Chapter twenty four --Flaws
The beasts came from all directions.
Sun had designed them that way.
The first one lunged from the left, fast and low, going for his legs. Sun sidestepped without urgency, let its momentum carry it past him, and drove his elbow into the back of its jaw on the way through. The joint gave wrong. The beast went down.
The second came from behind before the first had stopped moving. Sun felt it in the shift of air pressure against his neck and dropped his weight forward, sweeping low, taking its feet out from under it before it could complete the reach. It hit the ground. He put his knee into its ribs, found the gap between bones, and finished it.
The third and fourth came together, which was the point. He had designed them to come together at this stage. Single opponents were useful for technique. Simultaneous opponents were useful for everything else.
He stepped between them, let them collide with each other's trajectories, and dealt with what remained.
The clearing went quiet.
Then Kael stepped out.
Sun did not pause.
He crossed the distance before Kael finished the smile, driving a straight strike at the center of his chest, and Kael was not there. The air shifted and he reappeared three steps to the right, the position-swap Echo working the way it always worked, marking locations in advance and trading places in the fraction of a second between attack and contact.
Sun adjusted immediately.
He had fought this version of Kael enough times to know the Echo's patterns. It required pre-marked positions. It could not swap to a location Kael had not already designated. Which meant the movement had a shape, a limited range of destinations, and if you watched long enough the shape became visible.
Sun watched.
Kael attacked with the divinity-enhanced speed that had separated his head from his body in chapter fifteen of his memory, that same wrong quality of movement that existed outside the tower's defined scale, and Sun took it on his forearm rather than dodging because the dodge would have put him in the position Kael had already marked for the next swap.
The impact was considerable.
Sun's arm held.
He used the momentum of it to rotate inside Kael's reach, changing the geometry of the engagement before Kael could reset, and drove his heel into the back of Kael's knee with the specific force required to compromise the joint without shattering it, because a shattered joint produced a falling target and a falling target activated the position-swap Echo as a reflex.
Kael staggered but did not fall.
The perception distortion Echo activated.
Sun felt it arrive the way he always felt it in the training space, a subtle wrongness at the edges of what he was seeing, the outlines of things becoming slightly uncertain, depth becoming slightly unreliable, the specific visual confusion designed to make a defender mistake the direction of an incoming attack.
He closed his eyes.
He had learned this three weeks into the mental training. The perception distortion worked on sight. It had nothing to access when sight was removed. He had spent considerable time afterward training to fight by sound and pressure and the feeling of air displacement against his skin, and it was slower than fighting with his eyes open and he did not care because it was accurate.
He listened.
Kael's weight shifted left. The air moved. The position-swap Echo activated, the familiar displacement of something exchanging locations in the space around him.
Sun was already facing the new position.
He opened his eyes.
Kael was exactly where Sun had calculated he would be.
Sun hit him once, directly, with the specific force he had been building toward since the beginning of the session, pulling the dark emotions he had accumulated across the training and running them through his fist the way he had learned to run them through everything, and Kael folded forward with the specific silence of someone whose preparation had run out.
Before he could recover, Sun moved.
His hand entered cleanly, precise, exactly where it needed to be.
For a fraction of a second there was resistance.
Then there wasn't.
He removed his heart.
The image of Kael blurred.
Dissolved.
The forest dissolved.
The beasts dissolved.
The training space folded back into the room it had always been, the walls returning, the floor returning, the quiet of Frank's house settling back into place around him.
Sun remained cross-legged on the floor, back straight, breathing even.
He opened his eyes.
He had never forgotten that day.
Not the fear, he had experienced worse fear in three thousand years of existence, or what he believed was three thousand years of existence. Not the grief, he had felt grief before and would feel it again. Not even the specific image of his mother's hand coming up with the thumb extended in the last echo of a habit her body remembered after she was gone.
What he had not forgotten was the objectivity of it.
Viewed from Kael's perspective, Sun had been a genuine threat. An unknown variable with impossible characteristics operating on a floor where Kael had spent months building something careful and precise. From Kael's framework the decision to eliminate Sun made complete sense. Sun was the danger. Kael was protecting his work.
Sun understood this.
He was still going to destroy everything connected to the Order.
He was aware this was not entirely rational. A few months ago he would have noted the irrationality and examined it from multiple angles before acting. He would have filed it under behaviors requiring further investigation. He would have maintained the detachment of a being who governed doubt and therefore could not simply accept his own emotional conclusions as correct.
