Limitless

by John Gold

  Idzumi moves around the same way I do. Moving above the earth with enormous speed, he kills all living things in his path. A werewolf dashes after him, even managing to knock him down. And while it takes Idzumi just a second to dispatch his assailant, it’s long enough for six cherub blades to bury themselves inside him. Wait, we found a second Akashi to convince the angels to join the battle? The keeper’s health bar drops to 30%, and he loses his right arm. Again, he’s pinned inside a reverse force dome; again, he ports over to his pet. But right then, the two of them are caught together in a diamond fortress that creates a kind of Earth Magic prison. The four transparent walls, as hard as diamonds, are just the beginning of the well-designed trap. Light mages blind the opponent, water mages fill the box with water, and the gods build a seal in the air to bring the whole of their combined power to bear. A Brynhildr spear is the perfect choice for an opponent of that caliber. The bolt of light slams into the diamond fortress from above, only stopping when it hits the ground. The second part of the spell creates a small area where everything is incinerated by Light Magic doing maximum physical damage. This phase continues for as long as there’s still charge in the spear.

  The diamond walls let light through, meaning they don’t take as much of a hit as a nontransparent material might. Quite a few players die during the second phase, while the survivors see the dead body of Idzumi’s pet lying where the strike hit by one of the corners. There’s a small crack that, judging by the trickling water, has been there since the beginning. It looks like the poor thing tried to escape the trap that way. But where is his master? We find out the answer to that question when a red mist forms over the body of the cat. It spreads so quickly that, ten seconds later, it’s engulfed everything, forcing me to switch over to my magic vision. Part of the mist compacts into the form of Idzumi. His health is a quarter of what it was thanks to the gods working him over, though he’s already starting to regenerate himself. The arm he lost appears suddenly. Wait, how? He didn’t use a healing spell! Cellular instability? His body grows slightly smaller, proving my hypothesis. Basically, he sacrificed other cells in his body to create an arm, the red mist having something to do with the process.

  But the excitement rippling through the crowd doesn’t last long. The portal keeper drains health from the players, using the mist as a vampire conductor, and activating that ability stops me from being able to see him with my magic vision. But that doesn’t stop the gods. Everyone starts to fall back from the area where Idzumi is hiding, and rushing out after them earns him maximum Fire Magic and Mind Magic spells. A mental hammer leaves a hole in the mist. Soon, the keeper’s health starts to drop, the mist serving as both his strength and his weakness. Idzumi quickly realizes that he’s been discovered. But the fact that he’s running blindly around the circle means that the mist is blocking his vision, as well, though he can still sense the players. As soon as the mist collects in one place, he fires away with Space Magic, pinning everyone against the stone ring. At this point, groups of saints start to join the battle. Several battle formations combine their spells to control Idzumi’s movement and whittle away at his health, and this time, he can’t teleport away or hide in his dead cat’s body. A minute later, he’s dead.

  Global message: Interworldly portal unlocked

  Greeting ceremony for humankind beginning in 9 minutes and 59 seconds… 58… 57… 56…

  Global message: Tenth astral layer unlocked

  Something changes in the magic field. Right above it, groups of different creatures start to appear—draconids, ancients, dwarves, elves, humans, humans, humans. There are far more humans than anything else, making up at least thirteen of the twenty-four groups. And they’re all at least as strong as Krash! They’re weaker than death, weaker than the devil, but still much stronger than any of the other players here. They’re different, too. Their strength isn’t the same as ours. It looks much denser, which means that our traditional means of evaluating opponents have always been off.

  A new message appears in the local chat.

  Note! Third-order strength is now permitted around the portal.

  The cube in the middle of the ring starts to collapse into itself. Light shines out of the gaps that appear, and a portal opens above the group of players to reveal Tiamat in all his glory. His aura alone is enough for everyone to flee in terror. Finally!

