Overpowered Wizard-Chapter 292: B3: C82: Atlas and Meat

Moments before impact, Zarian’s laughter resounded across the square between residential and school towers. His laughter reached across the streets filled with the morning rush of citizens, some with mugs of coffee at hand, their day coming to a stuttering stop as they all looked up.

His laughter resonated down the alleys, echoed off the more geometrically challenging structures Hannah had molded into letters and unusual shapes for her own amusement. His laughter became a whispering undercurrent further out as citizens screamed or shouted in shock.

But rarely did anyone drop their precious coffee, the recent capital-wide training protocols kicking in as everyone turned toward the nearest shelters.

It was an incredible thing to witness, seeing humanity and their friends move as one orderly body made of separate existences. From a spider’s eye view, while surfing on web boards in the sky, or hanging from lines of arcana webbing at the top of the tallest towers, the people in the streets looked like cells in a network of cubic veins, all a part of one orderly magitek body lit with neon lights.

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They flowed where they were meant to go, guided by magic, enchantments, and considerably thoughtful city structuring.

Their expediency without breaking into chaos wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for levels and stats and the nature of their consistently changing lives under the Ride-or-Die Empire.

That was why Zarian laughed, because he could do in two months with nearly a hundred thousand people what the Marine Corps and armies back on Earth needed three months to do with a few thousand people.

Regardless of the magic. Regardless of the System and classes. The World of Castles and Caverns was a brutal place, where might made right, so those who lacked the appropriate might had to learn to pick up things faster when motivated.

So, Para’s impression of a big bad monster attacking the city got the appropriate results across the city. As for everyone remaining at the square with Zarian, they stood ramrod straight and waited in place, with only a handful of kiddos and some adults wetting themselves.

They barely made a peep as they put their trust in him. So, he repaid them kindly with a flex of aura and an activation of deeply engraved enchantments that dialed up the power in the defensive wards.

Para crashed like a bloody mountain against shimmering interlocked panels, each ward interlaced with a cluster of defensive designs, while also shifting to defend against one type of magic more than others.

So far, the Atlas Smart Defense Ward Matrix put an emphasis on countering Para’s parasitic phantom nature by pumping a magical electromagnetic current into the panels, coloring them with static blue and white force energy. The colossal collision had Para’s parts hissing away into red steam, like glacial ice meeting lava.

“That up there is one of many contingencies we have to protect you all!” Zarian pointed up. “You can call him Atlas. He’s almost like Magi, but more focused. Let’s give Atlas a greeting, aye?!”

The children, blessed their hearts, pushed past their nerves and belted out a disorderly greeting for Atlas. At least they were trying, and Zarian could see the System Enhancement giving them that little extra juice only afforded to human children.

Instead of losing their minds and passing out as anyone should do with so little Willpower, they gawked as Para’s monstrous form continued testing Atlas by trying to break in from other entry points.

Every time she clashed with a waiting electric blue and white ward panel, more of her form turned into steaming red vapors. It would almost seem like she was getting evaporated, giving some hope that Atlas could defeat her.

Then she fully recovered, reforming her face made from screaming scales while her titanic body coiled in the sanguine storm above.

“Okay, I think that’s enough city-scaring activity for today. We need to make sure the adults get to work so the empire can keep running like a well-oiled machine.”

Zarian used his aura to tell Atlas to drop the wards, and the somewhat sentient simulacrum made it so. The electric blue and white panels crackling in the sky blinked out, leaving seemingly open air between the capital and monstrous Para.

“Now, with that big introduction out of the way. Let’s have a more heart-to-heart talk about why you’re part of an empire and what it means to have me as your emperor.”

As Zarian talked, Para reared back like a great serpent, mouth open, building-tearing teeth on display. He looked up as she prepared to strike, then his eyes traveled down to the dwarven cuffs on his wrists, as if the incoming attack from the big monster was no big deal.

Para came down to disprove that, or it seemed like that at first, until she ran into thousands of lines of webbing floating in the air, anchored by arrays designed by the most studious and wondrous ninja wizard spiders around.

Para’s body came apart like meat through a grinder, turning her into multiple strings of steaming phantom flesh that were as thick as train carts and many times longer. The new trick among many that the spectral spiders could deploy worked like a charm as Para’s separated meat trains faded into large clouds of red steam except for one derailed meat train at the center.

The last train reshaped into a single man-eating serpent, slithering through the air, her meteoric speed aimed down at Zarian.

“First question: why are you part of an empire?”

