BOOM!

“We are going to die!” Olfric yelled as yet another explosion shook the anomaly around them. The walls were collapsing, the tunnels were caving inwards, and the stalactites hanging from the ceiling had shifted from being decorative architecture to falling missiles, fully capable of killing any unsuspecting travelers underneath. Any more of this, and the anomaly wouldn’t just collapse— it would take all of them with it.

Truly, the demons were out tonight. And they weren’t holding back.

“No way!” Zuken yelled back amidst all the terror and madness, concentric rings of power still glowing around his arms. Olfric had no idea whether Zuken had an unfathomable pain tolerance or he’d been using some kind of mana battery to eke by. Maybe when they reached Haviskali, he could—

He quickly took a step back, just in time to avoid another one of those swords of doom from falling right onto him. Instead, it crashed onto the ground and broke apart, flattening some kind of slimy thing underneath.

Vile, he sneered, before turning back to Zuken. “What are we going to do?”

“We,” Zuken replied, his volume now lower, “need to find Tanya and get her back. She’s gotta be—” more explosions interrupted his sentence, “—somewhere around here!”

“Oh I don’t doubt that at all,” Olfric snarked back. “She’s probably causing these explosions as we speak.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! She’s a wind-type.”

“And when has that ever stopped her from destroying things?”

“…Alright, point.”

“Besides, she told us to keep going, didn’t she?” he reasoned between breaths. “It seems pretty lame to blow our only chance at survival by going back to get her.”

“NO!” the half-elf snapped with surprising ferocity. “We’re not gonna leave her behind! We’re going to find her and we’re going to save her!” She had tears cascading down her cheeks. “I don’t know how, but we’re going to do it. We have to!”

“Oh, and how do you propose we do that exactly?” Olfric snarled back, grabbing her arm and jumping away, just in time to avoid another bombardment. Conversing with the non-Asukan, saving her life— they were all great ways to stay angry. Being angry meant he was too busy to be scared.

And in their situation, that was a good thing. Because being scared meant being dead.

“What is that?” Elena asked, stopping dead in her tracks to look at the well.

Olfric couldn’t have cared less. He was in too much of a hurry to wonder what fascinating piece of rock held the changeling’s attention at the moment, but—

The scent of something pungent hit his nostrils. He sniffed around, looking for the source, and promptly found himself facing the same direction as Elena.

Four pairs of red eyes smiled in the darkness, and the cavern exploded, obstructing their path forward.

“Like I said…” Olfric drawled, glancing back at the tunnel they came from. “We need to go back and get Tanya.”

Lukas Aguilar was many things. Some might call him oppositional to authority figures, someone who didn’t always do as told. And others might even consider him a troublemaker. But at the end of the day, he knew his limits.

He was a mortal, as Inanna so graciously reminded him.

As he watched the two Powers strike one another, that fact could not have been laid out more clearly. A single hit from that Frost, and he’d be a life-sized mannequin. And given what he’d seen the last time something had born the brunt of Inanna’s flames, he wasn’t keen on going anywhere near it.

Even the shockwaves between their attacks were enough to turn him into dust.

And so Lukas watched the fight, glancing back and forth between the two entities.

On one side was a strange, white-eyed blonde, her energy condensed into a wintery plume that cloaked her. Her hands, beautiful and pale, were up in the air, fingers spread evenly in a defensive gesture. Frost gathered upon them as mana, frigid like the tundra, shot out of her palm, aiming to freeze everything in sight. It was like a shadow, a dark, firm, undeniable outline that stood unmoving against the tide.

I have fought gods and survived, it told the world. Kneel before me or die.

On the other side was his resident goddess, Inanna, possessing his own mortal form. She was an existence that was able to comprehend the very Origin itself. A goddess of immeasurable might, powerful enough that her entire pantheon had to stand together to topple her reign; and even then, they were forced to trick her into defeat.

I am the barest fraction of my true self, her stance exuded. And yet, you are still nothing to me.

The fight was happening so fast— everything was just a blur of motion and energy. Sounds tumbled into one another so rapidly that it was impossible to pick out any portion of it. Lights flashed so brightly that Lukas, safe in his spiritual form, had to cry out against the intensity.

The blonde girl— if she was really even a girl —was wielding a strange weapon. A metallic whip with extra padding and tree pairs of scales at the tip. The entire weapon seemed to be coated with rime, solidifying any wayward monsters that came into contact with it.

Shattering them to pieces.

This was an executioner’s weapon. An army killer.

And far, far too fast for mortal eyes to keep track of.

Inanna, in her own characteristic fashion, had conjured a battle ax. Out of fire. Fire was simply incapable of staying frozen into a fixed shape like that, but clearly someone had forgotten to tell Inanna that.

And the funniest part— she was doing all of this with Level 3 Mana Manipulation.

That said everything one needed to know about the Akkadian Queen of Heaven.

The blonde attacked first, conjuring a wall of pure pressure and lobbing it towards Inanna. Lukas could only stand agape as the goddess stomped, raising a vertical wall of force that met the incoming blow and exploded in all directions, causing the cavern around them to collapse.

With the preamble out of the way, the two fighters blurred towards one another, energies swimming at their fingertips. Weapons clashed, and at times, they just threw techniques at one another with a grace that could only come from decades, maybe even centuries, of bone-breaking practice.

