MAGUS INFINITE

The wave of darkness rose out of the debris like a living thing, coiling upward, reaching toward the sky with a hunger that made my Adamantium flesh prickle with warning.

My eyes widened when I remembered the Soul Flayer. During my ascension of the shard to a Law, I had felt its perception reach towards me before the lightning turned it to ash, and from that moment, I had just pushed the matters of the demon behind me.

There was no way that the explosion and the crash could kill this demon, not when it was wearing the body of a Sovereign. Still, the darkness that was rising into the sky was far beyond the level of control that I knew the demon to have... did I inadvertently release the real Sovereign of Darkness from his prison?

”What is that?” the blue-haired Sovereign of Aldenmere asked, her voice sharp. ”The Conclave has another hidden piece on the board!”

Sovereign Halloway’s eyes narrowed. ”No... something is wrong. Why does this darkness feel so familiar?”

The darkness reached up for a mile before it exploded into a million tentacles of night and began to reach across the ground and the oceans for miles, and it did not take long to see that the darkness was gathering the debris of the fallen prison.

The debris began to move, drawn toward the darkness like iron filings to a magnet. The fragments of the prison, which had been scattered across the crater for miles, began to assemble themselves, clicking into place with the precision of a puzzle being solved by a hand that had done it a thousand times before.

”That is a Sovereign,” One of the seven Sovereigns who stood at my side called out to the Conclave Sovereigns, ”Do you still trust the Conclave when they had hidden a Sovereign from you all this time? Do you think that if their master succeeds, that any of you would have a say in the world he is building?”

The darkness below, gathering the debris of the Celestial Vessel, opened a small gap, and the figure of an old man emerged, holding a walking stick made from darkness.

”Arnold?” Sovereign Halloway gasped, ”Brother... you are alive?”

My eyes moved from the Sovereign of Darkness to Sovereign Halloway, and I was not the only one. Seed... no, Arnold, and I squinted my eyes a bit, and I could indeed see the resemblance.

Remove the beard from Halloway, give... Arnold a fuller complexion, and they could as well be twins.

Sovereign Caldus chuckled, ”Old man, don’t tell me we are about to get a new Sovereign added to our number.”

I glanced at the Master of Flame. Why did it seem that he was enjoying what was happening a little too much, as if he did not care that this war was tearing the world apart... He just seemed so amused.

”Crack... Boom!”

There was no warning... which was super interesting because a moment before, my Path Perception had shown me an attack from a Sovereign, even before it happened.

I think I blanked out for a moment, and when my perception returned, I was alone, and there was no one with me. I became confused; I thought that there should be sixteen Sovereigns in front of me. Why was I alone?

And as the confusion was settling itself, the pain arrived... but it was the wrong kind of pain.

I know what a broken body feels like, better than I think most people would ever know. I have had my ribs driven into my lungs, I have been burned down to the bone, decapitated, corrupted, shredded, crushed, bled out... I have had a Thul pour flesh magic up my arm and try to change me from the inside.

Every one of those hurt in a way that had a shape... I mean, I could tell which part of me was broken, and which part was not.

Whatever I had just suffered did not have a shape. This was pain with no edges, coming from everywhere, because... I think there was not enough of me left in one piece for the damage to have a boundary.

I could not see and could only perceive through my other senses because I no longer had eyes; I could not scream or touch my body. Something... had gone through me and taken the greater part of me with it, and had done it so cleanly and so quickly that I had not been present for any of it.

I should have been a red mist over nine hundred miles of ocean.

[ Unbroken Titan — lethal wound ignored ]

[ Law of Flesh — error detected ]

[ Correcting. ]

The notifications flickered across what remained of my consciousness, and I clung to them like a drowning man clings to a rope. The Unbroken Titan had done its work. It had ignored the first lethal wound I had received in this engagement. Damn... I had just been vaporized in an instant.

I did not know how long I hung there, suspended in the void of my own unmaking. Time had lost its meaning. There was only the pain, and the slow, grinding process of my body trying to remember what it was supposed to be.

And then my body started putting itself back together while I was still traveling, and that is the part that made me understand what I actually am now.

I had it backwards you know. I have had it backwards since I acquired this power. I don’t know why I kept thinking of Adamantium Titan as armour that kept me from being hurt.

Sure it could do that, but even this wall could be breached, and when that happens the Law of Flesh looks at what is left of me and compares it to what I am supposed to be, and where the two do not match it does not care what caused the difference, or how large the difference is, or whether the thing that made it was a Sovereign or a god or the sky itself. It simply files the difference as an error, and then it corrects the error, and it keeps correcting until the sums agree again.

Bone came first, threading out into the empty air along the line where I ended, and I felt every centimeter of it appear, silver and then grey and then something with the density of poured stone.

Then the channels, laying themselves along the bone like worms crawling into place, glowing so hard I could see the light through what was not yet skin. Then the deep sheathing, and then muscle over that, in the order the Law prefers rather than the order a body grows in.

My left arm arrived before my left lung, which is an experience I do not recommend and cannot describe properly.

The first thing that came back was my hearing. It arrived in a rush, a flood of sound that was almost as painful as the silence had been. The wind screamed past me, as my healing body tore through it at many times the speed of sound.

I don’t know where my Title was finding the energy it was pouring into the healing of my body, but when it was done, I was filled with endless energy, and I had no idea how much my Adamantium Titan skill must have grown from the fact that I had just been vaporized.

My perception returned, and I discovered that I was still moving past the speed of sound and with a roar of anger, I released the binding on my flesh and became an Adamantium Titan, causing my flesh to explode in size as I was surrounded by a storm.

Against all laws of nature, my body instantly came to a stop, as a shockwave erupted from the position that caused the ocean below me to cave down as if impacted by a meteor.

My perception gave me a figure... I had just traveled nearly 1,200 miles from my initial position.