Chapter 12

Dianna stomped, the world around her seeming to slow to a crawl… An explosion of sweat sprayed into the air with her abrupt movement, hanging about her person as a gleaming forest of crystalline droplets that surrounded her like rain. The world was silent in those intervening moments, drowned out and extended as heartbeats felt as minutes and second hours… existence itself nearly coming to a complete pause without ever truly reaching it as the power within one of her cards activated, and she noticed the giant quill that was flying towards her eye.

It was—strange… this odd ability that, for all intents and purposes, seemed to freeze time itself, even if she did understand that wasn't wholly the case. It was more that existence slowed during these short interludes… the card responsible for the sheer absurdity of such a thing now a precious gift from a man she’d hardly had the chance to grow fond of. Now, after she’d really seen what it could do, the card was among the very most prized of her possessions and, in its own way, a confession of love from a person who clearly seemed to understand her desires… One that she held so close to her heart that she might never let it go. A wild and horrific grin cracked across her face as Dianna shifted, spinning her body with the flow and grace of water as time resumed to it's normal pace; the explosion of sensations had her positively mad with a frenzy for battle!

The quill whipped by her armoured head, glancing off the curvature of her defences while Dianna screamed with delighted insanity, slamming her wings against the air even as she leapt! The force of her departure dividing the sand beneath her hooves! The colossal beast screeched with fury as she dove and darted about the air while closing the distance, that special card in her soul deck allowing her to contemptuously weave and spin through the onslaught of projectiles that threatened to skewer her like raw meat! Every time, slipping around what might be a fatal wound while skirting death like it was her lover.

She soared over the massive spined lizard as it hissed in outrage, swivelling its enormous head to try and snap at her as she sped by, but howled in rapturous agony as a torrent of hideous black and purple flames jettisoned from the edge of her sword! A flaming wave as thin and sharp as her infernal weapon itself bisected the creature's left limb, her work in slowly sawing through the appendage after several deep and brutal cuts that devoured flesh with sticky flames sending the monstrosity to a collapsing heap which shuddered the ground around them. Dianna didn't wait. Mercy was for fools and the dead. She dove at the creature again as it writhed and wriggled, dark and inky blood fountaining from its severed limb as a deluge soaked the desert as though a god were trying to create a lake of crimson… She commanded her blade to extend again, this time, the cruel and savage flames bursting from its tip as Dianna rammed her weapon home, plunging it downwards with all her might and tearing a terrible cavity into the incensed nightmares back.

She hacked and burned her way through the countless bone-like needles that protruded from every conceivable angle of the creature's body, laughing and screaming as her blade scorched and separated her foe piece by bloody chunk at a time! The sand around them blazed with sinister flames that never seemed to satisfy their eternal hunger, melting sand and rock into puddles of strange flowing magma that converged upon the monster’s ever-deepening pit in the sand, incinerating its body from both above and below! Finally, the labyrinthian behemoth settled, and Dianna felt its life—dim. She heaved from above, panting and laughing as the flames from her blade dissipated until naught was left but the nefarious-looking black slab of sweltering steel, so sharp as to slice through stone itself with little care for common sense. She had—done it… She’d done it! Days of fighting! Of retreating and chasing! Of brutal mortal combat with a titan that had nearly killed her a dozen times over with its horrid spines…

Dianna—collapsed, allowing herself to drift upon the wind as she descended to the battlefield below. She was exhausted… her body fractured and broken… mind—numb to the danger of it all. Still, slowly, she felt her bones rekniting themselves, her flesh fixing gashes and holes… She was wounded, perhaps even disastrously so for an individual without her—advantages, but as she was now, Dianna felt like a demi-god! Certainly, the behemoth was powerful enough to destroy a small city all its own… which, when she thought about it, meant she could destroy a city as well. The thought made her smile, not because she had dreams of wholesale slaughter of innocents and soldiers alike, but because the notion itself tickled her fancy. She’d like to see that whore Penelope try and spar with her now. As she landed, Dianna let herself fall to her rear, just sitting for a time as she placed her weapon across her lap to—admire the creature's size from a different angle. Even now, sitting there before it, she was having a hard time with the fact that she had managed to kill the damned thing!

