Blood Shaper-Chapter 53Book 6:

The giant monstrosity destroying Nelam’s former capitol during it’s battle with Kay had been visible for hundreds of miles, making it quite easy for Eleniah to see as she wrapped up the last bits of mindless resistance from the vampyr protecting the ritual circle that was her target. The elite vampyr that had led the defense had been troublesome, but nothing she couldn’t handle. The rotting plant monster it had turned into had been aggravating, with it continuously growing out of decayed seeds it sowed across the landscape with every attack, but she’d eventually worn it down. She’d left the crater she’d created while finishing off the monster’s true core, where most of the ritual circle had been, behind under the watch of the soldiers she’d been accompanying and raced toward the towering abomination with the best speed she could muster once she was free to leave.

She hadn’t been fast enough.

Eleniah had watched as her lover had fallen out of the sky, a speck she could only identify as Kay through sheer instinct, and splash down into the red sea. She hadn’t allowed herself to worry though, she could still see slightly larger dots with wings throw themselves at the eldritch being along with a tide of red crawl up it’s body while Kay was hidden somewhere beneath bloody waves. She didn’t know why he was down there waiting instead of taking the fight right back to the enemy, but she didn’t worry. She just ran faster so she could be there to help.

She didn’t make it on time.

As she barreled her way through hills and obliterated hordes of ravaging, mindless vampyr with her fists, she watched as Kay emerged from his sanguine sea radiating a power unlike any she’d ever felt. There was no effect on the world around Kay from the intensity of what he was exuding, but she could still feel it in her core. Someway, somehow, Kay had breached a divide and reached a new level of power beyond her own. Some people might have been jealous that some man had shown up into the world and surpassed her in less than a quarter of the years she’d lived, but all she felt was joy. She wanted Kay to live through the fight, so it didn’t matter how he eclipsed her, she’d catch up eventually. Plus, a good portion of his achievements up till this point had been thanks to her, so what was there to be jealous of? She pushed herself to go faster.

It didn’t matter. Kay used a burst of blood to throw the enemy into the sky and followed after it less than a minute before she got there. She arrived at the edge of a destroyed city, with debris scattered everywhere. Not a single building was left standing after the attacks Kay and the eldritch being had traded back and forth. What was left of Avalon’s army and the other troops that had accompanied Kay to the city were clustered together on top of a group of hills, where a thick line marking where Kay’s blood sea had risen to was still visible.

Eleniah continued to silently stare up into the sky. She ignored everyone that tried to speak to her, and had to push past at least one person, maybe more she wasn’t sure, to get to where she was going. She found Cindy without even really thinking about it and settled in next to her, practically oblivious to the orders being shouted and the activity around her as she kept staring. Staring, and waiting.

Waiting for Kay to come back down.

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Covered in armor made of blood, floating at the edge of space, breathing oxygen pumped into his veins through his skin from his armor, and facing off against a humanoid shape that contained the power and drive of a timeless cosmovore from beyond the stars that was wielding a translucent blade filled with eldritch green fire, Kay felt like there should be spaceships molded into letters with robots that screamed instead of talking flying about shooting at both of them. What else were he and his opponent in that moment but space wizards?

That single moment of whimsy didn’t last more than a second, but it felt good. Some part of him, the part that was still fixated on being “normal”, the part that hadn’t wanted to be a king or a Class Line Progenitor, the one afraid of reaching for something and failing, was beside itself worried that he’d become something other that he could never come back from. That piece of him had it’s uses, although he’d had to force it down more than once to push himself to higher levels of success. However, that didn’t mean it was always wrong, so he was glad that even in the face of universal annihilation he could have stupid little thoughts that were only funny in the face of such danger. It reminded him he was still human. Or vampire, whatever.

The duel between him and the avatar continued in the same vein where it had begun, but completely different also. It was still a reckless engagement with weapons flashing and tearing into each other’s bodies and wounds sealing over as their equally impressive regenerative abilities healed them. What was different was that while the avatar of Hungering Void continued to attack without any real thought behind it, seeking to damage the enemy above all else, Kay wasn’t. The early stages of wielding his new Class had seen him completely ignoring his own good sense to throw himself into the fray with as little thought as the eldritch figure before him was, but that wasn’t the efficient way to go about it. Sure, both of them could heal any wound and come back from anything short of total eradication, but they couldn’t do so forever. Every attack that Kay blocked, dodged, or parried was a wound he didn’t have to heal and energy he didn’t have to spend. The fight might rage on for seconds more or last decades, but at this rate Kay would win the battle of attrition.

