It was nothing like her previous times using [Dominate], and maybe Sable should have expected that. Her entire consciousness ignited, and the black-essence avatar fell to the ground, shrieking—putting on a display of exactly how Sable felt, even if she’d been locked in place and struck silent from her own pain, rather than writhing and thrashing.

Inside the bubble of shadows, the cultist likewise screamed.

The pressure inside her skull mounted as two wills clashed. Using [Dominate] had been a last ditch effort during the uncertainty of the fight, and at the first indicators that the cultist’s real plans had been put into effect, trying to subjugate her.

If it hadn’t been for [Sovereign Mind] granting her massive resistance to such effects, she surely wouldn’t have even made it this far. Whatever powers the cultist were dabbling with, Sable suspected a low level like her, dragon or not, shouldn’t have been able to put up such a fight. The cultist had sounded frustrated over how long it was taking.

Her vision darkened, the town square of Verindale fading around her. Her entire existence became the mental struggle of her against the cultist.

Then a third will appeared.

She and Nexr splashed impotently in a shallow pool of water, struggling like toddlers against each other, but what broached the surface was a leviathan from the deep. It erased Sable’s conviction in a moment, and she desperately flung herself out of [Dominate], trying to break the link to the cultist’s mind.

There had been a third party present—or at least a passageway to one. The barest fragment of a goddess turned her attention toward Sable and Nexr, and their consciousnesses boiled even from a sideways glance.

For one fraction of a second, the image of a hollow woman’s face stared at her, impossibly gaunt, mouth gaping open. A hunger radiated from the icon, so intense it eradicated all other thought. Sable stared impotently at the image etched into her mind, unable to look away, and she was vaguely aware of screeching in the background—though whether it was Nexr or the aspect, or even her, she had no clue.

Even just proximity to the primordial force—and the goddess of consumption was no sapient being, Sable could tell in an instant—had her sense of self sloughing away like filth in the rain. This link between the goddess, Nexr, and Sable was impossibly fragile, the tiniest possible strand that could exist, but even that was enough to rewrite the foundation of who she was. Something sprouted inside her, a gnawing hunger that matched the infinite hollowness of the ghastly face sprawling across her vision. It didn’t seem to be an effort of the goddess’s; the eldritch thing didn’t seem to have intentions, not as she knew them, but was rather some primordial concept that Nexr had somehow joined them to.

Then, finally, [Dominate] broke, and the hunger stopped growing. She was flung back into reality, the battle of minds thoroughly squashed with the intrusion of the far greater existence. The leviathan swimming past two simple pond creatures, disrupting their pathetic struggling.

Though drained to a degree Sable couldn’t possibly begin to explain, she knew the danger was far from over. Cracking her eyes open, she saw that the screaming was, indeed, from Nexr, whose shadow shield had dissipated. The man writhed on the ground, in extreme agony, his hands clamped to his eyes as he wailed. Perhaps the man had been even more affected than she, being the one who’d made the true link to the goddess—and maybe [Sovereign Mind] had once again saved her?

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The black gem radiating unholy power had fallen to the side. The long ribbon of black essence linking it and the aspect still streamed between the two, though the aspect remained as incapacitated as Nexr, twitching and screaming on the ground.

Sable herself was hardly spared from the catastrophic effects of glimpsing the goddess. Again, she suspected the only reason she hadn’t crumpled entirely was her skill that massively boosted her mental resistances.

She staggered to her feet, barely managing to do so. Not only had she taken half a dozen serious injuries from the aspect’s black blade, and burned through a significant portion of her mana, but the goddess’s influence lingered—hunger gnawed deep in her stomach, and she feared whatever that brief contact had been hadn’t come without consequences.

But Nexr was undefended, his shield made from shadows dissipated. His avatar, too, hadn’t recovered as quickly as Sable. They didn’t have [Sovereign Mind] to help.

She didn’t waste the advantage. The hottest, most potent torrent of white-blue flame she could drag out of herself spewed from her mouth, and the goblin cultist was wreathed in a different type of primordial essence.

The screaming cut off as the goblin, lacking defenses, died in an instant. She let up on the assault just in time to see the black gem crack, then dissolve, sinking into the ground like the black goo from Gadenrock

One problem had been solved, but not all of them. Though the link had been broken, and the cultist killed, the aspect remained—something she discovered in potent fashion. She howled as a gigantic black blade carved into her arm, biting a foot deep and nearly severing the limb.

The two of them returned to the vicious brawl from before, and the aspect didn’t seem to have been weakened by its master’s death—though it was disoriented from the previous clash of wills.

Its endurance had been greatly diminished. As she ripped and tore with her claws and teeth, the gouge-marks she made in its shadow-flesh didn’t heal as quickly. It could no longer draw on the gem to restore itself, perhaps?

If this had been the start of the fight, it would’ve meant a guaranteed victory. But for all it had been weakened, so had Sable. The last leg of the fight was a dizzy blur as Sable fought desperately for her life. With no more shocking surprises to come, it was as simple as her body and spells against the hulking, overpowering form of the aspect. A fight that was familiar in some ways, but never to such razor-thin margins.

Rather than magic or fire-breath, as perhaps fitting a sorceress, the frantic duel ended with Sable ripping out the shadow-creature’s throat, as she’d first tried to. She didn’t stop there. With magically enchanted claws, she tore the thing apart piece by piece. Each severed chunk of flesh melted into black essence and disappeared into the earth. Finally, just to be certain, she hobbled backward and scorched the clump of goo with fire breath.

When her flames cut off, a bubbling pool of black tar revealed itself. It quickly evaporated, the last evidence of the [Lesser Aspect] disappearing, and she sagged into the ground, barely able to stay standing. A second later, the familiar notification of a level up hit her, confirming she’d won—but she could barely pay attention to it, and disregarded it entirely.

She looked around the town square. It had been set ablaze from the fight, and even through her exhaustion she felt nauseous at whether or not the people of Verindale would be able to put it out before it spread. She was, unfortunately, so far from being in a position to worry about that that it was nearly comical.

She mentally groped around her surroundings and found Aylin’s and Granite’s minds. She called them to her. She didn’t feel great about leaving a bonfire behind, or the sixteen Bonecracker elites she’d brought on this mission, but her survival instincts were all that kept her body going. She operated purely on self-preservation and instinct.

Her minions arriving, she scooped them off, then unsteadily took off into the sky. She almost wasn’t capable of doing so.

Barely a victor, and sporting grievous, nearly lethal injuries, she fled the burning battlefield that had once been Verindale’s town square.