She’d taken things slow those first few days. Building herself up, cutting a blood swarth through the labyrinth's lower floors with the aid of absurdly powerful cards that had such—beautiful synergy… Not one of them had yet made the apex of bronze, the damned things sucking souls like a bottomless abyss… yet she felt as though she had the punching power of a veteran delving team of strong professionals in the high silver. Never in her wildest dreams would she have thought herself capable of doing what she just had. Yet, here she was, sitting at the end of the seventh floor all on her own, its guardian vanquished, body lying dead at her hooves.

When she was younger, Dianna had nearly died whilst challenging the fifth-floor boss creature that would let her delve to the next one below… Afterwards, she’d even tried to join a team to earn the right to see what so few spoke of, the lauded sixth floor of the labyrinth. The expedition had—failed as so many others had before it. The colossal stone-like goliath squashed all those who challenged it beneath feet carved of stone and fists the size of ships… But here she was… What had it been? A week? How many things had she slaughtered? Too many to count… too many to even think about. The sheer quantity of souls she’d expended in strengthening her deck was—comically absurd!

At first, she’d been horrified to learn just how hard it was to improve her husband's special soul cards. It was a universal truth that tarots with more innate power about them were more difficult to improve, but some of the damned things had been ridiculous! She was pretty sure she might just have managed to reach the upper ranks of gold with all the comparatively lower rank cards she’d fed her soul deck over the week just to see the lot of them hardly reach the later stages of the second tier. It was astounding how many souls it took to improve… yet, for all the difficulty they provided, she was sitting next to the corpse of a once-living fantasy. Oh, she knew there were others of its kind wandering about the endless desert… that was how the labyrinth worked in its strange and mystical ways… but, now the way was clear for Dianna to once more advance deeper than she’d ever dreamed of delving, and again, her soul deck only averaged high bronze… She would be—doing things to Arthur once she returned home to ensure he would be her’s forever… more, it hadn't been lost on her that he might just have been holding out on her when they’d worked through her wish list of cards. He knew things that no mortal should know, and as his wife, she intended to get him to share.

Idly, Dianna pulled on the heavy soul she felt lingering in the creature's body. Demanding that it answer her summons as she lazily held out her palm, only for a gleaming flash of golden light to appear a few moments later. Gold. Gold, gold, gold, gold… It was enchanting… its subtle soft glowing hue slowly fading away as the tarot manifested in her hand… Gold… Dianna frowned at the sight. She’d… never even met a person outside of the legions strong enough for her to wonder after their possessing a gold card before… Or at least, none who had admitted it… Though maybe strength wasn't the word she needed to use here, after all, she was learning that power wasn't necessarily so intrinsic to a card's rank and quality… Lazily, she eyed the card while turning it over in her fingers.

“The colossus…” She mused, reading its title while admiring her prize. “Take on the form and power of a colossus.”

Unlike her more—tailored cards, this one was somewhat typical for those that were more naturally occurring. Its explanation was sparse, depiction offering a scene of the floor guardian, and, that was more or less it. Still, it—sounded interesting, at least… Though, she’d probably just sell the damned thing… If she even could… Dianna leaned back on her hands, staring blankly at the sky as she thought. In theory, she was—rich now… a gold quality card was the sort of thing she’d earn a baron's ransom for… though could she actually find a buyer that wouldn't rip her off? Was there even a point in trying to pawn it off in the first place? Arthur, bless his tiny soul, could make soul cards or change them, she supposed, and, the truth was that the right card, even with a poor quality, was worth its own princely sum all its own. Why did she care to have more money at this point? Wouldn't it be better to—consume that card herself to get stronger? Or, perhaps even give it to Arthur or her daughter to absorb… Well, either way, merchants were definitely out, in fact, everyone who wasn't in her family wouldn't ever even know what she’d found here… Her own card—had reached gold as well, only the initial rank, but, she could try it out as it too was of the same. That said, Dianna was exhausted.

