Sell you a Bridge chapter 352

July 5th 2016 Mysterious Tower, 10:00 AM EDT

I  woke up in a bed, which was a huge improvement on where I'd fallen  asleep. I also woke up at all, which I hadn't been sure of at the end  there. I'd thought I was going to die for a second. I looked down at my  body, which was uncovered for the most part, except for a sheet. I'd  been in my armor, but I was trying to remember if I retracted it to deal  with the damage from the corrosive blood that had seriously burned me.

Whatever  I'd done, I wasn't burned now. I touched my torc, and it felt the same  as usual when it was retracted. I wanted to look it over with aura  sight, but it was around my neck. Then I remembered I was half ghost,  and I forcibly stretched my neck about a foot and turned my head to look  at it.

It looked...fine. Darker. More deadly. But fine.  The aura sang with power that hadn't been there before. It occurred to  me that the armor had, when I first got it, been altered by my old key  blade, and now I had a new keyblade, so maybe it was altered again. That  didn't explain the lack of burns, or the fact that my aura was MUCH  stronger now than it had been last time I'd seen it.

"Morgan!"  Came a shout, and my neck snapped back into place so fast I fell off  the damn bed with a start. Zee and Drea, both looking terrified,  practically teleported to my side. Surprisingly, Drea was the one who  buried herself in my side, and with a start I felt her actually sobbing.  I was poleaxed at the display. Not that she cared, but that she was  so...outwardly emotional. I was used to feeling her emotions through the  bond, and they were usually more...reserved would be a good word I  guess?

THIS was like a tidal wave of terror and guilt and  pain and love. It was almost drowning me. I shushed her, petting her  hair as she cried. Zee stood back to give us space. I knew why Drea was  so affected. She'd stoop up to Darkseid for us. Maybe not the REAL  Darkseid, but someone just as bad, maybe even worse. It was like facing  down the boogeyman for her. Darkseid was her nightmare, they told bad  kids on New Genesis that if they didn't behave Darkseid would come and  get them. And she'd fought him for me. No, she'd been willing to DIE for  me. She hadn't remembered the doll, she'd just drawn fire to keep me  safe.

I leaned down and kissed her softly, then I pulled  both of them up to the bed because stone floors aren't comfortable. "Hey  girls. Sorry I had to nap....I feel, great actually, though I'm not  sure what the hell happened."

"Luckily." Came and  unusually creepy and very familiar voice. "I happen to be quite familiar  with the situation, and should be able to shed some light on the  subject. After all, my student was attempting to treat you as it was  happening, and was able to get a first hand look." Master Yen Sid  stepped into the room through a door I didn't remember seeing there  before, nodding to me gravely.

He worked with Merlin, and  knew the deal with my abilities I was pretty sure. The actual details,  not the basic premise. So I wasn't too adverse to him filling me in on  what happened. "Well, I know that I just came stupidly close to death,  and that I still got off easy against the bastard who did it."

"Well  you aren't dead." Drawled Master Yen Sid. "At least no more than usual,  but sadly the stupid isn't curable." I raised an eyebrow at the joke,  which wasn't like him, but flipped him off for good measure, getting a  giggle out of the girls. "You did indeed come quite close to perishing.  You have limits, at least before you fully Ascend. There is a reason  your powers are to be exercised over time. You did not do that, and had  you not gotten very lucky your soul would have dissolved."

I  looked down at my aura. It didn't look weak. In fact, it looked MUCH  stronger. There was no way cracking my soul and then flooding it with  points should do that. "How?" I said bluntly. "How did I recover, how am  I stronger now. Like, my soul being repaired by the influx of energy I  could understand, but how am I stronger."

Master Yen Sid  stroked his beard slowly, his creepily wide eyes staring intently at me.  "Sheer. Dumb. Luck." He said crisply. "Mickey was on hand as it  happened, and took several scans I was able to use to discover how it  happened. Put simply, your soul was badly fractured. Not the core of it,  where your power lies, but the parts of it that are still human, which  at the moment is still most of it despite your various physical  transformations."

See, that sounded bad. But I didn't  interrupt. He waited for me to speak, but when I didn't he gave an  approving nod and continued. "The influx of energy would have, as you  said, simply repaired what damage it could. But the energy itself wasn't  enough. There was barely a trickle. What you would call five thousand  points. That wasn't enough to recover. But there was other energy in  your body. Powerful energy. And I'm sure you remember the unique trait  of Deception energy."

The realization hit me like a bolt  of lightning. "Shit!" I cursed. "Deception energy can become anything,  and can convert other types of energy. The points influx didn't fix me,  it altered the corrosive divine energy that was inside my body from  where the blood had eaten through and it merged it with me. I consumed  the divinity in Darkfather's blood. Hell, I literally butchered him up  close with his giant heart right above me. I might have had almost all  of it coursing through me. That's why I feel so strong. But what  about...me? Did it change me? Make me evil or some shit?"

