It was like being caught in the midst of a raging storm.

Surrounded from all sides, assaulted at every angle, his brain had shut down and reverted to the most basic levels of self-preservation. Details were lost amid a swirl of imagery. Solid information was washed over by a sea of blurred pictures. The concrete was replaced by the abstract as the mind funneled resources dedicated to surviving in lieu of observing. It was now down to muscle memory. To reflexes. To reaction times strained beyond their breaking point. His surroundings became an afterthought. The environment, a hazy blur. Everything became indistinct, muddled, and that included those he fought against.

And despite it all, Lukas could loudly proclaim that he was having too much fun.

It was maddening, but in the best way possible.

He parried blows from a gigantic limb as it swooped down to impale him through the heart. Spinning, he chopped at it from the middle, slicing it in half. Small daggers were useful, but a weapon of longer reach was so much better. It didn’t matter that he was surrounded by the miasma, or that the creatures around him were just as quick to regenerate as he was at incapacitating them.

He simply didn’t care.

All that mattered was that he was fighting back. Standing his ground. Giving as good as he got. Every punch he received, he threw one back in response. Every blow sent his way, he returned with equal ferocity. His actions became mechanical, his limbs moving as automatic extensions of his will. Even in a near-catatonic state like this, his method of retaliating was still far from just physical.

Half the maws were burnt and corroded by their own acid. Metallic appendages protruding out of the monsters were used to impale themselves. A certain shub-niggurrath was down on the ground, screeching and writhing, unable to face the brunt of his Empathy attack.

And it was still not enough.

“NOW!” he signalled, jumping back just in time for a fresh torrent of arctic frost to hit his victim, the hoar immediately spreading across the bodies, coating them with dark, corrupted rime.

BURST!

Lukas sent a thin lance of kinetic energy into the ice popsicle, shattering it into pieces.

He whistled, eyeing the rest of the hulking deformities around him. “Yeah, this miasma definitely classifies as the genius-loci. Dumpy here,” he looked at the broken, crystallized shards on the floor, “was faster than he looked.”

“He?” Tanya asked.

“Hmm, you think it’s a she?” he cocked his head, watching as the miasma slowly coalesced, giving birth to more monsters. It seemed like freezing them was only a stop-gap measure at best. So long as the miasma existed, there would always be more monsters to fight.

Lukas stepped back, sighing. “This regen is such bullshit. Slime worms have nothing on them.” He gave Tanya a jaunty grin. “Your frosty thing isn’t working either, not unless you can do the entire thing in one go. Although…”

His brows furrowed. “You, Jumbo,” he yelled at one of the remaining creatures. To his surprise, the one he was looking at actually turned towards him in response. He grinned, moving forward and hacking it at the leg and dropping the monster to the ground. Dialing Burst’s power to eleven, he slammed a Shatterfist straight into its face.

Boom. No more monster.

Thin tendrils shot out of the amputated leg and began contorting around itself, reforming.

“Ah,” he dryly replied. “No matter where you cut it, it just keeps on regenerating.” He cupped his chin. “I wonder what’ll make it stay dead.”

“Are you…” he heard the fresh horror in his companion’s voice. “Are you enjoying this?”

Lukas blinked, before staring at her incredulously. “Are you not?”

The twenty-sixth tentacle monster landed on the floor in three pieces, tendrils of blackness already beginning to grow from them as they sought out their counterparts. New deformed muscle, metal, and bone began to twist and reform into limbs to fill the gaps. Tanya knew she should have acted sooner to turn it into ice, but she couldn’t find it in herself to care anymore.

They just kept reforming. Over and over and over.

She glared at the miasma spreading everywhere. That was the true enemy they were fighting. She’d tried freezing the bloody thing, but the substance would just reform, pulsing and writhing with more power than it had any right to use. As such, she’d been delegated to freeze spells full-time while Lukas and his murder-happy cat kept hacking the tentacle-tree monsters to pieces.

Tentacle-tree? I need a better name than that.

It wasn’t that she couldn’t contribute more than that, but she simply didn’t want to. Lukas had long realized that wounding these things would just make them reform, often into an even deadlier form than before. But he just didn’t really seem to care, reacting to each new mutation with the air of a child being given a new toy. And so, the avatars of the miasma constantly took more byzantine forms while Lukas, grinning like an insufferable fool, tore through them without visible effort.

Tanya knew the Outsider had a great deal of lifeforce, but this was just… impossible.

