High Artificer, Ch 38: Ancient Foe

Sam and the army walked out of the portal in a flash of starlight, fading into existence between one moment and the next.

The Vos’Rekan’s system was a dark and silent zone. They had appeared on the edge of it, but they were not alone. 

The towers of Silverguard stretched out below them, shining with a thousand rays. 

The island fortress was massive, covering hundreds of miles. From where they stood, it looked like they were standing on a continent.

Six other fortresses were visible surrounding them in the Void, each of them shining almost as fiercely. They were a bit smaller, but they were all brilliant, creating the full arc of the Crown of Stars.

This was the ring of defenses he’d built for Aster Fall. 

Until a moment ago, they had been there, guarding the world from enemies in the Void, but it would be fine without them for a little while. There were still plenty of avatars there, along with the World Tree and other defenses.

He smiled as he looked down at the island and then his voice echoed across the ranks of the army.

“Welcome to the fortress of Silverguard,” he said. “It is usually around Aster Fall, but it will help to provide a defense in this battle. If you are wounded, retreat here.”

He had left a marker in the Vos’Rekan’s system so he could teleport here easily, but a portal was easier to bring the army with him, so he’d opened one to an avatar that was on Silverguard.

The fortress had helped him in his last battle against a Vos’Rekan and was built from its bones. It was only appropriate that it come along again. It would be useful to protect the army from the Vos’Rekan’s final strike.

Then he looked across the rising towers until his gaze landed on the person who was waiting here. A woman with long blue-silver hair and brilliant emerald eyes was standing on top of one of the towers.

Sam waved, smiling at her, and she returned it.

“Pay your respects to Asenya,” he announced to the army. “She is the World Forger and Caretaker of Aster Fall. She is older than all of you but Winter and an ally of the Titans. She is injured, but she will assist us in this battle and in giving light to the dawn of a new era. This battle is hers as much as ours.”

“Welcome, all.” Asenya raised her hand in greeting and then stepped into the air as she walked toward them. “It is good to see you all. Aster Fall will welcome you in the future for your support here today.”

Then she turned to look at Winter, her smile brightening.

“It is especially good to see a familiar face.”

“It has been a very long time, Wild Caretaker,” Winter said with a laugh. Her tone was joyful. “I am so glad that you are still alive. I missed our talks. You are also one of the few who still remember the old era.”

“We will have to catch up after this,” Asenya said. “But first, let’s take care of this old enemy.”

“Yes,” Winter agreed as she turned to look at the Vos’Rekan. “I believe it is already waking up.”

“It is,” Sam confirmed as he pointed at it. “They sleep deeply, but our presence is too powerful for it to ignore. We only have a few moments to approach and seize the initiative, but it will be enough. Prepare for battle.”

He turned to the army behind him and his orders rang out, accompanied by a wave of starlight as the Blessing of Silver Stars filled the Void. It was a field of stars surrounding them all, fusing into their aura, armor, and weapons. 

It was brightest around the nagas and the golems, his followers who received 50% of his Charisma to all of their attributes. His Charisma was over 65,000, which meant they received over 32,000 to every attribute. 

It made them physically as strong as Sixth Evolution fighters.

Many of the new warriors in the army were also glowing with it as their strength increased. Those were the ones who saw themselves as Sam’s allies. 

For them, the boost was only 20% of his Charisma, but even that was an enormous amount. 

He took note of the ones who shone the brightest and sent a few orders to the nagas and golems to help them if needed.

The army shifted behind him as enchantments flowed around the twelve companies led by his avatars, and then he looked at the Vos’Rekan.

It was a massive thing as large as a small world. It was still coiled into a sphere, which the beasts liked to do while sleeping, but massive ravines were forming as it stirred. Its limbs were beginning to uncurl. 

Two glowing yellow eyes were slowly opening as its head turned to look at them.

A shudder of fear went through the army behind him, among those who had never seen a Vos’Rekan before. The beast was large enough to bite through worlds and its titles and level were on full display.

It exuded an aura of desolation, a darkness that spread out around it and sank into the dimension. It felt like anything coming close to that aura would be swallowed up by the night and never seen again. The new warriors trembled in the face of it. 

