Demonic Devourer ch. 114

Angelic Tower — Root

As it turns out, Adrian doesn’t even need Kirin to take him through the floors.

After his abnormal Category ascension, he’s flush with power. Against monsters that are Category 1 at best, he is practically a god.

Adrian is flush with power now, and the world bends to his will.

Up until this point, he’s never come close to understanding what a Category 3’s power entails. For a long time, he was weak enough that even a Category 3 could crush him with just their raw attributes alone, let alone their true power.

Now that he’s here, Kirin is a willing and able teacher—though also a bit of a flabbergasted one.

“There’s no fucking way,” Kirin says on the first day.

He still doesn’t believe it until Adrian demonstrates his new power. It’s roughshod and unbalanced, but the ocean’s waves emerge nonetheless, suppressing all magic and life around them.

Over the course of the next few hours, Kirin helps him discover what his power is.

“You can’t think of your concept in the same way that you think of your skills or domain,” he explains. “You may have noticed that you even your own perception of it is different, because it’s not attached to you in the same way that the others are.”

“I think I’m with you on that,” Adrian replies. It would be far tougher to understand if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s just survived—and crucially, remembered surviving—the trial on the 25th floor. “It’s less connected to the system, isn’t it?”

“Not exactly, but close enough. I mean, maybe it’s different for you. I don’t get the opportunity to work with other Cat 3s that much, because I’m usually not fighting Titans.”

“Why not?” Adrian asks. “You were decent against the proto-Titan back in Whitestar.”

“For Category 3s, there’s a ten-year mortality rate of something like eighty percent,” Kirin says drily. “If you survive, you have a much higher chance to advance to an even higher category, but personally? I prefer living.”

No wonder Evelyn thinks she could dust you in a fight, Adrian thinks. Out loud, he says, “Point taken. Okay. You were saying?”

“I think of my concept as a frame,” Kirin continues. “Watch.”

The 26th floor is a simple maze of pristine white marble and cages, with monsters and puzzles everywhere—this particular one is a dog-like creature with six heads. Category 1. Nothing particularly special.

“My concept,” Kirin says, “is Armory.”

He snaps his fingers, and a dozen items manifest around him—guns, blades, and esoteric cubes that seem to fold in on themselves.

They orbit him, speeding up quickly. They blur into a single ring-like shape within seconds, and Kirin extends a hand.

Twelve different types of magic surge forward from his open palm. Adrian isn’t nearly as adept at differentiating magic as Sierra is, but he recognizes flame, electricity, and of course the high-pressure water that is his element. The others are more esoteric.

The poor mutant dog doesn’t stand a chance. It burns, then drowns, then is subjected to a number of effects that Adrian doesn’t understand. When it’s done, the creature is nothing but a bloody puddle of flesh on the ground.

Kirin’s weapons slow to a stop. “I’m not sure if you noticed, but have you seen what these weapons are?”

Adrian uses Identify Weapon, one by one, then pauses on the third one. Given what he knows now, he wonders, is it possible to expand his skill to look at them all at once?

He reaches out, forcing himself to think as little as he can, and he shapes the skill.

Hm. Not quite. Not yet.

Adrian continues trying it. He doesn’t need to examine all the weapons to tell what’s going on.

“The weapons don’t match the effects you were using,” he says. “This sword coats itself in spatial energy, but you shot it like a ray.”

“Exactly,” Kirin says. “Your concept is less like a skill and more like the base of your magic itself. When you exercise it, you are limited only by your perception of what it is. So long as you know in your heart, mind, and soul what your concept is capable of, you can do it. Using the concept is using the sum of your skills, but much less limited.”

Adrian raises an eyebrow. “That sounds… really powerful.”

“Of course it is,” Kirin says. “Did you think it wouldn’t be?”

“How long is your cooldown?”

“The time between uses is more flexible than a special skill’s or a domain’s,” the Relic Hunter says. “It depends on how the concept is utilized. This here was simple. I’ll be out for half an hour, maybe, and then I can use it again at full power. I could even use it again, though that would make it take longer to recover fully.”

“So it’s like a resource, not a single-usage skill,” Adrian says.

“Yep.”

“Alright. Let me try.”

The Ocean’s Waves. Adrian isn’t sure what to make of the singularity he’s achieved. Kirin’s is obvious—his entire existence is dedicated to using the array of weapons he’s collected, so it stands to reason that the sum of his skills is an Armory.

One word—a simple concept. Adrian hasn’t done much study of Category 3s before, but Sierra’s mentioned some of them in passing, and their concepts all sound similarly simple and effective. Scour. Control. Survivor.

Adrian’s is the only one he knows of that possesses a more complex concept. He’s unsure how much of that is because of what the fae ordered, how much of that is him, and, perhaps most importantly, whether that’s a good or a bad thing.

