Chapter 760 - Old Habits

The red dragon pulsed with so much power that Zeke could barely even look at the creature.  It was a beast – a monster by any other name – but it was also one of the most powerful creatures he’d ever seen.  By all rights, it should have been the one holding Shar Maelaine’s leash, and not the other way around. 

And yet, Zeke could sense why things were they way they were. 

The dragon clearly suffered from a similar issue to the Waymaster.  Its bestial origins limited it.  Had it chosen to evolve like other beastkin, things would have been different.  It would have lost some of its raw power, but at the same time, gained a level of sapience it never could have reached otherwise. 

It had chosen the beast, and Zeke wasn’t entirely certain that doing so was a bad decision.  Given the same options, Zeke might have chosen something similar.  Power was power, after all.  What good was self-awareness when you could destroy whole planets on a whim?

Of course, even questioning it was a mark of said sapience.  Imagining the lack was beyond the scope of his mental abilities.  Beyond most people, in truth, because sapience was a difficult concept to define, much less understand. 

In any case, the dragon was beyond strong, and it had come with many, many friends.  Knowing he didn’t have time for a prolonged battle – not with Shar Maelaine getting away – Zeke regretted the necessity to end the fight as quickly as possible.  The competitive part of him wanted nothing more than to fight it hand-to-hand and see who came out on top.  But that just wasn’t in the cards.

Dismissively, he waved his hand, mentally plucking at the threads comprising the beast.  However, he was immediately shocked when the strings resisted his pull.  He yanked again, but they were entirely immobile and far too tightly woven for Zeke to change that. 

“Little god!” the dragon roared.  “You think you can just pull me apart like I’m some puny human?!”

“Kind of,” Zeke admitted, shrugging as the creature’s chest inflated. 

 “You know so little.”

Before Zeke could counter that assertion, the dragon let loose with fiery breath that tore across the intervening distance with the ferocity of a nuclear explosion.  The crystalline palace – what was left of it – disintegrated.  Motes of magic and crystal dust were immediately consumed by the nearby sun, and Zeke found himself tumbling backward for a few thousand miles before he managed to catch the threads.  He stopped himself a moment later, but by that point, he’d already dipped below the star’s corona. 

Heat and pressure unlike anything he’d ever experienced enveloped his body, burning him to ash in less than an instant.  However, Zeke’s soul remained entirely intact – he would take far more to kill him than a little dragon’s breath and the surface of a star – and he soon pulled himself out of harm’s way.

He pulled himself back to his original position – only a few dozen feet from the giant dragon – and reformed his body.  Shock, such as it could be displayed on a reptilian face, overwhelmed the dragon’s once-victorious expression. 

“What?  How?!”

Zeke shrugged, reforming his clothing as well.  “How would I know?” he answered.  “I’m just a little god, right?  Just a puny human?  I think there might be something wrong with your breath.”

“What?!”

“Oh.  That didn’t come out right.  Not like a bad breath thing.  I’m saying it’s not hot enough,” Zeke clarified, though he quickly recognized that was the exact wrong thing to say. 

The dragon spewed another stream of fire in his direction, but this time, Zeke was ready for it.  He might not have been capable of plucking the dragon apart – not in short order, at least – but its breath was a different story altogether.  He latched onto the primary string, then separated it from the rest.  The flames still washed over him, but they were no more destructive than a normal fire. 

Which, for him, meant not at all.

What’s more, it gave him the chance to get his bearings.  If he couldn’t manipulate the creature’s threads and pick them apart, he had plenty of other options for a fight.  His first instinct was to recreate some of his old skills.  They were familiar enough that he could do so even more quickly than when they were codified by the Framework.  However, it had been quite a long time since he fought a powerful creature hand-to-hand.

And Zeke had to admit that he missed it.

Would it make tracking Shar Maelaine down much more difficult? Certainly.  But she was a greater good, and her skills were not conducive to laying low.  Finding her would not be the problem.

Or so he told himself, probably in an effort to excuse a bad – or at least wasteful – idea.

In any case, it was a convincing enough argument that he didn’t hesitate to throw himself forward.  Doing so surprised the dragon, and rightly so.  After all, Zeke was no larger than a normal human man.  A few inches over six feet tall, and even if he was built like a warrior, with all the muscles that entailed, he was no more than a speck compared to a dragon. 

Especially one with a wingspan measured in football fields. 

The dragon recoiled slightly, though it didn’t have enough time to truly brace for impact.  When Zeke’s fist hammered into its snout, it did so with world-shattering force.  Literally.  If he’d hit a planet that hard, the singular blow would have started a chain reaction that ended with said world being shattered into a million pieces. 

The dragon’s neck snapped backward, and it went tumbling for a few hundred miles.  However, the creature’s scales didn’t even crack under the attack. 

Zeke couldn’t help but smile at that.

There was a significant part of him that craved challenge, specifically in battle.  The man who’d spent thousands of battles in Hell’s version of Valhalla still dwelled in Zeke’s mind.  He might have spent the majority of the last few thousand years in intense study, but at heart, he was still a warrior.

And warriors, by definition, needed a fight, preferably against strong opponents.  At last, it seemed that Zeke had found one. 

Or more than one, considering that the dragon had brought quite a few friends along.  A thousand dragons – admittedly weaker than the leader – spewed fire upon him.  Zeke shielded himself with his arms as he struggled to pick each and every column of flame apart.  The streams converged on him in an instant, and as quick as he was, he couldn’t get them all.

