Slumrat Rising

Vol. 5 Chap. 99 A Starbrite Man

Truth respected a well-organized jumping. No sense in fighting one-on-one when you and five of your nearest and dearest gang mates could kill some lost soul from ambush. There was, however, a higher art. One that took you from a nobody to a certified menace. An art completely beyond the sorry and the weak. The legendary art of Reverse Jumping.

Starbrite had most of his soul reserved burned away. He had been ambushed by dozens of the Shattervoid. He knew that Sariel was just waiting for an opportunity to jump in. Starbrite fought like a rabid animal. No more swagger. No more taunts. Just violence. And it was working. At the very least, he sure wasn’t losing.

Truth did his best to imitate a dead rat off on one side. He was no use in this fight. These seniors were making moves on a scale he could hardly imagine.

The Shattervoid attacked by twisting space. Starbrite attacked with whips of fire the length of rivers. He attacked with swords made of billions of adamantine fragments, each a spinning saw blade that cut through those mountain sized beings like he was slicing a mountain’s reflection in water. He smashed a bolt of darkness into the flank of a Shattervoid clansman and beetles the size of apartment buildings boiled out, eating the giant’s black flesh and they grew and multiplied.

Truth had never imagined the Shattervoid screaming. Starbrite made them scream.

The void twisted and shook, mathematical cascades of sensations the mind desperately tried to sort and categorize and analogize into taste and touch and sound. To hear the color of the sky before dawn collapse and expand simultaneously into a fractal of suffering. To see the infinite curvature of the universe in a straight line that is constantly shifting between the color and the meaning of crimson. To know that a furious, vengeful, family got their daughter back, and she was mutilated in ways most things in the universe couldn’t put words to beyond the anodyne ‘trauma.’

Starbrite was hurting them, but there were dozens of the vast beings. Being hurt wasn’t going to stop them. They kept coming. Their magic raked over Starbrite, trying to shatter his material skull and his more metaphysical body. It looked like it worked, but somehow, never worked enough. He kept reforming, and smashing back at them with comets, with droplets of true Sunfire, with beams of green necrotizing light.

Odd. The spells he’s using… they are doing damage. Enough to wipe me off the face of existence almost instantly. But they aren’t doing the kind of fatal damage I would expect to the Shattervoid. They are terribly big, of course and… oh. Oh that’s interesting.

Since he had first heard of it, Truth had dreamed of getting the System. That magical, impossible thing that transformed a human into a demi-god. That took a slumrat, and with a single hand, raised him to be a Starbrite Man. A Starbrite Man didn’t cultivate spells in his apertures. He had no need for it- the System provided everything he needed. Whatever spell he needed, whenever he needed it.

But the System was Starbrite’s soul. Perhaps supported by intelligent spirits and other servants, but primarily it was Starbrite’s soul feeding information into specially prepared bits of his slaves’ souls. So did that mean Starbrite had cultivated every spell?

Impossible. Regardless of whatever strange powers came with being a fake Nascent Soul, Truth flat out refused to believe it included “Can cast every spell at will.”

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So how was he doing this? Simple. He wasn’t really casting the spells. Not the real spells.

So called ‘modern’ magic. Magic with all the useless, non-functional bits stripped out. All those improved, optimized spells that spell researchers were so proud of. Truth had wondered for a long time what those extra bits did. He thought they contributed to the final Nascent Soul, and it looked like that was true, but there was more to it. Truth didn’t realize he was smiling. It wasn’t a very nice smile. A lot of blood smeared over those white teeth.

All that ‘useless’ stuff? It was the parts of the spell that operated at higher levels of reality. Starbrite could, thanks to his actual, cultivated, spells, memorize millions of ‘modern’ spells. They had all the metaphysical significance of a blueprint for a garden shed. They only worked on the most basic, material and secular level. Oh, he could put some heat on them. He had the magical muscle to turn dross into, if not gold, then gilt. But Starbrite was trying to slay dragons with a foam sword.

Now that he knew what to look for, he could see Starbrite maneuvering. It looked like he was attacking rabidly, but his ‘wild attacks’ kept moving him closer and closer to the planet. Credit to the old monster, he was managing to at least hurt the Shattervoid. But it was all a front. At a certain point, he would turn and run for the surface.

FORBIDDEN. KILL.

Truth felt something seep into him, through a channel he didn’t know existed. It felt like Angelic possession, but this was deeper. Coming at him at a level beyond the physical. Sariel. He had received much from his Angelic benefactor, even if he didn’t know it. Time to fulfill his destiny.

With a thought, he restored his body to the peak of perfection with Cup and Knife. The Tongue of One Who Speaks for God was recalled to his hand. No wonder it had been so lethal. No wonder that Bane was considered unique and terrifying. It was barely concerned with damaging the things of the secular world. It was a weapon for killing at a higher level. The Meditations of Valentinian strengthened and armored his body. Incisive whispered now! And with a single step, he was in the fray.

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His sword whipped around and came slicing down on the floating head, looking to split the crown of the God-King. Starbrite made a noise between a yell and a yelp and desperately tried to dive out of the way while shielding. Truth only caught a piece of him, and that did make the old monster scream!

“Always thought it was funny the way you hid all the time. Weird behavior for the strongest man in the world.” Truth’s lips were pulled back into a death’s head grin as the iron blade spun through the vacuum. It was a strange feeling- he couldn’t plant his feet when he struck. Each blow had to move in conjunction with the Earth Folding Step to give the blows momentum and force. Didn’t matter. He had always been quick at figuring out a fight. He would treat it like attacking from the back of his iron horse- cavalry slashes rather than dueling.

