It was strangely calm.

He had expected a massive explosion of power. Maybe some massive tentacles erupting out of the ground, tearing into him from behind. Or perhaps a glowing eye would form in front of him, radiating destructive, unadulterated malevolence. But instead, he just sensed the power around him twisting and writhing into something else— that in itself was grounds for running to the hills, if there were any.

Still, there was something else going on. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

The power was flowing inward. Alien world or not, Lukas wanted to believe that the Law of Conservation of Energy still held true. If the things around him were sucking in energy, it had to come from somewhere else.

Which also made no sense. At all. The genius loci was everywhere, and it was consuming. Already, rocks and debris started falling to the floor as the walls cracked apart. If he didn’t know any better, he’d have thought the monster was gathering strength at the expense of the anomaly itself.

But monsters didn’t do that. Did they?

“Do not mistake a genius loci for a mere monster,” Inanna warned. “In a way, fighting it is equivalent to fighting the Source itself.”

You mean… the Omphalos.

Her silence was all the confirmation he needed. Roughly swallowing, he clenched his fingers around the hilts of his blades. At least he had all the power he needed for the upcoming fight, especially since there were still vestiges of residual power from the time Inanna had taken over to fight Tanya’s aggressive other form. Not to mention, the pendant was still active and connected to him, which meant it could still function as a mana forge and—

Lukas blinked. A mana forge?

Didn’t that mean—

“No. My pendant is no ordinary mana forge, mortal. It is a divine relic, capable of enacting miracles of the highest order. Accessing its powers is far beyond a mortal like you.”

But what about this auto-language thing?

“A paltry miracle I enacted to keep your head above your shoulders.”

Well, at least she was being considerate. In her own, Inanna-like way.

“Something’s over there,” Tanya suddenly spoke up, pointing towards the darkness ahead. It nearly made him scoff. Of course something was there. The ‘something’ was all around them.

Tanya pulled out a thin, cylindrical canister of some sort and tossed it towards him. With unerring skill, Lukas caught it in mid-air. Up close, he could see strange sigils etched on its surface. He looked up to see Tanya holding a similar one.

“…What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Activate it, of course,” came the response, as if that explained everything.

“How do I—”

“I suggest channeling lifeforce through it.”

Would that work? he wondered, readying a large Burst to—

“You wish to activate the device, not shatter it to pieces. Simply pass in a thin sliver of your power. It should be sufficient.”

And wasn’t that an odd thought. After all the time he spent in this hellhole, he’d gotten used to throwing power left and right, pushing past his limits to survive against overwhelming monsters day after day. Tanya had activated hers, and the sigils emitted an intense, bright light.

A magical flashlight?

Without further ado, he poured in a small bit of his lifeforce, doing his best to limit the flow. He doubted the blonde had a large supply of these magical devices, and even if she did, he doubted she’d give him another if he broke the first one.

Luckily, the sigils on the canister’s surface began to glow rather than fall apart. Brilliant, white light escaped out of it, pushing back the shadows that seemed to encroach upon their location.

“Using raw lifeforce to activate an enchantment. How pedestrian.”

Lukas didn’t bother coming up with a witty response. He was too busy staring at the walls around him, at the ceiling above, the floor ahead, and the space behind.

Every inch of their surroundings was now covered by it.

Someone screamed, he dimly noted. And yet, he couldn’t take his eyes off of the sight, despite not knowing what it was. Flesh, dead and dried. Flesh, alive and writhing. The languid, arrhythmic pulsing of corpses filled with maggots. Sounds of claws and nails. Bone. Flesh. Slime. Metal. Aqāru.

The stomach-churning, nightmare-inducing wrongness slithered across stone, now all around him.

Gathering.

Twisting.

Churning.

And then, they began to form.

Utterly pitch-black, it was a monstrosity made of ropy tentacles, each easily three times his size, standing on stumpy, hoofed legs. Another mass of tentacles, their surfaces shining with aqāru, protruded out of their necks, spiralling upwards before combining into puckered maws, dripping silvery-green goo covered their flanks. The ghastly caricature resembled trees in silhouette, with the trunks being short legs and the tops of the trees representing ropy, branching bodies. The macabre things twisted and trudged around on legs too short to carry them, shaking the very floor with every step.

Tanya dropped her flashlight. The shifting illumination only managed to make them appear even more hideous and grotesque.

“S—six,” he heard her stutter, as she carefully bent over to pick up her flashlight. “There are six of them.”

“For now, yeah.” He cracked his neck as the screen flashed with new information.

ANALYZE (LEVEL 2)

Shub-Niggurath: Chimeric Miasma brought to life. Extremely thick dermal layer with regenerative miasmatic tissue underneath. Compound 360-degree sensory awareness.

Probable Progeny of [Incomplete]

And that wasn’t all.

Closest evolutionary relative among accumulated Monster Prototype: Khorkhoi.

That… could come in handy.

“Yomi has well and truly opened up on us,” Tanya cursed. Frost was beginning to coat her arms. “These creatures are made of flesh. I think I can freeze them.”

Lukas watched her discreetly from the corner of his eye. This was the first time he was going to work in tandem with someone, and he hoped she wouldn’t stab him while his back was turned. On the plus side, he’d seen her do some seriously awesome stuff earlier, though he couldn’t help but wonder how the thrall would affect her performance during this fight.