Waves can be many things, he thinks. He remembers his meditations inside the Titan Inome’s time bubble. The ocean gives, and it takes, and it does not forgive.

He goes with that for his first usage of his singularity in the next room. Adrian visualizes it using his domain as a base.

Here, the monster isn’t just a single enemy—it’s a swarm of amorphous creatures that remind him of the proto-Titan of Time’s fetal form, just way, way smaller. And less dangerous. They spit acid that has the potential to sizzle through even Kirin’s armor, but it’s so, so slow.

Adrian almost wonders how he ever struggled against creatures like this. His control over liquids that aren’t pure water isn’t nearly as strong, but he uses a simple Misty Spray, an old Silver-tier skill that he hasn’t bothered using in a while, and the acid burns the ground instead.

He closes his eyes, imagines his domain, and pulls on the new source of power glued to his soul.

The room fills with water immediately. Unlike his domain, which spills out from him in a matter of seconds, overwhelming everything around it, this room simply is submerged now, as if it always has been. A wave of force ripples through it, destabilizing the walls and the bodies of everything within.

Adrian doesn’t question it. He uses Hydrokinesis to pressurize the water around the numerous slime-like creatures here and obliterates them. It’s easier than it ever has been—he can actually feel the skill slipping its bounds, and he thinks that for a second, he might have even pulled on the fluids within the creatures’ body.

The ocean is gone as abruptly as it arrives, taking the corpses. Adrian and Kirin aren’t even wet.

You have advanced to level 301!

1 stat point gained.

1 skill point gained.

Huh. He didn’t even complete an objective for killing the slimes, but he’s leveled up? Maybe it’s the new sense of power that he has after the trial on the 25th—or maybe using his singularity is a new key to his progression.

Leveling feels different, too. He’s been granted a couple of points, as per usual, but those points have a feel to them. Rather than just telling the system to add them to his body, Adrian feels like he might be able to grab them and devour them himself.

He wonders if this is how Evelyn has felt, all this time.

His singularity, he notices, has barely taken a hit. Adrian is already basically ready to go again.

“I think we can work with this,” he tells Kirin.

Less than an hour later, they make it to the 27th floor.

Then the 28th. Then the 29th.

They have to stop to rest and nourish themselves, and there aren’t climber stations past a certain point, but Kirin reveals that his Hammerspace doesn’t only store weapons—he has enough rations to feed an army in there.

“My boss used to joke that I should’ve gotten the Hoarder class,” Kirin says, handing Adrian a surprisingly fresh bowl of hot soup.

“Your boss? Who was that?”

“You don’t know her,” Kirin says. “She died a hundred and twenty years ago against Lya, Titan of the Living Moon.”

“Titan of the Living Moon?” Adrian asks through a mouthful of soup.

“Keep your mouth closed when you chew,” Kirin says. “Yes. That’s the only time it’s awoken in recorded history. I hope it won’t happen again.”

Adrian shudders.

The tower seems to shudder with him.

“Mm. I don’t like the look of that,” Kirin says.

Ah. The tower didn’t seem to shudder. It actually did.

“Reality’s not doing so hot, is it?”

“Doesn’t look like it. I wish I could see what the world is like outside, but that means throwing away progress.”

“Do you still have a reason to be here?” Adrian asks. “You said we were going to go for an angelic boon and jump into the hells, but… I’m pretty sure the fae implied the hells were already breaking.”

“Then we need to speed up, don’t we?” Kirin says. “Come. The earliest I’ve heard of getting one is on the fiftieth floor, but we’re likely not getting there that fast.”

“Then let’s go faster,” Adrian replies, handing Kirin his bowl back.

They reach the fiftieth floor the next day.

Traveler.

You must accelerate.

The first Titan. The original god.

Connect the dots, traveler, and ascend.

Sapphire Clearwater is coming.

Her ritual will never stop.

You and your partners.

Save us.

And the second trial begins.

#

The Sixth Circle - The Neverending Night

This hell is already breaking when we get into it.

I recognize it from my time looking through the paths that the system offered to me. This is the Neverending Night. It’s dark enough that I can’t see at all, and if I weren’t who I was, it would break my mind with darkness that reaches inside me.

Three circles ago, this hell might have been debilitating.

Here and now, I am the eighteenth Titan, and a shadow of another Titan’s nullspace will not defeat mine.

My nullspace still doesn’t have an exact rule within it. I can sense that its authority is loose, unformed, and undirected, but I’m not yet sure what I want to do with it. I don’t want to form it into something that the system understands, because being inexplicable has only ever worked to my advantage.

I figure that I’ll work on it when I have to. That’s how it always has been, and likely how it always will be.

