Chapter 315: The Four Pillars of Hell—Necrobix (4)

Ketal rolled his shoulder with a soft grunt and set the joint back into place. The force of the Black Hole had dislocated it, and the bone slid home with a muffled click that felt almost mundane when measured against the storm they had just survived. He flexed his arm once, testing the line of motion, and allowed himself a brief, genuine smile.

“A black hole,” he said, almost admiringly. “You can manifest even that.”

The phrase was not an empty flourish. It referred to a gravity well so absolute that even light could not escape, and somehow dark magic had called forth an imitation of that celestial phenomenon into the Mortal Realm. It was powerful, and not in some delicate or esoteric way, but profoundly and directly powerful. The process of tearing free had laced Ketal’s body with cuts and bruises of different depths, and if he had lingered any longer inside that ravenous singularity, even his endurance might have met its limit.

The wounds themselves did not trouble him. What struck him was that the wounds existed at all. He had chosen to route Aura toward breaking the prison and away from fortifying his flesh, and the price had been blood. The fact that anything in this world could force that trade from him was impressive enough to earn praise.

“It is remarkable. You have my compliments,” Ketal murmured.

Necrobix did not answer the flattery. Its attention had fixed upon the blade and the light that ran along it, not with fear, but with a recognition that unsettled its usually placid stare.

There was something inside Ketal’s Aura. The signature was warped and scarred, like a name spoken through broken glass, yet the essence came through. Necrobix knew what it was.

“The Abomination...,” it said at last, voice quiet and even. “Is that thing inside you?”

Ketal tilted his head and spoke as if thinking aloud, filing away a new rule he had just tested in combat. “If I draw it out as Aura, gods and demons can perceive it. Before that point, most cannot tell what it is at all.”

“It is truly in you. Why is it there?” Doubt fell away inside Necrobix, and certainty took its place. It looked again and saw more. The light along the axe was not a parasite devouring Ketal. It was contained. “You are controlling it. The Abomination has not swallowed you. You have swallowed the Abomination.”

The agitation in Necrobix’s eyes diminished by degrees as the conclusion settled. “You completely consumed the Abomination that slept within your axe. That is why only a husk remained in the weapon.”

The Abomination found the idea offensive, as if an old pride had been scratched by unworthy hands. Irritation colored its tone.

“I dislike that gaze,” the Abomination said, almost to itself. “This is why I did not wish to show myself to the world.”

Ketal laughed softly. “Is that why you wanted to stay quiet?”

Even while facing a foe like Necrobix, the thing inside Ketal had watched in silence. That quiet had puzzled him until now. It did not wish to display the state it now inhabited. To be contained, to be wielded by another, had to have cut the Abomination’s pride to the bone, and there was no reason it would want that fact paraded before one of the Four Pillars of Hell.

“I have no interest in exchanging pleasantries with a child,” the Abomination said from somewhere deep within, a voice that was not a voice so much as a vibration against the world’s grain. “Still, it shows me something curious. It has been a long time, Necrobix. Little one of Hell.”

“It has been long indeed,” Necrobix replied without raising its tone. “I believed I would never hear you again.”

“Spare me the idle talk, child. The darkness you swung just now,” the Abomination continued, and there was no mystery which strike it meant. Necrobix had dragged up a force that killed concepts and hurled it as a blade of shadow, a counterfeit of a deeper principle.

“That was my power copied,” the Abomination said. “Crude and thin, but not without interest. I suppose to you children, my power must seem magnificent.”

Necrobix gave a short, dry laugh that contained neither apology nor shame. “Your essence stains his Myst. That is how he wound a true body. How did he accomplish it?”

There would be no answer to that. Ketal only lifted one shoulder. “I see no reason to explain it.”

“You would not,” Necrobix said. “This is not good...”

Aura still rippled steadily along the axe. When Ketal had fought Materia, he had handled this power with more strain, calling it as an emergency and paying dearly for it. Now, there was control in the flow. He was learning to command the Abomination rather than merely borrow it, and Necrobix understood what that learning would mean if allowed to continue.

“Then we are done talking,” Ketal said, and he moved.

Necrobix raised its hand, and sorceries unspooled to meet him. The answers came like a tide, but Aura cut through every shape and rule that power could assume, reducing elaborate constructions to rags.

