Demonic Devourer ch. 110

My heightened Mind (Speed) attribute has always been beneficial in slowing down my perception of time, granting me the subjective processing period for me to determine what I can do.

Right now, Mind (Speed) sits at a ridiculous 219; the world around me may as well be frozen.

Except the angel’s explosion. That, even in this fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second, scorches the threads of reality, reaching out for us. I’m certain that even if a direct hit from the detonation doesn’t kill us, the resultant collapse into the void will.

That angel was formerly Angel 191, if the Appraise is accurate, which I can’t guarantee. It was a Category 4, and even then, it might not have been able to kill us once our Titan powers came into play.

But its self-inflicted death has drawn out every last iota of power stored within its body and more. The power it detonates with is beyond mine, beyond Sierra’s—maybe even beyond a true Titan’s.

Even at the level of speed I wield, I don’t have unlimited time. The expanding angelic supernova will reach us in a matter of subjective minutes, and Sierra’s attributes are nowhere near mine. For most of her life, she’s only been human, and I’ve had the benefits of my first class evolution pouring additional attribute points into me through every single level.

So our escape plan is going to rely entirely on me. Shit.

I can’t die here. I refuse to die before I can become greater than Sapphire, greater than the Titans, greater than the entire fucking system.

But how? Up until this point, it’s been Sierra who’s been the one that’s discovered the paths of skill creation. It’s her that has true knowledge of the system’s working; it’s her that has a functioning mind, not a mutilated artificial soul.

Which means I need to figure something out.

In times past, the system has offered me power in moments of crisis. Any number of my traits have been provided by it, and I’ve unlocked three separate special skills by virtue of standing my ground and defying my circumstances, forcing the system to grant me something that can save me.

I don’t have that here. None of my skills are powerful enough—the only regular skills I have at Diamond tier are Smite, Siphon, Soulrend, and Devour.

I try each of them in turn, but Smite and Soulrend alike are offensive skills. I can’t stop an explosion with another one. Siphon, on the other hand, seems to work for the briefest of moments, but it burns out near instantly. Even at Diamond tier, there’s only so much power it can drain.

Devour is my best shot, but when I send my unique magic at the radiant cloud, even the slightest taste of the magic hurts like only divinity can burn me. I suspect that if I were a true demon and not tainted by the fragment of a god, I wouldn’t be alive now.

Okay. What does that leave me? Special skills and Titan skills. Those are my only options.

I can’t Manifest my nullspace, nor can I attempt to use Descent to drag us into it. I’ve tried already; the Blood Ocean is a much more pervasive hell than the Shifting Sands, and we have no control over any of it. There’s no way for us to use those two to ride through this.

Annihilate works, but it again the same problem as my regular offensive skills. Thanks to our journey destabilizing the Ninth Circle, I’ve become attuned enough to the stability of reality around us to know that the angel’s final attack is doing the same thing we did to the previous hell—except this time, it’s intentional and orders of magnitude more powerful.

Trying to use a reality-breaking skill to stop a destabilizing bomb like this is like trying to put a wildfire out with gasoline.

Defiance would be ideal, but that skill needs fuel. I have the insane urge to try to use the angelic nuke next to us to power Defiance, but that sends my instincts into a screaming panic. I don’t entirely discount it, but I set it further back in my lists of things to try.

Special skills, then. Soulpyre—no-go, for the same reason. I haven’t even tried to use Carnelian Domain in a while now, since my nullspace is so much more effective, but I suspect that my control over angelic magic can’t contest the dying breath of a Category 4 angel’s. At bare minimum, it was level 400, and even with my enhanced authority, I just can’t contest that.

Last One Standing allows me to use the sum of what has failed to kill me. Unfortunately, it takes time to use the skill, and I can’t use it at its full power. Maybe if I had Inome’s unlimited time freeze, I could step into a frozen moment with Sierra and figure a way out of this, but I can’t rely on the skill to give me what I need immediately, and immediacy is what we need here. My body and magic both move fast, but even with only a few points of difference, my mind moves faster. I’m not going to be able to use this special skill alone to escape; I table it, because there’s a possibility I pull something decent.

Other than those skills, all I have is Bloodpath, which I haven’t bothered advancing much because it’s been serviceable. I can’t help but regret not training it more. Using Bloodpath is more than enough for regular transport, but there’s no chance that it’ll be fast enough to outrun an explosion.

I don’t know what the final intensity of the supernova is going to be, but I suspect that it’s going to be massive. To escape it, I need power that can take us both far, far away.

What else do I have that I can work with?

Not much, except a potential advancement. Those have always come easily in life-or-death situations, and right now, I’m at level 200. Right on the edge of Category 2.

That still leaves me with a few questions. Will advancing to Category 2 do anything that genuinely helps us escape? And more importantly, how do I do it?

To grow to Category 1, I ate the fragment of a dead god that controlled me. Right now, I have no gods to eat, unless I count myself, and I’m reasonably sure that trying to Devour myself is bound to result in failure.

That can’t be the only way to advance Categories, right? Sierra, Adrian, Sapphire, Marie, Simon, Rin, and literally everyone I’ve fought in the last few weeks have been Category 1 or higher, and I don’t recall any of them mentioning killing a god to bring themselves to that level.

