Chapter 731 - Fleeting

Even as Zeke struggled to put himself back together, he marveled at the scene playing out before him.  Seeing someone like Oberon, who was no bigger than a child, standing tall against a planet-sized tree goddess was a sight to behold.  To Zeke, who could see the breadth of their divine energy, the contrast was even more striking. 

Yet, as incongruous as it was, Oberon didn’t waver before such seemingly overwhelming odds.  He raised his staff, casually unleashing a truly dazzling tapestry of power that wrapped around Aja’s trunk.  She screamed as continent-sized chunks of bark sloughed away, rotten and crumbling. 

Meanwhile, she didn’t let that attack go unnoticed.  Her branches trembled, and her leaves rustled as an army of insects descended from within her canopy.  In the context of Aja’s immense size, they almost looked normally scaled.  However, as the buzzing filled the air – cutting through space like there was an atmosphere to carry the sound – Zeke knew they were far larger than normal.

Each one was the size of an aircraft carrier, and they swept in, ready to rip Oberon apart.  The insects looked like a cross between locusts and massive, flying beetles, with crushing mandibles and spear-like legs. 

So when Oberon waved his staff, enveloping them in a dense net of divine energy, Zeke was more than a little surprised.  They halted, hanging suspended by nothing before they simply fell apart. 

Hundreds of thousands of insect parts rained upon the planet below. 

Finally, Zeke forced out the foreign substance and reformed his body.  At the same time, Oberon intoned, “Your minions can do nothing to me, Aja’tarisa.  Do not sentence them to death unnecessarily.  Yield, and the killing can cease.”

“I will never surrender to you!” she shouted in a voice that echoed throughout the solar system.  “You are weak.  Inconsequential.  You are nothing!”

Zeke had not expected her to become so unhinged.  Certainly, he had killed tens of millions of her worshippers.  Perhaps even hundreds of millions.  However, she wasn’t angry about that.  Rather, she seemed to hold a personal enmity toward Oberon, who seemed very familiar with her.

Just as Zeke was about to throw his own skills into the fight, he felt a twitch in the nearby threads.  He threw himself sideways, and just in time to avoid a sharp and jagged branch of obsidian that would have destroyed him, had he remained in place.

A second later, another came at him.  He tried to block it, but it was stronger than him.  Thankfully, he managed to yank on a thread and pull himself backward, keeping it from impaling him. 

He was not so lucky when it came to the next ten.

“This is what everyone’s so worked over?” came a bored voice.  Zeke knew he should recognize it, though he wasn’t certain where he might have heard it. 

“Finish him, brother!” shouted Aja as she and Oberon continued their battle.  Divine energy billowed from their direction, the threads going wild as they tried to murder one another. 

That’s when he caught sight of another tree branch coming at him.  This time, it happened in what felt like slow motion.  Instead, it was Zeke’s perception that had sped up.  He saw the portal open and the branch shoot out.  But he saw past that and to the threads that comprised it.

So, he plucked one, severing it with a thought.

The portal winked out of existence, and the branch shattered, sending obsidian shards floating into space.  But even with the sound of broken glass filling the air, Zeke only had ears for a masculine scream. 

Suddenly, Zeke remembered where he’d heard it.

Oda.

The demon tree who was Aja’s brother.  All intelligence suggested that the two were estranged, but it was obvious that their sibling bond had brought him running.  In truth, Zeke understood it.  If his own brother – gone though he was – had been in trouble, Zeke would have been the first standing in front of him. 

He could respect that.

The scream faded, but the echoes remained.  Another branch came rocketing toward Zeke, but before it could reach him, he severed the threads controlling the portal.  It fell, just as the one before.

Soon enough, space was full of thrusting branches.  Zeke’s mind spun, and he played the threads like an instrument.  With every passing second, he understood them m ore and more until, at last, there were no more.  Oda finally appeared before him, looming just as large as his sister.

