Overpowered Wizard

The Darkrun Marriage Ring on his left ring finger made the corrupted stronger and more dark resistant when he was near them.

That hadn’t been an issue for him lately. He’d overpowered everything across the Stone Sea River so far.

But the Toy Knight +1 was literally built differently. The boost from being around him seemed to push the incredibly powerful creature to a new league above its own weight class.

Realizing this, Zarian took the Void Waltz exit.

Unfortunately, that was another mistake.

The Toy Knight +1 followed him like a shadow into the void. Because of the marriage ring, the creature only grew stronger while there with him.

With little choice, Zarian and Para braced themselves.

Para armored her host. She wrapped him up with as much hard material as she could. Zarian turned on Grand War Mage Body Furnace. He condensed his limited aura into a solid shell around him and Para.

That was all they could do before taking a barrage of hits that went harder than anything they’d faced before. The hits were so hard they would’ve demolished most of the Grimrock Castle Mountains, if not the entire range. Multiple kingdoms would’ve found themselves devastated, wiped off the map, if this happened anywhere else outside of the void.

Then a torrent of lightning-coated steam followed them out when they finally left the void. They struck a single dark spire that was bigger than all the spires Zarian had seen.

The lone spire was so big it made the thousand-foot tall Toy Knight +1 look small in comparison.

Like other spires, there were windows that led inside into rooms separated by rising elevations. Some spires even had treasures with monsters having set their lairs there either at the sky-scraping top or at the sea-floor base.

The behemoth crashed through a gaping window where its barrage of attacks had thrown Zarian into. They landed in the middle of the colossal spire where there were no other creatures but them.

Luciana’s puppet-like toy collapsed and skidded across the floor, its immense wings flapping uselessly while it seemed to forget how to move properly again.

That didn’t seem to matter. The Toy Knight +1 moved by any means necessary. It jerked, slithered, skittered, and thrashed towards its goal at a speed that was too fast and too effective for something of its size and bulk.

Zarian stood in a crater that was a few hundreds feet wide.

He was covered in his own blood. The kilt around his waist was frayed and mostly dead except for a few small serpentine strands that moved with a frenzy as his lion tail lashed left and right rapidly behind him.

Together, the wizard and his parasite seemed like a small and weak pair of creatures compared to the Toy Knight +1. The shadow of the immense creature engulfed them as the Toy Knight +1 drew near.

“You’ve won, Luciana,” Zarian said. “I’ll put on my hat.”

The Toy Knight +1 formed a large blue-orange hammer with Moon Armaments +2. The creature swung the hammer down on Zarian with all of its destructive might.

Before impact, the hat appeared on Zarian’s head. A shimmer of blue-red arcane energy passed through the hat and entered the wizard’s body. Aura expanding and circulating, Zarian flipped on Grand War Mage Body Furnace and covered himself in a brighter plasma-blue light. He flipped on Lion Prince once again despite the dangers, forcing the flow of causality and the firm sense of reality to tilt heavily in his favor.

Then Zarian punched the face of the hammer with his fist.

He condensed all of his intense aura and body boost to his knuckles. And he applied some shockwave magic on top of it while mixing in Void Domain.

The result was a breathtaking impact where everything became still for a split second. Then the hammer bounced backward and shattered to many pieces in the monstrous grasp of the Toy Knight +1.

Following that, an immense and energetic explosion erupted in the face of the Greater Aberration Corruption and threw it backward. The explosive wave struck the walls of the giant spire and blew them apart.

The floors below and above, many filled with monsters and treasures, got blown away just the same as a far-reaching destruction spread in an unstoppable wave that could be felt all around the World of Castles and Caverns and be easily seen from space.

Zarian didn’t just bring down the colossal spire. He scattered its many pieces far into the atmosphere and across the Walled Continent and maybe a little further beyond. He flayed apart the front of the Toy Knight +1, making it looked like it ran into a kingdom-sized cheese grater.