Master  Yen Sid shrugged. "As far as I can tell, no. The power did the same  thing it always does. It altered the fundamental nature of the energy to  make it more compatible to you. It tricked reality into applying only  gains and no losses. You're...quite a bit more of a god than you were  before, stronger, faster, and the human portion of you is basically  gone. Your soul is just as ghoulishly demonic as your body now."

Which  didn't bother me nearly as much as becoming a mini Darkseid. I reached  for my power, and I felt it...leap to my call. I covered one hand with  another, creating a space where anything could exist, and then pushed  just the slightest bit, opening the hands up to reveal...a rosebud,  carved from the most beautiful opal. I plucked it up, the stem forming  from beneath it as I lifted, and held it out to Drea with a grin.

It  hadn't hurt to make it, not even a little. It had felt like flexing a  finger maybe. I knew it took effort, but it was so little it hardly even  mattered. Drea giggled at the rose, but took it with a small smile. I  wanted to jump out of bed and dance and sing. But my smile faded as I  remembered the aura of my torc, and of my keyblade...I may have made a  huge tiny mistake. I wanted to call my keyblade, but I was a little  worried the girls might be hurt.

"Hey, can you guys go  stand by Master Yen Sid? I'm going to see how my armor is. It  feels...different. I'm not sure it's going to be within my control when I  first expand it." They looked concerned, but I just smiled  reassuringly. They finally nodded, getting up to go stand behind the old  wizard, who nodded to me gravely.

I stood up, looking  down at myself and called my armor. It flowed different this time than  usually. Most of the time it felt like liquid metal rolling over me,  coating me from head to toe. It wasn't slow but it was a steady pace.  This time it felt like a wave of black ink hitting a pond. It consumed  me, and I could feel Thanatos in the armor, greedily howling for blood.  It had patched the holes from the blood corrosion, and in doing so had  melded into the armor irrevocably.

If it had been before  I'd have had to fight it off, the blood haze trying to drown me, but I  was much stronger. I smashed my will and power into the sensation and it  just kind of...stopped. Like I'd stunned it. Then I kept bludgeoning it  with my divine will over and over until I felt it submit to me. The  feeling of bloody hateful rage evaporated, replaced by sullen  unhappiness.

The girls were looking at me with worry, but I  just cracked my neck, looking down at myself. The new armor wasn't just  black. It was black squared. Vantablack. It ATE light. I looked like a  walking black hole almost. Still, I could see flashes of ghostly faces  in the metal as I moved, screaming faces. That wasn't really ideal. They  didn't seem to be real living beings though, just corporeal resentment  from the gun tainting the armor.

I snapped out a light  jab, and my hand moved to fast a sonic boom cracked the air. That was  fast. About as fast as I used to be when actively channeling demonic  power for speed. The armor was stronger now. Like I was stronger. With a  tentative flick of my wrist, I called Thanatos. The keyblade blazed  into existence in a flash of ghostly fire. It was much different than it  had been before. I hadn't had a chance to look at it before, to take in  that changes, but there were plenty.

The shaft of the key  was metal of course, abyssal alloy, but the actual guard seemed to be  some kind of green stone that produced a resonance with ectoplasm. A red  demonic gem was set into the base of the grip, and I could feel it  calling out to me demonic nature. Lastly, the metal itself was hungry  for lives. The witch wasn't there, she'd been destroyed, but the  condensed hate and murderous nature of Gotham given form and infused  with the power of an ancient magical predator from the dawn of time had  warped it, and merging it into the keyblade had woken it up.

It  didn't try to consume or bully me. I'd beaten it into submission  already through my armor. It would take some getting used to, but I  could work with it. A thought struck me. "I guess in some ways I did end  up getting keyblade armor." I laughed as I felt the bond between my  keyblade and my torc, much closer than what had been there before.

I  dismissed them both, letting the metal melt away and the keyblade go up  in flames. "Alright." I said seriously. "That's...interesting. It'll  help quite a bit in our siege on the Scala ad Caelum, but for now I have  other things I need to do." I could create that implant now if I  wanted. Just with pure effort. And I was pretty sure I'd need it. I  reached into my spatial ring and pulled out the grimoire, showing it to  Master Yen Sid.

"I need to understand Void Magic much  better than I do. I've been studying, but some help would probably speed  things up a ton. I assume as the ancient master of magic you have some  familiarity?" The smile that crossed Master Yen Sid's face then wasn't  exactly comforting. I suspected he did know how void magic worked. But I  also suspected I wouldn't enjoy the learning process. That was fine. We  were on a time crunch, I had no problem doing some hell training.