CHAPTER 124
He Who is We
“RAISE HELL! FIRE WITH ALL YOU’VE GOT!” Cairen shouted as the black sea swept past the Isari, only a few hundred meters from reaching us.
What they had just witnessed with the behemoth stayed lodged in their minds. The terror of being consumed from within by countless hatchlings was something none of them wanted to see again.
So there was no delay. The cannons took aim, and no one needed to be told where to fire.
The cannons roared, six thunderclaps tearing into the black mass. Each impact pulverized thousands of spiders, shredding them into fragments that vanished into smoke and ash. The sea recoiled, pulling back for no more than a few seconds.
What were mere thousands against millions upon millions?
I felt it before I heard it: the Grey taking notice of what stood before us. Before I could force them into silence, they spoke. “He who is we,” more a whisper than a voice, yet somehow audible through the chaos, as if spoken right behind my ear.
Strangely, the voices didn’t tear into the others the way I had seen before. They shivered, yes, hands tightening around weapons, breath hitching, but their minds held.
That made me wonder if the Grey could choose which minds to pierce and which to leave untouched.
Or perhaps the chainrunners were already so close to despair that the Grey had little left to take. The same way that Abyss-born beasts were far more resilient to madness.
Maybe even a combination of both.
Regardless, I knew the Grey recognized one of its own. One that had escaped into the living realm and now returned to hunt me, take my core, and shatter the cage holding them back.
I wondered if the Grey wanted this, to see me broken, but part of me doubted it. Yes, I was a cage to them, but I was also bound to them, an anchor to the living realm.
If my flesh tore and my core was taken, I wouldn’t join them in their realm. I would live again in the mortal sense, stripped of power, stripped of purpose, but finally free of their pull.
Regardless, I had to act. This God had caught us by surprise and was ready to engage us fully. Haldrin was far behind us—too far to help before this turned into slaughter.
With the spiders came a black miasma, the God’s aura. It corroded whatever it touched, eating at stone, tainting the air, carrying rot and sickness.
It pressed against my mist like a tide, testing it, grinding against it with deliberate force, and made me strain to hold it back even as the black sea entered my domain.
If my mist had been allowed its full strength, the sea would have paid dearly to cross it. But weakened, it was barely a boundary. Even so, in my struggle of will, the mist still allowed me to hold back the black miasma itself.
The swarm around us scattered, retreating from something they clearly feared. It was proof they knew what, or rather who, this black sea was.
Their relentless instinct to purge corruption was, for once, overshadowed by the need to flee, along with the certainty that the corruption they sought to purge would soon be gone anyway.
“Don’t stop for anything. Keep this vermin away from us,” Cairen shouted, and the thunderous roar of the magic cannons didn’t stop.
Lucious’ creation might once have been able to harm demigods, but with my enhancements in the months leading up to the run, what our two minds brought forth was a weapon mighty enough to hurt even gods. Better still, it was one mortals could wield.
The thunderous impact forced the black sea back for a few brief moments before it surged forward again, closing more distance before the next strike landed.
At that pace, even with the trump card we had been holding back, the cannons wouldn’t contain them much longer, especially as the spiders began to spread around us.
The Isari withdrew from the middle of the black sea to reinforce our failing defenses, but the spiders adapted instantly, shifting with unsettling intelligence, as if they shared a single mind.
Even if the miasma and venom didn’t affect the Isari, this was a God. It certainly had countless other ways to kill its enemies. Or rather, “his” enemies, according to the Grey.
“He who is we,” The Grey repeated, as if hearing my thoughts.
We?
Was that a title? A hint at its power, its nature, or even his claim?
I couldn’t tell.
Thelora would have seen it, would have been able to determine the claim with a single glance, but I failed to do so. Even as I strained my vision until it ached, trying to catch the shape of truth beneath the horror, yet the claim refused to reveal itself.
Wait…
The Grey certainly knew it, but I knew not if they would tell me.
When I demanded silence, they often went silent. When I called them into a vessel, they came. I still didn’t know the limits of what I could compel them to do, but until now, it had felt like dealing with my own creations.
They would cooperate, right up until they decided not to. Often, with a different view of what the right path was.
With that thought, I tried anyway. “Do you know where its power resides?” I asked. “Its claim. Can you name it?”
Silence answered me.