Somewhere along the way the avatar realized that too. It’s attacks stared becoming… odd. In between strikes the sword stopped being a sword and became a concentrated beam of that putrid green flame. Then it was some kind of squid, then a rubber hose, then a backwards math equation, then the smell of peonies in the rain, then a little green pot shaped like a cat with no tail. After that each strike became even more bizarre as the avatar focused on conceptual attacks. They weren’t unlike the mental attack it had tried before, but instead of attacking Kay’s mind and his ability to deal with sensations and existence beyond the dimensions he was used to, it attacked his existence itself.

Kay’s improved defenses against mental attacks were impenetrable, at least when brought against the level of mental power the avatar could bring against him, but that wasn’t true for conceptual attacks. Breaking reality was Hungering Void’s nature in a way and that made it the avatar’s greatest strength. Kay’s ability to resist and fight back against the nature of other realities was strong with the stability his blood empowered, but that made them closer to even than anything else. A paper towel tube made out of vertigo lanced into his side and left a deep cut in his abdomen. Kay countered with a sword made of blood, then blocked an attempted overhead blow using the sound of purple dying with a sword made of blood. In response to an overwhelming litany of impossible strikes Kay used the same thing over and over again, blood.

While he’d thought about it and even made plans to dive deeper into it, Kay had never really refined his powers over blood on a conceptual level. There were many paths he could have gone down to grow that side of his abilities, but he’d put it off time and time again. Some of that was from distaste. Many of the concepts tied to blood involved disease, curses, or other unsavory ideas that he had no interest in. The rest were acceptable to him, concepts such as family, life, or connectivity, but he hadn’t delved too deeply into those either. He lightly touched on them here and there, such as with Meld Blood, but he mostly stuck to direct applications. Blood as a material, blood as a part of the body, blood as the system mammals used to convey oxygen. In some ways that choice cut him off at the knees, preventing him from reaching higher levels of power and more esoteric abilities. But in this battle that simplicity became his strength.

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The nonsensical attacks that the avatar threw at him cut not only at his physical form, but also at the concepts that made him who he was. Loyalty, duty, responsibility, greed, pride, anger, civilization, cooking, electricity, clothing, beauty, art, buildings, cars, weapons, armor, thought, preferences, language, reading, stories, and so many more conceptual ideas that were created by the existence of minds that could communicate, reason, and believe. Those are what avatar struck at. With every hit it tried to rip them apart or overwhelm and replace them with something outside and alien, something that didn’t fit in the space left behind. It didn’t matter if Kay could regenerate from any single drop of blood in his domain if “Kay” didn’t exist anymore.

In complete contrast, Kay attacked the physical form of the avatar and as a consequence ripped into it’s being. It was a shell that contained the power and will of the eldritch being that sought to eat this universe. Without the shell the power and will had no way to interact with this reality, and was thus powerless. While the avatar attacked with allusions and metaphors, concepts and similes, Kay struck back with facts. Blood is a substance comprised primarily of water that transported a variety of substances to various parts of the human body, primarily oxygen. It does so using hemoglobin, a protein that uses iron to bind oxygen in order to facilitate it’s transfer to the lungs. Blood is generally a liquid but like all other matter can change states under the right circumstances, mainly temperature and pressure. When matter is physical, and sharpened to a very fine edge, kinetic energy can be applied to it in order to cause it to move, which can in turn cause it to cut through other matter. For example, the sword made of blood Kay swung and thus chopped off the avatar’s hand.

Kay had seen it when he had caught a glimpse of the System. Both the System and Hungering Void were beings of will, or at least that was as close as he could observe them form his limited viewpoint. They existed as they did because of belief, will, and thought. They were, essentially, big bundles of concepts that worked that way because they knew that they did. There was nothing like the laws of physics or observable facts of reality that supported their existences, they just were. Thus mundane facts became the weapon to destroy one of them. Or at least curtail it’s power.

Still, while both combatants had weapons that could destroy the other, given enough successful blows, the battle really came down to willpower. Neither higher order concepts used to suppress lower order ones or facts used to beat back impossible ideas were completely banes to erase the other in a single strike, thus it came down to how well each fighter could resist the strikes of the other. And that was where Kay overcame the avatar. He had struggled and fought his way to the position he had built for himself. He had faced down monstrosities twisted by eldritch corruption, being flung into a space between universes, and everything else Hungering Void had thrown at him. He was experienced and could overcome this tribulation. The avatar had none of that. It had barely existed for an hour.

