Chapter 248: Chapter 247: Why Do I Feel Like The Bad Guy?

As Narcissus chuckled and tried to pull himself together after the massive divinity infusion he had received from Carl, he couldn’t help but laugh at how the young man had managed to throw them off so badly with nothing but a few taps of his foot.

He also found the unceremonial crowning to be a perfect example of how little such things meant to Carl, in his time at the faction he had seen that Carl acted more as the faction’s slave than its leader, something which originally struck him as naivety.

In light of this move though that was reframed totally, not naivety, but disinterest.

He now knew without doubt that Carl had zero interest in leadership and authority, in fact it seemed to strike as a contemptible concept entirely. Suddenly holding both gave Narcissus the perspective needed to understand, leadership is needed only because complacency exists and authority exists only because ill-intent exists.

The need to be ruled by one stems solely from the inadequacy of the many, leaving the few to carry them and the one to light the way.

It was a fact that carried the weight of the lives, hopes and wants of everyone under the leader’s rule, a weight that fell on Narcissus the moment Carl told him to do a good job and keep his people in line.

He would need to help the many overcome their basic instincts and accept the new order, keep the few motivated to maintain their current sentiments in the face of open opposition, all whilst pushing forward and rebuilding their society from the monument of retribution Carl left flowing over the earth, up.

“I really wish I hadn’t sworn to do anything he asked…” Narcissus then ordered Grenda and the others to help the nobles pull themselves together so they could effectively follow their own orders, then got straight to work.

Carl and the others were doing the same.

With the vampires brought to heel and put under more agreeable leadership, they had to move on to their next goal and to that end had returned to Ishtar, surprised to find her sitting on the beach where their house once stood.

“Your sister told me this was your home once, she told me much as a matter of fact. I’m not welcome in her presence anymore, not that I blame her or am looking for pity, it’s only fair.

You might be her brother, but you’ve done more for her than either of those who made the two of you. Before you were even born you sacrificed all the power you would ever have to save her, you had no way of knowing that you would be able to survive let alone control the power.

Your will was indomitable before you’d taken your first breath and it cost you everything. So just once in my life, I’ll be a real mother and I’ll leave when we’re done to go and buy you as much time as I can…”

Ishtar stood and pressed a finger to Carl’s forehead, force feeding the locations where the revived Elder-gods were holding off the villains.

“…I’ll be going now.”

“Before you do. You have a lot to answer for, a lot of amends to make, don’t try taking the easy way out before you make it up to Sis at least.”

Ishtar shrugged, offering only that she recommended they deal with Pandora first before disappearing.

Carl groaned and looked to Kyubi and Klaire, before opening a portal to their next target. The aura that flowed out of it was intense enough to make the sea retreat from the beach far enough to be mistaken for the early signs of a tsunami, but only managed to make the groan at the predicted expenditure of effort.

As they all produced their barriers, extended their barriers beyond the threshold and moved in.

They arrived in a world that had seen the peak of armageddon and then decided it wasn’t high enough. The world had been burnt to cinders, ravaged by plagues that left festering pools of puss to boil in the infernos, whilst hundreds of incorporeal shades waged war with hundreds of Elder-gods in front of them.

Their appearance immediately broke what had become a stalemate, with the Elder-gods rallying around them.

“You! You must be the little fox’s parents. I am Ellil, Ishtar’s grandfather.”

“Well, we don’t have time to talk, where can we find Pandora?”

“Wish we knew exactly. As soon as we dragged her here she seemed to exp-”

“Can you two help with them? I’m going to go make a scene…”

Ellil was clearly not impressed with being ignored, but when Klaire decided to quite literally pull out the big guns and fill the battle field with with her solar rounds, Carl decided to try his hand at divinity restructuring on a specific attack.

Changing her normal sun rounds into a more specific form.

“I upgraded them in heat and impact, but they won’t pierce. One round, one target, try not to miss since you could melt a castle with these.”

“You would know!” Klaire shouted with fake anger as he changed into his vermillion-bird form to gain altitude and distance from allies before changing back and going into freefall.

As he fell through the burning atmosphere, he let his divinity leak out and disperse, spread across the world by the thermal winds trying to put crippled world to rest as he could feel the energy of an infant storm gathering.

As his divinity spread throughout the air currents, mapping them and acting as immaterial sensory organs that spread throughout the atmosphere, he could sense the same divinity he had felt when Pandora emerged from her portal.

Moreover, after spending some time in the company of the evolved Illerion, he noticed a certain similarity.

