Felix grappled with the power, his screams not abating in the slightest as he rode the current down into his dark core space. The process, which was normally as simple as breathing, was now fraught as he teetered on the razor’s edge of burnout. Not since the Ravager King had he felt so bloated with power.

I’m here! Pit cried out.

Just as with the Ravager King, Pit was a steady presence in his Spirit; the tenku siphoned pieces of the Abundance Anima’s power, rotating it through his own whirling star before sending it back down into Felix’s core space.

It wasn’t enough. Unite the Lost had brought back more power than it had cost to enact the Skill—from a standpoint of conservation of energy, it made no sense to Felix. Yet he hadn’t the time to waste, figuring it out. He fell, emanating gold and silver trails that burst from him like solar flares. He was the sun, carrying a light that threatened to burn everything within him to dust.

I—I too—am here!

Vess appeared, her hand upon his physical shoulder transferred, phantom-like to ripple beside Felix’s descending form. She flickered and resolved into a brilliant Link, a cable made of solidified silver wind. It flowed and flashed, grasping at the power that spun off of Felix and nearly buckling…but she held on.

I have it! Vess’ words spilled out between stifled screams. I can—a guttural growl tore through their Link—I can shoulder the burden!

Goddamn, he was impressed.

Felix was filled with the might of the resurrected Abundance Anima. Its power, and a portion of its truth. Its significance. The screech of a tenku and the roar of a dragon ripped through his consciousness just as Felix emerged into scintillating chaos.

What Have You Done! Nym! What Trickery Is This?

Light blossomed among his core space, igniting the expansive dark with the light of a hundred orb-like particles and illuminating the sprawling, congealed mass of writhing purple-blue tentacles at his center. It flinched from the light, as if the gold and silver radiance hurt, and indeed its Essence-flesh charred and sizzled away into embers where it tried and failed to cross the boundary of Felix’s core space.

This Thing Hampers Me! You Should Not Be Able To! What Fell Artifact Has The Withered Given You?

The Creature let loose a bellow like twisted horns descending into basso fury and atonal, squealing violins. Waves tore through his core space, puckering the very fabric of his inner reality before it rebounded from those glimmering orbs in a cascade of golden-silver sparks.

Felix landed among the branches of his Divine Tree, and the crystal branch rang like a bell. The Creature might seem trapped, but it wasn’t fool proof. He needed to buy time.

The Spirit Tree’s power still bloomed from Felix’s visualized form, still poured in from the seemingly endless font of the Abundance Anima. Pit flickered into being beside him, a dazzling collection of lightning caught between wings of ice. Vess too, though she was a mere whisper, a cord that could have been a silver spear thrust through the nearby branches. Loops of golden-silver connected them to Felix, a constant flux of energies that threw his overgrown hair into a windblown mess. “You’re as stupid as you are ugly,” he said.

The crumbling, collapsing sinkhole that served as the Creature’s skull swung toward Felix’s voice, and its jaw hung open in a wordless, malevolent hiss.

With a flare of Felix’s mighty Intent and Willpower, he shoved his borrowed power down through his feet. The Divine Tree beneath him rang again, and this time the bell felt like it was the size of a planet. All that time preparing, Felix had built up his Divine Tree, and now it blossomed. As if fruit upon a galactic tree, nebulas of swirling golden-silver swelled into gaseous giants, spreading in an almost perfect circle around Felix’s entire core space.

The Creature spun, its skull tracking the sprouting trees with alarm. Tendrils lashed, rebounding from the Skills below as it was hedged in from all directions. This Is Impossible!

Crystalline roots rose from the shadows, bursting with opalescent shoots as their too-thin sapwood swelled into enormous, twisting barriers. The wood grew thick, rugged bark, turning vibrant with the thrum of newfound energies as Felix fed rivers of vigor into his Tree. It wasn’t just power and vitality though. It was Essence and Mana—and a portion of the Abundance’s very being. It was significance, matured and turned back around to the hand that brought it from the edge of Ruin’s oblivion.

All at once, across his entire core space, saplings erupted straight up from the barrier of roots. The baby trees thickened and grew, turning to adolescent copies of the Divine Tree itself, as sigaldry revealed itself across the expanse of crystalline root and branch.

The Creature spun, its broken skull hurling at the risen barrier of light and branch. A chorus of vibrations met the Creature’s substance and cast it back, burning its questing tendrils into spasming husks of charred Essence-flesh. How? it roared. How Have You Done This?

Felix bit his lip, drawing a rivulet of visualized blood that he knew was trickling down his actual chin too. “I’ve got a really good memory.”

The Creature moved.

Pit shrieked in warning, and Vess’ dimming presence flared in alarm, but Felix didn’t flinch. The tendril snapped out, almost too fast for him to perceive it, and splattered against a shield of opalescent light around the perimeter of his Divine Tree.

The Creature howled, withdrawing in pain as its appendage turned to ash. What Foulness? The Seal Cannot Accomplish Such Harm To Me!

It peered closer, its enormous, eyeless skull pressing cautiously toward Felix and the huge expanse of his Divine Tree. The Creature easily matched it in size, though its form ebbed and flowed like the tides of a cursed sea.

This Seal…This Tree—! How Did You Obtain This?

Felix pressed his Intent further than ever before. He had pushed himself during his long meditation, further than he’d ever pushed himself before, but it hadn’t been enough. The Seal is active, but it’s not enough!

Vess and Pit were shadows of their former presences—they could handle no more, and the streamers of potency ripped through Felix’s veins like barbed lightning. He bore down on it all, channeling everything he could into the Divine Tree.

