“So, I think you guys might be cheating a bit,” Ben told the remaining four, with Yuzu, Uliel, and Vasta standing together while Thera waited more to the side. “Shouldn’t you all be fighting each other?”
“After we realized that you were probably doing something psychotic in there, it suddenly made more sense to wait for you to finish and take you on ourselves,” Yuzu answered, the architect of their truce. “Three on one, we might have a chance.”
“... So I’m noticing a little problem with the math there. Does three on one maybe mean that one of you is going to be on my side then?”
“Nope, it means that I’m the final boss,” Thera grinned his way. “You’re the one who keeps telling the gods that I need to awaken, but it just so happens that I’m at a point where I’m short on capable sparring partners. Since you don’t mind volunteering me to hit the third tier, you shouldn’t mind helping along the way, right?”
“Hmm, I see, I see,” Ben muttered before raising his hands in the air and taking a step back. “Nope, don’t wanna die. I surrender.”
“You don’t get a choice!” Vasta yelled, throwing raw mana at him while Thera constructed a barrier around them all to keep anyone from escaping as the other two moved as well, with the non-affinitied mage, archmage, and newly skilled magic canceller all acting at once.
Ben didn’t even bother trying to use his material manipulation; there was no doubt that Yuzu was carefully cancelling every instance of non-affinitied mana he could create, with himself having a particular weakness to that power. The more attributes one had, the harder it was for a magic nullifier to cancel out a spell, given the various ways that different mana could be combined, but not only was Yuzu a contender for it, he could only use non-affinitied branches. He was basically easy pickings in her hands, leaving him with only his actualization to use instead.
“You know, I know you didn’t exactly want or ask for it, but having a power I helped you get used against me feels a little bad,” Ben yelled as he blocked strikes or raw mana from Vasta and ice that Uliel controlled with actualized shields that floated around him. “You aren’t affecting Vasta’s magic either, are you just casting through me?”
“You gave me the knowledge on how to use this; it would be a shame if I didn’t show results,” she yelled back, even if that was her limit. Much like he and Thera, to the extent she could, she wasn’t using her third-tier skill in that fight, while Ben forced himself to think about how he wanted to handle it.
Potentially, the simplest way would be to actualize containers to hold them all, trapping them in place, and while that might have been enough to block their views and make things significantly easier on him, there was no reason that they all wouldn’t still be able to cast blind. If anything, that might just make things more dangerous, and while he could do similar things to knock them out, he didn’t want to do that to Yuzu in particular. The other two mages were acquaintances and people he’d received help from in the past, but she was a friend, he wasn’t so desperate to end things that he wanted to hurt her, leaving him to accept that he was going to need to fight a different way.
But that’s fine. This is training for my actualization, I guess, along with training for the three of them, even if they’re teaming up on me. No need to do anything drastic to end this too soon. Instead, let's get creative.
Actualization was the power of his mind given form, the domain of the gods and what fuelled their actions within their realm, yet what he alone could do on the mortal plane, and even if it wasn’t obvious, he used that power endlessly. Using it in tandem with any act of materialization significantly reduced the mana cost by adding a mental one, but he had that in spades, and with his magic blocked off, it was a chance to put the limits of that power to the test.
“Alright then, if I can’t fight you as a mage, you’ll get to see firsthand how an actualizer fights.”
They thought they'd known what that meant. If actualization was a limit of the mind, then that meant it was a power that brought forth its holder's imagination. However, through all of that, they forgot one important detail. No matter how he presented himself, Ben was insane. The holder of a warped, twisted mind that would take in all forms of life it would touch, having brushed against the divine and far more unimaginable monstrosities. Even he could no longer claim that his was still human, but usually, the limits of that mind were more contained, trapped within the confines of his head or his realm where he'd endlessly actualize new experiments. The results of which he now had an excuse to bring down to the world below in all of their horror.
With nothing in his mind more terrible than his understanding of biology. Though not something he'd personally consider one of his specialties, anyone else who understood the depths of his knowledge would understand that such an assessment of himself could only be described as disgustingly humble.
