Free Tier - Accidental Champion (Book 7) - Chapter 49 - I’m Being Watched

Xavier’s spiritual sense lit up like there was a star exploding. It had felt something. Something powerful.

A disturbance the likes of which he’d never known.

Everything had been going dark. He’d been teetering on the edge of unconsciousness. A moment so similar to that of the one he’d experienced back in the Arakashinai Queen’s chamber. A moment he hadn’t known if he could fight.

That light illuminated the darkness. It jolted him into an abrupt and incredible wakefulness.

Agony ripped its way through him. He’d lost control of the foreign Soul Energy streaming out from the void portal. In another fraction of a fraction of a second it would have annihilated him.

It would have been too late.

Xavier shifted gears.

His shattered cores were not yet fully healed, but they were healing. He pulled the split parts of his mind back together, forming one coherent whole. The healing of his cores ceased. A hefty price, but one he needed to pay.

With the weight of his entire consciousness and its newly enhanced strength, Xavier once again directed his focus on the foreign stream of Soul Energy, contaminating every drop of it he could.

As before, the energy coming into his soul was too much to bear. He cycled it through his soul and siphoned every bit of excess energy away. This time, he couldn’t use it. He didn’t dare shift his attention away from that near-constant stream of power.

Incredibly, in the end more Soul Energy than he’d been able to use was lost, pushed out into the vacuum of space, before that stream of power finally ceased.

With the stream ended, everything felt suddenly silent. Space was always silent, but this was different. It was as though he’d been standing beneath a thousand suns, staring wide-eyed at them for a thousand years, and then all the light was simply taken away, plunging him into an unimaginable, unbearable darkness.

That was the weight of silence he experienced when the flow stopped.

In that deafening silence he sensed something his awareness hadn’t been able to grasp when he’d been fighting for his life.

I’m being watched.

He didn’t mean by the Old Man. He’d known Adranial’s ancestor had an eye on him more often than not. He was quite sure that man watched him more times than he was able to sense, too, but in this instance he’d known he was there.

He didn’t mean the Void Being, either. Though that presence remained on the other side of the portal inside his heart—a portal that had yet to close.

In that silence, with his spiritual sense newly enhanced by the Soul Energy he’d taken in, Xavier felt something else…

No. Not just one. Several somethings.

He tilted his head to the side and blinked. “Who are you all?” His lips moved, though no sound released.

The presences instantly disappeared after his lips moved—that, or his ability to sense them suddenly failed him. Later, he would examine this memory in depth. Whatever had exploded his spiritual sense with light was long gone. It had disappeared before the stream of energy—and he knew for a fact that it hadn’t been the stream of foreign Soul Energy. He also knew whatever it had been hadn’t done anything to help him.

Not directly.

But if not for that sudden jolt, Xavier was sure he would have completely lost control.

I’d be dead…

His mind tried to get distracted and think of what that light could have been. Xavier stopped that from happening. There wasn’t time for even a small part of him to contemplate such things.

Whatever it was, it was gone. Whatever beings were observing him, they were too powerful for him to sense. And they didn’t feel… close.

He had more immediate concerns.

Palini.

Xavier turned his attention toward the glass dome that topped The Collector’s tower.

The portal.

He turned his attention inward and observed the portal in his heart.

Shouldn’t that portal have closed, now the energy was gone?

Something’s keeping it open.

The Void Being’s presence remained. Now the dense ball of Soul Energy was gone, the presence was even more clear.

And it was coming closer.

Was this part of The Collector’s spell?

Though Xavier could see inside himself with his spiritual sense, “see” wasn’t exactly the right word as he didn’t have sight. He couldn’t see his organs or his bones but rather sense them.

His Farscope, however, could push through solid matter. Usually, a body as powerful as his own would be able to block such a device. But he’d discovered how to turn those defences off and allow observation of his insides.

Xavier used the Farscope to look at the void portal. It was smaller than he’d thought. No larger than the head of a pin. To his spiritual sense it had felt like so much more.

As he looked at it, something twinged in his heart—a wrenching pain that made it skip a beat.

The void portal was growing.

~

Gogramtla waited. Years. Time. It did not know. Such meaning was useless.

Long. It had waited long.

Power had appeared. Demanded.

Hold this. Don’t eat. Wait. Wait.

Gogramtla held energy. Vast energy. Energy that grew. The taste…Oh, to eat it would make Gogramtla grow. The taste…

Don’t eat. Don’t eat. Wait. Wait.

Gogramtla didn’t want to listen.

Pain. Pain! PAIN!

Gogramtla listened. Gogramtla waited.

Long.

One day, the energy exploded. Left Gogramtla. The power that gripped Gogramtla left too. The demands were gone.

Gogramtla ate.

No pain.

Ecstasy.

The taste… The taste…

Gogramtla grew and grew and grew. It could not consume more than a tenth of the power it had held for “long.” But what it consumed helped Gogramtla think. Made Gogramtla strong.

Made Gogramtla solid.

Gogramtla sensed the portal. Reached. Tendrils gripped. Made it bigger.

