Matthias had to stop himself from rolling his eyes as the turtles joined the conflict. He had honestly almost forgotten about them. He could at least admit he was surprised when they joined his side of the battle.

  The only issue with the turtles helping was that Matthias gained no mana from their kills. They did not help him gather the energy he needed to ascend. He could feel his core swelling with mana. He was maybe eighty-five percent of the way there. Every dragon slain gave a single percent. Even that was shocking. These dragons truly were stuffed to the brim with mana.

  Matthias waded into the tide of bodies below him. Five of his seven heads swung low to devour more prey. Even still, mana flowed in from the other two fronts at a prodigious rate. It was like a constant river of power being force-fed into him.

  Matthias sighed internally. He was being greedy.

  Greedy over percentages. Over increments. Over something that, in the grand scheme of eternity, would resolve itself in minutes. He was counting like a child licking frosting from a spoon instead of tasting the whole cake. Somewhere, distantly, he was aware that this fixation on numbers was simply something to occupy his mind. A progress bar. A distraction from the fact that none of this—none of the screaming, burning, dying—was particularly new. He should be thankful for the help of the turtle dungeon, not belittling it. Setting his distracted thoughts aside, Matthias refocused on the tide of bodies before him.

  With the slightest application of his will, roots shot up and rippled outward from him. The bodies caught on the spikes twitched only a moment before all the fluids within them were sucked dry.

  Matthias took another thunderous step, and bodies were tossed in every direction in broken heaps. Another swing of his tail scraped a swath of land clean down to the dirt.

  Despite the necessity of the fight, Matthias’ heart was not in it. His mind kept drifting. He swallowed more of the horde as he contemplated.

  “This really is a low- to mid-magical world,” he mused to himself in an almost melancholic tone. “This world had so much potential. It once had the potential to be more—both magically and narratively.”

  He plodded forward, completely lost in thought as his sheer mass parted the battlefield before him. He slowed and looked up toward the sky. Dragonfire tickled his senses as he gazed past the storm.

  The sky beyond was empty. No moons, no stars—just an endless void of darkness.

  It struck him, briefly, that he could remember constellations from another life. Stories attached to them. Myths layered atop myths. Navigation by starlight. Wishes cast on falling sparks of fire. Here there was nothing. Not even a lie to comfort the people below. Just absence.

  He wondered, absently, if anyone else even noticed. Or if they were too busy surviving to look up. Matthias idly wondered where the stars and planets had gone. Then he considered what he knew. They had probably been cannibalized to keep the world alive.

  Matthias sighed, mourning the loss of something he was not even sure had ever truly existed. The attacks of the hordes around him dragged his attention back to the present. They were little more than bug bites.

  Matthias was now ninety-one percent full on mana.

  The number drifted through his awareness like a lazy buoy in dark water. Ninety-one. He tried to remember what ninety-one percent of a meal felt like. Overfull, but still reaching for one more bite because it was there. Because it would be a waste not to finish.

  A dragon slammed into one of his shoulders and detonated in a flare of incandescent fury. The explosion rippled across his bark-like scales.

  He blinked once.

  Ninety-one percent.

  He reared back onto his hind legs before slamming down. The impact cracked the still-dry ground beneath the mud and muck.

  Ninety-two percent.

  Matthias turned one head back to the sky and basked in the rain. If he had been smaller, it would have been overwhelming. But in this form, the deluge felt reassuring against his craggy hide. Even as he savored the sensation of rain pattering across his body, his tail lashed out again.

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  Ninety-three percent.

  Five ground-shaking steps brought him to the fallen body of a dragon.

  He paused halfway there because something glittered in the mud. Not treasure—just a shard of crystallized mana reflecting stormlight. For a fleeting second he considered refining it. Cataloging it. Seeing if its structure differed from the last dozen he had analyzed.

  Then he remembered he was in the middle of a war and continued forward. It was easy enough to tear it into bite-sized chunks and consume it. His body rejoiced at the nourishment, vitality swelling within him.

  Matthias looked around and truly took in the world once more. This was not what he wanted. This was not the world he was fighting for.

  Ninety-four percent.

  Matthias stopped moving for a moment and really absorbed the scene.

