A sapling stands in the middle of a barren, rocky plain. It is covered with leaves that are blue like pure ocean water. Its trunk is thin, bone white, and covered with light gray streaks. Its leaves are very brittle; it is quite a fragile thing. A lifeless galaxy surrounded it.

This tree did not emerge from nothing, it was created.

—

A woman stands in the middle of a field of white. This woman is beautiful, her skin like ivory, her figure lithe and naked. Her eyes and her hair are purest black, falling over her shoulders.

She is not human.

On top of her head are two curved horns. From her back extend two feathered black wings with a wingspan three times her height.

“Where am I? I was…”

The woman recalls her prior moments with her army. Her dragon knights. They were laying waste to the frontlines of the heroes. With her being incarnated on the battlefield, her soldiers would exterminate every last hero and–

Why am I here now? What happened?

As if to answer her questions, something appears before her. Its form is grotesque and asymmetrical, a blob of shifting flesh. Her face twists in unreserved fury, recognizing this being. She raises her hand towards it, but is surprised.

Why am I in this form?

The woman tries to shapeshift into her non-humanoid spirit shell, the same form that had produced terror in the eyes of the humans. In that form she could destroy the sky itself, a terror on every battlefield. Yet she cannot transform.

She tries to will armor to appear on her human form. She tries to adorn her face with her black helmet. She tries to change her hands into all manner of deadly weaponry.

“What is this? I can’t…”

The creature before her grows larger and larger, eventually blotting out the sky and horizon ahead of her. A million eyes appear on the surface of the being’s skin, all of them staring directly at the woman. Thousands of mouths with serrated teeth appear, all of them smiling derisively at her.

“So, phantom brother.” She speaks scornfully, trying to mask her unease. “What sort of trap have you–”

A million voices drown out her question. All of them were laughing wildly, in pure self-satisfaction. The woman grits her teeth, her sharp canines seeking blood.

“Irakish…” The voices answer, almost drowning themselves out as each voice speaks the same words. “This place will be your grave.”

The formless entity reaches out towards the woman, Irakish, with several dozen misshapen arms, all of them containing a unique number of segments. Irakish dodges the attack while activating magic defenses.

Yet, her body and her magic are so slow. This form is not one she normally wore, it was a form that would represent her before her children. Likewise her magic was not meant to be used in this form either. The grotesque limbs attack her one after another and Irakish uses her magic to marginally defend herself against the onslaught.

I can still use magic in this place but it is unpleasant and unwieldy… I cannot adjust my spiritual form to what I want it to be either. Wait… Even my mind is being restricted! My magic should be stronger!

The limbs thrown at her tear away her magic armor faster than she can reconjure it. A stray limb covered in claws and suction cups grabs her leg and tears off her skin, flaying her left calf. Its touch burns off her tendons and ligaments as well. Irakish screams in agony before using her wings to quickly fly back.

“Wh-What? How are–” More appendages reach out for her. She uses lightning magic to hold off their reach while she retreats further away. Her enemy is undamaged and only laughs even louder.

Irakish flies while her leg regenerates. All the lost skin restores itself without scars. The memory of the pain lingers. She tries to reach the edge of the white plains but they stretch forever. Furthermore, no matter how far she flies, the grotesque flesh mass is always able to reach her.

This… is his domain. How did he create this place? How did he bring me here against my will? Why… do I feel this potency of pain? I-I need to figure out how to escape.

Irakish struggles. She uses her magic to defend and attack, going through every spell at her disposal. The pain is… troublesome. Even if her vitality is almost endless and her mana is nearly bottomless, the agony…

Hours pass.

Irakish has been burned, boiled, electrocuted, sliced, pierced, and crushed. The pain continually corrodes her mind. Yet, she can still fight. She can still wield her magic even though there is slightly less of it remaining. The cackling of her enemy truly reviles her.

As the first day passes in this domain, her pain becomes more and more bearable. She grits her teeth, the only thing she can do right now and it helps. She feels slighted however as her enemy is not seeking out a fatal blow.

He’s… He’s toying with me? How dare you… How dare you…

Irakish conjures forth magic spells that would have destroyed mountains and cities. She continues to assess the special physics of this realm in order to understand its properties and a possible escape. She calls out for her children, her armies, yet no one can be reached and no one arrives at her call.

How did he do this? How could he prepare something like this? How!?

As weeks pass, her resolve to seek escape starts to waver for the first time. She realized a while ago that her attacks meant nothing to her enemy so she has stuck to dodging his own attacks in order to preserve her mana. Yet her opponent has only grown faster and stronger.

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Every moment her enemy's limbs touch her skin, she is tormented again and again. The laughter is grating to hear and she receives no break from it.

She slowly loses her will to fight against her enemy.

She slowly loses her will to fight with her armies on the battlefield in reality.

She only wishes for an end to her suffering and exhausts all options to achieve it.

It is only after the end of the third month in this realm that she is left with only one conceivable option remaining.

Goodbye, my children… Goodbye, my son.

Irakish flies directly into the mass of appendages. She tears them off one by one while other limbs rip off her magical shields and destroy her flesh. There is no point to being in this realm anymore. If escape isn’t possible then she can use everything she has left in order to die while at the very least achieving a warrior’s demise.

While barely defending herself from the onslaught, Irakish activates her omega magic. It is magic that is thoroughly able to destroy anything physical. It won’t work on her opponent who has a spiritual core and shell remaining, but it will allow her in this purely mortal form to destroy herself completely.

