Sacrifice Mage

Chapter 245 (B3: 74): Rise

Path Interactions. Right. I had totally forgotten those were a thing, which I couldn’t be blamed for because they hadn’t occurred in what felt like ages. It had been several months since my last one, though I had to admit that it had been several months since my Paths were evolving too.The bright words on the blue screen were familiar, though. I recognized them from one of my previous Path Interactions. I knew where they had come from.

Back then, when I had used Soul Sacrifice on a piece of a Blight Swarm bug, my spirit had been physically transported across space and time into the memory. I hadn’t been able to affect anything, yet I had possessed enough presence to be sensed by an Ascendant and a budding Paragon too.

This time was much the same, except even more intense. I was physically transported through space-time yet again, this time with my actual body in tow.

I blinked when I could see again. I was inside the temple, sure, but I was also in an otherworldly realm now too. Where the Nether Vein’s metallic walls didn’t cover the temple and the neighbourhood, the cosmos itself did. The mountainside, the streets, and far too many of the buildings were all clad in shades of night, dotted with innumerable stars, nebulae here and there, and even comets streaking through here and there.

The sight was awestriking. I’d have liked to stay and enjoy, to watch the glimmering stars and everything else space itself could present. It made me desperately wish for a telescope just then.

But I had work to do, so I kept moving. I kept walking towards my goal.

More strangeness impinged on me with relentless ferocity. I wasn’t breathing air so much as metal turned into gas. Somehow, I was both hot and cold at the same time. At times, I felt like I was swimming through murky ice, and at others, I was floating through thin air even when my feet was on the ground. This new world, this other realm, was .

A spiralling protrusion towered off the centre of the temple, rising higher and higher like a staircase. It was at the tip of this rise that the eye I had seen earlier now rested.

In fact, as I got closer, I could see even more weirdness I had missed earlier. The eye was weeping liquid gold, which washed over the familiar figure of the Vaunted, daubing her in molten power.

I didn’t bother climbing. Gravity took me straight up. Just like before, my Aspects came up like butter. The tiniest intention and what I wished came into being, like I didn’t even need mana at all. It made me feel so overpowered, and in a wholly different way compared to anything else I had ever done.

“Are you done yet?” I asked when I reached the Vaunted’s level.

She slowly turned to face me. I could see her trying to tame the scowl that threatened to break out on her face. Her words echoed through the space as she spoke. “How are you persistent? No one was supposed to be able to enter this realm. This is the . I know you’ve been here before, but that should be no reason for you to interfere again.”

“It’s none of your business how I’m here.” I raised my mace. My good old trusty weapon that I hadn’t lost despite everything that had happened. “This is your last warning. Stop, or I’ll make you stop.”

She laughed. “You truly think you can stop a god?”

Before I could reply one way or another, she acted. The liquid gold dropping from the eye above us now stormed outwards. It sizzled where it touched me, but then it began to make me feel impossibly cold.

I blinked when I saw what was happening. Every droplet of the shimmering liquid that had touched me was slowly pulling off my body, and wherever it was coming away, it was dragging out a piece of me with it. A piece of my .

Reverence Everlife was obviously trying to stop it. The golden armour encasing every inch of my body was repelling the liquid’s effect. I could feel it fizzing as it reacted against whatever power was stored within that liquid.

Nevertheless, it alarmed me just how much it was affecting me. I could feel the first tugs of unconsciousness. She was attacking my very spirit.

“You see the power of a god?” she asked. “Are you beginning to grasp even the slightest idea of what sort of strength this grants us? And I haven’t even hurt you in truth yet.”

I cursed. She was absolutely right. The Vaunted was basically toying with me.

“If you yourself are affected so severely,” she said. “Imagine what would happen to the hapless souls outside of the Beyond…”

My eyes widened in alarm. I quickly looked behind. The golden liquid was turning into a flood of power spreading farther and farther outwards. It had already consumed a huge chunk of the temple, and now, it was pushing against the barrier I had struggled against. Threatening to spill out into the world I had crossed in from.

I focused on Entropy, channelling Ignition Charge to call on Framework yet again. Entropy had been able to decay everything I had targeted with it so far, so it should work here too.

