Chapter 9: Ch.9
Death. The smell of blood. The glimmer of life in their eyes fading quickly away before me. When did it become nothing to me?
As I roamed these pearl-white halls stained with red, I held strong my spear. These gods, they don't stop coming. They throw their lives away as fodder, and I end them without remorse.
The sun was still at its peak, while the palace was in an uproar.
The demi-gods still rushed toward me with weapons drawn, but they couldn't even scrape my skin. They set fire to halls, but the fire couldn't even singe my hair.
Soon, they came to fear me, they began to cease their charge as they rallied at the end of the hall, taking up the ground and walls of the plaza. I could see them. I could see the hundreds of them standing with spears pointed and bows raised. They even positioned one at the corner of the doorway.
They waited patiently and with anticipation for me to emerge from the hall. The air was still for moments upon moments until the silence was broken by my spear, coming through the wall and piercing the skull of the god standing in wait.
"Fools." My loud whisper echoed down the hall to the outside, with a gust of wind that blew over them. My spear, floated in the air toward the entrance, before being pulled to me.
"You are a false god!!!" One of them roared back. "The God of the World is the one true god! Rise up, my brothers and sisters! Our lives for him who gave us life!"
The rest of them became rallied by the one's words.
They were brainwashed fools, ignorant to the value of their own lives, but I was not so graceful that I would show them otherwise.
I rushed out, emerging from the darkened hall and crushing the skull of my first victim. A single stroke of my spear decapitated two others as the flurry of arrows rained down on me.
The arrows did nothing but bounce off my skin. What proceeded next was a brawl of the hundreds of gods trying to wear me down, but I fought them off as a warrior, while they threw themselves at me like animals.
I thrust my spear into a torso, ripping downward and spilling their blood and guts on the floor. A stroke of my spear slit throats, and my heel caved in a knee with a loud snap. Their agonizing wail, numb to my ears.
They attacked, one after another, in a relentless swarm.
As a fist came before my eyes, I head-butted it, feeling the bones of their knuckle shattered against my forehead. I grabbed hold of their head and slammed them into the ground.
A swing of my spear ran its path through the faces of a handful of gods, tearing across their cheeks and blinding their eyes.
I grabbed hold of one of them and plunged them onto the blade of another, before ripping the face off of the one holding the sword.
Blood slicked the floor and shouts of pain trembled in the air.
A woman's legs wrapped around my neck from behind, as hands covered my eyes and flames burst ablaze. I grabbed hold of an ankle, and like a whip, threw them to the ground.
By the time the sun was setting over the mountain horizon, the blood of deceased gods was spilling down to the mortal city.
The corpses of the gods I killed, butchered and mangled, littered the palace.
I ran my spear down the throat of the final demi-god to be slain by my hand, and it was then that he finally reared his ugly head.
"Is your stamina unlimited?"
Those were his first words, at the top of the steps that he looked down from. Not a hint of remorse in his expression, despite the hundreds of his kin whose bodies lay before him.
"Do you feel no compassion for your own blood?"
"Why would I? They failed to even serve their purpose."
"Another god, succumbed to madness."
He laughed in response, a stale look in his eye like that of the damned. "What do expect? Our species was not meant to live so long with such power. Even I know that, but why fight against it?" A bright, shining light appeared at his side. It took the form of a blade, reflective like mirror, bright like a light, a form that made it seem like metal. "Why fight at all?" Multiple appeared at his side, weapons that he conjured and sent flying forward.
My spear, clashing against each of them in response, shattered them like glass. I then launched myself toward him, the tip of my spear aimed at his heart, yet he stood firmly with that taunting grin on his face. I felt my balance tip over as if I were on ice and had begun to slip. I was suddenly pulled away as if by magic.
I was sent barrelling against a wall, slamming against it with that constant force continuing to push me against the stone.
Graith's laugh again cried out. "I am Graith! God of the New World! Everything in this world is mine to command, including its very gravity."
I was a little shocked to discover his ability over gravity, not enough that it would demoralize me, but rather it would make me cautious of what he was capable of. The thoughts of how he obtained such an ability came to mind, as well as how deep I should stir the water, but those thoughts were overshadowed by the one sentence that came to mind.
'If I go all out, how powerful would I be.'
I pressed against the wall and launched myself at Graith, destroying a piece of the palace in the process.
As I got closer, he again pushed me away, but this time I endured, the stone ground cracking underfoot. Soon enough, the whole of the floor would crater, walls collapsing, the palace walls crumbling, and the air stirring violently in a vacuum, with me at the center.
"Relent!" He shouted with an expression of frustration as plain as day, and I responded in tow with a roar that made the dense air tremble.
"NEVER!!!"
