Chapter 17: Godrick the Grafted - Part 2
Dragon fire painted the arena in apocalyptic light, turning stone to glass and air to molten agony. Godrick swung his newly grafted limb with religious fervor, the ancient dragon skull breathing flames that remembered when they had scorched continents and reduced mountains to ash. Each sweep of his arm chased Gara and Nepheli across corpse-strewn stone with heat that made their armor glow like forge-work.
The demigod's laughter echoed off walls that wept from thermal shock, high and brittle with the hysteria of someone who'd finally found adequate compensation for lifelong inadequacy.
"Behold the power of grafting!" Godrick screamed, his voice harmonizing with the dragon's roar in ways that violated acoustic principles. "I am become death, devourer of kingdoms!"
Gara rolled behind a pillar that immediately began smoking from proximity to Godrick's enhanced fury. Phase two had transformed the fight from difficult to nightmarish—the demigod's already devastating arsenal now supplemented by ancient dragon magic that turned the arena into a furnace.
"New patterns to learn. New ways to die. Time to get educated."
Death #111 came from dragon bite. Godrick's grafted skull moved independently of his body, striking with serpentine fluidity while his other limbs continued their own assaults. The dragon's teeth punched through Gara's enhanced Constitution like it was paper, injecting venom that burned through his veins like liquid fire.
Death #112: flame sweep. The dragon head traced horizontal arcs that turned the arena floor into molten glass, catching Gara mid-dodge and reducing him to ash that sparkled with residual magic.
Death #113: grab into fire breath. Godrick's original hands seized him while the dragon skull positioned itself for point-blank immolation, cooking him from the inside out while golden blood boiled in his veins.
Each death taught him something new about phase two's mechanics. Each respawn brought him back faster, more focused, less concerned with anything beyond pattern analysis and tactical optimization. By death #115, he was resurrecting in under three seconds—a speed that defied even generous interpretations of Tarnished resurrection mechanics.
Nepheli watched this process with growing horror that transcended mere concern for his safety. She was witnessing someone transform from frightened human into optimized killing machine, efficiency purchased through systematic self-destruction that violated every principle of normal existence.
"Gara, please!" she called during his sixteenth resurrection, her voice carrying desperation that cut through his analytical trance. "Remember why we're fighting! This isn't about patterns and statistics—this is about stopping a monster!"
But her words barely registered through his death-trance. Each failure triggered immediate analysis and adjustment, his consciousness narrowed to the tunnel vision that had carried him through tutorial hell and one hundred sixteen subsequent educational experiences. Pain had become data. Death had become learning opportunity. Everything else was inefficient distraction.
Death #117 broke something fundamental inside him.
Godrick's combination attack—dragon bite transitioning to flame sweep transitioning to grab and crush—caught him perfectly, demonstrating mastery of phase two mechanics that should have taken dozens more deaths to achieve. As consciousness faded beneath crushing force and superheated agony, something in Gara's psyche finally snapped.
He respawned screaming.
Not in pain—pain had become familiar, manageable, background noise in the symphony of systematic education. He screamed in rage. Pure, undiluted fury at Godrick for being strong, at the Lands Between for being cruel, at himself for being weak enough to require one hundred seventeen deaths to learn lessons that competent warriors absorbed through observation.
"I AM DONE DYING TO YOU!"
The thought echoed through his enhanced consciousness with harmonics that rewrote local reality. Every stat point he possessed flowed into Strength in one massive redistribution that left his other capabilities at zero. His body swelled with concentrated potential, muscles straining against skin that wasn't designed to contain such focused power.
POV: Nepheli Loux
She watched him transform from broken man into something that barely qualified as human. His body swelled like a balloon inflating with liquid metal, bones creaking under stress they weren't designed to bear, skin stretching until golden light bled through the cracks.
This isn't enhancement, she realized with crystalline horror. This is overload. He's burning himself out for one massive attack.
The thing that had been Gara Smith charged Godrick with movements that transcended human limitation. No technique, no strategy, no consideration for defense—just fury and mathematics made flesh, wielding his mace "Trusty Stapler" like a divine instrument of percussive correction.
The impact shattered Godrick's guard like it was made of paper and wishful thinking.
POV: Gara Smith
His overloaded Strength connected with Godrick's blocking arms and rewrote the demigod's understanding of physical force. Grafted limbs snapped like twigs. Ancient armor cracked like eggshells. The dragon skull's roar became a confused whimper as its host staggered backward, suddenly uncertain about the viability of his enhancement project.
Nepheli seized the opening with predatory grace, her twin axes cleaving through grafted flesh that had lost its supernatural resilience. Together, they carved through Godrick's accumulated might like surgeons performing emergency amputation on cosmic scale.
