Death: Genesis

The spear, glowing with radiant power, skittered off Zeke’s ribs, and he returned the failed attack with a backhanded blow from his hammer. The Knight took it on her shield, activating some sort of skill, and for a brief second, she resisted the momentum of the strike. Then, an explosion of sound, the skill broke, and Voromir sent the woman flying backward into her subordinates.

A hail of arrows fell upon Zeke. Some hit with enough force to stagger him, but most glanced off his metallic skin. Only one or two managed to pierce his flesh, but even then, they only made it an inch into his body before grinding to a halt. He slapped the offending arrows away just as dozens of magical attacks descended.

Fireballs, jagged shards of ice, and blades of wind were the most prominent, but there were quite a few other, more esoteric forces at play. Zeke felt his body weight increase a hundred-fold as someone harnessed the power of gravity, and bright lights seared his retinas at the behest of some sort of light mage. Chains of darkness erupted from the ground, wrapping around his limbs, and a dozen curses seared themselves onto his soul.

It was almost enough to make him stumble.

With a roar, Zeke harnessed his Will, ripping apart the chains and eradicated the primitive runes governing the curses. At the same time, he endured the volley of spells, trusting his insane durability to see him through. But even with all of his advantages – his high attributes and his innate resistances – he couldn’t deny the pain of having all that power directed at him.

But it was a long way from harming him, and even if that barrage did some damage, it would have easily been dealt with by [Hand of Divinity]. That skill wasn’t necessary. His foes, while numerous, were not strong enough to offer him any threat.

The same could not be said for the man that suddenly appeared atop the nearby wall. Using [Inspect], Zeke determined that the white-armored Knight had reached the peak of the Eternal Realm, meaning that he was level one-hundred. By comparison, Zeke was only level ninety-eight, which meant that he should have been at a disadvantage.

But levels weren’t everything.

“Face me, or I will slaughter everyone here!” he shouted. To punctuate that statement, Zeke used [Eye of Reckoning]. A beam of pure destruction erupted from the center of his forehead and scorched its way across the battlefield. It slammed into the invisible shield encircling the city, but that barrier shattered after only a second. The people behind it barely had time to widen their eyes in shock before they were obliterated.

Almost a hundred people died in the space of a second, but then the shield snapped back into place, stronger than before. Zeke could punch through it again, but not without serious expenditure of mana.

But his enemies didn’t know that. For all they could tell, he was a monster, which meant that they thought he was equipped with the nearly endless supply of energy characteristic of the most powerful creatures. That was one advantage they had over sapient races, though that was mitigated somewhat by the fact that monsters were almost always highly specialized – meaning that they usually only had one or two skills available to them.

“I will do it again and again until you fight me, coward,” Zeke spat. “Hide behind your little wall of mana if you wish, but know that in doing so, you doom those you were meant to protect. Choose now, or I will make the choice for you.”

To highlight the statement, Zeke kept [Eye for Reckoning] on the edge of reactivation. From experience, he knew that doing so would cause the rune governing the skill to become visible, and it would glow so bright that even from a distance, there was no chance that the Knight in charge would fail to see it.

Then, Zeke started counting down from five, fully intending to let loose with another beam of death if the Knight chose to ignore his ultimatum. When he reached the end of the countdown, the man finally leaped down, landing with a resonant thud. The impact kicked up quite a lot of dust – some of which were the ashes of combatants Zeke had destroyed with [Eye of Reckoning].

Perhaps some of them had been the peak Knight’s friends. Or failing that close of a relationship, maybe he at least knew their names. Followed their careers, perhaps. He might have even targeted some of them for promotions.

Yet, as much as Zeke might have empathized with the Knight’s emotions, he didn’t feel sorry for the man. The Knights associated with the Radiant Host were horrible people who’d, at the very least, looked the other way when confronted with one injustice after another. Zeke only needed to remember the state of the brothel back in Moreth to silence any doubts.

Or any pity for what he was about to do.

For what he’d already done to those loyal to the Imperium.

“They never had a chance to be anything else,” Eveline remarked as the Knight strode forward. He wore white lacquered armor and carried a longsword in one hand and a shield in the other. At his waist was an elaborately jeweled dagger that practically glowed with mana. A powerful artifact, then, and one the man would surely attempt to use against Zeke. Eveline then added, “He probably didn’t have a choice in who he became.”

“There’s always a choice, Eveline.”

“That’s a lie, and you absolutely know it. We’re a product of our environments. Maybe he would have turned out the same in another situation, but you can’t stand there and tell me that this man has been unaffected by being in the Imperium, where one wrong statement could see him hanged,” Eveline said.

“He could have left. He could have –”

“Easy to say when it’s someone else. This man is what he was made to be. He was just –”

“If you say he was just following orders, I’m going to lock you away.”

“Ezekiel, I –”

Zeke forcefully ignored her. It wasn’t the same as using [Bulwark of the Triumvirate] to imprison and quarantine her, but it was enough to let the former demon know that he didn’t want to continue a line of discussion. Thankfully, she took it as it was intended, and she went silent. However, there was a significant degree of ire radiating from her presence within his mind.

He ignored that, too.

