Divine Apostasy Book 11 - Chapter 54

Chapter 54

Uruziel lowered Ruin’s Core Velocity to three thousand and he thankfully let her manage the reactions. Keeping the chaotic packets of Destruction energy in check created a constant tension he didn’t enjoy. He gripped the hilts of his manifested swords as his breathing automatically adjusted for combat. Years of Bamboo Viper Step training had honed him into a calm, precise, lethal weapon.

Sivart flew a Minion Dragon not far off the ground. The dragon dragged its tail in the sand, creating a path directly to Ruin. A path the mass of Sandpede Liquifiers followed.

Like relaxing a muscle he released his Divine Domain and dropped to the sand. The domain remained, there to keep him safe from someone else manipulating the gravity around him, but not strong enough to inhibit any of his movements.

The sand beneath Ruin rippled then erupted. He sidestepped as a Sandpede Liquifier lunged upward, venomous hair bristling into sharp thorns. The creature launched twenty thorns and he stepped into a defensive form he called Willow Branch. His blades flowed in small arcs, deflecting the thorns into the surrounding sand.

The creature’s segmented body twisted to encircle Ruin. He stepped back, rotating his hips and striking the beast with Flowing Guard, slashing through the monster’s middle.

The Sandpede Liquifier’s body split, the segments falling to the sand in a spray of thick blood. The ichor covered the area, and its hot temperature scalded his skin through his armor. It smelled like rotting wood and dirt.

Regeneration activated immediately, the two pieces squirming with life. Instead of knitting themselves back together, they each ignored their quickly healing wounds and attacked.

The sand vibrated, warning of more creatures arriving in moments.

Ruin stepped between the two segments and lashed outward with both swords in a move named Dragon’s Claws. He wanted to know at what point the creatures wouldn’t regenerate from being diced into increasingly smaller sections.

As the new mob of creatures arrived, Ruin decided cutting them into pieces wouldn’t work. Even the thinnest sections of the Sandpede Liquifier would survive and turn to attack him.

Sand clumped together in a twenty-foot area as the creature’s massive loss of blood soaked the dune. Ruin’s acid resistance kept him safe from burns, but the smell made him gag. Worse, the acid had soaked into his Ink Lord’s Wrap of Shadow; it felt like someone had wrapped him in a warm wet blanket.

Ten Sandpede Liquifiers leaped at Ruin as another ten fought just below the surface to reach him first.

Ruin saturated the area with Destruction Essence, forming it into flames. Everything in a ten-foot radius was instantly engulfed.

The blood soaking the sand vaporized, creating an acrid smoke that burned Ruin’s nose and throat. His Arcangel Fortification stopped the acid vapor damage, but it made him even more uncomfortable.

The sudden drop of pressure inside Ruin’s center caused Uruziel to adjust his core velocity to five thousand, and the ricocheting packets inside his Center reacted with joyful anarchy, bouncing erratically and creating chaos.

Core pressure built quickly, the energy inside Ruin’s center threatening to overload his pathways. Gritting his teeth, he trusted whatever process Uruziel had implemented.

The surrounding Sandpede Liquifiers died from the flames. It stopped the attacks but defeated the purpose of Harvesting their essence to increase his core tier. While effective, the flames destroyed too much, and he needed to scale back its power.

Ruin wrapped himself and his swords in flames. This stopped his blood-soaked armor from clinging to his skin as the ichor burned. He held his breath and jumped twenty feet away to avoid any vapor.

Channeling power into the nearby ground, Ruin yanked two walls of sand into the air. With a focused burst of energy, he melted the sand into glass and then used Harden to turn them into slabs as hard as steel.

Slicing the Sandpede Liquifiers into tiny pieces had only increased the number of Ruin’s enemies, and his flames had destroyed them beyond use. Now he tried a third option.

Ruin slammed the twenty-foot square slabs together in a violent and sudden rush. A loud thunderclap sent sand spraying outward. The quick motion of the floating walls churned the air causing tornados inside the flying sand. He took advantage of the turmoil by converting the swirling sand into shards of hardened glass.

