266 The Entity Descends
Their teamwork was flawless.
Every movent they made overlapped with another, every opening I tried to exploit imdiately sealed by the presence of one of the others. They covered each other without hesitation, like pieces of a machine built specifically to fight soone like .
My power of Intangibility-30 practically made a god.
So being toyed with like this was unthinkable.
No.
I forced myself to slow my breathing.
Calm down.
These four were definitely onto sothing. I had gotten used to walking through battlefields without consequences, slipping through attacks like they weren’t even real. The lack of threat to my life had started to dull the edge I once had. I was getting comfortable, and comfort had never been the thing that made dangerous.
I had to rember what did.
Debris covered the battlefield around us. Broken slabs of ocean floor, lted hull fragnts, chunks of destroyed machines, and twisted tal from ships the nukes had ripped apart. The entire place was a graveyard of rubble.
I could use that.
I needed to isolate at least one of them.
Paleman was out of the question because he could teleport, and chasing soone who could reposition instantly was a waste of effort. Master Sequence and George practically existed as data now, their bodies acting more like terminals than actual people, which ant destroying them outright wouldn’t accomplish much.
War, however, was still a body.
I glanced at him and phased the ground beneath him, dragging his entire mass downward as if gravity had suddenly rembered him.
I leaped into the air and held myself there using controlled intangibility, suspending my body above the battlefield. War’s reaction ca imdiately as superheated strands of blood erupted upward from the ground. The crimson threads sliced through the air blindly while he forced his way upward, violently disrupting the phasing effect that had pinned him.
He managed to cancel my intangibility as he rapidly clawed from under to unearth himself.
Paleman moved next.
He appeared behind with disturbing speed, a pair of pale wings stretching from his back as they propelled him forward like a biological thruster. I had already predicted the movent, so I twisted midair and drove my left hand straight through his chest.
My arm passed through empty cavities.
He didn’t have a heart.
There was nothing inside to rip out.
Pain exploded through my arm a mont later as thin bone-like stakes erupted from inside his torso and pierced into my flesh. Paleman had grown weapons inside his own body just to stab the mont I touched him.
I ignored the pain and grabbed him by the torso from inside.
My power surged as I forced his entire mass into warp-state and swung him with full strength. The motion launched him across the battlefield like a living projectile, sending him flying far beyond the wreckage where he vanished into the distant debris.
George appeared in front of an instant later.
He charged with a speed that clearly didn’t belong to him naturally. So kind of speedster-based technology had been integrated into his armor or body, turning his movents into sudden bursts that cut through the battlefield like lightning.
I dodged with a single step.
His lance passed harmlessly through the space where I had been standing.
A crushing pressure wrapped around my body as Master Sequence activated his telekinesis again. The invisible grip constricted around my limbs while several new copies of him erged across the battlefield.
Each clone carried visible implants along the spine and skull.
Processors.
They were feeding computation into the telekinetic hold, amplifying the force applied to my body.
I glanced at the machines embedded in their bodies and phased them all at once. The processors slipped through their hosts and dropped uselessly to the ground, instantly weakening the telekinetic pressure.
War moved to block my view of the main Master Sequence.
He rushed toward with manic enthusiasm.
“Ahahahaha! Finally breaking down, Eclipse?” War shouted while charging straight at . “Co on, die properly already!”
Multiple superheated threads of blood lashed outward from his scarf as he spoke. The liquid crimson strands sliced through the air like glowing wires, each one hot enough to carve through steel.
At the sa ti George ca at from behind.
My left hand throbbed with pain.
Paleman had left sothing inside it when those bone stakes pierced my arm. I could feel foreign fragnts shifting inside the muscle whenever I moved.
I pushed the discomfort aside and cranked my intangibility to the absolute maximum.
Every incoming attack passed straight through .
War’s blood threads sliced through empty space where my body existed without interacting with it. George’s lance thrust through my torso without resistance.
I waited and tid it perfectly.
The mont George’s body collided with mine, I reversed the phasing vector and slipped inside him with possession.
The resistance was imdiate and violent.
