Bone Golem

Unfortunately, I wasn't the only one that could learn from my enemy. I'd only dominated the battlefields for a month before Raginor unleashed his "Children of Raginor" and I realized that the war was far from over. He'd developed avatars. He used light as the core circuit, of course, but that turned out to be a very lethal choice.

They were faster than anything else, even barghests. So much so that my barghests were finally dying on a regular basis. The heat of the light may not be able to deal damage to cerberi, but barghests were vulnerable. It required a dozen avatars focusing their power on a single barghest, but that wasn't a problem for the spawn. The avatars were able to be piloted by Whiteskirts in the capital. Raginor had so many of those that he could field more "Children of Raginor" than I had soldiers, though I couldn't fathom where he got the mana. Numbers was a resource the spawn lacked. In every regard.

Ten of the light avatars could work together to lift a cerberus, needing ten because the cerberus often tried to liquefy to avoid being caught so there had to be an avatar for each piece. Once airborne, the cerberi became much easier to deal with. A weakness I hadn't known they had. While the avatars couldn't hurt the cerberi, neither could the flames damage the avatars. The first few had been designed as liquid as possible so they'd be affected less by melting, but mana couldn't melt. Far from impervious to damage, but mana couldn't be melted or frozen. Circuitry was the only reason it had a physical form at all, a form that may be physical but was still a different kind of material than anything else.

With the dogs neutralized and avatars providing all the benefits of bombardment that my pyramids provided on my side, the war was turning once again in Raginor's favor. It may have required Raginor fielding double the numbers of my forces, but with the speed the avatars moved and the numbers of them Raginor had available to him it was a viable strategy.

Another creature unleashed was proof that bicorns weren't as hated as I'd been led to believe. Demons too. The spawn called them angels. Their glowing white forms looked nothing like demons or nightmares, but they functioned exactly the same. Luckily they weren't good enough to compete with gnolls. Their effects were limited, but they succeeded in stopping the gnolls from being able to affect the rest of the battle. A month after their addition they started dripping white flames that mimicked bicorn fire exactly. There was a slight difference in that bicorn fire dissolved into the air to spread while angel fire used the light radiated by the fire as a medium, but that was a mostly semantic alteration. Giving them solid bodies had stopped them from possessing anything, but they hadn't been using that ability on the battlefield anyway. Possession was a useless ability when fighting forces bolstered by worship.

While all of that was happening, Raginor had also advanced to class eight. And I'd underestimated the advantage a single class would be in his favor. It could have been due to maxing out his circuit as well, but whatever the cause behind it was didn't matter. I was being overwhelmed. Easily. I'd called in Sekhmet and Atlas to act with me, but even with all three of us the only spells that managed to activate belonged to Raginor.

The more battles we fought together reduced the number of circuits Raginor got to activate, but the improvement plateaued at letting ten circuits past us per battle. Raginor was the largest god by a significant margin, and it showed. Sekhmet and Atlas working together wouldn't have been able to keep up with half of Raginor's versatility. I could, but that was only by enduring extreme levels of concentration.

Atlas' colossi also proved to be as useless as I'd anticipated. Extremely competent with the bodies they'd died in, but those bodies had been sheathed in iron. They were around the same level of the first colossi I fielded that had died multiple times but had started as class two goliaths less than a year ago. Impressive for being new to the eighth class, but far from a weapon that could shift the tides of this war.

Sekhmet's netjer-tepi piloting avatars were much more effective, though they required a lot more help from me on a developmental level. They used a ritual circuit I couldn't recognize instead of light, but each of their avatars was as effective as Sekhmet's nature would make her, destroying enemies as allies were revitalized. Sekhmet being a goddess of destruction definitely played a part. Merely the presence of her avatars on the battlefield shifted burn and corrosive damage to obliterative as other forms of damage were amplified in different ways. Slashes exploding with extra force were common, others spontaneously radiated wind blades when they missed.

