Beacon from Beyond (Book 1 Complete)

Cralok's new body held a new energy source as well, the spinning white core of the planet, separated from his main body to take the place where the star previously was.

Cralok exploded forward, bursts of fire pushing from the back of his wings to tackle Dei with enough force to knock the sense out of him before curving upwards and away, coming back down for another pass.

The green-orange comet of fury shot thousands of rocky bullets on his passing, but again the Void boiled under Cralok's might, temporarily cutting off Dei's escape.

Dei flickered between the projectiles where he could, diving in and out of the Spirit Realm as Cralok forcibly pulled him back to the Physical world every few fractions of a second.

Some had to deflect with his hands, others broke on his body to lodge infected fragments within him, but most of the damage was averted. It served to distract him while Perumah did something he hardly understood, spreading her roots throughout his body to curl around his bloodstream, occasionally piercing into him with thorns and enhancing the connection between them.

Tendrils from Cralok whipped out at Dei, and his Connection met them in the middle, tangling the two and allowing Dei to reel the Dragon in. Rather than fight, Cralok dove forward to ram Dei once more.

Perumah, who'd slowly been drawing chaos into herself and running it through her own body, finally released it into Dei.

Dei roared as he felt himself be supercharged, his muscles enhanced as the refined power coursed through him, Perumah acting as a lens to limit the chaos towards a select few concepts- those of blood empowerment.

The blur that was previously Cralok slowed, Dei's speed and perception matching his own.

The fins on Dei's back glowed with ghostly light, and he sidestepped the meteoric Dragon, punching upwards yet only chipping away at the surface-level mantle flesh, dealing little real damage.

No longer could Dei grapple with the now planet-sized Dragon.

Entropy and chaos were nullified at its Authority over the Physical world.

It'd temporarily locked him from using the Void.

The only aspect of himself that the Dragon could not touch was… his Path of the Leviathan. He could still enter the Spirit Realm in short bursts, no matter how much the Dragon reeled him back in through some unknown manner he still couldn't locate- Good Samaritan seeing nothing, implying it was unrelated to his soul.

Dei couldn't flee to the Spirit Realm, but… he was on the path of the Reaper. The path of the Leviathan. Something stopped him from taking that final step, some requirement he didn't know, but he was still imbued with their power.

Cralok used that same hovering movement to position himself in unpredictable ways before striking out with thousands of rocks and tendrils. Dei defended where he could and deflected where he couldn't, Perumah's thorny roots striking out from his flesh to deflect what it could; micro-explosions flashed around him as she released controlled bursts of raw chaos, vaporizing many of the projectiles- still, it would not be enough to kill Cralok alone.

Cralok would not fall quickly, nor would he fall in a single strike. Dei needed to kill through "Death by a thousand cuts," and through his Path of the Leviathan.

Cralok shot beam after beam of festering Duplication mana at Dei, but he continued to dodge and weave through the Realms. Each time, he saw the Spirits build in both power and… definition. Whereas before they were formless white blobs, they slowly took on a green hue, building ghostly serpentine bodies covered in cancerous eyes and small dragon-like wings.

The beams and asteroids continued to rain down on Dei, searing him with pain as his body fought off the sickly feeling they gave, but he could barely feel it anymore as a plan abruptly came to mind.

The spell he'd formed when compressing Minerali… he didn't need to crush a universe… but it let him integrate with reality, and pull it into himself.

Perumah was dragged with him whenever he entered the Spiritual Realm, so he knew he could take others along for the ride.

His Connection could only go for a bit more than a mile, but the Dragon was easily tens of thousands across.

Their battle had taken them away from the Caps' solar system… he had space to work with.

Connection shot out, weaving in space and bending it inwards, his body acting as some kind of black hole as every distant celestial body either brightened or enlarged, the bent space acting as a magnifying glass.

Connection pulled, released, grabbed the next portion, then pulled again, tugging at reality like a rope, before tying it to the rest.

His power did not extend to the edges of reality, but it didn't need to. From an outside perspective, Connection rapidly expanded, turning from organized strings to expansive cracks in reality- all centered on Dei.

In the void of space, there was nothing. The concepts were weak, reality was not strengthened, everything was barren,

It was this very state that combined with something he didn't expect before that allowed his connection to expand tens of thousands of miles out- the Potential he'd imbued into himself from The Mother's soul.