“Stand firm!” Sleset’s voice hissed out across the army. “The Silver Lord is with us. All shall be well. Fight for his honor, fight for our names! The enemy will fall!”

The nagas let out a resounding hiss as they slammed their fists against their breastplates. Pounding drum beats echoed across the sky, one after another, like the heartbeat of a world.

Courage swelled among the ranks as the warriors’ faces firmed, and then they all looked toward Sam. Hope and terror mingled in their eyes.

“Now is the time to strike, before it fully wakes,” Sam commanded. A brilliant golden spear appeared in his hand and he pointed it at the beast. 

“Gather your courage. Forward!”

Silverguard flared with power and the entire Crown of Stars began to move, flying straight for the Vos’Rekan. From a distance, it looked like the army was riding the stars into battle.

Silverguard was fully capable of traveling across a system in the blink of an eye, driven by the enchantments Sam had imbued into it. It had no trouble closing the distance on the beast.

As spells and abilities flared from the army, Sam leapt off the peak of the fortress and ran through the Void ahead of everyone.

His cloak billowed out behind him and the spear in his hand was as brilliant as the sun. Its light merged with the power that radiated from his bracer, turning his entire arm radiant.

The Void thundered beneath his steps, shaking under the force of his essence.

His height increased, reaching his normal three miles and then going higher until he stood a thousand miles tall in the Void. 

Behind him, Silverguard came up to his knee. Shouts of awe and terror mingled together from the forces there as they saw him standing so high. 

It was enough to face the beast on equal terms, like a human against an alligator, which the thing vaguely resembled. 

It was covered in stony black scales with bony protrusions that turned into a spiny mountain range extending down its back, and it had four legs that were edged with dark silver fins, which radiated energy into the Void.

Each limb ended in four black claws that were large enough to cut through half of Silverguard in a single swipe. 

Its tail was long and spiked, and it was just now beginning to uncurl from where it was wrapped around the rest of its body, showing off the dull armored plates that made up the beast’s stomach, one of its weakest areas.

But its head was its most prominent feature, as wide as a mountain and densely scaled with rough dark diamond ridges that formed into an enormous, gaping mouth, above which two massive nostrils flared. Its eyes looked like two yellow moons ignited above a nightmare landscape of ridges and bone. 

This one had crueler and more jagged features than the last he’d faced, but it radiated the same endless hunger. As its eyes fixed on him, he felt the swell of essence that flowed out from it. 

A dark dimensional field of voidfire and twisted space erupted into existence, tearing apart the area around it. 

Voidfire only looked like dark flames. It was really a subtle fluctuation of dimensional space that helped to tear apart things near the beast so it could devour them more easily.

Stones and rubble that had gathered around the beast disintegrated into nothing. Their essence was swept to the center, pulled into the beast’s maw, which opened to reveal a gaping dark hole. 

Its fangs were miles long and in the depths of its throat, a vortex of dark energy roiled, consuming everything that flowed in. That was the entrance to the beast’s stomach, a dimension it carried with it. 

It was also the location of its essence and all of its power. 

Its body was made of pure stone, with nothing remotely resembling a digestive tract. It absorbed matter and energy and created more mass for itself directly by compressing what it ate. 

As it saw Sam approaching, its eyes flared with hunger and its mouth began to open. Its body uncurled quickly, until it was facing him. The dimensional field around it expanded by a hundred times, swelling outward as it ripped apart everything nearby.

Voidfire and that dimensional field were two of its major powers, but they were irrelevant in this battle. 

Sam’s spear turned into a golden line of light as he struck through space, leaving a clean line that tore straight down through the Void. 

The Force of the Stars was gathered in the strike, the same ability that he’d used to destroy worlds, and space tore apart around the strike, turning into crashing waves of energy that exploded outward.

His spear sliced down through the Vos’Rekan’s dimensional field, cleaving it apart in a single blow, and continued on toward the beast itself. 

The Vos’Rekan roared as it turned its mouth upward, trying to bite at the spear with its strongest weapon, but it was a moment too slow.

