Chapter 7
“Once the truth of what eidolons are is revealed to an uncontacted people, they will have the option to default to their existing belief structure and reject the new information, often quite explosively, or they will have to undergo an internal revolution to bring about acceptance of the truth. Both are terrible and turbulent events that sour first contact and can often result in ongoing warfare if the planet is sufficiently built up and belligerent. That is not to say that there haven’t been cases where it was possible for the existing belief structure and an understanding of the true nature of eidolons to coexist, only that such coexistence tends to be the least likely outcome.”
—On Eidolon Worship and Similar Stupidities, Galian Jurd, Part Three
The Ardent, Kaya, and Rania moved in convoy under the protection of the interlocking shields that they had deployed. Malachai moved ahead of them, sweeping the way clear of any stray eidolons as they approached. With their thinned numbers, it was a simple task for him. His only true disadvantage was in the dissolution of the eidolons’ bodies after their destruction. As creatures primarily held together by magic, they left no corpses of use behind to be reanimated. Otherwise, they would have been marching with legions by the second mile.
Sylvas was in a satellite position, moving alongside the convoy but at a sufficient distance that the swarms of eidolons descending upon him wouldn’t interfere with anyone else’s progress. In a strange way, it was nice. He was able to cut loose, to use all of the magic and strength at his disposal, without any fear of hurting the people around him or of exposing more of his power than he was meant to, to people who weren’t meant to know about it.
There was so much magic he hadn’t known that he could do. Even discounting all the changes to his body, his mana, and all the rest that his covenant had brought to him, the sheer range of spells that he could now cast had more than quadrupled. Gravity magic that had such high mana demands he never would have touched it now became a viable option. There was the full gamut of war spells that Mira was frantically transcribing from the makeup of his eidolon, and there were spells that combined and blended the two elements, not to mention all of the entirely new spells that he and Mira seemed to spend every moment of downtime frantically inventing. Without his perfect memory, it would have been chaos, but with it, every new piece of magic was diligently filed away for later use in the appropriate scenario, and here, now surrounded by enemies in every direction, he could finally use all of them.
His focused gravity spikes could be inverted, exploding outwards, blasting everything away from the point of impact, sending shrapnel of the destroyed eidolons out to tear through their kin. His focused gravity shears that he’d once used like swords were now projectiles slicing their way through the skies, downing dozens of shrikes with a single sweep of his hand. His unfocused gravity spikes, infused with more mana, could bring all the shrikes in the sky crashing down into the gorers below. A tug of directly applied gravity could haul one of the bloated artillery beasts tumbling through crowds of their jagged foot soldiers, crushing the gorers and abrading away the armored plates that made up his newfound weapons’ bodies. There was a spell, too, that had the same effect. A focused inversion of gravity let him fling bodies around without needing to use himself as the crux on which they would pivot, allowing him to shift his own gravity to suit whatever the needs of the moment were.
Few of the eidolons ever got close enough to Sylvas that he really had to consider fighting, and those that did were unfortunate to say the least, because if they made it that close, it was because he wanted them that close. His claws, what had once been a manifestation of the eidolon trying to force its way into his body, were now his to command. They extended from his fingers instinctively whenever a foe came in reach, but like everything else composed of his mana, they were subject to his will. He could lengthen them, shorten them, invert the gravity in them so that instead of carving through an eidolon’s hide with the densely focused edge of war and shearing force, he could blast them apart instead.
Isolating the different aspects of gravity was proving to be the most fruitful part of Mira’s work, even if it was the slowest going and the most prone to failure. Just as he’d been able to invert his personal gravity to repel mana away from him instead of drawing it in, reversing the whole engine of mana cycling and collection that he’d spent so long perfecting, so too could he continue pushing his own anti-gravity effects beyond that point. Pushing until the world around him seemed to slow to a crawl. Time was an aspect of gravity, or at least distorted by its effects, and with the right inversion and push of his personal mana, he could now slow it for himself.
Not by much. It probably wouldn’t even be possible to perceive from the outside, but when it was combined with his now-explosive senses and the algorithm that Mira had designed to process all of the myriad futures that his final Paradigm had granted him access to, he couldn’t just predict what was going to happen in the next moment, he could stretch it out to a few seconds.
He was still finding his balance, viewing the world through two perspectives at once, the present and the oncoming future, but he was uniquely equipped for it thanks to his ability to fragment his own psyche. One part of him could watch the future and feed information to him and Mira, while he remained focused on the present moment. At first, it made him terribly clumsy, letting enemies slip by his defenses and forcing him to resort to brute violence to tackle them, but gradually, he fell into the rhythm. When a distant eidolon blasted at him from beyond the range of his perception, shooting through the flocks of shrikes overhead with no care for their survival, it would have taken him by surprise if it weren’t for the premonition. As it was, he was able to invert its course with a quick inversion of gravity and return it to its sender.
