Scott fought down a tremor that ran through his body. A slight hint of drool formed at the edge of his lips and his eyes flashed brighter for a moment.

“Help me?” Harry laughed snidely. “That’s rich.”

Scott began to speak a certain incantation while Harry brought up a message window. Each word that Scott spoke seemed to take several long seconds, as though it was incredibly difficult to speak for some reason.

Harry chose to take the initiative to set things in motion for his faction. He quickly began a report of the situation and opted to record the remainder of the encounter for posterity. Sax would want to see what he did to the idiot when his buff ran out. The way things worked at the moment, Sax’s plans for the rebirth of the guild were going well. Everything was working exactly as he explained to them.

Nearly all the members of the Corpse Rats had abandoned Sax after he began harassing the Ardente family, but a few of the original members gathered and joined him in his little scheme once he was able to show a possibility for results. Soon, everything that had worked toward would come to fruition and nothing could stop them. Harry did not care so much about that facet of the situation, however. He wanted revenge. The red-haired ninja slut needed to pay, and that debt had finally come due.

Harry cracked his knuckles. It was time to end this farce. He opened an administrative window and began searching for Scott’s profile. Given what he had done, he was clearly hacking the world server somehow. As someone with limited administrative abilities, Harry would need to limit Scott’s ability to continue his flagrant Violations, and thus he intended to perform a complete reset on the man. Return him to level one, strip all his points, and bind him into a sub-spatial pocket that would prevent him from interacting with the world server at all.

Any minute now he would find his information.

Any minute now.

Yep. Any minute now…

Harry frowned darkly. “Where the hell is your system ID?” he groused. He could only record anonymously if he had another ID to focus on. Otherwise he would only be able to record using his own system identification. He had no desire to answer questions if things went South legally, so he shut cancelled his recording attempt.

Scott reached the end of his incantation, but he did not unleash the power that he held. Instead, he stared at Harry. His gaze penetrating the godling, Scott said, “Turn yourself in, Harry. Admit what you did. Tell everyone the truth about what is really going on behind the scenes.”

Harry snorted at him. “Just cast your stupid little spell, so I can catch your hacking on record.”

Arrogance. That was what Harry felt in that moment. What could the little punk do to him? He was a god. Even if that spell turned out to be powerful enough to kill him. He was safe and sound in the comfort of his own home at that moment. A being such as he could not be slain by merely killing his avatar.

Scott closed his eyes. He struggled mightily, as evidenced by his trembling flesh. For some reason he lightly licked his lips then began to breathe a little heavier. Soon, he calmed himself enough to say “Harry. You have hurt so many people, but in the end the one you hurt most is yourself.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “Get on with it, already.”

Scott’s eyes snapped open. Those eyes carried with them a strange somberness. This, for most people, would be a moment of anger well-spent. However, there was nothing but sadness in those blazing red eyes. He raised up his hand and imperiously intoned, “Dark Judgment.”

Harry smirked as the ground beneath him began to trembly. Flames rose up all around him, and a hole opened in the world. “Cute.”

He continued to be dismissive right up until the serpentine chains pierced his flesh. His eyes widened almost comically, even as a hellish screech ripped from his throat.

Surprisingly, however, Harry began to easily rip away those chains. Scott’s sorrowful expression never shifted. Harry was a god. While his chains could pierce him, he had been forced to call upon all the abyssal energy in the area in order to even make this attempt to save his soul.

Scott watched as Harry screamed in agony, the chains piercing the flesh of his avatar and reaching across dimensions to assault the god who drove it. He was not safe. Not from the chains forged from his own wickedness.

A multitude of message windows appeared. The word immortal object flashed over his head several times, almost an insult to what was happening. Harry screamed once, a wave of pure will power exploding outward from him. The chains were destroyed, not in the manner of a soul overcoming their own corruption but in the manner of a being capable of overwhelming the current power used to call upon those chains.

On several occasions, Scott had read that his exceptional abilities could not be denied. However, there was also a telling statement involved. If the target is powerful enough, they can break free of the judgment without being judged. Harry could not stop him from using that power, but he could certainly overwhelm it. Scott, for all that he was an ancient primordial being, still had to work within the framework of his own existence.

He was not the totality of himself. During his awakening, he learned many things. Some of that knowledge stuck with him. Some did not. During the battle with Harry, he recalled his ability to harm immortal objects. As a soul older than existence itself, he could do things that most could not. If those visions, those supposed memories, were true then many of the things that existed were due to his bringing the knowledge of it to this reality in the first place.

