Walking elegy( Tensura/marvel self insert): chapter 8: One life against Many

Humanity is a chorus of lies, sung in perfect harmony to drown out the sound of a single, screaming truth.

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The Sky-Spire Nexus was not a place of stone and metal, but of crystallized light and captured thunderstorms. A forest of floating obelisks hummed with power, channeling the leylines of the world to power Dwarven shield-domes and communication arrays.

It was also a deathtrap.

We had ceded the Serrated Pass. My continental adjustment had been a masterpiece of destructive precision. One moment, three legions of the Empire's finest stood guard in a mile-wide mountain pass. The next, the pass was a three-mile-deep canyon, its walls smoother than glass.

I had not heard their screams and had I done so, I don’t think that I would have cared much. The nothingness of Stillness in my veins had made sure of that.

But the Empire was adaptable. While I was scouring one front, they pressed another.

Now, their aerial corps, the Aether-Wings swarmed the Nexus.

They were not Champions.

They were soldiers, tens of thousands of them, riding winged constructs of light and force, their lances tipped with mana-draining crystals.

Individually, they were insects. Together, they were a locust swarm that could in theory and practically devour easily saint-level combatants.

"Concentrate fire on the western obelisk cluster!"

The voice was a melodic shout, cutting through the din of shattering crystal and screaming energy.

It belonged to Lyra.

She was weaving spells that spun shields of hardlight and lances of solidified sound. She stood atop a central spire like a conductor before an orchestra of annihilation.

I descended into the maelstrom not as a warrior, but as a natural disaster. I did not draw a weapon.

I simply was.

A field of nullity flared like a dark storm on the horizon at the behest of my will, acting not as a terror weapon, but as a zone of absolute negation.

Aether-Wings that entered its radius simply… winked out. Their magic failed, their constructs unraveled into motes of light, and the soldiers inside ceased, their screams swallowed by the void I carried with me.

I moved through them, a scythe through wheat.

A swipe of my tail sent a shockwave that vaporized a hundred riders.

A glance from my amber eyes unleashed a beam of annihilating light that carved a canyon through their formations.

This was power on a scale they could not deal with, could not respond to.

I was, in that moment, the end of all things.

And it was meaningless.

For every hundred I killed, a thousand more took their place. They were a tide, and I was a single, immovable rock.

The tide does not care about the rock; it simply flows around it, wearing it down over millennia, and if not the rock, then the pebbles and hills at its side and around it.

I saw Lyra falter. A squadron of Aether-Wings broke through our lines, their lances aimed at her spire. I was dozens of miles away, busy holding back the main force, yet there was a need for something.

I needed to do something or my subordinate, the one who had crowned me with flowers, who had looked at me and smiled and said she looked up to me, that I was something worth killing for, dying for, would die.

I needed something new, so I did the logical thing.

I did something that real me, the one I was before the effect of Stillness would have hated but hatred alone didn't win a war.

Only the worst acts did.

I invented a new spell on the spot.

I plucked the concept of "corrosion" from the air and felt as if thousands of ants bit into my skin.

I mixed it with the latent sorrow of the dying and ignored how I felt at once every death blow that had led those once leaving to death’s arms.

I wrapped it in a delivery system of compressed air.

I didn't even speak an incantation.

I just willed it.

A shimmering, emerald mist bloomed around the attacking squadron.

It was not a poison.

It was a curse.

Something malignant.

Something rotten to its core.

Something twisted and irredeemably wrong.

The moment the mist touched them, their armor began to weep rust.

Their skin sloughed off in greasy, putrid sheets.

They did not scream in pain, but in confusion, as their own bodies betrayed them.

They were not able to scream as they began dissolving into an acidic slurry that ate through their winged mounts.

Within seconds, the squadron was a falling cloud of putrescence.

It was inventive.

It was horrifying.

The Stillness running through my veins made me note its efficiency with approval.