Seeing it was… humbling. Both of them were leagues beyond him, capable of shaping and forming multiple instances of mana twisted into intricate techniques he could not hope to name.

Participating in a fight like that? The very thought was laughable.

Even if he were using Tachypsychia ten-fold, he wouldn’t have been able to keep up with them. The combatants blurred— it was as if multiple layers of the same image had suddenly started performing separate actions, and it was awe-inspiring to see potential, possible realities all overlapping while inhuman minds fought to predict the future, adjusting and counter-adjusting their actions based on what they could perceive.

Not only were they doing multiple things at once, they were also thinking through each possibility.

It was like solving a sudoku, a rubix cube, and playing a game of chess while trying to teach someone sword-fighting. All at the same time.

He witnessed Inanna conjure a bolt of brilliant blue lighting and strike the blonde with it like a hammer of God. The blonde’s slender body arched into a bow, curling around the spot where it came close to striking her. As she grabbed the energy with her rime-encrusted fingers, her nails blackened and smoked because of the heat, but she never let go. Then, with a wail of pure scorn, she created a ball of Frost and sent it expanding outwards, each shard of ice fully capable of draining Lukas’s lifeforce until nothing was left.

Inanna had no such worries. With a precision and grace he could never possess, she deflected every single shard that came remotely close to her— to his body —and raised an eyebrow back at the blonde, as if wondering if that was all she had.

Lukas swallowed. It would not do to piss off Inanna in the future. No sir, not at all.

He’d thought that seeing the potential destruction of his home planet had been hard on his brain. But that— that was nothing compared to what was occurring before him now. Because Inanna was receiving all her sensory input through his own senses, it meant all the information was being force-fed through his own mind, regardless of his permission or ability to handle it.

Had he been a bit less busy, he’d have wondered why he wasn’t rolling all over the floor, clutching at his head as he screamed his lungs out.

His new pet, the mercury-cat-slime, was nowhere to be seen, having dove into a pool of aqāru that had begun to boil from the seemingly endless amounts of energy being released into the environment.

And then, of course, there was the other thing to consider.

Soul Siphon Complete

Devoured Soul Prototype : Eochaid

Soul Siphon Complete

Devoured Soul Prototype : Rotwing

Soul Siphon Complete

Devoured Soul Prototype : Latceros

If this battle continued, the anomaly was finished. One way or another. Either the conflict of these Powers would cause the entire thing to collapse, or the sheer efficiency of Soul Siphon would end up extracting every single Monster Prototype, adding them all to his own collection.

He wondered which would happen first. Personally, he hoped for the latter.

“It’s been so long since I’ve been able to cut loose,” the blonde moaned, cracking her neck. “These weaklings are so fragile that I can barely move a finger without snapping someone in two.”

Now that there was a lull in the battle, Lukas took the opportunity to get a closer look at her. Her attire was mostly utilitarian and, in a way, looked oddly modern. The pink waistcoat screamed of high-quality leather, and the tattered state of her dress could be considered incredibly erotic, to the point of being arrested for public indecency, if not for the bloody wounds that came with them. Her pants were also mostly torn, only latched on courtesy of the thick leather belt bag on her waist.

Lukas really hoped the woman had an extra pair of pants in there.

Not that he himself was any better off.

His shirt was mostly gone, leaving behind what could technically be considered a sleeveless, buttonless shirt and a pair of tattered pants. He had no belt, but a piece of khorkhoi membrane served as an adequate replacement, both as a belt and as a protective man-skirt. And he had no shoes either.

It was like an episode of ‘Tarzan meets Amazon princess’.

Waka Waka.

The blonde walked forward, stumbling at first but more graceful and measured as she kept going. “Tell me, O stranger, who are you? Throughout my years, I have fought the worst existences of this land and even combatted Amaterasu’s wrath. You… I do not know. But I have seen enough to know what you are, False God. And I have no quarrel with you.”

False God?

Lukas made a mental note of the term.

“An ant,” Inanna intoned, casually allowing her axe to dissolve into thin embers, “has no quarrel with a boot.”

“Insouciant,” the blonde chuckled. “I like it. Had I been in my true form, I’d have crushed you like an insect beneath my heel.”

“Grandiose words from an amateur yet to score a single hit.”

Lukas nearly face-faulted. Really, what was he expecting? That Inanna would sit down and have a diplomatic discussion? The woman’s warlust was enough to send Genghis Khan running for the hills.

But the worst part of all? She was using his body during the entire exchange.

“Tell me, shard of a has-been. Do you know the first rule of negotiation?” Her upper lip curled. “It is always conducted between equals. And you—”

It was as if a giant, invisible hand pressed down on the blonde, forcing her to her knees.

“—Are not—”

She tried to stand up, only for her head to be smashed against the floor, where she lay prone.

“—My equal.”

The blonde’s eyes darted back and forth, no doubt looking for a way out. But no matter how much she struggled, no matter how much she twitched, she simply could not move as Inanna’s pressure held her in place. Every single piece of Frost in the vicinity began to melt, and before he knew it, fire exploded out of nowhere, engulfing his surroundings. Within a matter of seconds, the cavern became a raging inferno.

Lukas revised his earlier opinion. The blonde was far beyond a mortal like him, but the goddess was immeasurably farther. They weren’t even in the same league.

And this wasn’t even Inanna’s True form.

“You who sought to enthrall my Host,” Inanna smiled. “Allow me to show you what real thrall stands for.”

The blonde screamed.