Zarian stepped in and out of the void, leaving behind an altered cast of Quagmire Pit that he quickly changed with his Water to Slime spell. Para splashed into the ballistic-absorbing slime that was heavy as sin and hard to get off. The best part was how it didn’t splash much and made a ‘glomp’ sound, taking in Para’s physical manifestation and weighing her down.

Now standing a little further from the center, Zarian picked up from where he left off.

“You’re here because it’s my fault you’re here. Kingdoms are falling apart. Corruption at the governmental level is higher than ever. Chaos is reigning, and the Dark Era is ever darker.

“And at the heart of it all is me, someone who can end our entire existence. I know that’s a lot to take in, but some of you are pretty quick-witted. As for everyone else, the simplest answer to why you’re part of my empire is because it’s better than the other options.”

While he talked, Para shifted into an alternate form. Red vapors circled around the heavy slime as a feminine form floated up without a piece of the gunk on her.

The red vapors condensed into fine streams, the points flowing into her body, making her more solid, more anchored into the physical plane, more capable of existing on her own while separated from Zarian.

<Parasite Phantom (Level 3): Para is now a predatory phantom. Through you and other fleshy targets, she can exist, feast, interact, enhance, shapeshift, conduct magic, and hold objects in her pocket dimension. Beware! She has an extreme appetite to match her growing power and high aura cost. Scales doubly with Willpower.>

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The scent of offal and viscera of thousands of dead creatures wafted through the air, spreading across the entire square and further beyond. Above them, around them, holding them all close, the atmosphere became muggy and tinged red like being inside a very, very active slaughterhouse or churning stomach.

In the middle of the square, standing at the spot Zarian had stood a moment before, a red horror of a woman existed while made of meat on meat on meat.

She wore a dress made from slabs of meat. Her hair slithered while appearing as tendrils of viscous blood. Her eyes remained empty while also not empty, expressing hunger, anger, madness, and monstrous brutality inside of her sockets.

And in her hand was the only non-meat object she wielded – a long and curved greatsword made of ivory bone.

In two months, Zarian and Para had figured out ways to expand upon the Parasite Phantom’s many abilities. This version of Para, separate from anyone other than the meat from her prey, was a more berserk and physically imposing version of the phantom that feasted on meat and aura equally, but mostly meat.

Zarian watched as eerie engravings she’d scratched into the curved bone sword flashed with a bloody and menacing light.

More children and adults pissed themselves, but they remained in place, nobody running and screaming back into shelter even as they racked up stacks of trauma.

He could only push them so far.

Zarian activated the invisible aura-made arrays he’d carved into the air moments ago, right at the same spot Para had taken from him.

A gravity press from both sides slammed into Para’s physical flesh body and splattered her at once. To everyone witnessing, they would think he crushed Para with a telekinetic power.

He didn’t have one. He had Aura Mastery, and that wouldn’t work on Para – she could feast on aura.

She couldn’t, however, feast on a magic application made from an array that was purely aura-based, at least not in time to stop the consequences of its activation.

Zarian was glad there was more to his side relationship Ruvaria than the irony of the Dark Emperor fucking Corma’s Chosen One and having a blast while doing it. The past two months spent diving deeper into arrays and wards, which only true sorcerers could pull off competently, were a fruitful one.

If pure mages relied on magic made from skills, and pure wizards relied on magic made from their grimoires, then sorcerers relied on magic made from their aura. While Zarian had Aura Mastery as a tool that helped him turn aura into various elemental effects, a real sorcerer would use their aura to form arrays that could strike as the best mage skill or wizard spell.

Of course, it was slower to prepare arrays, and you had to rely on yourself mainly, unlike a mage who relied on their skills and a wizard who relied on their grimoires. And for most occasions, Zarian was better off relying more on his abilities and spells.

But having arrays not only opened up his repertoire, they’d helped him with his studies and with understanding the overall meta magic of the Star System. It was through learning arrays and grounding his foundations he would further progress his grimoires when the time came for that.

Besides, he’d used arrays plenty of times before, especially the ones for his gods-damned and unfinished gravity spell. He could just do it faster now, and with more dramatic effect, hence him rotating smoothly to face his audience as giblets of Para’s flesh rained down.

He extended his hands to the sides, smiling from ear to ear. He carried on even at the sound of humans pissing themselves, gasping for air, and trembling on the spot.

“Second question: what does it mean to have me as your emperor?” Zarian chuckled. “That one I can answer pretty easily. I’m here to serve you all.”

