Free Web NovelChapter 683: Pride and Hunger (II)
The battle raged with a ferocity that made the domain containing it feel insufficient for the task.
If not for the layered boundaries holding the three clashing forces inside the space they occupied, the continent would have been given new scars deep enough to remember for generations.
Calamitous forces were unleashed by all three, the Sin Generals throwing their full weight into it from the first exchange. They understood that the longer this continued, the worse it became for them.
They had the upper hand. Anyone watching could have recognized that much. The chaos queen was young, and her grip on her law was not yet the iron certainty of something fully mastered.
But control over laws and physical strength had never been the only variable that mattered in this battle.
The Sin General of Pride was among the worst possible opponents she could have drawn because of how its nature intersected with hers. Pride’s law encroached on one of chaos’s strongest principles, the rewriting of reality according to will, bending the world’s own framework into alignment with what one declared to be true.
Against most opponents, this was devastating and nearly unanswerable, and even against the Chaos Queen, the master of the source from which the principle of pride had originally emerged, it was still troublesome to contend against.
Yet law and strength were only a factor in deciding the result if a clash between Pride and the Chaos Queen was being fought on equal footing, which it was not.
The Chaos Queen had two advantages that no amount of experience or strength or mastery of law could simply account for.
First, she was immortal and did not care about her life, and second, she was being consumed by madness and did not care about the result of this clash.
Both statements were true, and together they produced a combatant that the Sin Generals could never be fully prepared to handle, because experience with opponents was experience with opponents who had something to lose.
Not death, nor victory held any meaning to her.
The chaos queen was not protecting anything. Not herself, not Elder Darrien fighting with death somewhere in the dissolving landscape, not Lady Margaret, whose condition had been deteriorating since before the battle began.
The chaos she unleashed was not directed, strategic, or shaped by any consideration of cost. It was simply chaos, expressed in its purest form by something that had no internal voice advising restraint.
This became clear within the first few seconds and did not become less clear as the minutes accumulated.
The clash between them was as grand as it was maddening, wild in its scale and its unpredictability in a way that gave even Alex pause, and Alex had witnessed battles between true Hegemons, and he had survived impossible battles dozens of times.
Twenty minutes passed.
The toll was visible on all three.
Beelzebub had been torn apart and reconstituted more times than Alex had the attention to count, the hunger domain absorbing the damage and rebuilding him from its own resources each time, but the process was not free, and the cost was accumulating.
The proud Sire bore grievous wounds that should have been healing and were not, the chaos having reached into the mechanisms by which Pride sustained itself and introduced into them the particular dysfunction of things that refused to follow the rules they had been given.
The chaos queen was missing her right arm. The right side of her face was gone as well.
Neither of these facts appeared to have communicated themselves to any part of her that governed behavior. Where the arm had been, chaotic tendrils of energy and flesh gushed outward with the frantic, purposeful urgency of something trying to claw its way free from inside her.
Alex watched, and after several more minutes of watching, the realization arrived with the quiet finality of something that had been building toward itself for a while and had simply taken its time getting there.
’She would die.’
The Sin Generals reached the same conclusion at approximately the same moment, their respective intelligences arriving independently at the same arithmetic.
The chaos queen was losing ground that she would not recover, the youth and the incomplete control combining with the damage into a trajectory that had a visible endpoint.
’But that wouldn’t matter,’ Alex thought. ’Not in the end.’
Sire, having reached the same conclusion, decided to act, and through the carnage of the exchange, his voice arrived clean and absolute, carrying the particular quality of something that was not making a claim but stating a condition.
"I Alone Am Supreme."
The words rang with the authority of a law acknowledging itself.
Sire abandoned the humanoid form that Pride had chosen to wear into this battle.
The blazing golden dragon that lunged at the chaos queen now was not a transformation so much as a declaration, the truest expression of what Pride looked like when it stopped managing its own appearance.
Enormous and radiant and terrible, its claws tore through the chaos queen’s body with the particular violence of something that had decided the time for measured force had passed.
