The Lone Wanderer

Chapter 599 – Colossus

Micky’s efforts caused the cold chains wrapped around his mind to loosen slightly, giving him some breathing room. Probably noticing his resistance, Lord Parnassus doubled down on his bloodline, tightening the ethereal bonds and trying to force Micky to submit.

‘Unlike Acton, he doesn’t have to speak out his commands,’ Micky noted.

He didn’t know whether this was the result of centuries of experience or just a different strain of the bloodline, but it didn’t really matter. His body started to move against him. His flesh turned softer, his crystalline bones and muscles partially turning liquid and squirming, seemingly in an attempt to transform him against his wishes.

Whether he was doing it consciously or not, the Violet was trying to turn Micky into a crow, perhaps thinking that his bloodline would work better if Micky took on the shape of a beast instead of a sapient.

Micky had no idea whether that was the case, but he had no intention of letting the patriarch do as he pleased. He resisted the transformation with every fibre of his being, his body cracking as pressurized rivulets of frigid water shot out of the fissures. Chunks of ice of various shapes fell off one after the other, most of them small like grains of sand – though they were occasionally joined by larger pieces – including one as big as a man’s fist.

Unleashing his domain, Micky shattered the ground around him, forming a crater over a dozen metres across. It kept widening as his willpower peeled off layers of mud and uprooted grass.

Of course, Micky couldn’t care less about destroying a random patch of land in the wilderness. He focused on the ethereal chains restricting his freedom, trying to shatter them with his domain – a potent tool that he hadn’t possessed the last time he was captured.

He partially succeeded, breaking several links and weakening the rest, though his efforts felt inefficient. The patriarch’s bloodline appeared to operate in a layer of reality largely divorced from the physical, the spectral, or wherever willpower tended to manifest.

Annoyingly, less than five percent of Micky’s power seemed to interact with the chains, giving him the impression that he was trying to grasp a gale of wind with his bare hands. Even so, he used everything at his disposal to resist the Violet’s oppression.

Lord Parnassus showed no intention of letting him off, however. He released his own domain – albeit a far weaker one – pushing back against Micky’s.

Gritting the beak that had formed on his face at some point, Micky desperately pried the chains off his mind as fast as he could manage, feeling a spectral slap of encouragement on his back. Percy joined his efforts, taking advantage of their connection to reinforce his mind.

Micky’s body tore itself apart as the Violet wanted to forcefully transform him into a crow and Micky fought to preserve his bipedal form. However, Micky wasn’t interested in retaining the appearance of a random human. Instead, a second pair of arms sprouted beneath the first as he shifted into something more familiar.

Taking one deep breath after the other, he whipped up a terrifying blizzard of ambient mana, shards of grey ice spiralling wildly with him at the centre as his boosting art resonated with his domain to strengthen both.

Soul-freezing motes gushed through his channels and saturated his frame, rapidly mending his bones and stitching the tears in his muscles shut, though he didn’t stop there. He kept absorbing more ambient mana than his Huehuan body could possibly contain, forcing it to start growing.

The abundance of soul-freezing ice caused his mutation to stir, nearly transforming him into an elephant-sized crow automatically. After all, that was his largest natural form, as well as the one that he defaulted to whenever he consumed so much mana.

Knowing that turning into a beast would only play into the Violet’s hands, Micky desperately fought against his own mutation with the Mimicry trait’s help, holding onto his bipedal shape. As a result, he grew without allowing his figure to deviate in the slightest, turning into a giant Huehuan.

The stronger he became and the longer he persisted against the chains, the weaker they seemed to get. Eventually, Micky reached an equilibrium where the influx of ambient mana barely managed to support his size and reverse his continuous injuries.

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He was about three times as tall as a regular person. Lord Parnassus was standing too far away for Micky to compare himself to, but he felt that the man’s scalp barely passed his knees.

The chains were still there, trying to force Micky into submission as always, and his body was still locked in a vicious cycle of destruction and regeneration. Even so, the crystalline skin at the base of his beak curled up as he realized something important.

‘I can move again… I can fight like this!’

He’d overcome the same bloodline that had cursed him for decades in the past. Its insidious influence still weakened him and threatened to annex his agency as soon as he made the slightest mistake, but this was enough – he had enough control of his body to resist.

