Chapter 681 - Alive

After everything he’d been through, where he’d spent decades fighting unwinnable battles in Hell, it would have been easy to retreat into his shell, hunker down, and take a long and well-earned break.  That was what Eveline wanted from him.  And in some ways, that was what he needed.

But Zeke couldn’t stop.

The idea of passing up a fight felt so alien to him that he simply couldn’t force himself to turn away.  Was it habit?  Momentum?  Was he just a glutton for punishment?  Or was he just so broken that he couldn’t manage his self-destructive habits?  Zeke recognized that the last explanation was likely the closest to reality.  He wasn’t stupid, after all. 

Yet, he also knew that it went a lot deeper than that.  For as long as he could remember, he had been a fighter.  Going back to his earliest days on Earth, he’d struggled against himself, against the odds that told him he’d never achieve his goals.  Then, he’d been thrust into a seemingly unwinnable war against the trolls.  After that, he’d fought his way across the Radiant Isles, won a couple of wars in the Eternal Realm, and then spent subjective centuries in a battle against Hell itself.

So, stopping now just wasn’t possible.

From a physical standpoint, he desperately needed to fight.  To dominate his enemies.  To kill.  His psychological mindset was little different, though with the caveat that he was finally in a world where true success was possible.  None of those hollow victories that he’d experienced in Hell.  He wouldn’t win only to have everything reset.  And he certainly didn’t have to fight with his hands behind his back anymore.

He had his skills.

He was equipped with the full weight of a primordial existence, complete with a body that had the potential to exceed the power of gods.  And every aspect of his existence – mind, body, and soul – screamed at him to test himself against worthy opponents. 

Did that mean he didn’t want to reunite with his companions?

No. 

It only meant that he found the fight far more appealing in the moment.

A more attentive man might have also recognized that his terror of what he might find when he returned to the tower also contributed to his reticence.  According to Oberon, so much had changed, and in the furthest reaches of his mind, Zeke was afraid that when he did return, he would find that he was neither needed nor wanted. 

Did that reduce the coming battle to little more than a distraction for a man who didn’t want to face the consequences of his actions?  Perhaps. 

Or maybe it was as it appeared on the surface – a broken man who needed the fight to give himself some illusion of the control he’d lacked for so long. 

Whatever the case, Zeke had committed himself to the battle, and with a wholehearted earnestness that precluded any debate about his reasoning.  At the moment, he didn’t care about any of that.  He only wanted to kill the monsters who lived in that enormous lake. 

Thankfully, Eveline remained silent as he trotted toward the body of water.  As he did so, a feeling of intense trepidation washed over him like a warning.  It conveyed a simple message – continue and die.  Zeke ignored it.

Instead, he studied his surroundings.  With [Primordial Mind] in full effect, he easily looked past the illusion of Mak’tar’s domain.  Without that disguise, the true nature of the terrain was laid bare.  Towering pillars of jagged rock, demonic beasts whose very appearance turned his stomach, and a sky roiling with lightning were the highlights, but Zeke’s true attention settled on the lake itself.

He’d caught a glimpse of the illusion it wore.  An idyllic body of water – the sort that would play host to a picturesque lake house and pleasant memories.  However, with every step forward, that image had shuddered as even the power of a god couldn’t conceal the evil within.  Now, with [Primordial Mind] banishing that false image entirely, Zeke saw it for what it truly was.

Once, he’d visited an acid lake that had been entirely corrupted by demonic forces.  The surrounding area was corrosive to anyone without demonic affinity, and it was capable of killing anyone unwary enough to venture close.  Back then, he’d considered it one of the most hellish sights imaginable. 

He had since amended that perception, especially after his trip through Hell. 

Once again, he was forced to adjust his idea of what true corruption looked like.  The lake boiled angrily, waves crashing against the drab rocky shore and steadily expanding its boundaries.  Every now and again, Zeke caught sight of lonely pillars of rock jutting from the roiling waters as lightning lanced down to scorch them. 

It was while studying one of those pillars that he first caught sight of the enemy.

They were pale, six-limbed creatures that looked like an entirely alien combination of insect, human, and demon.  Horns jutted from their heads, while their too-long limbs featured far too many joints.  Their bodies were long, flexible, and slim, though without the sinuousness of a serpent.  Rather, they appeared ridged and disjointed, like someone had shoved far too many bones into a white, fleshy sack.  Finishing the horrific appearance was a long, finned tail that jittered back and forth unpleasantly.

In short, they were living nightmares. 

And the closest pillar was crawling with the demonic monsters.  More were down below.  Zeke could feel them, surging with need and greed and a vicious lust for murder.  That was when he realized the truth.

The water didn’t churn from natural forces like wind.  Rather, it roiled as a result of the brutal fights taking place beneath the surface.  The monsters did not live in harmony.  Rather, they were embroiled in constant battle, fighting among themselves in a fruitless hope that one would one day reign supreme.

Zeke had no idea how it all worked.  The creatures clearly were capable of killing one another, so it stood to reason that they should have long since finished the job.  But he belatedly realized that he needed to adjust his ideas of what was and was not possible.  Did their life cycle make sense?  Assuredly not.  It couldn’t.  And yet, they remained. 

