Blood Shaper-Chapter 52Book 6:

The otherworldly greatsword burst into nauseating green flamed as the avatar lashed out at Kay, but the eldritch blaze produced no heat. Kay parried the swing with his own sword and delivered a powerful left hook to the avatar’s jaw. The monster’s eye, a baleful star of corruption, stayed locked on Kay even as it’s head was rocked to the side. The avatar grabbed Kay’s arm with an inhuman twist of it’s body and brought it’s blade back toward him, stopping it in the middle of it’s decent and completely changing it’s trajectory. The flaming blade punched into Kay’s side and was ripped out, unleashing a spurt of blood that dribbled down Kay’s side.

The wound didn’t hamper him at all though, and he immediately struck back with slashes and thrusts of his own. His blade pierced through the avatar’s body and tore holes in it’s skin that depicted a corrupted starscape. As he withdrew his blade each time to add another wound to the monster’s body the corrupted green fire flared up within the injuries, creating new burning pinpricks of light that perverted the very nature of stars and healed the avatar.

The two began a frenzied exchange of attacks that seemed to have no lasting effects on each other. Weapons made of solid blood only spawned more and more green false-stars and the blood ripped from Kay’s body by the brutal blade of that avatar only sealed the cuts and punctures it left. Both of the two opponents regenerated after every blow, so neither bothered to dodge. From the outside the battle would have looked like the exchange of two berserkers that didn’t care if they died as long as they took their enemy with them.

The hovering around them, serving as the boundaries of an arena miles wide, surged inward under Kay’s command. It became more copies of Kay and his strongest allies, replacing the simulacra that had been destroyed by the faux black hole, that threw themselves at the avatar in a massed attack. Four arms emerged from the humanoid figure’s back that grabbed at the air around it and tore. More of the putrid green flame poured from the openings and stared defending the avatar as it continued to battle Kay.

There were no minions of constructs this time, the fire itself fought back against an army of simulacra. It took on the shapes of limbs and weapons but it didn’t transmute itself into twisted facsimiles of flesh or metal. Stabilizing blood met eldritch power and instead of the normal effects, the blood melting away the eldritch or the eldritch making the blood into something entirely different, the two powers annihilated each other like anti-matter meeting matter, without the explosions. Where they clashed both sides simply ceased to be.

“You. Struggle. Pointlessly!” The avatar screamed as it drove it’s blade through Kay’s chest and pummeled at his chest with it’s fists, timed with each word.. “My font of power is unending, while yours is limited by physical laws!”

“Is it?” Kay slammed the side of the blade, forcing it out of his body by making it slash through him. The gaping wound quickly filled in and sealed over as Kay sliced down and severed the avatar’s wrists. He threw the sword to the side and let it drop as he went back on the offensive. “Infinity is big! I find it hard to believe the real Hungering Void has endless power, let alone you. You aren’t even bothering to turn your power truly physical at this point.” Kay’s helmet opened to show the avatar his smirking face. “Scared?”

The crown floating around the being’s head erupted with fire as it shrieked with rage. A force slammed into Kay’s chest, driving him back through the air until he managed to halt himself a few hundred feet away. The falling greatsword stopped falling in midair and the severed hands still holding onto it dissolved into the same energy erupting from the crown. The sword rocketed back to the avatar where two new, translucent and green hands grabbed it. “What is this gaffe!?” The avatar slashed it’s sword to the side and held it there. It’s other arm rose as it pointed at Kay and it tilted it’s head to the side, the one ominous eye still staring directly at Kay. “Why do you struggle with suck futility? Why are you acting like the superhero in a comic book, bantering with the villain as you play for time or dissect their evil scheme? There is nothing you can do here to win!”

Hungering Void slammed a foot behind it into the air and kicked off, launching itself back at Kay. It continued to yell as it resumed the fight. “You are acting as if this is some trivial showdown you will win through the power of friendship in the end, but you will fail! You will die! This universe and all others will be consumed! There is nothing that can stop my power!”

Kay ducked beneath a telegraphed swing and rebutted with one of his own, cutting the avatar’s head in half from the top and splitting it’s eye in two for the short moment before it healed itself. “I’m bantering with you because it’s working! Generally, talking while you fight someone is a waste of time and a distraction, but not if it’s a weapon!” He lost an arm to the edge of the burning blade but he just grew a new one, grabbed the severed one, and started bludgeoning his enemy with it. “You’re yelling, you’re screaming, you’re confused! How much of you is the offshoot of some cosmic power and how much is a copy of a dead man? A man that was so stubbornly set in his ways that he went insane when something outside his world view appeared before him?” The severed arm became a halberd that he droved through one of the avatar’s legs. He leaned forward and stared into it’s eye. “Can you even comprehend that you might lose here?”

The eye tore through reality, becoming a fire-edged portal into un-reality that was twice as wide as Hungering Void’s head. A beam of pure eldritch power erupted from that portal and erased Kay from existence. The blood armor covering him was eradicated, his skin became nothing, his muscles became the protean soup that could birth new life, his organs were made so that they never had been. A spear of noxious green miles long pierced the atmosphere and screamed off into space, blasting yet another hole in the clouds hovering over the battle.

