Low-Fantasy Occultist

The light spilling from the open vault doors was blinding, yet Nick forced himself to step over the threshold, squinting against the glare.

He wasn’t exactly sure what he’d expected to see, but the Elpen Forge lived up to his expectations.

It was a cathedral of metal and ingenuity. Enormous, silent gears turned within the walls, driving interlocking tesseracts that formed the beating heart of the estate’s Artifice.

And it was the estate, he now realized. Everything within the manor’s walls was part of the Forge, from the furniture to the people. All modular, capable of being swapped out for other pieces, but still important.

Yet, for all its majesty, the ancient machinery had been thoroughly defiled.

Dozens of corpses littered the polished stone floor. Ultimer guards in pristine plate armor lay tangled with gray-robed cultists. Every single throat had been cleanly opened. Their eyes were glassy, staring blankly at the vaulted ceiling, and their blood had been meticulously channeled into an immense circle that encompassed the central machinery and the Null-glass cage suspended above it.

Alexander had paid a staggering price in human lives to turn the Forge into a catalyst, and even that was only enough to access its outer layers, for the artifact’s true power was bound to Rosmaria’s soul.

Strapped to the altar just north of its center was Ephor Ultimer. He was sweating profusely, his veins bulging black against his pale skin as he served as the battery for the ritual.

Every second, more mana than necessary to cast [Bolt of Wrath] was violently siphoned from his body.

Far from thrashing in helpless panic, Ephor was actively fighting his restraints. The ether around the old Artificer churned with his anger, and after a moment, Nick realized what he was doing.

Having realized he had been betrayed, Ephor deliberately tainted his own core, forcing impurities into his mana stream in a desperate bid to clog the cosmological mirror Alexander had built. It was a cunning, if lethal, gambit, but the madman had anticipated it. The arrays siphoned the corrupted energy directly through the Null-glass, filtering the impurities before they could reach the tether.

Even more awe-inspiring, the ceiling was missing, replaced by a bleeding wound in the fabric of reality.

The golden light intensified, accompanied by a sound like metal shrieking and glass shattering. Something was being dragged through the wound.

What little of it Nick could sense and see defied mortal understanding. A chaotic tangle of burning wings, shifting, pupilless eyes, and blinding heat was filtering into the Null-glass cage.

It had to be a divine entity, even if only a fragment of it, and it shrieked. The sound traveled not on airwaves but through the soul itself, a crushing weight that forced Nick to his knees. Gaelen and Rhea collapsed beside him, gasping, as the sheer presence pinned them to the stone. Even Rosmaria slumped, held up only by the machinery she’d fused to her body.

Alexander stood in the center of the blood circle, directly beneath the suspended cage.

He wore simple, unadorned robes and seemed unaffected by the divine presence. In his right hand, he held a blade forged from a dark metal similar to the one he’d found in the mountains, though even more malevolent—the absolute antithesis of the light trapped above him.

Alexander looked up at the screaming, shifting avatar of Sashara—for Nick could recognize Her fires with his eyes closed—with an expression that held no madness. It was lined with profound exhaustion, wistfulness, and ironclad resolve.

"I gave you my voice," Alexander said softly, audible even amid the chaos. "I gave you my hands, my devotion, my entire life. And when you needed a vessel, you took my mind without asking. You wore me like a suit of armor and discarded me when the metal cracked.”

He raised the abyssal blade, which reflected no light despite being bathed in golden radiance.

"The heavens look down on us as playthings," he continued, his voice hardening into a scornful promise. For a moment, his eyes fell on the destruction arrayed around him, and he seemed almost sorrowful, but it only hardened his resolve. "You demand our worship and offer only silence, or, when it suits you, abuse in return. Today, that ends. I will butcher this piece of you, Sashara. And when your blood rains down, the other gods will learn exactly what happens when they reach too far into the mud.”

Nick could understand where he was coming from. The gods in this world were callous, terrifying entities, and Alexander’s grievance was entirely justified.

But if that blade struck the avatar, the resulting explosion of butchered divinity would erase Toneburg from the map and much of the North with it. Millions of people would be reduced to ash in a fraction of a second, and the consequences would be a holy war of unprecedented scale that would consume the entirety of Berea.

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Nick gritted his teeth, forcing his head up against the crushing weight of the Goddess. [Blasphemy] was of great help, allowing him to ignore its more esoteric passages, but the consequences of a divine spirit materializing weren’t so easily dismissed. There was a physical element to them that even he couldn’t fully reject.

For a moment, he considered hurling a spell into the warped ether, but he knew it would be utterly useless; anything he could cast would unravel before it reached the cage. He needed to break the ritual from within, striking at the very foundation of the array.

Though it pained him, he channeled as much power as he could into [Empyrean Intuition], seeing the World for its Truth, as it was painted in fel and divine fires.

Ignoring it all, he extended his consciousness toward the blood-runes, seeking to establish a link to weave [Blasphemy] directly into the array to sever Alexander’s connection, mirroring his desperate gambit in the Tower of Alluria.

As his soul brushed the edge of the blood circle, the golden light flickered.

On the floor, ten feet away, the glassy eyes of a dead guardsman snapped toward Nick. The corpse's jaw unhinged, letting out a wet, rattling hiss.