That wasn’t enough to kill such a creature, which clearly had its own way of fixing its body through rapid mutations or adaptability. That was fine and dandy. Zarian wasn’t satisfied. Something was taking over him. Something he rarely allowed himself to fall into.

Zarian became … berserk.

He synchronized his brain with Para. The parasite focused all of her power on reinforcing his body. He kept Grand War Mage Body Furnace going, its plasma-blue light shining over his muscular body with the bright light of a neutron star.

He kept Lion Prince powered on, breaking reality over his knee before fixing the pieces into a stack of cards with him at the peak. He used all of his available buffs to push him to the zenith.

He condensed all of his aura into his body with Aura Mastery and Aura Magnificence even if that was too much aura. He kept the dark cultivation and cursed crown, but the hat remained. Then Zarian flew forward and punched the Toy Knight +1 right on its helmeted face while taking a page from Naomi’s book.

He manipulated the force of his punch to come out wide so it could land on a larger surface area. He didn’t want to punch through. No, no, no. He wanted his punch to drum. So when he landed the hit, he made the helmet crumple like a soda-can, shattering many of the moon rock pieces fused to it.

With another punch, Zarian knocked the thousand-foot titan out of the sky. He sent it flying down toward the water. The wizard rocketed down after it, roaring with a roar that resounded halfway across the world, freezing up billions who heard him. The corrupted wretch, the focal point of his lion-like wrath, did all it could not to freeze up.

Zarian was preparing a third punch when the creature flapped its wings and slowed its descent. The Toy Knight +1 thrust forth its many limbs and released torrents of steam mixed with mini missiles of moon magic. Then it flickered into a more shadowy and intangible form to dodge around Zarian.

Zarian flew straight through the steam torrent. He flew straight through the barrages of moon magic missiles. He took his hits, bled, and let his vitality turn to rags.

But he stayed focused on his goal. He cast Void Domain to enforce his will upon the Toy Knight +1’s shadowy form and push it back into being solid enough for him to punch with a reckoning to its gnarled face – and he succeeded.

He connected with a third punch that sounded far louder and more devastating than the past ones. He made the creature flip backward and out of control, its mile-wide wings flapping uselessly.

Then the thing he wanted since this battle started emerged.

Fear. The Toy Knight +1 now knew what fear truly meant.

Zarian drank it up like his favorite addiction.

His Eldritch Existence kicked in and gave his vitality a rightful boost. The eldritch trait also worked on breaking the enemy’s Willpower and making it easier prey, even if a desperate one.

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The consequence of that led to the Toy Knight +1 going berserk and out of control. It wanted to kill the thing it feared most with a desperate and unintelligent fervor. That broke the controls Luciana had on her own toy as it thrashed, flailed, and attacked without strategy, without guidance.

Zarian’s Eldritch Existence only made him harder to hit. He seemed to flicker in and out of reality and reappeared from the peripherals out of nowhere before laying on the behemoth another punch.

This latest hit sent the creature down below the surface of the water. A whopping white geyser shot up, the tip exiting the atmosphere as a frozen lance escaping into space.

Another punch followed up the last while in a bubble of air, all the water displaced widely in all directions from the sheer force of Zarian’s attacks. So with no water in his way, Zarian struck so hard it was like setting off a nuke bigger than any nuke the old world could create.

All the rushing water that wanted to fill up the gap got sent back in the other direction. Nothing but Zarian and his prey existed in this impossible gap being forced open in the Stone Sea River.

Then Zarian punched again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. Nuke after nuke after nuke after nuke after nuke after nuke after nuke after nuke.

All of his punches had the odds in his favor as he condensed his aura to the ends of his knuckles, mixed it with concussive magic, and wrapped that up with Void Domain for the extra buffs that made his Grand War Mage Body Furnace an indomitable skill. With his Lion Prince and the odds staying on his side and Para’s reinforcement of his body, Zarian brought a hammer to a giant nail repeatedly.