The spear sliced down cleanly as it descended like an executioner’s blade straight through the beast’s body. It left a searing chasm of boiling and red hot stone in its wake. 

The Vos’Rekan’s movement managed to shift its body out of the way slightly, so the blow only cut through one of its shoulders, but a foreleg was completely severed by the strike. 

The limb tumbled away, its cut edge glowing. It floated in the Void, five hundred miles long. 

The first strike was Sam’s.

The Vos’Rekan howled in fury, its eyes glowing as it tilted its head back. 

Its jaws swung around and it seized the limb in its fangs, snapping it out of the Void in an instant. It refused to allow it to be separated. 

The vortex in its throat swelled as it swallowed the entire leg. 

Almost instantly, the boiling wound began to darken as new stone swelled up in its place. The beast’s ability to regenerate was already kicking in as it used its own body mass to fuel it.

If left to its own devices, it would only take a little while before the leg was fully restored.

Sam reached out toward the beast, his hand tearing through the Void as he crushed its dimensional barrier again and reached toward its throat. 

A massive Astral Rift followed in the wake of his grasp, shattering space as his hand closed around the beast’s neck.

The Vos’Rekan roared as voidfire flared upward, incinerating the same space that was closing around it, and its mouth snapped around, reaching up to swallow the attack. 

A gaping vortex swirled open, engulfing the rift in a blink. 

Shattered space met shattered space, all of it fragmenting into a storm of pure energy that was swallowed down the Vos’Rekan’s gullet.

It roared, its tail thrashing as its claws spread out. The arm Sam had severed was a quarter regenerated already.

The first exchange was a draw with neither side gaining a true advantage, but Sam was pressing the attack and the beast was on the defensive. 

Sam drew back his spear for a new blow. He’d barely tapped into his abilities so far, but this was a rare chance to exercise his strength. 

As much as he despised this thing, he was enjoying the exchange. He wanted to crush it with pure force and fury, ripping it limb from limb.

At that moment, Silverguard arrived behind him and his allies began launching their attacks.

Massive crystalline diagrams from Keros appeared in the air, the same as when they had fought the last Vos’Rekan, but even larger and more complex. Their lines shimmered with sapphire flames and a slight silver hue as meteors of crystal flame hurtled toward the Vos’Rekan.

They exploded against its hide, tearing open the stony surface in massive craters.

From Winter, rivers of white and blue ice flowed across the Void, swirling around the world and the Vos’Rekan like the tail of a comet as they worked to seal it. Sharp blades of ice and blizzard  winds sliced out of the rivers toward it, barraging it with a rain of death.

Her ice was so cold it felt like the Void was freezing solid, and even the Vos’Rekan couldn’t ignore it. Its body radiated a denser layer of voidfire as it let out a howl that made space shake.

Flames and ice melt, creating a crackling layer between the two energies.

From Asenya’s hands, a wave of silver-green dimensional energy spread out, and then it narrowed as it fell through the Void toward the beast. It was a pure dimensional blade, its edge as sharp as Sam’s spear.

The beast howled again as it saw the blade descending, but it was trapped by the layer of ice and crystalline spells, as well as Sam’s rift. It thrashed in place, but it couldn’t dodge in time. 

The blade sliced through its hide, severing part of a shoulder and another arm.

Sam saw a cold anger in Asenya’s features as the attack landed. 

The strike was a small bit of payback for what the beast had done to Aster Fall, both when it scarred the World Core and after. It had broken the world more than once while she was trapped.

The Vos’Rekan’s howl turned into a roar of pain as its mouth opened wider. The vortex in its throat swelled and blasted outward, turning into a dark line that severed the Void.

The line sliced through the remains of Asenya’s dimensional blade, its leg, and Winter’s river of ice without stopping. 

It was similar to a drake’s breath attack, but far more dangerous, a line of pure devouring force that consumed everything it touched. Everywhere it passed, matter and energy collapsed and flowed along the beam’s path until it went down the beast’s throat.

Then the Vos’Rekan curved its head, ignoring Asenya as it looked straight toward Sam. It could sense who its true enemy was.

