Ad Astra

169. The End (IV)

[Galactic Inferno] lay waiting, a coiled whip of qi churning in his gut, growing weightier by the second. He stepped up to greet Jez as any proper host should: open arms, and a pleasant smile. All the better to hide a nasty surprise…

They paused before each other, both treading on air, high above the raging battle.   Below, the Oasis Lord wrestled against a cadre of Earth-Realm Shamans. Bin Heilong roared himself hoarse trying to hold back a herd of sand wolves. Mor...

168. The End (III)

There were times, in battle, for thinking. For strategy. For sussing out the strikes of one’s enemies and planning counters. This was the sort of fighting generals taught, the sort of fighting found in textbooks: clean, direct, predictable.

Then there was whatever the hells Dorian found himself in now.

No time for thought. No space to execute. He let the thinking part of his brain go silent.

Pure instinct enervated his limbs, and he acted. The Javelin soared, his Chains ri...

167. The End (II)

A/N: >:( More chapters!! Hopefully soon! Almost there! I am hyped! 

/

Horns blew. All along the walls soldiers readied their Sticks, qi Techniques boiling feverishly at their tips. Thousands of eyes watched the line of beasts draw closer.

Then the sands at the forefront erupted.

A new horrible species reared up from the sands; like wyrms blown up to ten times their natural size, eyeless, toothless, screeching murder, streaming waves of san...

166. The End (I)

A/N: Back home after a hectic week of traveling! We're coming up to the last few chapters of this book... 

//

Dorian sat cross-legged at the edge of the blackened Sinkhole. His eyes were shut. His breaths were steady. A cocktail of elixirs roiled within him, healing elixirs, qi elixirs, recovery elixirs—all to prime his body for a drawn-out battle. He sat there, digesting, waiting.

And then the horn sounded. A crass, grating groan on the air.

Hi...

165. Storm (IV)

It was beautiful and it was terrifying.

There was ash everywhere. Black misshapen forms were lumped about the sands. The walls of the Sinkhole were glazed with a fine layer of soot. It all seemed to pulse with a dangerous gentleness, like hot coals, and what steamed off of them were not smoke but vestiges of Law—tiny translucent flecks visible only to those well-versed in Fire. The Sinkhole had in a stroke gone from holy font—the crux of all life in the Oasis—to a cursed land; if ...

164. Storm (III)

As Dorian walked the main street to the Sinkhole, there was not a soul in sight. Most everyone was grinding in a factory, manning artillery, conscripted into an army, or otherwise holed up. The whole city felt wound up like a clenched fist. The end was near; they all knew it.

He passed through the Sinkhole gates, manned by two sober-looking guards. Then the great steel doors swung shut behind him and there was only him and the expanse of water before him.

They’d gotten the Torch...

163. Storm (II)

Dorian woke with a start, fully healed and very confused. For a few breaths sat there, still and silent. His mind felt like a clogged throat, choked with thoughts, and he was having no small difficulty swallowing.

Brace yourself. Fate’s words still weighed on him.

“…Okay then!"

Jez was a real threat! Noted. Perhaps Dorian had been wrong to dismiss the man so. Perhaps Fate had been right all along.

The question was—just what the hells was he supposed to...

Quick Note on Next Chapter + Schedule

The story is nearing the end of Book 2, and though I've not got writer's block, I definitely at least have writer's constipation--and it's been quite annoying to work through. There's a lot of moving parts that I need to tie together neatly. I'd really like to get the ending right and not rush it.

I hoped it'd be resolved by now, but it's still resisting me some. It's coming together, though. Will just need a little extra time. Will be pushing today's chapter to Friday, and will be tryi...

162. Storm (I)

A few hours of sky treading later Dorian was back to the Oasis. The sun was setting, spilling harsh light over a bloody battle.

Not a big battle, nor a devastating one. A small wave of sandwolves, Vordors, and other lesser beasts splattered against the Oasis walls, guided by a small fleet of a dozen-odd shamans. Soldiers rained bolts of qi from above with their Wizard’s Sticks. Battleships shot down Vordors with ease.

Bin Heilong greeted him with a curt nod as he landed nimbly b...

Interlude V. Calm

A/N: Book 2 is drawing closer and closer to an end… I’m excited! A one-chapter interlude. Then back to main story.

//

Kaya thought about his offer. For a few seconds she squinted at him.

“I know you,” she said.

“Yes,” said Jez.

“You have the gold light too, don’t you?”

Jez smiled. “I am the gold light. I am joy. I am life. I am hope, eternal and everlasting. I am peace upon the Multiverse. And I am the ...

