Elysium's Multiverse

Chapter 315

Chapter 315

A brief stop by Brightsville had informed Allie of all she needed to know about what’d happened concerning Mara, Kathrine, and Crendir No-Name. Tre’Zix of the Purple Claw of the Klinac’Tal Clan had even verified it with his own eyes before making reports, with significant casualties on the other side but failing to retrieve the captured duo.

She was anything but pleased with his efforts, even if Crendir had used dozens of escape and warding treasures to get away. Unfortunately no one seemed able to answer any questions about the whereabouts of Nin and Vin either, but she was sure there was a good reason for that. She’d figure it out after she saved Mara.

Gliding through endless dark tunnels, across the deserted vampiric city, and finally into the silent halls of the underground precursor labyrinth, Allie’s obsidian wings cast death on every hostile she came across without so much as a twitch. She’d been powerful before, but now she was on another level as the plants and wildlife in the underdark simply withered and died whenever she extended her aura; the very rock around her would blacken and crack with wisps of gray and teal lights that would stream up off the floor - and that wasn’t even with her primary fighting form active. Anything less than level 120 instantly keeled over, the breath leaving their bodies as her presence settled like a silencing wave of cold energy.

During the days of searching and travel, she’d had to phase out of her Angel of Wrath form into her Angel of Death form in order to make sure the rage didn’t continue to build. She currently looked like she had before the transition into the Reincarnation of Wrath - but the sin inside her was simmering and just waiting to be unleashed if she would only allow it to leave.

“Are you angry with me, for causing you to strike out at your brother?” Wrath whispered into her head. “Embrace the feeling… you’ll need to harness that power for the rest of your life!”

Allie staunchly ignored the ancient entity, continuing to glide through the underdark as her pale bare skin let off ghostly trails like a phantom. Her state of calm and calculated killing intent was razor sharp, focused on her singular objective: rescue Mara. She was down here somewhere, and Allie could literally feel life or the absence of it at incredible distances now. She just needed to find her friend and everything would be fine.

Wrath let out a low, demonic laugh that echoed through her skull as the whispers and shadows of her new followers surged through the underdark with her; like a violent promise. The creatures from an age lost to time moved at her command, and they were some of the most peculiar mix of demons, angels, and undead she’d ever seen. She wasn’t even sure what some of the hybrids were, rather - they may just be extremely advanced undead; but some of their biology and soul signatures were both strange and yet also familiar to her. Perhaps they were just like she was now. Perhaps they were even like Fimrindle in some ways, given he too was a part demon and part undead entity.

Was that a coincidence?

Allie’s fist clenched, and she stopped mid-flight with a flare of her four wings. “Is it as we suspected?”

The archdemon on the other side hissed his response. “Yes… The vampire and his remaining comrades are attempting to make it to the precursor temple where you found the coffin of the deceased elder god. My clan and I are currently watching him fight precursor sentries at the temple’s base in the jungle. Mara and Kathrine are still alive.”

Allie’s fist relaxed, and she let out a long sigh of delight. The tension in her forehead diminished, and she closed her eyes while taking in a deep breath. “Good… We will be there within the hour.”

“Do you wish us to capture him for you? My clan will not fail again, now that we are aware of the kinds of treasures he holds.”

“No, not unless the lives of Mara and Kathrine are in jeopardy. I do not doubt your capabilities, but if what you said about these escape treasures is true - I don’t want to chance losing them yet again. He is already in the E-grade, and Elysium’s reset of your level and dao has made suppressing his energy to prevent pillar activation an unlikelihood. You may be able to kill him in a fight, but not before he uses another one of those damnable trinkets. Right now, it is likely that only I could completely suppress his soul quickly enough to prevent infusing energy into an escape talisman - so watch and wait, make sure you don’t lose him, and keep me updated.”

“That may be so, but if Crendir gets ahold of the Elder God’s power-”

Allie cut Tre’Zix off with a harsh rebuke as her voice rose. “Mara’s life comes before the world quest, I will not risk losing her over some dead god’s essence. Keep her in your sights, and only move if her life is in danger or if you are absolutely sure you can secure her first. Securing Mara is the priority, and only after you do so are you able to strike. Otherwise you will wait for me. That is final.”

