Magnus Thorne

  Magnus didn’t care who saw him or what came after him. His transformation into a half-eldritch being wasn’t the jarring, sudden event one might imagine. It crept into his body and mind slowly, weaving through his thoughts and flesh until it was part of him. It was just there, as if it had always been. His body hummed with the changes, instincts sharper, movements faster, thoughts colder, stats growing with each kill. He had felt the difference the first time he tore through something that should have been stronger. Now it was just normal. He didn’t feel awe, fear, or dread. Instead, Magnus looked at the changes with something closer to growing pains.

  The first time he’d looked at the world, it had been too much—layers of existence stacked like a rigged card game, things slithering through the cracks, shifting behind what people thought was real.

  Now?

  Now he could feel it. The great beyond clawed at the edges of his thoughts, prying into his skull like a drunk entity fumbling with a lock. It wanted him to see. To understand. To fix things.

  Fix the world.

  "Shut the fuck up," he muttered, rubbing his temple.

  God, they were so annoying.

  He could see the truth of most things, if he cared enough to look. Things people weren’t supposed to know existed.

  But he barely glanced at them—because, honestly? They were really fucking boring.

  He had better things to focus on, like the fact that no one could stop him.

  Magnus walked quietly, but quickly, crossing paths with another summoned hero—Aalis, The Forged. The thing had survived worse than this, and had been built for worse.

  Once, on his homeworld, The Engineers had ripped Aalis's bones from his body and replaced them with something better—Something more useful. Chitin grafted to muscle, reinforced marrow, nerves wired for combat response faster than thought. Aalis had never known weakness. He had been cut from war itself, his body stripped down and rebuilt to be the perfect warhound, engineered for absolute victory—a weapon given a pulse.

  Now he stood there, towering, plates of chitin shifting as he turned, recognition and disgust mingling in his dark, glassy eyes.

  “Magnus Thorne,” he growled. “Thought you’d have died by now.”

  Magnus smiled humorlessly, raising the revolver again. “You’d think. But I’ve recently upgraded.”

  Mana surged through him, forcing past the human limitations he once had. Temporal Gunman activated. Time surrendered. Every moment stretched apart and every opportunity laid itself bare.

  Aalis moved, bladed limb extending—a perfect killer built for war. Magnus stepped sideways, unbothered, summoning his second largest rifle and firing three shots into his chest as he passed at point-blank range. The warhound stumbled, staring at the gaping hole where his vital organs should have been, black blood hitting the pavement in sharp slapping bursts.

  But then his body lurched.

  The plates of chitin cracked, and something underneath began to glow. Magnus barely had time to register the shift before Aalis’s blade extended, nearly taking his head off.

  Shit.

  Magnus twisted, felt the air split as an edge that could split molecules missed him by less than an inch. Aalis’s body—or what was left of it—moved in ways it shouldn’t. His final strike the engineered twitch of a dead man. Magnus shot three more times for good measure.

  The warhound finally collapsed, barely recognisable as a corpse.

  “You were saying?” Magnus asked. He didn’t wait for an answer before firing again. The vault needed feeding.

  [1,004,995]

  The Vault of Lives stored souls in the way a furnace stored heat—automatically, aggressively, and without giving a single damn about where they came from or how many times they were harvested. It had a running tally of every unspent death he racked up, some kind of supernatural bookkeeping system that never missed an entry. It didn’t talk, exactly, but sometimes it belched up leftover memories like a clogged disposal—a scream here, a whisper there, a whole lot of existential bitching from people who should’ve died quieter.

  Would that have driven someone else insane? Probably. He’d stopped keeping track of things like mental stability around the time he realized sanity wasn’t particularly useful. What mattered was output. He fed it souls, and in return, it became something bigger. Something nastier. He could trade them, burn them, break them down into something useful. Alchemy, just with extra steps and a lot more screaming.

  It got heavier with each kill. Hungrier. Meaner. Not a problem.

  He could always make more bodies.