  Absorbed was the wrong word. Sampled, perhaps. Like tasting multiple dishes at once without committing to any of them. His awareness flicked from one front to another—the northern flank where turtles churned through bodies with methodical patience, the southern line where manticores harried wings, the western edge where something large and unpleasant was attempting to be clever.

  Nothing surprised him.

  That, more than anything, left him restless. The turtles running roughshod over the smaller hordes. The dragons too afraid to draw near. The looks on his enemies’ faces as the toxins he had infused into the storm filled them with euphoria even as they rotted from the inside out.

  With a sigh, the vines of his current form surged into the ground as Matthias planted himself. Once he was rooted, more vines shot outward, grabbing anything hostile and cocooning it. More and more were dragged toward him and fed upon. Matthias felt the Vital Hydra go rigid as he allowed the body to fully take root.

  Ninety-five percent.

  He wrapped his long tail around himself, creating a spiraling walkway up his massive form. His seven heads reached for the sky as his body hardened. Then the seven heads split apart and bloomed into massive flowers. They were brilliant, radiant things that emitted their own light. Every petal shimmered with a different iridescent hue.

  Something deep within Matthias clicked into place.

  The battlefield noise dimmed—not because it lessened, but because he simply stopped prioritizing it. Screams became texture. Explosions became punctuation. The steady influx of mana became a background hum.

  His thoughts skipped again.

  He wondered what the final rarity would let him build first.

  A forge that shaped concepts instead of metal.

  A garden that grew civilizations instead of crops.

  A lens that could see the wound in the heavens clearly.

  A dragon claw raked across one of his petals, shearing away iridescent light.

  He forgot the thought mid-construction and reached for another.

  This felt right.

  To root himself here.

  Even as dragons pelted him with spells, he hardly noticed. Contentment took hold as his roots and vines greedily snatched up anything living within range.

  Ninety-six percent.

  Matthias remembered the time he had pinned a shadow demon with nothing but his attention. He turned that same attention toward the dragons—but did not act.

  Manticores were arriving in numbers now. They fell upon wings and eyes. Then the wyverns descended.

  Ninety-seven percent.

  Matthias’ soul sang as he fell inward. He was not a fighter.

  He cataloged the realization as if it were new, even though he had known it for a long time. Fighting was maintenance. Necessary. Occasionally satisfying. Rarely creative.

  Creation—that was novelty.

  Creation still made him curious.

  Another percent ticked upward somewhere in the back of his mind. He did not bother checking which one until it surfaced fully formed.

  Ninety-seven percent.

  He was a craftsman.

  He drifted deeper into himself and dreamed of the many things he would create upon reaching the final rarity rank. Blueprints sang within his soul as faith poured into him.

  Ninety-eight percent.

  Matthias felt it when several dragons finally slammed bodily into his Devourer on the western flank.

  The sensation registered like a notification he chose not to open.

  They detonated themselves in a blinding cascade of force, ripping apart scale and sinew in a suicidal bid to remove the threat from the world.

  He noted structural loss. Mana redistribution. Opportunity for redesign.

  Then his thoughts skipped again. He felt when they detonated themselves in an attempt to remove the terrible threat the beast posed to the world.

  But it was already too late.

  Ninety-nine percent.

  The Winter Fey, having waited long for this moment, unleashed their wintry magics. All the water across the battlefields turned into blades of ice. The rain morphed into snow as their power continued to spread.

  Yet Matthias’ soul still sang as he drifted deeper into himself.

  The snow thickened. Ice blades carved through armies indiscriminately. Somewhere, commanders shouted orders that would never be heard over the storm.

  He wondered, distantly, whether winter tasted different from summer.

  Whether faith crystallized differently in cold air.

  Whether silence was easier to build than noise.

  Ninety-nine percent. Despite being the center of the fight, it all felt distant.

  One hundred percent.

  Matthias felt contentedly full. His soul thrummed with power.

  For a fleeting instant, he considered what he would say if someone were here with him. If there were another being capable of comprehending the scale of what he was about to become. A rival. A peer. A friend.

  There was no one.

  The battlefield continued to churn below him, but it felt like watching ants dismantle a loaf of bread he had already eaten.

  With the satisfied sigh of one who had finished a filling meal—and found the third course pleasant but unremarkable—Matthias triggered his final rarity rank-up.