There was a pause on the other side of the communication line. It was obvious he didn’t agree with her decision, but it wasn’t his call to make. “As you wish. I look forward to the intermingled success of both Gluttony and Wrath in this new age, may sin guide you.”

***

His small party of survivors reached the outer temple.

Crendir sent out a slashing arc at more of the blue precursor monsters, splattering another dozen of the odd creatures like a cleaver chopping through watermelon. He and his two remaining soldiers were covered in gore, as were the two chained prisoners they had to drag along. He was irritated that they had to keep the ghoul for this long as she’d intentionally slowed them down over recent days, but she seemed to know more specifics about where they needed to go while Kathrine seemed somewhat vague in her own knowledge. But he was also unwilling to kill Kathrine outright as he wanted her for himself - her lineage was strong and their children may even receive the gift of Malignant Prophecy if he got lucky; and at worst he could always sell her back to her family for an astronomical amount of money before running if the plan didn’t go as expected.

Crendir wondered if his fiance would even accept him back after all was said and done. But then again, the deeper he went down this rabbit hole - the more he understood about what kind of implications this would have for the vampire race as a whole. The markings along the labyrinth grounds and here on the temple walls told a tale as old as the tenth universe, perhaps even older - but revised from the teachings of the current Blood God. A history lost to time and hidden by deceit.

This was all far bigger than him. He understood why Elder Thune was so adamant about getting it done. Crendir needed to see this through.

“Shut the door and get inside!” Crendir shouted, stabbing a mutated hulking ape creature with toothy suckers like a lamprey in place of a face. Bile and gore splattered all over his dented armor, but he shoulder checked the next one and blurred forward - killing seven more of the monsters in the blink of an eye. “I SAID SHUT THE DOOR!”

Faras, the soldier not currently tasked with keeping the prisoners on a tight leash, slammed his broadsword into a chain keeping the temple’s stone slab up. The reinforced chain sparked, and as Crendir continued to mow down the swarming enraged precursors - Faras continued to chop away.

“It’s giving! Just hold a moment!” Faras yelled, raising his blade one more time as he infused the blade with his dao. The blade shimmered, but he let out a scream when a piercing blue projectile flashed through his left shoulder.

Faras was spun off his feet, flattening to the floor with a grunt. Another projectile bounced off his helmet, smashing his face back into the floor, and Crendir snarled his rage.

“Incompetent FOOL!” Crendir rushed back, abandoning the choke point for only a few moments as he began smashing his own sword into the damaged chain.

The chain then snapped, and the enchanted stone slab crashed down on a dozen precursors as the fanged humanoids crumpled like paper.

A flash of Crendir’s aura saw the remaining precursors who’d made it into the passage wither and rot, and the vampire leaned on his sword with a heaving breath while glaring down at the soldier who was picking himself up. “Those wounds should regenerate soon enough. Get up.”

Crendir kicked the man, causing Faras to wince, and turned back to Kathrine and Mara who were being held in place by thick chains and suppression collars.

“Which… Way…” Crendir asked, sneering with his fangs on full display. “And do not make the mistake of attempting to trick me again, or by the Blood God I will just kill you both and find the way myself now that we’re so close.”

Kathrine was too weak from blood loss and the beatings she’d received to reply, her head flopping to the side with her eyes only partway open as her fingers twitched.

Mara was not in great shape, but she was at least able to glare at him and maintain a more normal composure. Spitting black blood onto the ground in front of him, she arched her neck and head-bobbed down one of the three hallways leading further into the temple. She rasped: “That way.”

Crendir remained skeptical, eyeing the other two passages - but they all took sharp turns that prevented him from seeing more than twenty yards out. “Fine. But you’re going first. If there are any more traps, you’ll be the one triggering them.”

Shoving the bound ghoul woman down the corridor and causing her to stumble, he kicked her when she didn’t get up. “MOVE!”