  The hero at his feet twitched, his body struggling against the weight of death, and Magnus watched with genuine curiosity. The man had two souls. That wasn’t something you saw every day. Weird.

  Magnus pulled the trigger, emptying the remaining rounds, each punching through the small being. It crumpled, wordlessly adding itself to the count.

  [1,004,996]

  The Vault of Lives tightened again, a surge beneath Magnus’s skin, feeding off each death.

  Magnus had been killing for weeks, but the numbers were finally lining up. [1,004,850]. The tally ticked forward with every body that hit the ground, every soul ripped free and funneled into the Vault of Lives like spare change into a collector’s purse. He needed a million to purchase what he had planned, but he wanted [1,005,000]—for insurance. Nothing worse than getting to the finish line and realizing you didn't have enough Lives.

  The city wouldn’t be here much longer. No one would. Not the screaming lunatics in the gutters, not the masked unfinished watching from rooftops, not the altered high priests wrapped in gold, praying for their gods to notice them. Once the last five fell, it would start. The great and immediate unmaking. [1,004,993]. It would be loud. It would be fun. It would be absolute. [1,004,994]. The kind of event that left no survivors, no trace, just a perfectly empty crater where life used to be. [1,004,996].

  Four more. Then the real party started.

  ***

  Ahead, the city opened into a sprawling plaza dominated by a mural the size of a building. The colors were impossibly vivid, the details sharp enough to cut. Magnus stopped and let his gaze wander over the scene. It showed the God of Blood standing over a heap of shattered forms, his mouth twisted into a feral grin as rivers of golden ichor flowed from his victims. Another panel depicted the God of Magic, his hands glowing with energy as he bound entire pantheons in chains of pure light. The third showed the God of Creation reaching into the void, pulling forth something immense and unknowable, while pieces of his rivals’ bodies hovered around him like debris.

  It was beautiful, in a cold, brutal way. Magnus didn’t feel any awe or reverence, though. “Huh,” he muttered. “They really went all out, didn’t they?”

  He walked through the towering structures with the sort of carelessness that came from knowing he couldn’t die.

  Ahead, one of the quests 'Unfinished" stood, its body honed by two thousand years of war, hunger, and slaughter. Scar tissue wove through its muscles like old battle lines. Its armor grown, shaped by wounds that never fully healed, each crack and ridge a lesson paid in blood. Eyes like polished stone locked onto him, unblinking, patient. A thing carved by survival itself, waiting for the next challenge.

  “Move,” Magnus said, his voice low.

  The guardian stepped forward instead. Its voice was deep, laced with a hint of mocking curiosity.

  “...What are you?”

  Magnus stopped just short of it, looking up into the creature’s alien gaze. Then he pulled the trigger.

  [1,004,997].

  The 'Unfinished fell without ceremony, just another notch on a belt that didn’t exist. Magnus stepped over the cooling corpse, his gaze locking onto the mural seared into the wall beyond.

  The light caught the metal in strange ways, turning the figures to shifting things—gods frozen in motion, yet never truly still.

  The God of Blood stood at the center, carved with broad strokes that left his form heavy, undeniable. His hands, spread wide, held the proof of his victory—divine ichor, thick and flowing, sculpted to spill in streaks down the stone. The bodies beneath him twisted in pain, their faces warped in horror that did not fade. The gold in his eyes shone brighter than the rest, as if the metal itself had chosen him.

  To his right, the God of Magic wove his work into being. The carving here was thinner, sharper—each line cutting through the stone like a blade. His victims were bound together, their bodies stretched and tangled, caught in a web of power too fine to break. Their faces pressed into the weave, open-mouthed, their agony eternal. His hands, raised high, bent the fabric of the world, pulling threads from flesh, twisting life into something new.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  The God of Creation stood apart. His form was neither grand nor monstrous, yet the weight of him bore down harder than the others. His touch moved through the stone in ways the eye struggled to follow—a world in ruin, a world reborn, a world breaking again in endless motion. Cities fell in his shadow, mountains crumbled, new lands rose where old ones had shattered. Where his hands passed, the stone blurred, the carving shifting under changing light. The lines of his face were calm, steady, untouched by grief or triumph.