His nervous system fought like a locked door with electricity running through it, but Intangibility-30 was not sothing a normal brain could resist forever. I forced my consciousness deeper until control began to form.
“George,” I said from inside his own head while struggling against the resistance. “Snap out of it. Whatever they did to you, fight it.”
The pressure in his mind intensified.
The brainwashing held completely.
I abandoned the attempt for the mont and focused on control of the body I had taken over.
George’s body lunged forward.
War barely had ti to react before we slamd into him at full speed. The impact crushed his torso inward and scattered flesh across the ground, reducing him to a wet sar of blood and bone beneath the charge.
I kept moving.
George’s body continued forward like a missile and crashed straight into Master Sequence. The clone shattered apart as the impact tore him into pieces, fragnts of artificial bone and circuitry scattering across the ruined seabed.
Guesswork had already told what my role was.
I wasn’t here to kill them.
I was here to draw out information.
He was certain I wouldn’t be able eliminate them.
While controlling George’s body, I turned inward again and began examining the ntal restraints locking his consciousness away. Layers of commands and signals wrapped around his neural activity like chains.
I started trying to untangle them.
Beneath us, Dullahan let out a chanical neigh that sounded disturbingly like a scream. Steam poured violently from the joints of her armored body as her systems began to malfunction. Her voice ca through the battlefield speakers with a broken tallic tone.
“Nick… George left a ssage… if this happens… please kill him.”
The words echoed in my mind.
Fragnts of mory surfaced from sowhere inside George’s mind as I pushed deeper through the restraints.
The scene was strange.
George was younger again.
He was running through a narrow street while Dullahan ran beside him. They were fleeing from sothing behind them, both moving with desperate urgency.
The fragnts of mory were strange.
They felt incomplete, like broken pieces of a recording that had been spliced together without care for continuity. I was watching through George’s senses, but the perspective flickered and warped as if parts of the mory had been deliberately tampered with.
Dr. Ti appeared behind them.
He moved with the unnatural calm of soone who knew he had already won. His coat fluttered around him while the air itself seed to distort with every step he took, the flow of seconds bending around his presence.
The man looked down at them with cold irritation before glancing upward at sothing behind them.
Then the world tore open.
A mass of gray flesh descended from above like a living storm. It didn’t have a defined shape at first, only a writhing body of muscle and tissue constantly shifting in impossible configurations.
Dr. Ti’s expression twisted into open fury.
“You abominable fiend,” he spat. “You dare interfere with again? Stealing my quarry like so parasitic scavenger.”
The mass of flesh reshaped itself slowly.
Within the writhing gray matter, sothing resembling a face began to form.
The Entity’s voice sounded calm.
“You cannot have the child.”
Dr. Ti’s eyes narrowed dangerously.
“That boy belongs to ,” he replied coldly.
The Entity’s newly ford face stared down at George.
“The child is evil,” the creature said without hesitation. “He will destroy countless worlds if allowed to live. He must die.”
The mory shattered apart.
Clarity snapped back into place as my awareness returned to the battlefield.
Paleman stood in the distance.
He was positioned directly above what looked like the exposed remnants of Briana’s Trench, though the nukes had buried most of it under layers of rubble. I didn’t rember him moving there, yet he stood calmly at the edge of a newly opened hole in the debris.
Since when had he moved?
Several massive tentacles extended from his body.
They carried a huge storage tank between them.
The container was transparent.
Inside it swirled countless glowing shapes.
Souls.
Paleman’s face twisted into a grotesque smile as he looked straight at .
“Checkmate.”
He jumped into the hole. I imdiately tried to phase out of George’s body. Nothing happened. The connection refused to break.
I was trapped inside him.
Master Sequence’s voice ca from sowhere nearby, his tone carrying mild satisfaction.
“The trap was painfully simple,” he said. “We lure you into saving your friend, and then maybe we can buy a few minutes for Paleman to deliver.”
Pain surged through my mind.
Parts of George and Dullahan’s existence began to twist violently, corrupted signals attacking my presence like a swarm of parasites trying to tear apart from the inside.
Through George’s mouth, I forced the words out.
“What were you planning?”