Its fiery breath followed immediately, washing over what the claws had opened, melting her like candle wax, the edges of her blurring and running and losing their definition under the sustained, overwhelming application of sovereign flame.
The surrounding space dimmed as Sire pressed forward. The chaos that had been churning and shifting and pressing its impossible shapes against the edges of everything quieted in degrees.
Not extinguished but subdued, pulled down from its most extreme expressions by the expanding pressure of his presence, which had stopped being localized, spreading outward from him like an ocean finding its level, touching everything it reached and dimming it into something closer to submission.
The chaos queen was pushed back. Her body grew more formless with each exchange, the human shape she had arrived with dissolving steadily into something that had less and less relationship to the concept of a fixed form, consumed from the inside by the madness and chaos that had always been the dominant force in whatever she was, the battle simply accelerating a process that had been underway for a long time.
Beelzebub himself had lost any semblance of form that could charitably be called a body. What occupied the space where he had been was something that defied the kind of description that relied on reference points, because none of the reference points that normally anchored description were present or stable.
Countless heads. Uncountable arms and legs are arranged without any organizing principle of proportion or placement. Mouths everywhere, open and working. Hanging, open stomachs from which further mouths extended.
The pieces of hundreds, possibly thousands of beings, were consumed and incorporated and pressed into service as components of something that had stopped being a creature and had become something more.
It’s hundreds of eyes turned toward Sire simultaneously.
Toward the presence that was growing like an untamed fire, spreading outward from its center with the unstoppable momentum of something that had decided it was done being bounded, the golden aura washed over the battlefield.
"The Final Feast."
The roar came from all of Beelzebub’s countless mouths at once, the sound of it a single terrible note produced by hundreds of different instruments simultaneously, and in the instant after it, the grotesque form turned on itself.
All of those terrible, hungry mouths turned inward.
The churning of flesh that followed was audible. The grinding of bones followed.
The abomination devoured itself with the same relentless appetite it had applied to everything outside itself, the process rapid and without hesitation, mouth consuming mouth, consuming limb consuming head in the cascading, self-consuming collapse of something that had been building toward exactly this and had simply been waiting for the right moment to release it. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
The grotesque assembly of thousands of pieces disappeared into itself, piece by piece, until nothing remained of the form that had occupied that space except a single enormous maw.
It hung in the air where Beelzebub had been, vast and lined with rows of fangs that receded into depths that the eye could not find the bottom of, eyes glittering in those depths with the patient.
Serpentine tendrils erupted from it by the hundreds, each one ending in a beastly jaw of its own, gushing outward in every direction with the frantic, purposeful energy of something looking for something to eat.
The golden dragon was already upon the chaos queen, decimating what little remained of her human form with the focused, sustained violence of something that had committed completely to an ending.
A second later, what the chaos queen had become was not distinguishable as a person by any conventional measure.
She was an apparition of ever-shifting tendrils and maws and claws and maddened eyes, her form cycling through configurations with the continuous, purposeless urgency of something that had stopped being directed by anything resembling conscious intention.
The damage she was sustaining was enormous. The damage she was dealing to the two Sin Generals was equally enormous, tearing into their flesh and reaching into their minds with the particular, invasive quality of chaos.
All three of them were being mutilated continuously and continuously reforming from the mutilation, the battle having long since left behind anything that could be called technique or strategy or the application of law and having become something more fundamental.
Flesh and grit and the simple question of which of the three could endure the longest past the point where endurance had any rational justification.
Alex watched it with focused, analytical attention and found the future become ever more clear, that the chaos queen would be the eventual victor.
Not because she was winning in any visible sense. Not because the Sin Generals were weakening faster than she was.
But because even if she were killed, she would survive and be remade as a new one, whereas the Sin Generals would take home countless scars that would refuse to heal.
So, unless the two Sin Generals had something they had not yet revealed, something held in reserve for exactly such a dire moment, their options had narrowed to two.
Find a way out, or end up with soul-crushing scars to remember this battle by.
