Part III

As Jack stared at the mystical village in stunned disbelief, the last rays of daylight slowly faded. He watched quietly as a continuous stream of twinkling lights rose up into the sky. They were vessels launching into space or flying to the other major population centers of this world.

Finally, Jack’s incredulity broke his silence. “How could I have possibly missed this?” he asked his mental passenger. There were vessels flying in every direction. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed them flashing across the night sky for months.

Zachias laughed at his question. “How could you have possibly seen it? You would have had to stop for a second and just look. I will give you my soul right now if you can tell me what color this world’s moon is without checking first.”

Jack shrugged with his mouth and chewed on his lip as he thought. “I want to say yellow?” He looked around for a minute but there was nothing to find. Did this planet not have a moon? He realized that asking would only prove Zachias’ point.

“God damn it” Jack thought. “Wait. Are you saying that I’m a miserable bastard? If that ain’t the pot calling the kettle a big blue asshole. You’re the one who insists that I do nothing but train.”

Every time Jack had made camp, he had laid down some protective scripts and immediately sat down to meditate and train. Zachias apparently decided not to answer that accusation and stayed stubbornly silent.

Promising himself that he would come back to this ridiculous conversation, Jack pushed it to the back of his mind. He had more important things to worry about at the moment.

Looking over to Emrys, Jack half expected to find him getting ready to sleep as the druid always had the second that night fell. The tree folk were not active at night.

Instead, the tall, thin man stared awestruck at the gigantic village just as Jack had. Maybe things would be different now that he had taken his human form.

“I don’t think we should stop moving” Jack suggested to the druid and he could feel Zachias agreeing with that vehemently. “Fenris said that we didn’t want to be here when the real fight starts.”

Jack stepped to the inner edge of the wall and started to look for a way down. Unfortunately, it was all the way dark by this point and he couldn’t see the black surface of the wall even with his more than human night-vision.

When he turned back to Emrys, the druid was frozen in shock, his hackles clearly raised. Jack was confused for a moment until Emrys’ mental voice sounded loudly in his head.

“Did you say Fenris? That was the man who you were talking to?” Emrys was clearly agitated by this revelation.

Jack raised his eyebrows. “I take it you are familiar with his work?”

The druid laughed numbly. “He has been a living legend since before the forest was anything more than a single sapling. Many consider him to be the most dangerous being in the entire Universe. Why was he talking to you?”

“I would love to go over this in detail later” Jack said blandly. “But I think we should listen to the old wolf and haul ass to that village like our lives depend on it. Because I’m pretty sure they do.”

Emrys seemed to come back to reality and looked Jack in the eyes before nodding again. “You are right.” He walked over to stand on the inner edge of the wall and seemed to gather himself.

Jack felt himself lifting off of the ground once again and it took him a moment to realize what was about to happen.

Oh shit he thought to himself before he was summarily dragged over the edge. Jack’s breath caught in his throat as he looked down into the darkness that he expected to quickly swallow him. Instead of falling straight down into the unknown as he expected, he found himself soaring through the air towards the village.

Looking over to his druid companion, Jack saw that he was also flying with a look of calm concentration on his face. This flex of his telekinetic power didn’t even seem to be straining Emrys all that much. Jack decided to enjoy the ride as he wondered how long it would be before he could fly.

He put his arms out to the side and smiled as the wind whipped his hair around. What Zachias had said was making him reconsider his perspective. He had been treating this journey to find his friend Arthur like it was a sacred mission. Every moment needed to be spent advancing his goals in one way or another.

But did that mean that he couldn’t have any fun? If he survived, Jack would probably look back at this as the greatest adventure of his life. He didn’t want to regret that he never took the time to appreciate the fantastic events happening around him.

With that in mind, he enjoyed the sensation of soaring through the air like a bird. As it turned out, they weren’t so much flying as gliding to the ground. Jack had wondered why he had to climb the outside of the wall if Emrys could just carry them both with his Chakra.

Zachias informed him that Emrys probably could have carried them both to the top, but most beings did not like to strain their Chakra. Because—as Jack had already learned from personal experience—it would cause them to pass out when they pushed it to the limit.