161. Beyond the Sky (XI)

Now that Dorian was infused with Law he was exposed to a new world. It was like he’d been seeing in black-and-white all this time and could now perceive color. Laws of Fire and Darkness threaded the world around him, glorious tapestries suspended in air.

And now those tapestries were violently torn apart.

The ground shuddered. The walls hissed and bulged. Wisps of darkness scurried at the edges of Dorian’s vision like frightened vermin, and the flow of fire at the mouth of the...

160. Beyond the Sky (X)

He was this close! How dare that wyrmshit heart of his give out?!

He probed his body, and then realized it wasn’t entirely the organ’s fault.

Huh. It appears I don’t have any blood left in my body…

It’d all evaporated!

Then he came the rather startling realization that he had perhaps ten seconds of consciousness left. His vision grew fuzzy and darkly tinted, like he was seeing through an opaque lens. In a panic he thrust out a threa...

159. Beyond the Sky (IX)

In the middle of the volcano known as Drakestail Peak, one explosion after another rattled the earth. Rivers of qi were sucked in and blasted out and sucked back in again, like a whirlpool which couldn’t decide which way it wished to flow. At the center of it all was Dorian, brows scrunched and cross-legged, the whole of his mind stuck firmly on one task.

It was hellacious. His qi was monstrously dense, his grasp of Law tenuous at best. And Law would nee to be the binding agent if thi...

158. Beyond the Sky (XIII)

Out in the frozen tundra, a girl lay flat against snowy ground. Around her was a fresh graveyard, newly made; hours before there had been only bodies. Then snow fell, and fell, and fell, gently and interminably, and piled up around them, slowly burying them in unmarked tombs. The girl herself lay under three arms-lengths of fresh-fallen sleet.

It might’ve been the only thing keeping her alive. She’d nearly frozen solid by now. She wasn’t merely unconscious—she was the closest th...

157. Beyond the Sky (XII)

It was a tail. A big black spike-rimmed tail so big it nearly tripled Dorian’s height, coiling around him. Where he sat he couldn’t make out either its end or its beginning. The creature the tail belonged to was hidden from view too, but he didn’t need to see it to know what it was. His Resonance told him. It was a Resonance he felt at the Sinkhole, and a Resonance he’d felt whenever he found a scale in the Oasis, and a Resonance that struck him when he first laid eyes on the Heilong ...

156. Beyond the Sky (XI)

This was the part where Dorian magicked some incredible plan out of his behind, turned the tables, and won the day! He was Dorian, for Heavens’ sake, a legend of the Multiverse, a Godking several times over! He’d stared down tougher odds and won out. He’d overcome greater power gaps! The head ape was descending. That fist was coming fast. He was barely clinging onto consciousness. This was it. Now was the moment where legends were made.

…

He consulted his behind. ...

155. Beyond the Sky (X)

The lack of monsters was starting to grow suspicious. Dorian was nearly relieved when he came across his first.

It wasn’t much, as monsters went—a serpentine form Dorian had no name for. It was like a living chain of obsidian fused together with globs of metal. It seemed to lack eyes (why would it need them in a place like this?).

Then Dorian peered a little closer with his spiritual sense, and snorted—as much as it was possible to snort with magma up your nose. There was so...

154. Beyond the Sky (IX)

Kaya had been running for so long she didn’t recall when she’d started. Could’ve been a day ago. Maybe two? But she was still brimming with energy, energy leaking out her skin as a pale gold glow. She could run for what felt like forever—until she crossed the horizon, and farther still! And all the while she set upon whatever she found like a hungry vordor, turning insides to outsides and laughing and living free and wild, hair fluttering unleashed in the wind.

At some point it ...

153. Beyond the Sky (VIII)

He sprung off a shelf of stone, climbed up a steep rock face, and emerged at the top of the volcano. The lip of the thing was barely thick enough to fit his two feet before it dropped off into the volcano’s molten innards. It stretched into the distance on both sides—so far it was lost in the smoke belching from the volcano’s mouth.

Dorian glanced down.

The crater could’ve fit the Azcan stadium. It looked very much like a second Sinkhole, but stocked with a bubbling soup o...

152. Beyond the Sky (VII)

It was less hot than he’d expected! The outskirts of the Volcano, that was. He pattered along pockmarked rock which should’ve felt scalding, but only left a warm tickle on the soles of his feet.

Hmm… As an experiment he fished out a canteen of water from his Interspatial Ring and threw it into the open air, then slowed time to half speed.

Bubbles rose atop the droplets almost instantly. Halfway down they started to steam. The full splash of water went up in smoke be...