The Vaunted didn’t react even once. Not even when a sea of curling white horns spread out to cover the entire space, quickly sinking into the glowing golden power she had flung out.

Their interaction was strange, for sure. Entropy was destroying it, which was a relief. But Entropy was getting destroyed in return. The Framework of white, decaying mana was breaking down as it touched the Vaunted’s—the gigantic eye’s—gleaming energy. It wasn’t enough. My Ignition Charge wasn’t going to be able to stop it on its own.

“Pathetic,” the Vaunted said. “I knew you were nothing but a sham. One who merely benefited off good fortune. It had to end at one point, and now, your fortune meets its end.”

The gold swarmed me too.

I screamed as my soul began to get dragged out of my body. Even Reverence Everlife was failing to stop it. And if I was struggling, the people of Ring Four would be dying in droves.

This had to stop.

I needed to live.

My grasp on every single faculty I possessed slipped hard since I was losing control if my very soul. It was literally being ripped free. Framework swarmed me, the white horns coalescing on my body to take care of the golden liquid, but it wasn’t enough. It just slowed the tide.

So I added Sacrifice with Overclaim into the mix.

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That did it. The bit of my soul that had been torn loose now slammed back into me, banishing the cold unfeeling I had been afflicted with seconds ago. It was a Pits-cursed relief to see that Overclaim worked even on this… Divine Essence.

The Vaunted tutted. I wasn’t sure if she had seen that the golden liquid was failing, since I was still obscured by the stream that she had sent in my direction. More likely, she had just lost patience. So instead, she swiped her arm through the air, and space itself froze. I was encased in a veritable iceberg.

The sudden cold was so shocking, my brain stopped functioning for way too long. Reverence Everlife saved me once more. The shield cracked around my head and dove my skull. Whatever it did next finally let me think again. again.

Which was bad because for the next few moments my consciousness was swallowed up in the agony of a temperature so cold, it felt like I was actually burning.

My nerves were overloaded, my body not even getting the chance to shut down since it had never gotten to restart in the first place. My blood was literal ice in my veins, my lungs and heart were petrified. I was dead in ever sense of the word in the case of my awareness.

Immolation fired next. It took care of the frost withing me, restarting my vital heartbeats and lung expansion-contraction cycles. Then it spread outwards, faster and with growing intensity. I was overproducing the heat to counter the cold that had me thinking I had been doused in absolute zero.

Yet the Vaunted had accomplished what she had sought. I had been stopped temporarily only, but it had been enough to send the golden, soul-reaping power raining outside into the world.

Too late.

I had been too—

I screamed. No way. I was not letting them win.

Necessity bred innovation and discovery. More importantly, I had discovered that necessity bred . And that was what I needed for Sacrifice. I had noted that Sacrifice worked well enough in conjunction with Entropy to stop the golden tide. But I couldn’t be everywhere at once. I needed to make Sacrifice act remotely.

So I did.

Somehow, it clicked what that Affix was supposed to do or be. All I had to do was think of the condition where Sacrifice would work, and the only thing I needed was to make sure mana was there.

So now, I focused on the condition that wherever Framework existed, wherever I was channelling Entropy, Sacrifice would destroy what Entropy couldn’t.

My Framework, which had been slowly but surely dying in the golden onslaught, now revitalized with brilliant white radiance. It shimmered with power, with burning potency, with spikes and needles bursting out everywhere to stab through the Vaunted and her god’s broken auric power.

And then it Sacrificed them all.

The notification kept repeating. Now, I began to the Divine Essence that the Weave was talking about. All the strangeness I kept feeling within and without me began solidifying into actual, tangible material. Chunks of broken gold, glinting here and dull there, conjuring into being at the behest of the Sacrifice reward.

And every single chunk shot into me. It wasn’t painful. Tangible though they seemed, they didn’t mind the fact that there were clothes and flesh separating them.

I kept feeling each and every single shard ramming into my very soul.

The Vaunted laughed. “Oh, how you struggle. It seems I must end it myself, with the power I have gained. You fail to embrace the truth. Over and over, no matter where and how it strikes you, you fail to grasp your fundamental .”