When they came down to the soft, grass-covered ground, Jack and Emrys did not waste time. They started making their way towards the village with all haste, running as fast as they could without exhausting themselves completely.

Jack struggled to keep up with the more powerful druid in speed. As his advancement was more than two stages lower than Emrys’, the druid could keep a much faster pace with ease. However, they would soon come to find out that Jack could push himself much harder than most people at his level.

He could run until it felt like every muscle in his body was torn in half, but his healing physique was constantly restoring him to perfect condition. Emrys was clearly surprised that he had been able to keep up for so long. Jack had never outright told him about his natural ability to heal, but the druid had to have noticed some of the effects by now.

He decided that he would have to come clean to Emrys soon, although for now, he had to focus on the run. They had been moving at superhuman speeds for the better part of an hour, but had still made far less progress than Jack had expected. Apparently, the village was much further away than he had first thought. They hadn’t even made it halfway there yet.

After they had been running for a while, Jack had observed that there had been an extremely slight decline in the ground the entire time. With a start, he had realized that the reason he had thought the village was so much closer was because the entire area was shaped like a shallow basin. From the wall all the way to the outskirts of the metropolis, there was no curvature of the earth.

That was what had thrown off his original estimations so much. From the top of the wall, he had been looking at least a hundred miles to the village. Usually, anything at that distance would have been hidden by the horizon. However, that also meant that the buildings and the metropolis were even larger than he had thought at first as well.

His mind was blown by the scope. The fomorians that had built this place must have been amazing.

As Jack stared at the far away metropolis in wonder, something changed before his eyes. The myriad colored lights that had been lighting up the strangely shaped buildings like a Christmas tree flickered and every single one of them came back on in a bright red. All along the skywalks and streets, red spotlights came on and lit up the infrastructure like daytime.

It was clear that some kind of alarms were going off, and for a brief moment, Jack worried that they had caused this somehow. That fear was put to rest only a moment later when the ground began rumble and shake.

Jack and Emrys came to a stop and looked at each other.

“Do you think this is what Fenris’ warning was about?” Jack asked.

Emrys nodded and Jack got the impression that the druid had an idea of what was happening. “I think we need to run much faster.”

He felt a surge of Qi from Emrys’ spirit and the patches of bark on his skin began to branch out in twisting lines. Jack nodded and began to circulate his own energy through a pattern that would give his body a general enhancement to his speed. It was not the same one he had used in the fight earlier as that had been too powerful to control and it would burn through his Qi reserves too quickly.

Thin lines of blue lightning formed a simple swirling pattern around his body and he felt the enhancement rush through him. The human and druid took off once again. Before, they had been keeping a pace of around forty to forty-five miles per hour. That had been a speed that they could maintain all night while conserving their Qi.

Now that they had stopped holding back, both of them were tearing across the flat grassy field like a race car. Of course, Emrys still had to curb his own momentum to not leave Jack in the dust. Even though Jack was built for speed and Emrys was certainly not, advancement was clearly the greatest enhancement of them all.

Unfortunately, their dangerous pace was not enough to save them. The ground which had continued to shake the entire time quaked even harder and they both lost their footing for a moment. They quickly rolled back up and tried to continue their frantic retreat, but an incredibly powerful aura washed over them.

Jack and Emrys were both stopped in their tracks as their legs almost buckled beneath them. The spiritual weight of this aura was too much for them to carry. It was all they could do to stay on their feet.

The monstrous spirit felt like an oppressively powerful and toxic shadow. Jack was disgusted by the taste in his spiritual sense.

When the aura flexed with some effort, both Emrys and Jack collapsed onto their hands and knees. It was as if someone had turned up the gravity by a factor of a hundred. They knelt on the ground helplessly, struggling to even breathe through the suffocating presence that surrounded them.

***

Ethia, the current Lord of Mag Tien, hovered above her quaking village which blared with sirens and emergency lights. Her perception covered every centimeter of the civilization and she watched as citizens rushed to designated shelters or to vessels that they would use to evacuate to the sky. The streets below and the skywalks above were swarming with people.

When crowds of millions moved in a panic, violent accidents were inevitable. Ethia used her power to limit this chaos.

