Chapter 376: For the Sake of Survival
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Limbo. A realm of nothingness. A prison that traps your consciousness in the deepest reaches of your soul in a desperate attempt to preserve who you are.
It was a realm that only existed in one's mind, was only accessible through death, and was only escapable through reincarnation.
It was the highway between lives.
However, while I listlessly existed in that realm with nothing but my deepest subconscious to keep me company, I was calm. -How many times have I been here...-
As a wave of familiar memories endlessly flooded into my mind, I closed my eyes and attempted to focus on them.
But before I had that opportunity, I felt a cool, crisp breeze blow across my face, and with it, a smile surfaced. *Woosh*
*inhale* "Haah..." Taking a deep breath of the fresh, scented air, a monstrous wave of nostalgia washed through my consciousness, and I comfortably opened my eyes.
I was in the middle of a field of multicolored flowers, beneath an endless, unfamiliar night sky populated by countless nebulas and nearby galaxies. -What a beautiful sky...-
Gently sitting down as I looked up into the stars, I found myself in a shrunken, white-furred version of my fenririan form, only two meters tall, with rounded features and nubs for horns as if I were a child.
But rather than startle me, it made me comfortable.
"There you are! How many times have I told you to not come out here alone?!" Hearing the voice of a woman speaking a language I hadn't heard in millennia, I gently looked over my shoulder to find a normal, white Fenrir at least thirty times my height looking down at me.
It was a being with no face, but I recognized it instantly. "Mom, do you ever look up into the stars and wonder what's out there?" Looking back up into the sky, I smiled, letting myself fall into a trance.
"Haha," Her laugh was clear and warm. "Of course not, sweetie." Gently lowering herself next to me, she nudged her nose into my side. "Haven't I told you, I already know everything that's out there!"
She spoke with confidence, but at the same time, it was a line that made my smile fade. "R..right..."
Knowing what was coming, I closed my eyes and lowered my head.
*crackle* Almost instantly, the faint crackle of a fire met my ears, a wave of heat blew over me, and the scent of burning flesh flooded my nostrils.
Eventually opening my eyes, I found myself in a field of fire, now in a body that had matured immensely, with the mutilated body of my mother laying at my feet.
No matter how many times I experienced it, I couldn't get used to it.
Looking back over my shoulder, I found a white fenrir, only slightly smaller than me, staring past me with a look of despair painted on his face.
"You.. WHAT DID YOU DO?!" Bolting up to me, his jaws clamped onto my leg, immediately fracturing it.
But I let it happen. "Nothing... I did nothing..."
Biting even harder, I felt his teeth cutting through my flesh as tears streamed down his face.
"Stop... If you don't control your aura we'll be next." Looking up into the dark night sky, I found myself peering into an endless abyss devoid of stars.
But that was when a sudden growing ring of light appeared, starting from the center of the sky, before expanding over every horizon in a matter of seconds.
It was a ship so large it could disrupt planetary orbits, and so powerful it could effortlessly split planets in half.
Its presence alone was enough to ruin worlds.
However, while they were our enemy.. we weren't theirs...
We were simply an obstacle in the direction they were running.
*Zip-CRRRRAACCKK* A deafening shockwave blew over us as the ground turned molten and a line was drawn through the 'sky'.
*FLASH* Everything was instantly washed in a sea of light as I lowered my head and tried to block out all sound.
But it did nothing. *CRACK-BRRRRRMMM* As a heat wave so intense it burnt off my fur blasted over us, all I could do was grasp my aching heart.
"KIDS, WHAT ARE YOU STILL DOING HERE?!" Father's voice pierced the deafening mixture of sounds with ease. "I'LL BUY SOME TIME, SO GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!"
As the visualization of his body melting away filled my mind, I could only cringe, desperately wanting it to end.
But it continued.. and continued.. and continued... The eternally vivid memory of my father's skin melting off as he tried to protect my brother and I from the aftermath of an attack not even aimed at us...
-Stop...- It was so bad I had to plead with my own consciousness. -Please...- I knew it was an illusion, a memory playing before my eyes... "PLEASE STOP!"
But it never did.. forcing me to relive every single second of that day's agony before suddenly changing again.
The next time I opened my eyes, I found myself looking up at the stars again, however, instead of in a field of flowers, I was sitting on a bed of corpses, and blue-burning metal wreckages.
It had at least been fifteen thousand years since 'they' arrived, and they were still like an endless infection that couldn't be exterminated...
Looking down, I saw the corpse of a human, many times smaller than a single one of my claws, staring up at me with a furious fire in his eyes.
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He had a hole in his chest, with his mouth and nose still dripping blood, but he was alive, using magic to speak. "You can't win..." Gritting his blood-covered teeth, he stared into my eyes like a feral monster. "No one can win. Just give up and-" *cRuNcH*
Momentarily putting some weight on him, his body crushed into a puddle of mush with the other bodies he was laying on.
"They're like bacteria... They just won't die..." Hearing the voice, I quickly turned around to once again see my brother walking over a field of blood with red-stained paws. "Do you think this will ever end?"
I paused as another vivid memory played in my mind. "Their ship was destroyed by one of those 'things', and crashed here. They're completely stranded, and the few times they've tried to leave, they didn't even make it out of the solar system, so they've decided to stay here."
"As if!" Walking up next to me, he looked out over the endless sea of blood and destruction with a sour expression. "I ought to just go kill them all."
"You can't." Feeling his angered gaze turn to me, I could only sigh. "Haah... The only reason we are still alive is because they're using the wreckage of their ship to keep the planet in orbit. If you kill them all, it's just a matter of time before this lopsided planet crashes into the sun..."
"SO WHAT IS YOUR ALTERNATIVE?!" Getting more and more angry, he looked like he wanted to hit me.