'I KNEW it was a good idea to forgo giving it to my Class!'

Through it all though, only one thing remained unaffected- Cralok himself. No matter how Dei pulled with Void, Cralok would not budge, and the space he sat within remained unaffected.

That was fine, That wasn't the point.

Cralok realized Dei was doing something and charged his Dragon Breath, a rhythmic pulse quickening to indicate the power building.

Dei flipped the switch, praying it would work- otherwise the next few seconds would hurt. He felt resistance from the world, and nearly gave up to attempt a dodge when Perumah acted as well.

Her roots integrated with his Connection, piercing the insulation that protected them. It left the lines vulnerable, but through these holes she released a pure, unfiltered chaos.

The world went up in flames.

More than that, reality's hold weakened, the boundary thinned, and with a mental exertion, Dei finally utilized Void, the Path of the Leviathans, and his own personal domain to do something he only had a feeling would work.

He grabbed the Spirit Realm, then the section of the Physical Realm he had and made them… crash

He'd smashed two universes together, but the spell he'd gotten from the ordeal could be used for more than that.

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Physical and Spiritual ground together, and his little Dragon-spirits came into existence, all feasting on the powerful mana and concepts granted radiating off of Dei and Cralok.

Now that they were given unrestricted access to the pure sources of mana themselves, Dei watched their population… explode.

They multiplied like bacteria from thousands, to tens of thousands, then beyond under the effects of concentrated Draconic Duplication.

"Feed on the Dragon while I protect you from the world!" he asked of the swarm, and they responded with praise and happiness that took him off guard.

Dei's vision of the Dragon charging its fire was slowly blocked by his little spirits, and the last thing he saw before a wall of green and orange specks was a beam of Incineration from Cralok.

His heart clenched when he felt many of the lives at the front of the beam wink out, yet… those behind them lasted a moment longer, and those behind them longer still.

He could not feel the pure mana in the air, but he could see the tiny spirits gorging themselves on something, rapidly growing in power- several of which he recognized as something he'd met long ago. There were many Melders here, just as Gargeth was, yet instead of being Body Melders, they were Dragon and Duplication Melders.

More than that though, there were the monstrous ones- the killers that tore through friend and foe alike to gain power over the deeper concepts, to build their strength faster than the Dragon's Incineration could destroy them.

Between Dei and the Dragon, an ecosystem of rapid growth and rebirth was born. Crushed between the war of two titanic forces, pearls were born of the sand.

The seconds went by and the balance stabilized, spirits being destroyed equally as fast as they were born while the stronger ones feasted on those weaker.

Then the beam stopped.

At once, the trillions of spirits rapidly dwindled, but all hope was not lost for them, and the survivors turned their eyes on the only other source of food: Cralok.

Dei was their foundation. His very existence produced Spirit mana because the concepts of the Leviathan were powerful enough to corrupt the Draconic concepts in the space around them. To attack Dei would be like… eating dirt. He grew Spirit mana through his very existence.

Cralok on the other hand? He was the sun to their plants, and he'd now stopped shining down upon them.

They raced through the void towards a hesitating Cralok in an effort to consume that light once more, and Dei shrunk the space to allow for faster travel.

"Begone!" Cralok shouted, and Dei felt his grasp over the space around him shake, but hold. Cralok attempted to use Authority but it… failed. This was no longer the Physical Realm, Dei had usurped it.

"What have you done!?" Cralok demanded, "Spirits cannot exist here! They cannot exist in my Realm!"

Dei noted how Cralok's glow was diminished, and that the Dragon did not use his transportation ability to escape the rush of spirits. It seemed that Dragonfire was not something to be used lightly and his abilities were decommissioned, if only temporarily.

'Like Clever…'

"This is your Realm no longer. It is one of my own creation, the Union Realm, one of Physical and Spiritual alike!"

Again, Dei was struck by how prevalent his Domain was, even before becoming a unified concept under his command. 'Affinities exist before their Ascenders do. Unions are real, even without an affinity to indicate their existence like spirits have.'

Cralok struck out as the first wave of spirits reached him, but it was for naught. Though he was a master of infestations and parasites, he could be subject to them all the same- and these were parasites uniquely specialized into devouring him specifically.