"I am Lord of all that is—" Godrick began, his voice carrying the petulant outrage of someone discovering that reality had rules he couldn't simply graft around.
Gara's mace "Trusty Stapler" crushed the golden crown with finality that echoed through dimensions. The metal sang as it compacted, thousands of hours of craftsmanship reduced to abstract sculpture in the space between heartbeats.
"No," Gara said, his voice carrying harmonics that made the air itself vibrate with exhaustion. "You were just sad."
Godrick the Grafted, demigod and shardbearer, collapsed into dissolving light that painted the arena gold. The dragon skull detached from his corpse and crumbled to ash, ancient magic finally finding the rest it had been denied for centuries.
Runes flooded into Gara like a tsunami of liquid lightning.
Seventy thousand golden lights poured into his enhanced frame faster than his nervous system could process them. Power beyond anything he'd previously experienced rewrote his fundamental capabilities while his enhanced Constitution struggled to contain energies that belonged in cosmic phenomena rather than mortal flesh.
But more than runes came with Godrick's death. The Great Rune of grafting slammed into his chest like a physical thing, embedding itself in his spiritual architecture with force that made his bones ring like bells. Knowledge followed—understanding of flesh manipulation that had no business existing in any sane mind.
Then the Rune Sickness hit with intensity that made his previous dragon-absorption episode feel like mild indigestion.
Golden light erupted from his eyes, his mouth, every pore in his suddenly incandescent skin. He coughed golden dust that sparkled with residual magic, vomited liquid sunshine that burned his throat while his enhanced Constitution tried desperately to process power influx that exceeded safe parameters by several orders of magnitude.
His body collapsed into convulsions that spoke to electrical systems overloading and neural networks attempting emergency shutdown. Through the haze of supernatural intoxication, he felt Nepheli's hands supporting his weight while his vision cycled through spectra that normal human perception wasn't equipped to handle.
"You're more than human," she whispered, her voice carrying notes of awe and terror in equal measure.
Through golden tears and phosphorescent agony, Gara managed a response before consciousness abandoned him entirely: "Less than, actually."
POV: Nepheli Loux
She caught him as he fell, this warrior who'd just absorbed the essence of a demigod and paid the price in sanity and physical coherence. Golden light continued bleeding from his skin like slow-motion fireworks, each drop hitting stone with sounds that suggested cosmic significance.
This isn't normal Tarnished power. This is something grafting runes directly into his soul.
For a moment, his eyes focused despite being completely gold—not just iris and pupil, but sclera too, until they resembled molten metal more than human organs. In that gaze, she saw something looking through him rather than at her, consciousness operating on frequencies that bypassed normal perception entirely.
He's becoming something else. Each death, each victory, each impossible thing he does—it's changing him into something the world needs but humanity can't contain.
Hours passed before he stirred, golden light fading to normal luminosity while his enhanced Constitution slowly processed the worst of the supernatural overload. She'd maintained vigil beside Godrick's Grace, watching over someone who might no longer qualify for pronoun categories designed by and for normal people.
When his eyes finally opened—still faintly golden, still carrying depths that hadn't been there before—she asked the question that had been building since their first meeting: "What are you?"
Not accusatory. Not fearful. Just curiosity about the nature of whatever she'd been traveling with, fighting beside, possibly falling for despite rational objections raised by everything she'd witnessed.
POV: Gara Smith
Consciousness returned like sunrise after nuclear winter—slow, painful, accompanied by revelations that rewrote his understanding of personal limitation. The Great Rune pulsed in his chest with rhythm that synchronized to his heartbeat, +5 to all stats flowing through his enhanced capabilities like permanent enhancement made manifest.
But beneath the statistical improvement, something else pulsed with alien knowledge. Information about flesh manipulation, about grafting techniques, about ways to improve the human form through creative redistribution of component parts. Godrick's accumulated expertise, absorbed automatically along with his power.
Level 38. Great Rune active. New ability: "Limb Graft." And Nepheli looking at me like I'm a puzzle she needs to solve before it becomes a threat.
His laugh emerged exhausted and bitter, carrying harmonics that made nearby stone resonate sympathetically. "Honestly? I have no idea anymore."
The admission hung between them like confession, truth offered in place of explanations that would sound insane even in a world where insanity had become standard operating procedure.
But at least it was honest. After one hundred seventeen deaths, after systematic self-destruction in pursuit of tactical advantage, after absorbing the essence of a demigod and feeling it rewrite his spiritual architecture from the inside out—honesty was about the only currency he had left.
The question was whether it would be enough to preserve whatever remained between them, or whether the thing he was becoming had already destroyed whatever had made their partnership worth preserving in the first place.
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