She saw a little fomorian girl trip and her mother went to dive on top of her to save her from being trampled. Both mother and child suddenly found themselves hovering above the crowd, flying towards the nearest shelter. The girl giggled while the mother cried with gratitude and relief.

Scenes such as this played out all over the village as Ethia and others like her used their chakra to save as many citizens as they could. At her level of advancement, splitting her attention hundreds or even thousands of different ways was a simple matter.

But as the shaking intensified, she was forced to turn her focus elsewhere. This was not her job. There were many beings flying around the streets and skywalks whose job it was to manage the evacuation and protect lives. Ethia left it to them.

She turned to the source of the quaking just outside of the village wall. The ground had already begun to crack open. Soon, the leviathan would emerge to wreak destruction on her home. She could already feel the power of the beast. It tasted like an extremely corrosive shadow that would devour anything it touched.

Ethia reached into her pocket dimension and summoned her wicked looking black armor that glowed with a burning red from the seams. She plotted a route through the vessels rising from the metropolis in droves and flew relatively slowly through the chaos until she was clear. As soon as she left the bustling ships behind and the way became clear, she accelerated so hard it created a sonic boom.

Her Chakra was strong enough to fly even faster, but it would be foolish to strain herself right before a fight. Though she covered kilometers by the second, her perception encompassed the grassy land beneath her easily. She was looking for straggling citizens who had yet to reach the designated shelters or had been caught outside of the village when the alarms went off.

She soon stumbled upon two beings in the middle of nowhere many kilometers from any buildings or shelters. Ethia furrowed her brow and came to a stop, floating down to get a closer look. The leviathan was close to emerging, but she had a little time.

The two men, one druid and one human, knelt on the shaking ground with looks of intense strain on their faces. Both of them were on their hands and knees and seemed like they were about to be crushed by an invisible force. Their spirits were churning with Qi. Arcs of blue lightning sparked from the body of the human before they evaporated into mists of blue light that sank towards the ground before dissipating into nothing.

Ethia was confused by this until she felt a spike from the leviathan’s spirit and the two men were almost slammed into the ground.

They were being crushed by the weight of the monster’s massive power. The protective scripts of the village wall couldn’t keep all of its spirit from leaking through.

As she landed on the ground in front of them with a metallic clang, they looked up to her in surprise. The full suit of black and red armor that Ethia wore must have made her look threatening by the expressions on their faces.

She studied the beings at her feet with incredibly keen senses. The druid was near the peak of the Spirit Realm with a firm foundation and centuries of experience. His power felt like a mighty tree covered in piercing thorns. With a little luck and a great deal of determination, he might even break through to the Tyrant Realm one day.

The human, on the other hand, Ethia found to be much more interesting. His spirit was brand new and his power tasted like pure lightning. There was no sense of any kind of kinesis to it.

Clearly, he had barely even started on his path. And still, for someone who had only just advanced, his aura was expansive and dense and his core was pristine. With a foundation like that, who could say how far this man would go?

Her senses took in the human’s physical condition at the same time that she observed his spirit. He looked like he had been having a very long day well before the leviathan had showed up. His clothes were torn all over especially in his strike zones and he was covered in dried blood. It was mostly his blood too judging by the smell along with a smaller amount that probably came from a beastkin.

Surprisingly, there were no wounds on his skin where there obviously should have been. Ethia listened to his heartbeat and the sound of his blood pumping while she watched the pulse on the side of his neck. His blood pressure was normal. Every ounce that he had shed today had already been replaced. He must be carrying powerful medicinal treasures.

These aspects would seem to indicate that he was a member of the Olympic royal family. Maybe even a direct descendant of Zeus. On the other hand, Ethia noticed things about him that would seem to contradict this.

For example, why was he so weak for his age? Although his foundation was extremely solid, all of the human royals that she had heard of reached the Spirit Realm by the time they became teenagers at the latest.

Also, the spatial artifact that he wore around his neck was not of any make that she recognized. Every civilization on this planet almost exclusively used artifacts built in the style of the dwarves or the elves. This was their territory after all and they were the greatest crafters in the Cosmos. It was only natural that their influence would dominate.