The line of devouring energy followed, sweeping through the Void toward him.

The last time a Vos’Rekan had tried this, Sam had blocked it with a Void Barrier, basically opening a portal that displaced it out into the Void. 

This time, he simply braced himself and punched.

A massive vortex of golden energy and starlight flowed together into his hand as he compressed dimensional energy and the Truth of Endless Starlight into a single strike. 

Strange ripples of the Truth spread outward, warping the Void around his hand into something that seemed like flowing stars, one stretching into another without end.

A brilliant explosion of bright and dark energy ripped through the Void, sending out a shockwave like an exploding star. 

When it passed, the Vos’Rekan’s beam was gone, as was half of its head.

Sam’s fist was covered in black ashes from where it had been surrounded in voidfire, but as he drew it back flecks of the material fell away, revealing untouched golden skin.

The Truth of Endless Starlight was a lesser Truth than his main one of Silver Chaos, but he’d still comprehended it. It was a natural evolution of the path he’d begun with Stellar Conversion.

It was enough to deal with this Vos’Rekan.

The devouring force had met an endless existence and failed to overcome it.

As the beast reeled backward, rubble fell away from the remaining half of its head, which now looked like a misshapen lump.

At Sam’s command, thousands of silver flames ignited throughout the Void around the Vos’Rekan, burning away the beast’s essence as they countered the devouring force. With each bit they consumed, they burned a little brighter.

Missing half of a head only slowed the beast down a little, however, and it began to twist in place as its tail swung forward. 

Sam’s spear rose to meet it.

Behind him, the rest of the army also came into range and began to attack.

Thousands of astral golems and Silver Nagas leapt forward, sweeping toward the beast in great  formations. The Blessing of Silver Stars surrounded them, making it seem like they were made out of starlight.

Lines of stellar force tore through the beast’s hide, joining renewed attacks from Asenya, Keros, and Winter.

At the same time, a massive dimensional seal from Silverguard spread out across the system, locking down the fluctuations of space and ensuring that the beast couldn’t escape.

Sam’s avatars began to attack as well, standing at the heads of their companies.

It was like a dozen more Sixth Evolution Titans had suddenly appeared on the battlefield, laying waste to everything before them.

A storm of starlight and astral energy sliced toward the Vos’Rekan from every direction, trapping it within a hell of silver flames.

Despite that, the beast was Primordial, born of the hot expansion of chaos and destruction at the dawn of all things.

It didn’t fall so easily.

Its body shuddered as mountain ranges of stone moved, and the dimensional field surrounding it thundered with force. It grew steadily as it swelled with voidfire like a dark sun rising. 

Arcs of dimensional plasma tore outward like solar flares, severing the formations in chaotic lines. It was like a spiked star exploding. 

Then the field collapsed again, shrinking inward as it drew everything toward it. 

The beast’s jaws opened at the center, the vortex of its throat expanding until it was larger than the thing’s entire head. 

A massive field of stone that it had lost from its body, shattered astral golems, and swirling webs of energy and mana it seized from the battle disappeared down its gullet.

As the vortex disappeared, its body once again began to regenerate. 

Humongous expanses of stone appeared like liquid magma, flowing upward from the center of its body and sealing over cracks, forming new stone that stretched out everywhere. 

The force flowing upward was as powerful as the heart of a star, constantly generating new mass in unending quantities. It was energy that the beast had probably consumed in this system, where the sun was missing.

Its durability was clear, but its offense was almost as outstanding.

Its claws rose and fell in arcs of voidfire as it tore at the dimensional fabric of reality, and its jaws snapped toward anything moving within their range.

Sam’s avatars had to leap forward time and again to block its advance, fists and spears landing as he ripped its head away from his allies and hurled it back in another direction.

He met the Vos’Rekan blow for blow, feeling the crash of its strength against his own. 

It was like punching a mountain range and wrestling with a world, but no matter how hard the beast lashed out at him, it failed to advance.

Every time the Vos’Rekan tried to attack, a golden punch or spear tore through it, destroying the energy in its path and sending explosions rippling through the beast’s body.

