Chapter 114: Damascus’ Descent [3]
The subterranean chamber of the Grand Sanctum was no longer a place governed by the laws of the mortal plane.
It was an open wound in reality, bleeding the toxic, suffocating divinity of a True God.
At the epicenter of this cosmic nightmare, the four-meter frame of the Troll King Razarak remained pinned to the shattered floor.
His massive, muscular shoulders were violently trembling, quivering like a fragile reed in a tempest under the absolute...
Crushing weight of Lord Damascus’s arrival.
His soul was being systematically dismantled, yet his mind was a chaotic vortex of conflicting extremes.
He was gripped by a deep, instinctual, lingering fear that turned his blood to ice, yet simultaneously elevated by a manic, religious joy.
He had done it.
He had brought his god to the material world.
"Praise... praise the Father..." he rasped, his voice a broken whisper.
The cost of his success was immediate and horrific.
Within the span of a single second, a thousand discordant, maddening whispers slammed into his consciousness at once, overloading his sensory pathways.
The internal pressure became so immense that dark, viscous blood began leaking steadily from his ears, his bloodshot eyes, and his nostrils, painting his gray skin in crimson streaks.
Yet, even as his organs began to fail, his mind clung to its fanaticism.
"Hail the Father!"
"Hail Misfortune...."
"Hail the Herald of Death"
"Hail him!"
His lips moved frantically, constantly singing broken, rhythmic praises to the God of Misfortune.
Then, in a final moment of fatal devotion, Razarak slowly, painfully tilted his head upward.
It was an act of absolute hubris.
The moment his bleeding eyes locked directly into just one of the thousands of scattered, crimson eyes burning in the spatial rift above.
The fragile remnants of his sanity were instantly vaporized.
The raw, unadulterated concept of cosmic misfortune and decay flooded his brain.
In that moment, he remembered the infamous warning known throughout the ten continents.
Do not gaze directly at God!
The Troll King instantly ran completely mad.
A manic, animalistic shriek tore from his throat as he began violently gnashing his teeth together, shattering his own fangs.
"Arggggghhhhh mercy....mercy....Father....mercy" he screamed out his lungs.
Scrambling like a wild beast across the stone, he reached out and grabbed a jagged, heavy thigh bone from a deceased beastman skeleton lying a few meters away.
With a delusional, euphoric grin plastered across his bloody face, Razarak swung his arms and brutally stabbed the sharp bone directly into his own head.
The massive monarch collapsed heavily onto the fractured ground, his life-force instantly extinguishing.
The moment his heart stopped, the ravenous sacrificial array claimed its architect.
His entire four-meter corpse violently dissolved into raw particles, completely devoured by the ritual lines to fuel the final sequence.
With the King’s sacrifice fully processed, the entire subterranean altar began to tremble with catastrophic force.
The deep obsidian walls groaned as the thousands of unblinking crimson eyes shifted in unison.
Their terrifying.
Collective gaze locking entirely upon the unconscious human vessel resting on the grand stone table.
"Hahahahaha.....to think those little things actually accomplished this task" a crude ethereal voice boomed across the room.
This was the voice of a True God!
The transfer was absolute.
The vortex of dark purple and blood-red divine essence cascaded downward like a physical pillar.
Violently forcing its way into the human’s open pores and restructuring his mortal meridians into a divine network.
The echoes of a thousand whispers increased tenfold, reverberating through the cavern with deafening.
Mind-shattering intensity until the noise suddenly cut to a dead.
Absolute silence.
"Finally" the crude voice echoed once again.
The human’s eyes snapped open.
Damascus had officially descended.
Taking complete, unyielding possession of the human host.
The vessel slowly rose from the stone slab, stepping down onto the blood-slicked floor.
"Here I was worried that this simple task would take a hundred years to complete" his lips curled up.
Standing at a commanding six feet and three inches tall, the body’s physical appearance had been completely rewritten by the divinity.
His hair had transformed into a striking, pristine gray, flowing loosely around his shoulders, while his eyes burned with a piercing, luminous golden light that held no mortal warmth.
Across his cheeks and forehead, ethereal, glowing divine marks pulsed with a faint, bruised-purple radiance.
Anchoring his conceptual law to the flesh.
"After that sly bastard Telvanus was able to achieve this, I thought i might be able to descen again"
"I guess I was right"
A faint, cruel smirk formed on his lips as he adjusted to the sensations of the material plane.
He gently careesed his sleek gray hair, "I bet those fuckers from the Death Faction must be curious about my whereabouts"
"By the time I return, the path of a King should be simple enough for me to ascend"
He didn’t look at the empty space where the Troll King had died.
Instead, his golden eyes slowly pivoted toward the deep, fluid darkness near the entrance of the ritual chamber.
He didn’t unleash a wave of mana, yet his voice carried the weight of an apex deity as it echoed through the shadows.
"You have watched too much, don’t you think?" Damascus spoke, his tone smooth, ancient, and chillingly calm.
"Come out."
The shadows at the edge of the cavern rippled.
"My my....to think you have such sharp eyes" a soft clap echoed through the shadows as the sounds of approaching footsteps drew closer.
Slowly.
Deliberately.
Roy emerged from the darkness, his powerful human form stepping into the dim, crimson light of the altar.
His sleek curly hair of gold cascading down his waist.
His pale, gold-flecked irises locking directly onto the descended god.
Damascus’s eyebrows furrowed at the sight of Roy.
"A Divine Being?" the air rippled for a moment, since Telvanus could notice him, he knew he couldn’t hide from another True God.
He had no intentions to hide himself in the first place.
That was why he didn’t destroy the ritual when Tempest first invaded Norona.
"You must be the mysterious Varanus who usurped this desert from my grip" Damascus folds his arms.
"And you must be Damascus, right?" Roy’s lips curled faintly.
"You know who I am?" Damascus’s gaze darkened, "Who exactly are you?"
"From what i know.....no Varanus exists in the Heavens!"
"And besides that’s no avatar and yet you walk amongst this puny mortals"
"The question i should be asking is..."
"What exactly are you?"