The effects on circuitry were also new, being similar to a more aggressive form of intimidation. Intimidation that worked on the physical elements of the circuits themselves, stabilizing circuits that would have failed for allies while poking holes in enemy circuits instead of acting on the will. A largely useless ability, as the vast majority of those utilizing circuitry were only capable of the circuits because they were using faith, faith that was extremely reinforced. They turned out to be very effective at destabilizing the light avatars, though both sides were ready for such explosions.

What I really needed to turn the tides was a surplus of mana, however. I'd had a plan for mana avatars, and after a few more months of warfare I'd built enough that I was keeping up with the needs of the army while having enough to feel comfortable on top of that. Then my mana avatars took to the skies, flying so high that only their heels were in the air.

So high in the sky, they were invisible from the ground. Far from bright enough, especially during the day, to cause any effect at all. Once they were over spawn cities, I'd release the anti-suppression and replace it with suppression absorption I'd learned from boars. The resulting speed alone was enough to shatter cities, but the explosion of the avatar destabilizing after the impact with the ground caused explosions visible from the front lines. Barely a flash of light for the farthest forces, but anything visible from anywhere in spawn territory was beyond impressive. The impossibly accelerated boulders would have been capable of even more destruction, but we were still far enough out that cities were isolated from each other by significant distances.

The light avatars then turned their attention to the sky, pulling a lot of the pressure off of my forces. They were very effective in catching my mana avatars before they could detonate, making me detonate them comparatively harmlessly in the sky dealing one for one damage to avatars. Class four spawn would probably die to the violence of the aftershocks, but I wasn't naïve enough to ȧssume there were any more class four spawn left. Whatever stores of mana Raginor had access to, they seemed as endless as mine, as the number of light avatars didn't decrease any more. There were occasional cities annihilated by avatar stars, but the vast majority of the benefit was how they pulled many of the light avatars away from the front lines.

A counter I'd hoped Raginor wouldn't think of was having his light avatars match my mana avatars in height, but he never considered that an option. Above the sky, there was no horizon. His light avatars would have been able to see each of my radiant mana avatars and provide a much more focused defense. Luckily for me, Raginor or the spawn driving the avatars lacked creativity. The spawn were probably too overwhelmed trying to control the avatars at all that coming up with ideas for tactics was beyond them, that or they were so trusting in Raginor that they didn't see the need for their own ideas. With the numbers available, it was nearly impossible that none of Raginor's pilots considered the counter.

It was going so well that consuming Baphomet and advancing directly through the eighth and ninth classes was a trivial risk. One that I was very glad I'd taken. It allowed me so much leeway I started to treat this war as I had others; allowing it to progress as it would as I did my best to observe. The most apparent example was that I held down Raginor alone and allowed Sekhmet and Atlas free onto the battlefield instead of directly activating any more circuits.

Bolstered by their gods, Atlas' colossi and Sekhmet's netjer-tepi became much more effective. The colossi gained an impossible level of unity, thinking unified into a single cohesive unit with many bodies. Atlas, being a creature of faith, was much more adept at maximizing the use of their bodies, while also being perfectly capable of class eight circuitry. Angels were very convenient as aides, having a direct connection to the god.

A much more direct connection than Sekhmet and her cat-driven avatars, but with similar effects. Faith casting of circuits with the direct attention of the deity was incomparable to faith casting alone. Sekhmet was even touching on the ability to cast class nine circuits, though only bȧrėly. With her acting directly among the forces, my intervention became superfluous. Entire battles came and went without me doing anything apart from keeping Raginor at bay.

