96. The Soul Enters the Titan

The Soul Enters the Titan

Mort’s work did not collapse with the death of his flesh.

The changes he had made to the local weather did not disperse. The foundation he had built was not uprooted.

His army had been destroyed, and their summoning circles shattered, but that had only fed something stronger.

Just as he had sacrificed sixty-six captured locals to create a barrier that delayed the enemy agent, everything he had done had been transformed and reborn, because it had all been tied to his soul.

And his soul still existed.

Not everything had gone according to plan.

His original design had been to sacrifice a powerful member of the local resistance, use that death to empower his greatest victory, bind the enemy agent’s soul to the gift of his lords, and construct a guiding intelligence through which Mort could control everything.

When Mort was killed by his greatest weakness—his obsession with the complexity and cleverness of his own plans—that portion of the plan failed.

And yet, apparently through an unbelievable coincidence, the ritual’s requirement that the enemy agent be defeated by her own weakness had been fulfilled.

Mort did not believe in coincidence.

In the Great Realm, the powers that stood even above the Lords of Mavis did not roll dice.

They used fate and misfortune, prophecy and mission, story and faith to shape reality on levels mortals could scarcely comprehend.

Thus, Mort himself believed that what had happened here was the Dark Lord and the Crimson King extending a clawed finger to tilt the scales of fate and guide the outcome.

As an emissary of Mavis, Mort could have returned to his domain in an invisible soul-state like all Dark Masons. There, he would have been given another body and new resources with which to invade this… Earth once again.

Now that Mavis magic had established a foothold here, there was no need to accumulate power slowly.

They only had to expand their war machine.

Within a few hours, or at most a few days, they could conquer the planet.

But to do that would be to ignore the hint and implied command of his own gods.

So he did not.

His soul flowed into the growing seed. The seed became his vessel, and Mort’s consciousness took command.

He rose from the cradle of his birth and set his feet upon the earth, declaring possession of this land.

From his spiked, rootlike feet to the six crimson eyes set in his black adamantine skull, he looked down upon his new territory from a height of one thousand six hundred and sixty-five meters.

His body was likewise formed from black adamantine, roughly sculpted into the shape of muscles beneath thorn-covered skin. It retained tremendous resilience, and only strength beyond mortal limits could make it bend.

Each of his feet was one hundred and ninety-eight meters long.

The First Law of Mavis magic flowed out from them, and steel magic seized the iron in Earth’s crust with an iron grip.

His skin was fire-red and covered in spikes the size of houses, from which red mist rose.

The Second Law of Mavis magic extended outward from those spikes and embraced the environment around him. Fire magic strengthened him and his followers while denying that strength to their enemies.

Rage and passion, ambition and desire drove the people of Mavis forward in body and mind, while confusing, distracting, and maddening their enemies.

His left hand was shrouded in green light, a castle-sized barbed claw illuminating the surroundings with the blinding radiance of the Third Law of Mavis magic.

Beneath that light, all children of Mavis evolved and grew according to their worth, while those without worth sickened, mutated, or crumbled into dust according to the depth of their uselessness.

His right hand was clenched into a black fist, devouring the light of this new world with the darkness of the Fourth Law of Mavis magic.

Wherever he touched, enemy fortifications decayed. Their engines stopped. Their lights went out. Their buildings collapsed. Their fields rotted and dried. Their hearts and lungs ceased to move, and their bodies froze and died under the dominion of entropy.

His mouth opened like a vast cavern lined with tower-like teeth, and gray mist and souls were drawn into the abyss of his endless hunger.

This was the Fifth Law of Mavis magic.

Those who tried to flee him were swept back by the current of that gray fog, discovering that every attempt at escape was doomed by their own powerlessness.

Those who died before him had their souls captured and consumed, stored away to fuel Mavis’s endless future expansion and conquest.

Finally, atop his black head, a tangled mass of spikes grew like twisted branches, splitting and bending.

There were sixty-six branches in total, stretching three hundred and thirty-three meters above his head. Their shape was not that of a living tree, but of something stronger, more elemental.

Lightning leapt between the thorns. With the flash and thunder of the Sixth Law of Mavis magic, the air trembled.

This seed, once the closest thing to a physical incarnation of divinity among the people of Mavis, was now guided by the soul of a Mavis emissary.

It took its first step into the new world.

Its weight equaled that of nine billion mortals.

When its heavy foot struck the ground, the earth shattered. One enormous foot sank through bedrock to the ankle, proving that bedrock offered no more resistance to its strength than loose sand.

Mavis magic echoed and magnified that force through the iron within the planet’s crust, turning a single step into an earthquake.

The recoil of this violence against the planet itself was absorbed by him.

With one step, the being grew six meters taller.

Then the giant moved forward.

Every step triggered an earthquake. As his power grew, every movement proclaimed approaching doom.

The small insects on the ground fired at him with their insignificant weapons and powers.

He ignored them.

For the first time since his birth, he drew breath, inhaling the red smoke rising from his body. Then he exhaled it as a crimson wind announcing his existence.

The insects were blown aside by his breath, or trampled underfoot, or driven by new-born rage, desire, and maddened fear into attacking one another.

Fire, energy beams, and magic rose again and again in an attempt to halt the advance of the crimson giant, while groups of creations and survivors dared to stand against him.

But the giant did not stop.

Darkness swallowed beams and energy blasts as if they had never existed. Magic was weakened and dispersed like cobwebs trying to hold back an avalanche.

The plants around the ruins grew into tentacled things, pulled their own roots from the earth, and surged in their thousands toward the few remaining defenders.

A tiny insect buzzed around the giant’s head, biting at him again and again.

It distracted him. It annoyed him.

To the other insects and ants, it must have seemed as irritating as a mosquito.

The giant merely exhaled another breath of crimson air and blew it thirty kilometers away.

But this mosquito was stubborn.

Even as its flight became erratic and its body struggled against the giant’s influence, it returned.

So the giant raised his glowing green hand and swatted it away, knocking it down somewhere unseen among the ruins.

The local pests dwindled.

They fell beneath the giant’s power or hid.

After ten steps, the pests scattered in all directions.

After twenty, only small groups remained, struggling to survive in the aftermath of his presence.

After thirty, their existence could no longer irritate or distract him.

The giant walked toward the only building still standing.

It was a fortress of steel, one that had not been destroyed by the earthquakes, had not been swallowed by swarms of mutated plants, and had even endured the assaults of red and black magic.

The giant crushed the building—and the last hope of the locals—with his heel.

There was nothing left in the ruins worth his attention.

The giant turned his focus outward.

He sensed metal.

Through the air, he greatly enhanced his hearing.

He smelled distant life and death, and the emotions surging between them.

He felt distant heat sources and lights.

He tasted magic.

Beyond the horizon, more than a hundred kilometers from the giant’s current position, there were no powerful magical sources.

But there were other interesting things.