There was a certain likeness between their divinities that he hadn’t had the time or knowledge to see before, not in the structure as a whole, but in the core principles of its structure, like how homes of a given era can look vastly different but share a theme.

It wasn’t much, but it was enough to help him understand what caused them to become so much more powerful upon the system’s activation; It somehow managed to forcibly extract power from the laws.

A small revelation that quickly snowballed into a much greater understanding of the situation.

Carl reached out to his scattered divinity to give it purpose, turning it into a spiralling force to gather those remnants into a single point even as he continued to fall.

As his divinity worked, and the remnants of Pandora were sent gathered at his position, what seemed to be stray bits of divinity slowly began to reform into the woman who had tried to catch him in a pincer attack between herself and Mobius.

When she realised her body had been forcibly reassembled by him, her eyes snapped open and she speared toward him as if to finish what she had started with both him and the ruined world in one foul swoop.

’Thank you SATS for the hand-to-hand training.’

As she reached for him, he caught her out of her element, clear from the way she had dispersed that she had no experience with fighting in her own body.

He grabbed her wrists then positioned his body to act as an air-brake, before quickly repositioning again to use that newfound resistance to drive his knee around and into her face and finally transformed into his physically powerful demon-form and launched her groundward ahead of him.

As the woman collided with the ravaged world’s surface, it was barely able to resist the force of the impact, breaking away to form a crater many times larger than it should have.

To spare it, and possibly avoid a second impact causing the surface to give way, he transformed again to the fiery humanoid and landed with more grace than he ever could have in the other body.

“Hey, you’re the one who wrecked this world so why do I feel like the bad guy!? That doesn’t seem fair Pandora!”

It was childish goading, but the best he could come up with on the spot and he needed something to bait his trap, he even let himself look distracted by turning to look toward where he had left Kyubi and Klaire fighting the shades with the Elder-gods.

As improvised as it was, it worked and Pandora charged towards him as though she had completely forgotten her own strengths.

Then when she was just about to try and smother the flames with her bare hands, they turned to ice in an instant, ice which then began to consume her, as her chaos had consumed the world they stood on.

The ice crept up her hands, her arms and devoured her as it changed into a towering monument to the price of betrayal.

“I really need to use this more. Sorry, Pandora, let’s get your system burned away so you can go back to your old self.”

Carl reached through the ice and put a hand on either side of her face, then started filling her with divinity to burn the system out of her like he had the others. As he did, he began to ponder who they would seek out next, but then Pandora’s face twisted into a malevolent grin.

Before Carl knew what had happened he was laying on his back a few metres from where Pandora now stood free from the icy prison cackling.

As he tried to push himself up to be sitting rather than laying, a burning pain spread through him as he realised that his arms had been ripped off, or blown off. He didn’t know it had happened, let alone how it had happened and Pandora stepped closer.

“You arrogant little whelp! You thought you could hold me in a prison of glass? I am Pandora, mother to all evil in the world. I am the master of Chaos itself!”

“Now who’s arrogant? Illerion, I need you over here!”

In a blistering haze, illerion appeared, her daggers cutting Pandora’s throat and disemboweling her before either of them even knew she had arrived.

“So you’re the cretin that usurped my power all those years ago? I’ll be taking back what you stole. Carl, pull yourself together while I keep her busy, I’ll be mad if the kids see you like that.”

As Illerion engaged with Pandora, Carl ejected his soul form to help him up and then reunited so they could heal the physical body together, but Pandora was not a typical foe and the wounds were afflicted.

His head began to throb as infection spread throughout him, he changed to his vermillion-bird form to return to Kyubi, thinking that if she had the best chance at cleansing him.

On the flight back though, his fire turned a sickly green and the world went blurry and began to darken, he felt the impact as he crashed into the ground and then he felt his body change back as he could no longer maintain the change.

It was muffled, but he suddenly heard Kyubi’s voice as the warmth of her flames tried purifying whatever taint she had left ravaging him. For a second, it helped and his vision returned, but then he coughed up blood as black as Klaire’s armour.

It hurt to think, but he had no choice but to endure.

’What the hell did she infect? If it was just my body then Kyubi should have healed it no problem.’

He looked inside himself, desperate to diagnose the malady that plagued him and then he saw it, the taint hadn’t infected his physical body but the divinity coursing through it.

In one quick expulsion, he ejected it all into an orb next to him and told Kyubi to try again.

This time, it worked, the healing flames repairing the cells destroyed by Pandora’s lingering curse.

Carl’s body was quickly repaired, but the infection lingered in his divinity and if anything seemed to feed on it, as though Pandora simply happened to be his natural enemy.

