Chapter 26

Fury of the Soul

“Nothing to be done about it now though.” I used the mana I had been accumulating to raise the ground and create a small hill. The magical equivalent of using the controls of a hospital bed to boost someone higher so they could get a better view of their surroundings. Kate might have been healing me, but I still could not move on my own.

“Sorry about that, Kate. This is far more dangerous than you could understand. I don’t want you getting hurt. After this is all over maybe I can explain better, I don’t know…” She stayed focused on her healing magic, she didn’t have that much experience with it and was mostly brute-forcing the process. The mana efficiency rate was painful to contemplate. Good gods, that girl needs to be locked in a magical school for a few months. She may be naturally skilled, but even a genius engineer needs to learn physics before building a spaceship or something. Ugh, even my metaphors are suffering now.

As my body slowly knit together, I realized just how mentally unbalanced I had been. That I had been willing to give up, in some capacity, meant I had way more issues than I realized. I thrive on the edge, on the risk of failure. How the hell could I fall so far as to give up? Was it some unlisted status effect that the Shadow King caused? Was it the time travel and the melding of my younger and older minds? Maybe it was just the burden of future knowledge, that weight bearing down on me, millions of lives begging to be saved.

Whatever the cause, if I had accepted defeat, if I had taken that one step backward, a part of me would have broken.

“Thank’s Katenip, it seems you saved me from more than an errant Shade. You saved me from myself in a way I don’t know how to explain. So, thanks for coming and bailing out my sorry ass.”

Her laughter broke her concentration, and the healing stopped, but it accomplished enough. The cracks were mended, and I had regained my legs down to my shins. Kate looked exhausted. Sweat dripped down her face and her hands shook as she held the mop in a death-grip. While her healing stopped, she continued to radiate holy light, and the bubble shield sucked it up like a sponge. Brute force healing really takes it out of you, in a way that few other magics can. The fact she managed it at all was a testament to the sheer potential she had as a mage.

“Kate that’s enough. I’ll be fine now. Just help me sit up so I can see what’s going on out there.” She was too tired to respond, but relented after a moment of indecision. She tried to help me up, and I used a bit of mana to support the effort, so she felt like she accomplished something. No way was her strength stat moving my stone carcass on its own.

“I’m sorry Laz, but I didn’t want to be abandoned and left out, not again.” She whispered.

“It’s okay Kid. You saved me; I’ll figure out a way for us to win this. Bet the others have it in the bag already though…” My voice faded without conscious effort as I looked around.

After being helped to a sitting position, I could finally get the lay of the land. It was a nightmare. On the plus side, Cuddles had killed that fucking tree. On the minus side…. everything else.

The tree-killing team came back to help with the fight, and it’s a damn good thing they did. All the bodies had risen as shades, and more were spawning constantly out of the damned environment. Anyplace that looked like it had been bleached black was having the blackness stand up and start fighting. I could see that most of the original group was down and being tended to by Sekhmet, with Santa acting as a very overworked guard at the entrance to a small ice fortress. Rocky was wounded but firing arrows of smog into the crowd while missing a leg, and Rose was down to a single wand and occasional potshots. The ‘rescue’ team was only now filing into Santa’s shelter, with Hyde carrying an unconscious Sarge as he constantly summoned his hounds. Although at this point they were more like vicious puppies, he was clearly running on fumes. Fox was firing arrows while retreating, each one blowing up on contact, but the explosions weren’t even enough to kill a shade, a far cry from his usual power. Cuddles was lobbing her fireballs, and even though the distortions were only softball-sized, she was having the most effect. The shades were wary of her particular brand of mayhem.

So that left me out here, with Kate, behind a bubble shield. With the goddamn Shadow King walking slowly towards us, through a crowd of dozens of normal shades. I could see him staring at me. No, wait, he was staring at Kate. After all, she was the one shining with holy light. Well shit.

“Hey, Lazzy boy, this would be a good time for one of your miracles! I got mana left, but if I go all out it ain’t gonna last long!” called my friend.

Looking at my shattered legs, that sounded way easier said than done.

“What are we going to do?” asked Katenip. I could see it on her face, that dawning understanding of exactly how bad our position was.

Fuck… fuck, fuck, fucking, fuck! There isn’t a way out. No escape, no time. We were too weak; we needed power. Looking again at my stone body I whispered… “Power… that’ll do it.”

I closed my eyes for a moment to collect myself. With a trickle of mana to my throat to boost my voice, I opened my eyes and shouted. “Santa light’em up for 30 seconds on Mark! I’m going Soul Burn 3, buy me time!”

