Rewind: A Grimdark LitRPG Series (Pyresouls Apocalypse, Book 1) by James Callum (reading tree .txt) 📕

A series of mental commands brushed away the distracting prompts and windows. He knew what he was about and needed no list of his spells.

His time on Aldim would be short and any stat-geeking he indulged in would be wasteful. Besides, he already knew he was more than a match for the useless god.

Erastus stood with his back to Midarian atop a wide argent dais, the telltale signs of a portal spell taking shape in the air in front of him. He was pulling some poor soul from the world between sleep and waking.

What a lot of people didn’t realize was that those myoclonic jerks that feel like you’re falling right when you’re about to fall asleep are usually attempts at planar travel.

They’re mostly misfires. Latent magic.

But in the right circumstances and with enough juice, you could effectively shunt a person subconsciously attempting to Dive through a portal and to the destination of your choosing.

Of course, that’s a pretty shirty thing to do. Huh, language filter on the Worldshard too? I definitely did not mean shirty.

Most people only subconsciously did that when they were trying to run away from a situation so bad they would rather be anywhere else. Abuse victims, runaways, the most vulnerable people in other words.

It didn’t surprise Midarian that Erastus would prey on that sort. The poor guy the god had homed in on would go to sleep in his bed and wake up somewhere else entirely.

Not that he needed it but Midarian welcomed another reason to murder the god.

Killing a god had been on his bucket list for a long time. God-killer just had such a nice ring to it. So many of the worlds Midarian visited had silent gods or gods that had gone to the corner store for a pack of smokes and never came back.

The realms that did have active gods were mostly ashholes. Which meant that they were heavily guarded. There was a level of self-awareness among gods. Not enough to change their ways – who would stop them anyway? – but enough to guard themselves against the likes of Midarian.

So when he finally, finally, managed to get through Erastus’s layered web of protections, he was ecstatic.

Midarian arrived several seconds before the god had made his fatal mistake. A simple enough trick to perform from the Margins and it satisfied his most important tenet that had kept the rogue Magi alive all these long years: never arrive when and where you are expected.

Seeing the spell taking shape, Midarian understood the source of the flaw.

Portals were leaky, messy things. They always made cracks and fissures in reality. It was in their nature.

Any good spellweaver would be able to cover the flaw immediately. And indeed the foolish god had done just that. Too little, too late. Unlike a mortal spellweaver, a god had more juice to swing. He had pulled back the veil of time over the flaw in a bid to entrap Midarian as soon as he exploited the flaw.

Unfortunately for Erastus, Midarian had moved the moment of the flaw precious seconds prior to its appearance. And he was there in the god’s chamber before he was ready for Midarian.

The poor soul Erastus had targeted appeared in the black abyss of the portal and fell with a meaty thump onto the marble flooring. Dazed but surprisingly quick to recover, the man pushed to his feet. His brown eyes were wide with confusion.

Erastus spread his arms out like some tent revivalist preacher. His long billowing sleeves swung down and kissed the floor. Midarian imagined the god thought he looked impressive. But he just looked like a silk-winged bat.

Midarian drew two daggers and approached his quarry. Daydream in his left hand, gold as the first sunset of summer, and Nightmare in his right, black as the deepest moonless night in the dead of winter.

The time of the god’s trap drew near.

Any second now Erastus would be expecting Midarian to come through the Margins and walk straight into his waiting trap. Midarian didn’t need to see his face to know the savage grin that would mar the deity’s eternally youthful boyish features.

Midarian stayed his hand long enough to time his strike at the exact moment the god’s trap would have caught him, had he not arrived seconds earlier. At the moment of the god’s appointed victory, Midarian drove Daydream into his spine.

Before Erastus knew he had erred deeper than he could ever fear, Nightmare dove down like the beak of a hungry raven into the vulnerable space between neck and shoulder.

A gout of golden ichor sprayed from the wounds.

Midarian sawed Daydream through the spine and ripped Nightmare down. Either wound would have proven fatal on their own. But Midarian had a score to settle and the wily old cretin had slipped past his fingers far too many times for him to do anything halfway.

Flickers of cannon fire erupted from the wounds as Midarian pulled his daggers out, the last of the god’s defenses faded in those bursts of light and thick gold blood.

Midarian planted a boot into his white-robed back and pushed the god forward. He didn’t want to see his disturbingly innocent face.

The golden ichor that flowed from the wounds slowed, puddling about the god. It didn’t stain his robes, merely flowed over them like mercury leaving no trace on the fabric.

As the last dregs of stubborn life fled the god, the ichor began to change.

Midarian, ever the opportunist, scooped up some of it into a vial while it was still gold. He slipped the daggers back into their sheaths that had appeared at the small of his back and pulled his red stardusted hood over his head.

Eventually, the gold gave way to mythril-green, then shimmering silver before it hardened and began to solidify into a dark iron in both form and color. As magic fled the ichor, the hardened blood rippled from iron to burnished copper, completing its transmutation.

Midarian was halfway through the incantation