MAGUS INFINITE

The demon stopped defending against my threads, and it offered itself to it. My threads bit into its flesh, and apart from screaming in pain, it was letting it happen, as thousands of lines cut into its body.

Unlike before, the Thul did not seal its wounds, but allowed it to expand, and with a ripping sound that would have made me wretch before I entered the loop, the demon split its body apart, as if it was unzipping a meat suit, its hide peeling back in wet petals, and I had expected to see organs inside its body, but all I saw was a second mouth, the size of a door, ringed with the reorganized flesh of its own chest turned to teeth.

My eyes widened in shock as the demon lunged towards me; it had turned its own body into a trap, becoming nothing but a gigantic mouth that would crush me to paste, no matter the defenses that I had in place.

The mouth closed down with a resounding crack that echoed for miles, but I was no longer there. I did not dodge back; I dodged in. The demon had split itself open, but a lot of my threads were embedded in its flesh, so I had yanked myself along my own taut Loom, under the closing mouth before it shut.

With the blessing of the Moon Fox, my body drifted across the body of the demon like a feather until I was at its back, and I pushed Titan’s Marrow into my arm, and my hand and forearm swelled to something that could match the durability of this demon, before I drove it, wreathed in every scrap of Tribunal and Edict I had left, into the exposed wing from behind.

The actions of the demon and my strength made it possible to grip the wing from the joint inside its body, and I tore.

The wing came off, and because my hand was wrapped around the muscles and bones that held the wings to the demon’s body, I took a part of its spine with it and threw it far behind me.

I did not know that something could shriek so loudly, and the pain from having a sizable chunk of its body ripped away froze the demon in place for the moment, and I did not waste the opportunity.

I rose in the air, carried by tendrils of blue lightning, and I began to summon several Tribunal Spears while layering inscription on the expanding spell in front of me when the Thul took another transformation.

∞

The Thul stopped trying to close the ten thousand wounds I’d opened, and instead it pulled them inward; its flesh was reversing, dragging the shredded meat of its own body back into itself, cannibalizing the parts my threads had ruined and using them as raw material, feeding its own torn flesh into the intact core to rebuild itself to become denser and even more twisted.

My spear of lightning descended like a tribulation from the heavens, slamming into the transforming demon, and I had to blink for a moment to shield my eyes from the brightness of the impact.

The demon howled, but it emerged from the zone of destruction, much smaller than before, large patches of its flesh glowing with heat as if it was metal placed inside a furnace, but it was not dead.

”Fallen Achon, you shall pay for this pain a thousand-fold.”

∞

With speed that defied meaning, and I meant that, because even though the Thul had shrunken to half its size, it was still moving faster than anything of that size should ever move.

I vanished in a spark of lightning, appearing hundreds of meters away, only to be folded nearly in half as the demon caught me in the chest with newly grown claws.

Somehow it had moved faster than I could teleport, moving across multiple positions in the blink of an eye; clearly this transformation was made for speed.

I coughed blood as my body was sent sailing into the air, but I smashed into the demon, who had appeared behind me, and its jaws closed on my left shoulder, and it bit down, and I felt the flesh magic pour into the wound.

A groan of shock unconsciously emerged from me, causing me to spit out the air in my lungs as the will of the Thul began reaching into my body through its teeth, trying to do to me what it did to itself, to grab my flesh and remodel it, essentially unmaking me from the inside... and I do not think this transformation would be to my favor.

I had endured various shades of pain in the loop, and this pain that I was feeling was familiar, as it was among the first great pains I had ever felt, and that was when the Narghul Sorcerer poured his corruption into my body.

The remodeling of my own flesh being pulled at by a will that was not mine, my shoulder trying to become something the Thul wanted it to be, muscle and bone straining toward a shape a demon was dreaming for it, and the pain of your own body being authored by something else is a pain I have no ranking for... the only thing that kept my sanity was the fact that this was familiar, and I had to fight through the pain.

Although this was worse in a smaller way than that corruption, because it was intimate, the Thul was inside my arm, rewriting me, and for one white instant I felt my own shoulder forget its shape.

Maybe I began to scream; truthfully, I could no longer tell.

∞

It was a good thing that at this point I was used to pain, and screaming was just my way to release some of the mental stress on my consciousness while my mind searched for a way to escape this predicament.

I was about to tear myself away from the demon, even if it meant losing the entire right side of my body, when the answer to the problem slotted itself into my consciousness... Titan’s Marrow.

Why, you ask me? Well, Titan’s Marrow is the one thing I have that authors flesh too.

The Thul’s will was in my shoulder, trying to remake it, so I met it there, Marrow against flesh-magic, my own Celestial-born power to shape my flesh against the corruption of the demon, and the air between us hummed with power and lightning as a new war was fought inside my flesh.

The Thul tried to make my shoulder into a cage, and I made it back into a shoulder. It pushed; I pushed; and for a few seconds the flesh of my arm was a battlefield between two wills that both spoke the language of flesh, and it hurt in a way I will not and could not describe.

The laughter of the Thul pressed against me stirred the madness in my bones, and I reached up with my left hand and grabbed one of its massive teeth that was buried inside my shoulder, and with the lesson from how it wielded its magic, I poured Titan’s Marrow back down the same channel, up its own teeth, into its flesh, and I did to it what it was doing to me... I authored its flesh.