Spells didn't work on either side. Our resistances were too strong. Glorious melee combat in the name of the [Emperor] also didn't work, that stupid Exp Burn put me at a times-one-hundred disadvantage. This fight would last longer than the lifetime I had as a human, even after factoring in all my longevity Perks. Which sat at 8,547 years [1] to the century of base lifespan right now.
So, let's try something I was thinking of for some time. Time for some Eldritch Kaiju action. But first, a classic line.
I stared at her and shouted triumphantly as I focused on my Perk. "This is not my final form!"
> > Kyuubi Metamorphosis
The torii gate that appeared was black, indicating the urgency with which the guardian should act. The Empire was sinking and I felt compelled to save my Realm. I darted in and a sparkling white giant fox came out on the other side. My fur waved in the raging cataclysmic winds like fire, illuminating the back of the torii and the ground below. Were it not for the shape, I would be the fourth moon in the sky. Twenty-six bushy tails streamed behind me, impossibly attached to my spine. Each of a unique blend of color and texture, each representing one of the magics I allegedly mastered.
Marlowe would laugh at my face if I told him that. To him, I was just a dabbler who brute-forced my way around my spells. I could still kick his soft silken golem ass anytime even though he had centuries to train his craft, so who was in the right? Nobody.
"Changing shapes will not deliver you from me, Anomaly!" The Brood-Harlot taunted.
The 陰陽星の玉 ("Hoshi-no-Tama" Yin-Yang Star Ball) appeared before me and I bit it, safely storing this fragment of my soul inside my mouth.
I wasn't done yet. Using Snowdrop's centaur body as a template, I shifted my neck and head into a humanoid torso. Which was Snowdrop's, her long white mane connecting the crown of my head to the rest of my furry body. The pegasus wings sprouted above my animal lower body shoulder blades and extended sixty meters in each direction, three times my body length. I then shifted my shoulders to the pixie, growing a second set of gossamer dragonfly wings. Which I replaced for eagle wings, they too grew white feathers and extended as much as the second set. Each wing was a weapon. If she was so sturdy that death by a thousand cuts was all I could do to her, then I would not lack appendages with which to strike.
The canine fox paws switched into feline with their sharper and more propensity to deliver a critical hit with a claw attack. On second thought, It was not Lovecraftian enough. What I needed were tentacles. More tentacles. Recalling a dozen lives wasted by Bundeus' fanatics, one of them took place in the ocean, a secluded species of mollusk ladies who sported an octopus' lower body, The Scylla. I swapped my rear paws for a skirt of such grabby appendages, then the front paws for another set.
The body of a fox twenty meters long, the torso of a woman with proportional size. Two sets of wings, two hundred and forty meters long (after stretching), one on each part. Twenty-six tails that could stretch up to three hundred and twenty meters, then sixteen tentacles in place of the fox legs, each tentacle reaching a hundred and twenty meters. And I still had two perfectly functional arms and my unicorn horn. All that clad in soft white fur that glowed in the night.
Now we were talking! I hope that is Lovecraftian enough. The System categorized me as Gargantuan, with an x16 multiplier to HP and damage. The [Unicorn King Spear] and my armor grew to match my size, courtesy of {Resize Arms and Armor}. Which worked on the damned Adamantite plates even though I couldn't enchant them.
I extended my wings and like a white biplane, I soared to fight for air superiority.
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Instead of jousting like before, I intended to put every single one of my forty (don't blink or you'll lose count) grasping appendages to good use. She couldn't outmaneuver me because I too had the same time dilation spell as her. As we clashed again, I sent my tails all around us in a wide fan, wrapping around her wings, neck, front legs, hind legs, and tail. I ducked below her and dragged myself until my tentacles found purchase on her underbelly. I was upside down but I didn't mind. The suckers of my tentacles were already stuck to her scales. And here in the middle, my tails reached enough on either side to hold all of her body.
{Absolute Clinging} allowed me to latch onto her and also made it impossible to dislodge me by any known means. With her wings pinned, we plummeted to the ground as whatever buoyancy magic dragons used to fly despite aerodynamics was linked to functional wings.
"Get off of me!" She whined and growled in annoyance.
"Why don't you teleport now, bitch?" I taunted her.
She grimaced and refused to answer. We both knew what would happen if she did.
The best part of this setup was that I now could stab her to my heart's content. And since she couldn't evade, {Cruel Backstab} granted me its bonus. My damage went from sixty to a hundred million to one billion to a billion and a half. Now her health was coming down with each stab.
