Ever since I had become a savagery-focused sanguinarch I had yet to really go all out in a fight. That changed the instant that I dashed at Gorgomuth. I was engaging an archdemon in battle and I knew that that meant that there was no room for error or hesitation.
Gorgomuth's physical form was that of a gigantic centaur. He had a white body the color of freshly fallen snow and his face was a scarred mess that was a fascinating tribute to his lifestyle as a survivor of many different battles throughout countless eons. He held a sword made of strange, otherworldly crystal.
His body was covered in rippling muscles that served as a physical clue to suggest he was an imposing combatant more than capable of holding his own against a variety of enemies. He wore no armor and the only clothing he had on was a pair of specially crafted trousers that hid his more masculine features.
The very first thing that I did was move so fast that I might as well have teleported to my foe. He had been bellowing at me when I lunged at him, my sword out and pointed at his heart. He continued to bellow at me during the scant few picoseconds that passed between me commencing my charge and me reaching him.
In the instant, before my sword would have reached him he swung his sword which connected with mine and the collision sent out a shower of sparks. His blade narrowly caught mine, the archdemon using his weapon as a shield and stopping my advance.
"Fast." He uttered, almost as if in praise of me, as I reached him. I chuckled and leaped backward, attempting to goad him into following me. He, presumably due to his wealth of experience in battle as an archdemon of wrath, didn't take the bait and instead continued to glower at me from a distance.
He began to move his fingers, his fingers forming arcane shapes in the air and I sensed his mystical energy gathering in his fingers. I wasn't still, and before he could target me with a spell I took to the air, zipping off of the ground in a flash. A nanosecond later I watched the area I had just been in become engulfed by hellfire and raw evocation energy. I chuckled and as he snorted in disappointment I began to formulate counter strategies in the back of my mind.
My mind was running on all cylinders as I studied the scene before me. I was in mid-air as my opponent noticed that I had zipped out of range of his first true strike, a powerful magical attack that fused hellfire and raw, destructive evocation. So far he had only used his sword as a shield to take my blow rather than take the hit, and he had used magic to try and strike me, which suggested that either he was primarily a magic-user or he was equally willing to use both magical and martial skills.
He was a potent foe and thanks to an innate trait shared by all ascendants it hadn't been possible for me to scry him meaningfully, so I couldn't work to strategize based on any knowledge I had gained prior to the battle. I also possessed this trait, but the truth was that no ascendants knew of me just yet so even if I hadn't had this trait it's not like people would have known to try and scry me.
As I prepared to swipe at Gorgomuth again I mentally reviewed all of my abilities and traits. It was when I did this that I began to smile internally because I immediately recalled one particular ability I had, owning to my nature as a sanguinarch. "Absorption", which was the ability that allowed me to take on the skills, knowledge, abilities, and memories of those who provided me with essence.
One aspect of being able to feed on blood, or more precisely, on lifeforce, was that if I injured an enemy in battle I gained a tiny bit of essence from them. And therein lied the key.
Each of my strikes that injured an enemy left them weaker, in ways beyond the raw, freshly inflicted injury that had just been left on them. If I struck an enemy and did damage I could actually sap them of their identities if the fight dragged on long enough. This was true even of other ascendants!
This meant that even if I couldn't decisively defeat Gorgomuth I could win through a battle of attrition, and what was better was that Gorgomuth was far slower than I was. If I relied on speed... I could overwhelm him and win in the form of inflicting death by a thousand cuts. Not to mention I'd be gradually stealing his powers.
I grinned as I realized this, and activated one of my Sanguinarch abilities, the potent power known as "Shadow-Blanking".
In the bowels of the dungeon, the two world-shapingly powerful beings were engaged in a fierce battle. One of them, the one in the air began to smirk at his foe right before he vanished from sight, having become invisible thanks to one of his major sanguine powers. This confused and further enraged his powerful enemy, a mighty creature known as a destroyer of civilizations and worlds.