Sierra would know. She’d be able to identify a crucial element in progression and show me how to do it myself. My amalgam might have been able to, once upon a time, but now the most pertinent parts of that are gone, torn away along with any knowledge of the true nature of the system.

All things I need to find out for myself. On the one hand, I will never stop hating Sapphire for tearing a piece of me away. On the other, I’ve noticed that everything I truly learn from scratch has come out more useful and open to growth than the information I was born with. On the third, not having that knowledge might get me killed now.

Relentless energy courses through my veins, and I’m tempted to try to use that to boost my Bloodpath.

That’s a fool’s errand, though. The primordial chaos of the void is encroaching on us many times faster than the speed of sound; I can’t outrun that with my system-provided skills alone.

If the system won’t create a skill to save me, I’ll have to do it myself.

I’m not sure if I can handle this without Sierra, but I’ll try. I don’t have another option.

Fragments of memory come together to form the beginnings of something that could generously be called a plan.

It feels like it’s been ages since Novarath, though in actuality it’s probably been a month or so. Back then, when I made my first major steps towards true power, the system told me of a “skill bank” that would unlock at a future level.

Obviously, I haven’t yet obtained said skill bank.

But it exists. That means that somewhere—maybe in that primordial soup that’s between reality and the void—there’s a collection of power that I can affix to myself.

With Divinity removing my blindness to the authority that enables the system’s magic, it may actually be possible to obtain it.

First, I need to get that authority moving. I draw on the memories of creating our Defiance together, hoping I can get the rhythm right without someone to guide my hand.

I advance, I communicate. Saying the fundamental truth that makes me who I am to trigger this process just feels right.

Titan speech drains me less than it used to, and just as expected, it creates an instant in which systemless magic flows through my body. I take hold of it, relying on instinct and memory to shape it, expand it, feed it.

I try to use my skills, just a little, hoping that they’ll provide an inkling of the direction I need to push the authority in.

Blood spills forth from my body, seeping through my skin and coating me, and I force myself not to think, but to feel, to understand. If I think, I’ll reframe this in the context of the system that I’ve spent my short life beholden to, and that’s not what I’m doing right now.

Now, I need to go beyond. I need to break my boundaries.

Without Sierra, the process is so much harder. She truly does understand; even if it’s not the full level of understanding that the gods must have held in the time before the fall, it’s more than mine.

I can’t find the skill bank. I can’t tell what I have to do to amplify my own skills. My understanding is vague, incomplete; I know I miss the forest for the trees, but I can’t make myself see how everything links together.

What little I can find, however, is the burgeoning mass of authority at my core. The sum of everything I am, not quite contained by the system. It’s like an overflowing bucket, if the bucket was compartmentalized into a thousand different pieces—I can’t explain it, because if I try to explain it, the picture falls apart.

Though I don’t know how to find a way to improve my skills, I think I can find the traits that currently act on me. Those are the portions of the “bucket” that are currently swirling, pulsing with power. All of them are active, which surprises me—I haven’t hit the trigger conditions to have Soulless or Merciless or Free Bird active right now, but my authority restlessly shifts nonetheless.

Is it because they’re imprinted onto my soul, rather than aspects of power that I have to choose to use? I can see that a couple of them are at work more than usual, and given their shapes, I can guess which they are—Demonic Heritage, Voidtouched, Endling, Relentless, and, most obviously, Divinity.

That’s more than I thought would be active. Relentless is the second most active, and I picture it as a dog, frothing at the mouth to escape its boundaries. I could return and try to use that power to enhance a skill—or I could not. I could do something else entirely.

The “plan” I had hinged on being able to find a way to enhance one of my skills or grant myself another one, but I think there might be potential here.

Unlike the other traits, which are all passive, Relentless is a trait with a trigger, and it’s tied much more loosely to the rest of my authority than the others. The system’s grasp on it is looser when it’s active, like it’s opened a door for it to escape through and empower me.

I may not be true divinity yet, but if the system is going to grant me the opportunity to abuse it, I’ll take it.

I reach into myself and rip Relentless from its position, severing the skill from the rest of me and the system, isolating it as a mass of systemless power.

The angel’s explosion has gotten far closer in the time I’ve been working. I barely even noticed, but it’s mere feet away from us now. It’s erasing reality everywhere it touches, sending the hell it touches crashing into the primordial void beneath us.

I only have one shot at this. A mass of power stands before me, formerly imprinted upon me by the system and now imprinted on nothing at all. I can only hope this works.

But if there’s one thing I know about power, it’s how to take it for myself.

I Devour the remnants of my own trait, and as the systemless magic flows back into me, I reshape it just like before. The combined experience of creating Defiance and releasing Relentless is enough to make this comprehensible to me. Instead of simply letting the experience flow into me, I shape its authority, mold it to me, and I tell it to make me more.

And, bit by bit, it does.

Trait lost: Relentless

Undefined behavior detected.

I’ll learn what this world has to offer, I promised myself, and I’ll break it all.

Undefined behavior was not able to be processed.

The system can’t process it, so I do. Make me strong enough to break you.

Category 1 -> 2

Initiating ascension…

…

Undefined ascension detected.