Perhaps if it had been able to use a different body to form its shell and had other experiences to draw on in whatever approximated to a mind for it it might have been able to hold out. But the same brittle, inflexible mind that it’s chief minion had had was the basis of it’s existence in that moment and it could not deal with the level of damage it was taking and the pain of that shell, the only existence the avatar had really known, being whittle away piece by piece. After a particularly brutal blow where Kay severed it’s arm at the elbow then drove his halberd deep into it’s chest, it broke and ran.

It skimmed the edges of that atmosphere as it fled, curving around the planet. Kay didn’t know what it was searching for, if it even was searching for something. Perhaps it’s mind had broken with fear, with knowing it had the ability to feel fear, and had stopped being a threat. He didn’t know, but he couldn’t let it get away.

As he chased it he saw the world below them and marveled at it’s beauty. He could see the three continents he knew of directly below them and the edges of others in the distance that he’d never heard of. Approaching the shores of the continent he called home he saw a gargantuan fleet of ships, some lashed together into massive cities that trailed more mobile vessels. A mountain range that pierced the sky with peaks that were almost as high as he was in that moment was visible off to his left and a tree just as tall was somewhere to his right. It was beautiful. It was his home.

The avatar watched him approach, it’s body leaking that fetid flame of eldritch energy, and Kay could feel it’s panic. It had stopped complaining and lecturing some time ago, communicating, if it could be called that, with twisted bits of emotion and thought that echoed through the empty void they fought in. As Kay closed in on it it radiated desperation and dread. With a surge of rage tinged with the taste of paper cuts it turned to face the world below it and called on whatever power it could muster. The humanoid shell that contained the avatar peeled back as an incandescent wave of power was unleashed, aimed at the continents below it.

The pillar of flame breached the atmosphere with trails of it curling away as portions of the attack bled off. That didn’t stop all of it though, and the pillar was still as thick around as multiple cities as it descended toward the ground. Kay threw himself downward with all the force he could, streamlining his armor on the fly to pass through and into the atmosphere without losing too much speed. He eked out every inch of distance he could to get ahead of the descending cylinder of extinction that threatened his home.

It slammed down onto him as he got in front of it and put himself against it to stop it in it’s tracks. The eldritch power pushed down on him, causing him to sink a few feet in the air, but he pushed back against it. It was like being back int hat space outside of space where he had been dragged by that proboscis-leg of the eldritch thing summoned by the first ritual during the Shatterplate War, but he could still feel his physical form. Ideas, concepts, thoughts, fragments of existence that didn’t match his own and threatened to unmake him drove into his shoulders and tried to erase him. It was the same as all the other attacks the avatar had thrown at him as they dueled in space, but with infinitely more power.

It wasn’t enough.

Kay pushed back against against the pillar that wasn’t a pillar made of flame that wasn’t flame with stability and reality, with truth and facts. A gleaming crimson dot in the sky pushed against a column of fire to rise into the sky and forced the fire back upward. Kay cut through the monstrous attack as he rose, destroying it in his wake. He climbed and climbed until he once more stepped into the airless void and reached the avatar of Hungering Void.

Kay had taken the legend of Dracula, or a legend of Dracula, and turned it towards his own ends to gain the Origin Vampire Class, even if it was only for a time. He was sure that if it wasn’t for the System fragments meddling he wouldn’t have become a tailor made weapon to destroy this enemy. He would have ended up something much closer to the stereotypical vampiric monster that Earth knew so well. In homage to that legendary figure, a fictional creature created from twisted historical fact, Kay chose a final blow that was steeped in irony. Without the meddling of Hungering Void and it’s vampyr puppets, things would not have gone the way they did in Kay’s life. Without one vampyr trying to turn Kay at the orders of Hungering Void’s chief minion, he would never have become a vampire. Without that happening he likely wouldn’t have been in the perfect situation to destroy everything the eldritch being had planned and wrought. Thus, it was partially the cosmovore’s own fault that Kay was destroying it’s avatar and ruining it’s plans to feast. Why not end things in a way that never would have been possible without it?

Kay’s jaw almost unhinged with how far he opened his mouth, and his fangs gleamed sinisterly in the light of the sun. There was a brief moment where the avatar struggled to escape, to blast him with fire that was neither holy nor unholy, to defeat Kay and win as was it’s destiny. Then the tips of Kay’s fangs sank into it’s neck and he tore out it’s throat.