Despite the horror and the messy bloodiness and meatiness spread across the square, Zarian’s last words seemed to catch everyone off guard. Their attention refocused on him as he remained perfectly untouched in the middle of the splatter.

“It’s true,” he carried on. “That’s my job. It’s to serve you all. That doesn’t make me a servant, per your understanding, but someone who serves, nonetheless.”

With an amused huff, he continued. “You’ve come to me because of my actions, because of the chaos I introduce, because of the Dark Era and the Darkruns and the business of powerful forces shaking your world along with the rest of this universe and beyond. So to make up for that, I’m going to be a servant of my empire.

“I will go out into the horrible, twisted, highly dangerous places and hit our enemies with my hardest spells. I will respond to all threats that want to end you or harm you, and if not me, I will make sure I have the appropriate people who can. I will ensure you can have safety while living your lives, climbing the levels, and making the most out of what you can find here in the Ride-or-Die Empire.”

Zarian extended a hand toward the center of the splatter. Flickering red wisps curled toward his arm and faded under the skin with a bloody pulse.

He smiled as Para became more a part of him, her great, complex, and eldritch runes brightening as a complex and highly advanced skill attached to his soul.

“Truth be told, it would be easier to abandon all of this and live my own life. But I figured it would make for a nice hobby in between all the fighting and level-grinding. So that’s the core of my job.”

He did a fun shuffle step and skip, knocking his heels together before falling back into a puddle of blood goop. “There’s also the part where me and my appointed officials want to ensure there isn’t much negligence and abuse in my empire. That people of most races, creeds, and cultures can come together and live well.

“I can’t say all people, because there literally might be some people who are so violently opposed to things here, it’ll be hard to accept them. It’s a big universe out there, so there could be worlds filled with bastards, so fuck those guys.

“But that’s not here nor there. Right now, with our new brethren from different nations and different races, I’m sure my philosophies toward how we treat each other would get learned one way or another. And thankfully, I have a lot of people who are going to help me out with that. Like Princess Para.”

Para appeared as a ghostly serpent looking over Zarian’s shoulder. “Hello, everyone. I hope our show isn’t too scary. It’s harsh to show this, but this is part of our reality. Immense and terrible things could attack our home here at any time. Things beyond imagination. Things beyond mortal comprehension. So, it is best you understand now that it is risky being in our empire. But in our empire, there is a life that’ll be better than most, so it is less likely you’ll suffer being in the poo here.”

The children didn’t know what to say to that. The adults looked like they were just as troubled and confused as the children.

This wasn’t really a forum for having a back-and-forth conversation. It was more of a show that would send ripples through the empire and remind people of the risks of being here and how scary things could get.

It was also a way to reinforce that, yes, Zarian Sainte-Darkrun, the Dark Emperor, was a figure of horror and grand cosmic consequence, and that he probably shouldn’t be in charge of anything.

Yet, he was in charge, and he had a nascent empire, and he was at the center of everything, and they were getting swept into his mess. So he might as well give them a song and dance, as messy as it looked, to get the idea across that the Ride-or-Die Empire lived by its name.

Nobody said a thing, except for one child who had the darndest attitude.

“Is the meat for us?” said Boots, who was one of the few children who didn’t react so badly to the horror and chaos.

Zarian blinked at the unruly kid. “What if I said no?”

“That’s a waste of good meat, and you should feel ashamed.”

Everyone turned to her, gasping. A few of the children shifted away from her.

Zarian looked the child up and down. He remembered how scruffy and ratty she was when they first met in the underground areas beneath Central Bramblevale.

She was growing into a more energetic and sharp-eyed young lady and was one of the few pre-teens in the low Level 40s. It was kind of scary that a young girl could zip across the air and pulverize the ribs of most adult men with a simple kick.

Her teachers must be terrified of her.

“That really would be a waste of good meat. You’re right. Thank you for reminding me,” Zarian said, smirking. “Now go run laps.”

Boots sighed. “How far?”

“Until you run out of aura, you cocky brat.”

Boots went running around the capital with her special skill-based boots on her feet. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last.

Staying closely linked to Zarian, Para used her aura and phantom power to gather up great heaps of fresh meat and left them for the people to pick through and deal with. Thanks to the snow and chilly Late Winter temperatures, all the meat should remain decent enough for consumption once given a thorough rinsing. She also made sure the meat wasn’t cursed, either.

After having some conversations with the staff and giving uppies to a few teary-eyed kids, Zarian moved on with the next part of his busy Dark Emperor schedule.

It was time to pay the six patron temples a visit, especially the most recently built one … The Dragoness Temple.