From my perch, I could see his shock before I heard his amplified reply. “Burn 3? You sure? Of course, you are.” He sighed and icy light shone from his body. “Ready for Mark on order, Captain! Consider time bought!”

I looked at Kate, “It’s the only way…” I struggled to my nonexistent feet and stab my legs into the ground to keep me upright. I wouldn’t need long. I stared hard at Kate, looking her dead in the eyes. “Survive, get to Santa and survive.”

“What’s Soul Burn 3 Lazarus?” She asked, fear evident on her face.

“Survivable. When I change, run, it won’t be safe out here.”

That was only technically true. The only thing survivable about performing a Burn 3 is that I was a tier 12 master of soul magic not that long ago. Anyone else would straight up die. I had a 50/50 chance.

“MARK!” I called. Then I got to twisting my soul into a very complicated pretzel.

At my command, the front of the army before Santa froze and shattered. The wonders of a Temper class giving Int boosts to an ex-Grandmaster Avatar of Frozen Might, and that was his weaker class. The front ranks shattered into powdered snow, that then merged into butterflies of clear ice. Then the butterflies danced. A whirlwind of razor-sharp insects shot through the army, leaving frozen patches on everything they cut. Santa was remaking some of his old spells, at level 1, on the fly, and chaining them.

Holy fucking shit, that is talent, pure undiluted talent. It’s the equivalent of playing a game of chess by standing 10 feet away and moving your pieces by hitting them with a bouncy ball, and you’re throwing the damn ball with chopsticks, and winning the fucking game.

When he said time would be bought, he wasn’t kidding. Better hold up my end. I can’t let that lazy bastard one-up me in this.

I took advantage of the time he was buying to draw out strands of my soul and form them into spellforms that looped back on each other. With a spiritual ‘crunch’ I condensed the weave into a solid while lightly branding my soul with the inverse patterns to form a separate spell. With a mental flick, I set the weave to vibrating, causing a resonance feedback loop in my soul. As the power built, I spun up some soul dampening arrays that were not quite touching each other and placed a pair on all six sides of my soul. When the power built, it should exert enough pressure to merge the arrays and activate them. That would keep me alive… hopefully. To any that could view it, my soul would look like a very pissed-off 4-D fractal, or possibly a hamster in a cat’s cradle. Souls are strange like that.

As I drew my mind out of my soul, I heard Santa shouting, “Time buy ending in 3… 2… 1 MARK!” Perfect. I finished a few seconds early.

“Primal Form” I said as I activated the skill.

With the power boost from my soul fuckery my form was different, very different. I gained a bit of height and my body still contained traces of all my Affinities, but I had been using Earth, Lava, and Oil so much lately that they were the most obvious. I retained the bestial appearance of past transformations, but kept the manual dexterity of a human, even as great armored plates of lava-veined obsidian formed around me. My very breath contained volatile fumes and oil seeped from my pores in streams. Heatwaves blasted off my skin and the condensed life of those long gone fueled me. I became nature’s fury stuffed into a volcanic knight with a burning desire to end things in the most brutal fashion.

My resource pools overflow with the resonance of my soul, my stats multiplying with borrowed power.

Kate has taken my advice and taken off running for Santa’s little fort, while I have attracted the attention of every eye on the battlefield with my explosion of power.

I looked the Shadow King right in his false eye and growled, “I am going to rip your soul out and beat you with it.”

With a howl, I used my strengths. My mastery of blood, bone, soul, and mind all turned to creating better spell forms, better skills, and protecting those precious to me. “Time to die, fucker!”

My leap crumbled the weak earth of the hill I made as I rocketed towards a cluster of Shades. I hit the earth like a bomb and directed the shock wave while tweaking it with mana. It disintegrated the weaker Shades as it ripped through them.

Already, more gathered and formed, imbued with the shadowy presence of their King, they were closer to Elite guards than normal shades. It didn’t matter. I formed an elemental mirror of an old skill that I used up till the very end. The spellforms needed were way more complicated than something I should be capable of at this level, but for this brief moment, it didn’t matter.

“Burning Blood of the Earth!” I screamed. A ripple of intense heat and mana exploded from my body as the battlefield changed. Lava and oil erupted in pools; the heat intense enough to melt steel in an instant. Black clouds of toxic smoke billowed from fissures in the earth, the result of the burning oil reserves conjured and ignited below. Shades died by the dozens just from the hellscape I had created.

