Unbound-Chapter Nine Hundred And Sixty Seven – 967

Gold and crimson swarmed the enormous skeleton that Avet embodied, cladding its bones like jagged armor as it walked across the landscape. Each footfall sundered the earth. Each swing of the god's arms set hurricane winds screaming through the charred clouds. The black fire swarmed, falling from the sky like meteors, growing brighter by the second. But Avet himself gleamed with power. He slashed his hands, blasting through the fire, redirecting all of it away from the Unbound—into the world itself. Mountains vanished and charcoal forests were consumed in an instant, leaving nothing but empty roots and crumbling striated stone.

Avet stumbled, but he carried on, his voice speaking to them as if he still stood beside them. The Continent Is Ours. My Brethren Know This, But Refuse To Acknowledge What Happens If It Falls. We Are Tied Together.

"Tied together how?" Gabby asked. "The blue lines?"

Yes. They Bind Us To The Same Source.

"The System?" Evie said.

"Grand Harmony," Elowen suggested.

Avet laughed as black fire ate away at his metal cladding. You Have So Much To Learn. And So Little Time.

A comet tore from the heavens, big enough to swallow the sky, and the god of chaos and fire dropped them. Their platform of stone floated, Gabby nearly shook off its edge, as Avet charged. He met the comet’s approach, swelling until he was the horizon. A thousand arms sprouted from his wide back, clad in crimson and gold, each tipped with immense claws that reached out, fingers spread.

He grappled with the dark flame. They fell back, all of the Unbound, let alone Evie and Vess. They were pressed to their rocky platform, overwhelmed with a sheer pressure against their Aspects.

Gabby’s vision blurred, the horizon turning to streaks of shadow and light. Sound twisted, not Dissonance, but an atonal whine that pitched upward into physical pain. Her teeth vibrated, nearly shattering and forcing her to clench her jaw so hard it felt like it was going to dislocate. She couldn't breathe—none of them could.

A flare of power sent dark fire sweeping the distance, and all of them gasped. Their rocky platform dropped, smashing into the ground. They were sent sprawling.

Gabby tumbled free, landing amid the shards of their platform and a wild forest of broken banners and shattered spears. She climbed to her feet and her foot crushed bone. A skull? She backed away. Dear god.

Fire burned in the sky, gods grappled with calamities, but here they were surrounded by fallen armies. Gabby held up the torn shreds of a purple cloak. Legionnaires were everywhere, as were banners denoting the Dwarven Clans, the mage Towers of Levantier, and thousands upon thousands of others she couldn't name. It was a charnel house, a field of death.

"This is…” Vess heaved for breath. “All of the world has fallen.”

Pieces of the comet broke off, splitting around Avet's grasp into screaming chunks. They crashed into the earth around them, hundreds that fountained the ashen earth into the air in a spray of dark flame and speckled starlight. Enormous glitching beasts crawled from the craters, each a dozen times larger than Gabby's eleven-foot bulk. They screamed, and their voices were a thousand sounds inexpertly mingled together. A sheer cacophony of the damned.

YIn growled, low in his throat. “The past brought to the present. Ruination.”

"Heads up." Kevin lifted his sickle. "Here they come."

The monsters rushed forward, unstable creatures, as the Territory around them broke apart. They flickered and shone, spinning internally as breezes tore their flesh apart before they reformed, every step consuming the earth. It boiled behind them, a trail of flameless heat that bent the world. They plowed a furrow in the earth. And with every step, the stars within their flesh burned brighter.

“Galebound Glory!”

Spears shot from Vess and into the horde, bursting upon contact. There were only thirty, but Gabby could feel the strength in the attack, and it was nothing like Vess had before. Implosions rocked the monstrosities, ripping their unstable flesh inward and pulping their bones.

“Skyflare!” A burst of incandescent light followed her Drake’s pronouncement. It banished the shadows, searing into the distance and clearing the field of a dozen or more enemies.