The centaur-like demon lord and archdemon opened his mouth and issued another bestial roar, all while activating one of the powers known to be possessed by archdemons of wrath: his "unholy rage". The centaur demon began to radiate a haunting shade of red light and steam began to rise off of his corporeal form. His eyes changed color from a blood-like shade of scarlet to an eerie obsidian hue. What he didn't know was that while he was activating his power, his now invisible enemy had dashed behind him and had lifted his blade to launch a sharp and stinging blow.
Raul swung his sword downward and chuckled as his weapon managed to strike true. Gorgomuth's "Unholy Rage" magnified his natural strength and toughness, but Raul was a sanguinarch and archdemon and his skillful blow managed to sink into Gorgomuth's flank. Blood began to seep out of his sliced flank, the crimson ooze vanishing as it began to metaphysically flow into Raul. Raul had just drawn first blood!
His strike was nowhere near enough to be a fatal blow, but Gorgomuth reacted to it by wailing in pain and rage, and Raul felt the sinister effects of "Absorption" take hold as the archdemon's blood flowed into him and filled the sanguinarch. It sapped the malevolent being of a fraction of a percent of his power. Gorgomuth was sensitive to his body and he realized that an incredibly small portion of his power had just begun to leak out of him.
"What?! How?!?" He roared his voice a low rumble that sounded similar to how the earth sounded in the midst of an earthquake. Raul's blade snaked out of the demon's body, and the sanguinarch himself leaped away from his foe before the demon could lash out at Raul with his gigantic blade.
As I leaped out of the way of the demon I was facing I shivered in mid-air as I felt his blood begin to leak out of him and into me. Not only did it empower me in the form of providing essence, but I also felt a sliver of awareness of Gorgomuth's powers begin to emerge in the back of my mind. I grinned at my enemy, and allowed myself to become visible again, for the purpose of taunting my enemy.
I possessed a supernatural empathy and could sense the emotional state of any creature. I knew that Gorgomuth was deeply angered at the moment and I intended to capitalize on that. He had thousands, perhaps even millions of years of experience. If I was going to defeat him it was necessary for me to keep him from refocusing and strategizing with a clear mind.
The demon lord glared up at me and roared in fury, as portals began to appear around him. Demons of various sorts began to crawl, run, and slither through the portal, only for me to immediately target them.
Since both Gorgomuth and I were ascendants the same limitation on scrying that prevented me from learning about it also prevented it from learning about me. Which was why the foolish demon lord's rage that reached through space and opened a portal to its diabolic lair, something I also theoretically possessed but had yet to create, I saw an opportunity.
As a sanguinarch and a deity of undeath I had the power to turn more than mortals into my vampiric spawn. I could turn mortals, some immortals, eldritch beings, and even other undead beings into my spawn. This archdemon of wrath was thankfully ignorant to the fact that I was a sanguinarch, or perhaps ignorant as to what that meant, and in summoning its servants to serve as a distraction while it readied more attacks was actually giving me an opportunity to further overwhelm it.
I immediately turned the demons who came through the multitude of portals that my enemy had created into fanatically loyal, to me, vampiric spawn. The demons that came through the portal were each various nightmarish fusions of different predators, ranging from shark-headed wolves to eagle-winged giant bears. And the instant they stepped through the portals they became my servants, their minds connected to mine and my will supplanting their own. I mentally commanded them to turn on their summoner, which they did with a series of thunderous howls.
No less than fourteen demons stepped out of the portals that surrounded the demon lord of wrath. The nightmarish animals immediately rounded on their summoner, empowered by my soul-altering powers they had begun flying, skittering, or crawling towards their former master.
Gorgomuth was distracted by his enemy and didn't immediately notice the betrayal he had just begun to suffer from. It was only in the instant before the first demon, a nightmarish combination of lion, crow, and crocodile, hurled itself at the centaur that the demon realized something was amiss. He reacted to the strangeness of the betrayal by lifting his blade and swinging it at a speed that exceeded the speed of sound, cutting through the air around himself and slicing through the first of the animals to reach him, even as others raced towards him and towards their own demises.