He nuke-punched the Toy Knight +1 to the bottom of the Stone Sea River. Then he nuke-punched his victim even further below the surface, breaking the upper crust, moving continental plates, and causing earthquakes that everything around the World of Castles and Caverns could feel. He kept nuke-punching the Greater Aberration Corrupted underground, closer toward the center, until there was no more of Toy Knight +1 for him to nuke-punch.

Finally, the power of the Lion Prince snapped. It could only bend reality so much, and it couldn’t keep up with Zarian’s berserk rage.

Without that skill, everything else unraveled. Zarian found himself unable to keep hammering with the wrath of an ultra god. His body was broken and his vitality was shredded. And he was drowning in lava and raining sea water that was quickly filling the hole he drilled miles below the surface of the world.

Things faded into the black before he woke up later on top of a spire, vomiting the briny water. Every part of him hurt. Most of his body was fucked up beyond description and getting held together by parasitic threads.

His grimoires were gone. He completely forgot about them. He hadn’t remembered dismissing them. He tried to summon them.

Black rattled into appearance. Voidling made a metallic humming appearance. Gator hissed with annoyance. Morph didn’t appear. He used Devourer of Secrets and Stories to poke the Star System while trying to summon Morph again.

<The Advanced Grimoire of Freaky Morphs +1 is on cooldown until it recovers from destruction.>

“Shit,” Zarian said hoarsely. “My bad, Morph.”

Now they knew what happened when any of his grimoires got destroyed. They went on cooldowns that could last for who knew how long. It made sense that it happened to Morph, who was the most physical of manifestations compared to the others.

Zarian groaned, dismissing his still-working grimoires, and laid on his back. He felt weary. He had scraps of vitality left, just enough for stamina.

He had to pay the piper for abusing the Lion Prince so much, leaving him royally screwed. He needed to reach a decent healer. He needed Gilbert.

“Hmmm,” Para hummed, her voice sounding from every spot she held Zarian together. No kilt or cloak for now. She was all flesh-holding threads, the savior of his body. “Interesting.”

“What’s so interesting?”

“I’ve never seen you so angry before,” Para said.

Zarian glowered over the side. He saw an immense waterfall roar into the hole he’d created by punching a behemoth deep under the surface of the world.

“Luciana got one over me. She forced me to break my self-nerf. I didn’t want to break it … but that thing she made. It was pretty damn strong.”

“I suppose she has won one against us.”

“Ugh.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. You don’t have to. I’m just … feeling ashamed or whatever.”

“Well, it seems like her presence on your ring is lighter.”

Zarian turned his baleful glare to his marriage ring. He really felt pissed at how his wife had gotten in the way of his training. She’d created something so outrageously strong Zarian had ended up on the back foot more than he should’ve.

“Well, Luciana, are you happy now?” Zarian grouched down at his marriage ring.

The image of Luciana’s black-painted, velvety, and full lips appeared in Zarian’s head. All he saw was her lips spread into a glinting white smile that was both alluring and devious. Then the image faded from his mind, having answered his question.

Luciana was indeed happy.

She’d won one against him.

Zarian huffed. He couldn’t recall ever getting this pissed off before. It was weird.

It was also freeing.

He didn’t know what to make of it.

So he sat up, even if it was a struggle, and stewed in his grumpiness. His lion tail thumped from one side to the other on the spire roof.

The Intense Arcana Hat +1 was still on his head. He mulled over if he should keep it or not. In the end, he sent it away, which led to Para hissing unhappily.

The gravity web magic on his back was gone, wiped out, which further messed with his dark cultivation. He summoned some spectral spiders to spin and cast another version on his back to continue where he left off.

The only thing that remained uninterrupted was the barbed crown on his head, which made itself more noticeable after Zarian dismissed his hat.

“You’re in a contemplative mood,” Zarian grunted toward Para.

“Yes, well, the results were interesting. We’ve never done something like that before. The way we used our abilities on your body while you were so angry was powerful and enthralling.”