“Annoying,” Necrobix said with a small, humorless sound.

The Abomination had been right. Dark magic, as Necrobix had elevated it, was an art of imitation. While imprisoned in Hell, it had fallen in love with the authority that killed all things and had invested ages refining a counterfeit. It was strong, and the craft required to mimic such a principle had been a grand accomplishment in its own right, a work only the founder of dark magic could hope to complete.

However, the opponent was simply wrong for the method. A copy, no matter how devoted and refined, could not overcome the original.

“Power will reach its limit soon,” Necrobix said under its breath as it took stock of the reserves that flowed between its bodies. “The objectives elsewhere may fail. This is unacceptable.”

It measured its state for the length of a heartbeat, then lifted its chin. “I will not leave quietly.”

Darkness surged like a herd of beasts and broke for Ketal, and the basin shook under the opening exchange of a new storm.

***

Far from the dwarven holy land, in the outer spine of the mountains, the air trembled to the tune of continuous detonation. Necrobix was being forced backward one step at a time.

“Black fire rises and devours the world,” Necrobix chanted.

Flame that did not burn as fire should rose and spread, eating rather than consuming, insisting upon emptiness until anything tangible ended in ash. If left unchecked, it would crawl over every line on the map. Ketal drove straight through, a figure wreathed in contradicting lights, and Necrobix slipped its head aside by the smallest measure to avoid the falling axe.

However, it did not avoid everything. A long, clean line opened on its arm.

Ketal’s smile turned satisfied. “At last, a hit.”

Necrobix looked down at the wound without rancor. It was shallow by the measure of worlds, yet it was unmistakable. The wounds inflicted by Aura had pierced deep, reaching all the way to its true form.

“That confirms it,” Necrobix said.

Demonic force broke like surf and wrapped the entire field, and Ketal answered with a gleam of teeth as he lifted his axe again. The land groaned with the pressure of forces that had no business coexisting, and neither side found the path to an easy finish. For a long moment, exchange followed exchange without a decisive breach.

“Listen,” the Abomination said.

Ketal did not slow, but he answered anyway. “You were content to be silent a moment ago.”

“I told you I enjoy killing foolish children who mistake themselves for the strong,” the Abomination replied, and there was a dangerous light in the pulse of Myst within Ketal. “This one mimicked my authority. It is crude and clumsy, but the attempt is astonishing and also pitiable. I would crush it with my own hand and let it feel the gap.”

If Ketal accepted the help, the end would come quickly. That was not a conjecture. It was a certainty he could feel in his bones. However, he could not accept the request.

“No,” Ketal said, shaking his head.

“What?” The voice went still for the space of a blink. It had not expected refusal. “Why?”

The question did not carry pressure this time. It carried curiosity and, under that, the beginning of a suspicion.

“Wait,” the Abomination said. “Do you mean you do not wish to kill it here because it would be a waste?”

The Abomination had been inside Ketal long enough to know him. It knew his hunger for worthy trials, and it understood the kind of joy he took in the fantasy world. A demon of this level was not a foe a man discarded lightly. It would be possible to believe that he wanted to prolong this for his own sake.

“I am not that mad,” Ketal said, and while there was laughter in his voice, there was also truth.

“You are mad,” the Abomination replied almost primly.

“I am not,” he said, and for once he allowed himself to sound aggrieved.

“In any case, I wanted to ask you,” he continued, “Is that Necrobix’s full strength?”

Silence followed. The Abomination did not argue, and Ketal knew that meant it agreed in part.

“It feels too weak for a Pillar of Hell,” he said. “Even with rivals and counters, this should not be the shape of it.”

A being that many judged stronger than gods should not look like this when given the chance to kill. Necrobix did not fight like a creature that meant to stake everything. It fought like an observer building a ledger. It extended the engagement, feeling along the edges of Ketal’s power and seeking the center without stepping into it.

“If it is probing, I see no reason to reveal more than I have,” Ketal said.

“Is that truly your reason?” the Abomination asked him. “Not because it would be a pity to end it?”

“I already told you,” Ketal said with a sigh, “that is not it.”

The Abomination did not sound convinced. It did not press the point further either. It knew him too well to waste energy asking a question when it could already read the answer in the flow of his Aura. He launched himself forward again, decided. He would not lift more than the light already licking the axe. He would press, and he would not spend.