The stab-feast ended not before I could shave thirty percent of her health, forcing her to cast healing spells on herself, which I often countered. It was a bother to control this many appendages and keep situational awareness while counterspelling and stabbing, but three hundred points in Mind were for that. I felt my focus hone to a laser edge.
We rolled on the ground of the slowly sinking Empire, bouncing off fields and indestructible sleeping trees. I stopped a moment to wonder what would happen if the Empire was swallowed by the ocean. Would the sleeping people drown? Probably not.
However, she was still two sizes bigger than me and this moment of distraction was very costly. I felt searing pain as she tore my tails apart, tearing them with sheer strength. Each tail took only three seconds to regrow but she could break them faster than I could regenerate. Like Alloralla's fight with the red dragon, I had to restrain her better than just grappling with my own body. I started to weave silk strands out of each of the sixteen tentacles. They were orders of magnitude stronger now. I released her tail and wings and used the new appendages to help restrain her neck and arms. She might be stronger, but I could do teamwork with myself.
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With a thought, my severed tails which were strewn around hills and forests went to the item box.
I released her head when I felt she was about to break another two tails with her neck. She twisted her head on the long serpentine appendage and tried to bite me off of her. My floating shield, which had also grown to gargantuan proportions blocked her fanged maw, then the second shield defended the tail from the other side. I poked another hole in her underbelly for four billion damage (a critical) as her dark red blood squirted all over me and the ground around us.
I hope another open-air Dungeon doesn't form.
"You cannot win, my numbers are bigger than yours," I shouted, "And you'll soon run out of Exp to burn. Nothing to kill here!"
"I have you exactly where I want, Anomaly!" She hissed.
"Was it too hard to just leave me alone, bitch?"
"This is our world! You do not belong here!"
I tried to make Pandora assume her {Aspect of the Void} but nothing happened. It would be nice if she could disintegrate this pesky mortal (yes, she threw away her Divinity).
Shoving my hand into the big wound I made, I tore a loose scale off. The thing was five meters thick and I think I could make a nuclear shelter with these. She gave up on trying to bite me, instead of making herself busy with healing her wounds and cutting the strands of silk I kept wrapping around her. If she didn't, I would bind her in a silk cocoon, good luck getting out of there before I killed her.
We splashed in the massive river Ikrinad as if it was a gutter draining rainwater. Another roll and we were in the river valley, grappling over a large wheat field that was almost ready to harvest. After we passed, the golden wheat sprung back to its place, unharmed. She bumped her back against the farmer's house, then we went over it.
I scored another critical on her belly, as I now had a hole without scales right underneath me. I could see her flesh and as our eyes met, I grinned wickedly. Her end was near!
Then she teleported. I tried to keep her from doing so with {Dimensional Stability} but the bitch was an expert in using forbidden magic. And an expert time-space mage, it seemed.
But she teleported. As she did, {Absolute Clinging} denied her the ability to move the skin and scales I was latched on. She howled in pain as her own teleportation magic flayed herself, leaving me with a few football fields worth of dragon goddess skin and scales. Which I sent to the item box.
"{Second Wind}," She said as she instantly recovered several dozen billion HP, twenty-five percent of her health, erasing half an hour of work on my part.
The earth groaned and moaned like a giant stone ox as the tectonic plate the Empire was on tilted, making us roll west toward the ocean. I had to do something to save the land. Even if the Empire survived a hundred years underwater, everyone would drown the moment the curse ended.
This time Pandora resonated with my intent. Her {Aspect of Divine Vengeance} flared along with the {Sheltered Hearth}. I would allow the Brood-Hussy to escape and heal her grievously maimed complexion for now.
Golden light escaped from the orb poking out of my solar plexus in abundance, bathing the world with its radiance, making the wheat field a couple valleys behind light up like the precious metal under sunlight, banishing the night and reflecting off the storm clouds, which greedily drank the light and reflected it back upon the earth. It lit up the whole Empire in its divine yellowish glow and then…
Undone it.
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I had to beat my two sets of wings to avoid plummeting into the void below. I could see Labyrinth tunnels cut like a sectioned anthill and the rush of seawater flooding in the hole left by the disappearing continental landmass. The roar and surf drowned the peals of thunder from the storms and clouded the hole from sight with a fine mist. All of the world's oceans rushed to push more water into the hole. Then He appeared.
Bit, the Guardian Urchin, descended from the heavens. His massive size now eclipsed even me and the still-healing dragon bitch.
