Chương 130: Chapter 116 - Imminent Disaster

++Being weak in general is excruciating, doubly so when you have tasted the power I once did. Being weak in the presence of the strong, though, is worse. It is a recontextualization of all your own previous battles.

'Here is a fight in which I would once have done well, and now observe from the perspective of a rat in the grass'. Fear is unbecoming of a lich, but I simply had no choice about whether I felt it in those early days. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. I felt the Demigod's anger, even from miles away. I had to admit to feeling some measure of worry as I did. He was powerful. During the siege, I had seen him act only distantly, and known then that he was stronger than Aryqatan.

How much stronger was still partly in doubt, but I suspected a fight between them would not last long. This was not very good for me. Aryqatan seemed to be by far the more reasonable of the two, not to mention the less randomly violent. I found my thoughts drifting back to Bagran Voret. Was he dead?

It seemed unlikely, it was surely against Nu'chista's best interests to kill someone as prominent as him even if it would mean gorging on his power and growing stronger, but I knew full well that people could do things that were not in their own best interests under the right circumstances. Something squirmed in me at that, a stab of regret. Bagran Voret had served me well and was the reason I now ran free, that he should die for this struck me as wrong and unjust.

I always tried to reward good service when I received it. Now, it seemed possible, even likely, that I would not be able to. And it was the Demigod Nu'chista's fault. Orapathaqi seemed oddly tranquil as I made my way through it, in an almost disorienting way. With all the chaos and madness that had befallen me over the last few hours, I felt certain there should have been more upset in the streets. But of course, the people here did not care about that. They had no clue who I was or what had happened.

They only wanted to go about their lives. The natives to work and shelter, the soldiers to harass and rape those natives, life would go on even if I had died in that cell. It may not go on now though, because if Nu'chista's temper was as unstable as I thought, he was going to practically explode the moment he suspected Sethira's ritual was close to starting again. She had not seemed to think there would be another pulse of mana shooting out from it the second time.

She had not thought that would happen the first time, either, though. I suspected that the odds of it occurring again were no less than one in five. I picked up a bit of speed and headed for the second-nearest crypt entrance, seeing no reason to give Garamon an unnecessary clue about where I had gone by taking the first. Within, the custodians recognised me and let me pass without incident. Anything less than that would have been a total disaster. I took the tunnels at a sprinter's pace and made a beeline for…

what, exactly? Sethira had not told me where she planned to hide within the crypts. This was probably deliberate on her part, I imagined she thought that I may give away her position if I thought the Demigods would turn me over to the true Gods otherwise. A foolish concern, on her part, but that did not change that I still lacked knowledge of her position. I thought about the problem for all of two seconds before my thoughts turned to the custodians, and I eyed one of them.

"Take me to your master," I told it. Custodians were intelligent, that was by far the most impressive feature they had. It is very difficult to create an intelligent servitor. Sethira may have even been better at it than I was. These creations understood me quickly and led me through the crypts at a pace that most horses would have struggled to match. That was another problem with Bagran's likely demise; with him dead, I could not learn his family's levitation or flying techniques.

Currently the bottleneck in my moving fast was still on human legs and ground friction. Speed limits in the air were far higher. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. I would have to put a few months of concerted effort aside to re-learning my own flying techniques when this was all over. It took almost half an hour to make it to Sethira's new refuge.

I realised she had been telling the truth about the crypts and how vast they were, because I did not see a single familiar room throughout all of it. I realised, also, that paranoia was a trait more universal to liches than I had previously assumed. I was not one yard through the door before guns were raised and magic built, all aimed at me from fifty different sources. Even my strongest shield would not have fared well. Sethira, of course, was at the back of the group. She seemed surprised to see me enter.

Instantly surprised, in the moment, struggling to register and adjust to my presence. So she did not know that her custodians had been leading me here. That was a useful piece of information, I had been wondering whether they served as her spy network as well as just her guards and attack dogs.

"I have returned," I told the room.

"The Demigods know that I am working with you, or will soon, and our plans must accelerate. How is the ritual progressing?" I saw no reason to waste time, we had so little left already. Sethira apparently agreed.

"The preparatory stages are finished and most of the structural ones are done. We have assembled the physical ingredients, and we have prepared the sigils. All that is left is to begin manipulating the actual magic." A stroke of luck, then. That was a nice change of pace. The previous steps, I could not have done much to accelerate, but with four hands instead of two on the mana control, the final stages would go all the faster. I had arrived at the perfect time.

"Then we can get to work," I suggested.

"If you would lower the guns and magic." They actually hesitated, all of them, the vermin. Fortunately Sethira gave the sensible order and things began to progress less stupidly.

Bagran Voret was in pieces, his body popped open like a wine cork, his blood everywhere. His heart was in Nu'chista's hand, then his mouth, then his belly. Aryqatan's eyes watered from the charnel reek, then watered more from the pulse of mana in the air. The Demigod before her had already been stronger, then he grew stronger still from the siege. Now his power, fed by a generational talent, was swelling and calcifying even more before her very eyes. The room started to rumble.

Plaster broke and fell away like autumn leaves, exposing brickwork beneath that itself cracked at the pressure now blasting the air. Aryqatan took a step back. Her body was too durable to be hurt by mere proximity, no matter how strong Nu'chista was he was still ultimately no more than a fellow Demigod, but she was driven by an instinct that defied reason. Was this the most powerful Demigod she'd ever seen, standing before her? Perhaps. He was certainly in the top three.

"Vornholt," he growled. Aryqatan watched as the skin at his ribs began to bubble and swell. She stared in horror as something pushed up from beneath the flesh, stretching it out and drawing it upwards like a mountain peak, then warping it. By the time she recognised an elbow joint the growth was almost complete, and two new arms emerged proudly from the Demigod's sides. Another gift of the Gods? No, this was just his divine power running wild.

"We need to be cautious," Aryqatan tried.

"We need—""We need to stop this ritual before a threat to the Gods emerges," Nu'chista snarled. His voice was like a skyscraper crashing into the ground between them. Like every gun in the army going off at once. His eyes were somehow worse.

"Vornholt," he continued.

"I can end this before it starts. I just need to find Vornholt."

Agrian was running without a particular direction when he felt the burst of magic. For a moment he mistook it for a resurgence of that ritual—Isabel's ritual—pumping yet more mana into the air. Then he recognised the divine twist and turned just in time to see the Demigod Nu'chista tearing high into the air and blasting a building beneath him to pieces seemingly without even meaning to. It was a near-thing, but Agrian just barely got a shield up before the shockwave hit him.

He still went off his feet, tumbling back and over, rolling like he'd suddenly been thrust downhill and not stopping until his momentum had exhausted itself over five paces of hard ground. When he finally sat back up he could see wooden shutters splintered out of the windows around him and ground cracked with the force. His eyes stung with the glare of magical light emanating from the Demigod, and his ears felt like they were on the brink of popping. They actually did pop when Nu'chista spoke.

"VORNHOLT!" he called out.

"WHERE IS SHE!?" Apparently, Isabel wouldn't be getting a trial. Agrian wished for nothing more than his sister in that moment, to know where she was so he knew where to throw his body and shield. I still want to protect her? It was an interesting question, and one Agrian had no time to really ask himself. Until he actually found Isabel it was purely hypothetical. Right now, the maelstrom of divine magic threatening to tear Orapathaqi apart was very much real, and therefore much more of his problem.

He started running of course, about the only thing he could do.