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“I will not fall!” The avatar bellowed as the attack ended. “I am-“

Another halberd slammed into it’s leg while a sword pierced through the other and two punch daggers landed in either shoulder. “A nuisance!”

The eye raced around to the back of the avatar’s head where it beheld three Kay’s each one with a weapon driven into it’s body, having somehow slipped behind the twin openings that eldritch flame spilled from and the four arms controlling them. The avatar snarled and grabbed at all three and ripped them apart with it’s multiple arms. It’s body flowed like liquid to turn itself around without moving from where it was as it glared in impotent rage at the army of red figures that didn’t fade with Kay’s supposed death.

“What?” One of them called out, stepping forward to the front of the host. “You didn’t actually think that would kill me, did you? You cut off my head back there while we were wailing at each other, you aren’t getting rid of me that easily.”

A dozen balls of fire converged on and destroyed the figure, but another continued speaking, taking up the same position the other had died in without interruption. “Weak.”

“You are the nuisance!” Hungering Void bellowed. “You are an annoyance, a pest, a tiny fucking speck of a mortal! How dare you stand against me!?”

Kay scoffed and shook dozens of heads. “How dare I? That’s even more cliché than my taunts. But you can’t even see that, can you? You fucked up. Or the thing that made you did. I keep harping on it, but it keeps enraging you, so why stop? I bet there’s never been a time that an avatar like you showed up and didn’t dominate the world it was made for. This is the first time, isn’t it? I don’t know if you’ve never been to a universe and a world like this one, where people could fight at the level of power you’re on, or if me and mine managed to rush you enough that you fumbled the bag, but you’re mostly that dead Frenchman’s ego and arrogance aren’t you? All you have of the eldritch abomination that spawned you is desire and a limited battery to draw on.”

The swirling mass of energy still spilling form the rifts in space behind the avatar started moving and stitching themselves together. The avatar itself swung the five arms that weren’t holding it’s sword through the air and grabbed something that wasn’t there before. Five spectral outlines of a scepter merged into one as the five limbs melted into each other. When the process was done there was just one arm left with a fully realized scepter in it’s grasp with a large gem filled with the more of that eldritch fire. The gem itself was faceted in ways that didn’t make sense and blended into each other.

“Enough of this.” The avatar muttered, the sound still reaching Kay’s ears. “You will die here, I will recover what you took from me, and I shall rejoin my full self to devour everything.”

“You said that already, and I’m still not convinced. And I don’t hate to break it to you, but you aren’t getting that System fragment back.”

“Yes, I will.” The flows of energy behind it continued to weave together into a more and more complicated pattern, one that started moving into dimensions and in directions Kay couldn’t see. “You will give it to me!”

A spike of mental power erupted from the staff as the avatar brandished it at Kay in time with it’s words. The spike tried to lance into Kay’s mind, erasing his personality and leaving behind an empty shell that would only listen to the avatar’s commands. It failed. The System fragment had seen such an event coming and massively increased Kay’s defense against such attacks. The connections he had with his loved ones and those he chose to protect acted as a multi-layered shield that the psychic attack died on.

“Even if that had worked I couldn’t give it to you.” Kay taunted as the avatar shifted in surprise. “It sacrificed itself to give me the power to fight back against you. You’ll have to rip a brand new one off the System if you want to get that kind of access back.” He leaned forward mockingly. “I think that’ll be a bit more difficult than last time, won’t it? Since you gave away your hand and told the System it was possible.”

A cry of inarticulate rage burst form the being and it threw itself bodily at Kay once again. Hundreds of simulacra dogpiled onto it at once as it thrashed and struck it’s way through, trying to get to Kay. Dozens of wounds were opened up across it’s body that it ignored as it pushed through the bodies lashing into it and grabbed Kay’s head, crushing it. The body dropped like a puppet with it’s strings cut and melted into liquid blood.

“Can you learn?” Kay asked as he stepped out of the press of bodies still ripping into the being. “Are you bad at it and would eventually get it with enough time or will you keep trying that over and over no matter what?” He grabbed the avatar and threw it upward. He then transformed into sphere that sucked up dozens of the simulacra around it and hurled the blood into the avatar, firing it higher and higher into the sky. The atmosphere started to fall away behind them as Kay drove the avatar into low-Torotia orbit.

As they peaked somewhere above the curve of the gargantuan planet below them the being transformed it’s entire body into flame that exploded outward and freed it from the grasp of the stream of blood pushing it on. It reformed back into the pitch-black form speckled with false stars that almost blended in with the void around them as Kay reformed his own body from the mass of blood now floating in space. “What is the point of this? Do you think I will be weaker out here, or perhaps unable to fulfill my duty if I am not on the planet itself? Fool, I eat universes. Any spot in this reality is as good as any other to create the breach in the defenses that must happen before I feast.”

“No, I wasn’t thinking any of that.” Even without their being air to vibrate so that sound reached Hungering Void Kay knew the being would understand him. “I was thinking that you were going to get pissy soon and would start unleashing the really big attacks when I kept beating your ass, so I brought you down here to make sure that you didn’t hit anything I care about. I’m not interested in ending you then going back home to find a bunch of collateral damage. Now,” he gestured at the void around them. “I can’t stay out here forever. I’ve only got a few years worth of oxygen stored in all the blood I have with me, so let’s hurry this up, shall we?”