And finally, there were the tattoos of power that she could sense on his left side and the back of his neck. These were of special interest. They were clearly given to him by a Tyrant level druid and beastkin. But the denizens of the forest hated the humans that dominated this world.

The druids killed them on sight and the beastkin were known to do worse. And yet this man had been given the blessing to use their powers? As far as Ethia knew, this had never happened before.

She decided to take a look through his memories and see if she could understand. She reached out with her mind’s eye and cast a tendril of her mental perception into the human’s head. Or at least, she tried to.

When the tendril reached him, it ran into a psychic wall. Confused, Ethia pushed against the barrier, but it was somehow more than strong enough to keep her out. It should be absolutely impossible for the mental defenses of a Spirit being to keep out a Sovereign.

Before she could investigate further, she was taken by surprise yet again. The man’s spirit flexed and the arcs of lightning coming off of him grew brighter and thicker. The bolts were still quickly snuffed out by the leviathan’s power of course, but it was enough to get her attention.

She watched as this weak human struggled. His nose began to bleed as he lent all of his Chakra to the effort. He pushed off the ground with everything that he had, rising just enough to bring his right knee to his chest and put one foot down.

The druid must have sensed what the human was doing, but he did not increase his own effort to match. Ethia got the sense that the tree man just didn’t see the point. Even if they both stood up, they wouldn’t be able to escape.

On the other hand, the human didn’t seem to agree with that sentiment. He looked right into her armor’s visor with fire in his eyes. Pressing down with his right foot as hard as he could, the man rose centimeter by centimeter until he managed to get his other leg under him. He straightened as much as he could and then said something in a language that she didn’t recognize.

Ethia was impressed. The man probably didn’t realize this, but it was not a physical weight that he was lifting. His body was not any heavier than normal.

When a spirit was crushed by another much more powerful one, it only felt like their body was being stepped on by the foot of a giant. In reality, it was their own bodily instincts that forced them to the ground. Their spirit cringing away from a superior opponent.

And it wasn’t this man’s strength or chakra that was holding him up in spite of the spiritual weight pressing down on him. There was little that those things could do in this situation.

No, there was only one thing that was keeping him on his feet right now. The one thing that humans were known for across the Cosmos: the force of their will.

Some humans were just born with a will to sever fate and rewrite destiny. It seemed that she might have stumbled across one of them.

Ethia dismissed her armor for the moment and met the man’s eyes. There wasn’t much time before the leviathan broke through the surface, but she did have a few more moments.

As the human got a good look at her for the first time, the surprise on his face was evident. It did not last for long, however, as he finally reached his limit. He had overexerted his chakra thinking that it was helping him, and now, his eyes rolled to the back of his head and he fell to the ground unconscious.

She walked over to where he had fallen and crouched down to touch the scripted piece of metal hanging around his neck. The mystery of this weak human was getting more intriguing and she wanted to see what he was holding.

Unfortunately, this would have to remain a mystery for now. As soon as her finger brushed the spatial artifact, Ethia felt a sharp pain. Astonished, she looked down and saw blood leaking from her finger.

Where she had made contact with the man’s artifact, there was a tiny bleeding wound. It felt like she had been cut or pierced. But that should be impossible for a being that had only just formed a spirit.

Even if he had sacrificed his life for the effort, a being of his level wouldn’t be able to so much as pluck one of her eyelashes. It was obvious that someone very powerful had placed a protection on his artifact.

She glanced to the druid with the long hair and patches of bark on his human skin. He was still conscious, though he was barely holding himself off the ground on his hands and knees at this point.

Ethia decided to send a tendril of psychic energy into the druid’s mind to see if he was protected as well. He tried to reject the intrusion, but she brushed his defense aside like so much dust. She didn’t have time for a thorough examination, so she skimmed through his recent memories.

The druid’s name was Emrys. He was from a small branch of the Great Highland Forest’s Everwood clan and he practiced their prized path of the Endless Thorn. Emrys had been one of the branch’s prized pupils in his youth, until his growth stagnated near the end of the Spirit Realm as most druids tended to do. Ethia got the sense that he was a bit of a greenhouse flower.

