Amazon Apocalypse 4: Chapter 39

I crawled to my feet to take in the broken pile of bones. The battle was won at last, and I had a lot to show for it. When I’d decided to wipe out the naga and the undead, I hadn’t quite been planning to bite off this much of a battle. I picked up the skull to seal the soul within if anything was left of the Lich King, like I'd tried before. But the effort wasn't necessary. Both he and Dramonar were well and truly dead in both body and soul.

Congratulations, your class, Sage of Forbidden Knowledge, has reached level 169!

Congratulations, your race, Homo Fatum, has reached level 169!

You have slain a Death Defier! Reward selections are available.

I waved away the prompt notifications appearing before me in rapid succession. I’d already released Unholy Revelation, but now I took myself back down to normal by releasing the Mania entirely. As I did so, the strength it gave me left my body, and I felt more battered and worn than I’d been in a long time.

Carter Smith's Current Status

Race: Homo Fatum (Epic - Level 169)

Class Sage of Forbidden Knowledge (Mythic - Level 169)

Racial Stats:

Strength: 975

Agility: 1420

Perception: 1460

Vitality: 1495

Intelligence: 1705

Charisma: 195

Luck: 158

Class Stats:

Insight — 170
Aberration — 137
Arcana — 200

Abilities:

Passive Racial:

Iron Will, Mind Over Flesh, Share Curse, Power of Nature, Deflect, Sanity Siphon, Living Paradox, Machine Spirit Awakening.

Active Racial:

Arcane Blade, Mana Barrage, Time Stutter, Blood Sacrifice, Lightsculptor's Brush, Firescourge Breath, Mana Overload, Multipurpose Glyphs.

Class:

Corrupting Mark, Eldrich Augmentation, Void Cannon, Exploit Weakness, Shadowrealm Stride, Summon Void Leviathan, Soulchain Nexus, Voidling Embrace, Eldrich Blight, Awakening the Inner Beast, Unspeakable Word, Dragonscaled Mage, Dragoneyed Mage, Dragonblooded Mage, Destined Death, Aegis of the Void.

Titles:

Exalted Forerunner of Earth, Integration Survivor, Gallant Guardian, Mechanical Master, Death Defier, Bloodline Patriarch, Giant Slayer, Soul Vampire, Lieutenant, First Lord, Spell Architect, Amazonian Conqueror, Shard King, Holy Saint of the Goddess in Jade, Purger of the Unclean.

I closed my growing list of abilities and titles. There was more and more to them these days, and pretty soon I'd have to stuff some of the weaker ones away. And maybe find a way to combine a few of my abilities and open up more skill slots. Either that, or swap some old abilities out to make room for new ones. I had a feeling like I was pushing toward an upper limit of how many abilities a human should be able to hold onto at once.

Maybe a deeper dive into how those cultivators used their powers would work. They seemed to have more varied abilities overall, though were weaker than skills perfected by the System. If I could master their methods of energy control, I would be able to cheat the System's limitations. But that was a task for another day.

I wanted to explore those rewards for killing the Lich King, but with so many wounded to see to, my comfort was secondary. I gathered myself, straightened, and looked around the battlefield.

I saw Bridget crouched on the ground as she munched on a biscuit. Her hands were recovering, and the sickly blacked flesh on her fingers was receding. She glanced up at me as I approached.

“I can’t climb to my feet, but I have some special biscuits in my bag of holding. They’re not exactly healing potions, but they’ll restore a lot of health over a few minutes.” Bridget shifted her hip to expose the bag, though doing so made her wince in pain.

Sakura was next to her, panting and exhausted from her multiple stomach wounds, but she had stopped the bleeding and was nibbling down on a similar biscuit as the blood clotted.

“I saw you charging in to rescue me. It was very heroic,” Sakura wheezed.

“I’m glad you’re alright. Are you sure the two of you will be okay?”

Bridget waved off my concerns. “Go. There are others who need more help than we do. Take my bag.”

I took the bag from her, and after leaving her with a few of her own biscuits, I distributed them to the wounded, tossing in the occasional mana potion while I was at it. They were enormously expensive and only roughly equivalent to one of Bridget’s biscuits. Still, they worked slightly faster, and some people needed that.

When I started, there were only two other people on their feet beside me, Reluna and Myrina.

Myrina was doing her best with a few tourniquets. She was tying cloth to ruined arms and legs. I suspected that by the time this fight was over, more than a few people here would be sporting some of Doctor Roswell’s grafted zombie limbs.

Reluna had her own way of keeping the wounded alive. To me, it looked like she was turning people into ice sculptures, freezing them solid and dramatically slowing down death.

By the time I’d made the rounds, a few others were climbing to their feet. But not everyone was fit to stand, and one man in particular seemed beyond saving.

