Chapter 763 - Untethered and Uncontrolled

Zeke stepped forward, though he had no intention of closing on the Waymaster until he’d had a chance to truly take stock of the situation.  The creature undulated in the center of its chamber, arcs of gelatinous goo connecting it to the dome as well as the outer walls.  With every passing moment, Zeke could feel the threads unraveling. 

Not quickly. 

Instead, the pace represented gradual decay.  Yet, he could tell that it quickly approached the point of no return.  Suddenly, the decrepit state of the Ways and the abandonment of the city made perfect sense. 

Before Zeke could fully assess the problem, a bundle of threads erupted from within the amoeba-like structure of its body and slammed into his chest.  They latched onto him, digging into his skin and searching for the glowing soul thread buried within.  Zeke severed those threads with a thought, and one end retracted into the Waymaster’s body while the other side flopped to the ground, where they joined with all the rest.

“What are you doing?!” he shouted.

The Waymaster didn’t answer.  Instead, it spun, the goo-like tendrils detaching from the walls and arcing out with deadly force.  The first hit him before he could react, and he went spinning across the floor, hitting the wall only a moment later.  By the time he picked himself up, another tendril was screaming in his direction.

But by that point, Zeke had recovered from his shock.  He reached out with his will and unraveled the tendrils.  They resisted, but only a little, before they dissipated.  Of course, that drew the Waymaster’s ire. 

A million tiny threads exploded from its undulating body.  Each one went in a different direction, like spikes attached to a spinning ball.  Hastily, Zeke attempted to unspool the ones racing in his direction, but he could only work so quickly.  A few dozen made it through, piercing his torso and ripping through his flesh. 

Blood and meat splattered across the ground as they lifted Zeke high into the air.  He severed the threads, but this time, the remnants dug deeper into him, ever searching for his undoing. 

Zeke tried to chase them down, but he was forced to split his focus in too many directions.  After only a few moments, he realized that he was fighting a losing battle.  He needed to take control, and the only way he knew how to do that was to sacrifice himself for the greater strategy.

So, with an explosion of will, he tore himself apart. 

The invasive threads went with his sundered flesh, but more importantly, his soul thread escaped unscathed.  Without missing a beat, he reformed his body, weaving everything back together.  At the same time, he rocketed forward, twisting and turning even as his body reformed. 

His feet hit the ground at a run, but at that point, only his legs had been rebuilt.  His torso came next, and by the time he’d taken four more steps, he was once again whole.  More importantly, he’d gotten past the initial wave of threads, and now he had nothing between him and the Waymaster.

He pulled himself forward, his feet barely touching the ground as he dodged one spear-like thread after another.  Before he’d even covered twenty feet, Zeke reached out with his will and grabbed ahold of the Waymaster’s strings.  He pulled, but they were so densely packed that, even if he managed to dislodge a few – which he did – it made little difference.

So, it was clear that he needed to do things the old-fashioned way.

As he covered the remaining ground, Zeke rebuilt a facsimile of his old hammer, though he made it even heavier than Voromir was capable of becoming.  The prongs were sharper, and the head was much larger. 

Tilting sideways to dodge another thread, he cocked his arms back and swung the hammer like a baseball bat.  It hit the giant amoeba, ripping through its outer coating of gelatinous goo, and bursting the thing like an overfilled balloon.  The hammer kept going until it hit something solid. 

That was when the hammer’s arc met its first resistance.

It was like hitting a mountain.  Though Zeke, for all his other faults, was so incredibly strong that mountains shook beneath his feet.  So, when the unstoppable force of his swing collided with the immovable object of the Waymaster’s nucleus, there was only one appropriate result.

It ruptured.

The explosion shook the entire Nexus.  The shockwave tore through the chamber, shattering the walls and sending the dome flipping across the city.  It didn’t stop until it had passed through the shield protecting the Nexus from the abyss.  It passed through without difficulty, disappearing after only a second.

Even the floor broke, sending cracks spiderwebbing throughout.  But it held together, if only barely. 

Somewhere in the middle of all that, the Waymaster reacted, rebuilding itself in an all-too-familiar way.  Zeke saw the threads respond to the creature’s call, wrapping themselves around its shattered nucleus and rebuilding it layer by layer.  Meanwhile, Zeke was overwhelmed by so many attacking threads that he had no choice but to retreat. 

Self-destruction came next, and when he reformed his body, he found that his opponent was once again whole.  Just like him. 

The message was clear – this was going to be a long and drawn out fight.  If Zeke wanted to win, he had two choices.  Either he needed to exhaust his opponent, or he needed to rush into the fray and sacrifice everything just to get a grip on its soul thread. 

He knew which route he preferred.

But he also knew that rushing wouldn’t get him the results he so desperately needed. 

So, he tried a different tactic. “Are you in there?”  he asked, his voice echoing loudly enough through the chamber to dislodge a few stubborn bits of wall.  “If you are, I’m just here to help.  I didn’t come here to hurt you.”

“Lies,” it intoned.  “You wish to leash me, just like the other.”

“I’m not like her,” Zeke insisted.  “I have no quarrel with you.  We worked together, remember?  We’re friends.”

“I have no friends.”

“But –”

Zeke barely had time to dodge another set of threads as they blistered through the air, threatening to run him through.  On the heels of that attack came another.  And another after that.  Zeke scarcely had time to think, they came so quickly. 

That made one thing abundantly clear – for all that he’d considered the Waymaster to be inferior to someone like Shar Maelaine, that clearly was not the case.  How she’d managed to control the creature was a mystery, and one that had died with her.  However she had done it, Zeke just didn’t have that option.