Now, he only needed to purge the source of the disgusting ability – to kill Lord Parnassus – and free himself once and for all!

Looking into the Violet’s eyes, Micky spotted traces of resignation and even fear. The patriarch probably understood by now that his plan of capturing Micky alive and using him against Percy had been doomed from the start. Today, only one of them would walk away alive. Micky wasn’t sure that he was going to win, but he would rather die than become someone’s prisoner again.

He took a step forward as he borrowed the spatial seal from the other side of his soul and summoned a bunch of scythes in his hands. The weapons were too short and thin to properly wield in his giant form, so he broke their shafts and blades, using a lot of ice mana to fuse them into larger versions of themselves.

Unfortunately, Micky’s affinities prevented him from producing as much phantom mana as Percy, so he couldn’t easily create many copies of his equipment and surround his opponent with an army of spectres.

That said, he had his own advantages – like his bestial strength, his ridiculous regeneration, and his lethal mana type. On top of that, his friend provided him with as much phantom mana as he could through their shared soul, helping him repair and maintain his oversized constructs.

Micky approached Lord Parnassus, his feet leaving deep impressions in the ground with each thunderous step. He brandished a total of four colossal scythes, soul-freezing ice accumulating on their jagged edges to give them a savage glint as grey mist hissed and crackled around the malformed crescents.

Strips of tattered silk hung loosely over his shoulders and around his privates, greedily drinking as much mana as he could spare and slowly expanding to cover his now-massive frame. His body was made of living ice as always, but the illusion of pink skin adorned with tribal tattoos coated his crystalline flesh, reminding him of the life he had once lived.

He was going to fight like a gladiator of Huehue again!

Remior’s bright, yellow sun looked nothing like the dim crimson star illuminating the coliseum, but it would have to do. Micky let out a deep, guttural bellow that shook the area for hundreds of metres, the tall blades of grass that now barely reached his shins swaying outwards as something that he had been missing finally stirred inside his soul.

‘Symbel of the Savage Gods, First Toast, Challenge of the Colossus!’

***

Percy grinned as he followed the changes on his soulmate’s side. He was currently in meditation, floating inside the starlit void of their shared mindscape – a place that he had recently taught himself to visit at will after having entered it accidentally so many times.

The cyan and amber stars that formed the constellation of the giant crow were strangely agitated today, shining as brightly as the grey stars in Percy’s own constellation.

He hadn’t missed the emotional turmoil on the other side of his soul either, so he knew that his friend was on the cusp of something important. As worried as he was that Micky was locked in combat against a Violet by himself – and one that countered him so heavily no less – Percy was hopeful that Micky was going to emerge out of the fight stronger than ever before.

‘First Toast, huh?’

Percy’s grin widened. In hindsight, his lopsided fusion with Micky might have been caused by something more than just his friend’s fragmented past – namely, the imbalance in their boosting arts.

In theory, the Symbel of the Savage Gods was a spell on par with the Carnival, but Percy had registered his own version of the boosting art years earlier than his friend and had seized the opportunity to fully explore and tailor it to his fighting style after countless battles.

Meanwhile, Micky had acquired his own spell mere days before the fight against Deimos that had led to their fusion, so he hadn’t had a chance to tap into its potential.

Of the building blocks of the Symphony, their boosting arts were arguably among the most important – it might not be a stretch to describe them as the foundational pillars of their Extreme spell. Moreover, Percy distinctly remembered that they had incorporated most – if not all – of the Carnival’s Parades into their attacks against Hermes’s son.

If Micky wanted to solve the instability in his constellation and mental state, developing his boosting art in a similar manner might prove as important as rediscovering his purpose in life – in fact, there was a decent chance the two were synonymous.

Viewed from that angle, Lord Parnassus’s unexpected ambush might turn out to be a priceless opportunity for the reincarnated crow.

Of course, Percy had spent years and relied on a huge pile of Wiseman’s Murmurs to fully explore the limits of his own boosting art, so it was dubious whether Micky could accomplish anything remotely similar in the span of a single fight.

Fortunately, their fight against Deimos had provided them with several clues as to how Micky’s affinities and version of the spell could be leveraged, so he wouldn’t be starting from scratch – he merely had to digest his gains and make them his own.

‘Come on, buddy…’ Percy thought, anxiously clenching his fists. ‘I know you can do this!’