868 - Best Served
Encountering gods was nothing new to Lex.
The Night Mare. Kara. Soft Whisper. All were deities that he’d faced while still mortal, and in each instance he’d dealt with them on his own terms, refusing to be cowed. Now, elevated to an immortal titan, and facing a mere demigod – one who had already been outwitted by a Siren with an infusion of aristeia – Lex felt confident that the gap between himself and Kryonex wasn’t unbridgeable.
But as the demigod fully emerged from the portal, Lex found reason to question that assumption.
In an instant, the temperature fell to the point where even the assembled monsters – all of them creatures for whom the cold was a fundamental aspect of their being – were shivering. Lex himself felt the chill, despite having layered multiple overcharged wards against supremely low temperatures around himself, to say nothing of his cloak of fire and his inherent resistances as a titan. As it was, he needed to maintain his concentration to keep the flames around him active, the fire threatening to freeze solid otherwise.
The frigidity was made worse by the storm that accompanied the demigod through the gateway, wind suddenly whipping through the small valley with the force of a hurricane, sleet and hail churning through the air in a chaotic slurry that – had he still been mortal – would have left Lex unable to see anything. But although it hindered his sight not at all now, it didn’t escape Lex’s notice that none of Kryonex’s monsters seemed bothered by the storm; if anything they seemed heartened by the blizzard, regaining the courage they’d lost only seconds earlier. Gibbering and hollering as the wind swept over them, even the flying creatures seemed invigorated, rather than hampered, by the gale.
Worse, no matter how fiercely Lex concentrated on calming the storm – the weather being another way in which he could influence the world around him by will alone – all he could do was reduce it slightly, lowering it from a dangerous tempest to a frigid squall.
But neither the cold nor the storm were as profound than the sight of the demigod himself.
Or rather, the multiple sights that overlapped with each other.
In one instant, the demigod was a towering ice elemental, his features rough-hewn and indistinct. The next, he was a gigantic yeti with tentacles for arms. A moment later, he was a monstrous white arachnid with seven legs.
The changes continued, endless and never repeating, but Lex knew that Kryonex wasn’t actually altering his appearance. Rather, it was that his own senses were struggling to interpret what they were perceiving. Just like how mortal creatures couldn’t process the full scope of his own existence, instead seeing everything he did as outsized in an attempt to make sense of something beyond their ability to fully understand, the same was true for him now.
Even a demigod, it seemed, was too much for a titan to truly comprehend.
It was enough for Lex to realize that each of the gods he’d previously encountered had only revealed a limited aspect of themselves to him. All those times he’d summoned the Night Mare – or when she’d appeared in his dreams – had been a mere fragment of her true divinity. Kara, in keeping with being the goddess of shapeshifters, had shown him false impressions of herself. Even Soft Whisper, the detached goddess of death, had been holding back during their singular encounter, though Lex couldn’t begin to guess why.
Kryonex, however, seemed to lack any such sense of restraint, and Lex had to resist the urge to take a step back as the demigod’s icy blue eyes – the only part of him that was the same in every form – locked onto his own.
The beast inside of him gave a low, cautious growl. It wasn’t afraid, having purged that emotion from itself long before he’d merged with it, but it was still able to recognize a creature more dangerous than itself.
“And now I see what became of my stolen godhood.”
Kryonex’s voice was even more resonant now that he was through the portal, sounding like a hundred avalanches happening all at once, and Lex fought down the urge to dig his claws into the ground beneath him for purchase. Instead, he focused all of his preternatural awareness on Kryonex, willing himself to view the demigod’s form as a single, unchanging constant.
The effort gave him a headache that he knew would have killed a mortal, and he felt blood pooling beneath his eyes, wiping it away with a thought. But slowly, Kryonex’s form settled back into the shape of the massive, misshapen spider he’d seen earlier, and even the echoes of his voice seemed less sonorous, being deep without the thundering quality it had possessed a moment earlier.
It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless, and Lex held onto that as he stared the demigod down.
“Tell me,” continued Kryonex, “is it your intent to return what that crooning sow took from me? Or do you wear that purloined power so brazenly because you defy me to reclaim that which is mine?”
“It’s yours no longer.” Taking a step forward, Lex didn’t bother shouting over the wind, instead letting his voice resound with power enough to overwhelm the howling current of air. “I claim it now, and will not relinquish possession of it.”
