Chapter 922 — The Escaped God
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Too many legs...
In that brief instant, even a god who had no need of breath to sustain her life felt a choking sensation.
Myrmina stared at Narratir, convinced that this vast, spider-like "kin" of hers must have gone wrong somewhere—perhaps a disordered individual born of a mistaken school of thought, perhaps a "near-dead" already at the brink of madness; and whatever the case, she had best have no further contact with this spider.
That she could not escape this spider's pursuit was certainly not for some childish reason like "having fewer legs than the other," and Myrmina knew this perfectly well; she was simply too weak now, and at a disadvantage in this place—
To plan today's bold operation, she had split and reassembled herself far too many times, and for thousands of years she had deliberately curbed her own "growth," like a prisoner who starves himself thin to squeeze out of his cage. Her plan had succeeded, yet it had left her frail and drained; and that frailty, compounded by her disadvantage in terrain, made it utterly impossible for her to leave before this spider without a scratch.
But leave she must, and quickly—this was a strange "boundary of thought," where chaotic and formless surges of the consciousness-sea could be used to "grind away" the chains, yet could also do her immense harm. She could already plainly feel her remaining strength draining away, and draining faster and faster.
"Listen, little spider, I must leave this place," Myrmina said, steadying her own form while trying to divert Narratir's attention with talk. "In another setting, at another time, I might be interested in chatting with you a while longer, but not today—please step aside."
Narratir's attitude, however, was stubborn: "I am taking you to see His Majesty. Only when he says you may go, may you go."
"...That won't do," the lady who seemed gathered from mist suddenly curled the corner of her mouth a little, smiling as she spoke. "I cannot come into contact with any mortal now... I went to great trouble to sever my connections with them..."
Narratir's brows knit at once, and she stepped forward half a pace, meaning to reason with the other properly—but the next second, the lady before her, vast as a clock tower, underwent a sudden transformation: those shadows and thin mists, swelling and shrinking by turns, were abruptly stretched into countless ribbon-like structures, and between the lattice formed by the ribbons, innumerable mirrors surfaced from nothingness, reflecting disordered orbs of light and distant thick fog; then the orbs and fog vanished, and the images in the mirrors became flickering starlight, which was in turn stretched and twisted into bizarre symbols that interfered with Narratir's judgment...
Mirrors, threads, orbs of light, smoke, starlight, symbols—all of these were props or emblems that mortal mages commonly used when casting spells.
Narratir was startled for a moment by this sudden chaos, but she quickly recovered; her long joints swept across the gray-white water, and at once reflections corresponding to those mirrors surfaced upon it—the upper-layer narrator wove false facts, and through the relation between reflection and original, contaminated in reverse the battlefield her opponent had created. The contamination was remarkably effective: those hastily conjured things shattered almost instantly, and amid them the true form of the "legless lady" was revealed.
Narratir charged at once—the white spider leapt high in the posture of a predator, her long joints descending over her foe—yet she immediately sensed something wrong: her joints had closed around something utterly unresisting, which swiftly broke apart into a great many flying fragments and gradually dissolved into the surrounding air.
An illusion?