Master Sequence scoffed.
“Honestly, you are one scary motherfucker,” he said bluntly. “If given enough ti, you’ll be able to kill us. I honestly can’t keep up with you. Since it doesn’t matter anymore, I suppose I can enlighten you.”
His voice carried the casual arrogance of soone who believed the outco had already been decided.
“See, our master has beco too big to traverse into other realities. It needs enormous energy, enough to damn an entire sun just to cross worlds. However, there’s a cheat we call the Source.”
I kept struggling against the restraints controlling George’s body while he spoke.
“Every world has a surface layer of the Source within it,” Master Sequence continued. “Using it as the fuel, our master could freely co and go as he pleases between the worlds he’s absorbed the Source from.”
He laughed quietly.
“Do you get it now? You are going to lose! Once our master arrives here, he will consu you and he will be complete! You should’ve fled to another world when you had the chance, Eclipse!”
I ignored him and focused entirely on George’s mind.
“George,” I called from within his own consciousness. “Help here.”
I pushed my mories into him.
Not as words.
As experiences.
I showed him the ti he worked at the SRC behind a boring desk, shuffling paperwork and pretending he wasn’t secretly fascinated by the chaos around capes. I forced forward the mory of when he helped fight Crow, standing his ground even though he had no real combat experience at the ti.
I pushed the mont when he almost died, pulled, and was reborn into sothing else.
Then I showed him the Lawless.
The nights we spent running and eventually building that organization from nothing. The fights we got into with each other over stupid decisions. The rare monts where things actually worked and we managed to build sothing real out of the ss.
I pushed every mory we shared into him.
Nothing changed.
Everything felt futile.
Then sothing enormous erged from Briana’s Trench.
The ground shook violently as a massive shape crawled upward from the darkness below. It was a titan, a towering mass of flesh and structure so large it dwarfed the battlefield around it.
The creature slowly climbed onto the ruined seabed.
Then it lowered itself onto one knee.
The titan extended one enormous hand forward.
Standing on its palm was a man.
He had silver hair.
A porcelain mask was fused directly into his face as if it had grown there naturally, the smooth white surface rging seamlessly with his skin. Behind the mask, two eyes burned with a deep eerie orange.
The titan behind him compressed.
Its enormous body folded inward, shrinking rapidly until the mass of flesh reford into the familiar shape of Paleman.
The silver-haired man raised a single finger and made a small gesture. The restraints holding inside George’s body vanished instantly.
I slipped out.
George collapsed behind .
“T-The Entity—”
My breathing beca heavy.
Just looking at the man made sothing deep inside my bones scream with fear. My power reacted instinctively, showing layers of his existence that normal perception could never see.
He was wrong.
Wrong in ways that didn’t make sense.
The man’s eyes curved slightly as if smiling.
“Oh please,” he said pleasantly. “Call Old Nick. The Devil. Makes it easier to distinguish each other, right?”
I phased forward and kicked myself into superspeed, aiming straight for him.
The idea was simple. Tear through him, run past him, and figure out what the hell he actually was after the fact. My body slipped into warp-state while intangibility wrapped around every particle of , the battlefield stretching into a blur of broken stone and twisted tal.
Old Nick snapped his fingers.
The world flattened.
I suddenly found myself stretched thin, my entire body collapsing into two dinsions like a sheet of paper caught in the wind. My limbs flapped uselessly in the air while gravity tugged at the fragile surface that used to be my body.
H-How?
The sensation was nauseating. Depth vanished from existence, leaving only length and width while my mind struggled to process the absence of volu. I forced my power inward, grabbing the structure of my own existence and twisting it violently until the distortion snapped.
My body folded back into three dinsions.
The mont I regained form, Old Nick’s fist was already there.
I tried to phase it.
My power failed for a fraction of a second.
The punch landed squarely across my face.
I felt teeth crack as my head snapped sideways. There was no visible activation of any ability, no energy surge, and no distortion. Sohow he had simply shut my intangibility off at the exact microsecond his fist connected.
I staggered back and swung imdiately.
He leaned away with casual ease and drove his elbow into my ribs. The impact folded my body slightly before a second punch smashed into my jaw.
