The Silver Liquid is too tyrannical. It doesn’t just conquer; it devours.
He rembered the terrifying, gluttonous nature of the Domination power. If he used the Silver Liquid as a shortcut, he risked the it acting like a taphysical acid, completely digesting the Dreadwing’s soul as raw fuel.
If that happened, he would permanently destroy the very things he was trying to harvest: the hyper-lethal bloodline abilities, the panoramic vision, and the impossible, supersonic reflexes.
And he would only be able cry without tears.
So, he needed the finesse of a surgeon, not the blunt force of a wrecking ball.
He absolutely didn’t dare unleash the cheat. Instead, he decided to use his pure, raw ntal power.
He would break the beast with his own two hands.
Sol stepped carefully over a bubbling puddle of green plasma. He raised his right hand and placed his bare palm directly against the Dreadwing’s crushed sapphire head, resting his fingers between its massive, darkened compound eyes. The chitin was strangely cold, stripped of its life force.
He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and physically tried to drag the beast’s lingering soul directly into his solar plexus.
BOOM!
Reality shattered instantly.
The humid heat of the jungle, the stench of blood, and the sounds of the settling mud vanished. Sol’s consciousness was violently yanked out of his physical body and hurled into a dark, endless, taphysical void. There was no ground beneath his feet, no air in his lungs... only a crushing, conceptual gravity.
And he was not alone.
Even though its physical body had just been butchered, the Lord Dreadwing violently resisted. It was a Layer 3 Sovereign, a creature of ancient, sky-ruling arrogance, and it utterly refused to submit to a hairless ape.
Above Sol in the absolute darkness, a terrifying, screeching phantom of the giant dragonfly materialized. It was forged entirely of blinding, toxic-green soulfire and iridescent blue light. It dove directly at his ntal projection at supersonic speeds, its ethereal scythes raised, radiating a terrifying, suffocating aura of murder.
It was a massive, catastrophic ntal dogfight. The Dreadwing’s soul slamd into Sol’s mind like a freight train. It was a hurricane of pure, unadulterated predatory instinct trying to shred his sanity, trying to tear his human consciousness to ribbons and cast him into oblivion. The psychic pain was absolute, blinding agony.
But Sol was an anomaly. His willpower hadn’t been forged in the primitive mud of the Great Orrath, it was void-forged. It was an immovable wall.
"You lost the physical war!" Sol roared into the ntal void, his voice a manifestation of pure, unyielding exertion. "And you’re going to lose this one too!"
He didn’t just weather the storm; he surged upward to et it. His ntal projection manifested blinding, silver vises of sheer willpower. He reached directly into the toxic-green flas and brutally grabbed the ethereal, humming wings of the Dreadwing phantom.
The Sovereign shrieked, a sound that threatened to rupture Sol’s mind, fighting like a cornered demon. But Sol was relentless. He brutally wrestled the massive insect down, pouring every ounce of his transmigrator fortitude into his grip. He crushed its resistance, forcing the proud, ancient soul to its knees, bending its predatory will until it finally, violently snapped in submission.
With a brutal, taphysical heave, Sol ripped the subjugated spirit from the void and violently pulled it down into the core of his solar plexus.
Sol’s eyes snapped open in the physical world.
He fell backward onto his hands in the blood-soaked mud, gasping frantically for air as if he had just breached the surface of a freezing ocean. A profound, electrifying chill washed through his veins, followed instantly by a terrifying, kinetic lightness in his bones.
For a split second, his vision fractured into thirty thousand microscopic, hyper-detailed lenses, processing the trajectory of every falling leaf and drifting ash in the valley simultaneously, before snapping back to normal. His depth perception was suddenly flawless. His peripheral vision was unnervingly, impossibly wide.
The rush of new, terrifying power was intoxicating.
He threw his head back toward the purple-tinged canopy and laughed crazily, a wild, breathless, manic sound echoing across the silent graveyard.
"I fucking did it!" Sol yelled, his silver-crimson eyes blazing with manic euphoria. "Got the Lord Blood Dreadwing!"
...
He didn’t just feel different, his fundantal biology felt violently upgraded. Drunk on the sheer, intoxicating rush of the Layer 3 Sovereign’s soul settling into his core, Sol pushed himself off the blood-soaked mud.
He wanted to test it. He needed to test it.
He looked at a shattered tree stump fifty yards away across the crater. He didn’t flood his legs with Golden Liquid, he simply willed himself to move, tapping into the cool, sharp essence of the Dreadwing now coiled in his solar plexus.
CRACK!
The mud beneath his boots exploded. Sol didn’t run, he seed to teleport. The air resistance physically tore at his clothes as he crossed the fifty yards in just a few seconds, stopping dead in front of the stump with absolute, impossible kinetic control. There was no skidding, no loss of balance. His new, microscopic reflexes processed the sudden halt with flawless mathematical precision.
"Holy shit," Sol breathed, staring at his own hands. He threw a rapid series of experintal jabs into the empty air.
Crack-crack-crack! His fists moved so fast they seem to generate miniature sonic booms, almost blurring into invisibility, but of course it was just taphorically, right now he was still far from that level.
Still, his peripheral vision was unnervingly wide, processing the falling ash, the bubbling acid pools, and the twitching legs of dead ants in what felt like a near 360-degree panoramic sphere.
He was like a walking apex predator. He felt completely, utterly untouchable.
He spent a full minute just running around the crater, a manic, laughing shadow reveling in the ultimate mobility cheat, before the adrenaline finally began to level out.
The euphoria settled into a cold, pragmatic greed. He wasn’t done. The Great Orrath had delivered a buffet of Layer 3 Sovereigns, and his mind was absolutely starving.
Sol stopped his blurring sprint and turned his hyper-focused gaze toward the opposite end of the crater.
User Comments
0 comments from readers