However, where her branches were festooned with verdant leaves that played host to a multitude of animals, Oda’s were entirely bare.  Black and made of pure onyx, he looked the part of a demonic tree.  Red veins flowed up his trunk, giving his continent-sized face definition. 

His roots were stunted, though.  And many of his branches had been cleanly severed, giving his crown a haphazard look that Zeke found incredibly satisfying to behold.  Or maybe he was just vindictive.  After all, the tree had spent the last few minutes trying to spear him.  A little vindictiveness was warranted.

“You see the threads,” Oda stated.

“Of course.  Don’t you?” Zeke asked innocently.  Voromir was gone.  He’d dropped it long ago, so he was entirely disarmed.  But that didn’t mean he was powerless.  As much as he liked his weapon, he was just as dangerous without it.  However, the loss of the weapon left him saddened, largely because it had been with him since those troll caves.

In the back of his mind, Zeke knew he’d outgrown it, though.  Perhaps one day he would outgrow everything familiar about his old life.

And everyone.

“I see enough,” Oda said.  Somewhere in the background, Zeke was aware that Oberon and Aja continued to fight.  During his recent bout, he had drifted thousands of miles away, though he wasn’t certain how. 

Zeke snipped another thread, and Oda winced.

“Enough to do that?”

“You meddle with things you do not understand, you ignorant child,” he spat, his voice quivering.  In rage or pain, Zeke wasn’t certain.  Perhaps it was both. 

“Maybe.  I think I understand it enough,” he said, pulling himself to eye level with the enormous tree.  It took a few seconds, even at the speeds he could reach.  Once he was in position, he asked, “Do you know why I’m doing this?”

“You are insane.  A battle maniac.”

Zeke laughed.  “Probably,” he acknowledged.  “Both of those counts seem…valid from my end.  But that’s not why I’m here.”

It was so odd, having a conversation with a planet-sized tree.  It was even odder to do so while the battle between Oberon and Aja raged in the background.  Assuredly, that was Oda’s intent.  He’d already tried to kill Zeke, and he’d failed.  Perhaps he could try again, this time with even more potent abilities, but the contemptuous ease with which Zeke had countered his skills had forced him into a different tactic.

Delay.

So, he was clearly content to simply let Zeke waste time.  He trusted his sister – who Zeke suspected was the more powerful of the two – to finish Oberon off.  Then, together, they could kill Zeke. 

It was a good plan.

But it hinged on Oberon falling to the tree goddess, and after what he’d seen, Zeke wasn’t so certain that would happen.

He decided to play along.  “The reason I’m here is simple.  Our reality is unraveling.”

“Nonsense.”

“You don’t feel it?  If you could see the threads, you’d know.  It won’t happen soon.  This reality will persist for thousands more years.  But eventually, it’ll all come crashing down,” Zeke said.  “Have you felt the touch of the adversary?”

“No one has.”

“That’s not true.  The Waymaster certainly has.  So have I.”

“Lies.”

“Why?”

“You lack the power to endure such a thing.”

“And yet, I did.  Do you want me to tell you what it feels like?  Unraveling threads.  Wrongness.  Impossible pain.  Every second feels like an eternity, and yet, every minute passes in an instant.  Our minds are not equipped to understand it,” Zeke said.  “I nearly went insane.”

“Yet you did not.  If your claims are to be believed,” he added.

“I’m special.”

“You are just another upstart who got lucky,” Oda stated.  “I have watched you, boy.  Once, I thought you might make a decent footsoldier.  A lesser god who could lead armies for me.  Admittedly, I underestimated you.”

“More than you could ever know.  Do you know what I am, Oda?” Zeke asked.  “Do you know what I can become?  What…I will become?”

He pulled himself closer, and to his amusement, Oda flinched.

“You are the same as all the rest,” he answered.  “An…”

“Upstart, insane, battle maniac.  You’ve said that.  But you don’t believe it.  Not.  One. Little.  Bit.”

Zeke activated [Primordial Titan], though with only a single flick of a thread, his growth exploded.  When it finished, he was almost as large as Oda.  “I am a primordial.  Do you have any notion of what that means?”