I could afford to. I hadn't spent a lot of time in class eight, but class nine was far beyond my expectations. I still had to compress will around my will-core a little bit to keep pace with Raginor, but with the difference between myself compressed to the maximum I could stand while needing help from Sekhmet and Atlas to bȧrėly compressing at all while dealing with Raginor alone…the agility of my will had increased exponentially. A truly vast difference. I was dealing with Raginor while still being perfectly comfortable marveling at the increased sensitivity and vastly superior ability to focus my vision. Not only could I deal with Raginor, I didn't have to reduce my processing across the rest of my forces. I could take my attention off of the south, a little bit. Keeping my attention everywhere was the reason I needed to compress myself at all. Despite having less than a tenth the mass of will available and only one class of advantage, I was perfectly capable of equaling Raginor.

I was so comfortable that I was able to steal one of his angels, wanting to see if they were a true creature with empty will or a mere artifice built recently by Raginor's desperation. Giving them physical bodies had heightened their abilities on the battlefield, but they also made angels vulnerable to gnolls. The body contained the empty will for a little while after the will was shredded, meaning there was something left over to build a new will from. Angels in their natural state wouldn't have had that weakness. A weakness that led me to the conclusion that angels were a true reflection of demons, right down to the corrosive nature of their empty will. An observation I was able to make while the creature was still struggling in my grasp, completely shielded by Raginor's faith. I still used gnolls to verify afterwards, but it was still true that I could see the truth without needing to utilize their methods.

I had always been able to see the surface of a creature's will, like a cloud of color that carried the intent, intent that was a small and brief window into the opaque shell and revealed elements of the inner workings of a creature, but the opacity was waning. Distinguishing empty will from within the angels was easy, even to the point that I could understand its nature. It would still be difficult to read the angel's will-core like I could with my worshippers, but possible with adequate exertion. Exertion that would require me to put my will under more strain than I wanted to. I'd spent a long time in near-constant agony and I was ready for a break. I was still in a little bit of agony, but it was manageable. Compared to what I was in before it was as different as bathing in a lake of gaseous earth was to holding a finger over a candle. Much easier to deal with.

Watching the panic Raginor was trying to hide slide across the surface of his faith as he realized I had him beaten was a bonus, but not enough of one that I'd delve too deep into the angel for its secrets personally. The gnoll reconstruction as well as my own investigations from outside allowed me to piece together exactly what they were, and where they'd come from. Angels were developed by the Whiteskirts as a counter for demons, the first being a captured demon inundated in faith. A poor proxy for genuine worship, but enough to shift the bond from Abyss to Raginor. It had taken a long time for the demon trapped in a shrine to become a truly different being, but the spawn had had access to a lot of time. Since then, angels had been used to kill every spawn for generations in a ritualistic manner that hid the presence of angels from the masses. The majority of spawn were so weak at their time of death that millions of spawn were required for every new angel, but the number of spawn meant that the number of angels accessible to Raginor were far more than I'd seen on the battlefield. Maybe that was where he got his mana, he'd turned the angels into batteries, giving them mana avatars to fund his war effort. A very noble reward for the devotion the spawn had given him since the creation of the sun. A revelation that wouldn't change the mind of any spawn anymore. They were bound to the war effort far more securely than they'd ever been bound by mere belief. .

A war effort that wasn't going his way anymore. I made sure to increase the pace of my forces for two more months before allowing myself to believe that he didn't have any more tricks up his sleeve, and then I let loose my most potent worshippers. The battlefield was an excellent place for them to refine their abilities, I wasn't about to let them lose out on the opportunity because I was afraid of Raginor's response.

On one side of the front lines Angie's avatars appeared, each of the dozen bodies giggling madly as they wrote class nine circuits in quick succession. Every element was showcased in her abilities, she even utilized crystalline mana bullets, allowing for extreme levels of explosiveness in the eventual detonation of her attacks. Attacks that had even Sekhmet looking on in envy of her abilities before the second phase erupted from within the enemy forces. Those petty circuits paled in comparison to her most lethal designs, however.

