Chapter 195: Unnamed
[Uou have killed a quasi Demi god]
[Evolution is Available ]
Ren looked at the screen, his eyes filled with disbelief, they had managed to end it all, he had managed to win.
๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ซ๐ฃ๐ธ๐ซ๐ฎ๐.๐๐๐ถ
He looked at Ezra and Fey.
"Seems we won." He said with a smile.
"You did the most master, this is all you." Ezra said with a bow.
"No, it's us." Ren replied, he walked toward the body of Ophelia, he had to do what was needed before the body lost all its vitality.
He transformed into his full form and proceeded to consume her entirely, he still needed her to ensure Ragna and Riker survived.
He lowered himself so Ezra and Fey could get onto his back, and the moment they were secure he launched into the air and moved at full speed toward home.
The forest below was different from how it had looked when he had left it. The infected had stopped moving, and where they had been rushing and coordinated before, they were now simply present and still, scattered across the ground and the paths between trees in the particular way that things ended up when the thing directing them had stopped. He did not slow down to look at them closely.
He arrived at the settlement and landed at the entrance and transformed back before either of them had fully dismounted, moving directly inside without stopping to assess the state of the settlement or speak to anyone who came toward him.
He knew where Ragna and Riker would be.
The room they were in was quiet in the way that rooms went quiet when the people tending to what was inside had run out of things to do. The female monsters who had been treating them stood at the edges of the space, and the moment Ren walked in two of them looked at him and then looked at the floor, and he did not need them to say anything because the white cloth that covered both of the shapes on the ground said everything they were not saying.
One of them stepped forward.
"They lost all signs of vitality before weโ"
"Take it off," Ren said.
She looked at him with the careful expression of someone deciding how to say something that needed to be said.
"Master Ren, we have to explain whatโ"
"Take it off."
The voice that came out the second time was not raised. It carried something underneath the quiet of it that made the distinction unnecessary. She looked at the others and they moved together to remove the cloth from both of them, pulling it back and folding it aside.
Ren moved between Ragna and Riker and lowered himself onto both knees.
He placed one hand on Ragna's chest and one hand on Riker's.
He looked at the system.
"Start it," he said.
[Life Force Transfer โ Initiating]
[Stored life force sufficient for dual transfer]
[Process will draw on host as catalyst โ confirm]
"Yes," he said.
The golden light came from his hands.
It was not dramatic in the way that powerful things were sometimes dramatic, not loud or explosive or demanding of attention. It was simply present, moving from his palms into the bodies beneath them in a slow continuous flow, the light spreading through both of them gradually, following whatever paths it needed to follow to do what it was doing.
The healers in the room had gone completely still.
Fey stood at the doorway and watched with those wide eyes that did not know how to carry normal amounts of feeling in them. Ezra stood beside her and her jaw was tight and her hands were loose at her sides.
Nobody spoke.
The light kept moving.
Whether it was enough and whether they were coming back and when they would know the answer to either of those questions was information that the process had no interest in providing ahead of schedule.
Ren held both hands where they were and let it continue.
[โฆ..]
The defeat of Ophelia ended the spider network the way pulling the center out of a web ended the web.
Every infected monster across the kingdom felt it simultaneously, the spider within each of them shuddering once and then collapsing, the connection that had kept it alive and active severing at the source. The monsters it had been sustaining dropped inert within their hosts, and the hosts themselves were left with whatever the experience had cost them, which varied by how long the infection had held and how much had been drawn out of them during the final drain.
Many could not move for days. Several could not move for two weeks. The bodies of those who had not survived the drain were found in the places where they had last stood, and the number of them was not small.
Across towns and settlements throughout the kingdom, the same sequence played out in miniature. The spider died, the infected was freed, and whatever remained of the person or creature picked itself up and tried to understand what had happened to the time it had lost.
The losses were significant and not recoverable.
The threat, however, was over.
[...]
The fight between Remu, Silas, and William had been going on long enough that the forest around them had accumulated a record of every exchange in the form of missing trees and scorched earth and craters that overlapped each other at the edges.
But the fight had changed.
Where William had been driving the pace of it at the start, where his output had been the thing they were managing and surviving around, that had inverted, and what was happening now was Remu and Silas finding their rhythm and pressing it, the two of them working with the coordinated efficiency of fighters who had been in enough engagements together that the communication between them had become something below conscious decision.
Remu came from above with a flame arc that forced William to commit his barrier upward.
Silas was already low.
The wind blades he sent in from ground level hit William across the legs and side before the barrier could come back down, each one drawing blood, and William staggered and answered with a lightning blast that Remu took on his scales mid-descent and shook off.
They hit him again.
And again.
The wounds accumulated in a way they had not been accumulating before, William's output becoming reactive rather than proactive, and then Silas came in with a full wind claw strike that connected with his chest and drove him back three steps, and Remu came down immediately after with a sword strike that opened a deep line across his shoulder.
William went to one knee.
He stayed there for a moment.
Then something shifted in his expression, a change that had nothing to do with the fight in front of him and everything to do with something he had just understood.
He looked up.
"She is dead," he said.
Not a question. The statement of someone receiving information they had been half-expecting and had not wanted to arrive.
He looked at Remu and Silas with something in his eyes that had moved past the fight entirely.
"What was the point," he said quietly.
A voice came from behind him.
"Brother."
All three of them turned.
The cloaked figure stood at the edge of the clearing, the black of the cloak catching no light, the face inside it showing nothing.
"You have done your part," the figure said. "The obstacle has been removed. Come back now."
William got to his feet.
"I am not leaving," he said. "Not until I take these two down."
"She was always going to die," the figure said, and the voice carried no particular feeling about that. "That was always part of what was coming. I told you to stand beside her to make your position believable. I did not tell you to put your faith in her." He paused. "You are supposed to look to me. Not to her. Stop this before I become angry."
William turned toward Remu and Silas anyway.
The figure moved.
The back of his hand connected with the side of William's neck and the sound of the impact was not loud and the result was immediate, William hitting the ground in a crater that had not been there before, unconscious before he finished landing.
The figure looked down at him for a moment and then looked at Remu and Silas.
"Apologies for my brother," he said. He looked at Silas specifically. "The one who fought you before, who took you. That was also him, working in my place. He is convincing when he needs to be. He was not convincing enough, it seems, against your master."
He picked William up with one hand.
"I will gauge your master's strength myself when the time comes," he said. "Personally. I look forward to it."
The black smoke formed around him and took him and William with it bbb