Inside of the cave, Urru disappeared to the darkness in the back with a last flick of his tail.

To the left, a rectangular of darker shadows rose up to the height of a door. Through this, Arius led Evalaite.

Though her vision was dark, Val could sense that Arius knew what he was doing.

In the familiarity of his own home, he reached his hand out to flip a light switch. Instead, a blaze of fire started up at the head of a torch.

The firelight revealed a simple cube of a room cut from the stone. In a more complicated fashion, the furniture within his house looked like it rose up from the ground, carved from the same piece of stone that consisted of the floor.

"My living arrangement is a touch primitive," Arius admitted. "I did not grow up with many modern conveniences, and you happen to be even older than me. Hopefully you will find my accomodations acceptable for a night."

"Oh, but of course. You have Fire Immunity?" Evalaite stared at his hand, aglow in the center of the torch.

After a few blinks at his hand blazing in the fire, as if he had never contemplated it before, Arius pulled it out. "Yeah, I do."

"That was not much use against the Sea Itself, was it?"

Arius shrugged with a big smile as he walked comfortably about his home. "The ocean was one big pot for me to boil Tavras in."

"You certainly talk big, but apparently you can back that up. I would be interested to see if you can continue to satisfy." Evalaite lowered her voice into a purr over that last word.

Her increasingly suggestive demeanor frankly terrified Val. If she kept lurking around in the past like this, would she become scarred all over again like she had in that vision with Evalaite and Tavras? Out of her own self-respect, Val did not want to have to see Evalaite's breasts again.

"There was a reason why you decided to take me from Tavras's Paradise, wasn't there?" Evalaite continued.

Arius gave pause and turned around. "You obviously needed help. I am just trying to do the right thing."

More hostile, Evalaite said, "I am just part of the reward for your victory, right?"

Did Val just hear that correctly? The future sex goddess certainly viewed herself as little more than an object. If she went around with a worldview like that, it explained quite a lot about Evalaite, actually.

As bad of a first impression that she had gotten of Arius, he did not seem like too bad of a person. He responded in the exact way that Val would have wanted to react, and that made her appreciate him a smidgen more than before.

"What the fuck?" he asked at once. "Uh, no, I do not think that is how things work." Arius shifted awkwardly while he looked around, probably missing Urru as his third wheel to help tone things down.

Despite his words, when Arius glanced at Evalaite, his eyes became fixated on her body at the point of a subtle movement.

Her fingers trailed over her collarbones and up to her shoulder. Those fingertips with the neatly filed nails pinched at the fabric of her dress. In an equally slow motion, Evalaite began to draw her dress down to reveal more of her skin.

The atmosphere of this vision turned all wrong. Evalaite, with stronger mental faculties than Arius, was using an ability to garner unearned interest from him: Seduction.

Arius kept his glazed over eyes focused on her. His facial muscles slackened into an entirely neutral expression. To be fair to him, he probably did not have the free will to look away, even if he wanted to.

The moment that Arius and Evalaite had gotten alone together, she should have known to terminate this vision. Now that she knew that something disgusting would happen between them—albeit not in the way that she had expected—Val wanted to get out of this vision.

There was a thunk of a large object colliding against a surface.

Hazy and distant, Evalaite's voice said, "It is far too easy to overpower a god like you."

Intrigued by what had just happened, Val restored the full sensual range of her vision.

There, she saw that the thunk had been Arius's body collapsing to the ground. He lay there in sleep, looking peaceful if not for the stone floor that his head had just bounced against.

Evalaite set her bundle of things on the counter. From the colorful cloth, she drew out a sizable kitchen knife. "It is too bad for you that you don't have Knife Immunity, huh?" With a sadistic smile, Evalaite approached Arius's helpless form.

If not for the fact that she had met Arius earlier that day in the real timeline, she would feel quite positively that this would be the end of him. Even a god as powerful as Arius could get caught in a moment of helplessness it seemed, yet somehow, he had survived this.

First, Evalaite grabbed him by the collar to lift the torso of the sleeping Arius off of the ground. "Did you really think for a moment that Tavras had kept me against my will? I love the Sea Itself. I love Tavras, and that is why I am going to kill you for what you have done to him!"

She laughed aloud, much too gleefully to be killing someone. "I only wish that I could see the last look on your face as I run this knife through your throat." Evalaite played around with the knife point, tracing a few fluid circles around the Adam's apple of his throat. "Ah, but that would be a rookie's mistake. Now, let us not delay, darling."

Her slender hand drew along Arius's face. The pad of each fingertip caressed his skin and lifted up from beneath his jaw, directly over the jugular vein. "Sleep well."

Evalaite thrust the knife downward, strong and fleet. Golden blood gushed from the point in which the metal drove into the side of his neck. The hilt protruded from the tender flesh, and she left the knife embedded there. As blood rose to meet air, a satisfied smile also lifted onto her lips.

For a moment, Evalaite seemed to think that she had slain the god of war, as if such a feat could be that simple.

Arius reopened his eyes, blood red in their vengeful rage. Apparently, he did have some other ability that effectively served as Knife Immunity.