That just left the body… Again, she knew it was probably worth a fortune in raw materials… but, she hadn't exactly opted to account for a storage card in her deck, deciding that she more or less had wanted to cram it with as many exciting powers as she and her mate could come up with. Naturally, it had worked, but at the same time, Dianna had passed over a veritable ocean of valuable resources that could have been collected and sold… In the end, she gave it all a mental shrug. With her ability to teleport to and from the labyrinth when she wanted, it wasn't like getting things from the damned place was a big ordeal or anything… Dianna was about to consider calling her adventure into the depths a success, knowing full well that she could return to this floor whenever she pleased now that she’d defeated a guardian—when a sudden cacophony of hisses resounded through the air.

Dianna turned, shifting in her fatigued state to eye nearly a dozen strange insectoid-like creatures with numerous legs, large pincers and bulbously barbed stingers. “Those are new…” She muttered to herself, forcing her muscles to get her standing again as she grinned at the newcomers and their obvious challenge. Her smile—hitched a fraction when the hissing took on an altogether new decibel of sound, and, from above, the entire hillside of sand was suddenly swarmed with the little chitinous nightmares… “Oh…” was all she managed before the swarm descended.

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Dianna chuckled, an—idea forming in her head as she reached deeply into her soul deck and retrieved the card Arthur had given her to ensure she wouldn't starve. She hadn't wanted it, but he’d been insistent. All the same, it was an easy thing to drop. Casually, she plopped it down the inside of her armour, feeling it tuck neatly between her drenched breasts before she added the reward from her latest conquest to her soul. She felt the card settle in beside the others, felt her instincts—link to its power, and, without another moment of hesitation, Dianna activated the card. The world seemed to—twist as her perspective rapidly changed in a near instant. The enormous dunes of the endless red sea of sand—suddenly didn't look quite so enormous as they’d once seemed. Beside her, the behemoth she’d warred against for days shrank before her very eyes until it wasn't nearly a third as tall as it had been before.

“That's it?” She demanded once her focus seemed able to fixate and things stopped messing with her senses.

The demoness looked down at herself, still grinning despite being well aware that she’d more or less grown to a size that was—probably somewhere in and around two-thirds of the dead titan's own. Well, maybe, the damned porky-pine lizard had been a big bastard already, and it wasn't like her new stature was anything to scoff at. She peered down below as she regained her perilous footing with a few lazy flaps of her wings, preening with delight as the armada of giant bugs, again, relatively sized, now looked more like—tiny beetles. They scattered in both terrible confusion and chaos as the first of their wave was squashed beneath her heavy hoof. Dianna laughed as she felt their bodies pop and explode as she gleefully stomped and rampaged across the desert, enjoying herself far—far too much with a child-like whimsy. Out of curiosity, she summoned her magic blade, it's size now relative to her own, cackling madly as she swept it across the dunes, and a wave of baleful flame consumed most of the fleeing insects with callus impunity! This was the life! Where she belonged! Death and despair, her victims burning to cinder before her… then, with a pop, her weapon suddenly disappeared.

“Really?” Dianna tsked, clicking her tongue with annoyance as she gazed out over the raging inferno that had transformed no inconsiderable portion of her surroundings into what might have been mistaken for an active volcano. Well, she—supposed she might have been overdoing things just a little… Sighing, Dianna conceded that with increased size came a decrease in efficiency, as her mate liked to call it. Still, it had been pretty cool…

Time—slowed in an all too familiar way as she was admiring her handiwork; again, the time frame she was used to working with seeming to lesson—altering things a little bit towards the problematic as, before she could gather her wits, Dianna was stuck in her back by a shockingly blunt force that sent her nearly sprawling to the ground! Still, instincts honed to a razor’s edge won the day, and, before she could even work her head around that she’d just been attacked! Dianna was already spinning, her wings buffeting the landscape into a minor sandstorm of debris as her body moved on its own. From the distance, another figure shuffled through the sand on a direct tangent toward her, a familiar shape filled to the brim with deadly calcified spikes.

