Infinity Is My Affinity?!?

The thing the cultist used to be did not fight the way he had fought.

The man had been precise and economical, every movement carrying a clear tactical purpose while those red eyes tracked and calculated and adjusted, and fighting him had felt like fighting a machine built to last.

But this thing? That was a tornado with a cursed claw attached to it.

-Kzzzt-!

I teleported ten meters to the left as the massive curved claw came down, carving a trench half a meter deep into the dirt where I had been standing a fraction of a second ago, and the shockwave from the impact hit me the second I blinked out, damn near stumbling me.

Keeping Temporal Step hidden was no longer an option. That thing was too damn fast.

I had barely taken a breath, when the monster wheeled toward me with a speed that had absolutely no business existing in something that size, and I had the 60 MP AP Pebble stream already roaring before it had even finished turning, pouring supersonic boulders of reinforced ice directly into its chest at the full Gatling rate while three freshly conjured knights converged on it from different angles with their greatswords raised.

And it swung the claw just once.

Four claws peeled off the swing in separate arcs, and every single one of the three knights came apart in a cascade of dissolving gold light before they got within two meters of it, and the AP Pebbles hitting the claw itself simply shattered against it like they had struck something unstoppable, while the monster barely registered the impact and kept coming.

-Kzzzt-!

I blinked again, surfacing ten meters further back while my brain processed the spatial coordinate as fast as it could push the data, and I sent entirety of sixteen knights out of the Domain as fast as the orbs could bloom, all of them angling toward the monster while it tore through the gap I had just vacated and adjusted its trajectory toward me mid-lunge with an uncanny fluid ease.

-Ding!

{The subject is now exclusively utilizing the First Sequence of the Way of the Sword Saint.

The Second and Third Sequences require sustained focus. The subject appears incapable of maintaining the necessary cognitive state in its current condition.}

[Stronger, faster, nearly indestructible, but dumber huh?,]

I thought, though, it would’ve been more comforting if the nearly indestructible part wasn’t doing so much heavy lifting. The knights hit it from three sides, and it shredded two of them with a single wide swing that generated another four phantom claws in overlapping arcs, dissolving the units instantly, while just a single one got close enough to land a greatsword hit on its ribs that rang off the bone-white plating before that claw came back around and took the knight apart at the chest.

I was producing sixteen per second, and it was destroying them faster than I could stack pressure.

The phantom claws generated with each swing were chewing through the knights before they could coordinate into anything resembling a sustained threat, and the AP Pebbles were doing approximately... nay, it’d be more accurate to say, they were doing absolutely nothing.

And around all of it, the rest of the basin was in full chaos.

Every single Outsider had stopped targeting the living quarters.

Every single one of those golden outlines was converging on my strongest knight in a tide coming from every direction simultaneously, thousands of them throwing themselves at it in waves while the knight carved through them in wide devastating arcs, dozens dying per second only to reform at the Nexus deep in the forest and rejoin from the treeline minutes later.

And I could tell, I knew deep within that the whole thing was being directed by something beyond, something with intelligence enough to make tactical decisions.

Something was keeping my strongest knight occupied on purpose, and it knew exactly what it was doing.

I couldn’t bring the knight to me without dragging that entire tide of Outsiders along with it, and fighting that monster and an ocean of Eldritch abominations simultaneously with one real arm and leg was not a scenario I survived even with my strongest knight.

-Kzzzt-!

I blinked again as the claw came in from above.

The impact hit a meter behind me and the shockwave pushed me forward two stumbling steps as I gritted my teeth because the jolt found every wound at once, the arm stump, the leg, and that stab in the gut that the Tier 9 curse was keeping from ever fully closing, and the eye socket that was doing something deeply unpleasant that I had been successfully not thinking about for the past several minutes.

The adrenaline had been carrying me through all of it.

But well, it may be a magnificent liar, but it did eventually send you the bill, and I could feel the installments arriving with every impact and every blink and every second I spent in a body running at roughly forty percent of what it had been when this night started.

[A few minutes...] I calculated, watching the strongest knight’s gold glow continue its slow, inevitable dimming across the basin. [Maybe even less. And when that pool runs dry, whatever is commanding those Outsiders redirects the entire horde at me, and I’m more or less dead...]

"Okay," I said out loud while I blinked three more times in rapid succession to put as much distance as the basin allowed between me and the thing hurtling itself after me. "Let’s try this."

I stopped sending knights into the fight entirely.