Instead, he focused on his opponent, who’d covered a few dozen feet over the course of Zeke’s conversation with the mind spirit. In that time, the man had grown to a height of almost twenty feet. Clearly, it was a similar skill as the one used by various Knights of Adontis, but even with that powerful ability at play, he was still much smaller than Zeke’s titanic form.

Finally, the man came to a stop, his shield held aloft.

“Monster.”

“I was going to say the same thing,” Zeke said.

“You think me the one at fault?” the man asked, cocking his head to the side. His face was hidden by a full helm, but Zeke didn’t need to see his expression to know what it meant. “You invaded my country. You slaughtered my people. You –”

“No.”

“No?”

“You don’t get to take the high road,” Zeke said, rolling his shoulders. “Your armies attacked my people hundreds of miles from here. The Imperium started this, and now that I’ve seen the state of this empire, I’m more than happy to be the one to finish it. You enslave those you deem beneath you, and when you’re done with them, you have no qualms about slaughtering them. I have seen it with my own eyes. You’d rather kill the enslaved than let them be free. Monster, you called me. But in my eyes, you and yours qualify for that label far more than I ever could. More than any creatures I’ve ever seen. And let me tell you, I have fought monsters you can only imagine.”

“It is a skill, isn’t it? You are no Titan, as you are labeled by the Framework. What are you?”

“People keep asking me that.”

“And how have you answered it in the past?” the Knight asked.

“Just a man, and one who’s tired of allowing people like you and yours to continue to exist. Your goddess picked a fight with me. I make her uneasy. One day, I intend to stand before her true form and make her answer for the sins of her followers,” Zeke said. “But for now, I’m going to have to settle for you.”

“You truly believe that. You have no idea who I am, and yet, you believe yourself my superior. Is that hubris? Or are you just that powerful?” the knight asked.

“We’ll see.”

“There’s no getting around this, is there?”

“Unless you surrender the city to me, free all your slaves, and turn every single Knight over to me, then no,” Zeke stated. “There’s no getting around it. We’re going to fight, you’re going to die, and I’m going to purge this city from the face of the Eternal Realm. That, I can promise you.”

The Knight let out a barely audible sigh. Then, he raised his sword and said, “So be it.”

The moment the words left the man’s lips, Zeke felt a massive surge of mana in the air. Glancing up, he saw a spinning vortex of radiant energy. Normally, that particular brand of mana was golden, but this particular case presented so brightly that the area was cast in a wide variety of brilliant colors.

Then, that vortex tightened. At first, it had been a little more than a hundred feet wide, but with every passing second, it lost around fifteen feet in diameter. However, it didn’t lose any intensity, though. Instead, it grew denser with ever contraction until it was only teen feet wide and hovering directly over Zeke’s head.

He could have moved.

One use of [Shifting Sands], and he could be a quarter of a mile away. He didn’t use the skill, though. He wanted to see just how hard a peak member of the Radiant Host could really hit. Sure, a provincial Knight stationed in what amounted to a frontier town probably wasn’t the strongest the Imperium had to offer, but he was a good measure of what Zeke might expect going forward.

Finally, after ten seconds, the vortex coalesced into a dense beam of radiance that hit Zeke with the force of an atomic bomb. The earth beneath his feet disintegrated immediately, digging a hundred-foot-wide crater in the ground. Vaguely, he was aware of a shockwave that tore across the battlefield, melting the bodies of the warriors who’d dared to fight Zeke earlier in the battle.

Thankfully, his own army was a few hundred yards away, safely nestled behind shields erected by the spiritweavers. The Knights atop the wall were protected as well, though a few cracks spread across the stone edifice.

But the real damage happened within a few feet of Zeke’s location. In that small circle, everything was destroyed. Even Zeke’s durable body – with all its resistances – couldn’t stand up to that. In a detached way, he felt his metallic body melt under the onslaught. Then, the resulting quicksilver-like substance started to evaporate.

Zeke let it go on for nearly five seconds before he took hold of his body with [Hand of Divinity], gripping it with the incomparable force of his Will. Normally, he employed it to destroy but in this case, he reversed his intent, preventing the complete destruction of his body. It held long enough for [Hand of Divinity] to do its work, healing him without issue.

The barrage of radiant destruction continued for almost an entire minute before, at last, the power waned. When it finished, Zeke found himself kneeling at the bottom of a molten crater.

His unblemished body shimmered in the last vestiges of that radiant light.

He took a deep breath, realizing that he’d used his Will in an entirely new way. But it made sense to him. The key was that Radiance, for all the power it could bring to bear, was not pure destruction. And so, it could never conquer his Will.

Zeke let that breath out, then straightened to his full height. The crater dug by the Knight’s skill was more than a hundred feet deep, and Zeke had found himself at the nadir. So, he flexed his legs and leaped to the top, where he found an extremely surprised Knight approaching the crater.

“Not bad,” Zeke said. “My compliments. A few months ago, that definitely would have killed me.”

“What…”

“I guess whatever doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger, though. Now it’s my turn,” he said, hefting Voromir. The hammer was glowing with the residual heat of the beam of radiance, and yet, Zeke could feel that the weapon hungered to return the attack with one of its own. He intended to oblige the weapon’s brutal nature.