Three Sandpede Liquifiers got caught between the walls and exploded outward from between them in a paste. Another ten creatures found themselves too close to the wall attack, and the surrounding sandstorm of glass shards created a blender that turned them all into an acidic mist.

Ruin didn’t try and control his core and, like before, it lashed outward with invisible bands of force. This field drained the Destruction Essence from the blood and flesh of the creatures like a spider sucking the innards of its prey. In a moment, only husks remained, and the essence of thirteen Sandpede Liquifiers arrived inside his center, adding to the already chaotic environment.

Ruin sidestepped a whip-like attack from a Sandpede unaffected by the gruesome deaths of its brethren. Seeing the effectiveness of the glass blender approach, he shattered the two walls into fragments and increased the whirlwind around himself.

“Slow down the Harvesting,” Uruziel said.

Ruin immediately pulled energy out of the sky, cooling it significantly. He used the energy to create water, which he spread in the air above.

Thunderclouds formed in the cold air and rain fell.

In seconds, the dry sand atop the dunes had turned into clumps of wet sand and the valleys between filled with puddles. With every second the water soaked deeper into the desert. Inside Ruin’s Mind Domain, he sensed the creatures slowing as they fought to pass through sand that didn’t want to separate.

A beast Ruin had avoided lunged forward and he snapped out his palm, turning the water covering the creature’s skin into ice. He clenched his fist, and the ice condensed into a ball, crushing the creature into a pulp.

While Harvesting the single creature, Ruin observed Uruziel’s attempts to manage the flow of energy.

A large portion of the Destruction Packets thrown outward by Ruin’s core bounced around his center, eventually finding their way into a pathway where they ultimately struck a Meridian. This violent explosion inside the Meridian shattered the Destruction Packet into smaller Destruction Grains. Each grain consisted of a single type of Meridian essence, and they filled the Meridian like a fog.

If Ruin compared this to his human form, it would be like filling each Meridian with Spirit and then extracting all twelve essences instead of just the one that matched the Meridian.

Ruin’s Dark Meridian and Chaos Meridian had barely functioning pathways because Io’s Creation Essence no longer glued the pathways to his center and Meridians, leaving only scar tissue to hold everything together.

This fragile portion of Ruin’s Spiritual Network was especially susceptible to the violent and chaotic nature of his Destruction Core. The Destruction Grains filled his Dark and Chaos pathways first, their scarred and narrow passages unable to effectively let the grains return from the Meridian to his center.

The narrow pathways of his Dark and Chaos Meridian foreshadowed the future of his whole Spiritual Network. If things didn’t change, these Destruction Grains would clog everything up. It would smother his core until he couldn’t generate Destruction Packets, leaving his core useless in a center of tightly packed Destruction Grains.

“This isn’t working,” Uruziel said. “I need to clean up and start over.”

“Understood,” Ruin replied. It meant he wouldn’t have access to his core or its power until Uruziel finished. “What about Harvesting?”

“Steady flows are fine but avoid surges please. Sivart is leading the next wave away but one just arrived.”

Ruin had detected this already, and he’d come up with a plan to slow his killing without getting swarmed.

A Sandpede lunged, its thorny hair glinting with acid. Instead of dodging or striking the exposed underbelly, Ruin stepped closer. The creature coiled around him, hundreds of legs squirming against his armor as they tried to bore into his skin.

The sensation made Ruin’s skin crawl, but he gritted his teeth and tried his best to ignore it. Completely encased by the Sandpede, all light disappeared. Fluid sprayed from its legs as it drowned him in acid. The sensation of being smothered with a stinky wet blanket returned, only this time while he sat motionless in total darkness.

The next wave hit—dozens of Sandpedes erupting from the surrounding dunes.

Ruin hummed one of the catchy tunes he’d learned from Gunder, and predictably, the surrounding Sandpedes violently tried to reach him.

It took fifteen seconds for the creatures to shred the Sandpede coiled around Ruin. He let himself get wrapped up again and repeated the process.

Ruin had almost finished the fourth wave delivered by Sivart when Uruziel had a breakthrough.