  The wall did not tell a story of victory. It told a story of endings—of gods who fought and gods who fell, of a war carved so deep into time that even stone still bled its memory.

  Magnus flicked a speck of dust off the carving, watching the golden ichor gleam in the torchlight. Three gods feasting, their bodies swollen with stolen power, their hands still buried in the flesh of their kin. "Look at you idiots," he muttered, amused. They took, they ate, they became something beyond gods. The artist captured every detail—the stretch of skin too thin to contain what they had taken, the veins thick and black from excess, the wild glint in their eyes before it all collapsed. He grinned. That part alone was...

  "Glorious."

  They won. They consumed everything, left nothing, drank their own creation until the cup cracked. Not a single corpse remained to challenge them. No rivals, no thrones left unburned. They became everything, and then they fell apart under the weight of it, unable to withstand what came next.

  Magnus exhaled through his teeth, shaking his head. "Amateurs." The mistake wasn’t in the taking—it was in the execution. A little patience, a little fine-tuning, and they would’ve rewritten the world instead of choking under the weight of it. They had the right idea—take everything, leave nothing—but they had the wrong stomach for it.

  He traced a clawed hand over the last god’s half-melted face, the gold pooling at his feet. Power was only as strong as the one who digested it. He chuckled, low and sharp, stepping back to admire the masterpiece.

  "Good effort. I’ll do better."

  ***

  A creature tore through the last of the hunters who had dared to challenge it. The creature was a sculptor, and the battlefield was its art. The thing had come out of nowhere—big, fast, covered in something that shone between flesh and... Not flesh. The first kill had been instant. The second had been a game.

  The fast ones lost their legs first. The ones who used magic got it the worst—it let them cast first, just to watch their spells fizzle when its body adapted mid-fight.

  Now, only one was left.

  The road they fought on, if you could still call it that, was scattered with crushed armor, charred mana crystals, and steaming piles of what had been hunters. The creature that stood amidst the wreckage wasn’t done, though—it was dragging out its last meal. The hunter still clung to life, her breath uneven, one hand twitching toward a shattered blade, the other pinned beneath the weight of the creature’s claw.

  Magnus had been watching for a while. From the edge of a crumbled wall, arms crossed, weight shifted lazily to one side. The last hunter—a seasoned one, by the look of her not completely shattered armor and bloodied weapon—lay crumpled. She wasn’t dead yet, though she should’ve been. The creature had done everything short of ripping her in two, as if savoring her failure.

  “Not bad,” he said casually.

  She heard him.

  Her eyes widened briefly, and her lips parted. She was trained—well-seasoned by the way she moved even now, injured as she was—but she was also dying, and her instincts betrayed her. Hope, desperate and raw, rose on her blood-streaked face. She tried to speak but couldn’t muster the strength. When she tried again, her voice came in a rasp. “Help… me…”

  The creature, too, paused for a moment, as if waiting to see what he would do. The hunter’s breathing hitched, her face contorting in pain and confusion. “Please…”

  Still, Magnus didn’t respond immediately. His gaze shifted to the creature, whose attention now fully turned toward him. There was a low, guttural sound from the beast. The slightest shift in those many darkened eyes, a hint of awareness. It had registered him as prey, a second meal. Magnus felt it in his chest more than heard it.

  The creature paused its chewing just long enough to rumble a melody of sounds that resonated deep meaning in Magnus's new body. “She is weak.” The beast's voice was thick, deep, rumbling through the blood-streaked air like a temple hymn, as though it was singing to itself. “The weak should thank the strong for their death.”

  Magnus snorted. “Damn. That’s cold."

  Her voice cracked, more blood than words now. “You… you could… kill it…”

  Magnus’s grin widened. “Oh, I’m sure I could."

  “P—please,” she rasped, voice shredded, a wet gargle under it.

  Magnus didn’t move.

