Blood Shaper

Book 5: Chapter 47

The main force of the nanomachines was moving toward Sel fast according to the woman who could sense them with her Skill, and she wasn’t wrong. They hit the opposite edge of the island before Kay’s group could get close and clumps of eldritch monsters were battling against guards and adventurers, pushing up the slopes toward the city when they finally arrived on the scene. Blobs tried to engulf homes and businesses, humanoid and monstrous shapes were attacking people of every walk of life, and robotic looking forms were ripping buildings, roads, and everything else into chunks and hauling it all away.

There was no need to discussing anything. Kay launched himself at the nearest enemy and started destroying. Torrents of blood gushed from every surface of his body, simulacra leapt from his armor onto masses of nanomachines, weapons formed in his hands to lash out at the closest targets, and a sea of blood grew beneath his feet. Eldritch corruption was destroyed en mass around him, and still there was more to rid the world of as the Lord of Spilled Blood advanced.

More soldiers, guards, and adventurers fought their way forward as reinforcements flooded in from every direction but the one the enemy controlled. A burst of thunder marked Alahna’s entry onto the filed, and the tide of black was fought to a standstill the eldritch force no longer gaining ground. Buildings were leveled as powerful attacks went off and massive amalgams of nanomachines stomped forward. Smaller forms began pushing together into bigger ones and the majority of the defenders attacks suddenly became mere annoyances instead of strong blows. The ones Kay was facing grew even larger, fusing dozens of shapes into single enemies that had enough mass to toss of the bits Kay was corroding away and keep fighting.

The tide started to push forward again, and Kay decided to fight size with numbers. He reached deed into the wide pool of blood beneath his feet and activated one of his most powerful Skills. “[Create Blood Champions].”

Six faceless copies of Kay in his armor stepped up out of the pool facing the enemy. Each one created its own weapon and charged into the fray. None of them were as strong as he was, but they had access to most of his Skills, including his current trump card, Purify Blood. The Skill originally designed to purge contaminants, parasites, and diseases from someone’s blood stream was now purifying the world of eldritch taint. Each of the champions took control of some of the blood Kay was sending everywhere around him and started striking out at the enemy.

As they did, Kay invoked another Skill. “[Create Blood Army].”

Ranks of red soldiers rose up and started marching in a row at a time. They crashed into the black tide and halted, solid blood body after body slamming into one another as they hit the enemy and were halted. The initial setback ended quickly as a pair of the champions took control of the growing army and started having them hack into the mass blocking the way. Pseudopods, tentacles, claws, needles, pincers, fangs, stingers, and countless shapes and weapons beyond that cut, smashed, stabbed, crushed, sliced, and ripped into the soldiers, but they had no fear of death. The ones that weren’t destroyed immediately got back up to fight and the ones that were broken apart just became fuel for the champion’s attacks.

Kay’s front began to shift the flow of the battle as more nanomachine reinforcements were shifted from other parts of the battle to hold back his army and champions, leaving other areas weaker for other forces to punch through. Kay briefly made out Alahna’s shape rising into the air and sending down bolt after bolt of lightning, followed by a swirling cloud of razor sharp winds and twisting balls of water that tore through the enemies below her, before she sank back down out of sight. He also saw a colorful shape out of the corner of his eye that looked like a gigantic two-dimensional trapdoor spider made out of multicolored paints burst out of the ground, grab a particularly large enemy and drag it out of sight before vanishing.

With both of his “summoning” Skills in use and it costing too much in time and mana to double up on either of them Kay went back to personally fighting. The sea of blood centered under his feet grew thicker as it turned into a moving platform a few feet thick that followed him around, melting the bottom of any enemy that landed on it and dragging the nearby foes closer, and to their doom. He felt something that he hadn’t in a while, the hint toward a potential Class from his title as he made the sea drown his enemies in blood. He set aside the feeling for later as more and more shaped and shapeless monsters charged him.

He was obviously the greatest threat of the battlefield, and the nanomachines knew it. Additional fusions of enemy units began rushing him as each second passed and in less than a minute there was a writing wall of black that almost blotted out the sun pushing toward him, trying to fight through his own mono-colored forces to kill min and end the threat. Blood soldiers were crushed as enormous forms sloughed off layers of nanomachines contaminated by blood. The things had mass to spare and while they lost hundreds of pounds of steaming nanomachines to break through each line of defense, they had thousands of pounds to spare.

