Universe's End

Chapter 227: A Bane Realized Pt. 2

“Lady Roxy, are you alright?” Edward asked. With the defeat of the former blight khan, the rest of the battle had resolved itself shortly, the remaining monsters going mad and tearing each other apart as if the former khan was the anchor that kept them focused with a purpose.

“No,” The young woman panted. She was bloodied up, her left arm hung uselessly, and she held her hand firm as if it had been locked in place from gripping some sort of pommel. “But I’m alive.”

“Sorry,” Marcie had sauntered over, her battle high fading as she took in the gruesome carnage of the undercity proper.

“I… I tried my best,” Roxy groaned, her legs wabbling. “But there were so many. And I’m only a tier six.”

Violet suddenly stepped forward, pulling the faltering woman in for a tight hug.

“Hey, you did what you could,” said Violet. “And in the end, that saved people.”

With the monsoon of monsters dealt with, it was easier to ping the traces of life just beyond the door that Roxy had stationed herself in front of.

“I…” Roxy cut off, eyes watering before she shook her head, forcing them away as she looked off into the distance. “That’s the Vanguard I can sense, isn’t it?”

“Correct,” Violet answered.

“Why is she… way over there still?”

“Probably trying to stay out of the way for the time being, considering the sensitivity of what just went down.”

Roxy was about to say something when, as one, the three top members of the Elite Four all snapped to attention; gazes locked onto a patch of empty space.

“Roxy,” Violet instantly pushed the girl back. “Get behind us.”

Roxy had no idea what was going on, but she made no effort to resist, letting her adopted aunt push her away.

From far away, Roxy felt the aura of the Vanguard flare; just as space exploded. A rift torn open, the heavily mangled doppelgänger of her father stepped out. Instantly, it waved its hand upward as a giant column of space erupted in the distance, surrounding where the Vanguard’s aura could be felt.

“Marcie, Edward!”

Before she could fear for her father’s sake, she felt his aura flare to life, appearing upon the teleportation temple.

Except, before he could come to the rescue, he too was captured by the void barrier.

Eyes wide, Roxy watched as Marcie shot like an arrow directly at the Bane, her fighting spirit flaring back to life.

It didn’t matter. The Bane, even heavily mangled and clearly running low on pneuma, sidestepped the woman, caught her by the scruff, and tossed her, slashing its other hand downward as a rift was torn open and Marcie was launched through.

Edward was right behind her, swinging his illusion spear as the rest of his weapons shot forward in a storm of death.

The Bane, entirely unfazed by the illusions, snatched the spear from his hands, twirled it once, and skewered Edward, whipping the spear, and by extension Edward as well, aside.

Leaving only Aunty Violet.

She exploded with dawnfire, holding nothing back, flesh and blood kindling for her boost, pushed to its utter extreme.

The maniacal Bane grinned before snapping its fingers, as a vacuum of space blasted out and instantly snuffed the life out of the blue flames.

Enjoying itself, the Bane reached out to grab Violet, only to be repelled as the blue flames roared back to life, her fist striking with the fury of an aunt protecting her precious nephew.

Dawnfire was no mere elemental flame, oh, far from it. While they shared similarities, Dawnfire represented the burning flames that cast away the darkness of night; a mere vacuum would never be enough to extinguish them.

Which was all well and good, but there was still a tier difference between Violet and the Architect’s Bane. Annoyed after being temporarily delayed, the Bane stopped playing games, slashing out as its claws extended through time and space, the same attack that had cut the head from the Khan of Blue Lightning’s body.

The good news was that Violet didn’t lose her head.

The bad news was that she collapsed to the ground, merely cut in half at the waist.

Total time? Six seconds –four of the seconds from the simple surprise of being delayed momentarily by Aunt Violet’s stubborn fire. Unfortunately, six seconds weren’t enough; they were still four seconds short of what Rory needed to rescue her.

Certain of its victory, the Bane reached out, a moment away from inflicting the utmost injury possible to Rory’s soul, killing that which was most precious to him, his daughter.

Four seconds. A lifetime until Rory could free himself.

But not a certain other Founder who had been trapped first.

Paralyzed for a single moment, the Bane was forced to turn around as a knightly figure clad in royal red metal tackledthe doppelganger like a comet crashing upon the earth, the two grappling and tearing through the remains of the undercity like a city made of cardboard.

From where she was standing, Roxy couldn’t see what followed; her attention instead focused on her aunt, who was on the ground, bisected.

“Aunt Violet!” Roxy yelled, crouching down next to her.

“Fuck,” Violet spat, blood spewing. “Fucking hurts.”

Considering Aunt Violet generally made a point of not swearing around the ‘kids,’ no matter how old they’d grown, for her to be cursing freely meant she was in a hell of a lot of pain.