  The hunters lips trembled. Her hand twitching toward a potion at her belt, even though her arm wouldn’t lift. “I—I don’t—I can—”

  Magnus shrugged. “Sure.” He drew his weapon and fired a single shot into the hunter’s chest. She gasped sharply, blood bubbling from her.

  [1,004,997].

  When she finally stopped moving, Magnus holstered his gun. “There. Seven is good number.”

  The creature watched the whole thing.

  Watched the system steal the kill.

  Watched the soul settle deep in Magnus's chest,

  Its eyes widened.

  Then it laughed.

  A deep, grating sound, like stone grinding against metal.

  “You take life that is not yours.”

  Magnus holstered his gun. “Yeah. That’s kinda my thing.”

  The creature froze. Its head turned slowly toward him, though its jaws kept working, its eyes like molten gold searing into his.

  “Y-You speak?” it said. Its voice was low, guttural, but intelligible. It sounded as if it had learned speech only to deliver judgment.

  Magnus grinned wider. “I guess I do.” He stepped forward, making no effort to hide the fact that he was armed, unarmored, and completely at ease.

  “It growled. Its voice rumbled through the air, the kind of sound that made lesser men reach for their weapons without thinking. “How do you speak?”

  “Because I’m special.” Magnus smiled faintly.

  It finished its current bite, rose to its full height, and turned to face him fully, blood still dripping from its maw. In the light of the shattered street, Magnus could see all that it had been feasting on—remnants of more than one hunter team, most of them dismembered beyond recognition. The one he'd killed, dead at its feet, didn’t even register as a person anymore. She was just another piece of the scenery.

  "The truth." Its chest heaved, and when it spoke again, its voice carried a mixture of suspicion and awe. “You understand me. How?”

  Magnus grinned. “Got lucky, I guess.”

  "There is no luck here. Only the will of the gods. Only those chosen by the divine can—”

  “Yeah, no. Your guys were so weak. Not chosen. Not divine.” He waved the barrel of his rifle at the bloody scene behind the creature.

  “You think yourself above them,” the creature snarled, gesturing with a claw toward the remains. “yet you trespass toward the center, toward that which you cannot comprehend.”

  “You walk where the gods bled and died, you look upon their works, and you mock them?”

  Magnus chuckled. “Mocking them’s the only thing keeping me entertained.” He finally pulled one of his rifles from the air, a big one, the weapon barrel's enchantmnts springing to lifein mid-air, barely visible in the brightness. "Why do you care? They’re not your gods anymore. They’re dead."

  The creature bared its fangs in what could have been sorrow, if it weren’t so clearly a threat. The creature’s claws flexed, but it didn’t lunge. Not yet. “You are different,” it said. “You do not bleed the same. Your scent… it is not mortal. It is wrong.”

  Magnus cocked his head. “I get that a lot.”

  “You are an insult to the order of things.”

  The thing’s claws flexed.

  “Blasphemer.”

  Magnus spread his arms. “You’re taking this real personal.”

  The creature lowered its stance.

  One of them had to die.

  “Well,” Magnus said, spinning the gun once before holstering it, "nice talk."

  The creature lunged.

  Magnus sidestepped the first swipe, the creature’s claws raking sparks against stone. “You really don’t waste time, do you?” he said, firing a shot into its side with a better weapon. It didn’t slow down.

  The creature snarled, spinning to face him. “This place is holy ground! Blood spilled here is a prayer!”

  “Sure. And you’re the pope, I guess?” Magnus grinned, taking another shot, this time aiming for a joint. The bullet struck true, but the creature just adjusted, flowing around the pain.

  It bellowed, lunging forward.

  Magnus ducked under a swing, spinning to the side and firing again. “So you think you’re some kind of prophet?"

  “I was chosen,” the creature hissed, voice reverent, almost trembling with conviction. “The strong survive. The weak feed the cycle. We are all written in the scripture of slaughter!”

  Magnus didn’t answer this time—he just shot it twice more with a rifle designed to kill dragons, quick and clean. One in the throat and one in the chest. The creature’s momentum faltered. It fell to its knees, still clutching at him, still staring with eyes that burned.