Back to the hell, though—the darkness isn’t absolute for two reasons. First: my Titan ability is all about impossibility, and so I am one light in the infinite black.

Second: reality is coming apart at the seams.

I think the degradation from the angel nuke is scaling up through the hells. With my Annihilates, I destabilized the Ninth Circle until it started falling apart, so that’s probably gone. The Eighth has been shattered beyond a shadow of a doubt. There’s no way the angel’s explosion didn’t eliminate all of it, especially when it was so powerful that its effects reached into the Seventh.

The Sixth looks even less stable than the Seventh did.

“I suspect that the devastation of the Eighth Circle led to a chain reaction,” Sierra says. “Like knocking a load-bearing pillar down, perhaps.”

“That checks out,” I reply, surveying our surroundings. Unlike the last two hells, there is solid ground to stand on—pure black, of course, just like the rest, but it’s there. “I wonder if this is affecting the surface.”

“If Del’s theory on how the hells work is correct, I think it has to,” Sierra says. “It may simply be a reflection of reality, but if your shadow starts bleeding, there’s likely something wrong with you, too.”

“That’s true,” I say. “Give me some time to recover my strength. I don’t think there’s anything for us here.”

I can’t cross more than one hell at a time, which is disappointing. It makes some degree of sense, though—while my power has been vastly enhanced, my conceptual weight as been too. Crossing a single boundary takes a massive amount of power.

“You could try to eat the dark,” Sierra suggests jokingly.

“I might,” I say. I was able to Devour a bit of a hell before, and though I wasn’t able to hold it, I tasted the angel’s detonation. In the last circle, I was able to Devour a Sapphire-tier Jade Lightning, which indicates that I might be able to eat more of this hell. “I’d rather avoid destabilizing it too fast, though.”

That’s the only actual issue with this hell so far. I think that both of us can survive the primordial void now, but I’m not sure that we could make our way back.

Better safe than sorry. That’s a rare sentiment from me, but I haven’t come this far just to lose it all now.

“I’m going to see if I can get any progress with my nullspace,” Sierra says. “I still need, like, eighteen more levels before I hit a point where the system will give me enough of a kick for me to manipulate myself into going full Titan.”

“Are you unable to use my Devour?” I ask.

Sierra laughs. “Evelyn, I can copy most anything you do, but that one skill is yours and yours alone.”

“That’s not entirely true,” I disagree. “There were other experiments using it.”

She shakes her head. “Believe me, I’ve tried. It’s not possible for me to use. I don’t know why, but I can’t.”

“Weird. You were able to become a proto-Titan via your Blue Mage class, but you can’t use my most basic skill?”

Sierra shrugs. “That’s the way of the world, I suppose.”

I awaken.

Both of us snap to attention immediately, weapons and skills at the ready. That voice is a Titan’s. Not one we’ve seen before.

Carnelian.

It’s talking to me.

Neverending Night, I reply. What’s its name again? Skoton.

Come to think of it, it just said it’s awakened? How long has it been since the last Titan awakening?

“It’s too early,” Sierra says. “A Titan shouldn’t be surfacing this soon after the last one.

The awakening of an eighteenth is not insignificant.

What do you want, I reply back. The last few time I’ve talked to a Titan, it’s wanted me to keep my hands off its shadow. This one… doesn’t sound like that.

Your potential has awakened, eighteenth. The first chose wisely.

The first? Sapphire?

As I said, the first. We awaken together, and we see.

See what? Sierra adds.

Ah, the prospective nineteenth. Welcome, upstart. To answer: we see the future and the past as one. We see our original enemy. We see that which caused the fall.

Sierra’s eyes open wide, and I take that to mean the other Titan has just said something awfully significant.

The fall, she repeats.

The first plans our revenge. Rise, upstarts, and join us.

The darkness around us starts to fall away, and the Titan’s presence fades from our minds.

“Uhh,” I say. “This is going to be interesting, isn’t it?”

“Like you can’t believe,” Sierra says.

#

Elsewhere

The king beyond the gate opens their eyes.

The Titan scourge that the fair folk failed to eradicate a millennium ago have awakened, and their actions make themselves known across the anchored reality and those adjacent.

“What are you thinking, old friends?” they whisper.

A thousand plans are in play already from both sides. The travelers have been pushed by others to fight their mutual enemy, but the shattered divinity seeks to create themselves anew, perhaps with this Carnelian entity as a vessel.

The Titans—no, the gods. The broken pieces of the gods that survived the fae inquisition and the fall that came after—they seek Carnelian.

“We must intervene,” they say to themselves.

And finish what we started.

“Angel 1,” they say. “Finish it.”

The waiting angel departs, bound for the broken world beneath the gate.