That was something he needed to learn before he spent much longer in the Ethereal Realm.  The world didn’t need to make sense – not to him, at least.  Sure, there were almost certainly rules that governed everything.  But Zeke didn’t know them, and he suspected that it would take millennia of study before he could make that claim.

Years he didn’t intend to waste on that sort of thing.

That was when Eveline finally spoke up, saying, “Obviously, knowing how things work couldn’t help you reach your goals.  Better to toil away in ignorance.”

Zeke didn’t miss the sarcasm. 

“That’s why I have you.”

“I am the brains of the operation,” she stated smugly. 

Zeke tuned her out, instead focusing on the monsters’ response to his presence.  His approach hadn’t gone unnoticed, and the reaction was predictable.  The nearest monsters had already begun swimming in his direction, and the ones upon the closest pillars leaped into the water to join their fellows. 

Which Zeke regarded as a good thing. 

Better if his opponent – or prey, as he’d already begun to think of him – came to him.  That way, he didn’t have to fight in the water.

As that thought crossed his mind, he embraced [Primordial Titan].  His body rapidly expanded, quickly filling out and reaching a height of more than seventy-five feet.  Moreover, his flesh became a mixture of jagged rock, crystal, and glinting metal.  Voromir appeared in his hand a second later, looking perfectly at home in his transformed hand. 

The weapon had changed with his ascension to the primordial race.  However, it changed once again with his transformation, growing much larger in order to fit his new stature.  But the appearance also changed, and the result was that it looked more like a hunk of roughly-rectangular rock and crystal that had been fused to the bone haft.

Zeke didn’t have time to appreciate it further, because only a second or two after his transformation completed, the monsters burst free of the lake and fell upon him.  They were larger than he’d originally anticipated.  Maybe twenty feet long and full of shifting bones that made them look even bigger. 

And there were hundreds of them, with thousands more on the way.

Zeke grinned in anticipation before bringing his immense strength to bear on the battle at hand.  His hammer fell, completely obliterating one of the monsters.  It didn’t burst.  It didn’t break.  Instead, it was atomized by the force at play, and Zeke’s swing cratered the rocky ground, the shockwave launching monsters away. 

But he held his ground, and it wasn’t long before more monsters leaped into the battle.  Zeke lost himself, then. He still displayed impeccable technique – as learned during his many, many years of fighting eternal battles in the faux Valhalla – but he didn’t need to actively think about it anymore.  His body moved the way it was supposed to.  He only had to direct it.

Still, with hundreds of monsters attacking, it wasn’t long before they things were crawling all over him.  As it turned out, their tails were equipped with stingers bearing potent toxin, and yet, when they stabbed at him, those blade-like appendages could scarcely chip away at his rocky flesh. 

More concerning were their claws and teeth, though Zeke’s primordial body was more than up to the task of enduring whatever they could dish out.  And where it failed, there as always [Hand of Creation] to repair the damage they managed to inflict. 

He felt invincible.

But he also knew that he wasn’t.  If he gave them the opportunity, the monsters would eventually overwhelm him.  So, rather than allow it to happen, Zeke summoned divine energy to activate [Primordial Strike].  His hammer fell with the force of a comet, and the shockwave carried with it divine energy-infused destruction. 

Hundreds of monsters were vaporized in an instant.  Perhaps even thousands.  However, the skill activation told Zeke two things.  The first was that it took a significant chunk of his divine energy, cementing the reality that he couldn’t simply reuse the ability over and over indefinitely.  He was far from exhausting his entire store, but it was noticeable, nonetheless. 

The second thing he realize was that all monsters were not created equal.  More than a few managed to survive the blast while the weaker versions were destroyed.  The remnant blazed with divine energy of their own, reminding Zeke that they were classified as demigods themselves.  Clearly, that came with advantages.

And considering how many monsters there were, even if it was only a fraction that survived, it was enough to give Zeke some trouble.  That was exacerbated by the fact that the remainder were the strongest among them.  They raced forward, and when they attacked, they were far more successful than the ones who’d come before.

Zeke felt their toxin flowing through him as they savagely tore at his rocky form.  Dismissing his hammer, he resorted to a more direct approach.  Grabbing them and ripping them apart took more time, but it was also the only option when the creatures were literally climbing all over him. 

Suddenly, he realized just how dangerous his situation was.

Because the monsters were still coming.  Tens of thousands of them.  Maybe hundreds of thousands.  Perhaps even millions.  And they attacked with singular intent.  They didn’t attempt to preserve their own lives.  They didn’t use any great strategies. Instead, they piled onto him in a horde. 

Even more distressing was that Zeke knew he hadn’t even scraped the surface when it came to their most powerful versions.  He felt them swimming forth from deeper waters.  Great leviathans who could go toe-to-toe with him, even on their own.  Supported by hundreds of thousands more of their kind, the chances of Zeke’s survival felt incredibly slim. 

In her corner of his mind, Eveline muttered something that sounded distressingly like, “I told you so.”

Meanwhile, Zeke threw himself into the fight, feeling at peace with his choices.