Killing Carl’s murderer had left Derek as empty as the Void’s name implied. Without his revenge, without his brother, Derek had nothing to live for. With each step he took, Derek discovered that life on Mogar was going to be different.
There, he was strong and fast.
All the memories of Lith’s painstaking training sessions and struggles to overcome the bottlenecks were gone, leaving behind only the results. To the Void, he was a version of Derek McCoy who had just come from Earth and found himself in a body with the prowess of a Divine Beast.
The feeling of power and freedom as the wind struck his face was intoxicating. Derek had no heart but he experienced an adrenaline rush all the same.
It wasn’t just because of his newfound physical prowess, but because he had once again no care in the world. Living or dying made no difference to him but knowing that this time he could do a lot of damage before kicking the bucket brought a smile to his face.
Just like Lith during his early days, Derek/the Void was still pondering whether to stay on Mogar or not. Yet he knew that in this life, he wouldn’t be a victim of the circumstances.
‘Unless everyone on this planet is as strong as me, of course.’ He thought. ‘But I doubt it. A society of demigods would have never built a flimsy shack like that or left so much land untouched.
‘If I’m right, there is no law that can stop me. No imbecile with a badge can force me to lower my gaze and accept their idiotic rules. Here and now, I’m the law. I wield a power that can’t be taken away and no written word can stop.
‘I am a giant in a world of ants and I won’t hesitate to stomp anyone who dares stand in my path, no matter how many of them gather to fight me. Death means nothing to me.’
Derek had no way to measure his speed but he noticed how it would take him mere seconds to reach something he saw on the horizon and quickly make it disappear behind him. Before he knew it, he was rushing forward at his current top running speed, 326kmph (203 mph).
Every one of his steps left a deep scar in the ground and produced a boom of thunder. There was no one to see or hear it, but it reinforced Derek’s feeling of power.
‘Come on, new world. Throw anything you want at me! This time, I’m not just a man you can push around with your shit. This time, I’m the storm!’
Trees, rivers, animals, everything was supposed to be a blur yet he could see them clearly and react in time. Insects and dust particles slammed against his face with a sizzle as the Abomination devoured them.
“I wonder if…” He tensed the muscles of his legs and took a leap out of curiosity.
“Holy shit!” Derek quickly reached hundreds of meters of altitude and then started falling even faster, yet he felt no fear, only excitement.
The new world was still unknown, but he had become everything he had always dreamed about as a child. Powerful, unrestrained, fearless.
He tensed his muscles, trying to brace for impact, when a snap sound drew his attention and broke his fall. Two huge membranous wings had popped out of his back, turning his descent into a glide.
“Fuck me sideways, I have wings!” He said in excitement.
His attempts to flap his wings ended up in an awkward dive that made him lose altitude fast. Then, he stopped trying to understand what to do and let his body take the wheel again.
Lith had learned to fly from Feela the Behemoth and spent countless hours practicing in all of his forms. The muscle memory took just a few tries to kick in again and show Derek how it was done.
“This makes less and less sense by the minute. How can something as heavy as I am fly? And this fast as that?” The landscape below him changed constantly, Dragonspeed wasn’t just an expression.
“I’m not even a demigod. I’m a god who dominates the sky.” It took Derek several minutes to overcome the high that flying at high speed gave him.
While looking at Mogar from above, everything looked small and insignificant. Yet the sensation faded with time until he regained enough of his paranoia to wonder if he truly was unique or just one of many.
“I’d better not overestimate my abilities until I meet other people.” Then, the Void noticed two things.
The first thing was the presence of a constant updraft that filled his wings while he flapped them up and supported part of his weight during the rest of the motion.
The second thing was that he was quickly approaching a mountain range. In other words, if before he was in the middle of nowhere, now Derek was hopelessly lost.
“This is great.” He scoffed. “Let me guess, you don’t know how I’m supposed to brake, do you?”
“No.” Ragnarök replied as the south side of Mount Marala wrapped Derek in its rocky embrace.
The impact produced the rumble of an avalanche, scaring the local fauna for kilometers. The actual avalanche started a while later, but that’s a story for another day.
The Abomination found himself deep inside a crater of his own making for one time too many that day.
“That’s it! Enough experimenting blindly like an idiot. I need to figure out what I am!” The Void said and the Voidfeather Dragon couldn’t agree more.
‘Fuck me sideways!’ He thought. ‘George is in full control of our body and has no memory of anything that happened in the last twenty years. Think, Lith, think. How can I communicate with that jackass before he does something we are going to regret for the rest of my life?
‘How do I stop a homicidal psychopath with no empathy and a chip on his shoulder the size of a mountain? If I don’t find an answer, George is going to ruin my reputation and everything I’ve built as Lith since the day I arrived on Mogar two decades ago.’
If someone were to look at Lith’s life force at that moment, they would witness something unique. Both the human and Dragon sides were mortal like everyone else, but luckily, Lith had turned into an Abomination when faced with deadly injuries.
The Void had no vitals, no organs, nothing that could compromise his existence if damaged. He was just a mass of living darkness tainted by a small spark of Chaos that constantly ate at everything else.
The problem was that Strider’s betrayal had been perfect, to the point of triggering something unpredictable. The trauma of losing Solus, followed by the decapitation had left deep wounds on the human side that not even consuming the Zouwu had healed.
The damage had spread beyond the physical aspect, fracturing Lith’s mind as well. He was currently in a coma, trying to fix his maimed body and soul. Solus’ absence, the lack of his guiding star, had left him stranded in his own mind.
To survive, his life forces had rearranged themselves in the opposite of what their configuration had been while Lith was still a Wyrmling.