  This is the minute, the hour, the moment I’ve been waiting for. All I have to do is wait for him to fulfill his end of the bargain, and I can go get a new character. My parents will understand; the rest of the world will leave me alone. Goodbye, cruel world.

  Femida, Ekron, and Reiji stay up on the observation platform as I jump down. Tiamat catches me with a black strength sphere just before I hit the ground.

  “Thanks. I thought I was going to have to put my bones back together again.”

  “No problem. Representatives of human kind would like to talk with you. You…”

  I don’t listen to anything else he says as rage, contempt, and hatred for all the players left alive consumes me. Really, it’s more complete loathing than anything else. They experience enthusiasm, belief in their own abilities, and they scorn me. In the meantime, Tiamat just keeps talking as though nothing happened. And you’re with them?

  “Even death betrayed me. Is there a single creature in this world who doesn’t want to kill me? How I despise you all. You’re weak, you’re worms, every one of you, and the only strength you have is in numbers. And as it turns out, you’re exactly the same, Tiamat.”

  Death isn’t in the least perturbed by what I say. In fact, he doesn’t betray a single emotion.

  “I will fulfill my promise. The way I feel about you is unprejudiced and has nothing to do with what goes on in the world of Project Chrysalis and humankind. I’m the judge responsible for the trial; you completed it. The conditions of the deal will be completed shortly, after all, you don’t want them resurrected right here, do you? A portal will open in the Gray Lands, and you can use it once to appear before me. It doesn’t matter what the name of your character is.”

  Lies! Lies! Lies! Lies!

  “You think I believe you? Aren’t you the one giving them their hatred and rage? What do you know about being unprejudiced?”

  Tiamat, who is still holding me a meter above the ground, looks around at the crowd of players who are starting to surround us.

  “I can’t stay here any longer. My strength could traumatize others, but I can tell you that there has been no mental interference.”

  Bunch of bastards! Dung worms! If only they knew how hard it was for me to refrain from killing them all. I have less than five minutes left until I go crazy, and Reiji will be the only one who can pull me out of it. Bastards! I hate you all!

  Demon form, chimeric shield, bone blade. Wait, where’s the buff for being the keeper of a place of strength? If Tiamat isn’t instilling the hatred, it’s that thing in the astral doing it. And he’s slick, too—I’m the only one everybody despises.

  The anger inside me bubbles up higher and higher. Sure, I’m the only one who isn’t experiencing the emotion directly, but my empathy is bashing my brains in better than a sledgehammer. Do you know what it’s like to want to kill someone? I mean, to understand someone who wants to kill you out of pure hatred? I’m surrounded by a crowd of people who think they’ll be able to get away with it, too. My emotional buffer is going to go haywire pretty soon, but LJ is hanging in there so far. My love for people is falling behind. I will need anger and protection from the cherubs if I’m going to fight, however. Let him sit with his shield.

  Battle! You won’t stand a chance!

  Force blades, a meteorite rain, and an aura of darkness that does mental damage within a radius of a hundred and ten meters. You think the keeper was strong? You think I’ll be easier to kill? You smug, arrogant little idiots! Tornado personified, a blanket of true darkness. A thinned group of saints decides to try the same tactic they used on Idzumi—here’s a meteorite for
you. There’s only one person who can kill me under the Tree of Worlds, and he’s on my side. Femida joins the battle; Reiji and Ekron refrain, which I understand. It isn’t their fight, and they aren’t formally my friends. How many of these morons are there? And where’s that damn Leon?

  I don’t notice the divine alliance preparing an attack. They don’t bother with a diamond fortress, instead going straight to a combine erdo strike. There’s so much strength I invested in it that it wipes out all the players within a radius of two hundred meters. My flesh melts under the maximum light damage, though I heal myself instantly. You bastards! That hurt!

  My head is already starting to buzz from the emotions I’m holding back, and I’m becoming wobbly. My demon visage disappears for a second, and the remains of my pants, other clothes, and rings collapse to the ground. Complete item destruction. The tattered breastplate barely covers my shoulders and chest; my head starts to hurt. There’s too much pain, too much emotion.

