NOVEL NEXT Chapter 297: Dark Mana.
"I refuse to believe that the heavens would choose the enemy of the gods to carry out an act of constraint on one man," Arla shook her head, thinking of everything Sitri had done. "Fate shows no ally either, so how could it possibly have been the entity that gave Sitri her powers?" She added.
"You should not think of fate as a sentient body or a consciousness, Fate is a single will, this much I am aware of; Fate's role is balance; much like a Godslayer is supposed to mediate Vatui, fate mediates the balance of power for all living beings, Master Vestic thwarted that balance by simply existing, so Fate made even an uneven equation, do you not see the truth behind my theory?" Alpha looked at her turning her back to their destination and eating.
"
"You speak as though you have encountered Lumi's Fate," Arla stared at her, and the system went silent and turned again, saying nothing else for the duration of their flight until they arrived at another location where she soundlessly slipped through the ground and left without an utterance.
"Come out, we know you're here," Dina stared at the small bed of jagged rocks, but as she had expected, nobody approached or even made a peep, had it not been for their heartbeats wildly thumping against their ribcage, they would have been invisible to their senses.
"Fine then, be that way," she raised her hand and her hair began flailing around her head weightlessly while the bed of rocks began superheating.
[Infernal arts; microwave]
One by one, there were explosions of blood behind the rocks, seven in total, each from someone's head popping when Dina focused on their brains and fried them from the inside. Read exclusive chapters at M V L
"Was it necessary to be that cruel?" Arla asked, but the mage before her didn't even respond as she walked through the scorching heat and stared at the corpses one after the other, confirming each kill with her own eyes before she slowly began ascending in the direction of their next target. "Dina, are you-"
"I'm fine, Arla," she replied with a serious gaze.
"Let's just complete our tasks and move on, don't think of them as anything other than creatures we have to get rid of for the greater good, don't even consider them living, what we're doing is morally unjust, and I know that if I stop and give it too much thought I'll probably break down, so don't; just fight until there's nobody else left to fight."
"...Okay," The elf bit her lips, staring at Dina's back while they approached another group of individuals.
***
"He disappeared again," Umbra was seated on a moon the size of a house staring into the void. "Where does he go, why can't I do the same?" He asked, and Giza, who was suspended in the air behind him with her back pressed to his, stared at the void as well with a thoughtful gaze. "I know he's not in The Grey, if he was, I'd be able to sense that he was," He mused.
"Sol Vestic holds a collective within his soul, I don't know how he did it, but I know that is what he did, I sensed the moment he did so," Giza replied.
"The entire collective...?"
"Yes, that is what empowers him so greatly, he utilized the power of The Grey and controlled it with his will, even if he is my enemy, I still find fascination within that man, he has done amazing things so finding a place where not even you can find him is not so hard to believe- ah!" She stopped speaking when Umbra's hand clutched her neck and his gaze found the back of her head, unlike before where she was nigh intangible; she now had a full physical form and was caught off-guard when the man locked his fingers on her neck and leaned her head, bracing himself onto her and pressing his free hand against her side.
"M... My Lord?" She questioned his actions hesitantly.
"What are you doing? I told you not to speak of him that way in my presence again, he's not some deity, he's a monster," He hissed behind her, pressing his hand against her ribcage until he heard the first snap and felt her body shudder beneath his control.
"I won't keep warning you, the next time you utter his name in reverence I'll take your tongue," Umbra declared squeezing tighter and staring down at her. "Understood?" He asked and then released her back to the small moon watching her disfigured side fix itself as she gasped and took deep breaths.
"Yes, Lord Umbra, of course!" Giza gasped repeatedly then turned to him after a moment of silence, crawling on all fours and resting her cheek against his leg as she laid her head in his lap. "Forgive me, my King."
"I don't care for forgiveness, you're useless to me as a fangirl, what I'm interested in is power, it's barely been any significant passage of time but I've already amassed a large amount of power thanks to you, just keep doing what you're doing and don't stray from our goal; this collective, every collective; we'll plunge them all into darkness forever and annihilate everything the light touches."
"... On the matter of how he did it, my Lord," Giza spoke after he began holding his hand across her back and sensually playing with her neck. "I do not know, but it could be a case where he simply enlarged his soul to encompass all and then shrunk it once more, you were once inside so you should have felt the countless living beings within him; innumerable."
"Yes," Umbra answered, looking up from her hair at a gigantic mass of black before him and staring intently at it; for the moon he sat on there were several other empty moons, many of which were larger than Earth's moon, and they all orbited a megastructure that had been plunged into perfect darkness by Giza, he sat there listening to the billions of people screaming as they panicked and wailed from the agony which he found as comfort.
"It seems they're ready," He spoke again, and the woman in his lap raised herself and extended her hands towards the structure.
"Then let us continue," She began taking the darkness from the structure, except the more she took the more of the structure and the living beings upon it that came with it; torn into small ink-like lanes of rapidly condensing darkness which formed and shrunk into a mass in her palm, after an hour of absorption there was nothing but a skeleton of a megastructure left with no signs of evident lives ever existing there, and the mass in her palm had shrunken to the size of a small golf ball holding within it a conversation of whispers after she had destroyed their bodies as nourishment and taken their souls as fuel.
"And this will work?" Umbra stood before her, taking the small mass from her grasp and staring at it with his dead black eyes locked in focus.
"Yes, my King, this is life in its purest and most primal form; before light, darkness existed, all that exists was once formless and void, eat my flesh and be enriched with the greatest source of power to ever exist," Giza placed her hand beneath Umbra's hand and pushed the mass closer to his mouth watching as he opened wide and collected the entire thing with a single gulp, swallowing it down with a pained expression as his veins all turned black and he began breathing small black spots so microscopic that they looked like smoke.
"What is this power?" He asked, staring at the mass he had exhaled. "It doesn't feel like the Magicul I'm used to, it's far more potent," he reached out and tried grasping
"This is called mana, my king, dark mana; Sol Vestic uses a variant of it born of light, but I as the original vessel of darkness and the first consciousness am the one who discovered it before any being of light ever did, this is where my power comes from," She explained and he fanned his hand through the mass and breathed another huff of it, finding fascination in the small white outline which distinguished it from the darkness around them.
"Mana is solitude, the end of all things; it is death and absolution; forget about Atlan magic and focus your strengths on mastering my power instead, it will make you more powerful than fate itself, you will be the true god of the Grand Collective, able to turn any and everything into a source of power," She gestured to the Sun nearest to them and watched him extend his hand to it.
"Teach me," Umbra grabbed Giza again placing her to stand before him as his one hand remained extended over her shoulder and his other now locked around her neck. "Show me how," he began moving slowly towards the distant star.
"I want the power to destroy any being I touch and turn them into what you just fed me, if I can do this then defeating him is within my grasp again, with this power I can make him suffer, I can take everything away from him just as he left me with nothing!"
"Sol Vestic, just wait a moment longer... everything you cherish, everything you love, I'll destroy it all and force you to watch as it turns to darkness and dies!"