The purity and density of his divinity proved the perfect breeding ground for whatever kind of contamination it was, eating through it in and beginning to run rampant.

Kyubi was about to burn it away when Carl stopped her, and sacrificed his mana to recover divinity. “Thanks for your help, can you cover me while I analyse it?”

“What good will analysing your own divinity do? Don’t do anything stupid…” Kyubi grumbled, as she licked his face in fox form. “…By the way, why did Nergal’s sleeves get restored as though they’re part of your body?”

Carl looked at his arms, then to Kyubi and smiled. “Okay, you can scold me later.”

“Wai-” Before she could do anything to stop him, the sleeves seemed to dissolve into his arms, a process that was blatantly quite painful but of clear value when it finally stopped.

Carl had changed into yet another new form.

His head had almost completely changed into that of a lion with its mouth hanging open, whilst inside was a more human mouth making the rest seem almost mask-like except for the leonin eyes that scanned around.

His body had become as honed and muscular as Nergal’s whilst his ruined hoodie revealed that his forearms had become riddled with putrid boils and the flesh of his sides had rotted away from his bottom ribs up to his armpit.

He hadn’t simply done it because Nergal’s form would undoubtedly yield an enormous amount of power, in fact as fast as he made it, it was a decision he had never wanted to make.

The idea of mimicking the same idiots that had the power to stop this from happening, but chose not to, left him a bad taste in his mouth.

Regardless of that, the moment he realised Pandora was his natural enemy, things changed and he had no room to stubbornly refuse to use something that would keep him alive and allow him to win.

It wasn’t Nergal’s power that he needed though, it was the structure of his existence.

Pandora represented all the evils that plague mankind, war, plague, famine, corruption etc. Nergal on the other hand was Death’s son, not representing those things, but embodying them as intrinsic parts of his being.

She was but a human variant deified in the catastrophic wake of her own faltering curiosity, one who had to steal power from another to amount to anything more than a laughable caricature of Death’s firstborn son.

In his new form the once repugnant sensation his corrupted divinity seemed to give off, now seemed to have a strangely enticing scent, like a freshly cooked meal.

“Kyubi, don’t look this is going to be gross.” With those final words, he finished analysing it, then dug in and consumed every trace of his own tainted divinity.

As expected, in his new form the once ravaging infection became a satisfying snack his body consumed before continuing to fully absorb his discarded divinity.

He then made an effort to properly gauge the physical abilities of his new form, before he gave Kyubi leave to rejoin Klaire and headed off to take over from Illerion.

When Illerion saw him she snarled thinking Nergal had decided to butt in uninvited, but then she noticed his clothes before Pandora had recovered from thinking the same, she tossed Carl her daggers before she recovered and cackled as he used them to stake her through each hand and pin her to the ground.

By the time she realised it was Carl and not Nergal, he had already began filtering his own divinity into her in order to interrupt her control and prevent retreat.

He then gripped the dagger grips and used the Chaos-aligned divinity to extract the Chaos that had been used to reinforce her power so it could be returned to its source.

The process was slow, torturous, made Pandora feel as though she were being ripped apart from the inside out and put back together one molecule at a time, combined with the heightened perceptions it also seemed to last eternities.

Throughout the process she didn’t remain still either, but flailed and struggled and resisted, dragging out the torment as she tore limbs free from the blades one by one, forcing Illerion to help restrain her whilst he stabbed again and again to keep the process working at full speed.

It was a truly horrific procedure, one that was taking a significant mental toll on him to carry out. Illerion could see the pain in his expression, but that was when she truly felt a sense of undying respect for him, a leader willing to do things that left them disgusted with themself for the sake of their people was the kind of leader she wanted to be.

With one last scream as she writhed in pain, she fell unconscious and Carl stood. “Illerion, I’m sorry, but I only know one way to get the power in these things out.”

“Don’t worry, such things can be foreplay with the right perspective.”

“Screw it, I’m out, you do it.” Carl passed her the daggers and began burning the system out of the debilitated Pandora as Illerion chuckled and rammed the daggers into her gut.

unlike the others though, when the system was burned out of Pandora, a massive impulse of aura was expelled and threw two bodies dozens of metres.

After landing, Illerion decided to mess with Carl a little bit and let out a few fake moans, but when she didn’t receive any response she peeked only to see that the other body was Pandora.

Her eyes widened and darted over to where she was before…

“Klaire! Kyubi! Carl’s ascending and we need to evacuate everyone now!”

She wasn’t just being dramatic.

Unlike their ascensions, Carl’s was not forced or contained, this wasn’t synthetic like their’s were.

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