Chapter 825: New Power and a Freshly Cooked Batch of Smugness

Jason plunged from his cloud palace head first. His cloak trailed behind him, a black scar against the clear blue sky. His cloak was not a graceful tool of flight, but he had learned from the messengers how to compensate. They flew using the magic of their wings, enhanced by their ability to use physical force with their auras. Jason did the same, descending in a spiral to approach the ground with poise.

Close to Gary, currently four times his height, Jason floated in the air, producing a cloud disc to stand on. His cloak stopped mimicking wings and was whipped wildly as if by a gale, despite the hot still air.  The forces Jason was mustering far above were causing ripples in the unstable fabric of the transformation zone.

Gary was continuing his endless but one-sided beating of the avatar. With Jason's arrival, he kicked the avatar in the chest, sending it tumbling away across the ground. Every bounce left a wet stain in the sand; the same dark, thick oil now coated Gary’s armoured boot. He frowned at it standing on one leg and the golden flames wreathing his body flared. The black and purple goo was burned away and he set his foot down with satisfaction.

“This isn’t the place to be, Jason,” he said, not taking his gaze from the avatar as it finally rolled to a stop.

“This is the place I need the avatar to be. I need you to stop it from running.”

“Easily done,” Gary said, pointing with his hammer. The avatar was rushing at him and he pulled back his hammer arm. The avatar accelerated into a blur that Jason couldn’t follow, Gary moving just as fast. From Gary’s pose a moment later and the avatar sailing through the air, Jason deduced that an upward swing from Gary had sent it flying.

“I’m beating it like steel on an anvil,” Gary said, “but it comes back every time. It won’t run.”

“It will.”

“It hasn’t run from me and I’m a demigod right now, Jason. Your project up there is hardly subtle but the avatar hasn’t given it a second glance.”

The avatar charged it again. Gary and the avatar became a blur of motion and the avatar was knocked away once more.

“The avatar isn’t smart enough to understand what I’m doing up there,” Jason explained. “It’s little more than power and instinct; it doesn’t recognise the threat. It doesn’t run from you because it knows you can’t destroy it. Once it realises I can, that will change.”

“If you say so. It’s not like anything I’m doing works. But you know that I’m flooded with divine power right now?”

“You’re enormous and covered in gold fire, Gary. As reminders go, it’s a pretty good one.”

“And your giant sky spider fortress is designed to destroy the avatar, which is a big lump of divine power.”

“Yep.”

“Should I be worried about standing under that thing?”

“Nah, you’re good,” Jason assured him. “Until I get my hands on a soul forge, I can’t do much to Hero’s power. You and I need to have a conversation about that later, but right now I’ve only got the tools to mess this thing up. I couldn’t put a dent in you if I tried.”

“Why do you need a soul forge for me and not the avatar?”

“It doesn’t have a soul. There’s no one home to say no when I ask the power it’s made of to change into something else.”

“Jason, exactly how well do you understand what you’re doing?”

“Well, no time to hang around here,” Jason said. “You just make sure it stays put, yeah? I need you to keep it as directly underneath the cloud palace as you can.”

Gary conjured a golden harpoon and threw it at the avatar and it moved in a golden streak. Until it stopped, impaled in the avatar, Jason didn’t even see the golden chain attached to it. Gary was already hauling on it, pulling the avatar closer.

“You do what you have to do, Jason.”

Jason pushed the hood of his cloak back to reveal his smiling face.

“Always reliable, Gary,” he said, and then ascended into the air.

***

Essence users had excellent control of their perception, able to isolate specific smells and sounds, or dampen their senses against horrifying stenches or blinding light. The adventurers observing from the ground deadened their hearing to avoid the alien howl coming from Jason’s spider palace, but it didn’t work. Miriam quickly realised there was a spiritual component, piercing through mundane senses to affect the magical ones.

Amos Pensinata was a step ahead of her, telling the group through voice chat to restrain their aura senses as much as possible. Miriam looked to their allies who didn’t share the precision control of the senses that essence users had. She could see that the brighthearts and Builder cultists were suffering, their hands clamped over their ears and their faces twisted in anguish, especially the silver-rankers.

Miriam next turned her gaze to the messengers in the distance. Most had landed on the ground, something they were loathe to do. Sitting or resting on their knees, they were sweating as they all looked up at the palace. Miriam hadn’t even known they could do that. Their expressions were not of pain but worry, anger and fear. Their auras, normally so controlled, were barely masking their emotions.

Only the trio of gold-rankers remained floating in the air. They too looked like the desert air had finally gotten to them, their skin slick with sweat. Boris Ket Lundi turned to meet her gaze. He smirked to himself and cast his eyes back upward.