  It’s time to finish Leon once and for all. A dwarf hammer crashes home, dropping three gods instantly to the ground. You thought flying would give you an advantage? Leon is the only one who doesn’t have a shield up, and that makes my job even easier. I hear his last words even through the noise of the battle. He throws his arms wide and prepares to accept the blow.

  “No regrets.”

  “Go to Hell.”

  Where’s Rachel? I’m ready to even all my scores, and she’s next on the list. Ekron leaps down in her Beelzebub visage to keep Rachel from reaching an open portal. White wings sprout on the girl’s back making her clothes fall off. No, you idiot! Beelzebub is a girl who would happily tear you to pieces, not some guy who’ll stand there in a puddle of drool. Given the number of corpses littering the ground, Ekron is practically invincible.

  An enormous block of stone falls onto the field, followed by towers and a castle wall…Airis Castle. It’s collapsing having lost its god and source of energy.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  When Reiji saw the fortress come crashing to earth, he had just one thing to say.

  “I think it’s time, Aurin.”

  A three-meter ball materializes next to him, looking something like a hedgehog. Any chimerologist worth his salt would have recognized the best possible form of armor, one that would weather even a meteor strike, though that same chimerologist would have been at a loss to explain why little bolts of lightning were bouncing back and forth between the bone needles. The sphere unfurled to the size of a grown man. Next to Reiji, a man was standing in chimeric armor, with hundreds of kilograms worth of organic mana storages nestled underneath. He actually looked more like a cockroach with a studded shell.

  Human, Aurin, non-level, non-class, non-rank

  The transformation took less than two seconds, and then came the man’s reply.

  “It’s up to you to decide who you’re going to follow and what you’re going to do. I haven’t taken sides, though I’ll collect Sagie’s body if he dies. The portal keeper dissolved his body without leaving a trace.”

  Reiji looked over and sighed deeply. He didn’t like the battle either, though he gave the code phrase as he glanced at the castle coming crashing to the ground.

  “Remove the restrictions.”

  Human, Reiji, non-level, non-class, non-rank

  His body began soaking up a higher-order energy distorting the magic field. Then, he took off and reached the speed of sound just two seconds later. A shock wave burst through the compressed air. Three seconds later, the same occurred again, with an explosion two seconds after that. Reiji had broken through the fortress wall and detonated the main mana storage. The flight and strike had drained him of all his strength, so he fell onto the battle field along with the stone fragments that were raining down around him.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  As I push my way through the crowd of players, Rachel realizes why her path is blocked and goes all-in. She blinds Ekron with Light Magic, ducks under her, spreads her wings, and aims for the small portal.

  “You’re not going anywhere, you swine! Zero!”

  A small area right in front of the portal turns into a black hole. As one of the strongest Dark Magic spells, it destroys all matter it comes into contact with. Rachel does a somersault in the air to get away from it, though one of her wings touches the portal. Just a stump remains as the momentum sends her hurtling toward the portal and crashing into the cube. Yes, fall! I have a swamp full of stone torments waiting for her. Fall, fall!

  But she grips the edge, pulls herself up to the disappearing portal, and dives inside. No!

  The wave of attackers is starting to encircle me. You all want to come at me at once? I cast an area of darkness followed by a maximum dragon breath in all directions. Well, come one, come all! Where’s your fighting spirit now? The drunken battle rage you had going? But I stop, forcing myself to calm down. They’re just people under the influence of an artificial emotion.

  I’ve already gotten to the edge of the portal ring when I hear a voice that there’s no way I should be hearing. No, no, no!

  “Sagie, Sagie, I’m scared!”

  Rosie? How? Why are you here? Her voice calls out to me from the pursuing crowd, and then I see something there’s no way I should be seeing—again. A little girl’s body comes flying from the ranks in the rear and lands right in front of me. Rosie? How could anyone do this? She was just an innocent child.

