[KoJ] Chapter 91: Wrath

Through pain and blinding ash, my roar strips the world of motion. The explosion halts, but the damage has already been done. No thought cro

Through pain and blinding ash, my roar strips the world of motion. The explosion halts, but the damage has already been done. No thought crosses my mind. Only primal sensations remain. The agony of my scales melting and muscles burning. The unmitigated fury against those who dare to attack me. To harm me.

My body is moving before my fury settles into intent. Already I grow larger. I crash my tail against the earth, collapsing whatever ground the blast didn’t vaporise, and throw my massive heft into the sky.

Clouds of dust, ash, and burning air crack as they try to flee. The rising flames of the explosion hold not a candle to my own fury. Any that so much as lick at my scales are torn from existence. The wave of power rolling out from my immense momentum extinguishes the rest.

As I grow, metre by metre, my undamaged scales slide in place between the destroyed ones. Burnt cracks web all across my length, but it is better than remaining vulnerable. My broken eyes recover. The image of a landscape littered with trenches and the occasional sapient is replaced with a wasteland far too similar to the Other Side.

Even outside the central crater, the land is stripped of life and definition for thousands of meters.

Another unhindered hiss thunders out of my throat. I slide through a bend that opens before my face, and within moments I’ve tripled my speed. That explosion… I had watched the bomb drop. I know its path. With no mind for anything else, I follow it to the origin.

I reach them long before the blast’s shockwave does.

Deep behind Henosis’s defensive line, an artillery piece smokes from its barrel. At thirty metres long, the cannon is much larger than any other weapon I’ve seen from the sapients. Many warrior caste defend the location. Far more than I’ve seen gathered in one location.

Whether frozen in terror or simply too slow to react, they all die before they can move.

My jaw clamps around the cannon as my lower half crashes along the ground, flattening a dozen trucks and all the soldiers around them. I lift my head, tearing the artillery from its tracks, and bite. The weapon snaps like a twig. Heavy chunks of metal fall. One side crushes a stone building, while the other buries half a dozen sapients that hadn’t yet turned their terrified gazes my way.

If there were any stronger warrior caste amongst them, I couldn’t tell. In the next second, I butcher hundreds. My tail whips around, already thicker than a nest, and crashes through sapients, fortifications, and earth alike. One of their number almost react, to move from where they’d been when I first struck… but I swallow them. Power-infused skin and all.

In my blind fury, I also gulp down an unhealthy amount of rock. The ever constant thrumming hiss through my chest churns the stone to powder before it mixes with the dead sapients now resting in my stomach. When no life remains within my sight, the landscape is unrecognisable.

Even as my body reaches its full length, the pain never relents. My muscles burn. It was foolish to assume these sapients had nothing that could harm me. I seethe as I coil around the remains of the cannon. The steel had already bent and warped into an unusable shape. Yet it isn’t enough. Not a speck of dust will remain of the weapon after I am done with it.

I sit there for minutes. Trying to obliterate any remnant of the weapon that inflicted so much agony, and calm my own mind. It has been a long time since I’ve lost myself to the raging emotions of sapience. As always, they are as much a burden as they are a boon. While I know this is what I wanted — learning how sapients fight something beyond them — it is difficult to ignore the fury and call for vengeance such pain demands.

Within the smoking graveyard, I intend to gather my thoughts and control my fury until I can process my next steps. I intend to… but Henosis are determined to have themselves destroyed. Two more of those Titan-killers slip into my sight. They are deceptively small for something so powerful and destructive.

Unlike last time, I don’t wait for the bombs to strike. Space tears open before both rapid projectiles, and they are thrown back the way they came. Slowly, I take to the skies. Space bends to accommodate and support my size as I slither back and forth, waiting.

The first explosion hits only a moment before the second. An intense quivering of the spatial fabric along with heat that cooks the dirt of my scales. The bombs struck. They did so somewhere far out of my sight, but they did. Almost a minute later, the pressure rolls over me, kicking up dust and roaring in my ears one after the other.

With turbulent wind and rolling heat, I slide forward. I don’t bother with speed anymore. This will be slow, and thorough. The Henosis should have been satisfied with the one lucky hit they got in. Nothing more will be tolerated.

With my tongue darting out with my deep, irate hiss, I taste the warrior castes coming before I see them. Four of them. Each bounds across the land, ignoring the presence weighing down on them.

Ceasing my low hiss, I gather my breath and unleash a bellowing roar in challenge of these Henosis. The earsplitting screech crashes along the surface faster than the shockwave of any bomb, flattening and crumbling unstable earth anywhere in its path until it strikes the four sapients.

They stumble. One pukes, and tries to flee, only to be stopped by the others. Despite unleashing the full weight of my presence, these sapients don’t still for more than a few seconds. They continue forth, whatever fear they have is quashed.

I hover — my weight cancelled out with a few well-placed bends — a kilometre overhead and hiss down at my enemies.

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“You can’t be serious. Did you not hear that roar? No. No. No. No. No. Just look at it; that’s not something we can fight.”

“Caro, get your shit together or you know what the consequences will be. Look at its scales; the warhead clearly did damage. It is not beyond us.” Despite his words, Phanem struggled to suppress his own terror.