Plus, he had yet to use the same fire-spells he had used against her. Her frost was useful, but fire and frost together could have finished the job far faster. Instead, he limited himself to lifeforce and lifeforce alone, grinning like a loon as he cleaved through them as quickly as they came.

She was uncomfortably reminded of the fact that while the Outsider was on her side at the moment, that didn’t necessarily guarantee his sanity.

“What are you doing?” she snapped at him, using her power to freeze the monster he was hacking into. “Use your fire-spells already. Killing them is obviously child’s play to you, so why not just finish it?”

Lukas flashed her another mad grin. “First of all, it wouldn’t be any fun if I did that. Second, I can’t do any fire magic because… reason. And third, I genuinely can’t kill them. At least not as they are now,” he shrugged, his brows furrowing as he paused to consider his own words. “Come to think of it, that should’ve been the first reason.”

“But—”

“I’ve had enough time to analyze this creature,” the Outsider spoke in a matter-of-factly tone, almost like he was giving her a lecture. “This thing is no deadly hellspawn. It’s a gigantic bitch that’ll keep regenerating until you and I both tire and give up. So unless you can freeze the entirety of this miasma at once, it won’t die.”

He let out a sharp, playful whistle. “But since you can’t do that, I’ll just have to keep on killing it. Until it gives up on me, or the anomaly gives up on the monster. Either way, excuse me while I—”

Lukas suddenly spun around, slashing at the next unfortunate thing that came hurtling his way.

“What the hell man!” he glared at them, waving his hands angrily. “Can’t you see I’m in the middle of a conversation here?”

Tanya staggered back. She really couldn’t tell who she was more afraid of anymore.

Inanna relaxed into her easy chair as she watched the madness unfurl.

Say what you would about humans, but they did go out of their way to make things comfortable. It was as if they wanted someone to lord over them, offering luxuries in return for petty benefits. It was no wonder her relic had found its way to their planet.

Her Host, Lukas Aguilar, had come a long way from the insipid little vermin he had been when she’d first conversed with him. Although he had defiance in spades, it was nothing in the face of sheer power.

But now? He was a monster in his own right.

She saw him charge, ducking beneath the first monster’s legs before stabbing clean through them, followed by a quick burst of lifeforce to burst them apart in the process. The monster fell down into the bed of miasma with a giant splash, and the enthralled blonde quickly followed with one of her signature ice spells, calling hoarfrost upon it. The mortal lifted his blade and stabbed the now-iced body, shattering it into an incalculable number of pieces.

The entire exchange took less than two seconds.

She laughed at the mortal’s reasoning when the blonde demanded him to perform fire-magic. As if the mortal was capable of such a thing on his own. That said, there was indeed a creature, a foreign invader to the anomaly he— or, rather, his Omphalos —had killed back when he’d been stabbed. A creature of fire, albeit inferior to the wyrms and dragons she herself conquered in her time.

Still, it was an idea to be considered.

The fire-elemental, from what little she deigned to recollect, could perform fire manipulation directly, without an external mana forge. Perhaps she would tell the mortal to try allowing that monster prototype to take over and see what happens?

Experimentation was the key to evolution, after all.

But that was for later. There were far more pressing matters at hand.

Foremost among them was the ocean of lifeforce flooding through the mortal’s body at that very moment. It was the nature of power to corrupt, and with absolute power, the effects were far more permanent and egregious. Too much mana would poison the caster, paralyzing him for life. Warriors drugged on too much lifeforce would regress into little more than abominable beasts.

Lukas Aguilar was mere centimeters away from that point.

His metamorphosis into an anomaly had done wonders for his strength. His regeneration had been heightened. His capacity to store and generate lifeforce had grown exponentially. His new reserves allowed him to bring out the best, and worst, in him. Of course, a mere mortal like him still did not hold a candle to a magnificent being such as herself.

In hindsight, a small portion of the blame was hers to shoulder as well. She had not taught him restraint, but rather to wield his maximum strength to generate explosive results. She had taught him to fight without reservations, to suppress anything that interfered between himself and his prey. And frankly, she had been both surprised and pleased by how quickly he had taken to it.

Perhaps deep down beneath that mortal repression lay a true, bloodthirsty monster.

Much like herself.

But now, her training had shown its drawbacks. She had invested time and effort into shaping him into an acceptable Host. Forging him, turning him into her axe.

Lukas Aguilar may have been a mortal, but he was her mortal.

Hers.

She would not allow anyone to take away her weapon. He would be protected from all that wished to do him harm.

And if necessary, from himself.