Her most lethal ability was a class nine spatial circuit she dubbed Embrace of the Void. She compressed space in a sphere. What her circuit did wasn't that impressive, on its own. The cost was, in both mana and focus, requiring ten of her class eight avatars working together to allow it to function properly. What was truly devastating was how the world reacted to space being compressed. When she'd compressed to the best of her ability, everything fell towards the hole. Fell faster than the sky could suppress, accelerating to impossible speeds almost instantly. Completely ignoring the suppression of the sky. Even air was pulled into her void sphere. Within that sphere, everything was crushed with such extreme force that paste wasn't even good enough to explain it. A kind of damage that looked more like creation than destruction, compressing the smallest units of matter into a single mass. A mass that was extremely unstable. Every second she maintained the circuit was a war in and of itself. A war that she was destined to lose, as the enemy became stronger with everything the circuit consumed.

Eventually it grew to the point that she couldn't maintain it anymore, and she released her power. With the circuit gone, all of the matter that was compressed erupted with force that made stars seem like the softest of cat hair. With a single successful Embrace of the Void, Angie ended entire armies of spawn. It was a class nine spatial circuit, so teleportation didn't work. Even the light avatars couldn't escape, despite being so fast that barghests were helpless to escape. Even the speed of a light avatar wasn't enough to outrun the crushing forces of space, leading me to believe that nothing could escape the grasp of the circuit. The only ones that had a chance were light avatars and cats, as light avatars moved using light as a medium and cats used space. It would require a massive amount of mana and probably destroy the circuits in the cat's legs, but it was at least possible that they'd be able to escape. As the final stages of the compression even forced light to be compressed, light avatars could only hope to flee between the moment when Angie started making the circuit and when it was in its full state of compression.

Glrt's avatar that appeared on the other was a much more simple type of fighter. She also used class nine circuits, but hers were all earth-based with a taint of will. A very dangerous combination. Long gone were the days when Gravequake was her best ability, now she could maintain it as an aura while sending thousands of stars hurtling towards the ground with the wave of a hand, each one augmented to such an extent that had any of them missed their targets I could have understood if Earth itself reacted. That was merely her opening salvo, however. Her favorite circuit was Doom Dust, a perfect conglomeration of everything she'd learned. Hidden within the expected result of a salvo of stars was her true ȧssault.

The black dust was something common on the battlefield, the number of class eight creatures gathered together and exerting themselves to the fullest meant a lot of suppression, which meant a lot of dust. Glrt weaponized the dust, using comparatively little focus to work will-corrosion into the earth below and every star she tossed that was then kicked up into the air by the suppression or shattered into dust on impact. When the dust touched enemies, it hardened into earth worthy of being called class nine, basically impervious to everything while it was also impossible to shake off. Then the corrosion started.

Even more devastating was when the dust got inside the creatures, swallowed or breathed didn't matter. Defenses on the outside were common and very resilient. Defenses on the inside were much less robust. Every unit of will that was corroded left material free to become more Doom Dust, eventually turning the creature into a statue of class nine earth. She could have then used the demon created by the will-corrosion to make a golem with class nine materials, but she didn't feel it was necessary. Better to leave the bodies as they were, permanent testaments to her power. It had been an accidental discovery, but the earth didn't reclaim hardened earth as it did with everything else. It clung to hardened earth, but didn't try to reclaim it.

Glrt couldn't deal with the light avatars, but I was gaining more megaliths every day. Each one added a number of avatars to the field of battle, many perfectly capable of dealing with light avatars. When Sky's avatars joined the suppression was manually enforced, sending the light avatars crashing to the ground where Earth's avatar was perfectly willing to welcome them. They may have required more active guidance than other megaliths, but their effectiveness was far from in question.

