Divine Apostasy Book 11 - Chapter 35

Chapter 35

Ruin prepared to trigger his other options if he’d underestimated his ability to weather this attack with his armor and body.

The ultrahigh frequencies struck Ruin like auditory sledgehammers. He didn’t use his Wing Resonance to cancel out the attack because he wanted to gauge the strength of his natural state.

The waves of force tried to burrow through Ruin’s wing-cocoon but found no openings to exploit. He hovered in the air like a ship surrounded by a churning ocean. The storm that had engulfed him grew in power, desperate to sink and destroy him.

As the seconds passed, Ruin’s confidence climbed, and he cracked open his shell, prepared to restore his cocoon if necessary.

The mighty streams of condensed energy struck Ruin’s armor and he studied it intently. He didn’t want to damage the Ink Lord’s Wrap of Shadow, but he didn’t know how it would behave now that his body had absorbed it. He loved this armor and didn’t want to destroy it.

The sonic attack easily pierced Ruin’s seven thousand plus points of armor and struck his body. To his massive relief, the armor behaved more like a second skin than material armor, and even though the attack ripped through this protection, it didn’t impact how it looked.

Ruin realized this near obsession with keeping his Ink Lord’s Wrap of Shadow in good condition bordered on unhealthy and probably dangerous. But he couldn’t help how he felt. He loved how the armor made him look and was excited to show it off during the Ink Lord Conclave a month from now.

This Saraph body had absorbed the armor, and it appeared nothing short of destroying Ruin himself would be enough to harm the armor’s appearance, and this made him irrationally happy.

Ruin opened his wings fully and spread his arms to embrace the rain of destruction. After a few seconds his skin grew hot from all the energy attempting to bore through his skin. If he continued this foolish display, it would break through and into his body.

Fighting fire with fire, Ruin tapped into the reservoir of raw emotion his Saraph body always carried and screamed in defiance at the Screechlings.

Ruin’s shout shattered the channeled attack and sent fifty of the creatures spinning. His Forked Lightning triggered as ten seconds had passed, and eight of the closely packed bat-creatures suffered the consequences.

Screechlings filled the sky above Ruin, and the thought of fighting them all with just his Wrathful Crow Beater made him impatient. He considered just making a run for the distant tunnel so he could skip what would likely be a tedious fight. With this many enemies who had a clear advantage when it came to fighting in the air meant he would certainly take some damage.

Rushing through the dungeon defeated one of the reasons for being here. He needed to gain reputation tokens for his friends. If anything, having so many enemies was exactly what he wanted.

The real problem was obvious, and Ruin let the suppressed issue rise to the front of his thoughts.

The lack of access to the power in the Apocalypse Destruction Core prevented Ruin from using nearly all his magic. He needed to fix this obstacle, and he always thought the most clearly when his life was in danger.

The Screechlings regrouped. Trying to see past them all was like attempting to gaze through a dense forest. Behind the three hundred plus beasts he glimpsed a massive Screechling. It organized and controlled these flocks.

Ruin focused on his core and summoned his Wrathful Crow Beater. As he’d feared, nothing happened.

With the speed of an Archangel, Ruin punched the air thousands of times, each strike sending a shaft of condensed air at the creatures above. They did little damage, but it created chaos as the beasts tried to dodge the attacks.

Ruin kept his attention off his body and summoned his staff. This time it appeared. He tried to replicate this when casting Angelic Field Guardian, but it failed every time. Summoning the Wrathful Crow Beater was natural, and he could do it without conscious thought, but creating the clones required too much focus and it failed repeatedly.

Forked Lighting activated again, and Ruin prepared for the Screechlings who had organized a coordinated dive toward him.

Ruin dismissed the staff and recalled it rapidly, increasing the amount of focus each time, just before encountering failure again he sensed something, and he immediately activated Last Breath to study it.

The Scarecrow Aspect easily produced the staff, drawing on the Destruction essence in Ruin’s core without hesitation, but only when he hadn’t tried to control the process.

Ruin studied the core hovering in his center like a dark star. It differed completely from the Spirit core in his human body, which consisted of a dense liquid sphere of energy that responded effortlessly to his will. The Destruction core was solid—dense, impenetrable, and cold, and it resisted any attempt to shape it.

The core contained raw, destructive power that resonated with his Saraph body, but not in a comforting way. Focusing on the core highlighted the strangeness of his body, and it overwhelmed him. For a moment, he recoiled, his mind instinctively trying to reject the foreign sensations.

Ruin forced himself to try again. Concentrating on his core and ignoring the resonance it had with this strange body, he studied the differences between it and his human core.

Spirt cores contained gaseous energy condensed into a liquid form, fluid and adaptable, and responsive to controlled breathing techniques.

Destruction cores consisted of a solid version of destruction essence. It emanated a raw primal power, and Ruin’s Spirit inspired methods for accessing the core didn’t work.

Why didn’t they work?

Ruin hyper focused, drawing on techniques he’d perfected in his human form. The rhythmic breathing and gentle movements he used to gather and circulate Spirit felt wrong here, as though the Destruction core mocked his attempts to access it.

Understanding eluded him. The core just didn’t make sense. This Realm embraced chaos, so why were the cores here solid—which demanded order, the very thing this Realm fought against. The answer to that question felt important.

