The Chaos entity was torn, shredded, and assimilated in a way no different from real food. Everything was happening in the Mindscape so the significance of the event was clear.
Vastor wasn’t fusing with his Abomination half nor was he asking to borrow its strength. The Master was consuming the rogue part of his body, destroying it so that where once there were two now there was one.
The Vastor-Clone struggled to break free, yet he failed. The Abomination was a feral beast, hungry for power for power’s sake. He had no goal or ambition aside from becoming the strongest on Mogar and turning the entire planet into his plaything.
His body coursed with the power of the Eldritchs and through Vastor’s memories he had the same magical expertise as the god of the battlefield. Yet none of those things belonged to the Abomination.
He reaped the fruits of the Master’s efforts without enduring any of the challenges that Vastor had overcome to achieve them and that made the clone’s willpower as frail as paper.
Every wound he suffered made the Abomination waver, pain burned his mind into cinders because he was as empty as his dreams. The Abomination was a predator who had never been challenged and had no idea how to deal with failure.
Vastor, instead, was just a man. A man with plenty of flaws and weaknesses, but with the will and the determination to overcome them. It made him like steel, tougher with every hit he withstood.
Pain burned at Vastor as well, but it tempered him, making him more focused. Making him more deadly.
As the last bit of the clone disappeared down his throat, the Master regained control over his body and released a primordial roar. With no more interference from his other half, his bright violet and black core worked in unison.
The Chaos no longer posed a threat to his flesh, answering his every command like the mana flowing through his body.
‘The bastard was right. I can’t go back to my human form like this.’ Vastor thought, conjuring the tier five Chaos spell, Hungry Void.
A black sphere wrapped around him, absorbing the incoming volley of spells. The Chaos of the barrier neutralized the darkness component of the undead’s spells and fed upon the other elements of which they were comprised.
Vastor used that time to conjure more Chaos energy, using it to rebuild his body before shapeshifting back into human form.
“Dad!” Nothing could pierce through Hungry Void but Frey’s voice did.
Vastor dropped the shield, charging at the position of the children with the speed of a bullet.
Alas, with the world energy back, the Wendigo’s cold aura slowed him down enough for the Grendel to reach him from behind and swat Vastor down like a fly. Even with the Chaos at the Master’s beck and call, his body was exhausted from the wounds he had suffered.
His mana was spent and his mind weary from the battle in the Mindscape with his clone. With no spells at the ready, he was just an Awakened human.
‘What can I do? Think, Vastor, think. I didn’t just beat myself into submission just to lose against a bunch of leeches.’ Even while on all fours and panting like a bellows, the Master racked his brain for a solution.
‘My two cores work together, but part of my mana is constantly wasted to keep the Chaos under control because it has no damn counter-‘ The argument was old, Vastor had spent countless hours debating it with the other Abomination hybrids.
Yet the condition of his black core was brand new.
He no longer had to fight to keep it under control. After devouring his other half and destroying its mind, the cursed energy answered the Master’s call with the same meekness of his regular mana.
Vastor got back to his feet with a kip-up and pushed the Grendel back with a flurry of fists, using body casting as fast as he could. Yet he weaved no offensive spell, only Body Sculpting.
His Master Scalpel spell altered his life force, bringing the two cores closer until they almost touched. Usually, it would have been a suicidal move, the bottomless hunger of Chaos was supposed to devour the helpless mana.
What happened, instead, was Vastor controlling both of his cores so that the black core emitted a single tendril of energy, reaching the mana core.
There, it sucked the light from the darkness of Vastor’s mana flow, turning it into more Chaos. At that point, Vastor used the newborn Chaos of his mana core to fight the tendril off while his mana core reached a new equilibrium.
Instead of using the light element to stave off the spreading of the Chaos, Vastor used the remaining darkness element of his core until there wasn’t enough to provide the light element with its counterpart, turning it into Decay.
It was supposed to throw the balance of the elements inside his mana core into disarray but thanks to the tendril of Chaos, it was stable. The Chaos of the black core finally had a counterpart that kept it in check, not by suppressing his power but by synergizing with it.
The two cores overlapped just enough so that the black core kept the segment of the violet core that had turned into Decay stable. At the same time, the segment fed the Chaos with Decay, creating a perfect balance.
A new, unprecedented balance.
Vastor’s core was perfect and consisted of all elements.
Had Xenagrosh tried the same thing, her troll core and black core would have simply devoured each other. What made Vastor’s experiment a success was the fact that the Chaos no longer struggled and that his core was comprised of all six elements.
Light and darkness naturally coexisted inside of it and filtered both Chaos and Decay, acting each as a buffer against the other and stabilizing them as a result.
A small green pillar and another black one erupted from Vastor’s body, quickly followed by two bigger ones respectively descending from the sky and emerging from the ground.
The Master could feel the air around him become filled with so much world energy that he could finally Chaos Warp through the space-compressing array and move right beside the children before the undead could crack the Dominator armor open.
The pillars kept spreading in every direction, pushing everyone away but the Dominator armor, its quivering guests, and the Yggdrasil staff. The equipment carried Vastor’s energy signature so the green pillar just washed over it.
“Green?” Dervalos said in utter disbelief, the rest of the undead too shocked to do more than stand with their mouth open. “Golden is for beasts, orange for plant folk, silver is for whatever Verhen is. What does a green pillar mean?”
If Tezka the Suneater had been there, he could have answered the question. He was old enough to remember the last time a green pillar had appeared. The last time a human had undergone evolution, turning into a Tyrant.
‘Magnificent.’ Mogar stared at the old Professor, bestowing upon him her favor in the form of all the energy and matter he needed to survive the process.