His body roasted, the destructive power of the fire tearing through him without remorse.  But Zeke had endured being torn to pieces, over and over, for years in Hell.  He’d exhausted a god through regeneration alone.  So, how could a little fire kill him?

The fire enveloped him, scorching through his physical body without issue.  Yet, he rebuilt himself over and over again with every passing second.  The pain of it was nearly overwhelming, and yet, Zeke had long since resigned himself to a life of torture.  He took it, enduring the agony with the same equanimity with which he drew breath. 

It was a barrage fit to destroy gods and monsters alike.  And yet, to Zeke, it was just another day, little different from all the other times his body  had been destroyed. 

Still, the flames kept going for more than a few minutes, but when they faded, the dragons were clearly shocked to see that he was not dead.   However, the leader had recovered from Zeke’s punch, and it was hellbent on returning the favor.  Even with all his advantages, Zeke only saw the creature as a red streak.

It flew through space at nearly the speed of light before hitting Zeke with so much force that the impact very nearly destabilized the nearby star.  He rocketed backwards, then was caught in the star’s gravitational pull.  It sucked him in, and he was assailed by immense pressure and heat. 

He yanked on a single string, pulling himself free. 

This time, when he hit the dragon, he drew blood.  The impact tore space and time, shattering the creature’s red scales.  Bones crunched beneath his world-ending fist, and reality cracked.  Spatial fissures tore across the area, ripping a few of the slower dragons into pieces.

Most managed to avoid serious injury, though they were all cut. 

The leader flipped backward only a few times before arresting its momentum.  It tried to speak, but no words escaped its ruined snout.  Its chest swelled with potential, but Zeke had no intention of enduring another column of fire.

He pulled himself forward.

It must have looked ridiculous – a man charging a creature that rivaled skyscrapers in sheer size.  But even as the dragon opened its mouth to bathe him in fire, Zeke plunged into its mouth.  He was immediately disintegrated by the powerfully destructive flames, but he rebuilt himself a second later.  At the same time, he shifted his focus, knowing full well that his soul was nigh indestructible.  Sure, the dragon could hurt him.  It could inflict upon him sincere agony.  And over time, it might be able to whittle his soul down.

But it would not be a quick process.

Zeke relied on that factor, abandoning his efforts to reform his body.  He didn’t really need it anyway.  Not to do what was necessary.  He reached deep within the dragon and latched onto the much looser threads within its body.

He pulled.

But to his surprise, the dragon didn’t simply unravel.  Instead, changing the arrayment of the threads – even by a little – threw everything out of balance.  And with something as volatile as the dragon’s flames, that was a very dangerous thing indeed. 

The resultant explosion was like the death of a star.

No – it was more powerful than that.  It scoured Zeke’s soul thread, peeling it away, one comprising string at a time.  Millions of those threads were instantly ripped from their place, and with every passing nanosecond, more met the same fate.

If Zeke was accustomed to the pain of having his body torn to pieces, he was not quite prepared for the metaphysical agony he was forced to endure as his soul eroded before the might of the dragon’s explosion.

The power of it far exceeded its origin.  It wasn’t the might of a god.  It was even stronger than anything Zeke could manifest.  It was primal.  Primordial.  It was like enduring the big bang, though compressed into finite time and space. 

Zeke pushed every ounce of power into survival.  And to his absolute horror, he saw that the threads of reality were not entirely indestructible.  Until that very moment, everything he’d seen that they could not be destroyed.  That they were infinitely enduring.  Even when he destroyed someone by unraveling their threads, those strings simply joined another set. 

Yet, in that single, unconstrained instant, he saw thousands of threads wither away and vanish, as if they’d never existed at all.  Zeke tried to protect them.  He snatched at every loose thread, pulling each one back before they could disintegrate.  And in some cases, he was successful.

In most, he was not.

And then, suddenly, it stopped.

As his eyes reformed, Zeke looked around to see that nothing was left.  The dragons were gone.  The star as well.  All he saw was empty space.  Shifting his focus to the local threads, he witnessed something truly spectacular and horrifying, both in equal measure. 

There was a hole in reality.

For thousands of miles all around, the Framework was just gone.  And he finally got a glimpse of the adversary, steadily and inexorably closing in. 

It was indescribable.  A sight so alien that Zeke’s mind – godly though it was – struggled to comprehend its existence, much less the form it took.  One thing was absolutely clear, though – it was entirely antithetical to anything in his reality.  As it surged forward, more of a wave of entropy than a living entity, it consumed the loose threads at the edge of the hole.

But with every passing instant, that gap in the Framework closed, slamming shut only a moment before the adversary breached the surface of reality. 

Even then, the impact of its charge sent ripples of nothingness arcing through reality.  Zeke felt his threads loosen, and he very nearly was unmade.  But he clamped down just in time to prevent that.

Fortunately, the ripples weakened with distance, and there was nothing else around.  Not anymore. 

Zeke had set out to fight the dragons in a more traditional way.  That had been the goal.  But the second he’d been pressed, he resorted to familiar tactics. 

With a sigh that shouldn’t have been possible in the middle of space, he turned his attention to his true purpose.  Shar Maelaine was still out there, and her trail was growing cold by the moment.