With so many spirits around Thera at all times, it was easy enough to learn their accumulated knowledge on the topic as he plundered their minds, and given how it could be used in life magic, he'd had a large swath of the world's study on the subject in his head from his time tearing through the library. He'd interacted with the great life spirit who would run her own twisted experiments, and he'd learned how to perfectly create both a living seed as well as some animal cells from the gods themselves, and on top of all of that, what Ben had more than anything else was time.
A man in his early twenties by that point, as far as anyone watching him would be concerned, he'd only been on that planet for around five years, yet with his first third-tier awakening had come the sort of time that mortals weren't meant to touch on. Eons in his head, the nature of his skill not allowing the span to break him despite the madness of it, meaning the only thing he had to do was fill it with experiments of his own, his realm the only place they could be done to match the speeds he was capable of existing at, with the end product of it all revealing itself.
Starting with the basic principles of the basic biological systems he knew, he'd actualized them perfectly in the early days of his experimentation, tweaking them slightly, seeing how that would change the way they'd grow, no matter how slow it had felt. The first decade, the results had seemed slim, but all of that had been the act of increasing the breadth of his knowledge to build on, creating a foundation that allowed for an explosion thereafter. The next millennia had been devoted to evolving ecosystems; flora and fauna, things that were both and things that were neither, while the eons afterwards were devoted to seeing how far he could take them. What selective pressures would yield what results, and what direct biological modifications would yield the most significant changes? Even if it would all act by itself after he started, they were still his constructs and an unfavourable result could simply be rolled back to an earlier iteration, if not put away altogether, only to be returned after pursuing some completely different avenues.
All of it leading to that moment as, while blocking their continued attacks, Ben actualized not only a seemingly harmless pot of dirt, but also a singular damp seed within it, with that act releasing hell upon the world.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Instantly the seed sprouted while the other three just watched, losing their one chance to intervene as something only somewhat plant-like poked out, branches that looked more akin to a desperately reaching hand sprouted razor-like leaves that shifted in colour before adapting to take in what would be the most useful shade for that sun’s light output before breathing in the air around them and exploding in their growth, a massive trunk left to shoot up, touching the top of Thera’s barrier before it stopped, with wood that had a nearly flesh-like appearance seemed to bleed as dozens of large holes opened up in it and hands reached out.
“Holy fuck, it is too late to surrender instead?” Uliel muttered as she and Vasta changed their target to try to bring that strange structure down, ultimately failing to move it with their magics as the creatures those hands were attached to pulled themselves out, the current point in his experimentation where evolution had met his intelligent design.
The humanoid body plan only accentuated their horror, clearly not fitting in with anything nature or the system’s hybridizations had created, and with no intelligence or soul in them to make anyone mistake what they were seeing as people. Their flesh looked almost spongy, yet it was entirely pocked with holes; no facial features obvious except their mouths and the knife-like tongue that peeked through as they tasted the air. Yet, even without any obvious eyes, ears, or nose, it was plain that they could still perceive the world around them.
Bulbous forearms tensed as they jumped down to the ground below them, while they landed on clawed feet, before tilting their heads and focusing on the three he was fighting to begin to move.
In an instant, his dozens of creations were in front of them, forcing the others to try and evade but ultimately failing as they were thrown back, their bodies left to bounce off the walls that were originally meant to trap him as his beasts began to release smog from the holes covering their flesh, filling the confined space with a thick gas that would poison no one, yet would have the effect of causing headaches and blocking eyesight, taking that one sense away from his opponents that neither himself nor his constructs would require, all while Yuzu yelled at him while she ran.
“BEN! No biological warfare!”
“Don't worry, these probably don't technically count as biology at this point! Think of them as simple meat robots… well, I guess I wouldn’t describe a single part of them as being made of meat, but you get the point. They’re basically homunculi that just have strong enough stimulus reactions built in that they can react without being ensouled. No need to worry about them escaping to breed, and they'll only exist for a few hours at most, even with me sustaining them. It’s my first time attempting something like this in the real world too, so all of you, do your best while fighting them to give me some interesting data!”
Now that it had become a chance for him to observe the results of some of his studies and creations in a real-world setting, he was excited to take it as the others ran, trying to find anything that might work.