“Sir Sandon...” I sighed as I stared down at his ruined body. There was a reason I’d called for only C-Grades. Those of us who’d reached C-Grade were far tougher to kill. But Sir Sandon had ignored my orders to fight the good fight, and he paid the price for it.

I knelt down to gather the brave knight’s body when I felt something like a chill pass through me. It reminded me of those tentacles that were trying to drain my soul during the first phase of the ritual, so I reacted immediately, scanning the higher dimensions.

There, I found the faint glowing image of a familiar knight. He was nudging his own body, growling at it. He looked like he was urging his own corpse to get up, perhaps thinking he was staring at a fallen comrade-in-arms.

“The battle is over, Sir Sandon. We won.”

Despite my best efforts, there was no response from Sir Sandon. I focused, reaching out with all the powers of an Aethersmith. Reaching into that higher dimension that belonged to the System and its tools, I sensed my will brushing against someone familiar. Sir Sandon was there, or at least, he should be. Right now, he was refusing to leave his body behind and accept his death.

Looking closer, I could tell why. The System had its thousands of needles skewered through him, just as it had through all of us who’d been integrated. But Sir Sandon had another bond. This one was far simpler and took the form of jade-colored rope tied around his waist. The rope was broken and frayed, but he was holding onto it with his free hand to keep it from coming loose.

That rope must have represented his connection to the Goddess in Jade and the blessings she’d given him. If the System claimed his soul, they’d be lost forever, and he was unwilling to let that happen. So he hung onto the connection like a lifeline, clinging to the material world long after he should have departed it.

I could admire his determination, and I sought to help him. After all, I had defied death. And so had the Lich King. It had been done twice over, so why not a third time?

I had not delved too much into the workings of souls. I knew sometimes fragments of them went into enchantments and rituals, like magic quills that would write on their own or instruments that could play themselves. The clearest example was the possessed Dragon we’d just fought. Dramonar’s soul had facilitated the takeover of the Torchdragon, though the Lich King’s soul had finished the process.

Sharky could also manipulate souls in his own way. He stripped them down, chewed them up, and sent any goodness in them straight to the afterlife. Meanwhile, the dark and terrible stains they’d gathered in life formed together into a twisted amalgam of hatred and ill-intent—in other words, a Voidling. Those terrifying creations would roam around in Sharky’s wake, helping him devour the world as they’d been devoured.

Sharky couldn’t rescue Sir Sandon without destroying most of his soul, and the ritual diagram had the assistance of two Chaos Gods. But I had witnessed both processes, and between that and my own experiences, I’d picked up a thing or two about stuffing a soul into a new body. Did I dare to try?

I still had that promise to fulfill for Ben and the others. Perhaps this would be a good start.

I pulled Sir Sandon’s body into a bag of holding. It was likely ruined beyond repair, and if I failed, his people would want a funeral. Then I turned to Sir Sandon’s ethereal form.

“Can you hear me?” I mouthed as I stared at him between dimensions. He mouthed silent words in reply.

With my telekinesis, I reached out for the jade rope in his hands and pulled it closer. The binding came reluctantly, but pulling on it felt natural, like I had authority over it. What I was about to do likely wouldn’t be possible if the Goddess in Jade hadn’t appointed me her holy saint to aid me in my fight against the Chaos Gods.

I repaired the rope, binding it back around Sir Sandon’s waist. When I was done, his form seemed more substantial, like he was no longer moments from fading away.

“Wait here,” I said, and Sir Sandon nodded, mutely staring at his hands. Perhaps he was only now realizing that he was dead.

We lost two other warriors, neither of whom I recognized. Unlike Sir Sandon, they had nothing for their souls to hang onto after death, and so they swiftly departed this mortal coil. Hopefully they would find Ben and the others and wait.

I tugged on Sir Sandon’s jade chord, leading him behind me as everyone gathered up. Transporting these people home was going to be a bit of work, as many of them were in critical condition despite our best efforts.

“We could send a messenger to bring the big white carriages here?” Myrina suggested.

I shook my head. “The cargo vans will have a tough time over the rocky terrain. We’ll need to make stretchers and carry them. You’re fit to run, right? Get more people from the wall and bring them here with as much wood and fabric as they have on hand.”

We had Sharky with us, but I wasn’t sure how useful he’d be at carrying the wounded. His back wasn’t shaped for it if you couldn’t sit upright, and not even I trusted him enough to hold my wounded companions in his mouth. He would probably take an instinctive bite or two by reflex. So that meant we’d need to carry the wounded ourselves.

Myrina took off running while Reluna paced around, keeping the heavily wounded frozen. I kept the less heavily wounded stuffed full of Bridget’s biscuits.