I tried to counter with a warp-state strike.
He caught my wrist mid-swing and twisted it until the joint popped painfully. My knee ca up toward his stomach, but he stepped aside and slamd his forehead into my nose.
Blood sprayed across the ruined seabed.
“Co on,” Old Nick said with mild disappointnt while circling . “Where’s the oomph in your step? I heard so many interesting things about you.”
I lunged forward again.
He slipped under the attack and drove a punch into my liver before sweeping my leg out from under . I barely managed to recover before another fist hamred into my shoulder.
“You’re supposed to be terrifying,” he continued casually while dismantling my stance piece by piece. “Right now you just look like a guy flailing in a bar fight.”
I stepped on his foot to lock his movent, blocked his next punch with my forearm, and finally managed to sneak an elbow into his side.
The hit connected.
He barely reacted.
Old Nick simply pushed with one hand, the motion knocking off balance. The mont my footing faltered, he jumped forward and drove a brutal punch downward into my face.
The world flipped sideways.
I crashed onto the ground and spat out blood along with several broken teeth.
“Wooo! Did you see that?” he shouted cheerfully.
Paleman clapped enthusiastically from the side like an audience mber enjoying the show.
Old Nick extended a hand toward . My body lifted off the ground as sothing invisible wrapped around my throat. The grip tightened, dragging upward until my feet dangled uselessly above the shattered seabed.
It wasn’t telekinesis.
I could tell instantly.
He wasn’t grabbing my body.
He was grabbing sothing else.
“W-what are you doing?” I rasped.
Old Nick laughed softly while studying .
“That’s so resistance,” he said with interest. “Your soul’s not there, but I can feel it through you. Oh, that’s smart! It’s in the SRC right now!”
His grin widened behind the porcelain mask.
“They took your soul in anticipation of this mont. Unfortunately, it’s futile. I will be able to devour you all the sa. It will just take a slower ti.” He tilted his head slightly. “It’s fine. I prefer it slow. I’m a gourt, you see.”
The invisible grip tightened further.
I forced the words out despite the pressure crushing my throat.
“T-This is insanity. Isn’t the SRC’s mission to restore t-the world? W-what happened to y-you? H-How about Alia? Is it really w-worth it? I know what you want. Dr. Ti told . Y-You want to create a w-world just for you and Alia. Do you think that’s what she’d want if she’s alive?”
The smile vanished from his eyes.
“What can you do?” Old Nick replied quietly. “I’m selfish like that. You should know.”
Sothing ignited inside .
Pain erupted through my entire existence.
“AAAAAAAH!” I scread uncontrollably as the burning sensation spread through my body and sowhere far deeper than my body. It felt like my insides were being torn apart while sothing buried within was being dragged toward the surface.
The agony kept building.
I rembered Guesswork’s earlier words.
All of them suddenly clicked together.
I couldn’t let this monster consu .
Because this wasn’t Nick anymore.
This thing he was holding onto was Eclipse, the pure manifestation of my taint.
Through the pain, I forced out another question.
“W-what’s the Eclipse f-for in the sky?”
Old Nick glanced upward casually.
“I don’t really get it,” he admitted. “They appear every ti I set my gaze upon a world. A shaman in the past did tell it was my soul that had beco so huge and dark it blotted the sun. What do you think?”
“S-Sounds accurate,” I muttered weakly. “George, you know what to do.”
A lance burst through my chest from behind. The tal spear punched straight through my torso and out the other side as blood flooded my mouth. I began coughing violently, dark red liquid spilling down my chin.
Despite that, I grinned.
I had managed to untangle George at the very last second.
Behind , George’s voice trembled with sorrow.
“I’m sorry.”
Old Nick sighed with mild annoyance.
“Now, that’s just annoying.”
I coughed again and forced the words out between breaths while blood dripped from my mouth.
“It’s not your fault, George,” I said hoarsely. “Thanks for that.”
Old Nick studied silently for a mont.
“Is it really worth it?” he asked.
I grinned at him like a madman despite the spear through my chest.
“I’ll be back.”
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