Raginor was panicking more and more with each revolution of his body. So much so that I could see it reflected in the color of light produced. Not only was the light shifting slightly in color as Raginor lost his cool, but the coverage was also changing. What had been an even and warm illumination became spotty as some places spontaneously caught on fire while others failed to warm all day. When my forces finally reached the walls of the capital, the panic intensified to another level. Color changes so great that even the spawn could undoubtedly tell as even within their own territory the warmth and light became inconsistent. My forces stopping at the walls caused even more panic, as now he was forced to ask why they would do that. My forces could stay still and there was still the threat of Raginor destroying his own territory, the beams of intense light being so intense they left his light avatars far behind in the scale of damage. He was clearly trying to focus those regions on my forces, but he wasn't very successful even if fighting the light avatars hadn't taught them everything they needed to fight him effectively.

He'd finally run out of taunts. Wordless screams of panic and unwillingness were the best he could marshal. All of it was pointless, though. I wasn't going to let my worshippers end Raginor, that was my pŀėȧsurė and mine alone. They were only there to witness, to see the truth of my prowess proven once and for all. They didn't understand how they could be witnesses when they were several times too far away for anything I did to be within their horizon, but they would soon.

Pyramids had allowed me to use my class ten star, finally. They didn't need the sky to accelerate, in fact they were hampered by it. Moving a class ten star as large as an ocean was excessively expensive, but in the emptiness above the sky there was nothing to slow it down. Every unit of force it gained was merely added to the speed as it rushed ever faster. Cats had taught me to redirect those forces without needing to erase them, meaning raising and lowering the star in relation to the sun cost much less than it would have if I only relied on an anchor. To get the maximum possible force, I had to raise the star even further above the sky, so high that it was higher than the sun than the sun was to the earth. By the time it was that high it was already going much faster than any star had ever gone before. As all of those forces were shifted downwards, it only got faster.

My forces watched as mana avatars dissolved one by one, sacrificed to power the class ten star that was invisible to everyone. It radiated no light, and was above the only thing that would have made it cast a shadow. Not even Raginor could see it, if he could even see out of the sun. A doubtful proposition as my mana avatars were all perfectly visible to the sun. Beyond that consideration, he wouldn't see the star regardless. As the sun had always been the highest thing around, why would he look up?

When the class ten star impacted the sun, Raginor realized what had happened. Far too late, but he realized his folly. The star was packed so full of will circuitry that he couldn't have dissolved the Sun as he had his radiant shards. He was perfectly capable of feeling every nanosecond as the Sun shattered, followed by the column it rested on. He was class eight, so he could feel every shard as it was ripped from his fingers by my circuitry. Every piece an agonizing loss, no doubt.

The impact was so fast that my forces were still seeing an intact sun while my star turned the pillar to dust. They were still seeing an intact sun when my star hit the capital before plunging into the earth. At that point Earth and Sky had received feedback from their elements that something had occurred, but the eyes of their avatars on the border wall still saw an intact sun. At that point I used the will circuitry in my star to feed the force, not wanting to do permanent damage to Earth's will. The body, on the other hand, couldn't take the force of my star pounding into its center.

The entirety of Earth's body broke, under the force of the star. Cracks ripped out from the position of the spawn capital, splitting Earth's body into five pieces, even if it would take years for the ripple of force to spread through the entirety of Earth's body. The cracks were produced by forces so massive that they'd reach the edges of the world, though. My star had punched all the way through the Earth's body, ripping out in an empty area on the other side. Turning it around so it impacted the earth again was only the level of cataclysm that would end multiple cities. Almost all of the force of the falling star had been absorbed in the first fall, after all. There was no reason to send the star careening out into the void on the other side. The additional mass was a small consolation for the damage done to Earth's body, but it was all Earth was going to get.

Most of my forces missed the moment of the impact itself, their vision being too slow to catch the details. They did notice the sun going dark, though. When they thought they understood what had happened, almost two days after the impact, the shattering ripple of earth reached them, tearing through the spawn capital with such unquestionable power that none of them survived. My own forces only survived because I shielded them, changing the trajectories of rocks that would tear them apart where it was more efficient, or repairing their bodies if it wasn't.

