Lord of Entertainment

Chapter 528: Display of Power

(3rd Person POV)

Arthur and Solarus stood face to face, and the power rolling off the both of them filled the bridge to its edges.

Solarus could not stomach it — that a being would stand so tall before his might and show not the faintest flicker of terror.

"I'll wipe that smile off your face," he said. "You'll come to know true terror." The light of him swelled brighter still as the words left him. "«Infinite Energy»!"

Power brimmed up out of Solarus the instant he spoke it, so high that every soul aboard the ship felt the weight of it press down — Arthur's counterpart in Apollion's body among them.

Then Solarus flashed across the space between them and struck, quick as thought, straight for the neck. It landed clean. Arthur's head left his shoulders.

Every eye on the bridge went wide at how smooth and how swift it had been. Arthur — undone, just like that?

'Good,' Apollion thought. 'Now I've no need to trouble myself over this timeline's Arthur. Heheh — that strike was no mere blow to the body. It ran past his soul, cut clean through dimension. However mighty his Authority, it won't be enough to knit himself back together—'

The thought sheared off mid-track, for Apollion and all the rest of them watched the severed head and the body both simply blink out of the air.

"What's happening?" a soldier breathed. "Did Lord Solarus wipe him clean out of existence?"

"It — it's astonishing! Truly, our Lord is the mightiest Deity in all the universe!"

"I can't believe it! To think Lord Solarus had risen to a height like this—"

The whole bridge had already fallen to celebrating Arthur's defeat. But Apollion had gone quiet. He watched Solarus closely, and what he saw was that the Lord himself looked no less shaken than the rest.

'Was my power truly enough to erase a being like that from existence?' Solarus was thinking. 'No... something here is wrong...'

Apollion felt it too — that something had gone amiss.

Then his eyes snapped wide in alarm, and he threw up his own power to shield himself. "Father, look out!"

He meant to warn Solarus, and Solarus alone; the soldier deities and half-gods around them could rot for all he cared. He only wanted the Lord kept alive — Solarus made too useful a pawn to lose now.

But before the warning could do any good, Solarus was cut clean through at the waist by an unseen strike — and not only him. Every member of the crew caught unguarded was sliced apart in the same instant.

They were not dead, of course, nor did they fear to be; they were mighty gods of the Divine World, with healing arts that verged on the impossible.

"Impossible!" Solarus cried. "Who could deliver a blow at this height? My Divine body — it's been ravaged!"

The others reeled with him. At once they began to chant their divine-tier healing spells — and their bodies would not knit. The severed halves refused to rejoin, and their essence went on bleeding away regardless.

"No — I can't reconnect my body!" a soldier cried. "The divine healing, it isn't working!"

"M-me neither! What is this?"

Solarus tried, and tried again, pouring out his power, and still it would not take. "This can't be! How can I — the Lord of the Stars itself — be brought so low?"

And then Arthur stepped back into being, under the stunned gaze of the whole bridge. "Don't look so shocked. This is only the start of it."

"You—" Solarus was angry enough to hurl everything he had left.

"Careful," Arthur said. "Overspend yourself while your essence is draining out of you, and you've no hope of lasting at all. You'd only be rushing yourself to the grave."

"Damn you..." Solarus could not throw the words back, because he knew them for the truth. "How did you become so impossibly strong? This should not be possible."

Arthur snorted. "You have yourself to thank for that. I climbed this far, this fast, because of the threat hanging over me — and that threat was you."

Solarus fell silent, though he was reeling behind it. The starlight that had been gathering across his frame guttered and thinned. Stripped of it, he looked no more than an ordinary mortal — though the power in him had not fully gone.

Arthur stood over him, and to all appearances his whole attention rested on the fallen Lord.

In truth, he was watching Apollion.

And sure enough, the Crown Prince made his move at last, calling on the Authority of Souls to strike at Arthur from his blind side.

'There it is — what I've been waiting for,' Arthur thought. 'A foreign power is worming into my consciousness this very moment, and it comes quietly. I never caught it in the other timeline; it took me from behind. The Authority of Souls. The bare concept of it is a weapon. This counterpart of mine holds a fearsome Authority indeed.'

In that other timeline, this same power had shattered Arthur's soul core outright and left him to die — Apollion landing the deciding blow, scrubbing his consciousness from the universe entirely.

'Heheh — yes,' Apollion thought. 'Keep your eyes on Solarus. And I'll keep breaching your mind...'

But even as those tendrils wormed deeper into his mind, Arthur moved. He crossed the space between them in less than a blink and closed a hand around Apollion's throat, and the borrowed body of the Crown Prince came up off the deck a hand's width, heels kicking at empty air.

Apollion's eyes flew wide. "What?"

The attack he'd been threading into Arthur's consciousness snapped taut and recoiled on itself, every last strand of it severed at once.

Arthur held him there, unbothered by the struggle, and his eyes narrowed a fraction. "Hello again. Good to finally see you."

The word came out strangled against the grip. "Again?"

"Before any of this came to pass," Arthur said, "I'd already stood here and watched this exact moment — watched you slip in behind me and take me by surprise." He tilted his head a degree. "Isn't that right, Arthur?"

What little color the stolen face held drained out of it. The prince's hands scrabbled once at Arthur's wrist and then went still, finding no give in it at all. "Impossible. I erased myself from this timeline. I left nothing of me for any future of it to catch — my power is enough to blind a whole timeline!"

Arthur's fingers tightened, and the body in his grasp gave a thin, choked shudder. "Heheh. Not quite enough, it would seem." His voice stayed almost gentle, which made it worse. "Don't fret, Arthur. I'll go to the timeline where your true body sits, and I'll erase the whole of it with my own two hands."

For a moment the prince only stared at him. Then something came loose behind that regal face, and he laughed — a high, cracked, wild thing, badly wrong coming out of Apollion's mouth. "Ha! You think you can find me? I alone hold «Transmigration». I alone walk between the timelines. You truly imagine you command a power to match it?"

Arthur laughed as well. Not the wild laugh — a low, even one, almost fond. "Do you honestly believe you're the only one who can cross between timelines?"

The laughter died in Apollion's throat. His stolen heart lurched against its ribs. "What are you saying? Does that mean—"

"That's right." Arthur drew him in closer, close enough that the prince could look nowhere but at him. "I can walk into other timelines as well. And not by scattering pieces of a soul — I step into whichever one I please, in the flesh, whenever it suits me."

The body trembled in his grip from crown to heel, and for the first time something like real fear moved behind its eyes. "You — you're lying. That isn't possible—"

"It is." Arthur held his gaze and would not let it go. "I am the Lord of Time, after all."

The words drove through Apollion like a spike. He shook where he hung. "What?"

"I can step into your timeline whenever I choose. And as the Lord of Time, I can swallow it down whole — every last timeline you seeded your souls into to «Transmigrate», devoured right along with it."

"No..." It left him barely louder than a breath.

None of the others could follow a word of it. Across the ruined bridge — Solarus among them, still split at the waist and bleeding starlight onto the deck — the crew watched their Crown Prince dangle from a stranger's hand and heard him answer to a name that was not his, in a voice gone thin with dread. Whatever else they failed to grasp, the shape of it reached all of them at once: the man in Arthur's grip was speaking as something far older and far higher than he had ever appeared. Which meant Crown Prince Apollion was nothing at all like the being he had worn that face to be.