Another rumbling laugh came from the huge spider, eyes glowing brighter. “And by what right do you claim ownership of a shard of my very essence?”
“By all rights!”
Negotiating with Kryonex had never been Lex’s intention. With no way to return the divinity that Adagio had taken – he had no idea if that was possible, nor any desire to find out, and even broaching the possibility would likely have severely offended the Night Mare anyway – there was simply no basis for thinking that any sort of agreement could be reached. He had nothing of equivalent value to offer Kryonex in exchange for what he’d lost, to say nothing of his faithful that had been slain and the damages that had been inflicted as part of Adagio’s invasion of the demigod’s realm. The best he could have done was to either give the demigod Belligerence, or to make a pledge of fealty in exchange for being allowed to keep what he’d taken.
Both of those options, however, were completely out of the question.
And since fleeing wasn’t something Lex was prepared to do, that meant the only choice left was to endorse not only Adagio’s pilferage, but his own possession of Kryonex’s stolen divinity, as justified.
“As a moral agent, I claim this power because its originator has used it for corrupt purposes! As the ruler of a nation, I claim it for the benefit of my people! And as the Night Mare’s champion” – he held up his left foreleg, certain that Kryonex could sense the deific power within the barbed wire – “I claim it for the glory of my goddess, who is a deity far more exalted than yourself!”
But if Kryonex was off-put by his claiming a divine mandate, he didn’t show it, laughing again. “And where is this Night Mare of yours? You offer her such grandiose plaudits, and yet she seems wholly unconcerned that another god should personally approach one so esteemed in her eyes.”
Scowling, Lex lowered his foreleg. He’d known that any chance of bluffing about the Night Mare’s being prepared to smite Kryonex was thin, but he’d hoped that alluding to such a possibility would put the demigod off. Now, that hope was thoroughly repudiated, leaving him with no option but to try and minimize the importance of that observation. “She knows that I don’t need her help to confront one who was wounded by a mere Siren.”
“Is that why you’ve made no effort to dedicate this ground to her? Why no others from her earthly church nor her planar abode have come to join you on such a holy mission?”
This time it was Lex’s turn to laugh, canting his head toward the dead bodies lying behind him, already half-buried by the snowstorm Kryonex had brought. “She values her faithful, a lesson that you could do well to learn from. With the losses your realm has sustained, can you afford to be so cavalier with your remaining followers?”
“I am their god. To die for me is not only their joy, but their obligation.”
“Then they’ll die, and you’ll be that much weaker without their worship to sustain you.”
“Such absences are easily replaced.” The spider reared up, legs swinging outward in a way that would have been utterly beyond any terrestrial arachnid, and the portal behind it widened. “I am the one and only god to dwell upon the Plane of Ice, a universe of eternal cold. In that boundless expanse are an infinite multitude of creatures, all waiting to dedicate themselves to me.”
A single limb pointed at Lex then, and despite his best efforts, the wind grew worse. “And once I’ve dragged your frozen flesh back to my realm, and extracted the last of my divinity from you, I will encase your soul in ice and have my servants parade it across the breadth of the entire plane. Your suffering will be a monument to how other gods dare not confront me even when I defile their faithful. That will earn me new worshipers in excess of what I’ve lost.”
“And you’ll remain a mere demigod,” spat Lex, “dwelling in a backwater para-plane that every other pantheon has ignored because of its lack of numinous qualities. And even then, you’ll still be the very least of your siblings.”
Kyronex’s eyes turned a deeper shade of blue then. “I reign above them! They squabble and war for control of the other elemental planes, while no one dares to contest me for my own!”
Lex smirked, recalling what the Libram of Ineffable Damnation had to say about the elemental deities. “You’re an afterthought among the rest of your kind. The thirteenth god in a fractious pantheon of twelve. The true elemental planes are Earth and Air and Fire and Water, each with a single god who propagates that material across Creation and two demigods fighting with each other because they want to imbue the planar fabric with opposing spiritual slants.”
He took another step forward then, his smirk widening to become a sneer. “And then there’s you, who has an entire plane all to himself, and yet even without any opposition has accomplished nothing. Even with no one to contest your rule of a whole plane – albeit one that only exists where Air touches Water – you can barely amass enough worshipers to hang onto your scant divinity, let alone bend the plane to reflect your own metaphysical disposition.”