“Fuck, ouch. Roxy,” Violet panted. “Do me a favor. Place my lower body back against me.”

“What-?

“No time for questions!” Violet snapped.

Nodding vigorously, Roxy did as she was told, moving as fast as she could to place the bisected halves together.

“E.O.N above this is going to hurt,” Violet groaned. “Stand back.”

Again, doing as she was told, Roxy leapt back, just in time for Violet’s entire body to be swallowed by cosmically bright blue flames, a scream ripping from her body. Seconds passed before the flames passed.

Where Aunty Violet had been lying in two halves before, now looked like a melted stump of wax and flesh.

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“Aunt-”

“4th degree burns, better than bleeding out in seconds.” The wax stump moaned, then went silent.

As much as Roxy wanted to question the truth of that, it wasn’t as if Aunty Violet was in any shape to jabber.

Besides, another presence finally made itself known: the void barrier holding him back had shattered. Crossing the distance in a single flicker, a figure floated in the air –how he was flying, floating, whatever— was beyond Roxy. What mattered was that her dad had reappeared, his eyes scanning the scene.

And he looked pissed. In her years with her adopted father, she’d rarely even seen him ever reach anything more than mildly annoyed.

Now? Now it was as if his gaze alone could sunder the heavens.

“Zoey.” His voice suddenly radiated out, heard from everywhere all at once. He said nothing else, but the Vanguard must have somehow understood his intent as a moment later she reappeared, grabbing Roxy and hauling her over her shoulder like she was a bag of herbs, her other hand flicking upward and suspending Aunt Violet through pure pneuma manipulation.

“Edward, what about Edward?” Roxy asked. For a moment, the Vanguard seemed to stare off into the distance before shaking her head. “He’s fine, and more importantly, it seems like he’s gotten out of dodge, which we will be doing as well.”

The entire time the woman spoke, it was as if she made a point of not looking at Roxy’s face, which was a bit odd, but it wasn’t exactly the time to ask questions or judge.

“Why?” Roxy asked.

“I think Rory is about to lose his shit.”

Rory wasn’t generally an emotive or expressive person; if he had to grade his emotions on a scale, he was confident he'd be a six or a seven. He could get happy, sad, angry, annoyed, frustrated, and every other emotion under the sun, but even as a child, he’d always been even-keeled. There had been few and far between moments where he’d found himself overtaken by emotion.

Or so Rory had thought, the feelings he’d had on the topic back in his twenties.

Then he had become responsible for people, worked with them, cared for them, and found purpose.

Even after all that, Rory wasn’t sure he would have called himself a truly emotional person. The angriest he’d ever been had been when Ehkorrus had nearly fallen to the blight khan, a flash of rage clashing with frozen animosity, an intensity Rory thought had been the most he could ever truly manage.

He was fucking wrong.

When Ehkorrus had nearly fallen, plenty of people had died, hundreds, but they had been those putting themselves on the front line. Combatants.

But as Rory finally had a moment to observe the carnage, he felt something break inside him that he never even knew existed.

Children.

Slaughtering non-combatants had been bad enough.

Children.

Corpses, small little corpses, and judging by the gruesome state they were in, they hadn’t been clean deaths either.

And as the final cherry on top, Roxy, the most precious person in the world to him, had been a moment from being at its mercy, even four seconds to a tier eight was an eternity to inflict death upon a mere tier six. Had it not been for Zoey being trapped several seconds before him, and thus breaking out several seconds sooner, his precious girl would be gone.

His relationship with his Bane had always been a bit odd. He’d known it was a twisted, demented thing born from the more obsessive parts of his mind and personality. Yet even when he called it an ‘evil fucker’ it had always been said with a hint of respect or even twisted amusement that something so intense could be born from him.

And anyway, their conflicts had almost always been kept between the two of them, only dragging in a few others as a sort of logistical collateral.

This? This was something else. Any feelings of ‘respect’ had been wiped from Rory, as the crevice in his soul fell into a bottomless black abyss, a feeling he’d never truly felt before oozing out from the darkness. It wasn’t simple anger or hatred; those terms were far too elementary, far too sanitary.

It was a biblical, cosmic level of wrath and loathing, a universe-annihilating vendetta, an execration that would transcend time and space. Rory’s hatred ran so deep that English words couldn’t describe it.

The Germans called it Todfeindschaft. The Japanese, Fugutaiten, meaning ‘cannot allow the sworn enemy to live in the world’.

But if Rory had to sum it up in one word?

Bane.

As if sensing the change in Rory, his Bane let out the most joyous and maniacal laugh it had ever uttered, ecstatic as if having achieved nirvana.

“Yes!” It screamed. “Yes! At last, I am your Bane in entirety!”

Rory stared at the monster, the twisted doppelgänger of himself.