All of his thoughts were turned to the fight. Every step that he took was calculated. Every movement, every word, every breath. Even with all of his enhancements and training, it should have been exhausting to maintain that level of continuous, relentless focus, but instead, it felt blissful. He felt contentment like he’d never known as he slaughtered his way across the surface of the planet. All of this time, he had been forging himself into a weapon—a weapon designed to destroy eidolons—and at last he was seeing the fruition of all his hard work. The fact that there was an eidolon inside him that was so contented with the slaughter that it was practically purring was probably unrelated to his own joy.
Don’t get too excited about your capabilities, darling. There are going to be more substantial foes to face beneath the surface.
“Good, I could do with a challenge.” Even as he said it, he could feel the agreement echoing up from Strife inside him. It was tired of this distant slaughter. It wanted more. Reaching out with his raw will and mana, he grabbed hold of the distant eidolons surrounding him, and he pulled. All of them mashed together into one vast, jagged tangle of steel coming in at him from every direction at once, crushed together by the pull of his gravity. Hauled into reach of his claws when he extended them to their full length. A great dome of steel surrounded him, and then it was shredded apart. The tinkling pieces of eidolons great and small drifted around it like glitter to dust the rocky surface of the world.
The planet was entirely overrun with eidolons, but there still weren’t enough. It didn’t matter how many of them he destroyed, how many he tore to pieces, there were always more, and there were always not enough. They were too weak. Even massed in numbers beyond anything that they’d ever faced, they weren’t enough to challenge him. The world soul shard that he carried with him was like a beacon, a dinner bell ringing for every eidolon on the planet, and they came like moths to a flame, only to be destroyed utterly.
Once or twice, there were eidolons different from the rest, bigger, more complex, less animalistic, and more abstract. Something like a worm with a blender for a mouth burst out of the stony crust of the world from beneath his feet, only for him to feed it a concussive gravity spike that collapsed it in around itself as he hovered unharmed above it, beyond its reach. Wading in through the masses of hogs came a stilt-legged thing. A tripod with three orbiting circlets of metal spinning like saw blades. It would have towered over Sylvas if he’d been down on the ground. Unfortunately for it, he was hanging level with what should have been its head in the air.
A single slice of his claws rent the spinning blades, sending them ricocheting off into the crowded mass of eidolons still gathered. More slaughter. More strength for the eidolon Strife. Not just more mana being generated but every spell he crafted with the war affinity growing more effective and destructive with every cast. A sharper edge to his claws. It must have been like this for Malachai when he was surrounded by death. Sylvas could feel the war flowing back into him. The infinite loop of this cycle of violence.
Yes, I’m sure it is glorious to be hitting things, but you’ve arrived at your destination.
Coming back to reality should have brought the burden of having a physical body back to Sylvas, even if his mana was endless, but instead, he came back to himself feeling stronger than he ever had. His new body had not tired from the efforts of the fighting, but it was buzzing with energy, as if strength was being pushed out into it from the veins of etherium running through him. That would require some examination later, because it felt as though there was some sort of feedback loop that he hadn’t accounted for in the changes that he’d made.
I’ll get right onto that after all the billions of other calculations and analyses you have me running every moment of the day.
Kaya stood aside from the rest of the Ardent to greet him. He hadn’t been expecting a round of applause for this performance, but the cold stares he was getting didn’t feel quite appropriate either. “Ready to get down there?”
“What’s the best way to do this? Does one of the earth mages want to open it up or…”
The eidolons of this region may have been depleted by the slaughter, but there was still more flooding towards them from every part of the planet. Shrikes plummeted down at them, and Sylvas had to bat them away so they could continue the conversation. The Ardent, for their part, were already falling back into the defensive position they’d established back at the beachhead, beginning to raise defenses. Kaya sighed as silver shards rained down around them. “Whatever we do, we need to move fast.”
Back on Alvarhain, when it was still a planet instead of a corpse, Sylvas had escaped from the labyrinth with a particular twist on the gravity shear. He’d contorted the magic into a drill and used it to carve right through the solid stone that encased him. There weren’t many faster approaches than that.
He could feel the tunnels down below them with his gravity sense. The absence of mass that composed them. For a brief moment, he considered that all of the interwoven underground structures could have been a result of the worm-like eidolons digging around, but there were too many sharp edges and angles in the passages beneath for it to be true. Sending out one last concussive pulse to knock away the incoming shrikes, he began to cast.
The Ardent were still watching him, even as they were being beset by gorers on all sides. They’d been trained the same way that he had, to identify the biggest threat on any battlefield. He probably should have been flattered that they thought it was him, but it was difficult to draw much satisfaction from the fear he could catch glimpses of behind their eyes. Perhaps secrecy wasn’t the only reason that Covenant mages hid their abilities. Perhaps it was the isolation that came with the immense power. The Ardent didn’t even know that there was an eidolon inside of him, and they were already fearful of his strength.
If they knew the source of his power, he wondered how many of them would consider him to be their enemy.