The choice proved sound. The longer Ketal limited the shape of his strikes to steel guided by Aura rather than to the deeper thing that had scarred Materia, the narrower Necrobix’s eyes became.

“He is showing nothing more,” Necrobix murmured under its breath. “Either he cannot draw it out, or he is hiding it deliberately.”

It would have preferred to watch longer and make the distinction, but even Necrobix had limits.

“A miscalculation on my part,” it murmured, and the faintest note of annoyance entered the flat delivery. The effort spent here had been higher than expected. That would jeopardize the plans unfolding at the other points where its bodies worked.

“This will be enough for now,” it said. “Let us end here.”

Darkness erupted and sprinted like a hunting pack. Ketal felt the pressure spike. The weight of the assault promised that a gap must open somewhere else if he could split the line. He lowered his shoulders and met the charge head-on, cutting. The first wave parted cleanly, and he did not slow.

Steel whispered, almost gentle. Necrobix’s head left its shoulders and dropped to the stone.

Ketal’s eyes widened. “What?”

The headless body toppled, and the shape unraveled into shadow. It dissipated without leaving the scent of blood or the rhythm of a dying thing.

It should have been over, yet it was not. The presence that had pressed on the land was gone, yet Ketal’s skin did not lift with the recognition of a kill. Before he had struck, something had receded from the body. The sensation was like watching a hand pulled out of a puppet.

“What is this?” he said, and his mouth twisted in displeasure.

***

At that same moment, in the elven sacred ground, the battlefield rang with a sound that was more than a cry and less than a word. Elves and spirits hurled themselves forward, and most of them died for nothing as they met a wall that did not yield.

“Stop!” High Elf Queen Karin shouted, her voice shredding as she flung power. The wind leaped to her command and drove for their enemy with the relentlessness of a tide.

Necrobix lifted two fingers. The wind vanished, not dispersed, not deflected, but erased as if a line had been struck through it in the ledger of the world.

Ignisia did not stand still. She gathered everything into her Dragon Tongue. Yet, nothing happened.

Or rather, something happened and then died on contact without leaving so much as a scorch upon Necrobix’s skin. Around them, elves unleashed strikes that equaled self-destruction and spirits burned themselves down to embers in order to carve lines upon reality. Together with Karin’s and Ignisia’s best efforts, all they accomplished was a brief slowing of its stride.

Their strength waned, their expressions hollowing. They were running out of options.

Karin lifted her eyes in a motion that looked almost childish, and her voice cracked as she cried out. “Spirit God...! Please, help us!”

The elves’ sacred ground, the region that held the World Tree, was under attack by a malice that did not chip away at its edges, but tried to unmake it in place. This was the moment when the Spirit God should have answered. It was not a matter of doctrine. It was the design of things.

However, no answer came. The connection felt cut, not muted. Silence laid itself across the plea like frost. They could not rely on divine help. That truth arrived one eyelash at a time, and despair came behind it.

Ignisia stepped forward. She bared her teeth, and the Dragon Heart turned in her chest. Power thrashed within it, eager and terrible.

Karin stumbled toward her and reached out a hand. “Wait. Ignisia.”

She knew immediately what her friend intended to do. She would inflate the Dragon Heart like a charge and take Necrobix with her.

“I do not know whether it will work,” Ignisia said. “But, it is still better than waiting to die.”

She broke into a run, but Necrobix suddenly halted, and the abrupt stillness made Ignisia stumble.

“What... what’s going on?” she muttered.

Necrobix did not look at them, not in the way a person looks, and yet it was easy to sense that its attention had turned elsewhere.

“The other side drew more power than required,” it said as if measuring the flow through an unseen pipe. “This is the limit. I wished to burn the World Tree.”

It clicked its tongue in a gesture that felt learned rather than natural. “No matter. We will meet again.”

Its body began to thin, not like smoke but like frost under a rising sun. It diminished and then was gone, and the echoes of its steps faded as if distance had suddenly flooded the ground.

“What was that?” someone whispered.

“Did we win?” someone else asked, and the question did not carry joy, only confusion.

They stood amid the ruin it had made, bodies shaken, eyes vacant, staring at the place where their enemy had been as if it might reappear if anyone dared to blink.