When it tried to devour the army, starlight exploded in its throat, searing the passage closed and sending it reeling.

There were heroic moments among his allies, from when Winter froze the space around the Vos’Rekan as it tried to devour an entire company, when Keros burned through the beast’s spine with a torrent of crystal flame, and when Asenya grimly cut away piece after piece, severing its attacks before it could bring them to bear against the troops, but all of those attacks combined would only have delayed the beast’s regeneration and perhaps discouraged it from chasing them.

They were not able to kill it.

It was Sam who was locking down its main abilities, from its voidfire to its dimensional field, and tearing its body apart blow by blow.

Primordial forces met in the Void, his silver stars against the beast’s devouring hunger, clashing so fiercely that time and space shook. 

Strands of energy close to primal chaos formed in the collision as the energies were slammed back together, twisting through one another, and the shockwave spread outward, strong enough to rip through the system and its neighbors.

Those strands of energy were seized by Sam and they flowed into his cloak, twisting into threads of silver-grey light as they joined the field of energy already there. Force radiated outward, stabilizing space around them all and ensuring that the battlefield wasn’t simply ripped apart in the collision.

If it had been, nothing here but Sam and the Vos’Rekan would have survived.

Through it all, one figure blazed more brightly as the other dimmed.

Sam felt the strength of his body and his Truth expanding as he fought, their power improving as he became more familiar with using them in battle.

He had been missing a good enemy recently, ever since he crushed the Avatar of Blood. This was the first time he was able to go all out with his strength pitted against a force that was just as strong.

As the battle continued, his skill advanced and one thing became clear. Even only using the Truth of Endless Starlight, he was strong enough to crush the Vos’Rekan. 

If he’d used Silver Chaos instead, the beast wouldn’t have even been able to fight back. It would have simply crumbled away as all of its mass was returned to pure energy.

After a bit, Sam adjusted to the battle and he began to moderate the force of his attacks, drawing it out as the beast continued to try and regenerate. 

It had a massive amount of energy stored away and it was capable of restoring itself almost instantly until it ran out. 

New stone was constantly flowing upward through its body, holding the pieces together, sealing wounds, and fusing gaps where blades had cut through a moment before.

It gave everyone with him a chance to unleash their full strength on the beast.

But bit by bit, the continent-sized Vos’Rekan was torn apart, until its life was barely hanging on by a thread. Enormous chunks of stone floated in the Void, making it seem more like an asteroid field than a beast.

At the center, the creature still fought, its half-mangled jaws still trying to devour everything around it. A field of voidfire was struggling to consume the energy around it as it tried to regather its form and heal, but the attacks landed so constantly that it didn’t have a chance.

Finally, the end came.

The black hole of the beast’s stomach began to swell, contracting and expanding again as it entered its death throes.

“Back!” Sam commanded as his hand rose, pointing toward the fortress behind them. “Shelter on Silverguard.”

A sweep of his aura carried the slower warriors away, sending them flying back toward Silverguard, and he teleported those that were still too slow to get there.

The Vos’Rekan was writhing, what remained of its body twisting around on itself as it disintegrated. Lines of black devouring light were slicing through its body, pulling all the material it could reach inward. 

As its body collapsed, it could no longer maintain the stability of its core essence, which was all condensed in its stomach.

It was the Vos’Rekan’s equivalent of Sam’s essence constellation, except instead of expanding into a galaxy, it collapsed further, becoming stronger as it did. When it erupted, it was strong enough to shatter worlds and extinguish stars.

Instead of retreating behind Silverguard’s defenses like everyone else, Sam stood before the scene of destruction and raised his hand. 

A silver shield of essence stretched around him, sparkling like a field of stars. It fused with his cloak as it flowed out across the Void, giving rise to lines of primal grey and silver chaos that appeared in the depths, stretching away to eternity.

At the same time, the Vos’Rekan’s core exploded.

The Void inverted, turning black to white and white to black. 

Lines of crackling essence and dimensional energy lashed outward like a thousand blades, severing space and matter, followed by a shockwave that tore across the entire system. 