The cannons thundered again, shaking the road, sending countless tiny spiders into their deaths, but the black sea kept coming, closing the distance far too fast.
But I knew the Grey heard me. More than that, I knew they were pondering whether to give me the answer or not.
Eventually, the answer came as a chorus of too many voices at once. Ancient voices. Voices that did not belong in a human mouth. Some of them couldn’t shape the human tongue properly, and the attempt came out wrong, scraping at the ear like stone dragged across stone.
Many chainrunners flinched as the Grey spoke, ears ringing, some even bleeding. A few nearly slipped from their saddles. Others simply shrugged it off, flooded with adrenaline and focused on the enemy ahead.
Most took it for a mind attack, perhaps the fog pushing them toward madness, or hallucinations brought on by panic. Many on this run had experienced that at least once, some all three, so strange voices in the fog were not uncommon to them.
But some knew it wasn’t that. Cairen, Gustav, Artemis, and even Cedric heard me clearly through the battle’s noise. They knew I was communicating with something, though they were too occupied to do anything except endure it and keep moving.
“He who is we. Korrax.” The Grey spoke again. “His power is… Many.”
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Many?
It took me a few breaths to understand they didn’t mean Korrax had many powers. They meant his claim was Many itself.
As understanding settled, the battlefield before me vanished.
Chainrunners, the road, Korrax, the roaring cannons, even the ground, all of it vanished in an instant, leaving me floating in emptiness.
At the same time, my instinct screamed that I was being watched by countless entities, but everywhere I looked, there was nothing but emptiness, nowhere for my eyes to land.
Until my eyes finally landed on something.
Far away, I saw the battlefield again, distant, dulled. Time there had slowed to a crawl, but it was still there.
Everything looked too large, or maybe I had become far too small. That’s when I noticed the faint reflection, the sheen. I wasn’t seeing the battlefield directly. I was seeing it through glass… the same glass my flesh was made of.
I was inside my own body, inside the cage that held the Grey. Despite my godly power, I was helpless against an influence so ancient it permeated the fabric of life and death.
I had always known that beyond the common entities I bound into the Frostkin, far older and stronger beings existed within the Grey. But only then did it become clear they could unmake me if they wished…
Maybe they did wish it, but for some reason, they didn’t act.
I looked around and found nothing but emptiness, an infinite stretch in every direction. I could have moved forever and reached nothing. The only anchor was that single glassy surface, the one place where “outside” still existed.
From the emptiness, the voices returned. At first, they were incomprehensible, their meaning far too great for my mind to grasp. Then, suddenly, it changed.
Some of the words gained meaning where before there had been none.
They spoke of a tale from the beginning of time, the origin of Korrax’s claim.
“In the beginning, there was only the One, and the One was lonely, adrift in a vastness of nothing but itself. To banish the void, it shredded its being to weave the Many, filling the emptiness with its own echoes.”
“Korrax claimed this truth as his own. He slit his own throat, accepting the end of the self so that the Many could arise. After the end of the self, from the first drop of his divine blood rose a hundred; the hundred became a thousand, and the thousand became a million.”
“Korrax died as One, only to be reborn as Many.”
The voices fell silent. The emptiness collapsed, and the battlefield filled the void around me.
The black sea remained where it had been. But now I knew its name and its claim.
Korrax—God of Many.
Time still crawled, and though I knew it wouldn’t last, it gave me a moment to think.
Its power resided in the collective, but I didn’t know the extent of what this claim could achieve. One thing, however, was clear: it could split itself into countless bodies and still remain one will, one core and one soul.
Each piece might be weaker than the whole, but that only made it more difficult to kill him, as there was no way to deal a killing blow. To finish Korrax, I would have to end the black sea.
***
Time returned to its proper pace in a single brutal snap. The cannons still thundered, but the black sea was only seconds from reaching the chainrunners, and I had no choice but to dive in without a plan, without any idea how to kill this God.
I called ice up around the saddle and it answered in whips and tendrils, lifting me cleanly into the air. The next moment, it flung me forward, fast and straight, a launched spear aimed at the oncoming sea.
I hit the ground and it cracked beneath me. Ice burst outward in a violent wave, rising into spires that formed a jagged barrier. Spiders shattered against it, bodies skittering and collapsing as the cold bled through them. Thousands died in seconds, and the sea faltered for a breath.
However, it also brought the run to another halt. Still, it was better to hold our ground rather than to pierce the sea of spiders.
