“Dibs on its heart!” Arkaziel shouted, and his three duplicates leaped toward the diamond and Void wrought abomination that Syltharion had transformed into. The Archon’s angelic wings were wrought only of spiritual manifestation and energy, and appeared more like tentacles than wings. The first of the duplicate got intercepted by one of the tentacled appendages, and once entangled, the tentacle feasted upon the clone until, in a poof, it vanished from the battlefield. The second kitten clone got caught directly in the clawed hand of the eldritch Archon, where it was squeezed and drained out of existence like the first. The third clone impacted against the chest of Syltharion and exploded point blank in a detonation of Void and Shadow energies that sent delicate fractures through the diamond body.

#Cats will not defeat us! We are Syltharionyx, Harbinger of Nyarlathotep’s Will, Shaper of the Void!# Accompanying the declaration of identity a small cloud of diamond slivers shattered from Syltharionyx’s chest and shot at the true Arkaziel. The black house cat dodged, jumped, and rolled out of their way with ease, barely borrowing from the pool of Telos’ Flash Mode. The storm of shards were not to be denied, though. With every jump, dodge, and roll, the swarm mimicked him, and the gap between Arkaziel and the shards lessened by the second.

A block of ice captured the storm and locked it out of time and space.

“Quit screwing around, Arkaziel,” Telos scolded just a little.

#How? We are Syltharionyx, Sovereign of the Abyssal Tapestry! We cannot be denied by a mere godling!# Syltharionyx’s surprise only increased when Telos appeared point-blank before him, and her right fist punched him right in the face. The impact of her flesh against his diamond skin shattered diamond, and the press of the Astrum Nexus into his spiritual form released a blast of brilliant light that decolored the entire head of the eldritch archon.

“Oh shut the hell up. You’ve just been born, you’ve never even been to the true Void, and just because Nyarlathotep put a piece of squid in your soul doesn’t make you hot shit.” The archon slammed into the exterior of the wall so hard his diamond frame broke in half, and the room itself cracked like an egg, with the left side tilting as if it might fall into the trap-filled maze below.

“Inferno time!” Bobbi cackled and unleashed one last burst of flame breath into her cupped hands, which merged with a concentrated burst of her StarMane fire breath. Unlike Arkaziel’s beam breath attack, Bobbi’s seemed similar to normal dragon fire—except that whole shaping it into a ball in her hands thing, that is. The colors of the rainbow could be glimpsed in those fickle flames, and in the back of her mind, Telos could tell that the attack held the power to possibly defeat a lower-ranked Greater Archon. Yet Syltharionyx had ascended or descended depending on how you looked at it, well beyond that.

Bobbi wasn’t alone, though.

A second spell flew at the eldritch horror, an orb of roiling silver that showed minimal glimpses of purple beneath. When Telos beheld the orb knowledge from Binah rushed in to feel the gaps of knowledge she lacked in identifying what Kallos had formed. The magic was a sinister spell, one of the most feared in the armory of soul magic practitioners and called a Soulrend Orb. It struck the evolved Archon just before Bobbi’s fire, and a mass of powerful enchantments wrapped around the physical and spiritual aspects of Syltharionyx and distorted them in unpredictable, exceptionally painful ways that even a creature of the Void did not possess immunity from. Resistance, yes, but while it tried to resist the sudden attack upon its existence, the dragon fire attack from Bobbi struck it center mass while it was vulnerable.

Momentarily silence was shattered by screams from dozens of newly created mouths on Syltharionyx, as the flames and soulrending effect continued to torment it. The screams obscured the approach of a large cloud of darkness, from which thousands of tentacles wavered, tendrils of darkness that yearned to devour worlds. A small black cat flew above it, driving the storm into Syltharionyx, and Arkaziel darted off to the side while the miasma of Void, Shadow, Destruction, and Pestilence struck, and it imploded again and again on the eldritch archon.

Telos worried her lower lip between her teeth as the magics cleared to reveal a whole and unblemished Syltharionyx. That triple attack would have slain most Demiurges, or at least severely wounded them. This outsider-infested Greater Archon had taken it all point blank and restored itself physically. Mentally, Telos knew its condition to be a different matter. The cosmic song that played from it had become more barbaric and primitive as if it had given up some higher function in exchange for its continued existence. Since most eldritch entities were hive beings, and Syltharionyx had formed from whatever mutagenic sample and its own life-essence, it lacked the durability of unity provided by other collected souls. The physical damage had been repaired, but spiritual damage had stacked up, and without a host of combined power, it couldn’t bounce back the way most Void beings could.