I decided to shut her up by attacking. Everything was still ice, but with how Immolation was burning, I was able to carve my way through with a hiss of pressurized steam.

And then I was through, breaking out with a burst of icy crystals—

Only to be slammed back with a bash of her golden-liquid-infused arm.

I was sent crashing back through the ice that I had just broken apart. Reverence Everlife did its best to protect me, but even then, I felt my clothes and my skin tearing, icy chunks embedding into my flesh. I’d have been broken worse than the iceberg the Vaunted had manifested if I didn’t have Reverence Everlife with me.

Not that it was going to stop me for long. I was still alive. Wounded and suffering just a bit, trying not to panic with the light filling up every inch of available space, I was still determined to get to her. To stop her.

Good thing I had been decaying around me. Intake had been running all this time, and now I had a store of energy I could direct freely.

With Flare creating thrust, I threw myself at my opponent yet again.

The Vaunted hadn’t been lazy, of course. I wasn’t sure why whatever weird process she was performing wasn’t done, but I wasn’t about to complain. Even if I saw one of her hands burst with glowing white-gold fire while the other one encased itself in ice that gleamed blinding blue.

I shot at her again, flying forward as fast as I could. She grinned, her mouth stretching almost maniacally.

Our attacks landed simultaneously.

I didn’t actually land the mace blow. It was a feint. Trying the same thing, after it had demonstrably failed, was madness. I couldn’t afford insanity just then. Instead, I sacrificed my momentum to come to a complete halt. Then I thrust my hands forward, Photonic Compression turning all the absorbed energy into an obliterating beam.

It struck, eliciting a scream from her as her golden liquid aura was punctured through—along with her armour—to wound her directly.

But if anything beyond that happened, I didn’t get to see. She had attacked too. The flames in her left hand and the ice in her right crashed together, setting off a shockwave that had me shooting backwards yet again, the front half of my body literally both freezing and burning at the same time.

I didn’t get up just yet. There was no point in rushing her down. Plus, I needed Reverence Everlife to heal my wounds. I could hardly move, could barely breathe properly.

Maybe it was a small miracle I hadn’t died yet.

The Vaunted was cursing, though I didn’t hear anything specific. My mind was focused on how everything was intensifying. The golden light, the shimmering energy, an overwhelming pressure settling down on everything like a falling mountain.

I needed a new angle to fight all that. So I focused on combining Gravity, Flare, and Illumination. Pushing them out faster and faster to create the rumbling energy of Starburst that I knew I needed, trying to accelerate the process by using Multicast in conjunction with Manifestation to bring up all the Aspects at once while tying them together as well.

By the time I had gotten up, Starburst was ready. And then I Sacrificed it.

As if my body wasn’t already brimming inside and out with way too much energy, I was now flooded and frothing with magical madness. I was almost .

And I was already creating Starburst yet again. It came out so fast, it even took me aback at how my hands were shaking with the power I had trapped between them.

The Vaunted was ready in her own way too. Limned in glimmering gold entirely now, while also possessing the burning blue ice closer to her body, she was channelling molten power several degrees worse than when I had fought her earlier.

“You’re not dead?” she asked. Her voice came out in multiple octaves at once, like several versions of her were speaking at the same time. “Come and die already.”

“Ha.” I grinned. I couldn’t help it, despite the fact that my opposition was growing overwhelmingly stronger every second I wasted. “You should have killed me when you had the chance.”

“You’re right. I hate gnats like you annoying me constantly. But it’s good to have a witness. The process is complete, you see. Behold the rise of an Old God.”

I wasn’t there to behold anything. All I saw was the still-falling golden liquid of endless power. All I felt was the power blasting me from all sides and directions. All I knew was that I still stop it.

That I could still .

So, with Flare burning bright at my back, I thrust ahead. I could feel Power burgeoning, Burst Mana ready to boost even a Compound Aspect. My arms swung forward as I reached my target.

“Came to die?” The Vaunted grinned right back at me, her magic churning livid and fatal. “That won’t even tickle—”

I had never aimed for her. That had kept failing and failing. So instead, just as I got close enough, I rammed my hands . I unleashed Starburst into the waterfall of liquid gold.

Straight at the god coming to life over me.