One thousand meters away from me, a mountain rose from the ground, hiding the moon with its silhouette. The Bear Mountain had been awakened somehow.
“The relic from before… She’s moving the Bear Mountain!”
From its open chest and belly cavity, cushions, statues, people, and entire piles of rooms fell down to the ground in a cascade, like dust falling from furniture that stood still for too long. The limbs of the resurrected god each provoked an earthquake when they hit the ground, splitting the earth beneath its weight, and the eye sockets in the white skull shone with green flames, as a halo of light composed of many symbols “0” and “1” floated above the head of the Bear Mountain.
“Mari and the others are still there”, I got to my knees, whipping the blood off my face, and frowning. I needed to kill Grace.
I kicked the ground, shooting myself forward, and the rocks below melted with the force of my propulsion. I crossed the distance between the Bear Mountain and I in an instant, moving faster than the wind.
Before I could reach the creature’s head, however, it swapped its massive front paw against me, and I had to use all my power to conjure a dozen third level spells of metal walls between the god’s attack and me, and that only served to slow the Bear Mountain for long enough to me fly away from the attack. It was clear how I ended up so far away from Grace in an instant before…
If one of those attacks hit me straight in, that could really be my end, I could really die once more, and break the fifty-first seal. I could drown my own personality with a completely new one.
I needed to deal with the Bear Mountain first.
“Huuu…!”, I breathed in, and pulled my fists back. “Huah!”, I punched with both hands at the same time, and emitted two huge metal rods filled with electricity from them, punching the rods straight against the mountain-sized enemy.
Before the projectiles could reach the god, however, two circles burst into reality with bursts of wind, windows to a different reality, and consumed the electrical rods before vanishing. Portals to another world, a world where dreaming shamans go.
Then the Bear Mountain fixed its burning green eyes on me, and two more portals appeared before them, from which two streams of pressured lava erupted, burning hotter than anything in that world, turning the night skies pure white, brighter than the daylight.
I flew around the Bear Mountain just to avoid its attack, and even then the heat was enough to make the flesh of my legs instantly bubble up, and have the fat melt away from it, the blood in those limbs evaporating through my pores.
I conjured a fifty meters wide ball of water on top of the God’s head, and dropped it: once the water touched the jet of lava, a huge steam explosion expanded so fast, it uprooted all of the trees and grass around, and obscured the entire region.
I unmade the water I had conjured, however, and the vapor suddenly vanished, just to reveal the huge mandibles of the God about to close on me.
Without time to fly away from the bite, I focused my magic energy to conjure the biggest muscled arms I could, creating two twenty-five meters long monstrosities, and gripped onto the maxilla and mandible of the Bear Mountain.
The sheer pressure from the skull of the bear crushing on me was such that the huge arms I conjured had their bones fractured on multiple part, their veins burst all around, and the limbs were compressed until the muscle fibers were splitting the skin and spilling out. But the resistance put up by the conjured arms bought me enough time to conjure a shield and an explosion and quickly propel myself away from those maws.
I was right before the skeletal face of the god then. I touched my wrists on one another, pointed my palm towards the enemy, and conjured a third level electricity spell: the lightning was as wide as a river, and it meandered in its way toward the target in like one too, and just its killing thunder was enough to break bones, the full impact of the spell being godly devastating.
The lighting darkened the bony forehead of the mountain-sized bear, and it send electrical arcs all around its immense body, making the leather stretched over the skeleton burst into flames. The creature wouldn’t return to the realm of the dead so simply however, and even while burning, it managed to slap at me and send me all the way to the ground again, where I dug a hole crater with the impact of my body, and then the immense paw of the Bear Mountain fell down upon me, pressing me even further into the ground, crushing me down.
“Huur…!” pressed against hard rock and the weight of the undead god, I pushed my hands upward, and tried to move the mountain-sized enemy away. “Waaaargh!”, I conjured large arm muscles so not to be squashed, and then leg muscles to force myself straight up, and then I covered myself entirely in a magical body of conjured muscle and bones that grew taller and taller until I managed to raise the Bear Mountain’s paw from the ground, and by that time, I already stood fifty meters tall. Still an ant in comparison to the one thousand and three hundred meters tall god. And I was kicked like one.
Flying kilometers away from my target, my immense conjured body hit one of the many smaller lakes surrounding the old stationary Bear Mountain, and emptied the body of water in its entirety, splashing thousands of liters away as rain, and leaving behind only a mangled bloody giant’s body.
As the body I conjured vanished in magical waste, I breathed in hard at the bottom of the dried lake, barely standing up, with one leg and one arm broken, as well as all my ribs, and some vertebrae, and stared the immensely huge resurrected god stand on its hinder legs, towering over the landscape itself and touching the skies, breaking through the clouds themselves with its neck.
Even if we both currently had god status, it was clear I was at a great disadvantage…
“Guys…”, Thinking about the fraternity, the only people who I still cared enough about to fight for in that world, I tightened the grip on my side, scratching the skin over my broken ribs until they started to bleed.
Then, the bear Mountain opened its skeletal jaw, showing only its terrific silhouette behind the clouds, and shot a straight beam of green light that scattered the clouds around, and lighting up the night.
The light went up and up, it shone like a star above our heads, just looking at it could kill a lesser mage, and then it hit the moon. The beam sent purple waves all around the moon, quickly turning the entire celestial body monochromatic. Then, the Bear Mountain fell back on all fours. And the moon started to drip torrents of blood, not too dissimilar from the fools who accepted the gifts from the Order of the Moon Mirror…
It was a curse to a sleeping god. And all of that magical power was being funneled into a single point… Grace.
A bright gray yellowish light exploded on top of the Bear Mountain, and it started to fly upward. Thanks to my divine sight, I could see even from that distance, and at the center of the globe of light, a beautiful and young feminine figure stood with open arms and a serene expression on her face, her hair made of moon-colored strands, her skin brown as bark, and wearing a fine dress of spring leaves.
She had ascended.
“Peoples of the land… forfeit your destiny”, Grace spoke, her voice louder than thunders, shaking the very skeleton inside the listeners. “For your new gods have arrived, and I will reshape this world as I see fit… starting by punishing those who conspired against my rebirth”, she concluded, and the globe of light around her turned into a focused beam that illuminated only a group of six people, the captured fraternity.
“Ah…”, I had lost.
I gave it my all, but in the end, I failed at every single task I set my mind into. I failed, and then the only few valuable things to me in that world would be destroyed. What would even be the point of continuing to exist if there was no place for me? If there was nothing I could hold onto? If there was no one I could connect with? It would be a punishment. A constant reminder of my failures. No, in this case, I’d rather…
“Take good care of them”, I said, for some reason with a smile on my face. Of all the things I could be feeling, my chest was filled with relief.
Then I broke the fifty-first chain link.
And then broke all the forty-nine remaining.