He did not do that now.
Maybe this was part of being human, he thought, the willingness to act on something you knew was not perfectly reasoned because the alternative was sitting with it until it became a permanent resident in the filing system and never moved.
He did not care if the thinking was flawed.
The thought lingered anyway.
Not doubt. Something adjacent to it. Something that would have become doubt if he allowed it to continue.
He didn't.
He had decided.
The question of how to maintain that resolve across time had occupied him briefly until he remembered the God of Corruption's curse.
All beings shall become their own shackle in the pursuit of perfection.
Sun's interpretation of this, formed from his own experience as a former god and refined through everything he had observed since reincarnation, was this: every being was eventually limited by the very thing they were best at. The power you wielded most completely became the wall you could not see past. The concept you governed became the cage you lived inside.
He had called this the flaw.
Take himself. He had governed doubt for three thousand years and caused countless beings to question what they believed. He had never been free from doubt himself. Not once. Not about anything that mattered. The god of the concept was its most complete expression and its most permanent prisoner.
His new authority followed the same pattern. He could use dark emotions to augment his body and his strikes, could manipulate them, could draw them from the environment around him when his own supply ran low. He was never free from them himself. They accumulated in him the way they accumulated in rooms and in people and in the specific weight of memories that did not dissolve when the seed consumed the grief they were attached to.
He carried what he wielded.
The thought settled too easily.
That was the flaw.
Knowing this, he had decided, meant his desire for revenge would not fade. Dark emotions were his fuel. The desire for erasure was the darkest and most persistent emotion he currently possessed. He would not lose it through contentment or peace or the comfortable distance of time. The flaw guaranteed it would remain.
The God of Corruption had built a better trap than he probably intended.
The question of how to get stronger was more practical.
He needed will shards.
Will shards were fragments of a person's will that separated from them at death, small concentrated pieces of the thing that had powered their authority in life. Using them did not make you more powerful in the crude sense of raw strength. They refined control. They deepened the connection between your will and the authority it produced. Because all authorities derived from will, strengthening will meant strengthening your relationship with what your authority could do, the range of it, the precision of it, the depth of expression available to you at a given rank.
The alternative was harrowing danger. Near-death experiences that forced the will to consolidate under pressure. Sun had opinions about this method that could be summarized as it works but the survival rate makes it an inefficient primary strategy.
The people he had killed at the village had left nothing behind.
No fragments. No residue. No will shards.
That had been the first indication something was wrong.
Normally, death produced something. A remainder. A fragment of intent too condensed to disappear cleanly.
Will shards.
As for Kael, Sun had a theory about that, the unstable divinity stored in the tattoo had burned through Kael's will structure from the inside during the years he carried it, leaving something that dissolved with him rather than separating. Unlike the holy power Solus used, which was a clean external addition that left the user's own will intact.
More to learn there.
He filed it.
The system, he had also noted, was a mechanism for measuring and thereby limiting what people believed their will capacity to be. A standard status window showed a number. People looked at the number and adjusted their behavior to match it rather than exceeding it. They shackled themselves by accepting the measurement as a ceiling rather than a record. His own system showed nothing for will capacity because the seed had corrupted the measurement function along with everything else, which meant he had no number to accept as a ceiling.
He intended to keep it that way.
The deeper understanding of will had arrived gradually over the months since awakening. Will at sufficient strength did not just power authority. It manifested into reality directly. At a high enough level it created a domain, a space where the owner's will rewrote the local rules of existence into the shape they wanted reality to be. Someone who loved heat would manifest a domain of heat. Someone whose will was built around silence would manifest a domain of silence.
The tower was a domain.
Seven gods with seven wills of sufficient strength had manifested a reality around a purpose, and everyone inside it was living inside the shape those wills had decided reality should take.
Which meant the tower was not a physical structure.
It was an argument.
A very large, very old, very well-maintained argument about what reality should look like.
Sun sat with that for a moment.
Then he stood, adjusted his clothes, and walked toward the kitchen where Frank was doing something that smelled like it involved considerably more confidence than skill.
The tower was an argument.
Not a structure.
Not a destination.
An assertion.
Maintained across centuries by beings powerful enough to insist it was true.
He had a great deal of work to do.
And for the first time since awakening, he intended to do it without questioning whether it was the right thing to do.