Yet neither attack diminished their numbers. All of them reformed, starlight dragged into crawling shadow that spread from the earth itself. An indistinct formlessness at their center swirled, congealing new flesh without losing a single step in their charge.

“Hit them harder!” Evie shouted. “Bindings of the White Waste!”

Ice cold chains erupted all around them, a field of shackles sinking into limbs and bellies before freezing them in place.

“Lay your attacks on them from a distance!” Gabby warned. “They’re too dangerous to fight up close!”

“Not for me!” Evie grasped at her chain and let loose a laugh. “Blood and ashes, it's actually shown up this time.”

"What are you talking about?"

"A gift from your brother."

Instead of the usual chains she had wrapped around her midsection, the woman pulled free a rod made entirely of bone-white stone. Nine smaller chains extended from the end, each capped with crescents studded with sharpened thorns. Evie surged forward, her steps shaking the ground, and her flail moving like a feather in her hands. With a mighty swing of the flail, her body launched forward as if she’d been shot out of a cannon. She crashed, weapon first, into the leading monstrosity.

The weapon tore right through it.

“That’s not all!” She twisted her grip and the nine chains slithered outward, twisting around the creature’s many limbs before sinking deep into its flickering flesh. She let go of the weapon.

The monster fell, its movement stymied and plowed face first into the ground as if sat on by a giant. Its head lifted up, solidifying into a skull wrapped with fangs that roared at Evie's face, only to have Yintarion's jaws snap over its neck and rip it asunder.

"Good lizard.”

"Insolent child!"

“Viridescent Labyrinth!” Kevin flung his hands wide and the dead earth sprouted. Trees lifted around them into a vibrant forest, and Gabby felt a surge of energy across her Aspects. Fatigue vanished, her wounds closing up, and the Kobold stood stock still at the center, green gold mana pouring off of him in waves. Sunlight glimmered from an unknown source, filtering through emerald leaves to make dappled shadows across her face.

Yet the trees at the edges degraded and died, a rot passing through them at speed, spreading from the roots.

"More, Kevin," Shadow cried, "we need more!”

“I'm trying!"

Power flowed, soaking into the crumbling topsoil and filling it with a deep, vibrant hue. New sprouts erupted from its bolstered depths, thickening in seconds into ancient boles ten feet across. Vines hung low, flush with vitality and sharpened with wicked thorns.

Kevin lifted his short arms and lashed his tail. “Brace for impact!”

The creatures smashed into the rim of it, their starlit flesh burning through the trees before they could rot, but the vines caught them. Thorns tugged and tore, leaking smoky ichor into the sky as the greenery was unmade. It sank into them, thickening the abominations’ limbs and somehow stabilizing their forms.

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“Hallow Rise! Entropic Paradigm!”

Necromantic light surged into the corpses that the trees hadn’t consumed, followed swiftly by shells of thick chitin. Dwarven Ironclads, Tower mages, and warriors of all stripes groaned as Beef lifted them up in a wave of power. Hundreds of Risen climbed to their feet, clad in chitinous bulk and eyes burning with the keen intelligence of Hallow.

Beef thrust his hand forward. “Kill ‘em all.”

A silent horde of hulking abominations met the unstable creatures. Dozens were instantly snuffed out by a single swipe of their starlit claws, and more were crushed to the ground as the monsters ran roughshod over their corpses. All of them were absorbed.

“There’s more where that came from!” Beef swung both arms wide. “Hallow Rise! Entropic Paradigm!”

Hundreds more clawed up from the earth, lifted by the endless sea of entropic energy that surrounded them. Death was everywhere, Gabby could all but feel it, and Beef—he put it to good use.

An army of Risen pressed back the beasts, overwhelming their strange might by sheer, undying numbers. In their wake, Kevin regrew their defenses.

“Woo! I just gained six levels on my Skill!” Kevin stomped his feet, claws digging in. “Now I can do this!”

The trees thickened, blossoms sprouting from the thorny vines. They disgorged bolts of virulent green, a torrent of acidic spikes that peeled back starlit skin and exposed threaded, burning muscle.

