Victor of Tucson
Book 10: Chapter 46: To Break Their Will

46 – To Break Their Will

As Victor fell, he channeled Sovereign Will into his strength and vitality, bringing them to 1559 and 1541, respectively. He didn’t look at his status sheet to confirm the numbers, but he could feel the difference in himself. He’d broken through some kind of threshold in his cocoon-like state within his vault. Most of his attributes were significantly higher, but with his Sovereign Will boosting his strength and vitality, he felt like he’d transcended some sort of limit—and he wasn’t even Berserk. Was this what it felt like to be a steel seeker? A veil walker?

It wasn’t that he was deluding himself into thinking he was one of those. He knew he was still, technically, an iron ranker. He also knew that he’d been fighting—and beating—steel seekers since he was tier six. Looking back at himself, as he was then, he knew he was something different now. He was a true titan, freshly forged and just coming into his power, yes, but a titan nonetheless. Why else would he have the audacity to leap into battle with not one or two, but twenty-six steel seekers?

The thought made him laugh as he plummeted toward incoming fireballs, arrows, spears, and a dozen other attacks. When he was fifty yards from the ground, the first spell hit him—a lance of pure, red, destructive force. It slid off his aegis, leaving a trail of sparks but otherwise doing no harm. He batted aside a massive five-hundred-pound lance of dark metal—Lifedrinker was unimpressed. He shrugged off a dozen fire attacks, shards of razored ice, a storm of arrows and knives, and then smashed into the ground, right at the center of the pack of champions.

Several champions attempted to create distance between themselves and Victor, likely because they excelled at ranged attacks rather than direct melee. Many leaped to attack, smashing into each other in their frenzy to get to him. Victor saw axes, spears, knives, swords—even claws and spiked gauntlets. None of them seemed to have counted on the effect his impact with the earth would have.

Even expanded to his full size of nearly thirty feet, Victor was far denser than a normal creature. His titanic flesh and bones were hundreds of times more resilient than a natural human's. Add to that the colossal weight of his armor and Lifedrinker, and the impact was more like dropping a battle tank from a skyscraper than that of a man jumping off a building. For good measure, as he hit the ground, Victor stomped, casting Wake the Earth.

The concussion was like a bomb going off. The ground erupted in outward-flowing ripples of earth ten feet high. A great cloud of dust exploded into the air, riding the shockwave as the world shook and split, and fiery magma geysered forth from a dozen different fissures. The champions charging to intercept Victor where he would land were thrown back, one and all. Those running to make distance were smashed down by the shockwave, like a giant—one bigger than even Victor—had slapped them on the back.

Victor stood at the epicenter of his destructive landing, lifted Lifedrinker high, and roared, casting Voice of the Angry Earth. The spell was designed to be amplified by the strength of the caster’s aura, and Victor’s aura was strong, fully off its leash. He remembered when he’d stood up to Ronkerz’s aura, how it had required all of his effort, but he’d done it. Comparatively, he felt like his aura had reached those levels—no, it had surpassed them. As the thought flitted across his mind, part of him wanted to leave that very second and hunt Ronkerz down for a rematch—he wanted to make him bend to his aura.

The thought was just a fraction of a millisecond of distraction, though, and he pressed on with his planned attack. Voice of the Angry Earth served a purpose beyond announcing his might: it was meant to brutalize the senses of his foes and drive them to their knees. Its purpose was to begin softening their will. As his voice broke like thunder, a roar that shook the walls of the palace behind him, his foes, already struggling to find their footing, already channeling Energy into abilities that would right their balance, were smashed with the weight of Victor’s will.

The effect was profound. Many of the champions around him had their immediate thoughts dashed from their minds as they struggled to combat the weight of Victor’s aura. Those few who’d kept or regained their feet succumbed, falling to a knee or collapsing entirely. Those already down were hit even harder, their struggles to stand or move making their defenses sluggish.

