[Voidknight Ascension] Chapter 130: The Void Hungers

Sam opened his eyes in utter darkness.

“Where the—” Sam began, his voice echoing out into the distance and rolling back on him like a tide of sound. He winced at the discomfort of it.

Turning around, he realized he was floating in what appeared to be space, but there was nothing here. No light, no stars, just… complete nothingness.

And yet, somehow, within that darkness, Sam could make out an even darker patch of nothingness. A Void.

It didn’t speak, because the Void had no consciousness. It was a primal thing, a force of nature that had always been and always would simply be.

And it was connected to Sam.

He could see the thin wire of utter nothingness reach out toward that hole in the universe. It thickened and strengthened as his ties to the Void grew and he began to accept it.

Sam wanted to ask what he was doing here, what was going on, but he knew that there would be no answer. The Void was absolute. It was complete, and, perhaps most importantly, it was nothing all at once.

He would have scoffed at such a ridiculous notion before having put the Void mana in his possession through its paces. It was, he had concluded, an utter contradiction.

But to deny what it was just because it didn’t make sense to him, a creature who grew up in a world without a drop of magic, was pure idiocy.

There were an uncountable number of things that Sam didn’t know, and he was keenly aware of that failing every moment he interacted with Il’dran and its myriad systems.

But he also prized himself for his ability to adapt quickly.

Given the choice between adapting or dying, it was often an easy one to make. The Void was no different. It was what it was.

No denial or argument would change that.

That still begged the question of what the hell he was doing here, but he could guess. His Path had just hit level 20—or should have—and therefore it was rising to the Rank of Copper.

Unlike when he first Ascended to Copper, there was no fanfare, no lights or shimmering effects. He wasn’t even sure he had a body here. If this was the Void, pure and complete, and he stood—floated, really—next to the Heart of the Void, then what use was a body?

It couldn’t breathe nothingness.

Allowing that thought to ramble on a bit longer didn’t serve any purpose. If he was something subsisting on Void mana alone… well, he didn’t like the complications that would no doubt arise from that.

What he did with Void mana should have been an impossibility. The fact that the shadow clones couldn’t do what he did despite copying every facet of who and what he was spoke volumes.

His Void mana should have eaten all of the mana within his body. He didn’t know precisely what having 0 mana would do to a human, but it couldn’t be good.

Magical creatures simply died as if they were robots with their batteries completely drained. That made Void mana exceptionally strong when dealing with magical constructs, but again begged the question as to why he didn’t cannibalize his own mana in the process.

Sam didn’t expect any answers, but he seemed to have nothing to do here in this vast nothingness.

Before he could start humming “99 bottles of beer on the wall” the Void pulsed like a living thing and something equally dark emerged.

Unsettlingly, Sam noticed that it was tethered to him.

One by one, Worldshards winked into existence behind Sam, illuminating his back and the creature of shifting purple and black Void.

Sam had never seen that coloration of Void before. It was always silver and black, but this was something different. Darker, malicious.

Behind him, Sam could see thousands upon thousands of worlds blink into existence. Their presence soothed him.

In front of him, however, there was only the Heart of the Void and the creature that emerged from it. There were no notifications, no prompting of any kind.

And yet Sam knew that somehow, he stood between the rest of the Shardrune and all its Shards… and pure nothingness.

Sam drew his sword but found that his hand closed on nothing. He patted himself, surprised to have a body but more surprised that he was utterly naked.

The creature emerged completely from the Heart and was everything Sam was not. It towered over him in bulky spiked armor and wielded not one, but two massive greatswords.

Sam looked at them jealously. “Oh, that’s not fair.”

Despite the dire threat in front of him, that gave Sam an idea he’d like to try for later.

Unarmed and without any armor to shield himself, Sam launched himself at the creature without further hesitation. He was the damn Incarnate of War, and he wasn’t going to sit idly by while that thing floated over to him.

Sam reached a hand out and used [Void: Scour] as he got close enough to one of its wrists. The creature—quite a lot like a dullahan in size and speed—swung with one of its greatswords as Sam’s blast of silver-black fire disintegrated its wrist.

Coating his hand in silver and black flames of Void Mana, Sam palm thrust out and parried the blade that would have surely cut him in half if he had lingered a moment longer.

There was a surge of energy at the contact and what colors Sam could see of the world inverted for a moment. Up became down, and he felt extremely nauseated as everything flipped back to the right way again.

His plan to snatch up the Void creature’s weapon wasn’t going to work. Not only did he suspect that colliding any part of himself with the creature would result in another nauseating spin of the universe’s most fundamental laws, but it also meant he couldn’t hold the sword.

The thought of a sword, however, wormed its way into his mind and, before he knew what he was doing, the silver-black flames on his hand formed into a long surging gout of Void.

His Void formed into a greatsword that roared like a thousand suns. Sam surged after the creature, always willing to strike first.

It wasn’t quite as weakened as he had thought because the golem-like creation whipped out its equally massive greatsword to push Sam back.

So strong!