Perhaps death is the escape from this place.

Her skin starts to shine in gold as the spell matrix activates.

She speaks the long incantation without being interrupted and when she finally reaches the last syllable, the last moment before her oblivion–

“No.”

Irakish’s magic stops activating. The realm changes from a land of pure white to one of pure black. Yet both Irakish and the monster are visible to each other in this sea of empty.

“...What?”

“Did you really think I would let you die so easily, sister?”

Irakish is thrown away from the phantom god, her bones breaking as she crashes onto the ultrahard floor of this inverted realm. She opens her eyes. Her body was being slowly torn away by the onslaught of her brother’s attacks as she tried to activate her spell. Yet now, it appears the exact same as it had when she first arrived in this realm three months ago.

I… I didn’t regenerate myself… I didn’t even try to!

A pervasive horror fills her being. She stares in horror at the gaze of her brother.

“You’re not really here, Irakish. Did I forget to inform you? Your mind is here, the most important parts of it anyway. Yet, your body is… Well, I’m slowly consuming it in a ‘realer’ space.”

Irakish’s face twists in anger, fear, sadness, and eventually desperation. This is enough. This is all she can handle. She feels sick. Pathetic. She is weak, all her effort made in vain. A part of her wishes to surrender, to beg for mercy, for a swift and painless death.

Yet, she knows, doesn’t she? Her enemy has no mercy to give.

What would be the point?

“I understand.”

Irakish ceases all movement, standing before the enemy with her eyes closed, her expression empty. She will not beg for mercy. She will accept her own demise without a word. She was weak and, on this stage of power, the weak are not granted anything. Still…

You will not see me succumb to your horror.

The laughter ends.

“Fun’s over, huh. Well, this is who you are, isn’t it…” All of its mouths closed, the phantom god looks upon her with its million eyes.

His many mouths sneer once again.

“...I’m not going to kill you yet, sister. I have an experiment to run. We’re both going to be here for quite a long time. I’m going to be enjoying myself while waiting for… Well, you’ll see.”

No response. The sneers stiffen.

“...Our father will come for you and he will fall into this trap as well. Do you see? Then I will consume him too. You understand what that means, don’t you? While we wait for him, I will take my time… I will take pleasure in your torment, sister. You will feel unending pain. Then, your children will face extinction. Do you see?”

Irakish remains silent. The endless maws twist into frowns of annoyance, finding that he cannot get a rise out of her anymore.

“We’ll see how long you can keep this facade up. I will break you.”

Not even a twitch of her face. It was the only revenge she was capable of now. Her only recourse when all else was lost to her. She would not allow him to see her acknowledge him even once more, before her end. The moment she left this world, she would still have her pride.

He will not claim it.

—

An entity appears on the battlefield.

It was watching its daughter leading her armies until she had disappeared the moment the unseen one had incarnated himself. They had both left without a trace. From afar, the being had searched the scene of the continuing battle between mortals, trying to discern where its child had gone.

It scoured the entire world for her, a process taking hours. She was nowhere and the being started to feel desperation. There was only one option left for it. Heavenly embodiment. The process by which a divine entity could incarnate itself upon the surface of the world.

My first manifestation in a hundred thousand years… All for her…

The being, the Jiltre Vastiga, appears on the battlefield of its child’s conquest. The warriors in the midst of combat try to comprehend its image, yet they all freeze in fear, shock and insanity as they try to behold its form with their various mortal and immortal eyes.

They were staring at the sun descended upon the world, unable to process its sheer majesty so close to it. By the mere fact of its descent, the entire planet’s tectonic plates shift, initiating several earthquakes as well as a tsunami that kills thirty million intelligent creatures instantly with hundreds of millions more injured.

The entire battlefield beholds the face of the truest divinity they have ever experienced. Several reject their own ruling deities in the face of this incomprehensible existence, as if to appease it.

Though, the Vastiga is not concerned with any of them. It is concerned with the strange phenomenon in front of it, one that only it can see while incarnated. A large mesh is encompassing the battlefield. It was between the physical plane and the spiritual one, yet not in either, even now just barely perceivable.

That’s why I couldn’t see it from afar… He was really capable of… this?

The mesh’s design is unbelievably complex. The Vastiga can… see Irakish encased within as if trapped in an unbreakable, unbendable latticework of spiritual matter. She was asleep and her body was being… consumed.

How much… How much mana must he have been amassing in order to make this? Thousands of years of uninterrupted effort, not even including the complexity involved in crafting its design. This is where he’s holding my daughter? This is where he’s absorbing her power… and memory…

The Vastiga approaches the trap with Irakish at its center. It reaches out a tendril to unravel the complexity. It spends considerable portions of its mental capacity to find a way to burn away the net. Eventually, pieces of the net start to break away. Tendril after tendril of the Vastiga’s spiritual shell tear apart the defenses one by one.

It has nearly destroyed each cord of the trap. It has nearly reached Irakish. It touches Irakish’s spiritual form in an attempt to pull her out of the spell and reconstitute her mind near the core of the world, a place of security.

“I knew it.”

The voice of the phantom god bleeds the world of all colors. The Vastiga hurriedly extends its perception so it can see what’s happening on the battlefield. All motion has started to slow. The Vastiga tries to escape but it finds itself trapped within this space, its body tangled in newly emerging masses of spiritual vines.

The Vastiga feels fear for the first time.