The Godsfall Chronicles Book 8, 32 - The King That Was

Book 8, Chapter 32 - The King That Was

Translator: Xiao Lai

Was this another illusion created by the God King?

As Cloudhawk stared at the being he was genuinely confused. There were too many things that didn’t make sense. He knew that everything he’d seen so far defied ordinary logic. They were too wonderful, too strange. It was an illusion, but as real as anything he’d ever felt. For the Demon King to appear like this, here, it had to an sothing.

“Are we finally here?” The forr Demon King hovered in the ether. His trendous mind puzzled over sothing, the doubt he sensed in Cloudhawk’s heart. “You are the creature we have chosen?”

“You’re the Demon King? Or the God King? Or neither.”

“I am and I am not. Gods and demons are beings of the sa root, a fact you surely know by now. The human concept of gods and demons, kings and servants. An absurd paradox.”

The forr King’s words were lost on Cloudhawk. So much about this was strange and suspicious. He’d encountered the Demon King before in his mind. Their exchanges had been brief, but notable. He rembered the presence he felt. Every creature had a unique ntal signature, one that could not be copied or replicated. In all the universe, one’s particular ntal fingerprint was never repeated. It was the most perfect form of identification.

So he was familiar with the forr Demon King. His knowledge of the God King was also much deeper than it was before. Here in this illusory place he was connected to the leader of the gods and could feel him clearly.

The will of the God King had subsided in this place, not as intense as it was before. It seed that he had summoned the mory of the Demon King from his own mind. This is why it was strange. The forr Demon King was as strong as the God King recalled, but his presence felt more akin to the leader of Suru.

What was the connection between these two?

Standing here now the Demon King wore the visage of a god, as he must have appeared before his fall from grace. There was a relationship between him and the God King, like brothers from the sa brood. After all, space and ti were inexorably linked, two sides of the sa coin. It was impossible that the two should be entirely separate.

He couldn’t explain it. Cloudhawk realized he knew too little, the answer eluded him. What he did know was that this creature before him was special. It was as though the Demon King and God King had been cut apart and cobbled together. They existed together in one entity.

“Allow to determine how strong you’ve grown.”

Cloudhawk had no ti to ponder further. The image of his predecessor lted away and, instead of simply moving through space, almost appeared to join with it. His form vanished but Cloudhawk could still feel him here.

Here he cos! Cloudhawk could feel the attack coming.

Concealed in the space between space, a sword of light ca streaking toward him. Ordinarily this insidious attack would be impossible to avoid, but like a large fish beneath the water Cloudhawk could sense the ripples even though there was no sound.

The sword broke back through the veil and lashed out at Cloudhawk. Reality tore like a piece of cheap cloth. As space before him crumbled away he saw displaced images in the void, visible between dense cracks.

Cloudhawk instinctively teleported backward to avoid the strike. However the Demon King seed to know what his successor would do. In the sa instant the first strike reached out, a second struck from a completely different angle and location.

The two swords were thousands of ters apart but struck with coordinated precision. At first glance they were two separate bursts, as if two currents of space collided and left a storm of energy behind. An attack like these, breaching two locations is space, was dangerous and powerful.

Caught between these attacks, almost anything would be annihilated by the sheer force. As they ripped into Cloudhawk’s body they tore him apart into plus of fire. These motes of light slipped from the collapsing space to reform Cloudhawk’s body out of harm’s way.

The Demon King’s attacks did not cease, so neither did Cloudhawk. Everywhere he turned space ripped open and blazing swords reached forth. They weren’t attacking him, however, but reality itself. Thousands of gaping wounds in the fabric of space were everywhere. Storms of spatial energy raged as they were ford like angry dragons, buffeting Cloudhawk in the process.

Was this the way the forr Demon King fought?

Cloudhawk noted that his foe didn’t use any specific class of energy. He used all of his strength to hack at space, and it was the tears left behind that threatened his target. It was a tactic Cloudhawk knew well, one of the strongest in his arsenal.

All matter and energy in the universe were built on the foundation of space. Tear apart the space everything was built on and everything cos crashing down. The forr Demon King’s onslaught was doing irreparable damage to the flows of space – it was the reason why a huge swath of the southern wilds was wrapped in eternal darkness.

After the Great War, the Demon King’s ire had left space in that area ravaged beyond repair like a fruit ravaged by pests. No external matter or energy could co in from the outside, not even light. In the wake of that catastrophe, reality would continue to collapse into nothing, until the death of the universe.

As Cloudhawk dodged the assault on reality, he also fought back.

His predecessor was hiding in a parallel dinsion, moving through it in a way that prevented Cloudhawk from following his actions. The Demon King used his imnse power to punch through the veil between these dinsions and disturb the weave. To the average person, this sort of offensive was impossible to contend with.

Because the two sides weren’t even in the sa reality! One could detonate ten thousand nuclear bombs – a star could go supernova – and it wouldn’t create more than a ripple in the fabric of space. The Demon King’s imnse power over these flows did what an exploding star could not.

These attacks on space disregarded distance. The Demon King’s reach did not extend across the whole universe, but at least as far as the solar system. No matter where Cloudhawk turned he could not escape. The power of his predecessor was brutal and ruthless.

Whatever the creature – from a demon Elder to the great Suran marshal – could not survive in the face of such an assault. Soon thousands of kiloters in every direction were devoured by a storm of spatial disruption. Fractures and fissures were everywhere, creating zones anathema to all life.

These broken fragnts of reality were like being thrown into a at grinder, forever until the end of ti.

Cloudhawk narrowed his eyes and surveyed the environnt. His left eye blanched and turned white. An intense power burst forth, which with staggering force caused the storm of energy to slow to a crawl. It expanded at a snail’s pace.

In this mont of respite, Cloudhawk pinpointed his foe’s location.

He slipped through the veil into the dinsion beneath his own, entering into the sa space as the Demon King. With his target acquired, he launched at him with Godslayer, which caused cracks and warps through the area where it passed.

Where Cloudhawk’s attacks differed from his progenitor was that his spatial powers were weaved together with the power of ti. When the forr King tried to slip away through dinsions, he discovered that ti around him was stopped.

He was frozen in ti!

Cloudhawk’s power over space was equal to his foe’s, but in his journey he had also acquired dominion over ti. Their conflict went beyond the scope of mortal understanding. It was a battle on the scale of the Great War.

Even now Cloudhawk still didn’t know what was going on. He wasn’t sure where he was or who he was facing. But that didn’t matter. Clarity wasn’t important. He would tear down everything in his path until the truth was revealed.