I landed beside Lyra. Her face was pale, her breath coming in ragged gasps. "Viceroy… their numbers… we cannot…"

"We can," I said, the lie coming easily. "Re-calibrate the eastern spells. I will handle the density."

‘I will try to turn a lie into a truth,’ I didn't tell her.

‘I'll do my best so that you all survive,’ I didn't promise out loud, yet the way she looked at me, it's as if she knew.

I turned from her and faced the main swarm. I needed something bigger.

They were warriors, unafraid of death.

Soldiers who saw what they were doing as just, who would only see glory in a coming death, which meant that I needed something worse than death, something that would break their will.

I needed something that would break them.

I reached into the fabric of space-time and began to fold it.

I would create a localized black hole, a gravitational pit that would suck in every Aether-Wing for miles.

It would be clean.

It would be something that should break those lucky enough to survive, to realise that all of their companions, friends, brothers and sisters in arms were gone and that I had done so as if I was killing a fly.

But as I gathered the energies of the world, I saw him.

A single, small figure, separated from his unit.

A young lizardman, one of my subordinates, his scales the color of summer moss.

He was clutching a shattered arm, trying to drag himself behind a fallen crystal shard.

An Aether-Wing dove for him, lance aimed at his heart.

The spell for the black hole as almost ready. Beautiful.

The energies I had gathered, they hung in my mind, just waiting for my signal to make rain devastation.

To let them go now would mean losing the moment, allowing thousands of the enemy to regroup.

It would also mean letting thousands more of my soldiers be hurt, butchered, hacked at, crippled, murdered.

It would take but an instant, yet an instant in a war fought by beings capable of moving at lightning speed was a moment too long.

I needed to do the logical thing.

I needed to do the right thing.

Thousands of lives against one.

Kael's life against thousands with hopes, dreams, and loved ones.

Fuck.

Fuck!

I released the folded space. The nascent singularity dissipated with a sound like a sigh.

Instead, I moved.

I crossed the distance at such speed that it felt more as if I was fading out and in of reality.

I caught the Aether-Wing's lance an inch from the lizardman's chest.

I didn't break the lance. I unmade the molecular bonds holding it together.

It dissolved into metallic dust and into even less until only nothing remained.

The Aether-Wing pilot stared at me, his eyes wide with terror behind his visor. I could have killed him right then.

I should have.

But I just looked at him.

A human. A boy, probably. Fighting for his emperor, his nation, his people. Believing we were monsters.

A would-be killer that I should kill to protect mine.

A child that should not have been on a battlefield.

A human who probably saw a them, an other when looking at a monster, thinking of us each time he murdered one of my own.

He was a person.

And I was about to kill him to save one of my own.

The lizardman looked up at me, his eyes filled not with fear, but with awe. "Viceroy…" he whispered.

The silence broke and with it, my hesitation.

I snapped my fingers.

The Aether-Wing and its pilot turned to ice, then shattered into a million glittering fragments.

I hauled Kael to his feet. "Fall back to the tertiary spire," I commanded, my voice harsher than I intended.

I had saved one. I had let ten thousand escape. I had probably doomed almost as many too.

The math was atrocious.

The logistics were a nightmare.

But as I watched Kael limp to safety, even with the blue stone of Stillness on my neck, its magic running through my veins, even with having failed so many who had probably believed in me, I felt… lighter.

Lyra approached, her expression unreadable. "You saved him."

"He is a soldier of the Federation," I said, the excuse hollow even to my own ears.

"That is not why you did it," she said softly.

Then she turned back to the battle, raising her voice to a shout. "Guardians! Defensive pattern Sigma! The Viceroy has bought us time!"

I had not bought them time. I had doomed most if not all of them.

But as I looked at the faces of the soldiers around me, the ogres, the goblins, the lizardmen, the elves all fighting with a desperate, terrible hope, I felt the first, cold trickle of something the Stillness could not suppress.

It was the weight of their faith, and yet it was nothing but hope, crushing and despair-inducing.