Archie capitalized on it. He slid among them, a ghostly assassin that even the unstable monsters were unable to defend against. He phased through their attacks, dodged their erratic movements, and dragged several of them deeper into the earth. Those beasts floundered, quickly soaking up the ashen ground into their bodies, but not before they were trampled by the horde behind them, or stabbed to death by a Delven with a whirling dagger.

"Force them to absorb everything you can," Gabby shouted. "It slows them down, and makes them killable!"

“An excellent idea,” Elowen said, floating up through the trees. She passed over Gabby and her hooves and feet were lit up with purple-gold light that crystalized into an almost snowy trail. “Chaos Departs.”

All around their forest defense, the earth exploded. Huge chunks of rock and soil lifted into the air, blown back by Elowen’s power to form a massive berm. Ten feet tall and twice as thick, it foiled the lead creatures’ movements as they were forced forward by the pressure of their own horde. They plowed through it all, absorbing stone and dirt by the ton—yet where they ran their starlit skin steadied from its eternal glitching. The Risen met them again, and this time their weapons tore bleeding gashes in their very mortal hides.

“Dragon! Join with me!” Ondine flew up, ascending past the treeline to join Yintarion where he swam the air currents. “Stormwall!”

A hurricane of stormwinds rose up around their forest, just beyond the berms, and it tore the smaller unstable monstrosities right off of their feet. They hurtled sideways, caught in the terrible currents, as lightning lashed through the nimbus of clouds that cloaked the hurricane. The biggest of the threats, however, were unmoved.

“Yes! Tear them apart!” Yintarion roared. “Umbral Cascade!”

A wash of darkness poured from the Dawn Drake’s outstretched paw. It fell into the hurricane like ink into water, filling its roaring circumference in liquid night. Gabby couldn’t see what occurred there any longer, but the outraged cries of monsters more than halved in volume, as if the darkness were pulling something vital from them.

“Blinded and inflicted with Vitality Drain,” Vess said, her own wings flapping to keep her airborn. “Fitting for such beasts. Let us end this, then. Galebound Glory!”

Vess’ Spears launched once more, flowing into the hurricane in a stream that she did not let up. As each one imploded, pulling the abominations inside out, she let fly another, until the dark ring of their defenses gleamed with half-seen bursts of muffled starlight. Shadow followed suit, amplifying his arrows and unleashing them into the storm. They multiplied, weaker than Vess’ attack but greater in number by an order of magnitude. Monsters fell, even those too big to be lifted by the storm, their ichor staining the black winds.

Gabby grinned. They were doing it.

The earth shook. She leaped out of the way of a falling tree, its center ripped through with rot, and looked to the west. There, a massive beast with impossible anatomy strode through the tempest. Its footfalls shook the earth, its thick carapace deflected the worst of Spears and arrows, the rest breaking against them. Chunks ripped from them, but they didn’t stop, and soon were joined by several dozen others, all of them topping the storm by twenty or more feet. Even looking at them hurt Gabby’s eyes, like pieces of the eldritch gods cast down.

“Aurum Armory!” Golden light hardened around her armor, forming a suit that gleamed with the dawn of a new day. Gabby charged, leaping over another tree as it toppled before the creatures’ approach, her Brightblade shifting in her grip into a long-hafted halberd. “You’re not welcome here!”

She crashed into them, blade first, slicing through elephantine legs with a sizzling crunch. The first beast fell back, shell cracked and flesh burning, only to be replaced by another. Gabby slashed into them as well, leaving sizzling arcs across their chest, hands, and faces. Her halberd became an axe to lop off legs and arms, before she shifted it into a glittering hammer that Gabby turned on weakened joints. Knees burst, snapped backward, forcing the mighty abominations to topple…where her greatsword carved into their throats and jaws.

Brightblade is level 145!