The mountain of a snake curled eerily still on nothing but air far overhead. That alone would have been unnerving, yet the way its eyes of shattered fractal mirrors glared at them with a subtle green glow would be enough to have any lesser man break down in sobs. Lesser men like Caro.

“If the western nations have had this creature hidden away, why did it take so long for them to use it?” Therr’n asked, her water and acceleration hyle markings already shining like a torch.

“They likely can’t control it. A weapon of mutually assured destruction,” Phanem said. “I’d like to know how they kept it contained until now.”

It was abnormal to have four of their strength working together. Phanem himself had fought near every battle entirely alone ever since he’d achieved the rank of general eighty years back. Having this many elite gathered in one place was strategic disaster waiting to happen… but this war had been different than the rest.

Despite the losses garnered in the Empire’s recent civil war, they held the numbers advantage in every conflict. With their new warheads, they’d almost been guaranteed to achieved victory without losses to the noble and military families. Then came the áed. Some race from even further south-west than the hulking ursu. Instead of killing them, the warheads only empowered their kind.

Hence Phanem’s disfunctional little group. The two best water mages in the empire, along with the Suffocation Mage and his own expertise with presence made them the perfect hit squad for the living firestorms.

“So… plans? I don’t know about you Regina-dolls, but I usually run when something that big comes out of the deep.” Despite being the only one in the group that had been on the side of the Emperor during the last civil war, Arch, titled the suffocation mage, never seemed concerned to be around those that had been her enemies only a year before.

“What is it doing?” Caro interrupted. “Why is it just waiting like that?”

“Surely you aren’t so fattened by battles against people that you’ve forgotten how to fight beasts?” Phanem jeered the other three as he pushed out the last of his hesitance and fear of the presence that dwarfed his own. This would be difficult, but it would be the same as any monster from the depths of the eastern ocean. “Cleave at it until it drops, and don’t get bit.”

With a vicious grin, he ran ahead.

Organise their little team of isolationists into a coherent unit? There was no point wasting his time. Anyone that had reached their heights of power could keep themselves alive from some friendly fire. If you can’t keep yourself alive, then you never deserved that life to begin with.

With a low growl, Phanem spread his presence through every muscle of his body in a way few besides himself knew how to achieve. And none as effectively. He pulled back his arm and swung. A heavy crack shattered the air, but that was only the beginning. His presence curved the shockwave into a narrow beam that sliced through everything in a way mages could only hope to replicate.

The serpent shifted, but it was slow. Phanem’s distant strike cut through the air and sliced through its scales an instant after his punch. At least that’s how it should have gone. Instead, his presence-empowered strike slid off the damaged scales ineffectively.

Phanem clicked his tongue. Only direct physical attacks would work then? He kicked off the shattered earth and rose through the air towards the beast. Not a problem. With how slow the serpent shifted, his own aerial steps would keep him out of that giant maw. They didn’t expect it would be easy, after all.

His grin widened. It had been a very long time since he’d had a challenge like this. A shame he had to share with three mages.

With kilometres between them and their target, they watched the beast’s every move. It coiled up on itself strangely. Despite how massive of a being it was, the serpent moved far too slow. They would be able to dodge anything this monstrosity threw their way.

An icy hurricane already whipped at Phanem’s back. Caro, despite his cowardice, truly knew how to suck the heat out of your body. He pushed through the chill as the sky grew dark. Arch followed close behind him, and Terr’n, using her acceleration hyle, had already sped along the surface and took up a position at the serpent’s flank.

In a moment, her preparations would be done, and that terrifying stream of water would rip through the slow-moving serpent. Phanem threw more pressure into his steps. Wouldn’t want her to claim the beast entirely for herself, after all.

“Wait, tha-” Caro never got the chance to finish.

The serpent, which had been almost sluggish in its movements until now, whipped forward. That would have been fine — there was still more than a kilometre to react — except the giant suddenly disappeared.

Phanem didn’t have the time to turn before a gust of wind threw him off balance. As he tumbled, he found himself staring at a wall of scales that sped past him fast enough that a single touch might shear his body in two.

He readjusted and kicked the air to create some distance. The serpent was too close. It was too fast. And now that it was right on top of him, it felt so much larger. At twenty metres across and what must be at the very least six hundred long, that was a lot of weight to be moving that fast.

Caro was gone. Swallowed. Separated from his control, the storm collapsed before it could gather to its full might. A super-chilled tsunami fell from the skies, freezing over the not-quite Titan’s scales ineffectively.

Shifting his gaze to the side, he found the serpent’s length appearing from a warping in the air.

“Portals!” he shouted. “Spatial-bound!”

His warning came too late.

Therr’n activated their narrow beam of water accelerated by her other specialty. A red glow immediately surrounded it. The pressure was so great that the water both reached immense temperatures and froze as it sliced through air and disappeared over the horizon. Bolts of lightning arced outward, reaching for the ground from what was most certainly no longer water.

A portal appeared right in front of her face, and the beam shot back at her.

What in the Empress’s name were they fighting?

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These guys are stronger than what Beira was, but it's kinda hard to show that when Orm wipes the floor with them, haha.

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