Wincing and taking in a ragged breath, Mara grudgingly got to her feet and started down the corridor with a sullen expression. Deep cuts riddled her body and some of the wounds still leaked the black blood indicative of her race, and her hair was matted to the right side of her head - but she continued on anyway.

The trek through the temple was long and slow, and there were a few precursors still lingering inside that had to be dealt with - but the traps had all long ago been triggered with their shattered remains or scorched runes showing signs of use.

Stolen story; please report.

Crendir began to smile as he saw evidence of previous passage, and his heartbeat quickened in excitement. The ghoul bitch wasn’t lying after all, and he could almost feel the victory within his grasp. The only things slowing them down were Kathrine and Mara, and both of them were solidly beaten to keep them going whenever they stumbled or fell.

“I… I think I can feel it!” Faras gasped in excitement as they entered a large room filled with the bodies of a battle that had to be months old. Other dead vampires, likely locals, were scattered amidst the corpses of precursors, with a few heads mounted on spikes and an altar to some unknown god along the far wall.

Crendir could feel it too. A permeating aura of blood leaked out into the surroundings the further in they went, it latched onto his Blood Sub-Pillar like a leech - but the feeling was invigorating. It wasn’t the type of Blood energy he was used to, but it felt like a long lost piece to a puzzle was settling inside him as the soothing aura electrified his very soul.

A small, indiscriminate movement caught Crendir’s attention at the periphery of his vision - and he whipped around to stare down the hallway they’d come through.

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Was he seeing things?

Crendir sent out a pulse of his aura, causing the old bodies to rot faster as their coagulated blood was ripped from their insides. But there was no scream, no response, no roar of anger or pain that he’d been expecting.

He listened for heartbeats.

Still nothing.

Frowning, he felt his wrist twitch as the man holding the prisoners’ chains asked: “See something, commander?”

Damn it. Crendir couldn’t even remember the man’s name. He shook his head, and turned around to begin walking once more. “It must be nothing. Carry on, we need to hurry. We’re probably still being tracked.

Heading further into the temple, what Crendir and his comrades didn’t see was the chameleon flicker of insectoid chitin as multiple pairs of yellow eyes flashed brightly in the darkness.

***

Crendir stood in awe, a feeling of reverence coming over him while he beheld the inner sanctum.

The room was very large, a dome in the center of the pyramid, with large spikes sticking out along the walls. Only half of the spikes had any bodies on them, and the corpses looked withered and dry - while the other half of the spikes looked like they’d once been in use but had been torn halfway off, cut off, or obliterated by something. These particular remnants of spikes on the ground were still cached in dried black blood, but radiated sinister energies of sacrifice.

Signs of battle also marred the area, with long gashes along the stone. Pentagrams and runes etched into the circumference of the dome flickered on and off or were completely dead altogether. Bending down and touching one of the gashes in the stone, Crendir winced and yanked his hand back when a violently potent remnant of Shadow energy lashed out at him.

His eyebrows raised in surprise. Whatever or whoever had caused these markings had a fundamentally different view of how Shadow worked altogether, and it made him jealous to think that a dao insight so potent was even able to be achieved. Especially in a backwater world like this one.

Truly, Panu was an oddity when it came to integrating planets.

More than anything else though, what caught Crendir’s attention was the large coffin in the center of the room. It was laid out on a large and slightly raised platform, the stone of the coffin was carved intricately in patterns that radiated and pulsed energy that now permeated most of the temple. This was the source, and it was both ancient and powerful.

Just looking at the coffin gave Crendir a sense of foreboding and dread, and he felt his own soul energies being slowly sucked out of him to feed the coffin with every staggered breath he took.

“By Elysium…” Crendir muttered, red eyes wide and taking a step forward. He reached a hand out, and ever so slowly touched the coffin. “This is it! This is actually it!”

A pulse of that same energy that’d invigorated him earlier swept through his soul with a thousand times more potency, and Crendir let out a gasp of excited envy as he coveted the secrets of what this coffin held. But he knew he couldn’t try to absorb it just yet, and didn’t even open the coffin as he still had to take the vial supplied to him by Elder Thune. Crendir was not a true pureblood, and the mixture contained in the vial would help him absorb the fallen god’s essence long enough for his body to stabilize.