“It’s a good thing everyone is C-Grade. Most D-Grades die after being frozen solid. With C-Grades you usually have a few hours, which should be long enough to get to a healer.” Reluna waved a hand over Kyle’s motionless form, freezing him solid into a refrigerator-sized block of ice.

“I’m glad. And I am doubly glad you figured out how to reverse that ritual circle. That could have been bad if you hadn’t siphoned off his power.”

Reluna blushed and her cheeks turned a paler shade of blue.

“All in a day’s work for a student of magic. But yes, I think the way I reversed the flow of mana and diverted it into the void was quite ingenious. There was a small chance void monsters could have broken through to our reality right away, but the risk was worth it to kill the Chaos Gods’ avatar. Now, it will take them weeks to break through.”

I froze for a moment. “Say that again about void monsters?”

Reluna waved away my concerns. “One last act of spite from the Chaos Gods. Don’t worry. My seal ended up working far stronger than even I thought. It will last for weeks. We have plenty of time.”

I swore. “This really feels like the sort of thing you should have led with. Show me the seal.”

We rushed to the former ritual site, where Reluna pointed out the modified ritual circle. The blood had dried and hardened the sand and packed earth, but most visible of all was a crack in reality running through the entire circle.

“Is that supposed to be there?” I asked, pointing at the crack. Behind me, I could hear chitinous chittering, like insects grinding against one another as they tried to squeeze through the portal.

Reluna stared down at the slowly widening rift. It looked a lot like the kind of portal that appeared when I cast my Eldrich Blight spell.

“Perhaps I was overly optimistic. I’d say we have about three days,” Reluna corrected.

The crack spread wider.

“One day?” Reluna hesitantly corrected again.

I cursed. “We’re getting out of here now.”

Thankfully, most were already on their feet after chowing down on a few biscuits. A missing arm or leg didn’t slow a C-Grade down anywhere near as much as it would a normal human. While it certainly hurt, many of the walking wounded could even help carry some of the people Reluna froze solid.

I carried Frank and Kyle over either shoulder while levitating Kerrie behind me. All three of them had been wounded bad enough that Reluna froze them into blocks of ice.

That was about the most I could carry, and Reluna brought one more. I ended up making several trips hauling three at a time, doubling back for another batch every few minutes and checking on the seal. The more I looked, the more certain I was that thing was definitely not going to last.

Perhaps if I could spare the attention, I’d be able to do some artificing to reinforce it, but extracting the wounded was hard enough as it was. If this place got swarmed with void creatures, it’d be impossible to get them out of here before their ice blocks melted and they were gone for good.

We’d only made it a third of the way out of the shard before Myrina came sprinting back to us with a few bundles of cloth and some helping hands from the wall.

“Dear god, what happened?” one of the D-Grades said. To them, it no doubt looked like we were fleeing a losing battle.

“We won, but the dragon was possessed by a chaos god, and now monsters are about to break through from the void. We need to be on the other side of that wall before they do,” I hastily explained.

I heard audible gulps all around, and they needed no further encouragement to put this place behind us. I fashioned a few crude stretchers at high speed. Telekinesis was pretty good for threading sticks through cloth. The truly wounded were frozen into ice blocks, so they didn’t mind a bumpy run.

Just when the wall was in sight, I heard something cracking. It was like the sound of ripping fabric right next to my ear, but I knew it was way behind us in the direction of the ritual circle.

“That’s the sound of reality tearing. Hopefully there are no flying void monsters,” Reluna noted.

The people carrying the stretchers had been running as fast as they could moments ago, but now they were running even faster.

“Sharky, delay whatever’s coming in our direction!” I ordered.

“Nom nom...” Sharky turned and swam back in the direction we’d come.

Moments later I saw large, bat-like shapes flapping their way into the sky. It was safe to say there were flying void monsters.

Thankfully, we made it to the wall without issue, and from there all the ice blocks went straight into the cargo vans we’d come from town with. I rallied the remaining defenders.

“The good news is, we won. The bad news is that a lot of the elites are heavily wounded. That means you guys have to hold the wall against what’s coming.”

“Yes, sir!” shouted the nearest D-Grade warrior. “But... uh... what’s coming?”

Something hideous screeched in the distance. I nodded my head in its direction. “Whatever that is.”

<Note>
So I'm at least 30% sure those are the accurate numbers for Carter's stats. I will have to check again before publication.

On a more certain note, I was going over book 1 again and sure enough, I once again missed something. The "Lieutenant" title vanished during the note transition to the next book and I missed it until now.

It's a shame, because I had a whole series of quests planned for that title to upgrade it all the way to some sort of Supreme Commander of Earth title. Ah well. It's late to bring it back now, since Carter should already have some sort of general title. I'm sure I'll figure out something to do for it.