'How could Vanarus kill Eruil?' The Knight chose not to voice this thought but instead listen.
"Eruil was still distant, detached from almost everything. Once she got strong enough that control over her power came fluently, she chose to head to the darkness with Vanarus, and a few others, which would go on to be known as the first squires. They would wait outside the darkness and receive all those pulled from its clutches.
I chose not to participate; I had things I had to deal with myself. The first was that I had gained my power before I reached level 110, but it came at a strange cost. My soul warped, and became more like a memory, to accommodate my power, but in turn my body changed as well.
My body may look physical, but it was the flesh of a memory. I could even turn ethereal and enter the minds of others as a memory myself, and in there, no-one, not even the host could challenge my authority.
Thus, I became the very ever first manifestation. Down the line people would go on to learn that not all power are the same, and some like mine needed a vessel to be used. Many of the basic ancestors of todays manifested forms came from the era after Eruil's death, but for the time being it was just me.
I was grappling with the fact I was no longer human. In my appraisal, it called me a memory, like I was meant to be forgotten or something. So, I worked hard trying to understand the difference between this power and others.
I found that all power does change the shape of the soul, only powers too alienated from a specific type of soul force the soul to change so much that it forced the body to accommodate for these unknown changes. I also theorised that the children of those manifested would be born with the power, I just didn't know how it would work.
My body began to exhibit traits that were not skills or powers, side effects. It had its advantages and disadvantages as would every other manifestation after me. At the start they called them evoforms. I almost agreed, because they were a forced change in which power was a stimulator and not the environment.
The one who came to convince me otherwise was my student, Suilva. He said, calling them evoforms was akin to liking these to a selection route, since all animals that evolved did not chose to, they were just selectively bred out. Choosing not to give rise to such mundane disputes, I formally named these power changes Manifestations.
My manifestation disadvantage was that I could not be bred, of which I had given thought to but never cared for. The advantage, or what was supposed to be an advantage, was that I could duplicate myself, into separate but still singular beings like a microbe. Whereas the dragons created multiple bodies one mind, all mine would have their own.
Later on, we went on to learn that fundamentally, during the second legendary hero's time, that all manifestations shared one common advantage and disadvantage.
On the positive side, all their children would be born with the power and have to earn it, like my duplications, and on the negative side, should we attempt learning a second power, it should be aligned with the first or the soul collapses. This was strange considering that we didn't even know it was even possible to have two powers.
In my deep research, confused about the specifics of my power, I chose to not go for the exploit. I had told myself that since my memory power did not allow me to be able to see the memories in the sword, thus making me doubt I could restore yours; I would have to study the uses I could, because power could be reversed.
I didn't even say goodbye to them, I had connected them to my power, so I could see their memories as they made them. So, there was no real reason for them to even report back, because I'd already seen it firsthand.
It began with both of them standing on a line where they knew come nighttime, the darkness would come. They both stood there ready.
"You ready for your first time in the darkness Vanarus."
He gripped tightly to his heavy blade. "As ready as I can be, even thought I would have liked to reach your rank first."
"It's here."
The squires stepped back on instinct alone. The air before them became cloudy, as if it was burning, releasing a treacherous smoke to replace the air. To Eruil, it was as though she was stepping into the ashes of air itself.
Once inside, they scoured the place. In there, I realised I couldn't record their memories, so what I had was the chaotic mental diagnostic of what their minds thought they experienced, making every reading an outlier on its own. Eventually I learned to decipher these and learned an ambiguous clue about what happened that night.
They fought tooth and nail, but halfway through the night, the darkness vanished. In the records, because of the squires, it would go on to record as humanities first victory. Eruil was on her knees bloody and covered in injuries that even pictures could not capture.
I learned from my own experience that this was no victory. For the destroyers, it was probably the first instance in which their livestock had fought back, and they fought back with teeth made of tungsten, skin made of bubbling magma, and horns radiating a blistering radiance that nuclear missiles could not achieve.
The destroyers had not lost. Like any farmer, they were just surprised and had to verify with the vet if they should put down the animals with rabies before they affected the others. I'm not sure what kind of things count as emotions to destroyers, but that was shock if I've seen it.
It also had something to do with Eruil's power, it was just unreal, I guess even they thought so.
Vanarus, was slightly bruised, but unlike her, he was curdled up on the floor, his arms over his head, like a child during a thunderstorm. He had this look in his eyes, and because I had marked him with my power, I got a full glimpse into what turned people into monsters.
He kept uttering the same words under his breath.
"I'm not mad, she is, I'm not mad, she is… Eruil is the problem, I can't be wrong, those things cannot be fought, I'm not mad… SHE IS‼"
Madness was slowly settling within him. It blistered his mind and thoughts. It made me see that; one had to lose themselves to a single maddening thought to become monsters. At that moment, I lost full connection.