"You know those theories I was studying when I was young..? The ones you stole to try and make yourself stronger?"
He instantly tensed.
"I gave up on those theories after you stole them, but.. I was right..." My tone darkened as I lowered my head. "Had you not taken them, I would have continued to develop them, and there was a chance I could have saved Mom and D-" *pat*
He cut my voice short as he pressed his nose into the side of my neck, looking into my eyes with a threatening gaze. "Don't you dare try to twist blame..."
I didn't hold back my gaze either. "I twisted nothing. If you simply kept your greedy paws off my shit, even if we were still in this situation, Mom and Dad wouldn't be amongst the pile of corps-" *CRRACKK*
Hitting me across the face, the ground on the opposite side of me exploded, erupting into a bloody cloud of debris.
But I didnt move, looking him in the eyes with a fire that matched his own. "I'm going to start developing those theories again, and either get rid of the tumor clinging to this planet, or find a way off it."
But unfortunately, we didn't have time for either.
With a blink, another thousand years passed, and once again, as I stared into the night sky, I saw nothing.
But that time, it wasn't a ship. "We need to leave..."
*Zip-FLASH* As a rocket launched from a human base a few thousand kilometers lifted into the sky and exploded, a flash of light illuminated the underside of a creature, lined with endless rows of teeth larger than mountains, and covered in scars collected over an eternity.
It was the creature that had split the humans' ship in half: A creature known as an Abyss Eater. Something that used to be a guardian on the outer reaches of our solar system, consuming everything from alien ships to stray moons.
But that day was the day it turned its attention inward.
Drawn by the endless expansion of humanity, it came to wipe them out, taking the planet with it. *CRRRRRAAACCKKK* In an instant, the entire planet was sheared in half, and in a rush for survival, my brother and I jumped into the void through a gate made with an experimental space rune I had developed.
Back then, it caused an unfathomably vivid pain, the sensation of both my body and soul being eaten as if by acid, forcing us to race through the void as quickly as we could before eventually exiting to find ourselves in a world of endless rock and dust, under an atmosphere so thin it was nearly nonexistent.
But all it did was give us a clearer view of our world as it was continuously sheared into smaller and smaller chunks between the enwrapped tentacles of a monster so dark it's shape couldn't be defined.
Before long, the planet had been sheared so many times that it was nothing more than a giant molten rock. The grave of everyone and everything I knew.
We sat on the lunar surface for what felt like eons, hopelessly staring into the abyss that devoured our world.
We were its only survivors... Not even the so-called gods had a chance to fight back.
With nowhere else to go, I sank every speck of my mind into theories, expanding my knowledge of space mana and the void in an attempt to find a way off the rock hurtling farther and farther from the sun with every orbit, while Dagr focused everything he had to develop his strength.
Without food, water, or company, it was a thousand years of hell, living off the ever-thinning mana emitting from the ever-distant star which was now a tiny blip in the endless night sky.
But the more I studied, the less hopeful I became...
Space mana devoured everything, and the only way to keep it away was with more space mana. Even with a perfect mana shield, it would still seep through, squeezing through unfathomably tiny crevices, not between imperfections, but between particles of mana.
My only solution was to emit so much space mana that it pushed the rest away, effectively shielding me. -But I must have complete control over it for it to work...-
However, that was something far easier said than done. Even with the most efficient space rune I could craft, I simply couldn't control the space mana it emitted.
It was like an intangible cloud I could only control in clumps, forcing myself to rely on the control of runes rather than my own mind.
But there was only one thing I could do to change that. -I need to make myself an attribute node...- Not artificially, but through the study and manipulation of my genetics.
Using runes wasn't enough to make the mana 'mine', so I had to take extreme measures, using the void to damage myself so I could alter my own genetics, destroying and reforming my reserve dozens of times to shred my organs, and begin sculpting a new body in its place, modifying more than just the genetics related to my attribute node.
But none of it was enough.
No matter how much I destroyed my body, the attribute node I wanted my body to create wouldn't appear.
I needed something more...
I needed to evolve...
It was a concept familiar to many creatures on my old planet, where they would hibernate in order for their body to repeatedly destroy itself, and reconstruct everything.
But we, as fenrir, didn't have that, so I had to take to more extreme measures.
"Dagr, I need to die." Looking him in the eyes as I interrupted his training, his expression darkened.
"Have you given up?"
I gently shook my head. "I need to evolve, and in order to do that, I need you to kill me."
His bitter expression did nothing but darken the longer we stood there. "Find an alternative then, I'm not going to kill-"
"Brother." My voice and gaze firmed in an instant. "I have already tried every alternative... We only have a hundred years before we go careening into the Abyss Eater's territory. We don't have time to find alternate routes."
"But.. what if you don't-"
"I have everything set up, I just need to die." Glancing over my shoulder, I looked back toward the cloud that had formed on the horizon, over a rune the size of a continent. "That rune gathers mana and souls, I made it using the rune of reincarnation Dad showed us when we were young as a reference..." Turning back to him, I saw him staring at the horizon with wide eyes. "If my theories are right. I can reincarnate myself, and the genetic imprint on my soul will reconstruct my body."
There was a long silence as his expression morphed between awe, despair, and anger.
But eventually, he grit his teeth. "If this is your twisted way of abandoning me, I will never forgive you..."
Finally standing up, I turned around to look at the cloud on the horizon. "What do you think I've done for the last two thousand years?" Walking ahead, my calculative expression lit up slightly. "Have some faith in me this time."
But while I said that.. the pain of getting your skull caved in by your only family and companion, hurt worse than anything I had ever experienced, and for him, the pain was only multiplied.
It was for the sake of our survival, but to this day, even in memory, that pain lingers.
But the worst part was.. it was only the beginning...
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