Demonic Devourer: First, I Eat the Babies [LitRPG]

Power infuses my body, but I can already tell that this is not a fight I can win through overwhelming firepower. My attributes are far higher than they have any right to be, and ascending to Category 1 has done nothing but enhance every aspect of myself, but I face down a being infused with the power of the Titans. Even if it is merely a mockery fueled by ritual sacrifice, the raw power of the strongest beings to walk this planet is something that nobody can ignore. Not even me.

Last One Standing fades away as I rise, my minute-long special skill entirely spent on annihilating every last one of the Titan’s offshoots. Memories from other lives drift to mind, telling me that it is most frequently those offspring that response teams are tasked to deal with. The Titans themselves are far too powerful for anything short of an army to even attempt bringing one down.

In the last five hundred years, there have been two recorded instances of successful Titan killings.

This, however, is no Titan. It may be one eventually, but right now, it’s nothing more than a baby.

Slightly harder to kill than most of the others, but such is life. When has anything ever come to me easily?

I Bloodpath into the sky. With my increased stats across the board, I can easily spread myself thin across a cloud of blood the size of a city, but I keep myself condensed. My foe has displayed the ability to cancel skills out already, and I don’t want to be caught distributed across the sky when it decides to do so again.

To my surprise, I am not the only one propelling myself towards the nascent Titan. Even as it fully breaks into our reality, ignoring the laws of gravity as it simply hovers there, attacks from a dozen sources stream up towards its shimmering scales. Now that we’re no longer in a pocket reality that the Titan is larger than, the pressure it emits is dispersed, less focused, and I see a concerted effort make more headway in an instant than Zil, Ashley and I managed with an unending barrage in the fragment.

Adrian’s Tsunami surges upward, and I Appraise him using another special skill to infuse his water with lethal power. Sierra infuses it with her own special skill, and the whirling combination of light, darkness, and the sea slams into a scale. It flickers violently.

A Starfall Barrage joins their joint attack half a second later, fired from almost half a mile away. Ashley. She’s still alive, and she’s still participating in this fight.

They’re not alone. The other attacks rise upwards like pillars against the endless sky. I don’t recognize the other skills that are fired, nor do I know their owners, but they rise from the ruins of the Wastelands beneath us, all of them focused on the same scale.

Its flickers grow more intense, almost frantic—and then the scale goes dark. It does not begin to shimmer again.

Unexpected elation surges through me as the concerted effort of fourteen separate special skills proves that the Titan does, in fact, bleed.

It fades when I realize that it took that much to disable one scale. One massive scale, yes, but it’s only one of hundreds, thousands of them. We don’t have that much power.

I remind myself what I’m here to do. Now that I’m not on the ground, the pulsing weight of Sersui’s existence has faded into the background. The Titan of the Shifting Sands is going to bring and end to this fight, one way or another. All I have to do here is survive.

That feels inadequate. I want to win.

Another special skill is bubbling under the surface. I can feel it. There is more power within me, just waiting for me to unlock it. But not now. Not yet. Special skills are just that—special. I need to be worthy of a skill before I use it, I can feel that now. The cooldown’s I’ve been operating with have been a side effect of simply not having the correct body for skills that were supposed to unlock at Category 1. I suppose my domain is much the same.

The Titan is still a quarter mile above me when I exit my Bloodpath, not willing to get much closer. The pressure it exudes is almost overwhelming, but not quite. I can resist it enough to activate a Blood Clone, who immediately starts to fall. I cancel the skill immediately, using Hemokinesis to control the lifeless bloody copy of myself. An Evelyn made of blood holds the real one in her arms, giving me the control to create a Soulblade long enough to pierce the skies themselves.

My Soulshard Rifle is empty, and nobody has died close enough to me for me to refill it, so I scrape away at the Titan’s flesh with a quarter-mile-long blade. The skill is usually weightless in my hands, but now, every movement I make with it is a physical struggle. It’s only thanks to my vastly increased Magic (Meta) that I’m even able to stretch the blade that far, and it takes every ounce of my incredible power to fuel it.

Just like before, the Titan’s innate defenses protect it, and the contact I make is but a mere scratch. It’s like trying to force a mundane dagger through six inches of steel.

But I make the scratch, and that’s the important part. As I send my Smite upwards, I pair it with an Ethereal Tempest to quadruple its effectiveness alongside Wraithfire, allowing the latter skill to consume the entirety of the blade as fuel. The air burns in its wake.

Every move I make was impossible yesterday. Every skill I use flows like water, easy as breathing.

The special skill isn’t the only thing burning to escape from the space beyond space that I draw my power from. I can feel another presence there. Not a living one—this isn’t a repeat of the passenger I ate.

I think my new class is calling to me, but I can’t access it. Not now.

My skills collide with a scale in a vibrant explosion of color, rivaling the mesmerizing rainbow shimmer. Though my effort doesn’t eliminate the scale, the Wraithfire takes hold over the Titan, and it begins to dim.

A second wave of attacks rise, and for the briefest moment, I allow myself to entertain the idea that maybe, just maybe, we can win on our own. Sersui is still half a hundred miles away.

One point five seconds after I have the thought, the Titan decides to fight back.

 

The Wastelands, moments earlier

Travel to and from fragments is complicated, especially when said travel is meant to bring one halfway across a continent.

Honestly, Rin is quite impressed with herself for managing to hit the Whitestar Wastelands at all. Sure, it takes her a few judicious uses of her Timeslip to convince the fabric of reality that she’s at the site of the Titan event, but landing only fifteen miles off is rather impressive when she’s functionally throwing darts while blindfolded in a hurricane.

