785 - Full Body Workout
“I won’t do it,” growled Bagora – for that was the name that the towering creature, which combined the worst of simian and ursine features, had identified itself with – “I won’t help you.”
The monstrosity’s truculence served only to make Lex sneer, lips curling back to reveal pointed teeth. “You seem to have forgotten that the Night Mare holds me in far higher esteem than you, or anyone else in this shrine,” he replied, holding up his left foreleg, showing off his new claws as much as the barbed wire.
“The Night Mare entrusted the Keeper with this place!” howled Bagora as he rose to his full height, talons curling into fists as he pounded his chest. “He rules here, and my loyalty is to him! Not you!”
The refusal made Lex narrow his eyes at the brute. “If you refuse to participate in a ceremony to honor the goddess, then I’m driven to question your commitment to her.”
“My commitment?!” roared Bagora. “You brought light into this sacred place! You let pony heretics sleep here! You slew Ganas!” That last one made Bagora growl threateningly. “If not for the edict that worshipers cannot be slain here-”
“Then you’d already be dead, fool,” spat Lex. “The Night Mare cares little for worshipers with no ambition, treating her holy ground as a sanctuary to cower in – as the Keeper has done – rather than a bastion from which to project their power. Why do you think she did nothing to stop me when I marched Ganas to his death?”
“Step outside the grounds again,” snarled Bagora, “and let’s see if she stops me from marching you to yours!”
“Have it your way. Let’s go.”
“Eh?”
“Outside the Shrine,” answered Lex, turning his back on Bagora without hesitation as he stalked toward the large tunnel at the far end of the grounds. “Or were you spouting empty threats, confident that the Night Mare’s injunction against killing inside the Shrine would shield you from reprisal?” Glancing back over his shoulder, he gave the gorilla-bear a withering look. “Though that would be appropriate for one of the Keeper’s disciples.”
He didn’t bother waiting for a reply as he kept walking across the Shrine’s grounds, hearing Bagora’s teeth grinding as the creature’s footfalls fell in behind him.
Lex didn’t bother to glance back, finding the entire exercise tedious.
But there was little that could be done about that. He’d spent almost an hour tracking down the Keeper’s acolytes, letting them know that they would – like it or not – be participating in the ceremony he’d be holding. The task had taken longer than he’d expected, mostly because the undead pony’s collection of monsters had been trying to avoid him, apparently in fear of the newcomer who’d so easily intimidated their leader after completing his so-called Rite of Sublimation.
Of course, having an ally in the form of a seven-headed glowing-eyed behemoth didn’t hurt either.
“Move aside, Teyu,” commanded Lex as he reached the tunnel entrance – the wide entryway descending further into the earth – that marked the edge of the Shrine’s consecrated ground. “This won’t take very long.”
One of the giant creature’s heads barked, and a moment later Teyu shifted his great bulk aside, unblocking the entrance. That he was parked there at all was because of Lex’s order, having anticipated that the Keeper’s minions might try to make themselves scarce so as to avoid fulfilling the obligation he was putting on them. If so, Teyu had clearly made them think twice, since as far as Lex could tell the full complement of creatures that had been waiting for him to exit the Confluence were still within the grounds.
But while none of the Keeper’s monsters had dared to outright defy him – at least up until now – their responses had been uniformly lackluster. While Lex had no ability to read into the mindset of other ponies, let alone the bizarre coterie of creatures that the Shrine’s caretaker had collected, each of the strange creatures had needed to be ordered, intimidated, or outright threatened with expulsion before they’d complied, and that was enough to send a thread of worry through Lex.
While he’d read the instructions on how to petition the Night Mare for her intervention, he was still going into this procedure with little practical understanding of what it entailed to make a large-scale demonstration of faith. Would that really be possible if the congregation he was assembling was so reluctant to participate? After all, he could force their compliance easily enough, but evoking any sort of genuine religious fervor was something else altogether.
And of course, now he had Bagora to deal with.
But at least this problem is easy enough to solve, he sighed to himself as he stepped over the threshold that marked the edge of the Shrine.
Immediately, the lumbering steps behind him picked up their pace, and Lex couldn’t resist a snort of derision as he ducked his head, easily avoiding the clumsy swipe of Bagora’s paw.
“This is why the Night Mare takes such a dim view of those who use her faith as something to hide behind,” he jeered, avoiding a swing of Bagora’s other, equally inelegant paw. “It makes them weak.”
“SHUT UP!” bellowed Bagora. “I will have vengeance! For Ganas! For the Keeper! For the Night Mare!”