Victor wasn’t done, though—he’d only just begun. Standing at the center of the crater he’d created, he cast Core Domain, fueling the hungry spell with a thick ribbon of fear-attuned Energy. Shadows burst outward from him, cloaking the blackness of moonless midnight. The ground, already treacherous due to his landing and Wake the Earth, became a shifting landscape of nightmares tailored to each beholder’s personal fears.

Some of the champions found themselves struggling in thick, soupy water. Others were no longer struggling to stand on dirt and rock, but amid moldering corpses. Still others saw the soil teeming with rats or insects, snakes or maggots. Grasping, decayed hands sprang from the earth, and the air echoed with the chorus of individual nightmares. Many of the champions had already been panicking, but this new scenario, this nightmare incarnate, broke them further.

Standing at the center of his nightmare domain, Victor laughed as he watched these champions struggle. It was a cruel laugh, but it was rooted in righteous fury—these were not men and women to be pitied. These “champions” had come together to bully and massacre those weaker than themselves. They were here to break into Victor’s home and slaughter men, women, and children. They would show no mercy, and neither would Victor.

The nightmare had more effects than to terrorize his foes. It was Victor’s domain, and he was aware of the beings within it. It helped him recognize who was suffering the most and who was resisting his will. He could tell that more than half of the champions arrayed against him were broken, ready to flee, but that wasn’t enough. Gathering his Energy, Victor cast Dread Imperative.

The spell called for rage- or fear-attuned Energy, and Victor was unsure if it would make a difference which one he used. Since he’d already created a domain rooted in fear, he channeled rage into it. A wave of malignant red light rolled outward with him at the epicenter, and where it passed over the foreign champions, he could see how it invaded their minds. Their eyes widened, their faces twisted into visages of terrorized madness, and many of them ceased their futile attempts to flee his domain, falling to writhe on the ground, convulsing with screams and howls.

Victor, face grim despite his carnal grin, scanned his domain, surveying his foes. Were they ready? He could feel some of them fighting to regain control, struggling to turn the tables on him with a well-placed, well-timed spell. He wasn’t surprised—these were champions, after all. With a great inhalation, Victor focused his gaze on those with the strongest wills, those who were, inch by inch, fighting to claw their way out of his terrorizing spells. Then he breathed abyssal magma on them.

On some instinctive level, Victor knew the magma, laced with the emptiness of the void, would further break them. His eyes blazed with hungry crimson flames as the torrent of fiery lava, rippling with waves of impossible black, poured forth, engulfing his struggling foes. They burned and screamed. Some died outright, but those who didn’t were broken in other ways. Victor felt their wills shatter, and his nightmare domain swooped in, taking their minds away from their tortured bodies.

Satisfied with his efforts, Victor finished his planned attack. Gathering a tremendous surge of Energy, he cast Maw of the Broken Will. He felt his rage-attuned Energy gather around him, slipping its furious tendrils into the fabric of the universe, and, with a sharp punctuation of his will, he pulled, ripping open a rift, a jagged chasm into a realm of nightmares, devoid of any other Energy or any hope of salvation for those drawn within.

All of his efforts up to that point had been made to soften his foes, break their wills, and prepare them for the maw. As long, shadowy, grasping claws stretched out of the rift, grabbing hold of his enemies, few even struggled. Those who did could not resist the strength of Victor’s will as he commanded his terrible spell to pull them in. By twos and threes, they succumbed and slipped into that gaping, awful fissure until only Victor stood on the battlefield, several burned, twisted corpses arrayed around him.

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He still held Lifedrinker on his shoulder, and he could feel her disappointment, her urgent need to fight. “Not yet, chica. These aren’t worth your efforts. We’ll water the soil with their blood, but your fight is yet to come.” As he spoke, Victor looked inward, saw that he’d burned more than a hundred thousand Energy, and allowed his fear domain to fall away; he wouldn’t need it.