Ruin extended his mental examination, pushing deeper into the core, trying to understand this apparent contradiction. He knew from alchemy how structure played a large role in how substances interacted with the world.

The fundamental arrangement of the core eluded Ruin, but he discovered something else. An immense tension. A rapid vibration. Like a prisoner shaking the bars of their prison. These vibrations amplified the vibrations nearby until the entire core felt like a frenzied animal straining to escape.

Ruin shivered as understanding arrived. Or at least a partial understanding. By artificially forcing order on chaos the intensity of the disorder increased, creating a far more potent form of energy that strained to burst free.

He abandoned the familiar Spirit-based methods, recalling what he’d sensed earlier when summoning the staff.

The Scarecrow Aspect hadn’t tried to mold the energy or guide it lightly. Instead, it had acted with brute intention, overpowering the core, breaking it and leaving it bleeding fragments of power. Power the Aspect channeled into the Wrathful Crow Beater.

That’s how it appeared to an outsider, but Ruin now had a deeper understanding of the underlying forces. The Aspect set the chaos free, violently breaking the bonds that held the energy prisoner.

Liberating the chaos required a different process. Direct, not guiding. Unrelenting and destructive, not gentle and shaping.

Now that Ruin knew what to look for, he recognized the way the Staff gathered the power it needed to materialize. This energy exited the Destruction core—not in a stream, but in jagged bursts. Like prisoners running from a warden.

Ruin had failed because he’d tried guiding trapped energy. He needed to free it, destroy the order that held it locked in place.

Instead of using the Spirit method to access and circulate energy, Ruin visualized the solid core as a boulder with a network of internal walls that trapped packets of destruction essence. Walls he needed to break.

Ruin accepted this violent concept and for the first time sensed the frantic energy and locked potential that filled his core. Mindful that he had a bomb inside him and not wanting to release all the destruction essence at once, he visualized a small fracture across its surface.

Nothing happened.

Ruin reminded himself, direct not guiding. Unrelenting and destructive, not gentle and shaping.

This time, Ruin formed a mental chisel and struck at the bonds filling his core using Will as a hammer.

Chains shattered and walls collapsed.

Ruin released Last Breath.

Power surged outward from the core, wild and unruly as it cast off its bonds. Ruin’s Saraph body reacted instinctively, rotating his core and flinging the fleeing packets of power outward. Some of these packets entered his pathways where they raced headlong into a Meridian. The explosion caused by the collision shattered the destruction essence packets into smaller grains of distinct essence.

If a Death essence grain found itself near the Death Meridian it would stay, safe amongst its own kind. Each Meridian quickly became tribal, violently expelling any essence grains that didn’t match their Meridian.

Ruin dodged six diving creatures and returned to the ground. He quickly punched the air a hundred times, sending spears of condensed air into the mass of Screechlings. That should keep them busy for another few seconds.

In stunned amazement, Ruin surveyed the chaos and destruction inside his center.

Ruin’s Apocalypse Destruction Core rotated in his center. The initial burst of essence packets he’d released had been flung randomly in every direction. Most ricocheted off his center and continued to bounce around. When these hit his core, it released more essence packets, which the core then flung outward.

If two packets collided with enough force they exploded into essence grains, and each grain matched one of his twelve Meridians. These grains formed a cloud inside his center, but each grain drifted toward the pathways that led to its Meridian as if drawn by a magnet.

Ruin had always used the pathways like one-way passages. Spirit entered one pathway, circulated past the Meridian where essence was filtered out, and what remained of the Spirit came back to his center via the return pathway. The liquid-like Spirit acted like a long rope he threaded in and out of pathways in an organized and efficient manner.

Nothing remotely like that happened now. Essence packets entered whatever pathway their trajectory took them. No entrances or exits, only routes that took the packets to Meridians.

In another massive departure from what Ruin had understood, his Meridians rotated as well. They acted in a similar manner to his core. Meridians latched on to essence grains that matched their type and violently flung foreign Meridian essence grains and packets away.

Ruin accidently stopped his Death Meridian from rotating and realized he had control of not only his core’s velocity but all his Meridians as well. He quickly returned the Death Meridian to the velocity that matched his core.

Uruziel and Overlord appeared in Ruin’s peripheral vision.

“What a mess,” Overlord remarked.

“I know,” Ruin responded. “How can this work? It’s chaos.”

“Slow the reaction,” Uruziel said. She stepped out of Ruin’s peripheral vision and pointed at the core that hung in his mental vision like a moon. “Decrease all velocities by at least fifty percent or release the energy building around your core.”

Core Velocity maxed at twelve thousand, and Ruin’s current value was at one hundred. He immediately slowed it to fifty.

“What do you mean by reaction?” Ruin asked.

“I’ve seen this before,” Uruziel said. “Well, Uru did I mean, but I remember. There are natural reactions that mimic what you see here. They are incredibly efficient if controlled but are catastrophic if allowed to run away.”

Ruin checked on the Screechlings and saw they had almost finished reorganizing from the brief disturbance his air attacks had caused.

“Hold that thought,” Ruin said. “You can finish telling me in a moment and tell Sivart its time to ride.”