It was a shock to find something as powerful as he was, and quite frightening when something eclipsed even his prodigious might. And with only one arm.

If not for the Void blade in his hands, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. As it was, the blade seemed a little smaller than he remembered.

Focusing, Sam pumped more silver-black flames into the weapon and it grew accordingly, but he could feel the toll it took on his body.

They clashed, again and again. Countless flashes of silver-black and purple-black Void echoed across the starscape that served as his new battlefield.

No matter which way he moved, the Shards were always behind him. He wondered about that as he tried to figure out what the Void Golem’s weakness was. It was fast, but not quite as fast as him, and it was strong, far stronger than he was.

That was an odd turn of events that he hadn’t expected.

Sam felt the sticky wet sensation of blood splatter across his chest and arm, where he had only just managed to extricate himself from the battle in time.

For every strike he landed, the Void Golem hardly seemed injured, but Sam lost something vital with each attempt. He grew weaker, slower.

Sooner or later, the Void Golem was going to kill him.

It would have been nice to have a heads up that this would happen! Sam yelled into his head. Had he known that hitting Copper on his Void Path would mean he had to fight a colossal creature of some malicious-filled Void, he would have held off until he could—what? Make up a strategy for some enemy he never knew existed?

Okay, sure, Sam thought. Maybe I couldn’t have done anything. But it sure would have been nice not to be blindsided.

The Void Golem lurched through the murk on its side of the universe and Sam barely got the fiery silver-black Void blade up in time to prevent himself from being cleaved in two.

The blade crackled and wavered, shrinking visibly as he barely kept the golem’s larger and more fearsome blade away. It took both of Sam’s arms, muscles bulging with effort, to hold off a one-handed strike.

If I hadn’t taken out that other hand, I’d be dead.

Sam tried to use [Void: Scour] again, but he didn’t dare take one hand off the hilt of his sword. He was already struggling. They were nearly evenly matched when Sam brought everything he had to bear.

Not near enough, however.

The Void Golem loomed over him, pressing down with all its might. Every other time, Sam had managed to twist or shift out of the blade lock they were currently in, and every time he took a wound for his cowardice.

There was no standing up to the Void Golem. It was stronger, and with every passing second, Sam was growing weaker.

Sam pulled out every last trick he knew, but aside from Void powers, he didn’t have much. He couldn’t use [Heavy Blade], or even [Rally].

His formal training failed him, only showcasing that he had been right to abandon it in favor of a more organic style. Nobody ever trained to fight something like this.

Sam was only able to stand his ground by sheer grit, but there was no way he was going to be able to keep it up. Willpower and denial can only do so much.

Help me! Sam cried out to the light of the Shards at his back. There had to be a reason they were there, right? This is your fight too, isn’t it?

The answering call was a wave of brilliance that was blinding to look at. The Void Golem flinched at the light, but Sam was not wholly of the Void, and he reveled in its glory.

The light from the Shards pulsed, and Sam felt connected to them all at once. Even though their swords were locked, Sam felt his gaze pulled down to his navel.

There the thread of Void was thickest, spreading out into the Void Golem and into the Heart of the Void beyond. It was blacker than anything he had ever seen.

Behind him were countless threads of silver light, stretching out from every Shard within the Shardrune of Il’dran. It was the first time that Sam had seen the Shardrune in all its glory, and yet he knew what it was as intimately as he knew himself.

The Shards wove a beautiful tapestry of light that formed, from an incomprehensible distance, a singular rune. Sam was captivated by it.

It seared itself onto the backs of his eyelids.

The Shardrune weaved silver light into him, and the Void fed utter darkness into both the Void Golem and Sam.

The silver-black flames were a mixture of both Void and Shardlight. It was impossible to express Void mana any other way upon a Shard, but it was not wholly what Void truly was.

Here, facing the darkness in front of him, Sam realized the truth of what he actually wielded.

Silver light suffused his body, but it could not heal his wounds suffered by the Void. His strength matched the Void Golem’s, then surpassed it as he pressed his advantage.

Unwavering, Sam let the argent light of the Shards behind him flood into the Void blade he created. It flared to life like a blinding star streaked through with flames of pitch.

The Void Golem’s sword shattered against Sam’s reformed blade, and still Sam did not relent. He swept the [Voidshard Blade] through the Void armored body of the Golem.

Though it had no voice up until that point, it let loose a terrifying scream as the [Voidshard Blade] ripped through it, bisecting the brute and leaving it to dissolve into nothingness.

No, not nothingness.

The Void Golem became motes of purple-black light that were drawn into the Void tether between Sam and the Heart. Sam had taken its powers for himself.

For a moment, suffused with the Shard’s light, Sam knew he could sever his connection to the Void for good.

What that would mean for him or his powers, he wasn’t sure, but he knew that the window was rapidly closing.

He could be rid of it for good. Sam could gain new attunements and be able to wield other elements without being tied to the Void.

Sam struggled with the choice as his opportunity dwindled to that of a single point in time upon which all his futures seemed to pivot.