More followed the heels of the first few, but she caught them with a heavy, spiked ball of golden light. It swung out on a chain that morphed from the hilt of her sword, and Gabby gave it a hefty whirl above her head before swinging hard into their path. The spiked ball tore through two of the things before it wrapped around a distant neck.

She transformed it back into a sword. The stiffening links sliced through bone and starlit flesh with ease.

Skills dropped on them soon after, arrows from Shadow and those acidic bolts from Kevin’s flowers. Beef’s Risen tackled other abominations, slicing at their heels like murderous ants, while Archie himself flitted among their number with his whirling blades. At least, until he was blindsided by a claw. It slammed the Delven to the ground, bouncing him off of it before he at the wherewithal to phase through a copse of trees. The beast roared, its snout peeled back to expose its entire skull, and charged, dropping onto all six of its heavy legs.

Gabby lopped off its head.

“Thanks for that,” Archie managed through a groan. “Watch out!”

He hurled his dagger and it spun outward in a glittering arc, slicing through the half dozen eyes of a slathering monstrosity. Gabby bashed through its blind skull with a Brightblade mace.

"Cool weapon," she said.

"Thanks, I stole it from the Path."

Gabby blinked. "You can do that?"

"I guess so." He threw it again, and Gabby realized that the knife never left his hand. Instead, an echo of its form tore through the enemies. It passed through them almost as smoothly as Archie himself, but where it touched flesh, it split it clean. Thrust after thrust sent two copies outward in a dizzying pattern of attack.

Huh.

Monsters crowded closer, and Gabby was forced to protect the diminutive man. His blades chopped through claws that sought out her throat, while her Brightblade and shields protecting him from attacks he couldn't avoid. She swung until her arms burned and her throat ached from shouting, until her armor sizzled with ichor and the battlefield around them went still.

The hurricane stopped.

"So this is the Ruin?” Shadow shouted over the dying winds. “They aren’t so tough.”

“No,” Vess said, flying down from above. “Look.”

The comet that Avet still struggled with was there, filling up the entirety of the west. Above it, however, glowing with its own impossible power, was a mote of pure horror. Clouds boiled around it like a halo and set the very air on fire as it descended like the sun itself. Gabby realized it wasn’t black at all, but a violet so dark that it soaked up all of the light.

It punched into the upper atmosphere, and all of them cried out. Gabby was slammed to the earth, her Aspects crushed like an ant beneath a boot. Everyone else fell too, and the trees shattered around her with gunshot cracks. Yin tried to fly up but he fared no better than the rest. Vess slid down her glaive, its arcanite haft bending beneath the impossible weight of the Ruin's approach. Someone sobbed something, but her ears were ringing. Gabby could barely see. She was being crushed. She—

Pressure faded.

Disbelieving, Gabby looked up, her breath still caught in her chest. A figure of shadow and stars strode the horizon, passing into the west like a dozen moons stitched together, big enough to eclipse the dark violet sun. It was shaped vaguely like a man, but like the gods it bore appendages she couldn't keep track of—yet the gods had all fallen. Even Avet no longer stood.

Who—?

Then she saw them: Wings and claws, scales burnished by a thousand battles, and a crown of gold.

Gabby vomited. It's too much. He is–he can’t!

The figure reached up and seized the sky itself. Avet was gone, but it didn't matter, because the comet vanished—it turned to light and smoke that poured into the figure before the sky bent under its Will. It…twisted, and the stars rained down from the heavens, pulled toward that grasp.

Something screamed words that made Gabby’s ears bleed.

The Ruin flared, its dark violet igniting into comets of might, each bolt bigger than cities—yet it didn’t matter. All of it swirled, pulled inward toward the figure’s grasp. Into him.

No!

Wing and claw ignited with purple flame, pieces of itself unmaking, ripping apart before joining back together. Consumed.

That figure turned back to them, its once blue eyes now a blazing darkness. And Gabby saw him. Her brother's face. Sat beneath those eyes, and above a vast, unending maw.

The Ruin Is Gone, Avet whispered. All Hail The Ruin.

The Beast turned on the world, and everything burned.