[Stay focused, Rin.]

“I’m focused,” Rin says, wincing as she fully materializes. “Are there other UCC ops in the area?”

The newborn Titan’s spiritual shroud presses down on all of them. It takes active effort to breathe. Rin is glad she decided to fully uncloak. If she were any weaker, it’s quite possible her lungs would have simply been crushed by the Titan’s existence.

[Nine operators are already here.]

“Get me in touch with them,” Rin says. “If you can.”

She frowns, searching the area with her senses. Tragically, it has always been Sy who’d been her eyes and ears. To her, trying to locate even her fellow operators is like trying to identify where the scent of pig shit was coming from in a horse stable that hasn’t been cleaned in years. The Titan’s presence overwhelms all else.

[Working on it.] Even in his limited form, trapped within his phylactery, Sy possesses a portion of his previous powers.

Rin looks up to the still-emergent Titan, shielding her eyes from the sun. It’s one of the smallest ones she’d ever seen, and it’s just… sitting there. The fact that she hasn’t heard about any casualties yet means that it’s truly a newborn. Sersui is supposed to be within a hundred miles of her, and she can feel its presence even from here. If that was Sersui and not this new, still-undesignated Titan, she doubted she’d be alive and well right now. In the absolute best-case scenario, she’d be fleeing.

Far above her, a faint figure explodes with magical power, so much so that Rin can detect it even against the overpowering backdrop of the Titan. Black fire travels up a golden blade the length of twenty train cars laid end-to-end, followed by a blindingly bright flash of pure divine magic.

Rin has seen this powerset before. She has an instant to decide whether to laugh, cry, or scream in rage, ultimately choosing none. Sy interrupts her before she can finish processing.

[I’ve linked up with the other operators. There’s going to be a coordinated wave of attacks in about seven seconds. Be ready.]

She tosses aside the painful thoughts, well aware of the consequences that came to her for dwelling on them too much last time, and Rin prepares her skill.

Unlike Sy, who primarily prioritized one class, both of Rin’s classes are strong. She was level 46 in her secondary class before this started, but the sheer versatility it’s had alongside the series of trials she’s been through has allowed her to push it further. Now, her second class stands on the edge of 100, while her first is almost ready to push her to Category 2.

It’s not quite enough for a domain, but she doesn’t need that. Trying to utilize a domain against a Titan is foolishness, anyway—its will always outmatches any mortal’s. The important part for her is that she has a bevy of special skills to choose from.

Given that the Titan appears to have emerged from a fracture in reality, Reality Break will not work. Similarly, Annihilate is unlikely to affect a creature inured to the void, especially one this big.

Rin hasn’t been at the forefront of a Titan fight before. Every time she’s been present for one before this, it has been miles away from the action, fighting offshoots and saving those that can be saved. As such, she’s not entirely sure what she’s supposed to do here.

She’s still trying to sort through her special skills when Sy tells her that the others have already fired theirs. Rin swears, hastily scrambling for something better—and then she feels the air distort.

“Shit,” she manages, and then time stops.

Special skill: Contingency. Condition: loss of control over local time context window.

Effect: activate Diamond-tier Timewalker skill Time Anchor.

Rin gasps, forcibly dragged from one context window to another. To her, the entire world is frozen. Clouds of dust stop mid-swirl, each individual grain of sand and particulate of smoke clear to her eyes. In the sky, a dozen different skills from operators she’s never met course towards the lightly-wounded Titan.

It truly must be weak, she muses, for a mere dozen operators, none of them above Category 2, to hurt it.

That’s when she realizes that the Titan is still moving.

Time Anchor accelerates her perception of time and ability to act by chaining it to someone else’s skill.

In this case, that “someone else” appears to be a Titan.

“Fuck me,” Rin whispers.

The Titan is slower than you, she tells herself, observing the lumbering beast far above. In this patch of frozen time, you can win.

An image courses through her mind, one of her obliterated entirely, killed without anyone else even knowing she was there. The end of her and the end of Sy, just like that. Part of the ten percent of operators every year that embark on a mission and never return.

“If I act, I might die,” she says out loud. “If I don’t, everyone will.”

She shakes the fear out of her bones and gets moving.

 

The Wastelands, now

For a fleeting instant, incredible power fills the air, sending palpable dread coursing through my veins.

I blink, and I am somewhere else before I can react. Blood Sense tells me that there are over two dozen individuals alongside me, all gathered within a hundred foot radius. Zil is here. Ashley too. Adrian and Sierra, thank the gods.

The Titan is not where it was. I don’t need particularly refined senses to detect its impact on the world. I look in its direction.

And I find that it has completely crushed the amalgam of fragments shorn into reality. Even as I watch, it rolls over them, obliterating every last building in its trace.

Disconcertingly, I am now a mile away from it.

“You had all,” a familiar feminine voice gasps, “better make this worth it.”

I turn to look at Rin.

She looks different, though much of that is likely because she is bleeding from every orifice of her body. From what I can sense, it’s internal. I can’t tell if it’s lethal.

I consider Hemorrhaging her, but I can detect the aftermath of a truly massive amount of magic on her body. That, combined with the wording…

Rin glares at me for five full seconds before looking away. “I’m tapped out for the next few minutes. It took everything I have to keep you all alive.”

She saved me? She saved me?

“Given the information I have gathered, I am formally designating this Titan as PT-31: Inome, the Proto-Titan of Time.”

Off in the distance, the Titan roars, and its scales shimmer ever brighter.

Sersui is twenty-seven miles away.