When the darkness lifted, he could feel the eyes of thousands on him and knew the walls and tower-tops were covered with people. He looked toward the Khalidaysian encampment and saw that an audience had gathered there, too. The other champions, and their leader, no doubt. He hoped the dragon was among them. He hoped he’d see what he was doing and come down to face him. If not, Victor would have to take the fight to him. This assault on Kynna—on the veil walkers—couldn’t go unpunished.

As he had the thought, his knuckles tightening on Lifedrinker’s haft, the first of his enemies was thrown from the maw. The champion was more of a beast than a man—a great bear with vaguely bipedal features. He writhed on the ground, coughing in deep, chuffing gasps, struggling to crawl. Victor knew the man’s Energy was gone, his will utterly annihilated by his nightmarish pocket realm. He took two strides and cleaved Lifedrinker through his neck, sending his head rolling.

There began a great slaughter, as one after another, his Maw of the Broken Will ejected his foes, broken and ruined, and he put them down. It was dark, bloody work, the kind of thing that no man would take pride in, but Victor knew it had to be done. He had to make it clear that continuing this siege, that confronting him, meant death. As before, he hardened his heart by reminding himself what these men and women would do to the people—the children!—taking shelter within his palace. He reminded himself that they’d happily slayed Kynna’s defenders for days.

When he finished, Lifedrinker bloody on his shoulder, he stood and faced the enemy encampment, defiant. The foreign champions shrank back from his gaze, distant as they were, and they and Victor knew it was over. None of them had come forward to aid their broken comrades. Their best chance had been when Victor’s Energy had been partially depleted—that time was already past.

He contemplated shouting threats or challenges. He contemplated charging into their ranks. This wouldn’t be over until the imperial family was broken. Shouldn’t he find the commander of this assault? Was one of those distant observers the empress? He was just about to step forward, to kill or send those remnants fleeing, when a figure stepped out of the crowd, a tall man, devoid of armor, but wielding a massive black two-handed sword that rippled with waves of malignant red Energy.

Victor knew immediately that this was the dragon. This was the man Tes had warned him about. He took one step toward Victor, but then a torrent of Energy so thick that it looked like a volcanic geyser erupting, exploded out of the torn battlefield around Victor and lifted him a hundred feet into the air. Apparently, the System had decided his current battle was over, and it was paying him his due.

###

“Go, you coward!” Troyssas bellowed, watching the giant, transfixed by a veritable river of rich, translucent Energy, soar into the sky.

“So you aren’t just fond of your own voice, eh?” Dro Vah chuckled, forcing a yawn to highlight his boredom. “You really are stupid. You’ve never heard of a System rebuke?”

Troyssas frowned. It sounded familiar, but, in all honesty, he couldn’t recall what it meant. “Enlighten me.”

“If I try to strike him while the System has him like that, I’ll be struck with a bolt of tribulation Energy and left stunned. The rebuke would be commensurate with the amount of Energy it’s currently doling out to that bastard.”

Troyssas groaned, reaching up to tug on his hair—he’d grown it out and had his man plait it for him. “Wonderful. Then he’ll be even stronger when you face him.”

“Face him?” Dro Vah chuckled again. “What makes you think I’ll face him?”

Grand Prince Troyssas felt his face purpling with fury as the horror he’d just gone through rapidly converted to rage. “I just watched that man slaughter more than half the champions we brought to bear here!” He waved an arm, indicating the ranks of fighters standing to either side of his pavilion. Even as he did so, he realized their numbers had thinned—where had they all gone? Were they fleeing? “Do you think these champions can stop him?”

Dro Vah chuckled, waving a placating hand. “I only wanted to see your reaction. Of course, I’ll slay that man. A giant, or titan as he calls himself, is no match for a dragon. I’ve killed bigger than he. Besides, those little fear tricks won’t work on a dragon—I’m immune.” He sat down in the grass, laying his long, evil blade across his knees. Lifting a hand, waving it lazily, he added, “Relax. When the time is right, you’ll finally see what your sister has been paying for.”