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Telos initiated the next volley of attacks with an alacrity that the others could only envy. Before Syltharionyx knew what happened, she had already struck it seven or eight times, and each blow absorbed precious Void energies from the corrupted Archon. An unidentifiable sack of flesh festered within Syltharionyx where its Order Core, or heart, should have been. The origin of the corruption wasn’t a mystery, but Telos intentionally ignored it. It didn’t matter if Nyarlathotep had put a kidney, spleen, or gizzard in this Archon; all that mattered was that it had fused with the creature on a fundamental level. Each time her fists impacted the Archon, the Void Core that now gave life to the Archon lost power, beat slower, and diverted power from its combat capabilities to survival fruitlessly because Telos absorbed and stripped it of fuel with each blow.

When Telos finished a rain of combos, she kicked off the Archon’s diamond face to land back by her companions, who unleashed upon the Archon again.

“Again,” Telos urged her companions. She could have finished the foe, but this was a chance for her to gauge if her friends could finish off a foe of this caliber if she softened it up first.

“Shameful,” Kallos said with disgust, perhaps self-disgust. None of the party were people used to their abilities not having the power to finish an opponent, and that Telos put her hand on the scale so blatantly ruffled pride, even if pride was meant to be overcome, and not given into.

The silver and purple Soulrend Orb Kallos generated this time exceeded the original almost twice in size, and a crackle of white at the edges revealed to Telos that her lover had blown a miracle to empower the attack even further. Bobbi flung three orbs of fire this time and was left panting and out of breath when the orbs left her clawed hands. The Soulrending magic mixed with the dragon breath orbs to create a cataclysmic explosion of silver and red. The strength of the two attacks alone surprised Telos, the ladies had gone all out in their second try, and then Arkaziel joined the double attack to make it a triple attack. The reality inside Oizys’ Tower thinned and rippled in response to world-ending powers being bandied about, and Telos found herself holding it together through force of will even as Arkaziel strained the fabric of reality past the point of breaking.

Arkaziel unleashed a terrible roar. Sure, he had the form of a little kitten, and it began as a high pitched rar, that grew and went higher, as if the sound were being made by his true form instead of the tiny shapeshifted form he wore. The cracked side of the room shook, and dislodged itself to fall down into the labyrinth below. The echoes of the roar still rumbled Telos’ chest when Arkaziel opened his mouth and exhaled a coruscating beam of twined light and darkness. Black lightning arced and danced around the beam, and when it struck the Archon’s chest the impossibly hard diamond, heated by Bobbi and given innumerable spiritual wounds by Kallos, cracked like a heated aerosol can.

Bobbi did not leave it with the flame attack though, and two elven looking spirits, one fire and one air, darted into after-math of destruction and then merged into one-another, to create a final immense explosion, as the spirits laughter at playfully merging detonated.

“That’s new,” Telos muttered as pieces of charred diamond were flung from her hair by exceptional control of her prehensile luminous strands.

Arkaziel already pawed at the wreckage of the Archon, where he chewed on a dark, terrible thing that Telos felt certain would kill most races immediately.

“Ugh, twerp. At least cook it first.” Bobbi scoffed at Arkaziel’s greed to devour the Void organ that had become the central core of the one-time Archon.

“I’m on team Bobbi here. For all we know that’s Nyarlathotep’s kidney stone your eating, Ark. I know you’ve got the whole space cat constitution, devourer of gods, but Azathoth’s kids are a whole other league.”

Bundled within the petrified essence of the elder god’s malaise lies a power not meant for mortal realms. Ware thy actions, insolent cat. The Void shall erode the already tenuous link between your essence and physical reality. Soon the trillion hands of the Abyss will draw you down, deep into the depths, where you will burn in my black flames. No totems, tenets, or interference from above will save you! You will burn like a marshmallow, then be devoured, like a…. marshmallow.

“Really, Fred?” Telos pinched the bridge of her nose, and desperately tried to contain a sigh with enough emotional exhaustion to slip multiple star systems into ennui.

Heed my warning, lest the cat’s soul be lost to the eternal hunger of the cosmos.

Fred tried to finish strong, but he’d lost the entire audience with his slip up. Arkaziel continued to chew on the Void cursed organ, Bobbi had moved over to poke through the ruined debris around the Archon’s corpse in the hopes of loot, and Kallos had her eyes closed very tightly. Telos could tell her love fought a desperate inner war to not burst into laughter at the ridiculousness of even the true heart of the Void being rendered impotent in the face of StarMane arrogance, and their racial ability to ignore anything that didn’t align with their desires.

A dark sense of amusement that filled the air reminded Telos there were other concerns, and when she checked in on the Celestial Warden’s, she realized she may have forgotten about them for a bit too long. A fifth of their forces had been killed by Archon’s and Oizys direct intervention, and an avatar of Oizys had joined the battle against Siegfried.

“You’re going to have to eat that on the run, little guy. Oizys launched an avatar at the Celestial Wardens, and we should go help clean up.”

“Oh, they’re still alive? Fine, I’ve got to carry out my promise to Thalassa anyway,” Arkaziel grumbled and chewed faster.