“Tenacious bastard, aren’t you?” Lyrhea said as she ducked beneath the swinging claws of the reborn Chosen. “But let’s see if your increase in speed has had any adverse effects on anything else.”

“I’m fucking invincible!” the Chosen roared through his animal mouth as he brought both of his clawed hands down in an animalistic imitation of a double-fisted ground-pound. Lyrhea, though, had squeezed between his legs and lashed out with her knives, one slicing at the monster’s legs near the back of one of its knees and the other aimed at a more.. delicate place.

Both strikes from Lyrhea struck home and, as Lyrhea had anticipated from her foe’s rapid increase in speed and maneuverability, the enemy Chosen lost a lot of its absurd armor and general durability. Both single-edged curved blades cut deeply into their designated areas, and the beast stopped its movements against her as it fell to its knees and whined softly and in a high pitch.

“You can’t expect me to look a gift horse in the mouth, can you?!” Lyrhea laughed as she wound her way around the body of her stunned opponent, almost slithering across the Chosen’s body while delivering more and more stabs, slashes, and cuts. By the time she had peeled herself off of her foe, she had carved up its body quite a fair bit.

“That….. was uncalled for….” the enemy Chosen whined, but Lyrhea didn’t listen. What was the purpose of keeping to the high ground in a battle to the death where the only two outcomes were survival and a combination of erasure and/ or eternal torment?

“Your resistance was uncalled for.” Lyrhea said mockingly as she slashed at the rising opponent’s back a few times before skittering away. “But that didn’t stop you from trying, now did it?”

“RRRRrragh!” the Chosen roared as it healed its wounds and swung around behind itself, and yet Lyrhea had already moved away. The Chosen began to pant a bit before he/ it once again got to his/ its feet and tried to rush down his opponent.

Despite being faster than before the Harvest God’s Chosen was as big as he was before and hit just as hard as well, but that was not enough to match the speed of Lyrhea, who had essentially dumped all of her stats into Agility and Accuracy, not that she had any choice in the matter. As such, while it would have only taken but a single hit to knock Lyrhea out of the fight and almost certainly end in her death, if you can’t land a hit on your opponent it doesn’t matter how powerful you are, and the Harvest God and their Chosen were learning that lesson the hard way.

“ENOUGH!” the Chosen screamed as he stopped attacking. “My Master! Give me the power I need to kill your enemy! Do what you will to my body! I don’t care what it is; just let me claim victory for you!”

The Dungeon itself began to shift as if an earthquake was impacting it, and Lyrhea did what she felt was needed and rushed towards her foe. As the enemy Chosen began to laugh maniacally, Lyrhea unleashed an endless flurry of strikes to all sections of his body, yet he refused to go down even though he was no longer healing.

Eventually, she simply threw caution to the wind and chose to risk it all. If this fight dragged on for much longer or got much harder, things would almost certainly go poorly for her, and so she chose to bite the bullet and bum-rushed the bestial Chosen and slashed his throat out before spinning around his body and driving her knives into the monster’s connection between the spine and the brain stem.

At this, the crazed laughing stopped and the beast began to totter a bit in a few directions as Lyrhea simply did not stop stabbing and slashing away at its neck and spine until the creature inevitably fell forwards onto its face and lay there in a growing pool of its own blood.

Still, despite what to many would have seemed to be a clear sign of victory, Lyrhea refused to stop laying into the fallen foe, slashing, hacking, carving, stabbing, and eventually simply opening her mouth and letting her venom flow freely onto any new wounds as she continued to brutalize her fallen opponent.

Seconds of this onslaught turned into minutes and then into half an hour before she finally stopped her attacks and pulled herself off of her clearly dead enemy. She had already carved a path through the back and the bones within the body and into the organs deeper in, had plucked out the dead Chosen’s heart and tossed it aside, though she quickly regretted doing that when the Dungeon began to shake again.

The silence was now replaced with rumbling that seemed to sound somewhat like that of a roar of anger and macabre laughter, and then the Dungeon fell apart with Lyrhea deep inside of it. The ceiling fell, the whole landmass above fell inwards, and Lyrhea was unable to escape as the Dungeon decayed and sealed everything that once was within it in an earthen tomb with no room to move.

But the fall of everything above did not crush Lyrhea, as it stopped just before reaching her. Or, to be more precise, time froze just before she was crushed by countless tons of rock and soil and vegetation. She was already prone, and she looked around to see what was going on, only for a force to grab her from behind and yank her through a portal and out into the open air beyond the collapsing shrine, at which point time resumed once again and she realized to her horror that the Boss Battle hadn’t ended…

It merely entered the true final stage.

As she looked up at the swirling mass of rock, shredded houses, blood, gore, metal scraps that looked like sickles and scythes and food made from plants (mostly sheaves of wheat), she found herself stumbling to her feet as she asked the question that was omnipresent in her mind.

“What is that bullshit?! Did I enter the last battle of a JRPG?! ARE YOU SERIOUSLY ASKING ME TO KILL GOD?!”

Because, yes, she now had to fight the physical incarnation of a God.

And yes, she was Hopelessly outclassed here.

And yes, if she fought it, she would definitely die 10/10 times and suffer nothing but absolute, total defeat each and every time without being able to leave a single blemish o the Avatar’s form, especially with how it was a humanoid mass of blood, vegetation and storming winds.

But, as the skies darkened and Lyrhea braced herself for the end, the swirling mass vanished, and she found herself frozen in place along with everyone and everything else.

And out of the corner of her eye, she swore that she could see a man made purely of fuzzy white.. something… with no face and no clothes watching all that was frozen before time resumed and everything that made up the Avatar fell to the ground as the force animating disappeared, leaving Lyrhea smack dab in the middle of what she could only describe as the site of a massacre more than a few minutes old.