Every new orb that bloomed at the edge of my Domain got directed away from the battle and sent to stand by at the far basin edge, where they materialized and held position in a growing line while I switched ammo.

The AP Pebbles cut off, and the Fragmentation Pebble stream came online, and I spent the next five Temporal Steps creating as much distance between me and the monster as the basin allowed.

-Kzzzt-!-Kzzzt-!-Kzzzt-!-Kzzzt-!-Kzzzt-!

With more than 50 meters between us, the living quarters’ wall at my back, the monster was on the far side of the open ground, still accelerating toward me with total, reckless absence of any sanity.

I raised my hand and let loose.

-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!

Boulder-sized Fragmentation Pebbles screamed across the basin at supersonic speed in a continuous stream, each one detonating on contact and throwing hundreds of thumb-sized ice shrapnel fragments in every direction with a blast radius that overlapped the next detonation before the first one finished expanding.

The monster hit the first cluster head-on, claw swinging through the incoming stream the same way it had been swinging through the AP Pebbles, and the first one detonated directly against the claw with a concussive crack that lit up the basin in white, and then the second hit, and the third, and by the fourth, the monster had stopped moving forward.

-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!

The entire impact zone disappeared into a churning, brilliant fog of ice crystal and glittering shrapnel and erupting dirt, each new detonation folding into the previous one and compounding the pressure, and through it all the monster was shrieking in something that sounded considerably less like battle fury and considerably more like pain, and I kept the stream pouring into the cloud without pause while I panted.

My whole body was registering complaints at this point.

The arm stump was throbbing in waves.

The ice leg was holding, but the part where the bone ended and the magic began, was sending up shrap, piercing pain every time I shifted my weight on it.

The gut wound had sealed on the surface, but the curse was doing something unpleasant inside that I was choosing to classify as mild discomfort.

The left eye socket was hot and itching with the specific wrongness of something withering in slow increments.

[Knight’s lost about 40% capacity...] I thought, watching the standby line growing at the basin’s edge while the strongest knight’s gold glow grew visibly dimmer. [Time to get the standby force to support the strongest, I have enough of them to build actual pressure and... divert the bandwidth to the shotgun.]

I stopped producing new knights and sent the accumulated line rushing across the basin toward the Outsider tide while I routed the freed bandwidth into charging the shotgun, and the familiar deep vibration started building in the grip as the Virtual Mass count climbed.

The cloud of glittering frost and debris was still churning from the Fragmentation Pebble barrage, each new detonation throwing fresh shrapnel through the existing fog, and for a few seconds, I let myself breathe and count and do the math on whether any of this was actually going to be enough.

And just as I had, the screaming had stopped.

That thing inside the cloud had gone quiet, and what was coming out of it instead was lower and more resonant, a deep rolling roar that got the hair on the back of my neck standing up.

I cut the Fragmentation Pebble stream.

The cloud kept churning on its own momentum, glittering ice crystals hanging in the frozen air, and through the settling debris, I could see something rising through the fog.

A mass of pulsating meat at least ten meters high and still growing, with its surface rippling and shifting as whatever was inside it built outward and upward in thick, dense increments while the roaring coming out of it kept getting louder and louder with every new meter it added to itself.

And then, through the thinning fog, that mass resolved upward into a face.

A maw, the same long serrated teeth from before but bigger, set into a jaw that could have taken my knights sideways, rose above the clearing cloud while the rest of the body followed it upward and outward into something that dwarfed the twelve-foot knights entirely.

It was all dense muscle and bone-white plating and that massive single claw gleaming red in the dark.

The pressure it was radiating hit me like a wall walking into me, suffocating and fundamentally wrong.

[What is even going on?!?] I thought, keeping a charged boulder of Fragmentation Pebble floating above my head while I watched the thing finish assembling itself in the middle of the glittering debris field.

[A third phase? Really? That’s just cheating at this point!]

That thing had no eyes, but it looked straight at me anyway before-

-THOOM-!

The massive foot hit the ground, and a quaking tremor rolled through the ground and up through my legs.

From the glittering fog and settling dust, it stepped fully into the open basin, and the scale of it settled over me like a tide of horrors.

It was taller than even my knights.

It opened the maw, and the sound that came out violently rattled through my chest, the base of my skull, and the thin layer of functional composure I had been maintaining through sheer spite and math and an increasingly abstract relationship with the pain coursing through my body.

-AAGGRRRR-!!!

"Shit."