"The World should not be unraveled. The Labyrinth shall not flood," He Decreed, and that was made reality. I could sense that he summoned a layer of bedrock to cover the Labyrinth.
"Bit, why did you guys remain silent for so long?"
I could sense his eyeless gaze settle on me. A deep sorrow irradiated from my only friend among the Pantheon, then he was gone as if he'd never been there, to begin with. I could still sense his Divine power in the air, though.
But what happened to the Empire? Did Pandora just disintegrate it? But it said… to Remake Anew! I focused on the [Wisp of Creation] and witnessed a miracle.
The Empire was reborn. Not as a contiguous part of Yznarian but in its own world inside Pandora. She grew again.
> > Your Wisp of Creation gained the Aspect of Genesis
>
> * Aspect of Genesis: Cradled in the Goddess's bountiful bosom, her faithful subjects shall always have a place to call home.
Inside that budding world, the Empire awoke as they were remade without the curse. Even Raswaria was there, with everyone alive and well on it as it should be. I could sense their hearts, their wishes. It was overwhelming. Madge and Mona, along with the former [Emperor] were there too, alive and well as if nothing had happened. They all knew what happened. My brothers, the disenfranchised [Princes]. The people in Seyham. My priests. They could all sense my presence, my protective blessings wrapping them like a mother's embrace.
I wept. Gliding in circles over the crater that would become another ocean, I cried, my {Mermaid Tears} dropping down into the surf and crystallizing into magical gemstones. A war would be waged for them much later on, but that's another story.
The Empire may have survived (or been reborn, depending on the angle one looks at it) but my fight was far from over. Yet the changes only kept going.
The whole world felt the change. The golden light Pandora released was not a net expenditure of Divinity as it bathed not only the region around the Empire but the world as a whole. Demons screamed in pain and withdrew to the dark corners of their half of the Scorched Continent. The Minotaur Kingdom would have some months of respite. They were aware who granted it for the light carried with it the Matriarch's divine power.
During the last seven centuries, while the Pantheon kept their silence, my church grew and my priests traveled the world, the only ones who still concerned themselves with the people. Now every church, every shrine was enveloped in the golden light, showing a skeptical world not all Gods had abandoned them.
The people recognized that and opened their hearts.
> > You have lost the Crafts Domain.
>
> > You gained the Creation Domain.
That was both a qualitative and a quantitative upgrade of immense proportions. To be regarded as the Goddess of Creation placed me above every single one of the other deities. Protection and Wisdom weren't minor domains by any stretch of the concept but Creation was one of the biggest ones.
With a single thought, the storms disappeared. The earthquakes settled as the earth rested. Water became real as the hole filled and the oceans became placid and idyllic once more. The stars blinked in disbelief as they witnessed it with great curiosity, even though they were obfuscated by the three full moons, Ayla the white, Vester the blue, and Sylvis the green.
I glided next to the dragon.
"Surrender now and I shall show you mercy."
She spat a gout of flame down at the new ocean. "I have no need for your mercy, Anomaly. I'll kill you, and seal your soul for all eternity!" She challenged.
"You cannot win. We'll fight for weeks but I will kill you. You're outmatched."
"Fuck you! I will accept no handouts from either you or those traitors I once called friends!"
A cornered and pitiful existence. Not a single dragon among the few who survived believed in her anymore. Should she have not shattered her Core, it would dwindle as a deity without believers is nothing. Despite her size, she was just a salty pile of crafting ingredients now.
"Are those your final words?" I asked.
She glanced at the moons and I followed her gaze. The three were high up, sharing the zenith among them.
"Absolutely not, I have you where I wanted, as I said. But if you want my final words, allow me to utter them. {Self Sacrifice} {Agnostic Ward}!"
Before I could react, a magic circle thousands of kilometers in diameter appeared and activated underneath me as her HP and MP dropped to zero to empower whatever desperate last-measure she intended to use. She moved her mouth up and opened her maw, beaming a bolt of dark light that darkened this half of the world. It shot up into space and struck Sylvis.
Pandora dimmed, lost its glow, and painfully dropped from my chest into the ocean below. I was suddenly stripped of all Divine powers and found myself immobilized. Without the Wisp of Creation, I was not the Matriarch.
And her wicked ritual had only started.
Sylvis shattered.
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[1] 100 * 10 {Elder Elven Longevity} * 1,3 {Imperial Veteran} *2,63 [Mental Mastery] (1%/5 points) * 2,5 Endurance (1%/2 points)