Chapter 186: Final Stages
Abyss looked at him from the tree, the sword through her shoulder, blood running down the blade and dripping from the bark.
"Do you really believe you can stop her?" she said. Her voice carried nothing behind it, no pain, no urgency, just the flat delivery of someone stating a fact they had already made peace with. "There is no stopping her anymore. What she has begun cannot be undone."
She reached up and grabbed the sword.
Ren pushed.
She pulled.
The sword came out of the tree and out of her shoulder simultaneously, the motion throwing him backward with it, and he hit the ground and rolled and came up on one knee with the sword out to his side and his other hand pressing into the earth, looking up at her.
She was changing.
The transformation moved through her from the ground up, the lower half expanding and reshaping, eight legs replacing what had been there, the spider form rising until she stood over eight feet, her upper body still recognizably her, pale and expressionless above the dark spider mass beneath it, looking down at him with the same flat eyes.
Ren looked at her.
He scoffed.
"I guess this is not over then," he said. Then: "Well."
He felt it as he said it, the pull through the cave walls intensifying, the streams of purple energy growing thicker and faster, and he understood what that meant. Whatever Ophelia was doing inside that cave was accelerating. The final stage was close.
Abyss launched.
All eight legs drove into the ground and she came at him at a speed that her size should not have allowed, the legs working in rapid sequence to carry her forward faster than a charging animal.
Ren was already airborne.
He pulled chunks of earth from the ground with both hands, the gravity manipulation ripping them free in rapid succession, each one the size of a small vehicle, and hurled them one after another directly at her.
She broke through the first one without slowing.
The second hit her and she broke through that too, the debris scattering around her as she pushed through the cloud of it, and the third she took head on and it shattered against her and she kept moving.
She came through the dust of the last one expecting him to be there.
He was above her.
He looked down at her from the air, her eight legs planted on the scorched and broken earth below, her eyes finding him immediately, and he exhaled once.
"Let’s end this quickly," he said. "After all, you’re a spider. And I’m a goddamn dragon."
He opened his jaws and poured everything into it.
The dragon breath that came down was not the sustained stream he used in measured exchanges. It was everything at once, the full output of what his Chaos Devouring Dragon form could produce, compressed and concentrated and aimed straight down, and it hit the ground with a force that was not a sound so much as a physical event, the shockwave from it rippling outward and setting the trees at the edge of the clearing alight.
The flames burned.
When they receded, the crater they left behind was enormous, the edges of it still glowing, the ground at the center scorched to a black that would not recover quickly.
Abyss lay at the center of it.
The burns covered her entirely. She tried to move. The pain that came with the attempt was enough to stop the attempt. She tried again and the same answer came back.
Ren descended.
He was breathing slightly heavier than he wanted to be and his arms carried the accumulated weight of the fight in them, but he landed on the edge of the crater and looked down at her.
"Quite strong," he said. "Not strong enough." He looked at her for one more moment. "Still a spider. Still a bug."
He walked past her.
She tried to follow him with her eyes and found she could not hold the effort.
She collapsed.
Ren did not look back.
The cave entrance was the same as he had left it and he walked through it without slowing, moving deeper, the purple energy streams thick around him now, the walls practically glowing with the volume of what was passing through them.
Ophelia’s voice came before he reached the chamber.
"Seems my plans to stop you yielded nothing." A pause. "You are really something else, Ren."
He kept walking.
"But you are far too late."
He stepped into the chamber and saw her.
She floated above the throne, arms spread wide, every stream of purple energy that had been moving through the cave walls converging on her body, pouring into her from every direction simultaneously, her form beginning to radiate with it, the light of it making her difficult to look at directly.
He did not stop to look.
He leaped, covered the distance in a single motion, sword raised, and came down at her with everything behind the strike.
A purple dome snapped into existence around her the moment the blade reached it.
The sword hit it and the impact threw him backward, the force carrying him across the chamber and into the far wall hard, and he slid down it and hit the floor.
Her laughter filled the space.
"I told you," she said, still floating, arms still spread, the energy still pouring in. "It is game over." Her voice carried something in it that had not been there before, a resonance, a weight. "This world shall bow to me when I become a demigod."