I watched this with a smirk on my face and began to use his own moves against him but with a slight twist. I could also create a multitude of portals and attack from them but I would do so in a way that he couldn't corrupt. Even as he swung his sword at a speed that made the speed of sound feel slow, I opened portals that surrounded him in every single direction and from them, my other bodies all grinned at our foe. And as one we all rose our hands and pointed them at the destroyer I had come here to destroy.
"Let's begin this fight for real." We whispered in unison, which caused Gorgomuth to stop swinging his sword around himself in rage and look at the portals that surrounded him. It was when he stopped swinging his sword that each of my bodies released separate but equally powerful diabolic blasts at my foe. The demon froze in shock as numerous dozens of blasts exploded out of the portals and collided with him, each a fully powered burst of hellish energy. I snapped my fingers and the portals that had allowed my other bodies to strike vanished, having been unmade by my potent abilities.
I knew this wouldn't be enough to finish the demon lord but I was unsurprised to note that it was enough to inflict damage to him. I sensed a small amount of essence flowing out of him and into myself, and audibly exhaled as I felt the tiniest amount of Gorgomuth's knowledge, skills, abilities, and memories began to flow into me. I devoted a small portion of my mind to working through the memories of his that I had just stolen from him so that I could begin to understand my seemingly dimwitted foe.
He was no longer still, and even as I enjoyed the sensation of what made him the demon lord that he was seeping out of him and into me he grew emboldened. He was no longer content to stand still and he leaped at me since I was in mid-air. Smoke was rolling off of his body, and he had both of his hands wrapped tightly and powerfully around his sword. He was far faster than he had previously been, but it wasn't enough.
I rose my blade and when he was close enough to slash at me with his, I parried each of his blows using the knowledge and experience I had copied from my worshipers regarding things like swordplay and combat, which since I now had billions of worshippers was quite a fair amount of knowledge. As I did he closed in on me, a furious scowl on his pained face.
I wasn't deterred by his fury and instead took a quiet breath as he continued to furiously swipe and slash ineffectually at me. When he began to get within arm's reach I exhaled the breath I had just inhaled and, using my deific powers over nature, transformed even a breath into an attack.
The breath that escaped my lungs was turned into a heavy attack, as hurricane-force winds slammed into the heavy demon lord and began to force him away from me. He let out a pain-filled scream as I steadily forced him back, and as I did I realized that despite my attacks taking portions of his strength from him he was now hitting me harder and harder, even if his attacks were ultimately meaningless in the face of the combined millions of years of battle experience I had, thanks to my worshipers.
"This asshole is somehow increasing in power even as my attacks wear him down and eat away at him..." I thought before my investigation into the knowledge and memories I had taken from him resulted in me gaining an awareness of the demonic, wrath-attuned power that allowed him to do that: "Unholy Rage". That particular ability was nasty and with it, all of his combat-based attributes increased in potency for a period of time commiserate to his personal power. He could fight for hours at a state beyond his actual, personal peak.
What was worse still was the fact that it was an ascendant level ability, which meant that even though I could absorb it from him it'd take me absorbing a truly otherworldly amount of essence first. So I'd eventually steal it from him, but not before I had taken almost everything else first. That said, something about that knowledge spurred me to action because as soon as I pieced all of that together I glared at him and began to close in on him again, just a few nanoseconds after I had forced him back to the ground below me.
As I closed in on him I resolved to show the centaur-like being true speed and I began to lash out with my lengthy sword, aiming not directly at him but around him and forcing him to stay on the defensive. My weapon was a blur in my hands as I used it to force my opponent to stay on his feet and react to me rather than allow him to dictate the flow of the battle.
Even as I practically danced in front of him the knowledge, skills, memories, and more that had once been his began to fill a quiet corner of my mind. I was learning from and about him while I was prepared to truly go on the offensive and take even more knowledge from him!