  “You speak as if you understand,” it gasped. “But you’re just—”

  Another shot, point-blank, and it collapsed. Magnus stared down at it, cocking his head. “Guess your gods weren’t listening.”

  [1,004,998].

  Sometimes, the universe just had to flip his skull inside out and pour reality straight into the holes. One second, everything was normal. The next, his vision exploded like someone had overclocked his eyeballs past factory settings. Light blasted in—blue, red, green, all fighting for dominance, and the whole world decided limited vision was for people with regular optical nerves.

  He saw through walls. Through mountains. Through the miles of rock people kept pretending were solid. The planet’s molten guts churned below like soup left too long on the fire. The bones of ancient things sat undisturbed, waiting for some idiot to dig them up. Machines he’d never touched hummed deep in the dark, working on tasks no one had assigned.

  He blinked. His eyes raged at him for it. Blinking felt like dragging sandpaper over raw nerves. He blinked again. No change. Blood streamed down his face, but at this point, his ducts were just doing their best under impossible conditions. A bleeding perception shoved directly into his nervous system with no regard for personal space.

  He exhaled through his nose.

  "Oh good. It’s happening again."

  Magnus hated it when that happened.

  A creature waited in the shadows, too large to be mistaken for a man but too still to be anything mindless. Its form hummed faintly, as though the magic in its veins was trying to break free. Six legs, each jointed like a predator’s, anchored its massive frame. It had too many eyes, each one shifting focus as Magnus approached. It didn’t speak immediately. Instead, it watched, calculating.

  “Another one who thinks himself untouchable,” it finally growled, its voice low and sharp.

  Magnus turned his head, tossing his weapon lazily from hand to hand. “Untouchable, sure. Let’s go with that.”

  “You walk in the gods’ domain, half-made thing,” the creature snarled. “You don’t even know what you are.”

  Magnus shrugged, the grin never leaving his face as his wrist twisted to aim. “I know enough."

  The bullet shattered its skull cleanly enough, but Magnus still stared at it for a moment longer than necessary, his eldritch gaze peeling apart its layers until he was forced to look away.

  [1,004,999].

  He understood the city's monsters now, the way they thought, how they spoke, and the cruel logic that guided them. While some of them were knuckle draggers, two thousand years of endless evolution had made the rest pretty smart; turns out they weren’t killing because they were beasts—they were just dicks.

  Magnus walked slowly, giving the dead city time to whisper its last, irrelevant thoughts. Behind him lay a trail of wreckage: the twisted remains of hyper-evolved predators, scattered pieces of once-untouchable hunters, and crumbled architecture that had witnessed too many eras to count. Ahead, the massive cathedral gates rose from the earth like a monument to arrogance. Golden etchings hummed faintly on the surface, twisting and writhing as though alive, forming patterns Magnus didn’t bother to fully decipher.

  The gates themselves were a masterpiece, the kind of creation that would’ve left the old Magnus—before all the eldritch nonsense—speechless. He stopped before the gates, feeling them hum under his touch. The Vault of Lives inside him surged with power—the final step, the last pieces in place. Just two more.

  Magnus didn’t care about survival. Survival was irrelevant. He was here for the end. His end, their end—every end.

  He pressed his palm against the gates, feeling the cold metal hum with power. The mana surged through him again, whispering forgotten truths he’d already dismissed as irrelevant. The eldritch side of him laughed quietly, amused at his refusal to comply. His fingers tightened on the metal.

  “This had better be worth it,” Magnus said dryly, feeling the gates tremble beneath his touch, ready to give way.

  The Vault of Lives screamed quietly in his chest, full to bursting.

  “Finally,” Magnus whispered to himself, smiling darkly as the massive golden gates began to tremble—

  The city would burn.

  Magnus tilted his head upward, a faint smirk crossing his lips. “Well,” he said, his voice loud in the stillness.

  “Let’s see what happens next.”

  The is up and running. So if you like, you can read ahead there!