The moment the words left her mouth, every infected monster in the forest began to move.
He could feel it even through the cave walls, the shift in the energy outside, and he understood what it meant. They were coming here. All of them. Everything she had built her network through, every body she had touched and used and turned into an infected , all of it converging on the cave now that the final stage was active.
He pushed himself to his feet.
Then he felt them.
His people.
The presences arrived at the edge of the forest and he recognized each one without needing to see them, the particular quality of Aris and Fey and Ezra familiar enough that he did not have to question it.
He exhaled.
"Now I can focus on you," he said.
He compressed the flame breath into the tightest stream he could manage and fired it directly at the dome.
It hit and pushed.
The dome resisted and then cracked along the surface where the impact point was, the fracture spreading slowly outward from the center, and Ophelia’s expression shifted for the first time since he had entered the chamber, her attention coming down from wherever it had been and landing on him with something that was not quite concern but was adjacent to it.
She pointed at him.
The compressed purple blast that came from her palm hit him in the chest before he had finished reading the motion, and the wall behind him received him at high speed, the stone cracking around the point of impact, and he went through it and into the passage beyond and the cave ceiling came down slightly from the force of the whole exchange.
Her laughter followed him.
She rose.
She moved upward through the cave ceiling like it was not there, passing through the stone the way the energy streams passed through it, and emerged into the air above the cave with her arms still wide and the transformation beginning.
[....]
Outside, it was chaos.
Infected monsters of every shape poured from the forest toward the cave, the coordination of them no longer subtle or measured but raw and urgent, and Aris and Fey and Ezra landed in the middle of it.
Aris transformed.
The wolf form came out grand and immediate, white fur, larger than her human form by a significant margin, and she launched into the nearest cluster of infected without ceremony, the chaos energy wrapped around every strike, each one not just hitting but removing, the infected catching her claws and coming apart from the contact.
She moved through them fast and elegant, reading the formation and breaking it at the points that mattered, pulling attention toward herself to open space for the others.
Ezra was already in the air.
Metal formed around her as she moved, not slowly but in rapid bursts, sheets and spears of it pulling into existence and launching outward in the same motion, the generation and the attack happening simultaneously. Her spear moved between the metal constructs, the flame at its tip leaving trails in the air as she swung, each arc clearing space that the metal had already softened.
A four-armed infected monkey came at her from above and she met it with a metal spike that formed between them on contact, the impact carrying enough force to send it back the way it came.
Fey stood at the center of it and watched with calm.
Then she snapped her fingers.
"Everyone back, I am about to help my master," she said. Her voice was quiet enough that it should not have carried over the noise of the battle, and it carried anyway., she smiled evil as she did.
Aris pulled back. Ezra pulled back.
Fey spread both arms and the magical circle that formed beneath her was enormous, the green lines of it spreading outward across the ground faster than the infected could move out of the way, and from the center of it something began to rise.
The skeletal hand came first.
Then the arm.
Then the rest of it, pulling itself upright from within the circle, thirty feet of armored skeleton wrapped in dark iron that had not come from anywhere near this forest, a massive scythe held in both hands with the ease of something that had been designed specifically to carry it.
It straightened up.
It looked at the infected around it.
It swung.
The scythe moved in a single horizontal arc that covered everything within its reach and what was within its reach ceased to be a problem for anyone.
[...]
Ren burst out of the hole Ophelia had left in the cave ceiling and emerged into the open air.
She was already transforming above him.
The exoskeleton that formed over her was not the crude biological armor of the spiders he had faced before. It was elegant and deliberate, purple and black worked together in patterns that covered her entirely, the crown of it rising from her head in a geometric formation that caught the light of the energy still pouring into her from the infected below.
Her form was larger. Her power was different. The weight of her presence had changed in the seconds since she had left the cave, and he felt that difference the way he felt the difference between fighting a forest lord and fighting what had given a forest lord power.
This was the final stage.
He had to stop it now.
He spread his wings and the transformation took him, the Chaos Devouring Dragon form expanding outward, sixteen feet of crimson-edged black scales filling the air above the cave, his eyes locking onto her.