There was another inhuman shrieking, but this one was pure sound and easy enough to block out. It came from the avatar as it clawed at the rocky, sandy ground, trying to scramble free of the golden chains binding it. It ignored Gary as he brought his hammer down on one limb after another, rendering them useless for only a brief time before they snapped back into shape.

A column of faint light had come down from the palace maw to shine on the avatar and the demigod. This was what the avatar scrambled to escape, unable to get free of Gary and his chains. The light had been barely perceptible at first but grew stronger by the moment. Colours could be made out now, the signature gold, silver and blue of transcendent power.

The light eventually grew strong enough to affect the avatar. Black and purple flakes started rising from it like ashes from a fire. It was slow at first but more flakes broke loose of the avatar as the light grew brighter. With each passing moment, more of them drifted up toward the palace. They rose through the light, bursting into white flame as they neared the gaping maw of the palace, filled with dark smoke and flashing orange and blue light.

Miriam focused her attention on the flakes as they burned on approach to the palace. She had seen such fire before, ghost flames burning off the undead like dry scrub. The flames were weak when the flakes first combusted, like those of Jason's ghost fire. They grew brighter as they approached the maw, blazing like Death’s miracle by the time they vanished into the smoke.

All of this was accompanied by an oppressive aura washing over the landscape from the cloud palace. It was Jason's aura at its most unyielding and merciless. His cloud palace and whatever strange magic his familiar wielded made it far stronger than anything Jason could accomplish alone. His aura brooked no challenge, but there was a benevolence to it as well, with the protectiveness and condescension of an adult to a child.

The aura seemed utterly unassailable, so Miriam was startled to sense it falter. It was only a brief moment; the silver-rankers were unlikely to have sensed it. But it told Miriam that whatever fight Jason was fighting, it was not the one-sided affair of Gary and the avatar.

***

Jason wasn’t truly conscious inside the cloud palace. As his body reclined in a cloud chair, his soul was clashing with Undeath’s power in a kaleidoscopic mindscape. It had no true form, paying against his senses as a maelstrom of colour and power. It was strange but Jason knew what to do, pitting his will against the echo of the absent god.

It was a battlefield Jason had experienced before when the Builder had tried to force him into accepting a star seed. He had no true memories of the conflict, just echoes marked on his soul in scars like hieroglyphs on a tomb.

As Jason fought the amorphous will of the god in the mindscape, his body reflected the battle. It was a battle of the soul and Jason’s body and soul were the same thing. Lying in the cloud chair, his body thrashed and flailed like someone caught in a night terror. His skin crawled and undulated as if Colin were trying to dig his way out. Light blasted from his eyes, sometimes blue and orange, other times the transcendent mix of silver, blue and gold. Occasionally they would flash purple.

The dead remnant of Undeath was a paltry thing compared to the active will of the Builder Jason has fought in the past, but Jason lacked his singular advantage from that battle. Against the Builder, he had the shelter of his soul; an impregnable fortress that could only be breached if he opened it himself. This time, Jason’s soul was already open. It was a necessary part of the process, something he had told no one. They would have tried to stop him.

Jason’s cloud palace was also his spiritual domain. It was a physical expression of Jason’s power, like the sanctum of a god’s temple. Jason had shaped the entire thing into a platform for Gordon’s massive working of intrinsic-mandate magic, linking it to Jason. That was the first tool he needed to sanction the avatar’s authority.

The other tool he needed was something that could work with the authority’s affinity of undeath. A forge to reshape it into something Jason could claim for himself. Authority could only be altered so much, but death and undeath were all but identical; pure or corrupted versions of the same power. Jason did not have any divine power, but he had something close.

The goddess of Death had shown Jason how to make fire in his soul, lacking in divinity but still shaped in the way that gods used power. And now some divinity had conveniently turned up. Jason was using the ghost fire to reforge the god's authority, turning the corrupt power of undeath into the clean power of death. Jason was then spending that authority to fuel his ghost fire, turning it from a pale echo to a divine weapon.

The shape came from Death and the power from Undeath, but the result belonged to Jason alone. It was no mortal weapon of sharpness and steel; it was a flame that would annihilate any undead power, second only to the goddess of Death herself.

Forging a divine weapon was no small undertaking, and Jason was not done. He was stealing from a god, and even the echo of it threatened to crush Jason before his work was complete. The danger was existential as he’d opened his soul to take in the authority. If he failed to eliminate the corruption of undeath, that corruption would claim him, undeath taking root in his soul. If his will fell short, Jason would become Undeath’s new agent, as Gary was to Hero.