Behind me, not far back, I could see the first line of chainrunners. Their unblinking stares were fixed on me with hope.
Hope that I would find a way out of this nightmare. Hope that I would save them, somehow.
Inside, I cursed fate itself, because like them, I saw no way out except to meet the sea with raw force and power.
Meanwhile, Cairen kept spitting orders in rapid succession.
“Group up! Break formation, form a circle around me.”
His reaction was immediate. The river formation collapsed cleanly, not into panic but into a disciplined pivot, and within moments a circle of riders formed, spears outward.
He didn’t explain. He didn’t have to. I saw what he wanted the moment the circle formed, and I extended the ice barrier outward, dragging it around us until it became a ring.
Controlling ice was as natural as breathing to me, so I raised tall walls to meet the oncoming sea—smooth, steep, and angled just enough to deny easy purchase.
The sea flowed into them anyway, striking the walls with crushing force. The ice shuddered, cracked, but held.
So I raised a second wall behind the first—taller, vertical, and separated by a narrow gap. The spiders that managed to climb the outer wall spilled over and fell into the space between, unable to reach the second barrier.
They would pile up there, bodies pressing from behind, crushed by their own numbers as the cold bled through them.
But it wouldn’t be enough, not even close. Once enough bodies piled up, they would simply climb over the fallen and reach the chainrunners.
“Keep firing! Thin them out!” I shouted over the chaos. “Don’t let them stack! Don’t let them build up on the wall!”
Cairen met my gaze and gave a short nod.
But Korrax was no fool. He could make the many become one as easily as the one became many. Groups of thousands converged, forming taller, larger spiders.
Those larger spiders carried ebony power; some even held onyx power within them. With sheer strength, they leapt over the walls entirely.
Spears and swords flashed as they cut into the spiders that reached the ring. Their legs were hard and sharp as ice, cutting and piercing in return.
Worse, many of them spat venom.
One of the first chainrunners to meet them killed two in rapid succession, only to be struck by venom from a distance. Thick and green, it took moments for his stance to falter before he dropped to one knee, choking and coughing blood.
And that wasn’t all.
Simon and Gorin took the front, sweeping their spears through the spiders as they led the others.
To Gorin’s surprise, one of the spiders split too easily under his blade. He had half a heartbeat to register it before the wound produced no blood at all. The thing didn’t die. It split into two.
Then four.
Then eight.
Before his eyes, a spider carrying onyx power came apart into a thousand again, rushing him faster than he could cut them down.
Gorin knew that full well that if the tiny spiders reached his insides, it would be over. Even worse, what would hatch from him would claw its way out the same way it did the behemoth.
Before the spiders could reach him, I called upon a breath of ice, slipping through the air as a faint breeze, one that seeped into the tiny beings and forfeited their lives before a single breath could be taken in the cold.
He looked at me, relieved, nodded, and then charged again without wasting a moment.
Panic was everywhere, in clenched shoulders and rushed breathing, in eyes that were far too wide. This was why the trial existed. Not to make them fearless, but to teach them to keep their hands steady while fear took hold.
To my surprise, most of them held firm and didn’t give in to fear.
Beyond our ring, the sea kept reshaping itself. Whole sections condensed into giants, spiders rising to the height of the Isari.
The Isari met them head-on, and the clashes continued all around us, with the miasma far back still pressing against my mist.
If I unleashed the true mist, I could end the sea of spiders in moments, perhaps even kill this God and push back the miasma, which had no strength to rot what was already devoid of life.
But the humans within my mist were my weakness. My power was limited by what they could endure and Korrax understood that perfectly.
It was cunning, far too cunning. But so was I.
I saw through its deception, though its lies.
The sea of spiders was too strong to be held back by walls made on the fly. Besides, it could have raised countless more onyx and ebony bodies, leaping the barriers and tearing the chainrunners apart.
Yet it didn’t.
It wasn’t driven to purge corruption, so it had no reason to kill the humans outright. If it wiped them out, it would remove my weakness and Korrax knew that.
So instead, it sent only enough to keep us in check, enough to keep everyone busy and force me to intervene, but not enough to wipe them out before he could end me.
So without thinking twice, I vaulted over the walls I had created. I left the chainrunners behind and dove into the deepest of the dark sea, finally free to release the power I had held back for so long.