Another guardian? Now? So soon? Just for her? Was the labyrinth trying to flirt? Dianna grinned widely, cracking her knuckles as her claws extended and her segmented armoured tail flickered with anticipation. This was perfect, just perfect! She’d literally just been wondering how fun it would be to brawl with one of the behemoths now that she was nearly its size, and there one was! She howled with joy as her wings beat the air into submission, sending the giant demon hurtling towards the oncoming goliath, which fired its massive spines at her across their great distance. Dianna might be bigger, but, she found herself tougher and faster as well. She’d always been amazed when such massive things moved so quickly, but they always did, despite how many wrongfully assumed as such. She artfully dodged each spear as it flew through the air, tucking her wings, dancing to the side, ducking and leaping into the sky only to change direction with lithe ease at the last seconds. Before a minute had hardly passed, they were upon each other, the massive spined lizard rearing with a ferocious roar of indignation, even as Dianna wound back and slammed her fist into its jaw!

The monster screeched with what sounded like earnest surprise, toppling backwards as Dianna advanced upon it in a pugilist's stance, having the time of her life! The beast squirmed up a storm of sand as it regained its footing, lashing out with a massive bone-quilled tail that Dianna didn't bother blocking. Instead, she leapt over the swinging appendage, wings buffeting the sand and air as she delivered a spine-warping kick to its snout. The monster bellowed in anguish as a geyser of blood erupted from its broken face, yowling in pain as its tail swept back around with disturbing speed. Aided by its fury and, perhaps just a little overconfident, the spines took her in her abdomen, spearing into her body in dozens of places as Dianna screamed with hatred and mind-numbing pain! Her bladed tail whipped like a creature possessed and severed the monster's own with a gleaming flourish of blood and black chiton, separating them both in an instant and sending each combatant flying off balance as enormous masses of weight were exchanged!

Dianna shrieked as she ripped the spikes from her rended side, watching as blood oozed from every new orifice with pumping streaks of spilling crimson! Her soul card, which, to that point, had largely kept her much smaller body alive through damage that would kill another, struggled to just stifle the bleeding but—Dianna found herself smiling all the same. She screamed her defiance at the monster while swinging the creature's own tail around her like a still-living flail, spinning it once, then twice to build momentum before hurling it with all her might at the monster that was still fighting to find balance. It crunched into the monstrosity's face with a sickening and bloody squelch, eliciting a horrible keening from its surprised and broken skull! Dianna bounding forwards with unchecked abandon, seeing red, feeling the thrill of exhilaration in her chest as she collided with the creature like a falling meteor! Her hoof’s stomping on the creature's damaged head with all her immense weight and momentum! She felt herself obliterate the titan's skull as she squashed its cranium like an overripe melon, its brains and head exploding all around them, the monster growing limp in the same instant they connected only for the air to tremble as more familiar cries of outrage pierced the air!

Massive quills lodged in the sands all around her and Dianna moved whilst still in a trance of battle. A needle perforated her shoulder as she failed to dodge the incoming hail of projectiles entirely, the spine managing to find an already weakened chink in her armoured form! She howled in rage, glaring at the thing, but was subsequently yanking it from her wound and returning it as a spear in kind to its previous owner. In the distance, a massive crawling form stilled as Dianna hurled her improvised weapon like a bolt of lightning from a vengeful god, destroying the behemoth's brain as she took to the sky with a berserker-maddened rage! Higher and higher, she rose, avoiding skewering death as they rocketed past with deadly precision, then, Dianna broke into a full-on dive as she sped towards the nearest colossal beast like a ballista shot from a giant!