All around him, the slaughtered cultists and guardsmen twitched. Joints popped and snapped in sickening unison. Dozens of bodies dragged themselves up from the blood-slicked stone, their ruined throats gaping open as they turned their dead eyes toward the intruders.

It seemed Alexander had left a final trap to ensure his vengeance remained undisturbed.

The divine pressure radiating from the torn veil made every movement feel like wading through a current. The dead, however, were completely unbothered. Animated by the profane magic of necromancy, they moved with unnatural speed.

A dead Ultimer guard vaulted over a runic conduit, his jaw hanging loose, bringing his sword down toward Nick’s head.

Using kinetic mana to withstand the pressure, he forced his limbs upward, catching the blade on the Shard of Human Ambition.

The impact rattled his bones as the corpse retained the raw physical stats of its former level, bolstered by the unnatural stamina of undeath.

With a grunt of effort, Nick channeled a burst of [Zealous Flame] through the staff. The spiritual fire washed over the guard, violently burning away the abyssal taint in its body and stripping it of flesh. What remained of the corpse collapsed into a heap.

"Keep them away from the blood lines!" he shouted, barely audible over the multi-tonal scream of the trapped avatar. He didn’t know exactly what would happen, but the combination of necromancy and an injured god couldn’t be good.

There was a small chance it would break the ritual, but the backlash alone would level much of Toneburg anyway.

Gaelen ducked under the wild swing of a reanimated cultist, driving his cursed dagger up through the creature's chin. It flared with dark light, severing the animating magic, but a second corpse slammed into his flank.

He hit the stone floor hard, and a knife in the dead man’s hand found a gap in his armor, biting deeply into his ribs.

Rhea yelled in anger and anguish. The stone beneath the attacker buckled violently, snapping the corpse's legs backward. A moment later, she grabbed her brother’s collar and hauled him up just as three more bodies swarmed their position. Her left arm hung at an awkward angle, bleeding sluggishly from a shallow cut, but she kept weaving earthen spikes to keep the horde at bay.

At the center of the room, Ephor Ultimer bled from his eyes, still being siphoned. Yet the old Artificer was far from defeated.

Several dead cultists who had been on the other side of the ritual scrambled over the altar, intending to crawl over Ephor to reach them, but the Patriarch bared his bloody teeth. For the first time, he pushed more mana outward, forcing it beyond the ritual’s bindings and connecting, for the briefest moment, with the stone below.

The Forge was untouched by his power, still locked tight, but the rest of the estate responded readily, and several panels slid open.

The charging corpses fell into the open gaps, plunging into rapidly spinning gears. Metal ground meat and armor into paste, spraying dark liquid up in the air and covering Ephor with even more blood.

“You will never do it!” he cackled. “A mere mortal can never strike at the heavens!”

Alexander did not even seem to hear him, his attention fixed on the screaming divine fragment above, still preparing for the killing blow.

Nick swept through the remaining horde, drawing on the remnants of the World's lifeblood to power his strikes. He unleashed [Righteous Gale] into his wall of fire, and a blade of wind laced with holy flames cleanly decapitated four charging knights. He spun, catching a leaping cultist with a point-blank burst of red lightning that blew its chest cavity wide open.

Almost hysterically, he realized that the tattoos that granted the Circle of Pure Souls so much of their power were gone. Tied to their lifeforce, then.

If those had still been active, the battle would have been much harder, but even Alexander couldn’t prepare for everything.

CONGRATULATIONS!

You have defeated [Blood-Bound Knight - Level 81-88] x4

You have defeated [Reanimated Cultist - Level 67-74] x6

You have participated in the defeat of [Corrupted Homunculus - Level 82]

+485,500 Exp

Level Up!

The notification hit him just as he dispatched the shambling form of a homunculus. He would have thought the absence of a soul would have made it immune to necromancy, but it seemed the Elite ones still had enough remnants of humanity to be reanimated, if not as well as actual people.

The expansion of his mana coils felt like a balloon bursting inside his chest. His soul pressed against the confines of his mortal flesh, fighting the crushing gravity of the divine avatar above. Nick dropped to one knee, gasping for breath, sweat stinging his eyes as the violent energy settled into his bones.

He was one step away from the threshold. It was a power he desperately needed, for he knew he couldn’t affect the ritual bound by human limitations.

Ephor was too caught up in its boundaries, and Rosmaria lacked much of the power needed to affect it. She’d probably regain it by unbinding the Forge, but that would only help Alexander.

No, he needed to be the one to do it.

He looked up, intending to find more enemies to kill in a desperate rush to close the gap, only to find Alexander staring directly at him.

His expression was flat, almost uncaring, and he didn't speak. He simply flicked two fingers toward the floor.

The pools of blood left by the corpses on the ground bubbled and coalesced, ripping themselves free from the stone and condensing into a tendril of darkness. It shot across the cavern like a bullet, aimed at Nick’s heart.

Nick’s instincts flared. He forced his heavy arms up, channeling his newly expanded mana into his staff. [Crest of the Thunderbird] erupted into existence before him, as brilliant a shield as ever, and the spear struck.

For a fraction of a second, the lightning held, shrieking as it fought. Then, with a sound like rumbling thunder, the abyssal energy ate through the shield, turning its very divine nature against it.

The Crest shattered into a shower of blue sparks.

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