He Who Fights with Monsters 11

BOOK 10 SUMMARY The Battle of Yaresh saw the city largely razed to the ground by the messengers. In the aftermath, it is discovered that the messengers have been seeking power deep underground, only to unleash a potential cataclysm. Jason Asano leads an expedition underground, and encounters the brightheart people, a subterranean civilisation on the brink of collapse. Magically warped messengers are being produced by a corrupted tree, leaving most of the brighthearts dead. Jason is forced to ally with not only the brighthearts but his old enemy, the Builder cult, in order to stop the cataclysm. In the heat of battle, it is revealed that things are even worse than they seem. With most of the brightheart civilisation left dead and rotting, the god of Undeath has sent his priests to raise an undead army. Jason, his companions and his allies have to race against time to stop the cataclysm, holding off the undead in a pitched battle. Against an ever-growing army of undead, defeat seems inevitable. Even more so with the rise of Undeath’s avatar, a giant filled with divine power. Jason’s friend Gary makes a sacrifice, taking on power that will buy them much-needed time, but ultimately kills him. In a desperate move, Jason and his allies stall the cataclysm by dragging the entire battlefield into a pocket reality. Known as a transformation zone, they have little idea how the battle there will play out, but the only alternative is death. With the grand magic enacted, both sides wait in the final moments before the transformation zone takes them all. 1 WHAT MAKES THEM OUR ENEMIES Jason stood next to Gary, chatting in an oddly calm fashion given their presence in an underground necropolis. They both felt the surging disruption in the fabric of reality and Jason gave him a smile. “See you on the other side, brother,” he said. “Is this going to hurt?” Gary asked. “I don’t know,” Jason told him. “You’re the first person I know to pick up a temp job as a god. Are you prone to exploding under dimensional duress?” “I’m not a god, Jason, even a temporary one. That’s blasphemy.” “That’s—” “Kind of your thing, I know. I’m only a demigod, Jason, and the power is not mine.” “So, you’re more like an intern?” “What’s an intern?” Then Gary was gone and the world fell apart. Jason could still feel his own body but nothing else. The absence of even gravity’s familiar pull left him feeling untethered. Most of Jason’s mundane senses were blanked, with nothing to see, smell or hear. His magical perception suffered the opposite, however, bombarded with what once would have been an incomprehensible deluge of sensory input. Jason had been through a lot since the last transformation zone back on Earth. While his essence abilities had barely shifted, his knowledge and power in other metrics had advanced by orders of magnitude. Half-transcendents stood at the peak of diamond rank, be they essence-users, messengers or some other magical entity. The other half of transcendence was something many spent millennia trying and failing to achieve, yet Jason was already striding down that path. Between his gestalt body and his astral throne and gate, Jason was unharmed and unbothered by the dimensional maelstrom, reforging the reality around him. He observed the forces at play with detachment, seeing patterns in the seemingly random chaos. He only comprehended a fraction of what was going on, but it was a valuable education in the nature of both reality and the astral realm beyond it. It was a perspective normally reserved for gods and their ilk. It was not the first time Jason had felt the universe break around him. This was his third transformation zone, and each time, the experience was different. In the first, he had broken into a zone already in place, with little power to manipulate the forces involved. The zone itself had transformed him, taking one of his outworlder powers and forcibly evolving it into the Spiritual Domain ability. This gave him the power to imprint himself on physical reality, reshaping it to his own will. It had been an early and critical step on the path to becoming an astral king. In the second transformation zone, Jason possessed the power to reshape it from the beginning. In doing so, he had caused a fundamental change on Earth. The base level of magic had risen; magic no longer manifested in proto-astral spaces before spilling into the world. He had begun a new age of magic, where monsters and essences manifested directly in the world. The third time was set to be different again. Transformation zones on Earth were the result of the World-Phoenix intervening in eons past, to prevent Earth from breaking under the influence of magic. Pallimustus had no such need, not being as fragile. As a result, the dimensional rupture that had now appeared required another hand to trigger the transformation zone. Jason was the only one available. An unmoving stone in a whirlpool of cosmic power, Jason could feel the fundamental design of the universe. The original Builder had taken imprints from countless realities that had come before and melded them into a blueprint for two linked universes. This cosmic experiment in recycling was the very act that had gotten the first Builder sanctioned. As Jason sought out every scrap of power and knowledge within himself, he found a tenuous thread of power, something he was barely conscious of. Shade had called it destiny magic, a power to sense the most powerful and fundamental aspects of the cosmos. Shade suggested that Jason had been using that power instinctively from his first introduction to magic, but they had also seen it used more actively. Gordon was a young familiar where Shade was ancient, but he had demonstrated a connection to that same power, something even great astral beings were wary of. Jason suspected his own connection to it was the very reason the familiar had chosen him. Jason now called on that power, crudely and instinctively. He felt Gordon offer guidance and support from within Jason’s soul realm, pushing him in the right direction. Jason followed that thread, feeling some