Bigger.

Made it fit.

Gogramtla pushed a claw into the centre of the portal. Tore it wider.

Open open open.

~

Xavier acted.

Using all the knowledge and power he had over portals, he poured Reality Energy down his channels, to his heart, and flooded the void portal until he could wrap his will around it. Anger seeped through the portal—the Void Being on the other side. It was fighting his will.

God. This thing is strong.

Xavier fought back.

When a claw pushed out of the portal and scratched his heart the pain made him fight even harder. Bit by bit, he wrenched the portal closed.

He hovered there a moment, shut his eyes, shook his head.

Damn, it’s been a long day.

Xavier was about to teleport to The Collector’s throne room when he felt something tear. It didn’t come from inside him—fortunately. It came from behind. Claws, five of them—one which was identical to the claw he’d seen come through that portal in his heart—gouged their way through the fabric of reality.

Eyes peered out of a hole that was only becoming larger.

The claws and eyes belonged not to some massive dragon or bestial demon from the bowels of hell. The Void Being, in whatever life it had lived long ago, hadn’t been a beast.

It had been a Denizen.

The Void Being wasn’t translucent—at least, not entirely. It was more solid than any spirit Xavier had seen.

The sight of the Void Being struck Xavier with sudden terror. Not because of the power radiating from it. Not because unlike the last Void Being he encountered, this one didn’t need to inhabit a vessel. Though those were reasons enough to be cautious.

The sight struck him with terror because he instantly recognised the Void Being.

It was a dragonkin. Or, it had been. Once.

The Void Being was him.

Or a version of him—a version of Xavier Collins that had walked the path of dragonkin. A version that had died long ago. His spirit must have languished. Never made it to the Otherworld. Gotten stuck in the void.

And become… this.

The Spirit of Time had warned him of what happened to those who couldn’t accept their fate.

The eyes that stared back at him from a face so unnervingly familiar yet completely foreign did not show any hint of recognition, only hunger. A terrifying, sharp-toothed grin lit the Void Being’s face.

Xavier did not allow the terror to grip him for long.

From the moment that Soul Energy had stopped flowing through the void portal, he’d known he didn’t have time. Barely a couple of seconds had passed since The Collector had left him in space to die, but now Gregori would be inside a time dilation field in his throne room.

Xavier couldn’t cast Time Alteration. Not yet. His plan to defeat The Collector this time around, once he returned to the throne room, was one of simple brute force.

The void being complicated matters.

Xavier’s spiritual sense told him the power the being held was chaotic—it also felt somewhere in the realm of mid B Grade. Not an ordinary B Grade, either. A damned strong one. His thoughts once more threatened to take him down a thousand paths. Where did this Void Being come from? How could it being here be a coincidence?

And how did he die?

This was the Void Being that had been on the other side of the portal that had been housed in The Collector’s heart for… who knew how long. The presence that Xavier had felt the moment that void portal had entered his own heart.

A dark, malevolent presence.

But the presence hadn’t been this strong when he’d first sensed it. The Void Being also radiated something else, something Xavier instantly recognised but had been thrown off by the fact that the spirit was him.

The foreign Soul Energy. It reeks of it. It must have consumed its fair share, making it strong enough to break through the thinned walls of reality.

He had far more questions than he had answers to. The impulse to find those answers was strong.

Touching the mind of a spirit was altogether different to touching the mind of a mortal. Xavier knew very little of the practice other than it was possible. As much as he craved answers, and as important as that felt right now, he knew they would mean little to him in the grand scheme.

There isn’t time.

Xavier retreated with a great beat of his wings as the tear in the fabric of reality was made large enough for the dragonkin Void Being to struggle its way through.

Then he cast two spells: Pocket Time Stream and Portal. With Pocket Time Stream active, by the time he flew through the portal, the Portal spell had reached its cooldown and Time Alteration was well on it way to being usable again.

There was no time for an intricate plan. No time to assess the situation in the throne room before entering it. No time to figure out what to do with the Void Being.

Xavier had to act.

The portal he exited was at the back of the throne room. Xavier had altered the city’s runes to do more than turn on the people inside the capital—he’d also ensured the alarm system that sensed spatial distortions wouldn’t sense any of his own.

But that didn’t mean he could hide his entrance. The runes might not have detected the portal, but even the C Grades in the room would have the power to. Portals weren’t exactly subtle tools. Using his Teleport spell would have been more obvious, but Teleport wasn’t going to get this particular job done.

Xavier had a perfect memory of the throne room’s layout, and he used that to his advantage. The portal wasn’t just at the back of the throne room—it was behind one of the huge pillars that stretched up to the glass-dome ceiling. Xavier had picked up more than a few spells over the years, and while stealth wasn’t usually something he cared to worry about, right now he knew it was his best option.

His cores perfectly veiled, Xavier had cast another two spells as he passed through the portal. The first of those spells was a simple Invisibility spell. Invisibility was powerful, but it only prevented a single sense from being used to an opponent’s advantage—sight. More sophisticated stealth and invisibility spells tended to have high costs on the wielder, ones he’d never wished to pay.