Kryonex’s eyes had grown darker, the blue becoming more and more shaded, but Lex didn’t let up, needing just a little more time to finish casting the suite of defensive spells that he had been layering onto himself ever since the exchange had begun. “You’re a pathetic failure of a deity. If the other elemental powers knew that a mortal was able to not only injure you, but make off with a portion of your godhood, you’d be even more of a laughingstock than you already are.”
And with that, Lex managed to finish the last spell he’d been casting. But he couldn’t resist throwing one last epithet at the oversized spider, pointing toward the portal. “If you have an ounce of intelligence, you’ll cut your losses and scuttle back into that frozen pit you crawled out of before I humiliate you even further.”
Kryonex’s eyes were so blue now that they were almost black, but no angry roars or furious threats came from the enormous spider. Instead, his gaze wandered over the assembled monsters, before glancing back through the portal. “Whoever drags this blasphemer’s body before me will be given the privilege of becoming my avatar, imbued with the same power that his harridan stole.”
His foresight told Lex what was about to happen, and his muscles tensed as he prepared himself.
A moment later the swarm of monsters rushed him all at once, as reinforcements from beyond the portal poured forth to back them up.
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Would be intresting if Lex could overcharge somethinbg like Break so it worked on metaphysical concepts as well as just physical objects, giving it a variation of Fear or Power Word, start perfusing Kronexs Plane with FUD, Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, slowly pisoning hs followers against him, causing effects in return, or how much work and power would that tak even for the wekest creatures on that Plane?
Being a Plane walker, Kryonex dont have to worry about somehow ending up on the Plane Of Fire even if Lex had the requisite portal spells?
this?
Lex might not be able to use his foresight on Kyronex as he learned last chapter, but the demigod's minions are another matter altogether. Hopefully, Kyronex's pride will prevent him from stepping in to fight Lex personally cause even as a titan, going against a demigod would be ill advised especially if the display of power from his entrance was anything to go by.
Then again, going up against foes who had an overwhelming advantage over him is the norm for Lex but he's also bitten off more than he could chew before as well. Something he's likely to be keenly aware of...
Well, Lex doesn't mince his words at all.
"Oh so you don't even have the balls to take me yourself?"
Seriously Kryo boy, way to prove him right.
11699530 Lex is capable of a lot of things simply by thinking about it now, but there are also limits to what he can do if he tries to project his will beyond himself. It's been broadly hinted that he can restore his corporeal body regardless of how much damage it suffers, or how repeatedly it's injured, but he's already acknowledged that he can only do so much with regard to healing (without magic) with regard to others, and only so often before he needs to take a break from doing so.
To that extent, trying to extend his power across an entire plane in order to turn everyone there against Kryonex is likely to be far beyond what he can accomplish, even as a titan. He can influence minds in his immediate vicinity, quite harshly from what we've seen, but it's one thing to create a localized effect; it's quite another to force the arc of an entire universe to bend in a different direction.
As for dumping Kryonex in the Plane of Fire, well...that's certainly an idea, but given that Kryonex opened up a gateway from his home realm to Everglow, it's hard to see why he couldn't do the same if he's shunted somewhere else.
11699605
No, that one was accurate. Kryonex was referring to "his harridan" in terms of "Lex's harridan" (a harridan being a term for a belligerent woman, i.e. Adagio, who stole Kryonex's divinity in the first place).
That Kryonex doesn't seem willing to get directly involved in the fight seems like good news for Lex...but that raises the question of why he's not getting involved. Why hang back and throw large numbers of inferior opponents at his enemy, if he knows that he's stronger? Certainly, Kryonex doesn't seem to have been (overly) provoked by Lex's taunts, so that would suggest that he has some sort of strategy. If so, then it's probably going to be to his own advantage. Hopefully Lex will be able to figure that out in short order and turn things around...but if that means going up against the demigod directly, that might be a hard fight indeed.
11699769 Having determined that there's no point negotiating, Lex leaned quite heavily into antagonizing his foe, presumably hoping to goad him into making a mistake.
Time will tell if it worked or not.
11699822 For better or for worse, Kryonex proved that he can't be taunted into a reckless attack. As for whether or not his minions will be able to do much of anything, that remains to be seen.