His muscle mass doubled, tripled, and eventually swelled out of his body. Knelt on one knee, Eruil looked to the shadow that was quickly blotting out the light of the stars.
I could feel some shock in her, but something within her, always told her that something like this would happen, so she was already prepared to face Vanarus. What she did not think count on was being this injured when it happened, and Vanarus becoming a hundred metres high.
She got up, dripping of blood from every wound. Standing on her feet, she blacked out for two hours. Eruil hadn't known just how much damage she had actually taken, and standing up just did it. When she came to, she saw the squires flying, many dead on the floor. Part of her was impressed the defended against Vanarus for so long, they never lasted a fraction of the time during training.
She had to act to save those still alive, because at this rate, all of them were ready and willing to lay their lives for her. They were no match for Vanarus though. Her sword swung around in the air, making a whole wheel. The blade stopped completely, but instead, as if there was a camera attached to it, Vanarus, was grabbed and tossed around.
The blade had stopped changing, but she instead moved the change to Vanarus. Supplexing someone as big as Vanarus sent a massive wave through the supple soil, launching everyone off the ground. But even this change she subjugated.
The ground became flat, and the entire force from the quake travelled through Vanarus, causing the hideous monster to swell up with fetid blood. She dropped her sword, facing both her palms to Vanarus.
His body began to invert and collapse. Everything around it was not changing, the air remained stagnant, the time around him suffocated him, and all the moving of blood as well.
Vanarus stubbornly still moved around, crushing his flesh into a pulp against what was not allowed to change. Vanarus was stuck on the same thought, unable to change it too. His muscles began to change as well, reverting back to his human body.
She was attempting to change him back into human. His power level dropped, he became younger. Eventually he was the size of a teenager. She had undone the changes that power had done to him. She remembered what I said to her, "The darkness is so much more to handle now that we are capable of attempting to experience it."
She believed, if she took power out of him, reverting him to the young innocence of human, he would be okay. She breathed heavily, looking at the sleeping boy far ahead of her, steeped in the blood of a monster. He had no power, no skills, not even at power level 0, she had undone even that change.
Earlier, she had done something similar to the destroyers, but they only lost a few power levels each before vanishing. Her power gave her unbelievable control over any and all forms of change.
Put simply, if it could change, if it was changing, if it had changed, she could freely change it herself or just stop it. She looked at Vanarus again, he was dead. It seems changing him back to the simplest form of a human did not save him, once the madness was gone, there was nothing keeping him alive.
Vanarus was now in the body of a little boy, dead, and she found no better reminder to the fact that she had taken yet another innocent life, and funnily enough, it was not the destroyers who took it.
Suddenly, the darkness came back, bold and strong as ever, this was with just a couple of minutes left before daybreak. Eruil either had to run out, of which she could, or fight out the remaining minutes.
For the first time in a long time, she thought about you, her memories confirmed it. Something didn't favour her pallet regarding this decision; she was not about to run where you had succeeded. Her one vindication was that, if you had survived an entire night, so would she.
Eruil was in no condition for another battle, but she trusted herself enough that her special skill [Trust] would allow her over and above enough time to actually survive the few minutes left. Sword in hand, she tried to move forward.
'What is forward? What is up? Am I speaking? Is this night? Who am I? Where am I? Is this a thought? Is this a thought? Am I speaking? Is this forward? Where am I?'
Eruil was unable to form coherent enough thoughts, screams, or even voices in her head. Put more accurately, she didn't trust that she could.
Even in such a state, there was one thing she was certain of, if she was to die here, she would survive the night just as you had. At the very least, she wanted to survive an entire night in the darkness at least once in her life, so she didn't care for anything else.
This was her last standoff against someone she always competed with in her head, someone who had pushed her forward in phantom thought, someone that was no longer here, so she couldn't even prove herself superior.
She breathed in calmly, or hectically, she had no way of knowing. And with her thoughts so chaotic, she didn't have it in her to reverse what had been done to her, and she didn't even know what it was that had been done anyway.
One of the squires had a potent counting skills, even allowing them to count what she had not known was there. She went on to use this skill to count the number of destroyers that had come that night, and to her surprise, with the few minutes of night left, they had sent one, and even though she was not yet capable of discerning them apart, she was sure that this specific one was beyond all comprehension in all its forms.
Just one destroyer? I thought to myself, when she told me later on.
This did not matter much though, because at that moment, following the one thought she had been having for centuries, thee only thought that had remained true, Eruil did it. She let out something she had been perfecting, even briefly stopping that unparalleled being completely in its tracks."