The announcement came with more swings of its claws, the eight-foot monster throwing all of its bulk behind each strike as it advanced on Lex.
But none of its attacks came anywhere close to hitting him, the unicorn dodging each one with a contemptuous sneer...though only outwardly. Inside, he couldn’t help but marvel at what he was capable of now.
This new body truly is incredible. Even as exhausted as he was, he was able to move with a degree of alacrity that his old self couldn’t have accomplished even at peak condition. Despite how much his mass had increased, his muscles were easily able to compensate for it and then some, giving him a degree of physical coordination so great that it made Bagora look like he was moving in slow motion.
And that was just the beginning. Even without calling upon his dark magic, his senses had been enhanced to a degree that bordered on supernatural. Not only was his darkvision perpetually active now – his eyes slipping into that mode of vision of their own accord whenever the ambient light grew too dim to see by – but his hearing had increased markedly as well, allowing him to clearly register the grunts and snarls that telegraphed each of Bagora’s wild strikes.
It was his sense of smell, however, that had grown the most.
Ever since he’d found out that he could use his dark magic to manipulate his senses – something he’d realized was possible due to his shadow-form having no sensory organs, and so realizing that the magic of his horn could be used to artificially augment his ability to perceive the world, even when he was corporeal – Lex had periodically used that power to heighten his olfactory awareness. But now it, like his darkvision, was permanently operating at a heightened state, one that he was still adjusting to.
The entire world was alive with smells now, feeding him a steady new stream of information that he’d only barely been cognizant of before. He could smell the stink of old meat and blood on Bagora’s breath, coming across stronger each time he huffed in preparation for another heavy swing. He could smell the oily scent of the thing’s unwashed fur, the stench growing thicker whenever its paws swatted at him. He could smell the dust in the tunnel being stirred up by the gorilla-bear’s ungainly shuffling.
Taken together, the sheer breadth of information available to him, combined with the physical coordination that he now had to act on it, made it so easy to dodge and weave around Bagora’s clumsy attacks that Lex found himself resisting the urge to yawn.
He might not have been able to recognize whatever nonverbal subtext undergirded interpersonal communication, but right now he could read Bagora’s moves like a book.
And not even a particularly difficult book, Lex decided as he contemptuously sidestepped a heavy upswing. The kind that, even as a child, would have been beneath me.
“STOP RUNNING AWAY!” screamed Bagora, frustration and exertion comingling in his voice. “YOU CALL US COWARDS, BUT ALL YOU’RE DOING IS FLEEING!”
“Fleeing?” scoffed Lex. “From you?”
Digging his talons into the unworked stone beneath them, Lex raised a claw.
And when Bagora’s next strike came, he caught it, grabbing the creature just below the wrist.
Even with how much more developed Lex’s physique was, Bagora was still larger and heavier than him. At just over eight feet tall, the gorilla-bear was thickly built, with layers of muscles that – in the unicorn’s estimation – had to add up to nearly a ton of sheer brawn. He was, if nothing else, exactly the sort of physical powerhouse that one would expect given his component animals.
And yet the gorilla-bear’s swing came to an abrupt end as Lex’s talons encircled his arm, unable to complete the strike.
“Why would I need to flee from someone so pathetic?”
Seething, Bagora strained with everything he had, leaning all of his weight forward as he tried to break Lex’s hold and complete the strike. Lex simply squeezed tighter, and despite how thick the muscles in Bagora’s arm were, he could feel them – slowly but steadily – compressing in his grasp, until the gorilla-bear’s labored groaning turned into a repressed moan of pain as Lex felt the bones in the creature’s arm starting to give way.
In response, Bagora changed tactics.
Rather than trying to press forward with his attack, he abruptly threw himself backward, pivoting at the waist as he rotated his shoulder, trying to yank Lex into the air.
Instead, all that happened was that he wrenched his shoulder out of his socket as he found himself unable to move the unicorn in the slightest, and the howl that came from his maw then was one of unfiltered agony.
“Now do you understand?” continued Lex as he continued to squeeze Bagora’s wrist. “You’ve contented yourself to following the Keeper’s path and grown feeble as a result, while I’ve strengthened myself through new challenges-”
That was when Bagora – his eyes blazing with hatred – brought his other arm around.
His lip curling at the futile action, Lex was already preparing to dodge it before the blow was halfway complete, knowing that he’d easily be able to avoid even while keeping hold of the creature. But he was caught off-guard when Bagora suddenly howled a pair of syllables, registering a brief crackle of magic.