Answer Me, Nym! How Did You Steal A Piece Of My Beloved? Its voice was a constant cacophony of Dissonance, threaded with only the patchiest of melodies. Rage suffused all of its Essence-flesh, turning its amorphous hide the color of a bloody bruise. What Have You Done To Vellus?

“Like I said,” Felix grunted. “You gods are all the same.”

This time there was no clever planning or deceitful sleight of hand. This time, the Creature didn’t hold itself back. It threw all of its might against Felix and his Divine Tree—the one he’d grown from a sliver of Vellus’ own power, and which he had used Vess’ visualization techniques and his Hunger’s Mind numbing effects to forge into a near-perfect replica of the Seal of the Breach.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was goddamn close. Close enough that a sympathetic connection between his Seal and the one in the Corporeal Realm could be established. A Link.

A phantom voice echoed through him. As without, so within.

The barrier flared, turning to a solid sheet of golden-silver as the Creature’s colossal bulk hit all of it at once. The new-grown trees around his core space swayed with the impact, flashes of liquid, prismatic light flowing down the roots in wild streams.

I Will Destroy You, Nym. You And All That You Love. Your Empire Will Fall, And No Matter What Aid The Withered Has Given You, It Will Not Be Enough.

The Creature’s voice boomed, louder than anything Felix had experienced, even the Maw. The pressure of its unhinged words drew more sparks from the barrier, which had begun to bend ever so slightly outward. Every muscle in Felix’s body was tense as he moved caustic flames through his pathways as fast as he could.

I Stole The Withered’s Very Power! A Mere Sliver Of Glorious Godhood, And I Bested The Scion Of Misrule Itself! I Claimed The Powers Of Flesh, Even Dissonance—The Warped Echo Of Harmony! I Shackled Them To My Will And Laid Low All That It Cared For! Just As I’ll Do To You, Nym!

The barrier bent further, a steady buckling that was turning the golden-silver light to a distinct, bloody crimson. Felix could see the gnashing teeth of the mountainous Creature, biting at the light as parts of its Essence-flesh turned to charred dust. It was driven to the brink.

He Called Me The Treacherous One. Ha! I Was To Make This World Better! To Remove The Dross! Yttin, Primordial, And This Seal Are Nothing More Than Temporary Delays Of That Fate. You Cannot Run From The Inevitable, Nym!

“Holy shit, do you ever shut up?” Felix snapped, as the barrier impacted the crystalline branches of the Divine Tree. He was so close, as golden-silver sigaldry spread in complicated patterns beneath his feet—patterns that bore a distinct similarity to those in his Stronghold.

For Even Daring To Touch My Beloved, I Will Not Stop Until You Have Fallen Before Me! For Stealing Her Potency, I Will Puppet Your Flesh And Force You To Hunt Down And Kill All That You Love! I’ll Cut You From The Grand Harmony Itself And Feed You The Twisted Anemic Strains Of Dissonance!

“You idiot,” Felix stepped forward, his feet splashing among pools of liquid light. Sigaldry spun out further and further. “I said you made a mistake, and you never once asked what that was.”

The barrier shrieked, pressed to its utmost limit by the Creature’s furious assault…but it was utterly subsumed by the tolling sound of ten thousand chiming bells and the stentorian peal of a crystalline tree the size of a town. Golden-silver sigils connected, finally connecting the last bits of the sprawling design Felix had worked into the Seal.

"You said you claimed flesh and Dissonance. That you controlled them.” Felix bared his teeth, revealing a mouthful of bristling fangs. “Those are mine."

Sovereign of Flesh!

Though it was not a true Body, the Creature’s Essence-flesh was more than valid as far as his Transcendent Skill was concerned. Immediately Felix’s Willpower locked over the Creature’s own, and its writhing form was hauled bodily from the edges of his core space. The barriers faded back into quiescence, their waterfalls of sparks gone, as Essence-flesh was pressed and packed into a far more restrictive space.

You Cannot! Nym! This Is—I Am Above You!

It fought, tooth and nail, but it was useless. All of its strength seemed to fail before the Title-boosted onslaught of Felix’s Will, and the fury of his sovereignty.

Sovereign of Flesh is level 85!

…

Sovereign of Flesh is level 88!

Tendrils of Dissonance and Harmony spat outward from its collapsing form, waves that tried to send fissures of pain and torment through Felix’s Mind. They met instead the stone-fastness of his Bastion, flared as hard as he could manage. The Creature’s assault battered into him, shaving stone and sending cracks through his modified Mind Skill.

You Cannot Hold Me! Your Body May Be Mighty, But Your Mind Is Weak!

More cracks spread through his Epic Skill, and pieces of his reforged walls began to shear away. Felix screamed as lances of pain cut through his resistances like red hot pokers. The Creature howled with mad laughter.

Yet, he dared to turn away from his Bastion entirely, putting everything on the line as he pressed a massive chunk of his Mana toward the Seal itself.

Cardinal Flame!

The Seal ignited, bathing the endless dark with a dome of impassible light and the overwhelming strains of a concerto so complex it beggared the imagination. It was the music of many things. Dissonance and fury, expansive hunger and aching silence as the Creature rebounded from the threshold of his Bastion. The Creature reared back, struck suddenly dumb as everything hit it at once.

Very distantly, Pit trilled in triumph.

You Cannot Contain Me! The thing’s head pivoted within the cage of Willpower Felix had forged, and its pulsating Essence-flesh twitched in unresponsive outrage. I Am Eternal And Elemental! A Goddess!

“Fuck the gods,” Felix growled. “Hunger!”

The tiny solar system around him shuddered, the light of the Tree and Seal dimming as if an object suddenly cloaked them all. The Creature stared down at the darkness it had so far ignored. A darkness that was bending the light and sound all around it into a halo of shuddering, inescapable Need.

“Sic ‘em.”