If he wanted to keep from being destroyed, he either had to retreat or kill it off.

Even if he didn’t really want to.  After all, he’d spent untold centuries in the Waymaster’s company.  Sure, they’d rarely spoken.  Most of that time had been spent training.  But Zeke had grown so comfortable with the Waymaster’s presence that he’d managed to convince himself that the thing wasn’t a nearly all-powerful proto-god. 

Yet, that was precisely what it was.

Amoeba or not.  Sapient or not.  It was extremely strong and extraordinarily skilled. 

But Zeke had to believe he could defeat it.  So, as he dodged the barrage of attacks that filled the entire chamber with hostile threads, he threw the entirety of his consciousness into figuring out how to beat it at its own game.  That meant applying his knowledge of the threads in new and unassailable ways. 

Like that, he entered something of a meditative state.  He couldn’t afford extraneous thoughts.  Instead, the whole of his mind was occupied with two things – training himself with the strings comprising reality and keeping himself from being ripped apart by the Waymaster’s attacks. 

Gradually, Zeke sank deeper and deeper into that zen-like state.  Time passed, and far more quickly than he could have imagined.  As it did, the chamber continued to erode, and from the glimpses he got of the city outside, so too did the Ways degrade.  He could practically see through the grey filter of the surrounding shield, it had become so thin. 

And yet, he wouldn’t let that distract him.

Instead, he focused on the threads themselves, on manipulating them even more deftly than he ever had before.  Killing Shar Maelaine had granted him power, which translated into an ability to move the strings more quickly.  It also gave him more insight into the negative threads.  But learning to harness that newfound power was not the work of a few hours.  Instead, it required an entirely different timescale.

Days turned to months, and months into years.  But even that wasn’t enough.  The fight wore on, and the Waymaster’s fury never abated.  Not even when those years stretched into decades. 

Just as that giant, amoeba-like creature fought on, so too did Zeke continue his own two-pronged task.  At some point, he stopped reacting to the attacks, and instead, learned to anticipate them.  It was almost like he could see the future, his interpretation of the pattern became so perfectly in tune with the Waymaster’s actions.

With anyone else, that might not have been possible. With sapience came creativity.  But the Waymaster lacked the pattern of thought that would enable it to explore different strategies. 

Meanwhile, Zeke constantly innovated with his own interpretation of the threads.  At some point, he progressed from a caveman beating on a homemade drum to keeping a real beat.  And that beat soon became a complex rhythm that was only a small part of the symphony he conducted. 

And through it all, he maintained full concentration.  No easy feat, even for someone like him. 

In those years, he learned more than he had in previous millennia. 

But unfortunately, it was destined to end. 

The Waymaster would continue to fight indefinitely.  It knew no other way, and it was incapable of change.  But what could change was the condition of the Ways.  They crumbled with ever passing decade.  The Nexus had long since been abandoned by anyone who could flee, but that was far from everyone. 

Because many of the people in the Ways had nowhere else to go.  In some cases, if they set foot outside the system of bridges and discs suspended in the abyss, they would be killed by their enemies. 

So, when the Ways began to fall apart, they made their peace with their own inevitable demise. 

For Zeke’s part, he could sense them all.  Especially when whole platforms fell away.  But it was especially impactful when the shield failed – not all at once, but rather, in small patches – and the abyssal enemy reached into their reality.  It defied description, save to point out that it was comprised of tentacles.  And when it breached the surface of reality, everything was corrupted. 

Even Zeke, who suddenly had to deal with out-of-control negative threads in addition to the Waymaster’s assault.  Fortunately, he was barely capable of deflecting them, though it added to the degree of concentration he was forced to achieve.  On and on it went, as the adversary assailed the crumbling Ways.  Meanwhile, Zeke continued to train against the invasive intrusion of threads, positive and negative alike.

All the while, the amoeba-like Waymaster grew ever more erratic.  As the years passed, Zeke realized that it was fighting both him and the adversary, and it was losing on both fronts.  The abyssal enemy, unknowable as it was, was contained, but only barely.  It railed against the confines of its imprisonment, shaking the very foundations of reality.

That was what pushed Zeke to finally make his move.

He launched his will at the creature, manipulating the threads with unprecedented deftness.  The Waymaster countered by tightening its strings, but Zeke was far too quick.  And he was capable of pushing the negative threads into position, blocking the Waymaster’s attempts at defense.

And then, finally, Zeke latched onto its soul thread. 

He flexed his will, and the thing screamed.  It was a sound that echoed across reality, shattering structures and leaving fissures in the fabric of space and time.  Yet, Zeke didn’t let up.  He didn’t dare.  Now that he was committed, he had no choice but to see it through. 

With a roar that rivaled the Waymaster’s scream, he ripped the creature’s soul apart.

And with it, came a massive fracture in the universe that left everything briefly exposed to the abyss.  Suddenly, Zeke’s mind was overwhelmed, and his body disintegrated.  His own soul struggled to remain intact as he turned his metaphysical gaze upon the very thing he’d vowed to fight.

The abyss beckoned, vast and completely beyond his senses. 

And that was when he realized that the adversary was not some entity living within that expanse of nothingness.  Rather, it was the abyss itself, given form by the transition into physical reality. 

Zeke froze.

Or rather, his soul thread, which was the only piece of him that remained intact, did. 

The abyss crept closer, offering to unmake him, body, soul, and mind.  If it reached him, he would be no more.  He would be nothing, past, present, and future. 

And then, a glittering cage slammed down all around him.  It expanded incomprehensibly, and in every dimension. 

It was the Framework, and it was directed by a force of unimaginable power.  The Creator had finally joined the fray.