MAGUS INFINITE

The first Demon Titan reached me before the second egg hatched.

I had never seen anything move like it. The closest thing I had to compare it to was the stranger. It took a step and all fifty feet of armoured flesh crossed the distance between us, tearing through my web of lightning and my domain as if they were nothing, and its fist caught me across my whole body.

I got Harden across my forearms and took the blow on both of them, and I felt the bone in my left arm break in three places as I was thrown out of my own web, until I hit the ground a mile away and carved a trench in the earth.

Faint laughter bubbled up out of my chest, since I had been in the middle of a Stormstep before that fist landed. The laughter hid my anger at this endless rat race. I killed a demon and a bigger one showed up... when would it end?

I got up, and the Titan was already there.

It stood over me, its dozens of eyes all fixed on my face, and a mouth opened in that face, and it spoke with a voice like the chorus of a thousand screams.

”Broken Celestial. You hold a broken gate and fight a lost cause. The Celestials are no more. Why fight for the dead? We are here to relieve you of your burden.”

I did not answer. These damned demons always spoke without any meaningful context, since all of them believed I must know whatever the fuck was happening behind the scenes.

Technically, I just woke up in my tent an hour ago.

The Titan’s weight pressed against the space around my body, as if it were physically leaning on me. Reality was bending around it and the earth was shattering under it, and through that weight I could feel the Pale Matron pressing against my skin. As more of the Demon Titans reached me, their bodies tearing through reality as they came, the weight of her exploded, and I was caught between her will pushing through my soul to shatter the seals and her material presence pressing in on me from outside.

The Titan in front of me reached down, its hand large enough to swallow me whole.

Pushing against a weight that wanted to crush me into paste, I wrote a Script with my fingers, and Lightning Edict answered as a bolt of golden lightning shot from my fingertip, compressed to the width of a needle. It struck the Titan in the centre of the chest, and its Abyssal shield flared like a meteor falling to earth, casting a glow that spread for miles.

Through the light of the clash I could see that the shield around this Titan, warped by its own weight against space, had held against my spell.

The glow had not even faded when I manifested my Inscription Pen, poured a great deal of Anima into it, and wrote Sever in the space in front of me. The Script pierced the barrier over space and imprinted itself on the Titan’s chest, and it did nothing.

The line opened perhaps four inches into that hide and then closed. I felt the Law of Sharpness strain against something that was not refusing to be cut so much as refusing to be addressed.

My domain rippled around me, and a hundred spears of Heaven’s Verdict fell on it, and it shrugged off the whole working as if it were a mild breeze.

”You cannot hurt us,” it said. ”We are bound to the Pale Matron. Her power flows through us. As long as she lives, we cannot die... and she is eternal.”

I looked at the Titan, and then my gaze went past it, and I counted twenty-nine others of its kind. And in the distance I saw that the frozen tentacles of the Pale Matron were no longer nine. There were four of them.

And I understood. These were not merely demons. They were extensions of the Pale Matron herself.

Every Titan that hatched out of those eggs was a piece of her flesh. This was looking less like a battle and more like an execution.

∞

The second Titan reached me while I was still weighing the magnitude of what I was facing.

It came from my left, and I had no time to write another Script before its fist connected with my side. I felt ribs break, and my body went through the air again, and the ground shattered where I landed.

The third was waiting for me when I stopped. Its foot came down, and I rolled, and the place where I had been standing became a crater. I wrote Sever on the air, merging several of my Laws into the Script, and it flew at the leg, and the leg came apart at the knee.

The Titan went down on one knee, and it came back to its feet the next moment with a new one, the limb forming out of the stump in seconds, and then it was standing again, and its fist was coming at my head.

I blocked with my forearm, and the impact sent shockwaves across the plain. I held, and I felt the bones creak.

”You cannot win,” the Titan said. ”We are eternal. We are the Pale Matron.”

I grinned at it through bloody teeth that were slowly turning from silver to red. ”Good to know.”

I let that blow launch me, and while I was in the air I closed my right hand around the Death Stone I had just manifested, and I howled at the sky as my body exploded with lightning and I began to expand.

Adamantium Titan was my first Sovereign-tier skill. It had grown beyond anything I ever imagined, fed by the deaths of gods and demons and the weight of worlds. At 167, it was a statement about what I was. A titan wearing the shape of a man.

I grew.

Fifty feet. A hundred. Two hundred. Three hundred. I matched the Demon Titans, and then I passed them. My Adamantium flesh, already dense beyond reason, became denser still as the Law of Flesh poured mass into every cell. My channels, ten thousand and eight of them, widened until they could have swallowed rivers. My heart, the core of Cor Telluris, beat with the rhythm of a drum the size of a mountain.

The Titans paused. For a moment all thirty of them stopped moving, their dozens of eyes fixed on my expanding form.

I kept growing until I neared four hundred feet, and then it stopped, and I looked down at the puny creatures that called themselves Titans. I towered over them like a god over mortals. My blue-white lightning lit the sky for miles, and my shadow covered the plain where the expedition camp had once been.

The Death Stone was cold in my hand, and I could feel it feeding on the death around me, on the millions of demons I had killed, and it was growing heavier, and for a moment I thought I heard the faint laughter of Death.

I looked down at the thirty Titans, and I smiled. ”You are not the only titans here,” I said.

My voice was thunder, and my words were law. I raised the hand that held the Death Stone to the sky, and the heavens answered me with bolts that could shatter a continent, and all of them poured into my waiting hand.