“Now, then,” Lyrhea said to no one in particular as she walked down a flight of tilted stairs towards a shattered wall. “Shall we pick up where that bitch forced me to stop?”

She moved to the shattered wall and took a step outside. Had this building not been in the position it was right now, and had the nearby buildings not been in the positions they were in, her single step would have led to Lyrhea walking into the air and falling more than 20 stories to her death.

However, the nearest fallen building leaned against the one she was leaving, allowing her to drop merely a few meters to a solid surface rather than falling many more and breaking some bones in the process. As she landed, she heard a hissing sound and a smile crossed her face.

She lowered her posture and slinked over to a bit of nearby cover and peeked around the side of it, locking her gaze on the first tool that she would need to make more Lyrheans. When one heard the word ‘tool’ they likely would have thought that she needed something unnatural in nature, like some piece of machinery or whatnot.

This was not the case, as that which she needed was, in fact, just a few snakes. Yes, literal snakes. As in, the kind with no limbs that a certain sect of people claim tempted the first human man and woman to eat a certain forbidden piece of fruit.

The snakes she needed were nothing major or overly powerful, either. They would be used to create more Lyrheans, yes, but as they were not overly powerful, the Lyrheans she would be making using their bodies would be middling in terms of power at best.

At the very least, though, they would have the intellect of a human and the hunter’s instincts of a snake, not to mention the previous experience of the snakes used in the process as well. They would be the first, but they would be a stopgap measure at best, or so Lyrhea thought.

She had not taken into account several factors that would see her more than willing to eradicate the native snake population in an effort to build a nation of powerful beings that lived under her thumb, though.

…

“Damn it.” the Ranger spat as she pulled herself up from the ledge that she had grabbed. “I’ll kill that monster next time.”

She pulled herself onto the roof of the building that she had nearly landed on and picked herself up. That damn monster-person was a true danger, but with her animal companions out and about doing her business she had no real option regarding fighting that monster-person aside from doing everything herself.

Her Patron had told her to prepare the area for that particular hunt, and she had done just that, but she had not expected that the simulated human-level intellect of the monster-humanoid to be that advanced. Her teleportation scroll had been a one-use tool, and while it had nearly allowed her to kill the creature with minimal effort, she had made a classic blunder and announced her presence before dealing that fatal strike.

Se could not help it, though, as she was only human. Humans were, even after the Apocalypse, or as some called it, the Fog Fall, far from perfect.

She dusted herself off and pulled a now-broken talisman from her pockets and chucked it aside. It had saved her from death, invoking a spell of Feather Fall the moment she began to truly accelerate while falling to what should very well have been certain doom.

She then looked up towards where she had been thrown from and narrowed her gaze, letting her Hunter’s Sight peirce through the mist and spot the hole that the monster-bitch should have been standing at. Before she even did lay her eyes upon that place, though, she had already nocked another arrow and aimed so that she could arc her shot through the hole.

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She was, of course, irritated that her prey was not there once she saw through the mist, and she loosened her bowstring’s tension slowly and put the arrow back into her quiver.

“Next time, you won’t be so lucky.”

With those words, the Ranger turned and left. She could not hunt the target for a while now, as it would no doubt be on high alert.

She would need to wait, bide her time, and prepare again. This next time, though, there would be no escape, and she would have her Animal Companions ready to help her hunt down and kill her prey. That snake-person's head would adorn the mantle of the Guild she had sworn her allegiance to, and her God would reward her for that hunt.

…

In a void devoid of all but a single being with rapidly increasing numbers of heads all linked to a rapidly enlarging slender body, a hydra known as the Primordial Serpent watched the new sandbox of the Gods and the System with a mix of emotions. On the one hand, it was glad that destiny was finally taking its course, on the other, it could feel that its existence was being altered as destiny itself rewove itself and was altered by time and action alike.

Humans, a species that by all rights were unremarkable save for their sheer refusal to die off, were more powerful than any God or even the System had given them credit for, and the new world that had been made specifically for the various Gods to make champions and play around was being turned into less of their sandbox and more of humanity’s.

To many Gods and to some parts of the System itself this was sacrilege and blasphemy, but while she herself was of two minds about it, she had to admit that humans were, as a whole, far better building blocks and tools than any other race had ever been. Sapient race, of course.

Humans were creative, imaginative, and born survivors, which is more than could be said for the thousands of other sapient species that had been transplanted to the new reality that had been forged from the building blocks of an entire universe. She patted herself on the back as she watched her Chosen strut about the stage, congratulating herself for her foresight.

Lyrhea was giving her all of this power… much more than any being ever had over the course of thousands of iterations of the Great Game. While her form constantly shifting was an annoyance, she couldn’t help but marvel at the new powers and abilities that were laid at her ‘feet’. Humans, in their infinite imagination, created countless serpents, both real and fictional, and now all of them were nothing more than another aspect of herself.

What had been a single head before now were millions. She was no mere serpent any longer, now being a cross between what she was, the mythical Norse beast known as Jormungandr, the Lernaean Hydra, and more.

And as each second passed, more power was given to her, and more dreams of terrible serpents became a part of her being. Humans could not be tamed, nor could they be truly chained by a God or Pantheon of them, and so there was no point in trying.

Her Chosen was far more useful and powerful when free to act, so long as Lyrhea knew her place. Lyrhea was the perfect Chosen, a human, a being of unimaginable and nigh-infinite potential, crossed with her own existence. The more powerful Lyrhea and her people got, the more powerful she would become, and once they ruled the world, she would be more powerful than entire Pantheons.

But a true hunter knew when to wait, when to plot and plan and scheme, and when to strike. She would grow for now, and when she felt it was right, she would act. She could already pull off some Divine Intervention right now if she wanted, but that would draw too much attention.

She would watch, wait, talk with her Chosen, and bide her time, all to prepare for the strike that would shake the Order of the World.