scouring sensation of the Ascendant Soulthread dissipated. All of a sudden, I felt a lot… not weaker, exactly. More like a heaviness settling within me, the sort of numbness that accompanied tragedy and clogged up my throat.
I was so sad at losing access to that level of magic.
The feeling wasn’t completely gone. While the overwhelming liquifying sensation of my body turning into literal magical energy was slowly dissipating from my body, it left a mark within me. Yet another different kind of hollowness, like a crater burned out by a meteor impact.
A cradle where something else was coming to live.
I decided I’d investigate that later. Right now, I was just basking in the bone-deep mixture of exhaustion and satisfaction that claimed me as I settled back onto the street. Onto the burning devastation and massacre I had caused.
This time, the break was real. The silence was truly unbroken—at least locally, since there were still distant booms and crashes far off in other quarters of Ring Four and higher up Zairgon. But in my neighbourhood, on my side of our mountain, we were finally, blessedly free of the bug monsters. No more of them were coming.
I really had beaten them. For now.
No time to relax, though. For one thing, I needed to head back to the temple, start regrouping, taking stock of our overall situation.
For another, I could finally think back on what my last Sacrifice had revealed. On what I needed to do to get to the bottom of the Blight Swarm and its intentions. The hints had been there all along. It was only now that I could actually spend time thinking about it that I had begun to connect them.
It was time I fulfilled my promise to the Se-Targa Councillor.
I laughed a little. Probably a very odd sight when I was standing in the middle of all the carnage. But it was funny. I was going to need yet another Sacrifice.