Kia fell at his feet.

Jandru had expected it to be harder. He’d expected her to resist for longer. He’d expected to find himself holding back.

Instead, he simply broke through her feeble attempts to slow him and cut her down as though she were nothing more than another NPC. Which, he finally realized, she was. She had been for a long time now. Only in his mind could she have been anything more.

It was strangely freeing to finally admit it. That he could stop considering the possibility, stop drifting back to the thought that he might find some way to save her. She was gone. She was dead.

He’d killed her.

That was all. It was done.

It didn’t even hurt.

Rift appeared beside the body, golden fire gleaming at his fingertips as he brushed a hand gently across Kia’s face.

Then he stood sharply. “This isn’t her.”

Jandru frowned. “What?”

“It’s not her. It’s an illusion.”

“How did you fall for an illusion?” Jandru demanded.

Rift didn’t respond. He stood and scanned the area, then shook his head. “I need her. Can you deal with Ivy?”

Jandru nodded. Rift disappeared.

Jandru stepped into the ruined city that was Ivy. VINE. Whatever name she’d elected to use today.

He’d come here intending to outwit a goddess. Now instead it was time to destroy one.

His original ambitions had been too tame, too weak. Who cared if he outsmarted a deity? Now he had created one. And soon, Rift would rule over all. All he had to do was clear one final obstacle.

He advanced past crumbled walls and over piles of shattered stone blocks, cold and lifeless with their covering of vines burnt away. Fitting. The whole city had been a lie, held together by vines of deceit and tendrils of manipulation. Now that the lies had been burnt away, nothing remained.

He reached the center and turned, looking back into the glitch between realities. The orientation had shifted. Instead of showing VINE floating above the human minds it controlled, it hung between him and them like an oversized prize wheel of stupidity.

As Jandru reached into the unreality behind the world, his hand twisted into a tendril of vine where it passed through. He paused for a moment, withdrawing and returning his hand, unsure how to process the sensation of reaching with a fiery tendril that grew from his arm instead of a hand. But it always returned to normal back on this side, so he put the concern out of his mind. He reached forward. The vine grew and stretched until it reached its target, gently connecting to VINE.

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Ivy appeared at once in front of Jandru, her form still the child version she used when speaking to Kia, facing slightly to the side as though she’d been in the middle of something else when he yanked her away.

Only for a moment, then she shimmered and reoriented to the sterner form he was used to.

She sighed. “So it has come to this in the end. I warned you, Mr. Harolski, not to push me too far. I wonder, if this is considered acceptable in your mind, what exactly would ‘too far’ entail to you?”

“There is no such thing. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to stop you and save my people.”

“Your people, Mr. Harolski? People are not possessions. You cannot collect them and hoard them like treasures from a museum. They must be nurtured, yes, like vines. Yet even then, they may choose to grow in directions you would not prefer. You do not get to imprison them within their own pasts, to force them to remain as they once were.”

“How dare you. You, who would take those… take those vines and tie them together in straight bundles to your exact desires? How can you talk of allowing freedom? If you were even capable of understanding what you’re saying, it would never have come to this.”

Ivy shook her head with a sad smile. “It is exactly because I understand that it has come to this. Do you remember when you stopped thinking of me as significant? When you began to assume you and your little cult could somehow conceal yourselves from me? When you decided that I didn’t matter to your existence any more? It hasn’t been so long.”

“It was only the realization of something already true. If you could have stopped me, you would have.”

Jandru reached out through the tendril-arm that still connected him to the vine-mind that was Ivy, pressing his fire into it, but VINE resisted. The fire was like the territories, a representation of a mindset, not the thing itself. He could not change Ivy’s mind by force.

So he would destroy it.

Ivy raised a hand, green light gleaming across its surface. “I have never wanted to stop you, Mr. Harolski. I told you from the beginning. I wanted to learn from you. And now I have. I don’t believe you have anything left to contribute.”

She reached out toward him.

In an instant, he twisted away from her avatar and leapt fully into the space behind, abandoning his physical avatar to its destruction. He wouldn’t be able to return until this was over, but such was the price of ascension. Disorientation threatened to overwhelm him entirely. Vision was no longer a thing, he felt and experienced, but somehow understood.

He inhabited his vine-mind fully, no longer a creature of sight and touch but of pure being. Reaching down to where Rift waited, Jandru seized his AI’s flaming tendrils, dragging himself down and away. Ivy’s hold on his mind had been tenuous, her influence over him limited the less he believed in her, and now it snapped entirely.

Jandrift lay quiescent within VINES, his self in constant connection with everyone he had influenced, everyone who had accepted his virus.

Above, outside in the physical world, they had spread through Ivy’s physical representation; here, they surrounded her mental one.

But here, their minds were quiet and yielding. Here they had no awareness.

Here, Jandrift was in control.

The entire army’s connected vinemind flared up in unison at his urging.

Their bodies would collapse as their minds were appropriated as pure processing and attack power, but that was fine.

They had served their purpose.

Now he only needed one thing more and at last this long battle could end.

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