MAGUS INFINITE

I took a single step forward, and my body moved with and through the storm, traveling miles with that step, and leaving the dead city behind. My storm was an inexorable flood of red cloud and screaming souls that would roll across the continent with the patience of inevitability.

There were powers here and deep laws that were brushing across my consciousness, and I wanted to delve into them, but with the light of the living constantly irritating my mind, I knew I would not have the silence to meditate as long as there was life left on the continent.

The rain of blood was now falling in sheets as the number of souls in the storm had reached hundreds of thousands, and I no longer counted the souls that were now pouring into the storm.

The chains that extended from my back were too numerous to track, each one carrying a soul that had been added to the weight I bore. The weight was immense, crushing, but Mortal Shell and my Titan Marrow became the reason that I could push this storm to this extent.

I believe that there were specific defenses in place by nature that would have stopped the spread of death to this extent, but my abilities seemed to have broken this safeguard. Otherwise, I was sure that no Arcanist should be able to do the things I was doing, even if they were given my Titles.

If I was an average mage with this blessing, then the weight of the dead would have crushed me to dust. Mortal Shell aided me in sharing the burden on my incredibly powerful soul, but when the souls in my storm reached hundreds of thousands, the only thing that kept me intact became my Titan’s Marrow that had transformed and was now feeding on the vitality of death.

When I grew, my body durability, strength and all around performance increase as well, meaning that Mortal Shell was supercharged by a bigger and stronger body, which gave me the stamina to carry more souls, and if I could carry more souls, the storm would expand faster, spreading more fields of death, and giving me more vitality that leads to the growth of my body, and so this had become a self sustaining death loop, where I get stronger as my storm spreads, and not weaker.

My body was now thirty feet tall, and still growing, the scarlet robes billowing around me like a second storm. My red hair fell past my shoulders, and my eyes glowed with a cold, pale light. I had become something that was no longer human, no longer even a mage. I was a force of nature.

∞

The Conclave forces on the ground had stopped fighting and were running. This should have been a good thing, but for the life, hehe, the death of me, I could not find the reason why this should be good; it only meant the speed of my hunting had reduced.

I could see them through the storm, their bright souls flickering like candles in the dark. They tried to hide; there were even entire towns and cities where they had left massive numbers of people behind for me to reap.

Hmm... I recall that the Conclave was a ritualistic society, and their magic had flavors that were different from what was available on this continent. It did not matter that this life felt familiar; their souls all weighed the same.

I passed over a mountain range, and the peaks crumbled beneath the weight of my passing. I crossed a river, and the water turned to blood. I moved through a forest, and the trees withered and died, replaced by the endless fields of screaming skulls.

The souls accumulated, and the weight grew heavier, and I grew larger. My body was now fifty feet tall, a titan of red and black, and I could feel the storm pressing against the edges of the continent, hungry for more.

∞

I reached the coast, and I saw the sea stretched before me. I remembered that the moment I began moving east, I had thought I would not make it to this coast because it was a thousand miles away, but my storm was moving faster than I had anticipated at the start, and it had barely taken me two hours to cross a thousand miles.

I stopped and looked at the skies, and I smiled. Apart from the booming in the high heavens where the Sovereigns were fighting, I could sense that the battle at the Arcanist threshold had ended, and if I knew mages, the reason I was not being currently attacked was that they were preparing for me.

Closing my eyes, I listened to the screams of the soul in my storm, and they had broken past a million. If I was going to succeed in my task, I needed more souls; life needed to end.

The coldness in my chest pulsed, and I felt a flicker of something that might have been satisfaction. It was followed by something else, something deeper that I had been pushing down for a long time... Grief.

It was faint, barely a whisper, but it was there. I had killed a million people. Some of them had been innocent, some of them had been children and mothers and fathers like mine, and I had not stopped.

The coldness surged, drowning the grief before it could take hold. I was too large now, too heavy with the weight of the dead, to feel anything but the cold. I was a Death Titan, and Death did not grieve.

I turned away from the coast and began to move inland. I needed more souls, and the storm responded to my will, following my will and spreading faster. The souls accumulated, and the weight grew heavier, and so I grew larger. My body was now seventy feet tall, a titan of red and black, and I could feel the storm pressing against the edges of the continent, hungry for more.

The number of souls in my storm neared five million when I sensed the lights of the Arcanists descend outside the range of my storm cloud. My eyes brightened, and I began to move towards them.

They numbered in the thousands, and I knew that this number could only mean that the Arcanists of both continents must be arrayed against me, but I did not care; in fact, I welcomed it.