Era of Madness

Battle of the demigods 8

Back on Londris, the battle had reached the peak of what the violence a conflict between demigods could be.

The flames Cain had summoned already spread across the entire planet. As Saginus was desesperately trying to make the burnt on his body disappear faster than they were appearing, he completely abandonned the hope of controlling his Authority while doing so: all across Londris, entire pieces of the planet itself were ripped apart and disappeared, while the rest was slowly being reduced to nothing by the incandescent fire, which seemed to irradiate the warmth of the sun itself.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

Saginus let out what was undoubtably the most pained shriek that ever came out of a human mouth. The suffering he was subjected to, being burned whole in continue, countless times, was more than what an average human mind could even imagine to take.

And yet, the one who was actually in the most pain was none other than Cain. As he kept calculating the derivative of the Dream Field so he could prevent Saginus from just turning all his injuries to nothingness, his brain was put under the most severe backlash possible. In the first place, Timewalker Blessing was designed to suit Tyler, and even the latter experienced severe backlash upon overusing. Angel or not, Cain was not doing much better, especially with how much he was forcing on it.

In the first place, was calculating the derivative of an entire set of physics' laws easy? No, it was quite the opposite: it was impossible, even for Cain. Instead, what he was doing was calculating a significative part of it so, once he got a global understanding of it, he could just do as Saginus and change the rest instinctively...

... which, obviously, did not mean it was easy in the slightest. He still had to calculate dozens, or even hundreds of thousands of values each time, and memorize all of them while doing the next ones. And each time, it was as if he had to rediscover every basics of mathematics, as the method changed each time. It was about as hard as inventing 1+1, 1x1... 38278², really, everything from scratch, even the most complicated things, and all that while resisting the terrible, inhuman pain his head while subjected to.

His whole body was already incapable of moving, and actually sustained nearly as much damages as Saginus'. The conclusion of the fight would depend on only one thing: how much time the magician would last.

For the first time in more than seven centuries, Saginus felt the fear of death invading his mind. All these centuries, more than one and a half millenials living with the sole purpose of crushing people's dreams and forcing them into nightmares, to finally feel the joy of seeing their lives end painfully.

He lived his dream life for so long, only to end up getting killed by someone even worse than him? If he had to choose, he would have preferred to die to the hands of a hero, a good person or anything else, rather than to be the victim of such a cruel irony.

Yet, it wasn't really something he regretted much. No, if he had to think of one thing he truly regretted, only one would come to his mind: if he could redo everything from the moment he became a Great Sin, he would have made sure to cause more pain, more suffering and more despair.

'Haha,t would have been so fun... Well, even if Cain stole the final kill, making Tyler snap is okay for a grand final, I guess...' he thought. 'Haha, his face was so fucking hilarious, haha, hahahahaha'

On this thought, his mind started to fade away.

However, Cain's mind too was on the verge of shattering. It was a natural reaction for any being with a mind, human or not: after concentrating on a single high-difficulty task for a long period, the brain would naturally start to drive away toward other thoughts to distract itself. However, in this case, distraction would mean creating more disorder in his brain which, given his current state, meant a certtain lost.