“Mind, Body, Soul! With this, I have achieved my goal! All that is left is to tear each other apart!”

“That’s what this is about?” Rory said, voice barely containing the depth of his emotions.

“Yes!” It screeched, utterly deranged in its ecstasy. “You shall have your victory here, but next time I shall stand victorious, destined enemies, soul-bound in perfect enmity! Our final clash will shake the heavens of the eighth realm, after which I shall tear your head from your shoulders at last!”

Rory continued to stare for a moment longer before he began slowly shaking his head, a mental thread reaching out to elsewhere as he did.

“No.”

“What?” The Bane seemed confused as Rory glared at it with an anger that could transcend worlds.

“I said no.”

“There is no other way,” The Bane cackled. “Even if you were to defeat me next time, I would return for our final bout; there will be no escape from our entwined destiny!”

“No,” Rory finally repeated, sensing the reinterpretation request had gone through. “Hear me and Despair, O Foul Beast.”

Reaching his hand out, for a moment, the world seemed to grow heavy as the attention of something vast focused on them.

“Sworn upon my right as the Architect of the Precursors, I renounce you. There shall be no battle upon the summit of the Eight Realm. The next time we meet shall be the last, all restrictions lifted.”

“What? No!” The Bane shrieked. “You do not have the right, the power! The Eternal is the final decree, the final command-”

And that was when a moment of perfect stillness descended, the observation of the higher being descending for a single moment.

“Accepted.”

For every time that Rory had interacted with Eon, it had been within the realms of his inner mental spaces or through an exchange of interface updates. Not once had Eon directly decreed something out loud.

Shook through to his very core, Rory could now understand why everyone else, except the Founders, genuinely treated Eon like a god.

Because of all intents and purposes, it was.

For a moment, Rory felt a searing pain in his hand as a black mark appeared, one he had seen on Zoey’s hand before. Likewise, his Bane raised its hand, a strange golden circle appearing on the palm of its hand, surrounding the bastardized version of a rune Rory was familiar with, the second ever evolved rune.

The Rune of the Architect.

“Now then,” Rory said, Eon’s presence having vanished. “Time to end this. Enchain!”

For quite some time now, Rory had slowly been doing something unheard of.

Building a skill from scratch.

It had started with Earth Soul, learning the basics and intricacies of skill alterations, with the Earth Touch skill slate heavily modified over time.

Then it had taken a step further with his Limiter and Limiter release ‘skills.’ While they were technically skills made from scratch, they were also just the release or addition of restrictions that were already in place on him; they weren’t making something from nothing, merely altering what was already there.

Enchain was different. Having been shown the absolute barebone abstracts revolving a chain concept during their climb of the King’s Spire, Rory had let it simmer at the back of his mind for years now. In truth, it still wasn’t complete, but it had advanced far enough that, as he used it, Rory felt themental click informing him of a skill acquisition.

Still needs work. That’s a LOT of pneuma.

Unlike his free-form chains made from projections of his affinities, this was different at a conceptual level, like the difference between a 2D and a 3D image.

And as if to prove his point, his Bane attempted to free itself from the shackles that had bound it, a quick flicker all it needed to escape.

Except there was no escape, not while Enchain persisted.

Having burnt through an utterly egregious amount of pneuma in a single skill, Rory drew from another source, a source he’d begun to feel growing ever since the start of the Undercity emergency. It felt like pneuma, and it acted like pneuma, but pound for pound, it put even liquid pneuma to shame. While the details of the energy were still up in the air, Rory was reasonably confident he had a guess.

Belief.

Belief, Faith, worship juice, in the end, it was semantics. For the moment, all that mattered was that it was there and free for the taking.

Drawing his hand back, a bow appeared, formed of solid light in the colors of Ehkorrus, glimmering with an almost divine radiance. From his inventory, two gems appeared, circling one another, as even his ring chipped in a moment later. Colliding, Rory did what would have seemed impossible to him only a few years back.

He manipulated oblivion energy, shaping it into a twisting arrow with dual prongs of utter death.

Armed with a bow projected from the potent energy of belief and an arrow projected and formed from the energies of oblivion, Rory focused completely on the captured Bane.

“For a Fallen Friend. Anata Shesha.”

If Nathair was born in the image of Eia, then Anata Shesha was born in the image of the heavenly Empyrion Serpent, The Koi That Would Be, The Khan of Blue Lightning.

You were my sworn friend, you died for my people, and yet I so rarely saw you as anything more than the giant serpent in my basement. For that, I’m sorry. Go in Power, my friend.

The arrow did not do something as mundane as ‘travel’ or ‘fly’ from his bow to where the Bane was caught.

It simply appeared, warping across spacetime in a single instant, as if the universe had willed it.

And then everything was enveloped in the holy light of erasure.