Starbrite didn’t bother replying with words. He couldn’t hear them anyhow. He sent a barrage of iron arrows, each etched with runes spelling pain and defeat. Thousands of them, impossible to dodge or parry. Truth stepped on the void, his sword cutting out again. Once, Starbrite’s gaze would have been enough to lock him in place. The all seeing perception of the Shattervoid would have turned space into concrete. But Sariel was on him now.

Truth felt shields shattering beneath his blade. Felt the wards pop like soap bubbles. They couldn’t hold up. Starbrite tried to cast something, swore, cast a different spell, and shot away at high speed, leaving exploding balls of gold-melting acid behind. Truth stepped just ahead of the leading wave of acid and brought his sword up in a thrust towards Starbrite’s eye.

“Strongest man in the world is hiding all the time. Raises a pack of thugs he calls the PMC. Has people whose job it is to puppet governments and businesses to do his bidding. In fact, every time you have a chance to not do something, to farm out the work and the danger, you do it.”

Starbrite continued to let his spells do the talking- Balls of molten iron the size of houses, spell-crafted insects who’s stingers dripped flesh dissolving venom. Whips of raw ether who’s lashes left eternal stripes of pain. Truth simply stepped past them, the Tongue lashing out and destroying the more inconvenient spells.

“I get it now. You are strong. You are. But you are hollow. All that’s in you is fear of death, so all you care about is getting yours. Most pathetic of all, you still want to be loved. You want that reverence. You want people to say only nice things about you. You really don’t like criticism at all.” Truth didn’t smile as he said it. His tone was casual, and sincere. “If you did have to argue, you wouldn’t do it yourself. You would hire someone to do the arguing for you. Then call it ‘an efficient use of time,’ and pat yourself on the back for your smarts.”

Starbrite read his lips. Somehow, in the midst of everything, he managed to be outraged.

“You take a shower recently? You’re welcome! You eat fruit in winter? You’re welcome! Trains? Tee-shirts? Not having a church or temple run your life? Never have to bow for a king or queen? That’s me! That’s me! Medicine? I made it work! Mass production? I made it work! You want to know why there is so much good music, good shows, good books? Me!” Starbrite was throwing everything now, from snakes made of lava to cascades of needler rounds, each self propelled and self guiding. Nation ending assaults. He was running away as he threw them, though.

And Truth just stepped right past them. Unstoppable, inexorable, inevitable. Whatever came at him, he ignored. Just evaded, and kept on attacking. When the homing spells doubled back, determined to kill him, he evaded again, putting Starbrite in the path of the danger.

Starbrite didn’t like that one bit.

“Your pants- I made them! Your shoes? Me! That haircut? You saw an actor wearing it because I made it profitable!”

Truth could hear Starbrite just fine. He had to talk using his mouth. Starbrite wasn’t so limited.

“You didn’t do a damn thing. You set the ball rolling, got people moving, then sat back and enjoyed the profits. All that stuff you said you invented? Someone else did it first. All you did was figure out a way to take over the market and take the credit. Any time there was a price to pay, you shoved it off on someone else. Your employees, the customers, the government, anyone but you. Then you called yourself smart, and got very sad people said mean things about you. And you hid. Now you want me to be grateful for all the good you did me?”

Truth slashed out again, tracing a bloody line across Starbrite’s scalp. “I’m grateful. But now you have to balance the books. How much are you holding?”

The Shattervoid hadn’t let up on their bombardment. “Friendly fire” was only a relevant concept if anything down range was your friend. Truth was evading it thanks to his spells and Sariel, but Starbrite was having to fight through it. He wasn’t able to outrun the Shattervoid any more than he could outrun Truth.

“Oh, get fucked. I know that game. How about this one?” Starbrite slammed a fist down on the void, bringing a vast spell into life. “If you kill me-”

Truth stepped and swung his sword, splitting the head in half. He could feel the angelic bane rippling through the ancient monster, first here, then down in the world below. Starbrite’s body was in pieces. No sense in letting even a speck of him escape.

The spell tried to launch. Truth stabbed the spellform with his sword, breaking it. He could imagine Starbrite having multiple doomsday weapons set. Probably on a lot of redundant deadman switches. It was going to be a hellish mess down there.

He looked up at the looming Shattervoid, their bulk blocking the stars. He looked down at the planet, seeing Sariel. Feeling the angel inside of him. It was, when you got down to it, a hellish mess up here, too.

He stretched out his hands, snagging the bits of Starbrite’s skull. It was, once, a thin face. Deep eyes, furious even in death. But there was something in that forever-young face. Something ground into the corners of his eyes and the creases of his scalp.

Fear. Something drove him to this particular sort of madness. Was it the divine revelation? Was it fear of mortality? Or did he just grow up poor, hungry and sick, with an alkie dad and an abusive mom, in a poison hovel with evil neighbors? Was he terrified of going back to that place? So scared, he would sooner destroy the world than let it happen?

Didn’t matter, really. Motives matter, but so does outcome. And speaking of-

He knotted the hair on each half together and tossed it up to one of the Shattervoid. It slowly tumbled through the void, making mockery of the inhuman distances involved. His fare was paid. If the offer was to be honored

He could remember seeing the billboard, the handsome man in the cream trench coat lighting the beautiful woman’s Golden Bat cigarette. “A Starbrite Man is always ready.” Promising himself that one day, he would be that man. Well. He wasn’t a Starbrite man. But whatever came next, he was ready.