The maul that appeared in the gorilla-bear’s free hand then was little more than a large mass of stone in the crude shape of a hammer. Even in the brief instant that he caught sight of it, Lex could see that its balance was all wrong, that it lacked anything like a proper grip, and that its handle was off-center from its head.
Then it impacted the side of his face.
The force of the blow was so heavy that it shattered the stone hammer, the pieces fading away as the spell which had made them fell apart along with its creation. The few that managed to hit the ground before disappearing had the sound of their hitting the stone drowned out by Bagora’s triumphant laughter...which abruptly ended in a scream as his wrist suddenly broke, the claw holding his arm tightening sharply.
And Lex, whose head had been snapped around by the blow, slowly turned back to look at the gorilla-bear.
“That...almost...hurt.”
If his new body had simply been stronger and possessed of greater senses, it would have been a marked improvement over his old one. That its magical channels increased how much raw power he could move through his body was an incredible gain as well.
But more than anything else, the single greatest change about his new form was its incredible defenses.
He’d only had a chance to examine himself briefly – there were simply too many other things to do – but what he’d determined so far was awe-inspiring. Every single part of his new body was built to shrug off damage, allowing him to absorb punishment that would have crippled or even killed his old self. The fact that he’d just taken such a heavy blow to the head and didn’t even have a headache was proof enough of that.
It started with his coat. Normally the thin layer of fur that covered a pony’s skin was little more than ornamentation, being only a few millimeters thick. And while his coat hadn’t lengthened in the slightest, its composition was radically different from what it had been before, having become organometallic in construction.
The protection that offered couldn’t be overstated. Each fiber was now made of an extremely durable compound whose molecular construction was akin to one of the more resilient metals. Overlapping with each other, the effect was that he was effectively wrapped in a suit of steel armor, one that not only didn’t impede his movements or slow him down, but was – given how the creature he’d merged with had ignored being immolated – likely extremely resistant to heat.
And that was just his outermost layer. Although he hadn’t had time to properly test his anything else, quick examination suggested that not only were his muscles far more robust than before, their makeup was similarly transformed, and he suspected that his bones and organs were likewise toughened. “Soft tissue” was likely a contradiction in terms for him now.
And of course, the most solid aspect of his physical construction was also the final new perk that he’d gained: claws.
“Now, it’s my turn.”
Releasing Bagora’s shattered wrist, Lex surged forward.
It was to the gorilla-bear’s credit that he reacted immediately, lurching upright and stumbling backward as he tried to fumble his way through what Lex recognized to be a healing spell.
He never had a chance to finish it.
Lex’s assault wasn’t a simple slash, nor did he place his strikes with care or precision. Rather, he launched himself into the air, leaping bodily onto Bagora, snarling like the beast he’d absorbed as he sank all four of his claws into his enemy’s body. Foreclaws capable of slicing through stone easily lacerated muscles, sinking in and catching onto bone as his hind claws did the same to the gorilla-bear’s thighs, a roar that no pony could have made tearing itself from Lex’s throat as he immediately began to flex his talons, shredding the creature he was latched onto.
Bagora roared back, and this time fear could be heard alongside his pain, thrashing wildly in an attempt to dislodge the wild animal that was now latched onto him, his undamaged arm swinging in desperation as he tried to grab Lex and tear him off.
In that he failed, as Lex – without ever releasing his victim – moved out of reach, digging his talons in deeper as he crawled across Bagora’s body without touching the ground. Claws hooked onto ribs as he ducked under the wailing creature’s clumsy grab, a rear claw slicing his belly open as he crawled around the gorilla-bear’s side and latched onto his back, each motion leaving bloody grooves behind. Shoulder blades were rent as Lex dug in harder in response to Bagora flailing, the brute panicking as he felt talons reach up to scrap the back of his head.
Desperate, the gorilla-bear hurled himself backward, trying to pin Lex between himself and the ground, but the stallion was already moving. The end result was that Bagora hit the ground with Lex on top of him, now perched on the larger creature’s chest as he continued to savage his enemy. Thick, shaggy arms came up as Bagora tried to protect his face, and for his effort Lex cut them to the bone and wrench them wide, splattering the nearby stones with blood as he easily overpowered the gorilla-bear’s last, futile defense.
Then one claw came to rest on the creature’s face, talons less than an inch from Bagora’s eyes.
“Now,” announced Lex, all savagery suddenly gone. “What was that you were saying about marching me to my death?”
For a moment, Bagora couldn’t reply, wheezing as he tried to breath through the haze of agony, his chest having been punctured several times. But when he finally managed to speak, his voice came out in a growl. “D-do...it...”