His second spell was Manipulate Air. This allowed him to mask much of his passage through the portal, preventing sound and scent from travelling past the small bubble he created.

The instant he came through, he cast Phase Out, a spell that would further mask his presence. Once cast, he had no reason to manipulate air any longer. The reason he hadn’t cast that spell before coming through the portal was that it didn’t allow him to actually interact with portals.

That same issue didn’t apply to the Void Being, however. It was able to come through Xavier’s portal just fine, despite being slightly incorporeal.

And it did just that.

Xavier, now out of phase, flew inside the large pillar in front of him and used his Farscope lens to watch the Void Being’s entrance.

When he’d first come to this throne room, he’d had every intention of salvaging the lives of The Collector’s guards. That was a large part of his plan. Throwing a powerful Void Being into the mix was most certainly something that would put that at great risk.

Xavier didn’t feel guilty for his actions, however. As much as he didn’t believe these people deserved to die, if any of them did he wouldn’t let it weigh down his conscience.

He hardened his heart to such concerns. Until The Collector’s death, everyone in that room except Palini Damascus was an enemy combatant. They wouldn’t even be considered collateral damage.

 Xavier took a split second to get eyes on two people: The Collector and Palini.

The Collector sat upon his throne. He looked pale. Weary. There was a slight tremor running through him. Casting that spell had clearly weakened him a great deal. Despite that, his chin was raised, and a smirk twisted his lips.

A bloodied man was on his knees in front of the throne. Two of The Collector’s B Grade guards held him down, his right cheek squished into the marble floor—a floor littered with spiderweb cracks.

Palini.

Xavier gritted his teeth as he noticed another important detail: Palini had been unarmed.

Literally.

Xavier had no idea how much time had passed inside the throne room with the time dilation field at work, and he didn’t care to do the math. Clearly, much had come to pass while he’d been up there in the vacuum of space.

Palini Damascus’s arms lay on the ground, one on either side of him, nothing but bloody stumps protruding each shoulder.

Xavier hesitated to speak to the man telepathically with their linked Communication Stones. As much as he wanted to let Palini know he was there, this momentary snippet of the scene before him didn’t tell him if the man had signed a forced contract or not.

By the time the split second Xavier took to get eyes on The Collector and Palini had passed, The Collector’s sadistic smirk had disappeared. Lines crinkled his forehead and his gaze shifted to the back of the room.

His chin dipped, and filled his eyes, and his guards moved.

Gregori The Collector rose from his throne then froze as the Void Being flew out from behind the pillar and alighted on the marble in the middle of the grand hall. Unlike the real Xavier, this dragonkin was completely naked, not wearing a scrap of armour or clothing, making him look all the more bestial. His muscled bulged in a way that made them almost look deformed and his skin was colourless. Despite his slightly transparent form, the claws on his feet were strong enough to dig into the marble, piercing holes into it that his claws seemed to cling to idly.

The guards in the room, unlike The Collector, didn’t hesitate. Melee fighters rushed forward. Mages cast spells. Arrows were loosed.

The Void Being moved its lazy gaze past the guards and settled on Gregori The Collector.

Xavier, out of phase inside the large pillar, smiled.

He’d had a hunch—a small one—that this would happen. Xavier had no idea how long The Collector had held that void portal inside his heart, feeding off his Soul Energy, gathering and condensing it on the other side. But from how much Soul Energy had come through to try and destroy him, he knew it must have been closer to a thousand years than a hundred.

Maybe longer.

And if what he believed was true—that the Void Being had been on the other side the entire time—then it would have grown very familiar with The Collector. Even now, the Void Being was able to enter the mortal realm because it had devoured a vast amount of Gregori’s Soul Energy.

Xavier hoped this would mean one thing: That if the Void Being encountered The Collector, it would cut a line straight for him.

Xaiver felt more than strong enough to defeat The Collector without the aid of a chaotic Void Being that happened to share his face—especially now, after he’d survived the Soul Energy bomb, become strengthened by it, while The Collector had been weakened. He’d had a brief thought or two, after he’d sensed it, about the odds of that Void Being breaking through to the mortal realm, but he’d assumed it would be useless without a vessel.

If he’d had the time and knew he could manage it, he would have slain the abomination the second it broke through.

But sometimes, one must work with what they have.

Something flickered in the Void Being, making Xavier blink. This flicker happened to coincide with his Time Alteration spell—aided by Pocket Time Stream—reaching the end of its cooldown.

Xavier cast the spell, keeping the time dilation field wrapped close to him, hidden inside the pillar. With the other time dilation field still active in the throne room, Xavier had expected the space around him to move roughly ten times as fast as the space encased in the other field.

A quick comparison showed him how incorrect that assumption had been. The spell’s power had increased. Dramatically.

They’re moving at one-fifteenth my speed.

Xavier released a breath. He knew a fair amount about spirits and souls. But there was someone he needed to consult who knew far, far more. And now, he knew he had the time.

Rhaalir? Rhaalir, are you near?