Chapter 182: Cancer Excised

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Birdsong echoed across the clearing, and the sun was beginning to flirt with the horizon. The massive lump of glass was still smoldering off to the side, faintly cracking as the outside cooled off faster than the inside.

It had been quiet for quite some time.

One second Will was there, and the next he’d vanished, the only indication he’d been there were some footprints in the earth leading toward the pit radiating enormous amounts of heat from its edges.

It was easy to forget that Will was a rogue archetype until he vanished like that.

Does he have an Ability for it or was that really from a Relic? Travis couldn’t help but suspect that Will had something even more outrageous than the ‘bespoke’ Relics he offered to the Party.

“So…you think he’s still alive?” Travis asked the cute Fae lord standing beside him, looking for a topic of conversation. Travis didn’t know the first thing about raising a daughter, so that one had been a bust.

BOOM!

The earth to the right of the pit exploded outward, revealing Will flying upwards, a cancerous mass the size of a building behind him, being torn out of the ground like a stubborn weed.

“…Yes.” Onacona replied, her tone dry.

“Travis!” Will’s voice projected from the distance.

“EH!?” Travis held a hand up to his ear to indicate he’d heard him.

“Get the rest of the caravan! They need to take turns stabbing this guy!”

“On it!” Travis shouted, conjuring a flying carpet and setting off.

***William Oh***

Will watched Travis fly back to Bakton Keep and nodded to himself. Sure, Travis didn’t fly very fast, and Will was going to have to keep Kincaid company for a few minutes, but that wasn’t too much of a problem. He flew decently fast, and he could likely carry more people at once than Will could.

Kincaid would keep for now.

Four of Will’s five snakes had their armor changed into chains brimming with fishhooks, which they used to catch the abomination’s flesh and drag his fat ass out of his comfortable little temple of self-worship.

Will hauled Kincaid up and up, nearly a mile above the earth…where the others couldn’t hear them.

“This is pointless. Kill me or not, you are doomed to failure. Such is your lot. Nothing you do has meaning.” Kincaid groaned as Will hung him in the sky and settled down in front of the meaty face emerging from the grotesquely distended stomach.

“Mean words are the last resort of the impotent,” Will said, matching the sentient stomach’s glare.

“It is simply the truth.”

“Maybe so.” Will said. “But I felt your fear: You’re afraid of disappearing, your legacy ground to nothing by the relentless turning of the Coil, afraid of becoming an afterthought to a hero who will in turn be rendered nameless by time.”

“…What of it?” Kincaid asked.

“Help me. Share your knowledge of the previous Coils. Instead of dying a footnote, your legacy will be that of the great sage who granted Wiliam Oh secret knowledge that he used to surpass every hero who came before. Kincaid, the sage, whose heart was pure and knowledge unrivaled.”

“A Lie.”

“A legend. Your heart is pure evil, and your knowledge is sure to be unrivaled in certain aspects. Legends are more a reflection of the people who tell them than the subject themselves. believe me. I know.”

Will raised a finger.

“But. Your name will be applied to this fake version of you, and your ‘deeds’ will be admired and emulated by Climbers for endless coils. Your name will outlast either of these two.” Will gestured to the two other fae Lords below them.

Will offered his hand.

“Share with me the darkest secrets you’ve acquired over your long life. Exceed your rivals in death.”

A rumbling laugh shook the air around him.

“Is that your offer? I share the world’s deepest secrets and you will tell pretty lies after you’ve killed me?”

“I know a really good hype man,” Will said.

“…Deal.”

A fleshy pseudopod reached out and wrapped around Will’s hand.

They shook on it.

“What kills my peers at the end of each Coil?” Will asked.

“The Tower itself.” Kincaid said. “I don’t know the specifics, but I overheard one of your incarnations mention Reese pushing him to find a way to reach something that was protected by the Tower.”

“And you think that killed him?” Will asked.

“All the power that you have used to humble me is borrowed. You can no more use it to defy the Tower than you could piss backwards, human. Your predecessors and their cohort overflowed with that borrowed power, which made them all the more feeble when it was taken away from them. It is the only thing that I could imagine stopping you dead in your tracks so many times. The Tower itself.”

“You mentioned Reese.” Will said. “Tell me about him.”

“Ah yes, the immortal. It’s rumored that he is ancient beyond measure. Older than me by far. Maybe even older than you. Who knows? Like you, his life is tied to The Tower somehow, and the only way for him to achieve the sweet release of death is to shut it down. The ‘advice’ he gives you is all in service to this one goal.”

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“What do you mean by ‘shut it down’?” Will asked. “That…would kill everyone, wouldn’t it?”

“That is one way of looking at it, sure.” Kincaid gave an ugly grin.

“The people who made you: They discovered a lot about The Tower. Give me the highlights. What is it?”

“In the course of their attempts to decode miasma and the dimensional effects of the tower itself, there were a few radical scientists who believed the tower’s nesting properties to be a form of shelter from the gods themselves. A way of insulating humanity from beings whose power defies all laws of nature, each Coil adding a Floor and retreating further and further away from a reality where monsters beyond human understanding reside, whose mere attention would cause your body to warp and crumble like a burning hair from sheer miasmatic energy.

What you might call gods.

Naturally, these scientists were scorned and imprisoned because such theories fly in the face of Tek’tut’kanlay’s divine mandate. The ones who made me could not see the pattern, nor even conceive of it. But the longer I live the more the hypothesis seems to hold some weight.

Why do you think Key Sites on every Floor are pumping a beam of Miasma up? They are pumps bailing out a sinking arc. In the long run, we are all doomed. Whether that is three or a thousand Coils from now. Sooner or later, the Tower will collapse under its own weight and this little panic-room of a world will flood with miasma and finally…come to an end.”

Will’s eyebrows rose.

“That’s a lot to process. What’s at the top of The Tower?”

“My guess? Humanity’s origin. An abandoned world so thoroughly corrupted by miasma that no living thing could set foot there without immediately mutating into a monster, or simply bursting into flames.

It isn’t completely abandoned. The gods exist, batting our enclosure around for their amusement like a group of toddlers wrestling over an ant-farm. Making bets, picking favorites, and giving them sugar when they please.”

“So it’s just the gods at the top of The Tower?” Will asked.

“BAHAHAHAHAH!” Kincaid bellowed with laughter.

“No. ‘The gods’ are the six or so creatures of limitless power who bother to amuse themselves with humans at all. There’s no reason to believe that there aren’t billions of creatures of similar or greater power strewn across that world who simply don’t care one way or another.

“So there’s billions of gods at the top of the Tower, and only six actually care?”

“That’s what I believe.”

“Anyone ever make it to the top?” Will asked.

“I’ve heard of a few. They exchange a few words with the gods before they are forced to scurry back to the land of mortals, forever altered by the experience.”