###

The battlements were a frenzy of celebration as the soldiers watched Victor absorb the Energy from his slaughter. Arona, small in stature compared to the people of Ruhn, struggled to keep from being jostled by their hysteria. It reached the point where she cast Solar Shell and let the blazing shield of golden Energy keep people at bay as she climbed atop a crenellation to better see the field below.

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Bryn shouted, trying to be heard over the mayhem.

Arona glanced at her. “That he won?”

“That he slaughtered more than twenty steel seekers in a matter of minutes! Did he advance somehow? Is he a veil walker?”

Arona shook her head—not because she thought the answer was no, but because she simply didn’t know. “I’m at a loss. That spell—he trapped them all. How? Did you feel the Energy surge? It reminded me of some of Vesavo’s great workings. Maybe he did… Maybe he’s a steel seeker, at least.”

“I’m so glad we weren’t down there. I’m so glad we weren’t inside that field he created. Even from a distance, it shook me. I had to look away.” Bryn’s voice was nearly lost in the clamor as she spoke more softly, but Arona had good ears. She heard her.

“I understand what you mean. I almost felt sorry for them, but then I remembered those they’ve killed. I remembered why they wanted to break our gates. Besides, I’ve seen worse. At least Victor killed them quickly.” She shielded her eyes as she watched the stream of brilliant Energy pouring into Victor. Had anyone ever received so much at once? Twenty-six steel seekers—it seemed impossible. How many levels would that give her? Even in tier nine, she had to think that two or three steel seekers would amount to a level. “Twenty-six…”

“What?” Bryn shouted.

Arona shook her head. “Nothing.”

###

Despite the intensity of it, the enormous amount of it, the Energy didn’t make Victor senseless as it had done so often in the past. He was aware of every second as he floated into the air, and the Energy poured into him. He was like a bird on a high-voltage line, but rather than being electrocuted, he was being flooded with power, and his body was awash with endorphins, dopamine, and every other pleasant chemical the Energy could squeeze out of his glands.

As his Core absorbed the Energy and his body was instilled with it, he felt each level it granted, and, in a new twist, was given System messages while he was under the influence of the Energy infusion:

***Congratulations! You have achieved level 96 Doomforged Tyrant and gained 24 will, 24 strength, and 5 vitality.***

***Congratulations! You have achieved level 97 Doomforged Tyrant and gained 24 will, 24 strength, and 5 vitality.***

***Congratulations! You have achieved level 98 Doomforged Tyrant and gained 24 will, 24 strength, and 5 vitality.***

***Congratulations! You have achieved level 99 Doomforged Tyrant and gained 24 will, 24 strength, and 5 vitality.***

***Congratulations! You have collected enough Energy to transcend the mortal ranks and begin the synthesis of your learning. Do you wish to be guided through this process? Yes/No.***

Still floating above the ground, still in the System’s grasp, Victor tried to remember the advice he’d been given. Dar wasn’t against using the System, but hadn’t his ancestors told him to eschew its help when it came to… whatever happened after level 100? Should he let the System help him get started, or should he walk his own path and figure it out alone? He remembered Azforath’s words, “You must simply find a way to make the Other leave you be—to stay out of your way as you progress as you should, without the…limitations it imposes.”

That was the word Victor had been looking for—limitations. He didn’t want the System to limit him. “No,” he said.

***Warning! You have selected to forge your own Mantle without System guidance. This choice is irreversible. By rejecting guidance, you will be foregoing system optimization and Mantle stability safeguards. Are you certain? Yes/No.***

“Yes.”

***Congratulations! You have reached level 100. Your excess accumulated Energy has been deposited into an Energy-well that resides in your spirit space. You can use this Energy to help refine your Mantle. In the future, all collected Energy will be deposited in your Energy-well.***

Victor felt the remainder of the Energy surge into him, and then he fell to the ground, as gently as a feather drifting on a breeze. He could feel the Energy in him; he could feel the power of his new ranks. He lifted Lifedrinker to his shoulder, grinning as he faced the enemy camp. He was ready for a good fight—he was a steelseeker!