It was an ocean of power erupting, flooding across everything, and it only wanted to disintegrate everything that it touched. It flowed across the Void, swamping Silverguard and the rest of the Crown of Stars’ defenses in a dense tide of crashing waves. 

The wave was so large that even the enormous fortresses looked small against it, like islands floating in the dark when the ocean rose to swallow them.

But in front of them, a towering golden figure stood alone, his hand held out like a wall, and the tide parted around him, flowing away in two directions like it had been divided by a cliff.

As the energy hit Sam, it was absorbed into his cloak and by his Truth, which swiftly converted it to his own use. New strands of primal chaos appeared within his aura, energy preserved for later. 

It was a critical resource, the energy the beast had gathered over the ages, so he gathered the majority of it as he let the rest of the explosion fade away into the Void.

As the wave faded, he took the opportunity to seize the essence and experience from the Vos’Rekan, the sum of its millions of years of existence. 

The essence was his, but he let the larger part of the experience flow toward his allies behind him. His Silver Nagas needed levels and those who had come to fight also needed to feel like they were being rewarded for this battle.

Silverguard’s shields held firm and as the eruption faded away, the Void became visible again, as well as Sam standing alone in front of them all.

Gasps of shock and then a stunned silence fell across the crowd as the warriors from Council and the younger races saw him there.

“Hail the Silver Lord,” Sleset hissed with pride as he saw it. He turned to the crowd and smiled, his fangs flashing. “His power knows no bounds. Bow your heads, followers, and acknowledge him.”

The other Silver Nagas hissed in agreement, their fists thudding against their chests again as the sound resonated. 

The other races gave them confused looks, but it didn’t stop them. They just did it even more loudly. Their hisses were proud and echoing as they formed back up into ranks and waited for Sam’s command.

Sam gave them a nod of acknowledgement, and then he looked across the system, scanning over the rubble that had been the Vos’Rekan.

His hand swept out.

When it came back, shimmering points of dark light were gathered on his palm.

Each of them was a Fragment of the Primal Void pulled from the Vos’Rekan’s bones, slivers of energy from the First Age. 

It was energy that could only exist in the grasp of a Primordial being. If he hadn’t seized them, they would have started to dissolve into the Void, swiftly disintegrating into the chaos winds.

They were the true value of this beast's nearly endless life.

The foundation of a new future.

There were thirty of them, even more than he had hoped.

These would be enough.

He held up his hand as he showed the fragments to the crowd, and a smile crossed his features.

“With these shards of chaos, we will forge a new era. Look upon them and know what you have done.”

The shards glimmered in his grasp like stars, burning fiercely. Their color was already beginning to change from matching the Vos’Rekan’s black stone to Sam’s brilliant silver energy as they resonated with his aura.

“One day soon, Evolutions will change,” he announced, his voice resonant as it echoed in the Void. “The system we use to handle them will improve. I will advance it, making it capable of things you can only dream of. The Path of Stars will burn in the heart of every star, its force touching you all.”

He paused as he let the moment sink in, and he saw their expressions changing as a sense of solemnity fell over them.

“Your descendants will know better days than the ones you have walked, and futures brighter than the ones you believe in, which is all a living being can strive for. That is due to what you have done today.”  

He paused again as he looked over the crowd, and then he looked back over his shoulder at the remains of the Vos’Rekan, the rubble strewn with treasures that would make even a Titan jealous.

“All of you will receive a chance to consult with the World Core and affirm your Path, but that will come shortly. Now, it is time to deal with the more immediate rewards of battle.”

His hand rose and currents of silver light divided the Void, swiftly organizing the beast’s remains into different types. 

The plain stone he gathered in one area, which would go toward reinforcing Silverguard and the other fortresses, or perhaps toward building even more.

The rest of the riches he sorted by type, from the stellar cores, dimensional stasis crystals, natural treasures of the Void, elemental crystals, mana crystals, and more.

Then he began to distribute them.

Behind him, the desolation of a Primordial beast lay stretched out against the cosmos, its corpse still humming with energy as it swiftly cooled to true stone.