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A thick strand of black launched itself from the closest enemy, growing dozens of reaching and grasping fingers from its end as it burst toward Kay. Completely ignoring the damage done to it by Kay’s armor it tore at him, trying to unseat him and drag him into the black mass to be consumed. He didn’t move an inch. The boots of his armor were fused into the raised sea beneath him, anchoring him to the ground with more force that one limb could output. It melted away and died as Kay destroyed it internally, but more and more started flying toward him, making it look like Kay was a ship to be moored at the docks with how many lines were aimed that way. Spinning, dome shaped blades burst from the sea, slicing away everything grasping at Kay, but there seemed to be an unstoppable tide of them.

Huge enemies in the shapes of mammoths, dinosaurs, shapeless rolling blobs, and more all pushed into the blades and let pieces of themselves be sheared off as they fought their way forward. They used the same tactic Kay did with his blood soldiers, endless wave attacks. They were a terrifying thing to face when you were up against mortal enemies but it was horrifying when up against undying foes with no fear of anything you could to do them. Broken chunks fell to the ground and threw themselves at Kay as projectiles or started launching bits of debris at him. Still the waves of black came on, and they showed that whatever else they were after, they wanted Kay dead.

Kay’s own wave of undying fighters were swept over or completely ignored, the damage they dealt disregarded as well as the enemies focused on destroying the source of the red soldiers. Kay turned the blades into a fully closed dome, forcing the enemy to push their way through what was essentially acid to them. They had no fear and no pain, so the only deterrent was the destruction of their nanomachines, but it kept the larger pieces from landing near Kay and turning into weapons. Large bulges began pushing in as the dome’s surface bent under the pressure. Kay could just make out Eleniah turning shapes into black mist with the force of her punches and Lauren sending out huge arrows at distant targets. A deep shadow passed over his dome and a continuous rumble of thunder shook Kay’s body. The unending flashes of lightning that started up and danced their way up and across the dome of blood covering Kay were so close together it seemed like one continuous burst of light as Alahna fried the mass of black sludge trying to sweep over him. The fried and steaming lump melted away as Kay dissolved it from around him and broke his way out.

Even with the stream of enemies headed to him, the battle was still in a stalemate. There were combatants capable of destroying swathes of nanomachines with their Skills available, but not in great numbers and even they had their limits. Big, flashy destructive spells were expensive and couldn’t be cast repeatedly or endlessly. For those without spells or Skills able to wipe out the machines, they faced enemies that put themselves together after each attack or reassembled themselves after seeming defeats. Adventurers and soldiers died alone and in groups as they pushed back the enemy one step and then lost two more all across the battle lines. The regular fighters on the field could slow the enemy down, temporarily destroying the shapes the nanomachines formed or breaking them to pieces that took a moment to reassemble, but they needed the combatants capable of powerful attacks through rare or high tier Classes to put the enemy down for good.

As the stalemate continued, perhaps slightly pushed in the people of Torotia’s favor thanks to Kay’s permanent destruction of what had to be millions of nanomachines, something began to change as ripples flowed through the black mass. The individual or fused bodies of the nanomachine shapes began to run together, the figurative tide of hundreds of black bodies running together into a more literal tide, a flowing solution of darkness that ebbed and flowed as it undulated. A large shape that looked like a slug covered in hooded robs swam across the top of the surface without moving, and at its center was a glowing blue light.

The light was eerie and made it look like the slug shape had a massive eye staring out over the battle. Where limbs and weapons were as the widespread merge happened became extrusions of the gargantuan mass of nanomachines, still swinging out at enemies even as the fusion took place, the blue light began to glow brighter. With it came a familiar sense of unwelcome otherworldliness, a spread of eldritch corruption that could be felt with one’s very being. It tasted like TV static and the bellows of angry fax machines to Kay and his fangs ached with the need to end that thing.

Veins began to glow beneath the surface of the mass, spreading the blue light along the entire surface of the nanomachines that Kay could make out. The blue light shone beneath the translucent black skin and then things started to shift. The uneven, lumpy texture of the thing smoothed out a little at a time as the buildings beneath it began to be eaten away. The swarm of nanomachines running together into one humongous shape started growing, the slug shape extruding itself upward. It grew and grew as the bulge the shape sat on became a tower and the blue light looked down on all of them.

Tentacles burst from the surface and started lashing out, squirming and twitching tendrils as far as the eye could see, lashing out at anything close and trying to drag people in to be consumed. Soldiers and guards screamed as they were drawn beneath the rolling surface and adventurers let lose with their most powerful attacks, burning and tearing gouges in the top layer of the nanomachines, which soon filled in again. Ponderously the glowing light swung to face Kay and two more massive extrusions grew from the tower, become limbs bristling with weaponry and sharp edges that reached out to slam down at Kay as behind them a tidal wave of nanomachines began to gather in order to sweep over everything and everyone that stood against the eldritch horror created through advanced technology from another universe.