Withdrawing the small crystal vial from his spatial sack, Crendir lifted the vial to his lips and quickly downed the substance as the others watched behind him.

[You have drank “Voluminous Bloodline Inheritance Factor”, upgrading the quality of your vampiric bloodlines to “Pureblood” quality temporarily. It is possible to make this a permanent change, should you meet the necessary dao requirements.]

He turned around, grin wide across his face, as he sneered at the two bloodied prisoners on their knees at the room’s edge. “All that trouble to try and keep me off the scent, all that time wasted… If only you’d done as you were told the first time - I may have let you live!”

His two soldiers laughed, and Mara nervously bit her cracked lip while Kathrine barely supported herself with obvious head trauma after the last beating.

“You said you wouldn’t take our lives if-” Mara began with a quivering voice, only for Crendir to lash out with a pulse of his aura again.

The aura collided with Mara’s body like a violent slap to the face, and she reeled back as pockets of black blood were leached out of her body as her skin began to shrivel. The ghoul woman screamed, writhing on the floor as the vampire soldiers laughed louder at her obvious agony.

“Yes… Scream for me and die like a dog, and perhaps-” Crendir’s eyes saw a flash of purple blades and a yellow gaze as a tearing motion split space itself in front of him.

Crendir stopped monologuing, dropped the used vial and created a barrier of blood, intercepting the attack that caused the entire gigantic dome room to shudder with the force as his two guards were annihilated in sprays of gore.

Like chameleons, the spiked chitin and skin of six mantis-like archdemons began converting from the colors of their surroundings to that of a deep burgundy red. Purple scythe-like blades along their arms, demonic horns sprouting from their heads, pincers clicking, and yellow eyes boring into him, the mantis creatures flared their wings towards him with hissing and the sound of strange laughter.

One of the mantis picked Mara up and administered some kind of liquid into the ghoul’s mouth through a long, tube-like, fleshy tongue, and the decay effects of Crendir’s aura were quickly subdued and even reversed as Mara began to gasp. Kathrine had the same done to her next, though remained in a semi comatose state despite her wounds visibly healing to the naked eye.

“Ah yes… We’ve been hunting you for some time now, little vampire!” The one Crendir had come to know as Tre’Zix crowed, laughing as his huge forelegs smashed into the stone with a hiss of delight. “You’ve been quite the slippery one! To think that you’d have gotten this far with meager trinkets is somewhat befuddling, even if your level is technically higher than ours is right now… It brings me great shame to have let you go - and even greater pleasure to see you die before me now!”

He was too shocked to react.

Before Crendir even knew what was happening, five of the six mantis demons sprang. Two went left, two went right, and Tre’Zix launched himself overhead with a flare of his wings as purple scythes infused with sin erupted in explosions of raw energy. The pack hunters were coordinated and hit him in a dozen different places at once, cleaving off his arms, his legs, and skewering him all over as Crendir’s vampiric armor was punctured and sliced through effortlessly. Gore and blood erupted out of his body like a volcano as his jaw was ripped off, his neck sliced open, his intestines ripped from his insides.

But his life saving trinkets all simultaneously activated at once in response. With over fifty of the incredibly expensive amulets and rings flaring to activate at the abrupt change in his life force, they exploded in a shower of light that knocked the archdemons back with angry screeches. Tre’Zix and his comrades all hit the floor and walls on their own feet though, twisting in the air to land like cats and shielding themselves with barriers of their own as the rebuffing white light sought to kill them while simultaneously healing Crendir.

His limbs stitched back together. His jaw reattached itself. His intestines re-entered his torso and the wound zipped shut like it’d never been there before.

WHUMPH

A thick wall of green, unholy power suddenly separated Crendir from the archdemons, and he blinked in shock while wiping the sweat from his eyes. None of his protective trinkets did something like this, nor had the ability to produce a barrier of this quality. So just what was creating it?

He saw Tre’Zix scream in rage on the other side of the barrier, wings flaring again as he smashed a purple blade against the thick green wall to create sparks of malignant energies and shockwaves across the room. The words and attacks were muffled in volume though, “GREED WORMS! I’LL GUT YOU FOR THIS! I’LL GUT YOU ALL!”