The moment that I stepped closer, the ground crushed denser as my foot fell down. My ears then burst, my nose began to bleed, my lungs collapsed, my eyes began to shed tears of red, and my vision blurred, but I did not relent.
I grit my teeth, tensed every muscle in my body, and I raised my arm with my spear, tightly grasped in hand.
I swung down with the explosive sound of thunder, splitting the mountain and sky with a scar that tore across the realm.
The mortals began to flee in fear of the wrath of gods, with the remaining few demi-gods who had managed to cling to their life, looking up in astonishment at the night sky.
Though my natural senses were blown, I prepared for the fight to come.
A storm began to brew, swiftly engulfing the once pristine night sky in a shroud of ominous, roiling clouds. They surged forth, accompanied by flashes of lightning and the booming crescendo of thunder, unleashing a symphony of tumultuous energy within their midst.
My divine senses were ultimately linked to my physical organs, leaving me incapable of seeing anything more than a thinly veiled blur, but despite my sight not being crystal clear nor my precision perfect, I was not incapable. I found Graith within the wreckage of the collapsed palace and splintered earth, having been thrown to the plains some distance away.
He hadn't managed to escape uninjured. His arm was terribly bruised and trembling, a number of his ribs broken, and his shoulder dislocated. He managed to push his arm back into the socket with a loud pop and a painful cry that led him to bite into his lip, just before I appeared behind him. I closed the distance with a large leap, falling from the sky with my spear aimed at his head.
He was alert and able to turn around in time, he was narrowly allowed to grasp the handle of my spear in defense of me staking his skull, but the tip of my spear had still managed to cut into his eye. He cried out as I twisted my spear and churned his eye socket, managing to throw my weapon off course at the sacrifice of his eye. I twisted and swung my weapon around in a flurry of swift thrusts and sweeping cuts.
Despite my vision, I was still able to rear his flesh, entirely due to his slurred movements.
He conjured a bright light that prompted me to look away for a moment, which gave him time to disappear into the sky.
Then, I felt the earth beneath my feet shake as if an earthquake had suddenly erupted. The very earth beneath me began to shake and rise, climbing up my legs and surrounding me completely, as if I were a magnet. They covered me completely, rising from the ground and surrounding me until there was a crater where the land used to be, and a mountain-sized boulder floating in the air.
He would raise up the mountain of earth even more, compressing it in order to entrap me. Under so much weight and mass, I was unable to even move. The mortals from the city, in their panic, fell to their knees in awe and fear of a god's power.
Graith would cackle like a maniac, with clawed hands and a vile grin on his face as he threw the land into the storm that swallowed it. He continued past the sky, going all of the way to the very peak of the world, in order to throw me into the dead of space.
He was exhausted after having used so much of his stamina and strength, a satisfied grin on his lips from having succeeded in defeating me. He watched as the land was floating away into the darkness, watched as it then began to crumble and spew out molten slag. His grin faded as the whole of the land began to burn red.
From the hellscape of erupting magma and fire, I emerged, having clawed my way out onto the surface. Fire encompassed me, consumed me, yet still, I held my spear in hand. Graith would attempt to push me further out into space, but with all of my strength, I would throw my spear, impaling him and sending back tunneling back to the surface of the planet.
The force of Graith's impact mirrored that of a meteor body colliding with the world, shattering a mountain upon contact. The land convulsed violently, upheaving in shockwaves that rippled across the once-stable terrain. Cracks snaked through the earth, ravaging the landscape, while the very air quivered with the aftershocks of his descent, yet still, he remained alive, but not without injury.
He quivered in agonizing pain, barely able to hold his hand steady as he reached for the handles of Ironpierce, attempting to pull it from his own body. He was unable to muster the strength, unable to even bother any further, as he looked up to the sky.
A storm of clouds and thunder stretches across the world, an encompassing darkness filled with flashes of white light. The clouds stirred violently, like that of a forming hurricane. As his eyes bore witness to the stirring forces, he let go in defeat.
A surreal sight unfolded before his eyes. It was as if the sky itself was falling. Within the billowing clouds, my ethereal visage began to materialize, a colossal countenance that depicted me as I appeared; with a hand, massive and awe-inspiring, extending from the celestial tempest, fingers outstretched and descending with an undeniable weight, not just of physicality but of an indomitable force, an entity, beyond the grasp of comprehension. The extension of my strength, my hand, as it appeared of the storm, befell him. A strike of thunder that shook the very world for miles.
When the dust settled, I would find Graith in my physical form, finding a bloody, charred, and beaten man barely able to mutter a whisper.
I approached him, pressed my heel on his chest, and ripped out my spear.
His eyes beaded with terror.
"Don't fret. I will not kill you..." I softly told him. "...Because you have your uses." With a single stroke of my spear's blade, I severed his head.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone