Greed: All For What? - Chapter 1454: The Calvary.
The smart thing he should do now is to give up, but he isn’t going to do that because he is confident in handling whatever a demon god or a group of demon gods can throw at him. He has reasons to be confident. As long as he protects his main body with Chaos energy, any fight with a demon god or many demon gods will only make him stronger.
That means he will be able to produce stronger Chaos energy, which will increase the rate at which he grows stronger. He will be able to eat faster, which will translate into growing stronger faster.
“Soon everything and everyone will become a part of my existence. I think this is what it means to be Chaos. Spreading faster and faster until there is nothing left to corrupt.”
He is not the embodiment of Chaos yet, but he is already behaving like it. Chaos doesn’t stop once it starts. Instead, it becomes stronger and stronger until it overwhelms order and all of creation.
The only unfortunate thing here is that his mark of sin increasing in power might not be a completely good thing for him. It might increase the difficulty of trying to fuse with it.
Soverick doesn’t think so, though. He claims that the resistance of the mark of sin has already been removed. He believes that the difficulty will remain the same, so it will be a good thing for Aeternus to grow stronger.
However, they don’t know that for sure. They don’t have any information to work with. Aeternus is probably more unique than the Tree Father in the void universe, so he is on his own for this. He wants to eat PRIDE, so he will continue chasing PRIDE.
The small demon god chased after the large demon god. It was a comical and strange sight to anyone who didn’t know the back story. It was extra strange to see the golden cloud losing weight and speed as it ran.
Aeternus didn’t let up during the chase. He was slinging Chaos energy attacks at PRIDE from a distance. He didn’t aim to pierce the demon god through. All he wanted was for Chaos energy to touch the demon god. This ensured that PRIDE’s sacrifice of its body couldn’t get rid of the corruption of its existence.
Things would have been different if he were in control of the Supreme Law of Chaos. He would be able to attack PRIDE continuously with a single attack, and PRIDE wouldn’t be able to get rid of the corruption unless it killed him. One contact between them would have been all he ever needed to fight PRIDE, regardless of the distance between them.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t control the Supreme Law of Chaos. He is just a carrier of the Supreme Law and a vessel for its energy. So the best he could do was direct Chaos energy onto PRIDE, while Chaos energy did what it does passively, which is to corrode and corrupt.
The good news is that this is enough for his victory. PRIDE was losing energy to each attack from Aeternus, so it slowed down even faster than it expected. Aeternus was able to catch up to it after five minutes of chasing.
He laughed evilly and boisterously as he got to work on ravaging the demon god of pride. A large black cloud reappeared and surrounded PRIDE. Nothing could be seen through the black cloud, but the diabolical laughter of Aeternus could be heard clearly.
PRIDE didn’t beg for its life. It engaged him in an all-out brawl to the death. It sounds brave, but it is just the final struggle of a person at death’s door. PRIDE couldn’t win before when it was whole, so it surely couldn’t win now that it is weakened too much.
The ocean of black, corrosive energy submerged PRIDE quickly. Large black whips of Chaos energy lashed at the golden cloud and tore it apart. Aeternus formed a spike of Chaos energy that he drilled into the golden cloud. PRIDE had weakened, so its defenses were pierced through and the spike entered its body.
The spike entered the golden cloud and grew black roots that spread throughout the cloud. Aeternus used the network of roots to pump more Chaos energy into the golden cloud. It was as if he was pumping generous amounts of poison into his prey.
Chaos energy corrupted the energy matrix of PRIDE’s existence. It caused energy to be stripped away from PRIDE into more Chaos energy. This new Chaos energy corroded more of PRIDE to create more Chaos energy. This way, PRIDE was being digested from within.
PRIDE still had the presence of mind to gloat. It said with bitterness, “You abomination. There will be no place for you in the abyss. You will go mad if you eat me. Every demon god in the abyss will band together to kill you. Your days are numbered, abomination. I will be there the day you die. I will make sure you suffer.”
Aeternus wasn’t concerned. But he still spared some attention from his laborious work to speak. “Are these your last words? How original.”
Maybe what PRIDE said about him going mad would have happened if he were the one devouring his energy. Unfortunately, it is not. It is his mark of sin that’s doing most of that. His mark of sin is chaotic, so it can handle any type of energy. It will even convert them into Chaos energy, so he doesn’t have anything to worry about.
He spent most of his effort on consuming the power of PRIDE’s existence. It is truly a lot of work to digest a demon god from the inside and from the outside simultaneously.
But things didn’t end so easily. Aeternus sensed helpers soon after. A golden cloud was approaching the two of them at the speed of light. It was so fast that it was already too close by the time Aeternus sensed it.