Para hissed thoughtfully before continuing.

“None of that would’ve been possible without Lion Prince. It makes me think that Lion Prince is not only a part of a lineage but perhaps another side of ultra god bloodline. Maybe it’s a separate force.”

“Para … are you saying … I’m not just carrying a single ultra god bloodline? But maybe two? One is defined by Overwhelming Darkness. And Lion Prince defines the other. Doubling what makes me the son of ultra gods. Is that what you’re saying?”

“In layman’s terms … it’s like you have two cosmic classes that are condensed into two skills at the forefront of your profile. So, yes, I think that is the case. You are not just gifted with one but two separate and powerful ultra bloodline skills. That would explain why your family is so interested in your development despite prior failures. Maybe you have the potential to be the most powerful of them all.”

Zarian opened and closed his mouth.

Did Ariana know this?

Did Luciana? Was that why Luciana acted so weirdly toward him?

Zarian looked down at his scraped up knuckles that Para couldn’t quite fix. He’d punched in a way he never done before, all because of Lion Prince.

Was this what it was like to fight like Naomi? Was this why Naomi could push so hard and put herself in the thick of things?

For that one moment, where Zarian had let go and fought like a beast, he stopped being a wizard. He’d concentrated on the most effective way to pummel his enemy. Then he’d done it again and again and again with punches that landed like the biggest nukes, one after another after another.

Lion Prince seemed to favor such an approach. Outright domination with a one-track mind. Completely focused. Very simple. Quite the opposite of Overwhelming Darkness and its expansive, far-reaching, and flexible approach. Both could be destructive in their own way, but Zarian wasn’t sure if he favored them equally.

“I don’t mind how Lion Prince prefers to be used. But I don’t want to lean on that.” Zarian sighed. “It’s not the path I want to build. So, yeah, I’ll concede. Luciana got me on this one. She showed us how I can be a beast when I let go. She showed us how destructive I can be even without my darkness. But that’s not what I want.”

Zarian clenched his hands into tight fists, then with a sigh he loosened his fingers and let them unfurl. “I want … to be a wizard. I want to fight with power and mastery and control. And I want my friends to be right there beside me.”

“Mmm, I wish for the same for you and for me. But I don’t think it’s bad that we have other options in case we must go berserk as long as we are aware of how it narrows our focus. It makes us dumber, in a sense, and makes free evil +7 pointless. And if we waste such a destructive power at the wrong time…”

“We’ll become pretty freaking vulnerable in the aftermath,” Zarian said, looking down at his messed up body. He could fix that by killing himself and reviving, but he wanted to keep the power of the Divine Revival Charm reserved for emergencies.

“So let’s agree that’s not something we use often, eh?” Zarian suggested.

“Yes, but it’s not something we shouldn’t shun completely. Perhaps … Naomi would also like to see this part of you under a more controlled setting.”

Zarian hesitated a little before coming to an agreement, which was unfair. Para dangled Naomi’s name in front of his face like a carrot. The parasite was becoming more and more depraved with her … research.

Either way, he already had a lot of tools in his tool shed he needed to master. The super punchy berserker version of him could wait in the back of the line or act like a ‘Break in Case of Emergency’ option.

He could begrudgingly thank his wife for pushing his buttons far enough to lead to this important revelation. But he was nowhere near ready to admit that aloud right now.

He might never admit it, honestly.

Luciana might go even crazier from hearing that.

Man, Luciana is becoming a pain in the ass. Smug and hungry for attention.

Was that because she was a gothic shadow goddess with an ultra bloodline paying close attention to his double ultra bloodlines?

Or was that what it meant to be a married man with a wife?

Zarian wasn’t sure. Instead of thinking about it any further, he let himself rest. Then he went off to find Aura Slayer, which had landed on the seafloor some fifty miles away. Once he retrieved the sword, he continued his journey east across the Stone Sea River while still committed to his dark cultivation and cursed aura training.