CHAPTER 125
Crushing Tides
“Omen, you crazy tall, pale bastard, come back here!” Gustav screamed.
His shout wasn’t the only one. Others followed, overlapping, panicked. Chainrunners turned in unison, eyes wide, seeing only the madness of a man breaking formation and running straight toward the black sea.
Artemis and Cedric stared at me, worry plain on their faces. Cairen lunged for me, far too late. “Omen, what are you doing? We need to stay together!” he shouted, confused and afraid.
None of them saw through Korrax’s lies. To them, I was mad at best, suicidal at worst, abandoning what they believed was protection and hurling myself toward the black sea.
And how could they have?
None of them had faced a God. To them, this was just another swarm—larger than any before, but still a swarm. Even those who heard me call it a God could not truly perceive it as a single entity.
In truth, it wasn’t truly one being at all. But I failed to fully grasp the power of his claim. Korrax might have been many, but treating him as a singular threat made everything simpler to me.
With the chainrunners fighting for their lives, none of them could see the truth—they were never the target. Their struggle was a distraction, a way for Korrax to herd me into position, surrounded, constrained, unable to act the way I needed to.
From above, the pattern finally revealed itself. The dark sea extended far beyond the visible streets, an unbroken mass of spiders emerging from the miasma, crawling over walls, spilling through shattered windows, pouring from every structure like an endless tide.
As I landed, to everyone’s surprise, including mine, the spiders did not rush toward me, despite countless of their kind being crushed by my landing.
Korrax clearly hadn’t expected me to abandon the chainrunners inside the ring of ice.
Perhaps he had been following us all along. A single weak spider would have been enough, something not even I would have noticed among the swarm that had trailed us since District 99.
He could have been studying us, our tactics, the way I stayed close to protect them, assuming I would never leave them behind. And truthfully, I wouldn’t have, if not for knowing he could not end the chainrunners without ending me first.
“Korrax, God of Many,” I said aloud, my voice full of anger. “I see you.”
The ground beneath my feet froze solid, ice crawling outward as my presence anchored itself to the land.
The world beyond the ward had always been treacherous. It brought pain and fear to all who braved the fog, even now. I wasn’t afraid for myself, but for those who came with me—afraid Korrax would take their lives. And honestly, I was tired of being afraid. It was time to show Korrax fear as well.
“I, the God of Creation, will rip the core from your dead body. And when you die again, not even the Grey will take you. You will return to nothingness and be forgotten.”
Words had always carried power, especially when using the Language of the World. What I didn’t realize until I spoke was that when a God speaks about the future, his words become prophecy.
That understanding came the moment I spoke. The wind did not carry my words right away, as if reality itself paused, weighing the power within the prophecy while an insurmountable amount of will poured from me into the void.
At last, my voice was carried by the wind, far and wide.
The prophecy did not make Korrax weaker or me stronger. In fact, it made me weaker due to the will spent. For a moment, I wondered what the point of it was. Yet I knew the truth: the prophecy I had successfully proclaimed would pull the strings of reality to my side, the same way claims could twist reality.
The black sea hesitated. Fear rippling through Korrax’s will.
Who would have thought that a mere drop in the dark ocean could still fear? And yet, I did.
Through the spiders’ eyes, I felt their gaze pierce my cloak’s illusion and land on my true self.
Spiders froze mid-motion, even those inside the ring of ice. The chainrunners didn’t hesitate; they cut them down while they stood defenseless.
Whatever fear I had stirred in Korrax lasted only moments. Soon the tide resumed, and even more spiders poured into the ring around the chainrunners.
I tore my attention away from the chainrunners and the failing ring of ice. The moment I did, the world around me reacted, as if the air itself recognized where my will had shifted.
Behind me, the battle noise from within the ring of ice continued, but it felt suddenly distant, like sound heard through a thick wall.
The vessel I wore ceased to be a boundary to my will.
Cold gathered where my limbs had been, ice condensing out of the air, summoned by my will. A new creation wove itself into being.
What had once been arms and legs stretched outward, elongating into thick, flexible masses that bent with slow, deliberate will. Ice folded and refolded into malleable forms.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Layer upon layer formed around me, translucent and dense, swallowing my smaller vessel until I was no longer standing within the black sea, but looming over it.
The temperature plunged as the transformation continued. Frost spiraled outward, seizing the moisture in the air and turning it into drifting shards that circled me like debris caught in a current.
One by one, eight vast tentacles formed, each thicker than a wagon and long enough to sweep a street clean. Above them, a massive head coalesced, bulbous and armored, a fortress of ice built to protect my true form and endure the crushing tides of the black sea.
Spiders tried to cut their way through the ice the way they did with the Isari, to no effect.
The transformation took a dozen seconds, but once complete, I rose to twenty meters and a few hundred tons. An octopus, no less, like the ones I had seen in drawings of the world before the fog.
Then I lunged headfirst into the black sea. The impact sent tremors through the street and into the bones of the district. Nearby buildings groaned under the strain, cracked, and began to collapse one after another.
