Chapter 448: The Natal Weapon

Perhaps it was the way that I held the blade, but the god must have sensed something, and it backed away from me.

A mile of it, bleeding black blood into a valley that used to be mountains, and it pulled its head back and up and looked at me with its one good eye, and its whole body went still in the air.

I knew that stillness. I have seen it many times before when something drastic was about to change. I was fighting a god, not an overgrown snake, and in that stillness, I saw the real face of my opponent.

Ah, I should have been afraid, but no, this fickle heart of mine was beating faster in excitement... perhaps there was a reason why Death itself had chosen me as her consort. Am I not always courting death?

The mouth of the serpent opened wide, stretching beyond what any normal snake was capable of, and inside that terrifying pit, words emerged and arrived inside my skull in a flat voice that I knew, without any doubt, was the voice of the System.

Sanction: Natal Weapon. Granted.

And I felt the world itself answer.

∞

That is the thing I will not forget about that night... the sound the world made when the System gave permission to a god.

The voice sounded like an accountant the size of a continent, looking up a name, finding an entitlement written beside it, and releasing what was owed, and it did all of that with no more ceremony than a clerk stamping a form.

My senses shivered and new truths poured into my mind, whether I wanted them or not.

[Eldritch Perception: 30 → 39 (Acolyte)]

It is funny sometimes how life works. Three hundred years ago a dragon god brought something down from the depths of the void, and now a serpent under a dead fortress on the far side of the world was entitled to a weapon.

A sound like a massive heartbeat thundered from the serpent and then every scale on its body opened at once. Blood burst out from the serpent in such enormous volume that not even its mile-long body could have possibly held it all... it was a literal ocean of blood, and like the serpent, its blood did not fall to the ground but gathered and compressed itself repeatedly before lengthening and hardening into something that was still moving inside itself, and when it was finished there was a blade two thousand feet long hanging in the air over the ruin of Serrath, curved like a fang, red as a wound and bright as one.

The serpent closed its jaws on the hilt of it, and slowly turned towards me, and I knew that I was dying.

"Bring it..." I whispered.

∞

With a deep laughter from its stomach that resounded for hundreds of miles, the god flew towards me.

Slow, I wrote, using my blade to carve the Inscription into the air, and a vast Script covered the serpent, but the blade in its jaws tore through it and the Script burned away like paper thrown on a forge, and I had time to understand that it had not even inconvenienced the god before the edge of its weapon reached me.

I got Dorrik’s sword up, and the blade of a god met the blade of a god and mine held, but the rest of me did not.

I was blasted for tens of miles, and went through three mountains, leaving a line of destruction through the earth. It was not a fun experience to feel your bones break over and over again.

∞

My blood poured out from my body in a silver river that rose to the sky as I struggled to even stand from the pit that my landing had created.

I coughed in pain and looked around me before my eyes widened in shock. Defending against that blow with the sword had been the right move, as the clash from our weapons had torn the earth open, cutting the whole of Serrath in two.

And the cut bled. The edges of the wound in the earth wept red, and the red ran up the sides of the canyon it had just made, against the fall of it, back towards the blade.

Blood is the first weapon. Blood is the last weapon. Everything that blade opened fed the blade.

I stood in the rubble of what had been the third mountain with the Law of Flesh screaming through my ribs and watched the massive serpent drag a two-thousand-foot sword towards me.

I tried to reach for the lightning, but another swing from the god, even though it was miles away, descended towards me, and I was buried under its radiance, my entire body... sliced in two, from my head to my crotch.

The last thing I said was, "I hate swords."

Darkness began to cover me as I heard the laughter of the serpent in the distance.

[ Unbroken Titan — lethal wound ignored ]

[ Law of Flesh — error detected ]

[ Correcting. ]

[Adamantium Titan: 150 → 155 (Sovereign)]

∞

Vitality surged out of nowhere and flooded my body, and the two halves of me were drawn together as if time itself was reversing, and even the marrow that I had spent maintaining my titan form had returned, filled to the brim and more potent than before.

I may have just grown by five points, but these five points carried an enormous weight behind them that pushed my entire body to new heights, and indeed, my current height had surpassed three hundred feet, and was now three hundred and ten.

I got up and called my blade towards me, and the air cried as it cut through space to fly into my bloodied palm. The laughter of the serpent had stopped, but I did not care for the god, because in this moment the only thing on my mind when I held this blade was simple: I want a pen.

The thought was simple, but the will behind it was not.

The blade resisted my will. I felt it the moment I pushed my intent into the metal, a resistance that was not physical but spiritual. The sword had been forged by Dorrik, shaped by the Unending Flame, married to a Law of Sharpness that had been waiting for the right steel. It was a weapon. It had always been a weapon. And it did not want to be anything else.

No, the blade seemed to say. I am what I am. I cut. I kill. I am not a tool for writing.

I gritted my teeth and pushed harder, and the resistance grew. I could feel the Law inside the blade... Sharpness, pure and absolute, rejecting my will. It was not sentient, not truly, but it had a nature, and that nature was in conflict with what I was asking it to become.

You are a sword. You cut. That is your purpose.

I am a mage, I thought back. And I do not want a sword, I want a pen.

I was dimly aware that the god was raising the blade again, but my attention was elsewhere.

On the blade, its resistance, and the growing understanding that I was trying to force a Law to be something it was not.