151. Beyond the Sky (VI)

A/N: Sorry for the late chapter! Half my day yesterday got knocked out by an unforeseen event... this is on me, though. I'll try to write an extra reserve chapter so this sort of thing doesn't interrupt the schedule in future. Sorry again. Y'all deserve a stable schedule. 

Onto the story! 

//

Dorian passed a courtyard stuffed full of men and women as he made his way up to Bin. It was a motley bunch: there were heaps of Heilong soldiers milling abou...

Interlude IV: The Loneliest Man in the Multiverse (III)

A/N: Last interlude chapter…

“No,” said Houyi.

Fate choked. “Pardon?”

Houyi was silent, his stare impassive. It was plain nothing else was coming. He’d given his answer. That was enough.

“Why? How?” spluttered Fate. “Could it be that you still believe Jez is in the moral right?!”

Silence. “He is waging war on the Multiverse, sire! Whatever aspirations he professes to—whatever ideals to which he aims—he ...

Interlude IV: The Loneliest Man in the Multiverse (II)

Houyi was a myth in flesh. As Fate was led up the gentle blue slopes, past cozy little hamlets up a gravelly path, he was feeling a smidge unsettled. It wasn’t that there were hymns sung about him (though there were), nor was it their strange and dangerous environs, nor was it the fact that there were as far as Fate knew fewer than ten beings in all the Multiverse who could genuinely threaten him, and Houyi was at the tippy-top of the list (though this too was true).

It was the man hi...

Interlude IV: The Loneliest Man in the Multiverse (I)

Edge of the Multiverse

Old Man Fate dipped an oar into the pitch-black depths, and rowed. “Hup!” He gasped, pulled back, and went for another. “Hup!”

It made for a peculiar sight. A Godking, who had enough power in one finger to flatten a mountain, struggling atop a ratty old wood rowboat? But nothing here was ordinary—not the little old rowboat, which was in truth a divine treasure carved of the Tree of Eternity, perfectly buoyant, endlessly durable. No...

150. Beyond the Sky (V)

Core three started off smoothly. A flood of Bloodline and qi rushed in, and his body quickly set to burning it up and stuffing it in. The percentages crept up and up, to Dorian’s mind linear— to 721%… soon 735%… 754%… So far, so good!

Then he felt a unsettling sensation grip his Spirit Sea. It felt like he was pissing himself—but that he could handle. He’d pissed himself more than once and it was only morning! No. He was pissing himself, but rather than w...

149. Beyond the Sky (IV)

The rest was but a formality.

Yama’s Chains struck out and bound up the leftover Torchdragons. They writhed and flopped weakly like fish stuck on hooks, but they were too sapped to put up a serious fight. It was like with that Sky-Realm Frost Dragon, trussed up and pitiful. Dorian gutted them like fish.

It was only after he’d happily collected his the last of the Beasts’ Cores, however, that he realized just how severe the damage to his body was.

All this time there ha...

148. Beyond the Sky (III)

Dorian wracked his brain for a plan and came up blank. The bone around him was now so scalding it were gave off a sickly pale light. Where he was crammed up against it he felt his skin curdle; searing jolts of pain shot up his body. He felt like a lobster in a pot. The temperature around him would not stop creeping up, and up, and up…

He groaned. What was he supposed to do?

Break out? How? He was straining to keep the holes of the Torchdragon’s skull plugged as it was...

147. Beyond the Sky (II)

A master cultivator never entered a fight without a clear strategy if they could help it.

A master cultivator never entered a group fight at all, strategy or not, unless the difference in power was enormous!

There was some romantic idea—Dorian blamed the poets and the bards for this—of one hero mowing down a dozen of his peers. Say, a Godking with a Multiversal Ranking of 20 slaying five peers of slightly lesser standing (a few Godkings ranked in the lower do...

146. Beyond the Sky (I)

Dorian pierced the heart of the Frost Dragon. Blood and innards spilled out the back end, a glorious shower of gore that splotched the sands crimson, drenching soldiers and Beasts alike. They all saw it — the Oasis fighters, the Beasts, the Vordors and their Shaman Riders.

A silence fell upon the battlefield.

Then Dorian raised his hand, and the chains bulged out, blurring, splitting. In a blink they’d doubled. He bared his teeth.

Almost all at once the Ugoc for...

145. All That Power (XIV)

It took him six shadow jumps.

A step into an alley shadow took him to a chimney’s shadow cast on a nearby Guild roof. Then another shunted him down the street, and another farther down, and then again, and again, and at last he landed on the broad walkway atop the Oasis’s thick outer wall.

He was greeted by a scene of chaos.

Below it was hard to say who was winning. The ground troops seemed to hold off a tide of wyrms and wolves well enough, he supposed. A light-show pla...