Guess we’ll find out.

The monsters ahead of him roared. Not the cry of an animal, but the howling of a hurricane ready to make landfall. It shook the cavern, deepening the darkness within. Even Lukas felt his skin become ten degrees colder, as if life itself was trying to slide from his veins at the mere sound of its cry.

Which, he realized after a moment of consideration, was exactly what was happening.

“A monster so antithetical to life that merely standing near it is painful? What is a gem like this doing in such a dim cavern?”

That, he decided, summed up everything he needed to know about the Supreme Queen of An and Ki.

“I don’t have a lot of power left,” the blonde admitted. “Can you get me an opening?”

Flooding his body with lifeforce, he shifted his weight forward. “Do what you can,” he advised as he tied his new flashlight to his belt. It was enough to provide illumination, but not enough to be a distraction itself.

Better.

Digging his feet into the ground, Lukas leapt forward, ready to face his foe.

A single clash of metal on metal. Then they separated.

Three seconds later. Another clash.

Two seconds.

One second.

Half.

One. Half. Two. Half. Two. Half. One.

The skirmishes happened as rapidly as they ended. With a swoosh here and a spat there, tentacles continued to fall off, unable to survive Lukas’s speed and thrust despite layers of thick endoskeleton and slime trying to keep his swerves from striking true.

Tanya watched with surreal fascination as the strange hi-yuman fought three of those monstrosities at once. The metal blades in each of his hands kept slashing away at the dark, slimy tissues, cutting through metal and bone with impossible ease. She knew his daggers were sharp, but this was the first time she realized how horrifically overpowered they were in close combat.

“HAAA!” Lukas yelled as his blades cut deep, slashing off one of the creature’s legs in a single sweep, carving through muscle and bone as thick as a tree trunk without slowing down.

She saw one of the monster’s many mouths spit corrosive acid right at his face, only for a burst of pure kinetic force to push it back, splattering it across its own writhing tentacles instead. A third attack came from a second monster, but Lukas’s fist met it head-on.

Her eyes bulged as the monster’s limb— composed of a great many tentacles to form an incredibly dense, grotesque arm —exploded in a shower of gore. She didn’t know what the Outsider had done, but his single punch had obliterated the entire tentacle-arm. Not just tearing through flesh and bone, but literally making it implode. A second later, several pairs of tentacles, two pairs of legs, and a crushed head dropped onto the floor, unmoving.

Lukas Aguilar did not seem to care. He just sharply exhaled and went onto the next creature.

Tanya reflexively swallowed. She wasn’t going to get on his bad side anytime soon.

Still, it made her wonder. The man looked young. In fact, she was fairly certain he was close to her own age, perhaps even younger. So what could have possibly forced him to undergo such weaponization? Watching him was like watching a butcher’s knife in action. No grace, no beauty, no question of honor or chivalry.

Only pinpoint precision and hammer blows. And the undeniable sound of metal hacking through flesh.

Tanya knew all about being put through life’s grinders. She had been through several pickles herself to become who she was today. They weren’t always events to be proud of, but sometimes things just had to be done.

So what was his ordeal? What made Lukas Aguilar the man he was?

So many questions, yet so few answers.

The miasma hissed, rising from the floor and converging into pieces of bodily tissue as they slithered about, coming back to life.

“Oh no,” she snarled, “no one said you could do that!”

A spear of Everfrost pierced through the darkness, smashing against the thick trunk that was the monster’s leg. Immediately, hoarfrost covered the surface and began to drink the miasma’s power. Growing. Expanding. Crystals of black, putrid ice— twisted from the corrupted lifeforce —began to rise all around the fallen body tissue.

And then a writhing tendril of shadows slammed against it, destroying the frost outgrowth into a thousand little shrapnels.

Tanya grimaced. Trust the genius loci to use even lifeforce differently. She was no expert, but she knew lifeforce to be a useful tool for creation, rejuvenation, and fortification. But tonight, she was witnessing a fourth use of it. One not very prevalent in bremetan society.

Destruction.

Both from Lukas, who was wielding the power of Life to obliterate others, and the genius loci, whose lifeforce was so twisted it made the curse in the desert above look tame.

[ [ [ WAAANNNNNCCHHHHH! ] ] ]

The sound was less like noise and more like getting dunked into a vat of sewage. Tanya staggered back, no longer able to breathe. There was a building pressure against her skin, and her ears burned with pain. She dropped to one knee and clutched her ears as her entire body shook, leaving her dizzy and disoriented. A sound of something swooping made her raise her head, and she instantly froze as a contorted tentacle-limb plunged towards her. Before she could so much as think about moving, something fluid and metallic intercepted it, forming a large paw at the point of contact.

She watched with bated breath as Lukas’s familiar, the cat forged of liquid metal, meowed and slashed at the interfering limb with a second paw, chopping it in half.

“So the damn cat is a murder-happy bastard too,” she roughly chuckled.

Suddenly, Tanya felt Ezzeron press against her psyche. That… was fast. Just a little bit more, and she could bring something to the fight too. Normally, allowing her kami to go wild was a terrible idea no matter where she was. But she was exhausted, terrified, and had been through too much to care anymore.

Why was she ever so squeamish about this, anyway?

“Bad things keep happening to me,” she snarled, her armbands radiating with a bright blue sheen. “It’s high time I started happening to them!”