The capital being the epicenter, there were far more than five cracks. What had once been the capital was rendered shredded earth, so completely shredded that Sky wasn't sure how to react. There was no cohesive piece of earth to reject them towards. Eventually Earth was the one that reacted, reaching out tendrils to connect the five broken pieces of its body and all the new pieces that remained distant in the center. It was extremely hesitant to combine back into a single entity, a hesitance that I felt no need to deal with. The world could do with some new landmarks apart from the sun.

My forces and the state of the world were secondary concerns, however. The vast majority of my attention was on Raginor. On savoring every bite I took of the sun. On conveying the intense pŀėȧsurė of each moment to Raginor as I used his name to pull his true body closer to me. Names were indeed vulnerabilities. Raginor couldn't flee me in the mana ocean, not now that he had a name. An identity. It was a leash, if a very valuable one.

Without a name, Raginor could have evaded me, fleeing into the mana ocean as fast as I could chase. He'd given his name, and I intended to consume it. I was a bit regretful that I hadn't been able to ȧssume Baphomet's name, but I didn't regret not being able to ȧssume Raginor's. It may be an even more pervasive name, but that didn't make it mine. The only name that was worthy of me was the name I developed as I grew. Whatever that turned out to be.

Finally, he was in my grasp. My will slithered across his faith maelstrom for a moment, reveling in the taste of victory. I savored every spawn, watching with glee as Raginor only grew more panicked and less capable of fighting back. A cornered animal was most dangerous, but that was only true while it thought survival was possible. With every Whiteskirt I devoured, Raginor left the realm of panic and entered despair. When I started in on the cardinal Whiteskirts, Raginor launched a suicidal ȧssault. An ȧssault I devoured. I may be in absolute agony, so much will concentrated in my will-core that it felt like I was breaking, but I wouldn't tolerate any shard of Raginor surviving. Every thread that made Raginor would be consumed. I didn't even want his knowledge, shredding that as well. Maybe I'd regret giving in to my hatred as I had my rage, but in that moment of victory it didn't matter.

The faith maelstrom being consumed left only Raginor's faith-core left. The last bit of self that was Raginor, but a bit that contained the most will of the entirety of his being. I couldn't afford to savor it, consuming will-cores was a dangerous business. Raginor was also only one class weaker than me, even if class nine was incomparable to class eight. My will inundated the faith-core, shredding it more finely that anything I'd ever shredded before but otherwise working as efficiently as possible.

With that final meal, I finally had enough will to advance to class ten. To max out my own state as I had for so many others. To see what the peak of my existence could become. I was so powerful now that the process was almost instant, my vision erupting from every shred of will in the entire mana ocean. I'd thought everything was losing opacity at class nine, but at class ten there were no secrets that could be held from me. Not everything was in my faith maelstrom, but everything may as well be. Abyss and Hell were the two that I'd left alone, though I still wasn't quite sure why I'd left them alone. I didn't need to worry about it anymore, though. All will was as open as if it worshipped me.

It was effortless to look into the depths of Abyss, noticing the reflex that would normally allow him to notice and return the favor. Hell didn't even have the same reaction, as the core of her being was different. Where Abyss was chaos, Hell was order. Abyss claimed the top of the earth, spreading his demons there and ensuring chaos. Hell ruled the bottom of the earth, and there was only a single civilization there. A true bug kingdom, where the physiques of hornets, beetles, and mantises were very much alive. Warped by Hell's devils in their upper echelon, but very much alive.

I had become everything. I was everywhere at the same time. I didn't even need to create more mana true circuits, as I could pull from everything. If there was mana anywhere, I had access to it. I'd become a true will nexus, the central point that connected all will. My own will was still distinct, but I had a connection to all the will anywhere. With so much accessible to me…what was I supposed to do now? There was nothing else to take, no benefit to growing my faith maelstrom.. I'd found my peak.