Jason's plan wouldn't have been possible if Undeath had even the meagrest sliver of active will in the fight. Jason could no more have taken the god’s power than he could have swallowed a mountain, be it in the shape of his own head or not. Even just the leftover touch of the god, driving the avatar’s simple instincts, threatened to crush Jason’s will.

The battle of wills was something Jason had anticipated and believed himself ready for. His soul had his body scraped off it as it was cast through the depths of the astral. It had felt the touch of gods and the all-out assault of a great astral being. He had thought himself strong, ready to face the challenge. He had been naïve, once again failing to grasp the magnitude of the forces using him as a pawn in their games.

All he’d done, all he’d endured, was barely enough to get him into the arena alive. Without those experiences, just his first brush with the echo of the god’s will would have annihilated his mind. In the wild mindscape, he was a tiny man with a knife, fighting a giant in a hurricane. Jason steeled himself and gathered his resolve; he was going to fuck that giant up.

The fight was imaginary; a clash in Jason’s mind that played out on his body very differently. As he absorbed and reforged the power of undeath into death, the corruption flowed out of his body. Viscous oil, like raw crude, ran from his eyes, nose and mouth. As more and more poured out, Jason’s skin started to crack, more oil oozing out.

Inside Jason’s body, Colin worked to keep Jason alive through the process, preventing his body from giving out before his will did. Countless leeches fell from Jason’s flesh dead, coated in the purged filth of corruption.

Inside the mindscape, Jason fought on. The will of the god was absent, yet Jason was caught up in the aftermath of its presence. Like a man caught in the wake of a ship that had already sailed on, he was constantly on the verge of drowning. He scrambled to keep his head above water, desperately swimming through the ocean of power trying to inundate him.

Jason took it all and remade it, turning it into power for himself. But he could not use it until he was done, unwilling to risk breaking the magic that Gordon had forged. The power of undeath kept coming, as indefatigable as the avatar he was stealing it from. It seemed limitless, while Jason himself was not. He fought on, the spirit willing as his resolve never wavered, but his body and mind were beginning to flag.

***

The observers watched as Jason’s cloud palace started to break down. Sections fell away from the whole before dissolving into smoke. The ashes of Undeath’s power grew closer and closer to the palace before burning up in white flame and Jason’s aura faltered, pulsing like an unsteady heartbeat. The piercing noise was not gone but had been reduced to the point of background noise, to the relief of everyone.

Boris Ket Lundi flew away from his own people, the adventurers and their allies wary as he approached them alone. He moved directly to Miriam who moved out to meet him. On arrival, he looked back up at the palace before he spoke.

“We need to be ready if Asano fails,” he said. “If he does, he will become something like the lion demigod.”

“Will he have the same power?”

“No. Asano has turned much of Undeath’s power from undeath to death. Those two forces will be conflicting inside him. You must use your demigod to contain him until those powers destroy him.”

“How do we save him?”

“You don’t. Once he dies, the territories he and the avatar control will become unclaimed and we will have a lot of work ahead of us. Even more, for me, once we’re out. Without Asano to save his world, I will have to do it myself. An ugly necessity that will have unpleasant consequences for the Earth.”

Boris looked past Miriam as Jason’s team and other companions approached.

“Jason won’t fail,” Humphrey said.

“Your confidence in your friend is admirable,” he said, then turned his gaze on Sophie.

“Hey, girl. Ever been with a winged man in a booth?”

“Really?” Miriam asked. “Now, and in this situation, you’re acting like that?”

Boris grinned and turned to look at the cloud palace once more.

“I think,” he said, “I might have some confidence in your friend as well.”

“I hope you’ve got confidence in yourself,” Sophie told him. “Once I get to gold-rank, I’m going to kick you square in the balls.”

He turned to look at her again.

“What happened to a good old slap to the face?”

Humphrey’s hand slapped him in the face with a sound like thunder cracking. Boris rubbed his jaw while letting out a groan.

“I guess I had that one coming. Are you really silver-rank? Might essence?”

"You'd best watch your mouth," Humphrey said, "or at gold-rank, you'll find me standing in line behind the lady."

“You know messengers are some kind of fruit or something, right?” Belinda asked. “I’m not sure he has the equipment for either of you to kick.”

“This is not the time,” Miriam said in the incredulous voice of the only sane person in a world of madmen. “We need to be ready if Asano fails.”

“He’s not going to fail,” Neil said, sounding bored. “He’s going to almost kill himself and come back with some stupid new power and a freshly cooked batch of smugness. I always tell people and they never listen. Nothing’s going to happen to Jason.”

As Neil finished speaking, the cloud palace exploded.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Neil said.

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• Party leader [Jason Asano] has been compromised and is unable to maintain his abilities. Party has been disbanded and party interface has been revoked.

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"Uh… that might not be great," Neil said.

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