“Nothing.”

“You don’t believe that either, little tree,” Zeke said.  “Your sister had me on the back foot.  But you?  You were always the weaker sibling, weren’t you?”

Zeke plucked one of Oda’s strings. 

He screamed as one of his branches snapped.

Zeke kept on, “That’s why you turned demonic, isn’t it?  I have it on good authority that not all of you were truly bad people.  One of my closest friends used to be a demon.  She’s turned a new leaf. But you?  You went to hell for good reason.  I don’t know what you were before all of this.  Maybe you were a tree back then, too.  Who knows?  But you are driven by your own inadequacies.  You were always the second-tier sibling, weren’t you?”

He snapped another of the tree’s branches.  Oda was having none of it, and he tried to flee through one of his portals.  Zeke barely noticed it in time, but when he did, he unraveled the threads without thought.  Building things might have been difficult, but Zeke had always had an intuitive understanding of destruction.  So it was with those skills. 

So it would be with Oda.

He plucked another string, eliciting a similar response.  Oda lashed out.  Zeke let the branches land, spearing him through.  The pain was significant, but he could easily divorce himself from it.  When the flurry of attacks ceased, he simply healed himself via [Hand of Creation]. 

He watched the threads, but they were so dizzyingly complex that he knew he wouldn’t be free-handing his healing anytime soon. 

But that was okay.  He had a skill for that. 

He snapped another of Oda’s limbs.  This was one of the thicker ones, but he broke the same as all the rest. 

“I understand you,” Zeke said. “I pity you, too.  Never good enough, so you turned to evil.  I know you probably don’t believe in that concept, but I do.  I’ve lived it. 

“What do you want?” demanded Oda.  “I’ll give you anything.  Anything!”

He knew he couldn’t truly harm Zeke just as he was aware that he couldn’t escape.  He was dead in the water, and there was nothing he could do to change that reality. 

“I’m going to kill you,” Zeke said.  “And in doing so, I will absorb your divine energy.  It will give me a few ticks on my status.  Nothing more.  But know that what I do serves a greater purpose.  Your death will serve to save our reality.”

“I don’t care!  Please…”

“See?  That’s your problem.  That’s everyone’s problem.  You just don’t care.  In truth, I get it.  You stand so far above everyone that they don’t seem real.  Just pieces on a game board.  Or strings to be plucked.”  He accentuated the statement by doing just that, and another branch snapped.  “They are that.  As much as I wish that wasn’t the case, I can’t deny that’s what they are.  But they’re also living people.”

“Says a genocidal maniac.”

“Oh, there’s the fire,” Zeke said without amusement.  “Yes.  That’s what I am.  But I’m trying to save our reality.  Surely a few deaths can be justified.”

Just then, a scream echoed from afar.   He didn’t need to look back to know that it had come from Oberon.  Their battle had reached a fever pitch, and he knew that the time to assist had come.

So he reached out with his mind and severed every single string attached to Oda.  The demonic tree resisted.  He held fast to his threads, activating some sort of skill.  But that skill was easily bypassed by Zeke.  The truth was that Oda was only a little stronger than his previous victims. 

Killing him was not so difficult.

Unraveling him was slightly harder, but Zeke knew he couldn’t pass up the chance to learn more about the threads.  So, he leveraged the entirety of his will – and mind – toward picking the tree apart. 

As he did so, Oda’s branches snapped. His onyx bark shattered.  And his blood-red sap ran freely.  In the end, he died a pitiful death as his very existence unraveled all around him. 

In the last few moments, he couldn’t even scream.

For a few seconds, Zeke just stared at the collection of onyx that had once been a mighty and demonic god.  Now, he was gone.  If there was ever a lesson about the fleeting nature of life and fate, it was in that cloud of shattered onyx.

With that in mind, Zeke turned back to the other battle, intending to use his newly developed expertise to assist Oberon in defeating Aja.