  Third Sequence Limiter activated

  I forgave my enemies and tried to live my life. I wanted peace, a family, to be a brother, to be a friend, just to live. And what did I get from people?

  Second Sequence Limiter activated

  Haven’t I suffered enough? Have I not done enough for the world? I’ve done so much for so many people!

  First Sequence Limiter activated

  So, you’re the god in this world, you monster? Hiding in the astral, blocking access and deciding that nobody’s going to be able to pull you out of there? There’s no immortality, no absolute strength. Just you and your rules. I resolve to show it what it has shown me: the pain of defeat, the pain of loss, the pain of betrayal.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Femida saw Sagie sitting on the ground, his wild eyes staring at an empty spot in front of him. After the first flash, which bathed the field of battle in red light, she quickly realized that there was something wrong with him. A flash of darker red light followed a few seconds later. After the third flash, she had the distinct impression that her plate gauntlets were gone, along with the skin, and that there was nothing but naked flesh in their place. Sagie radiated the kind of power that burned right through your body and soul, a wind you know could grind you into dust with just a little gust. But nothing made sense of what was going on. Why was Sagie sitting there, staring into empty space and losing his mind? Suddenly, it hit Femida that it was an illusion. She could even see her chosen one’s aura, a terrible red halo of strength through which his figure was only an indistinct haze. Was he still human? He was always scary when he put on his demon look, but the person right there before her oozed horror. Only his eyes remained in his bone mask. His body looked like it had been flayed. He was still sitting there, his eyes fixed on the same spot in front of him, and his aura catching all the spells being thrown at him. It was so thick, in fact, that none of them hit their target. Nobody dared get close enough to try a sword on him, though one brave soul hurled a spear. That roused Sagie, but he just sent a message in the chat instead responding to the attack.

  Run, run, run, run, run. Get as far away from me as you can. I have nothing left to lose.

  It’s an illusion! I’d…

  But Sagie wasn’t listening. He raised his left hand, and his aura started to expand, growing denser and denser. Materialized souls started leaping out of it. The same thing had happened during the battle for Airis Castle eleven years before, and precious few of the spirits then had been neutral. Most attacked the players, devouring the living and the dead, while a few even fed on the terror
that gripped everyone there in order to gain power. The first wave of creatures was killed by the area attacks aimed at Sagie. Nothing could touch him, however—he had left the bounds of this world.

  Utter chaos reigned on the battlefield for about twenty seconds. The scattered players tried to fight back against the hundreds of creatures whose levels went from 100 to 10000 in less than a minute, until a snake-like body finally appeared in the sky. Two kilometers long, with four pairs of mismatched eyes, a crest along the length of its back, thousands of large scales, and an enormous mouth, it was so powerful Femida felt as if she were about to lose consciousness from a whole kilometer away.

  Keeper, Tser’Kareni Papir, non-level, non-class, non-rank

  “Sagie, you monster!” Femida screamed. He’d ripped a keeper into the real world, and it would brush him away like a piece of fuzz if he dared touch it.

  Femida was forced to battle with a bone reaper spider. Happily, nobody else wanted to share its spoils, and she was able to watch Sagie fire off an attack on the keeper. The meteor he cast crashed through the crown of the tree and smacked into Tser’Kareni’s shield. She’d thought Sagie had already cast the largest meteor the world would ever see when he destroyed Castle Airis, but right then, she realized she was wrong. The size of the meteor whistling down dwarfed even the keeper. It was more than two kilometers in diameter, the cosmic fireball enough to kill all living things within tens of kilometers in every direction. But Tser’Kareni caught the blow with his magic shield and diffused the shockwave. Even with that, however, it was strong enough to kill anyone who wasn’t behind a shield. Ekron was torn to pieces, if not dead. The rubble Reiji was lying in was pulverized into a fine gravel. In the meantime, Femida was already fighting a royal ogre.