If he had a true self, that self currently slept like all the others. No doubt, in that earlier vision that he’d had, he was that massive dragon that seemed to be guarding so many children. In this life, this form, the dragon known as Blackthorne was only an infinitesimally small fragment of who he truly was. Every version of himself throughout reality was but a tiny piece of that main existence.

Simply put, he was part of that primordial dragon god thing, but he was not the entirety of it. In this life, the incarnation of Noct-El known both as Scott and as Blackthorne was not yet strong enough to cast his judgment upon a god and guarantee its success.

Harry finished overwhelming Scott’s power, but the exertion drove him to his knees. Panting for breath, bleeding from hundreds of wounds, he glared hatefully at the mortal pissant who had dared to harm him. “You son of a bitch! How did you do it!”

There was none of the fear that would normally come from the understanding of what had transpired. Harry’s soul had been pierced by the abyssal chains, but the judgment had not truly taken place. In his mind, it was only a powerful attack spell and nothing more.

“I tried,” whispered Scott. His body began to shake violently. It was everything that he could do to lessen the trembling.

“I’m just…” whispered Scott.

“Just what?” snarled Harry. He tried to get up but found it impossible to move. In a way he was paralyzed. The message screens that he’d ignored earlier due to fighting off that weak sauce spell had warned him of several things that he was only now coming to know.

“So…. Damned…” said Scott through clenched teeth. His calm and sorrowful demeanor was broken now as he began to pant like a dog, his tongue elongating slightly and lolling out of his mouth. A certain light came to his eyes.

“Weak?” taunted Harry.

“Hungry!” snarled Scott like a raving beast. His tongue lolling obscenely from his mouth, he shot toward harry wild-eyed and desperate. All semblance of humanity, or a better angel had disappeared from his face as the flesh starved beast within finally overwhelmed his senses.

While he drew upon the powers of the abyss, he had been able to forestall the physical aspect of his awakening, but that power had been spent. Harry’s had mocked that shaking. He had snickered and derided his trembling body as a sign of weakness, and yet the truth was far more brutal.

Scott’s face morphed into a disgusting caricature of itself as his mouth opened far too wide for a human skull. Unable to move, Harry screeched in agony as Scott descended upon him. His claws rent into his flesh. He teeth ripped into the side of his face and bit off a huge bloody chunk.

Rend. Tear. Feast. Meat. Those were the only thoughts that the deprived beast could think at that moment. Harry unleashed blood curdling screams, but those screams only rose in intensity and pitch when he discovered that the emergency logout, he had set for certain pain thresholds did not activate. In fact. Then he thought of nothing else but his own agony as Scott stabbed his claws into the meat of his shoulder and ripped out hot quivering flesh.

Piece, by bloody disgusting piece, the beast devoured the godling who had destroyed his family. Bones were cracked. Marrow was feasted upon. Degenerate flesh was devoured.

No matter what damage Scott did to Harry, the man did not die. Above his head, the words ‘Immortal Object’ continued to flash.

Eventually, Scott’s instincts warned him of an impending confrontation. He would not give up his meat. The beast dragged his immortal prey out of the cemetery and deep into the woods beyond. He ate, and he dragged, and he ate some more.

In brief moments of clarity, Harry tried to log out but found that he could not. Worse, he could not turn off his immortal stats. Those damnable chains had corrupted his system admin privileges when they attacked his spiritual matrix!

Beyond the river. Beyond the limits of the city. Well beyond the ability of the local police department to track given the fact that the night and its monsters would soon be upon them, Scott feasted upon the immortal flesh of his undying stepfather.

Harry, however, knew nothing. In another world, one of unparalleled modern themed glory, a young god sat slumped over his command console. Blood poured from his ears, eyes, and nose. In human years he would look to be only fourteen years of age, but of course gods aged much differently than men. The damage done to Harry’s spiritual matrix had reached the core. He would not be going to the abyss that day, but he felt everything that happened to his avatar and was in fact inextricably linked to it now. The spiritual scars ran deep. It was possibly that he might never recover from such trauma… such unrelenting brutality. A monster who fed on the weak and reveled in their pain. Harry was now a mindless husk.

Eat well, little Blackthorne. You’re a growing boy…

###

~ End of Volume 3 ~