With their performance being even better than he’d hoped. Uliel tried all of her affinities but their flesh would neither burn nor freeze, their design had left them in a strange space between life and death, rendering both of those powers meaningless on them, and the holes filling them made it so air magic wouldn’t be able to either fill them or strip them of gasses in a way that would incapacitate them, with those designs even able to stand up to raw vacuum.
Earth was also failing her, with any cuts or punctures she could make instantly resealing themselves, and light and dark were both meaningless on monsters free of any spiritual component, as well as being constructs that didn’t rely on normal senses.
That did leave her with both space and time, able to slow them in their chase and teleport them away to give her some more leeway to figure out more useful spells within those attributes, but that was the most they had.
Vasta could only keep testing her spells to see if anything would stick, and Yuzu could only run now that no magic was involved in their designs, leaving Ben’s victory certain. They’d been made to be harmless but there was no denying he could have created something far worse if only given the chance, once the three admitted defeat, that would be the end of things, and would have stayed that way if another party hadn’t joined.
All at once, his constructs were sliced and diced into cubes a few centimeters wide while the earth itself rose to destroy them, ending things as he was captured in the dirt’s grasp as well, even if he wasn’t finished without complaints.
“You know, if you say you’re going to be the final boss, you should at least wait until I’ve properly beaten the others,” Ben said as Thera came down, watching the cubes that remained of his creations as they tried to reassemble themselves despite her efforts, or else grow into new creatures still, as she continued to destroy them while she answered.
“I figured I should just put a stop to things before you permanently traumatize anyone watching,” she sighed. “And now that this is over, can you stop actualizing them?”
“Eh, yeah, I guess you got me,” he said as he released his constructs, leaving an unsettled air as he finished.
“I said get rid of them, not change them,” Thera told him.
In her eyes, at the very least it became clear that nothing was moving anymore, and along with a slight colour change in everything, all of his creations looked like they’d collapsed slightly, but that was the end of it. Even the giant tree-thing, which she’d initially left, had only lost some of its form and drooped over limply, with Ben shrugging in answer.
“I got rid of every part of them I was actualizing, but that left everything they used behind themselves.”
“... I know I’m going to hate asking, but elaborate on that.”
“You know I can actualize on a molecular level, making things act with proper chemical reactions, but what I did there was actualize to the point that chemistry met biology. The seed I made sprouted from the dirt I created, but while it was taking in plenty of actualized atoms, it was also taking in the products filling the air, ultimately creating hybrid structures of real and fake matter. I got rid of the fake stuff, but when I did, it left behind everything that was real.”
“... Ben, please.”
“What?”
“Where do I even begin?” She sighed, unable to help but notice that the other contenders who’d been watching flinched away at the explanation. “Okay, I guess what’s most important is that this is all thoroughly dead, right? Nothing you made is going to sprout more of these monsters, and we aren’t going to be left with a newer, somehow more horrific invasion to deal with?”
“No, even if releasing my actualization didn’t kill everything, I already told Yuzu that they’d only last for a few hours. Even if I materialized that instead of actualizing, it ultimately would have been fine. I’m not going to create and release an uncontrollable, unending plague of monsters on the world.”
“... Yeah, I’m going to hate the answer I get to this most of all,” Thera complained to herself before asking what felt like the obvious question from there, with the answer already seeming plain even without it being said. “Is that something you could do?”
“... I mean…”
“Gods above,” she muttered before putting her head in her hands. “Alright, Ben? As someone who too often finds themself acting as your voice of morality and reason, I’m just going to tell you. If you ever get the urge to do something like that, don’t.”
“Relax,” he reassured her. “I live here too; I’m not going to fill the planet with soulless monsters.”
“No doing anything like you just did again either without consulting me or your god first, too.”
“Seriously?”
“I actually couldn’t be more serious right now.”
“Alright, fine,” he shrugged. It wasn’t exactly something he was looking at doing all of the time, at least. There was a reason he kept most of that line of experimentation confined to his realm, and there was still plenty of time to refine the designs too. After all, the only time he could think he’d be really tempted to do such a thing again was going to be during the next wave, and by the time that rolled around, the amount of research and experimentation he’d be able to do on that front would make the things he could create completely unrecognizable.