He’d never seen the archdemon so thoroughly enraged before in the few short times he’d had the misfortune of meeting Tre’Zix.

The sound of a wooden staff tapping on the stone gave Crendir pause, and he hesitantly turned his attention to the right - where a human figure had walked through a shifting portal just behind the coffin.

It was a tall red-skinned tiefling, toned but not large, and likely blind due to the black bandage wrapped around his eyes and the back of his head. He wore no shirt, and had baggy pants coming down to scale boots that glinted in the light of the magics on display. In his right hand he held a staff with the severed heads of various species hanging from strings off the top, and behind him were similarly dressed tieflings with luminous purple eyes that were only slightly smaller in stature and wielded various curved blades instead of staves.

“Tut, tut, you didn’t think Elysium would allow you to come to this integrating world without competition - did you? You look so surprised! Come now, Tre’Zix - there is no reason to be so angry! Your efforts will prove futile unless you want to whack at it for at least a minute! By then it’ll be too late.” The tiefling man chuckled, coming to the unholy barrier and tapping it with one of his knuckles. He seemed completely uncaring of the attacks now raining down on the barrier with whirlwind speeds, and cocked his head with a mocking frown. “You and I both know that you assassin types don’t gain shield penetrating abilities of any worth until the D-grade. You’ll have a rather hard time breaking through that spell-weave now that we’ve all been reset!”

Some of the other tieflings laughed along with him, and the blindfolded man turned around to stare at Crendir still on the floor. His frown grew deeper, this time being more genuine. “What on Greed’s name are you still doing on the floor, boy!? We don’t have time to be dawdling around like this! You have an important part to play and we can’t have you stupidly staring up at your would-be murderers with that dumb look on your face. My word, I hope The Gambler knows what he’s doing aligning our forces with that incompetent Elder Thune and his goons.”

The entire temple rumbled, and the tiefling abruptly looked up as the ground began shaking underneath him. Surprise, and then anger crossed the caster’s visage as the stone of the ceiling began turning black - and cracks began to spread with illuminating neon-teal and gray lights with a vast aura permeating the room.

“Oh my.” The tiefling muttered, watching his barrier begin to show cracks of its own, spreading from the ceiling, as a feminine scream of utter rage crashed down on their location. “This is not good. You four, get the coffin. You and you, grab that vampire brat. It appears the Reincarnation of Wrath has come a little bit sooner than we’d expected.”

Six shirtless tiefling soldiers with grim expressions rushed to secure Crendir and the fallen elder god’s coffin, and the four with the coffin let off pained grunts as the magics started eating away at their flesh and sucking in their essence at the touch. But they kept at it, and rushed headlong into the portal the tiefling caster had made.

Crendir was still utterly dumbstruck at all that was going on around him, and let out a scream as a huge, clawed hand made from bone and ghost plasma smashed through the ceiling.

Ripping off the temple’s roof, a huge horned devil made entirely from bones and encased in the body of a phantom glared down with neon teal flames for eyes. It was absolutely monstrous, and the aura it produced wreaked of death and violence. Above the devil were well over two dozen angels of death with glares that could kill, all of which were floating around a singular six-armed, four-winged woman whose black skeleton could be seen through her own phantasmal body. She was beautiful, yet menacing, and just looking at her made Crendir vomit blood as he gasped and hit the ground.

“Oh hello there big boy!” The tiefling sheepishly laughed, stepping backwards as Crendir was dragged along the floor and the barrier began to shatter. “It’s been a few eons! Barktarus, was it!? And of course, the Reincarnation of Wrath herself! Who could forget? It’s been a pleasure but I do believe that it’s time for me to leave. Goodbye for now!”

Tre’Zix slammed an empowered blade into the barrier as Allie’s aura continued to leave cracks all around it, and the unholy energy exploded into fragments of green and black light.

The tiefling caster shrieked and jumped through the portal the same moment Crendir was dragged through, and in an instant they were gone from the underdark.

Crendir had somehow made it out alive.