For the first time, the figure reacted, tilting its head slightly to get a better look at the conceptual energy surrounding Jonathan’s hands. Then it raised its own hand, and summoned a sphere of pure darkness to it, so immensely, unreasonably black that it was almost as blinding as if it had been a nascent star, birthed into reality.
With a roar, Jonathan threw himself forward, stamina blazing within his limbs to accelerate him to supersonic speeds. The monster before him raised its hand, palm out, and thrust its orb of darkness towards him. Space bent before it, accelerating the apparently languid strike to immense levels. Jonathan drove his fist forwards, and slammed his Divinity enhanced runic energy into the figure’s raised hand.
Immediately, Jonathan felt something that he never had before in his time as a warrior of the System. An equal, and opposing conceptual force. It was not that of a rune, rather something far stranger. It was as if his foe were not a living being, but rather a facet of the universe itself, representing some portion of its boundless meaning. A sense of endless, inexorable darkness, devoid of even the hope of future light, was somehow conveyed through that contact, warring with Jonathan’s own conceptual powers. However, he had something that his foe did not. Divinity.
The golden light of his nascent godhood made reality shone like the sun as it coursed down his arm and into his Rune. Where once had been a small flame of red, there was suddenly a roaring bonfire of scarlet fire, blazing like the sun. Put next to the colorless, lightless form of the monstrosity before him, it was far brighter than it ever could have been alone.
The darkness was pushed back, retreating back into the empty space of Jonathan’s invisible foe, and for the first time, he was able to damage the thing, his Divinity scouring the creature’s flesh. The shroud of unreality peeled back, revealing an expanse of dark flesh beneath, completely without features save for its absolute darkness. Jonathan sank his fist into the monster’s flesh, and with a snap of his fingers, sent a pulse of radiant Divinity radiating out though the creature. Cracks spread across its form, shining with a pure golden light.
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Jonathan pressed the full meaning of his godhood into his strike, and with a tinkling crash, the elemental came apart like it was made of crystal, shards of darkness falling to the ground. A wave of gold spread out in all directions from Jonathan’s fist, erasing the remnants of the abomination from reality. Enough essence entered him for another level, just before the world around him broke apart, mirroring the demise of his latest foe.
***
Jonathan’s progression through the rest of the dungeon layer was an ever increasing journey through realms of madness and grotesquery that he had never experienced before in all of his life. Along the way, his host saw fit to educate him a bit about the nature of the world that he found himself in. He was trapped within the bowels of a dead outer god, a being once known as Inexorable Hunger. So vast had the creature’s desire for mindless consumption been that it had eaten itself to death, consuming itself in an ouroboros of primal madness, driven by a mind more aligned with a concept than any natural entity’s. While most beings were masters of their own destiny to some extent, there were many creatures out there that based their power off of their adherence to a singular ideal over all else, to the point where that was the sum total of their existence.
Georgescu enjoyed boasting about how his monstrous patron had chosen him to stave off this descent in insanity that plagued so many of the beings that drifted between universes, but a key fact went unsaid. There had been two Georgescus before the current one, both of whom had died in their service to Org’Ysoth. A god dedicated to the concept of endless progression, its very nature necessitated periodic transitions from the old to the new. Every so often, it tore down everything it had ever accomplished, including its hosts, and rebuilt itself from the ashes, stronger than ever before.
This stream of insights kept Jonathan company as he butchered his way through what felt like thousands of nightmares, many of whom were far worse than his initial foes. Ranging from monstrous, multi headed chimeras that cannibalized their own flesh to creatures made entirely out of insects, every challenge brought a new woe with it. Jonathan began to lose track of time as the challenge progressed, but it had at least been a week since his entry. Though, he had no idea if time even worked normally here. His connection to the System was strangely tenuous at times, and his analysis skill continued to diminish in its efficacy the more outlandish the beings he fought became.
