The Oracle Paths

The Fire Mage was levitating like a wraith a few feet above the ground, shrouded in a blaze of roaring scarlet flames. From his position, Jake watched helplessly as his friend pointed her fiery hands hatefully at Asfrid on the brink of death.

Gritting his teeth, he tried to teleport to intercept the attack, but his consciousness flickered for a split second, followed by a searing pang of pain in his throat. When he opened his eyes again, his mental sense found only a sea of flames instead of Asfrid. Even her ashes were nowhere to be found.

He could have cared about where Enya had gone, but a flowery scent of vanilla mingled with the smell of his own blood assaulted his nostrils. Looking down, his chin bumped against a mass of silky brown hair. Two delicate pale hands with red-painted nails were clawing tightly at his shoulders to hold him in place, while the lips of the woman they belonged to were sucking his blood as if they hadn't drunk in days.

Jake didn't need another look to recognize his assailant. His blood began to boil, black lightning and unspeakable radiation coursing through his veins, but unlike his previous experience with the previous Ordeal, Carmin didn't stop sucking.

He frowned. His blood was regenerating faster than she was draining it from his body, but he had no intention of letting her continue. With a forceful grab, he pulled her by the hair and yanked back hard. The sheer brutality of the move left Carmine's canines stuck in his throat, eliciting a pained yelp that instantly snapped her out of her trance.

Sadly, it only lasted a mere second. After exchanging a mortified and guilty look with him, Carmine's eyes turned blank and she tried to bite him again.

Seeing the crazed expression on the gorgeous vampire's face, Jake stopped hesitating and pushed her far up into the air with a palm strike to the plexus that squeezed the air out of her lungs, shattering her ribcage into hundreds of broken fragments, crushing the internal organs beneath.

"Sorry, Carmin, but I don't have time for this crap." He muttered grimly.

At that moment, his consciousness flickered again and for a moment the scenery of the Purple Hell faded from his vision, replaced by a deep, dark mist. As his mental clarity was at its lowest, Jake suddenly felt an ominous presence that made his hair stand on end.

"Who?! Show yourself!"

Silence answered him, but just as he stopped hoping for an answer and began to relax, that same presence surfaced from his own body. Before he could react, he saw his own Spirit Body split into two halves. Before his stunned face, a carbon copy of himself appeared before him.

A copy? Not exactly. Jake's eyes narrowed as he immediately identified several differences between himself and his clone.

First of all, their eyes were different. His clone's gaze was cold, hostile and inhuman, like a predator's gaze on its prey.

Second, his clone was aglow. Jake in his peak form. His body glowed with fire, his lava veins shining like a thousand suns, and his silver-gold hair fluttered beautifully behind him, highlighting his galactic eyes filled with ageless wisdom.

Jake felt subconsciously intimidated, wondering why his clone was so "big" and why he felt so insignificant in front of him. But then he realized that it wasn't his clone that was big, it was him that was shrinking.

Alarmed, he looked at his hands and noticed that they were both familiar and foreign to him. They were his hands. His hands before they received his Oracle Device.

Then he looked down at his arms and saw that the light from the lava veins iridescing the surface of his skin was beginning to dim as his turmoil grew.

"What are you doin-"

"Don't bother." His clone interrupted him. "I am you. And you are me. But that's over. From now on, I'm my own person. Thank you for giving me control of your body."

Jake's eyes suddenly widened as he realized what was happening. As his strength was being drained from him, he also felt some feelings and memories go out the window.

He finally knew why everyone seemed to be going crazy outside. Instantly regaining his composure, he snarled, "I won't let you. Be a good boy, and become part of me again like you're supposed to be."

Undeterred, he mobilized all his willpower and clashed head-on with his clone. His body tripled in size in the blink of an eye while his clone's shrank by about a third.

For a moment he found a glimmer of hope and attacked again. What he couldn't see was that using his own True Will against himself was tantamount to damaging his own soul to achieve his ends. For every bit of soul he regained, he was jeopardizing his future sanity.

After completely obliterating his clone, Jake briefly regained consciousness, but he was dripping with sweat and his expression was completely haggard. The sight that greeted him upon his return chilled his blood.

Wyatt's sword was buried in his heart and in the palm of his own hand he held the crushed skulls of Wyatt, Enya, Aisling, his mother, and some of the other Myrtharian Nerds and Pureblood Players he couldn't identify. While he was gone, he had transformed into the same giant as his clone and unleashed all the violent impulses hidden in the depths of his mind.

Not far from him lay the corpses of several dragons charged with protecting Will. Drastan and his Trolls were still killing each other, their insane regeneration having kept them alive until now. The few Eltarians still alive after Asfrid's execution were the only ones still lucid, but they were in dire straits, hunted to extinction by a horde of Undeads and androids.

The Purgatory had long since been deactivated.

As he scanned the area for survivors and to understand the extent of his sin, he realized that he was standing on top of a pile of scrap metal. The metal composing them had liquefied, sucked up by his bare feet as if they were a bottomless pit.

Thousands of tons of metal were siphoned into his body every second and any android daring to approach him would disintegrate as it came within a meter of him. Scanning the mountain of scrap metal below him with his Myrtharian sight, he met the gaze of a shivering Vhoskaud, still hidden under his shield.

In panic, the leader of Replicators was summoning endless amounts of androids to replenish his losses in hopes of overcoming Jake's appetite, but he was beginning to realize that this enemy's appetite likely had no limits.

"WHO ARE YOU?!" The android screamed in rage and incomprehension. This didn't match his information at all.

Jake was by far the most puzzled. He wasn't doing anything. However, he could confirm that it was indeed him who was gobbling up all that metal without any apparent effort.

"So I can be this strong..." He raised an incredulous eyebrow. It was a little hard to believe. His instinct was telling him that something was wrong.

At that moment, his pupils narrowed when at the bottom of the mountain of scrap he found the tattered corpse of Lucia. Surprisingly, although his heart ached a little, he didn't feel much and that confused him even more than everything that had transpired.

"Why am I so indifferent?" He muttered uneasily. "I feel... hungry."

Suppressing these dissonant emotions, he scanned Lucia's body with his mental sense and discovered that although she was indeed dead in any clinical sense, her Spirit Body had not yet perished. Like him, she had perhaps finally regained control of her body, but at what cost?

On the other hand, her physical wounds were clearly of his making, or that of another Kintharian. The titanic battle between Gerulf and Rogen was still going on, with both aliens displaying an inhuman tenacity.

As he wondered what to do, his vision blurred again and the misty scene reappeared. The presence he thought he had wiped out erupted once again from within him, even more formidable and invasive than the previous time, but now he was ready.

His Spirit Body emitted a peculiar, all-consuming aura, pulsing at a high frequency and a screeching wail echoed inside of him. The presence disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, leaving Jake's mind in a state of extreme confusion.

When he woke up, the scene of the purple sky fading away to reveal the Mana Storm flooding in with impunity welcomed him straight into hell.

"Vexa..." For his greatest shock, this time he was not only indifferent, he even felt an ounce of contempt.

His mental sense scanned the place where the cube man and his subordinates were supposed to be and without surprise he discovered that Vexa had indeed just been killed. Except that the murderer was not the one he imagined. He expected it to be the black hole woman or one of the Mirror Vanguards Players because of their proximity. Perhaps a Player from Lost Divinities in ambush.

But certainly not two Ruby's.

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