My tentacles unfurled in all directions, each one with a life of its own, without needing me to give them direction. Together, they carved the black sea apart. Wherever they passed, the sea recoiled, freezing solid in violent, expanding blooms of ice.
Around me, currents of frost spread like a second sea, and the tentacles shook the land each time they landed, crushing countless tiny spiders with every strike.
However, the tremors also reached the chainrunners within the ring of ice. They watched the battle between the octopus and the dark sea with fearful expressions, barely holding to their horses as the land quaked beneath them.
But this wasn’t the time to worry about them. I couldn’t hesitate against such a being. All I could do was hope the Isari could protect them while I couldn’t.
Meanwhile, millions of tiny spiders flowed together with purpose, climbing over one another without hesitation, many hills forming around me across the black sea. Each one was as tall, if not taller than me.
I froze them by the thousands and shattered them by the millions, yet the loss meant nothing. A surface wound at best.
The black sea kept coming from beyond the edge of my mist. It extended as far as we could see, threading through streets and half-visible buildings that the miasma had swallowed.
Korrax had certainly multiplied himself far too much since the last time I saw him running away from Sjakthar.
My worries proved true when, far away in the miasma, I saw an immense tide of spiders converging. It was no mere hill. A mountain was forming, swallowing the city beneath it and dimming the sky as it climbed higher and higher, blotting out the sun.
Korrax was changing strategy, reallocating his forces to meet me head-on now that he had noticed the black sea was powerless against me.
Time, for once, favored me.
I had forced Korrax into a reaction he hadn’t planned for. That massive mountain of bodies would take time to assemble, even for a God like him.
Until then, I needed to reduce the black sea while it was defenseless against my wrath, perhaps even reach the mountain before it finished forming, and make him pay for attacking my companions and me.
So I dove back into the black sea, using my new form to swim through its currents. Despite my colossal size, there was no ground beneath me anymore, only the living sea.
The streets and the city below were being erased, buried anew each time another wave of spiders rolled over them. They flowed like liquid, bodies slipping and pouring over one another, filling every gap until nothing but the tiny spiders could be seen.
I couldn’t grasp the number of them. Billions, at least—likely more. Moving through a sea composed entirely of living bodies was disorienting, and it was made worse by the fact that every single one was actively trying to reach my true self, sealed within the bulbous head.
They died moments after touching me, each managing to land one or two bites at most before perishing from the cold I carried with me. Yet they didn’t care. Nothing stopped them.
The noise was the worst part. Millions of small impacts layered over one another—scraping, cracking, gnawing—until it became a constant roar vibrating through my entire form.
My tentacles managed to generate enough force against the spiders to let me swim. Without hesitation, I pushed toward the first hill and surged upward toward the surface.
Three hills loomed within reach. I didn’t need to think. My tentacles lashed out on their own, slamming into them and collapsing their structure. Ice surged outward from the impact points, spreading and freezing the mass in place.
Two more fell in quick succession before they could fully take form.
Three down, but there were at least thirty more, each one bearing crimson power. Yet, they wouldn’t be enough to stop me.
Korrax understood this as well. The hills weren’t meant to defeat me; they were positioned deliberately, blocking the path toward the mountain forming deep within the miasma.
He only wanted to slow me down, buying time to fully form his godly body, the same one that had divided itself to create the black sea.
I didn’t believe I could stop his formation entirely. But if I reached him while he was still assembling, I could make the cost unbearable.
And so I plunged again, deeper into the black sea. The closer I moved toward the miasma, the deeper the sea became.
Two more hills collapsed moments later, breaking apart and being swallowed back into the black sea. Meanwhile, twenty-five others finished forming.
I was about to strike another when I was caught off guard by a crimson spider emerging from deeper within the black sea.
What? Can they swim too?
I had assumed their bodies weren’t meant for this, that they would stay on the surface, crawling over the black sea rather than through it. I was wrong. And worse still, in the depths, I could no longer tell the countless small ones apart from the stronger forms moving among them.
The hesitation lasted only a heartbeat. It was enough. One of my tentacles was cut clean through, severed by elongated limbs rising from the depths, many crimson spiders moving with shared intent, converging on a single point at once.
The first one to rise from the black sea into the surface expelled a venom that behaved like acid, eating its way into my bulbous head.
A surge followed immediately. The mass slammed into me, driving spiders into the breach carved by the acid, forcing them deep into the damaged layers.
The smaller spiders survived only seconds in the corrosive residue, but they didn’t care. They sacrificed themselves for a bite or two, and in such numbers, they began to burrow inward.
The sound intensified—biting, tearing, cracking—echoing through the armored shell until it became impossible to ignore.
My tentacles lacked edges, but their weight carried devastating force. The remaining seven answered at once, striking outward and sending ripples across the black sea.
The one that spat the venom was caught before it could retreat. My tentacles seized the massive crimson beast and began to tear it apart.
The titanic beast form collapsed and spilled crimson blood across the black sea.
I felt Korrax’s anger. More spiders converged and surged past me, the majority flowing toward the growing mountain within the miasma, and yet I was still far from it.