Emrys’ family had discovered a random mortal human traveling deep in their territory. They had been baffled at how this weak man had snuck past the many intricate protections that were built into their woods. Emrys had been part of a group sent to capture this human.

He had been sure that they were carrying the poor man to his execution by the hands of their family’s Tyrant. Instead, this man—who he had learned later was named Jack—not only survived, but was given the blessings of the forest and a guide for his journey. Emrys had absolutely no idea why his matriarch had decided to help Jack on his journey rather than executing him.

Ethia didn’t understand either. The Great Forest had warriors that could stand up to the gods. They refused to bow before the Olympic sect even now. Who could frighten or entice them enough to help a trespassing human?

She saw that Emrys had struck up a friendship with Jack and the human had explained how he was from another world. He had said that he came to this planet through an ancient scripted doorway through space to find and save his friend from the ruling pantheon.

Ethia’s eyes widened as she skimmed these memories. Could it be? That would certainly explain how Jack had managed to appear in the middle of druid territory without setting off their alarms.

But if that were the case…

A great tremor rumbled through the ground beneath them and a pillar of thick, venomous shadow erupted into the sky outside of the village wall. Ethia had run out of time. The citizens had reached their shelters and the village defenses were activating.

She looked down at the human at her feet and decided that she could not just leave him here to die. He clearly had some kind of significance to someone that she could not afford to offend.

Ethia gathered her willpower and folded space before tearing a small rift open. A black scar appeared in the world. She lifted Jack and Emrys off the ground with her Chakra and unceremoniously dumped them through the tear in space. She could figure out exactly what to do with them later.

With that taken care of, Ethia tapped into her pocket space and summoned her armor again. The wicked black plates seemed to absorb all light while the glowing red seams cast her surroundings in a dangerous tinge.

She leapt in the direction of the rising pillar of shadow leaving a sizable crater in the ground behind her along with an especially loud sonic boom. As she soared through the air, she used her Chakra to glide the kilometers between her and the village wall.

Coming down for a soft landing inside the wall, Ethia began to channel her power into a technique that would take over a large swath of the terrain around her. When she had finished the weave, she stomped her foot down on the ground and a perfectly straight crack appeared in the earth kilometers long.

The crack was quickly filled by a glowing red liquid that seethed with heat. The lava overflowed from the crack and spread evenly across the ground incredibly quickly. It took the shape of an oval with sharp points. When this technique was seen from above, it looked just like a gigantic red eye opening and that was how it had gotten its name: the Eye of Balor.

As the lava covered the ground, every blade of grass and rock it moved over was turned to ash or melted. After the blazing red eye was all the way open, most of the surface area turned black as the burning red liquid hardened into volcanic glass.

Now, there were only thin lines of red lava that flowed through the massive black eye in powerful and intricate fractal scripts. Ethia stood at the center of the eye in a large pool of molten rock that served as the pupil. It was the largest collection of the red liquid left in the formation and all of the runes of the giant array were connected to it.

The pupil was surrounded by a much larger script circle that looked like a black and red iris from above. The streams of lava that branched out from the iris looked a lot like the veins of blood in a black eyeball with a terrible case of red eye.

Ethia activated the scripts in her armor which automatically connected to the giant fractal array. Qi poured from the formation on the ground into the black and red armor. The armor collected that energy and used it to protect and empower Ethia’s body.

Even without the enhancement, her strength was greater than the laws of nature should physically allow. With the armor’s technique active, she could stand up even to many of the monsters of the deep ocean.

As she waited for the leviathan to finally break all the way through the surface, she began to lazily circulate her next technique in her core.

More pillars of shadow rose into the sky around the first one. It wouldn’t be long now.

The village’s other Sovereigns had finished their evacuation duties and were making their way over towards her now. Defensive script formations activated throughout the area and started to draw massive amounts of power from the village reserves.

Lines of white light appeared around the wall and formed intricately connected runes that rose high into the sky.

The village of Mag Tien had many defenses, but Ethia was the lynchpin. She prepared herself to do battle with the amazingly powerful path that she had inherited from her father, Balor.

The path of Ash and Obsidian.