Lex raised a brow. “Hm?”
“Not g-gonna...beg...” spat Bagora, glaring up at him. “Mercy’s...a s-sin...”
A thin smile crossed Lex’s lips then. “I know it is.”
Clenching his jaw, Bagora grit his teeth and waited.
“Now,” proclaimed Lex, “be healed.”
That was, he decided, the one good thing about the ceremony having taken so long to prepare: enough time had passed that the Charismata had finally replenished itself.
Invisible bands of divine power emerged from his outstretched claw, wrapping tightly around Bagora. Immediately, the wounds on his body closed, muscles repairing themselves as lacerations disappeared from bones and skin knit itself. Within moments, there was no sign that the gorilla-bear had been injured, leaving him gasping as the pain he’d been in vanished, looking up at Lex with confused eyes. “What...?”
“Don’t mistake my actions,” noted Lex, stepping down from the defeated creature’s chest. “I told you before, your participation in the ceremony I’m holding is mandatory. You can’t do that if you’re dead.”
“...”
“And when we begin, I expect you to express devotion no less intense than what you displayed just now, when you finally began to honor our goddess by choosing to die rather than betray the tenets of her faith. Is that clear?”
“...yes...”
“Good,” nodded Lex, changing his sight to infravision as he glanced back toward the Shrine, the heat-sensitive wavelength letting him easily spot several of the Keeper’s minions trying to conceal themselves as they lurked near the edge of the Shrine, obviously having been watching Bagora’s defeat. Hopefully they’d spread the word to their compatriots, and there’d be no need to do this again.
“Now, go and gather the rest of the acolytes in the cathedral. We’ll begin the ceremony immediately.”
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Okay, assimilating with the aurumvorax was definitely a major power up for Lex in terms of combat capabilities as well as augmenting his already high intimidation factor. Still, even if he has cowed the acolytes to his will, I can't help but worry some of them might try something. Then again, it is a ceremony to the Night Mare so maybe not.
The only wildcards, I can imagine barring those pursuing Lex, is the Keeper himself and the mixed bag that is Fail Forward along with Thermal Draft herself. All for differing reasons.
If Lex succeeds, then Grisela and family are going to end up with a real problem? Especially if Lex is pragmatic about the unrepentant?
Lex has become overpowered. This is what happens when your merge with a late game boss. Now let's hope the ceremony going right.
This is Lex as I always saw him. The tyrant with the best of intentions. The Ritual itself may have been a fraud, but the Mare of the Night has blessed her champion none the less. This was just perfect Lex... "If we could step outside..." "We can and will." "Mercy is for the weak!" "That is why I am granting you mercy."
Also I can't imagine his waifus back home are sitting idle... they know Blue Blood paid the assassin...
And they re capable in their own right and don't need lex to seek justice.
11468359 With any luck, he's intimidated them into not trying to mess anything up. Since the Keeper seems to have no appetite for challenging Lex, the idea seems to be that he's cowed the rest of his followers into submission. Of course, Bagora seemed intent on challenging him anyway, but with how readily Lex took care of him, that was hopefully the end of any rebellion on the part of the rest of the Shrine's monsters.
Of course, the Keeper himself might not be quite so down-and-out yet. But maybe he is; it's hard to say, given that he's both a talking skull and is apparently mad. So here's hoping that there are no problems there. (And presumably Fail Forward realizes that antagonizing Lex is a bad idea, for numerous reasons.)
11468440 Oh, I'd say that Grisela and co. are going to have a real problem on their hands one way or another. Lex might have brought Solvei back, but I doubt he'll forgive what they did to her.
11468519 Well, "overpowered" is a relative term. Lex has been up against a lot of enemies, most of which have outclassed him physically up until now. But with the upgrade he's gotten, that's no longer the case...hopefully.
11468546 Your comment made me smile.
This was indeed "peak Lex," though he'd be quick to point out that technically Celestia is also a tyrant (in that she's an absolute monarch with no institutional checks on her authority, the other princesses notwithstanding) with the best of intentions (even if he strongly disagrees the manner in which she's trying to actualize those intentions), and so any sense that his attempts to rule are illegitimate on those grounds necessarily apply to her as well. 
11468549 You know, in my head I've been writing a "meanwhile, back in Equestria" chapter for a little while now (working title: "Meanwhile, Back in Equestria"). Things have not been idle there, in the wake of Lex's disappearance (and, in all likelihood, presumed death). I'm mostly looking for a good narrative place to post such a chapter, at this point, since right now it would break the flow of how things are developing.
11471334 Yeah, pretty much that in a nutshell.