Titan King: Ascension of the Giant Chapter 1701 The Weight of a World

"Heh. A little more strength and you could have killed this avatar of mine." The Lord of the Boundless Expanse let the words drift. "But you can't. You're not strong enough."

He wasn't wrong. Orion wasn't strong enough. A moment longer—if he hadn't burned out when he did—and the Lord would already be dead. A pity.

"You don't die." Orion didn't care what anyone said about his strength. He'd felt the truth of it when the trident went in: this thing healed, regrew, knit itself whole.

"Shadow rebirth. Every living soul in the Mirage Void carries it." The Lord said it with pride. Only an Ascendant Plane with deep roots could bless its residents that way, hand a gift to every creature born under it.

"There's no such thing as can't-die. The blow just wasn't hard enough." Orion's gaze cut sideways. "Take him. In your Mirage Void he'd rank as a Sovereign, no question."

The Lord looked at Commander—one stroke to drop a sixth-stage apex, even if only an avatar, was obscene. He reached out, probing for anything he could learn. Commander didn't give him the time of day. The Lord's fight was with Orion.

"So you're the Lord of the Boundless Expanse." Orion let the other's talk slide and brought it back to the thing in front of him. The stance, the strength it had already shown—he was sure now.

"Shadowclad Marshal. Lord of the Boundless Expanse. Moraeon." The mist sloughed off him. Beneath it: heavy armor of mixed metal and bone, a cloak of black fire stirring at his back, every inch of him built for war.

None of that was what stayed with Orion. It was the face. The thing had no features—just a lattice of red threads where a face should be, black specks flitting through the gaps as though something pressed against an unseen membrane, peering out at the world. Hold your eyes on those gaps too long and the mind slipped, for a breath, into vision.

"Orion Stoneheart." He gave his name. Respect for a sixth-stage apex, and a declaration of intent both.

"Still not enough, then." Not a question. A verdict. At driving a weapon, Orion's gift fell short of Commander's—he'd never reach that height. But that wasn't where his strength lay. His was in the blood.

"Moraeon. You come without a Divine Vessel—who exactly are you looking down on?" His voice dropped. "Today not one of you walks away."

He had no complete Vessel, and he was no sixth-stage apex. But he was a Divine Vessel descended, and the idea that one stray avatar of the Lord's could put him down was a joke.

"You can't beat me. Killing me isn't even on the table." They'd traded blows; the Lord knew exactly what Orion had—short of Commander stepping in. And Commander showed no sign of it.

"Is that so." Orion's voice sank low. His head dipped, his eyes closed, something gathering behind them.

"Through the world's deep roots, by the eternal will of Titanion—I, Orion Stoneheart, command you: pierce heaven and earth, draw up the source-power of the whole world, and through the body of Stoneheart, descend in glory."

Orion was one of the four Archdukes of the Titanion Realm. Calling on the world's source-power was instinct and birthright at once. The moment his will hooked into the Will of the Realm, Blackstone City, the Titan Continent, the branches of the World Tree, the other three landmasses, even the Primordial Continent yet to be born—all of it trembled, all of it answered.

Then the light of the whole Titanion Realm dimmed. The land went still. The seas stopped turning. No wind, no cloud. Every growing thing froze where it stood.

And the source-power came—endless, pouring down through the roots of the World Tree like falling stars, flooding into Orion's titan body.

Across the Mirage Void, Orion drew in the source-power of an entire world, the whole weight of every living thing it held.

Too much.

He'd overreached. His incomplete Vessel felt ready to burst—it was the source-power of an entire Ascendant Plane. At the breaking point, instinct tore a roar out of him. His head came up, his hands pressed together; the surplus heads and arms snapped off and sank back into him, thickening his frame, deepening what it could bear. Not enough. The trident drifting at his side heard the call and became a chain, lashing his body and arms tight, lending its Demigod Artifact substance to plug the gaps in his Vessel.

Only then did Orion open his eyes. The power leveled out and held. He'd reached a new summit.

"Die."

He fixed on the Lord of the Boundless Expanse, eyes blazing, face wiped clean of anything. He stood for more than himself now. He stood for the whole Titanion Realm—and against an outside enemy, with everything on the line, the only answer was to clear the threat away. To end it.

His fist came like a falling star, eyes like a red sun, hips sunk, feet rooted, force gone wild as a madman's. Inch by inch the punch advanced, indifferent to the laws of space and time, indifferent to anything in its path.

Moraeon stared down that fist in horror—nowhere to turn, nowhere to hide. His whole body shuddered and crawled, collapsing at last into a warded shield. The shield was the surface; the truth of it was the dimension folded inside, his strongest guard, able to shed force or borrow it.

"Strong—" The instant they touched, Moraeon knew something was wrong. Too late. "There's no stopping it—"

The ward shattered. The dimension blew apart. Orion's arm drove through the black mist and scattered the dark to nothing. Far off, a great trench split open across the world, running on past where the eye could follow.

The battlefield fell silent. The world came clear.

"From this day, Blackstone City's territory pushes ten thousand miles further out." Orion's voice rolled down from the heavens, full and contemptuous of everything, ringing in the ears of every kinsman and ally.

That punch was Orion's confidence made plain—and the spine of the whole Stoneheart Horde. How strong it truly was, even Orion couldn't say. But he knew it stood with the best a sixth-stage apex could throw.

Orion had grown stronger. He'd carved out a path that was his alone: using the Divine Vessel and the Demigod Artifact as vessels, loading them with more source-power than they should hold, and transforming outright.