Her claws dove into the reptile's neck as she landed like a cannonball! The world flaring with an all-consuming cloud of sand and rock! She felt her fingers sever and tear ever deeper into the horrific wound, hearing the monster squeal with terror, even as her bladed tail deflected the creature's own. She wrenched and heaved as meat, tendon, and muscle stretched and broke with sickening wet cracks and pops, the sound of shredding flesh filling her ears while her muscles flexed and pulled with all their might, showering her with glorious blood! Then, she fell back a step, her gristley trophy in hand… Dianna broke several spikes off the dead creature's still convulsing body, tossing its head behind her and taking to the air once more. Above, the desert was a ruin of bodies and white quills as dozens of the behemoths came for her and died as she ripped them limb by limb in kind! The entity of existence blurring into what stood immediately before her! Instinct, not thought, driving her madness for battle as consciousness submerged itself in the darkness of a complete blackout…

She didn't know when she finally stopped fighting… but, at some point, she’d just—collapsed. Her body was in a ruinous state of barely healing wounds and torn muscles… wings shredded and tattered… She’d even returned to her old size… though if she’d ultimately won the fight or simply been lost in the desert storm that had swirled to life as titans clashed, Dianna would never likely know… She groaned while picking herself up from a partial tomb of sand that had threatened to burry her as she coughed and spat, rising on unsteady legs to gaze over the dark and lifeless landscape that was eerily silent as her thoughts were—blank. Everything hurt… each joint and bone feeling like it was the creaking hull of a warship as it rocked against an ocean's waves… Her wounds closed with time, her body healed and was nourished and watered… And, Dianna collected the cards of ten additional colossi that had perished in their battle, as well as several dozen of the—large bugs that she could easily find. Ten more cards from the behemoths… all gold… all the same as the last with the exact same rank…

Dianna felt dull… empty as she stared at her trove of wealth and power. The high of combat was fading, much as might the euphoria of an orgasm, and in its wake was a sort of melancholy… Not quite loathing… no, she’d enjoyed herself too much for that… but, perhaps, after all, was said and done, a sense of—irresponsibility had overcome her thoughts… She was—done with fighting for a few days… of that, she was fairly certain… It was fun, and she’d never deny it—but also intense. She hadn't let loose as she had for—ages really… and, now, what she really wanted was a good meal and maybe a hot bath… She sighed, knowing that probably wasn't going to come to pass, at least, not yet anyways… She had defeated the guardian for the floor—several in fact, and, she’d be damned if she turned back now without at least taking a peek at what might come next. On a spur of the second decision, Dianna forced all ten of the additional gold souls she’d taken from the guardians into her healing tarot. Feeling more than watching as, with the massive influx of strength, it too, much like her metamorphosis had, reached the lofty height of true power itself. She grinned, immediately feeling the soothing chill of magic flow through her veins, her body rapidly regenerating itself in a manner that saw her form return to its peak condition within heartbeats.

Yet, the fatigue of stress still lingered in her mind. She’d done—alright for her first go-around, there certainly was nothing to be ashamed of or self-doubting about… Dianna could take it easy for a few days, check out what the eighth floor was all about, and, maybe see after selling some of the—bug cards. Those weren't gold, but, they were middling silver… she might just get more than they're worth in quality and rank if they were useful… or, again, just save them for those waiting for her back home. Sooner than later she’d have to organise a trip down to Kaitrice in the near future for her husband and daughter. With how—effective her new deck had proven to be, Dianna was eager to let her little girl have some real fun armed with a dangerous assortment of souls. Thankfully, Arthur wasn't like her. Dianna wasn't at all obtuse that she probably wasn't the best parent around… but, she had her own talents for what they were worth. Talents she’d be putting to good use to make sure Tulla did have at least one responsible adult in her immediate life that could give her real structure. So what if she spent a few more days down here? She was confident that her new mate wouldn't let her little girl get into too much trouble or danger…