They began to burrow into him, and Cralok screamed in agony, ripping out any rocks that became infested with spirits in an attempt to get them off him.

They were too close, though. His very presence empowered them, and they began to multiply once more, this time with a new target for consumption.

Cralok's glow slowly returned and he attempted to cast spells, only for the mana he channeled into them to be devoured rapidly, worsening his situation.

He relied on mana to-

'Wait, Dragons can't use mana. Aloran told me that… What are the spirits eating? And what is he using to move, because it's clearly NOT just his body. Aloran either lied or had an incomplete picture. Think later, kill now.'

Though Cralok had no mana, he certainly had something powering him, and the spirits had a terrible need for this.

They descended upon the screaming Dragon, flashes of green and orange briefly piercing the veil before disappearing the only indication of Cralok's persistent struggle

* * *

Shortly before the fight, on Caps.

Yalda's disheveled form traveled down the familiar halls as she made her way to the observatory along with many of her coworkers. The moment she walked through the door, she saw a scene of chaos.

Almost every instrument went utterly haywire, picking up impossible readings from their demise in the sky.

"What's going on?!" she asked her second-in-command Rondor.

"The plague planet sending off waves of force like we've never seen. All our tools are getting overwhelmed! We're dialing them back now but… we don't know what could cause this."

"Ma'am!" one of the workers in charge of visualizing the information shouted, "A picture is forming! If we lower the sensitivity, we might be able to see more!"

"What are you waiting for?! Do it!"

Yalda and the rest watched in anticipation as a visual finally appeared on the screen, the plague planet, FO-532, enlarging in terrifying clarity.

They saw in gruesome detail the eyes, green flesh, and spires that made up the entire thing, and Yalda was once more struck by how dumb they'd been to try and make contact with it.

'Loneliness and hope will make one do terrible things. We just wanted kind neighbors…'

Over the lip of the planet, they watched in solemn silence as a being they'd only theorized about appeared- the commander.

'Is that…?"

"A Dragon?" Rondor spoke her mind.

"No," Yalda said with absolute conviction, "Look at its flesh. If it was once… it is no longer. It is something much worse now."

It opened its maw, releasing a roar which even their instruments could faintly pick up, translating them into a vibration of the camera. It moved so quickly they couldn't even detect its afterimage, Yalda briefly considering that it may have just teleported. Where it arrived, they watched it strike at something they couldn't see, and bounce. The claws on its hand shattered utterly, and it recoiled.

Yalda could hardly believe her eyes. There was something out there fighting the thing, and they couldn't even see what. She considered that there was perhaps some kind of innate barrier around her planet, even if they had no Champion of their own, but something else was born from the darkness.

A blindingly white giant grew from a speck behind the Dragon's back. Previously invisible, a creature of equally terrifying magnitude enlarged in their vision, standing between Caps and FO-532. Terrible claws on its hands, fins from its back, and a whipping mane of hair that extended down its body, floating aimlessly behind as it dove towards the enemy before striking forward as well.

What happened next… they couldn't understand or see. Every part moved too quickly, but each glimpse they caught showed the Dragon looking further harried until, eventually, it stopped and turned its eyes back on its homeworld. Before they could celebrate its fleeing, the planet exploded, and it entered a second form.

They lost sight of the battle again. There were some glancing strikes, a few attempts to tussle with the thing, and everything else, but only after a blindingly bright explosion did they notice a change in the battlefield- white lines of the second beast's hair extended outwards in all directions, and their instruments detected that the space affected was… wrong. The visual information distorted, and they scrambled to recalibrate everything.

For naught. Seconds later, they picked up a beam of pure destruction which damaged most everything in their repertoire.

They sat in dread and darkness of the world for several minutes, doing everything they could to get as much information from their backups as possible. Eventually, they had enough to form a blurry image, and only a vaguely humanoid blob remained at the end, the white lines that'd irrevocably changed reality nowhere to be seen.

Even with the vague image they had though, the researchers of Caps watched the massive beast, which supposedly had just killed the dragon, reach its hand up to the stars and motion towards them with familiarity.

Waving at them.

"Can it see us?!" Yalda cried, but before anyone could respond, it popped out of existence and disappeared.