The King had stopped in his tracks. He actively started summoning Elites. This was where the true battle would begin. With his chains broken by my folly, he could bring forth a small army of incredible power. His imprisonment may have weakened him, but his powers were now his to wield in full, and would only grow with time. Time I didn’t intend to give him.

I formed a complex weave of mana and channeled it into the ground through my feet. “Volcanic Armory” I intoned. Quick and dirty adaptations of old spells at this level still required verbal focusing components. If this wasn’t borrowed power, I could ignore that limitation, but I would make do with what I had.

I spent a ton of power to eliminate the normal shades. Forcing him to use his reserve guard would be the only way I could keep my friends safe. His Elites should be a limited resource for the moment, until he can kill and make more, they would be a finite resource. A resource I could kill.

I launched myself at the ground in front of one of the new elites. As my foot touched the ground, my spell took effect. A sword of blazing stone burst from the ground, the pommel at the perfect height for me to grab and continue the motion into a full-on decapitation of the summoned enemy in front of me. All this happened in the moment after I landed.

With a flick of my wrist, the sword flew through the air, impaling a shade charging towards me twenty feet away. I could feel their twisted souls in this heightened state, and I rolled out of the way of a thorny spear from behind. As I rolled, I caught the handle of another stone weapon, a great axe with rivulets of lava running through it, and bisected the would-be assassin in the same movement that brought me back to my feet.

The beauty of the Volcanic Armory spell is that there would always be a weapon at hand when I needed it, one infused with the might and heat of the mountain. I used to do this with bone weapons on a battlefield, drawing power from the dead and dying to infuse death and soul magic into my armaments. This was especially effective when I waded into battle with a host of undead at my side, as the effect would apply to each of them as well.

Without a legion the spell was less effective, but still enough for me to dodge, bob, and weave through the small horde of conjured foes, ripping weaponry out of the ground with every step. Each dodge or step brought to hand a mace, sword, or axe. Each kill a spear or glaive.

With every strike, I would discard my weapon as an attack on more distant foes or the King himself. My dance of death took full advantage of my insane stats for this area, with cartwheels resulting in kicked daggers that erupted from the ground at just the right moment to end up buried in the nondescript face of a shadowy guard. The only reason this worked so well was that these quickly summoned elites didn’t have access to their skills and classes, they were Elite Shades only because of their comparatively huge stats. The Shadow King could only boost the quality of a mass summoning so far.

As a minion user myself, I would have been disappointed that he hadn’t discorporated a company of fully summoned elites before even hinting he was free. If I wasn’t trying to kill him. It showed just how far my past self had outgrown the meager skills of the Shadow King. If it weren’t the beginning of the game, he would hardly have been a threat.

As it stood, he was a threat to humanity. One I was determined to end here and now.

As I whittled his forces down, I monitored my resources. They were refilled and boosted, but they weren’t infinite. If I could have used a different Soul Burn technique, they would have been limitless, and this fight would already have been over. I would also have zero chances of survival.

Soul Burn techniques use principles of sacrificial magic to gain a power boost for a price. Back in the Protectors Guild, anyone fighting against world-class threats was required to know at least three power-boosting methods and know the shorthand names of the most common ten of each category, so they knew what to expect when someone pulled one out. The ‘Suicide Boost’ class of boosts was the most powerful, and technically Burn 3 fell under this heading when used normally. Normally there weren’t any restraints put on the building power. I drastically weakened the technique by trying to survive it, and survival was only possible because I was damn good at what I used to do.

With the last of his army falling, the King made a choice; he joined the fight himself. Since he couldn’t replenish his forces faster than I could take them down, it was the only option.

His roar blasted the smoke away and cooled the lava. It even inflicted a stun effect on me. The shredded remains of his army flowed into him, and the rest of his body soon matched his replacement arm. By the time I could move, the King was a scar on the world, a humanoid figure of bloody red shadow and corrupting black ice.

I had about a third of my mana left; I hoped it would be enough.

Our clash broke the ground. Admittedly, it was weak starter zone ground, anyone that trusted the ground in a low mana zone deserved to lose their footing. I met his sword of red ice with a shield of glowing obsidian and smiled.

I had been releasing aerosolized oil from my pores the entire fight, keeping a connection to the mana or the ever-expanding cloud. After stabbing the dagger in my other hand into the King’s arm, I kept him locked in place. “Sayonara bitch.” I heard the distant shout of “Oh Fuck take cover” from Santa right as I triggered the spell I had been building from the start. Fuel-Air Convergence.

In a flash, every particle of oil converged in a sphere the size of a pea right behind the Shadow King’s back. Then it ignited, and the world went white.