Chương 98: Ascension - 2

Then, everything turned white. WARHOL regained control and awareness of himself. He felt invincible. By reflex, he tried to open his stats page to see his gains. He had forgotten, though, that his most recent mutation had removed the System from him.

"No matter," he told himself.

"I will merely concentrate. If my sense organs could inform me of notifications and auto-incant, then I can suss out my core stats..." It took him a long while, but he did it. He had to focus like he was an initiate again, using all of his mental prowess to force the numbers to appear in his mind's eye. The numbers and words did not appear exactly as they had before, sure, more like vague representations of the concepts he had been taught by the System over the course of decades, but he knew what each line meant.

{Martialness: 10, 000, 000} {Magic: 5, 000, 000, 000} {Resolve: 150, 000, 000} The description for [Demon Core] hadn't lied — a major stat boost for real! For a while, Warhol mediated on the nature of what his revised core stats meant and whether there was a point, even.

'Martial Prowess' changed to 'Martialness,' for example. Did that have some connection to his new 'ascended' state or was that all from some innate element? He pondered the possibilities when he became aware of new tingling at the edge of his consciousness. It felt as the same type of pull as notifications, did... he 'opened' the notification, allowing the information to enter his being: {You Have Absorbed Every Triple-SSS Mutation: Final Ascension Now Available: Collect More Monstrous Energy to Proceed...}.

Collecting more monstrous energy? He smiled. That was something he could do -- easily, in fact. Warhol stood up and felt... different. It wasn't just that he was bigger or stronger. No. It was more that he was attuned to the universe in a way he hadn't been before; he felt more capable, more like he could influence the nature of reality itself; was that the difference between Humanity and a God? Lackadaisically, he pointed a finger at a nearby boulder.

On impulse, he thought of a throne; a fancy one with great royalty and threat, one imbued with the shape of wands, skulls, and sigils, and other such fanfare known to wizard-kind. And the boulder changed in response to his willing, becoming the throne he imagined in his head. A wicked grin claimed him. He was going to have fun with this... The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

As much as he wanted to get to work in building his grand palace, Warhol wanted before anything else to earn some monstrous energy. And the only place he was going to get that kind of energy was back in Horror Space; he auto-incanted a [Teleport] to his last destination, right before the Vortex, and was back there in a jiffy. By now, he no longer felt the coldness of space. It was to him like any other environment. Merely a plane to be trampled upon.

Seeing no new tentacles, he shrugged and drifted himself into the Vortex. Whatever lay deeper inside the Horror, would be his true prey anyway. The creature's brain would have more than enough monstrous energy for him to fulfill his apotheosis. He let himself be taken in by the vortex. Though he suffered immense dizziness, he bore no more injuries than a befuddled sense of direction for an hour or two. Upon his ejection from the vortex, he was inside of a space unlike anything he could've imagined. It was a room...

fundamentally. This room was giant beyond measure, though. He only sensed the limits of this room because of his [Cosmic Sense] mutation which informed him of 'space' but of a 'space' that was 'interrupted' by an artificial division, like a gust of wind at a forest's edge only felt when one left the closeness of the woods. The room was about the size, then, of a planet, if that planet was wedged into a cube-like shape, that is. If he was to fight the Horror in a room like this, it would hardly be an arena.

He did wonder how far the vortex had taken him, but he could not identify how far away he had been taken, which must've meant he had been taken far indeed! Warhol drifted through the colossal chamber until he reached a gargantuan door. In front of that door was a gigantic, armored warrior clad in thick plate mail and bearing a heavy, two-handed mace. On his approach, the warrior moved into a defensive position and spoke.

"Greetings, Powerful One," it told him.

"I am a vassal by which the master of this place speaks. Tell me your name, oh honored victim." He smirked at this thing's righteousness. But he would play along: "My name is Warhol Chaucer. And who might you be?" The guardian grunted. It did not respond right away. It was as if it had choked on its words on the way out. Not that he could blame the guardian-puppet for being intimidated; once it refused to let him pass and he had to rip it apart piece-by-piece, it would understand it had every right to be terrified.

When the guardian did speak, it tried to hide its fear, but Warhol still sensed the fear through his mutated sense organs. He had been so satisfied, in fact, with his intimidating of this puppet, he almost forgot to bask in yet another new trait about his form discovered — identification of emotion!

"My name is... one you might know from a previous life," the vassal spoke. Now the Horror has his attention. Could it be that this Horror was, to his curious disregard, be someone he had met before? Who?!

"Will you be telling me, oh great cosmic horror, or shall we play a guessing game?" The way this creature was dragging out their conversation made him think that this Horror was a lot more of a wimp than he at first gave it credit. The puppet chuckled darkly.

"My name is... used to be, Faux the Trickster God!"