The hunger ached and scratched, stabbing into the lining of his belly and parching his throat.

Drink.

Antonias Calion heard that siren’s call every moment of every day since he first drank of another’s life force in the Fields of Asphodel, and he knew he would forever.

Drink.

Others had referred to it as replacing past addictions with a new one, which he liked to dispute by saying that Shine and the numerous narcotics and stimulants he had preferred as a Copper only degraded his potential, this just made him stronger.

Drink.

That reason was true, but he gave it because it appealed to most of the Imperators and their servants to think he did it for power alone. A grisly pact made with infernal powers. Foolish to many, but understandable at the same time. The other true reason was that everything he had taken before faded in time, the second high was never as good as the first and in time a drug addiction became more about taking it to not feel terrible rather than getting any pleasure or numbness out of it.

He eyed the container of Adrias’s blood he was holding, resisting the nearly magnetic draw to bring it to his lips.

Hunger and thirst were nothing like uppers and downers, a man would always grow hungry no matter how many days he lived and if he was truly ravenous, it tasted better that it ever did before.

A familiar touch buzzed against his mind, burning with the desire for fire and glory instead of his own for blood and domination.

“Toni. Change of plans. I’m going into the Cognitosphere. You’ll feed on one of them while the three of us are immobile.” Adrias’s voice came in.

“I thought the Regent told you not to do that.” Antonias replied.

There was no answer and Antonias smiled, revealing sharp teeth. Some things never changed despite how much the two of them Advanced.

The sphere he had eaten was beeping within him, his friend’s teleportation signaler having made itself ready. Timing was of the essence here, if he gave the machine in him agreement to start the transfer too early, then one of the Golds would notice and deal with him before going to the realm of minds. On the other hand, if he waited too long Adrias might have his mind flayed from the inside out.

Drink.

That he could do.

He downed it, the taste of Golden perfection and Imperator grandness mixed with hints of the spicy burn of godblood searing away his taste buds on its way.

Antonias’s vision tunneled and his teeth ground against themselves like two glaciers sliding against each other.

“Yesss…” He hissed, organs shifting around. Every drop of blood of this caliber made his Leechling half warp and twist. Antonias would have called it a form of Advancement or evolution or ascendance, but in truth it felt more like a descent, a burrowing of his soul closer to a chthonic and hellish transformation.

Antonias the Leechling was as ready as Antonias the Silver Imperator to kill one of the two Golden enemies that had come to slay his closest friend. He craved the taste just as much he hungered for the victory.

“That’s long enough.” He said, before using technopathy to activate the contraption.

It slowly dissolved him into the substance that blurred the lines between lightning and light in appearance, the same form of teleportation that Adrias had hated so very much. It took longer now, longer than Antonias had expected.

His exalted form resisted exterior change, Antonias supposed.

The bolt streaked across the ruined landscape, devastated even far, far away from the field of war. When Antonias coalesced back into flesh, he found himself beside what he presumed was Adrias, though the body resembled charred meat more than it did a human, as well as a much more intact person with their hands around Adrias’s throat. Both of them appeared to be unconscious and both of them were eerily floating just above a white hot sea of liquid metal, less like flight and more like gravity had stopped working properly.

Things had evidently not gone well, in Antonias’s estimation. Not one bit.

He decided he would go for this closest threat, Antonias did not know where the other one had gone and this one, Nero most likely, had a literal stranglehold on Adrias.

Inspecting his prey, Antonias lunged towards Nero’s throat. The other man was far beyond a Silver in terms of supernatural power. But that was alright with Antonias, because at this point he was far more unnatural than he was supernatural.

Antonias’s jaw unhinged like a snake, yawning wide right before his jaws clamped onto Nero Aezion’s throat and blood began to be ripped out. The Gold shifted but did not wake, lost in mental warfare. He would eventually as Fate prepared to snip his thread, but by that time hopefully Antonias would be so enhanced with stolen vitality that he could kill Nero and Advance to the Fourth Rank of their Path.

They said that a Gold’s regeneration was endless, that they could fill entire oceans with their lifeblood.

Oceans aren’t enough to satisfy me. Antonias thought.