distant thing at the far end. It was a whisper in the hurricane of power raging around him, but he put all that aside, reaching out with his soul. He could barely sense what was tethered at the end of that thread. Stretching his senses to the limit, he could feel that it was broken, yet it was so much more vast than he was. Even sundered, it rivalled the might of the great astral beings. Jason could barely touch it, unnoticed like kelp brushing past a whale. Even so, just the echo of it helped Jason understand how to tame the power storming around him. The distant power was a thing of boundaries and that was what he needed. He could not control the power so much greater than himself, but he didn’t need to. The right nudge, in the right way, would cause the power to bind itself, setting in motion the forces that would resolve into a transformation zone. Jason drew on his soul realm, tapping into his astral throne and gate, along with his power to create spiritual domains. He took a delicate hand with making changes, aware of his shallow understanding of the forces at play. Calling on the knowledge and intuition he had painstakingly built up about cosmic forces and physical reality, he did what he could to reshape the reality still in flux. His meagre power was far from enough, like trying to redirect a river with a bucket. For the first time, he actively called on his connection to that distant cosmic power, letting it guide and strengthen his efforts. He strove to be the butterfly, flapping its wings and waiting for the hurricane. Jason felt it when the storm of dimensional forces took the first step towards a transformation zone. It was a tiny thing as the patterns within the chaos became slightly more ordered. The crux of a transformation zone coming into being was the imprints of older universes used by the old Builder. Broken shards of reality coalesced, taking shape in accordance with those imprints, forming the territories that would make up the zone. The physical area containing the underground realm of the brighthearts stopped existing by most metrics. The astral space inside it ruptured and the whole area was encapsulated in a dimensional boundary. From there, the transformation zone began forming in earnest. Jason wasn’t familiar with lesser transformation zones, the most common type that had appeared on Earth. Those were self-resolving, leaving a scar on the universe but repairing the damage without intervention. He had stepped in when they were too unstable, repairing them from the inside before they blew a hole in the side of the universe. Those zones were comprised of territories, far larger on the inside than the space outside. Only by unifying those territories could the transformation zone be repaired. Jason had plenty of experience claiming and unifying transformation zone territories, and as he watched territories form in this new zone, he decided to get a jump on the competition. Given his access to the already forming zone, he was confident that he could not just pre-emptively claim a territory for himself but establish a solid foundation from which to expand and unify the entire zone. Experience let Jason know that, in the early stages, claiming territories was easy. The more that were claimed, however, the more difficult it would become. The baseline was also set by the most powerful people within a zone. In this case, that meant gold rank or even something more powerful given the presence of Gary and the avatar of Undeath. If the zone reacted to their divine power, things would become more dangerous than anything Jason had faced before. These thoughts galvanised his resolve to establish himself quickly and strongly. He picked a single territory as it formed, something that had a familiar feel so he could better work with it. The territory was something close to Earth-like, which made it easier for him to shape. He exerted his will, shaping its formation and imprinting himself upon it. There were limits and restrictions, elements he didn’t fully understand, but this was something he was comfortable with, both in scale and scope. Claiming transformation zone territories was something he’d done many times, and he was just getting in early. He couldn’t define the specifics, but the territory would be a reflection of him as his will imprinted upon it. The wild forces calmed as the transformation zone developed. Territories formed and linked together to establish the geography of the zone. The space was highly manipulated, like others he had seen, with the dimensional barrier containing it smaller than the space inside. Everyone in the underground realm had been dragged in and would be scattered around the territories at random. Jason suspected that only he and Gary, who was filled with divine power, had managed to retain consciousness throughout the process. The Undeath avatar was an open question, as it was a direct conduit of Undeath’s power and the god was now cut off. Ideally, they would eventually find the avatar standing around doing nothing. The messengers were another question, with their gestalt bodies, but that alone was unlikely enough to let them keep their senses. Jason had sensed presences floating through the dimensional chaos but had not dared reach out to them. Not only could he not identify them, but he did not want to risk affecting them adversely. Essence-users were highly resistant to change, but not everyone here was an essence-user. What effect the zone would have on the elemental messengers, the Builder cultists and the brighthearts, Jason could only wait and see. On Earth, many normal-rankers had been transformed into other races, in accordance with the transformation zones in which they found themselves. He’d seen humans become leonids, celestines and other races native to neither Earth nor Pallimustus. Some managed to resist the change, but most were affected, their souls accepting the transformation. As best Jason understood, the process was a more gentle version of what the Builder had attempted on him when trying to implant a star seed: applying pressure until the soul willingly accepted the change.