She panted, exhausted, blood and sweat running into her eyes. Edna was surrounded by ice and deep black waters.

She stood on a broken piece of flotsam, that bobbed up and down with each step she took.

‘They’ had caught up to her and if they had caught up to her, then ‘he’ wouldn't be far behind. She had to move.

She leapt up from one piece of floating ice to another till she found herself staring at stepladder that led up into the mouth a great rust covered radio tower.

Seeming conspicuously out of place in the middle of the half-frozen.

The approach of the hoard behind her, the sound of their gambol and skitter, stopping Edna from actually thinking on the matter. She climbed up into the upside down doorway.

As she climbed, she spied them, a horde of jongleurs who looked eerily like children. Diminutive, dressed in bell and chime, laden clothes that were a very ‘wrong’ mixture of vibrant and drab. Like a brief explosion of color right before one blacks out.

The manic light in their eyes containing all the vibrancy, their sort would ever need.

Behind the horde was something effectively looked like a jongleur all grown-up. A tall gaunt copy of its peers. It didn’t walk, so much as it drifted and on its face was a smile that made Edna’s blood run cold.

She climbed faster. Knowing that if nothing else, she didn’t want to let that thing catch her.  Firing her AWs behind her as she heard a few of the shades getting close enough to almost touch her.

*****

Elsewhere Elena, lay on a plain of flat gray nothing and soft white sand, staring up a behemoth, a steel giant with a sword as big as a building. She lay bleeding. Her arm lying just a few feet away from her.

Consciousness was a tenuous thing, here. One moment she ‘was’, and one moment she ‘was not’, and then in the next instant she was strikingly aware of how scary it was to have almost ‘not had been’.

She awoke and she crawled over to her severed limb. Not to pick it up, and reattach it to herself. That wouldn’t do her any good here and it’d take too long.

No, she just needed the recovery potion she’d been gripping when the limb was sliced off. As she crawled there, tugs and pricks and a pain that was both sharp and dull. A pain that made her aware that a fair portion of her insides were now outsides.

She couldn’t feel her legs and prayed that that was only because her spine was broken not a sign that she had been cut in two again.

She continued to crawl, ignoring the taste of sand and grit. Aware of the one that watched her, the sadist that stood on the shoulder of the steel behemoth.

*****

“Nh...Morning.” said Billy. Greeting the guardswoman at the gates, while passing out of the new walled Aria village.

“Uh...Er...Y-yeah. Good morn-..morning, milord.” said Alessa. Responding wearing the same wide-eyed deer in the headlights look she’d worn the last ten times Billy made the mistake of greeting her.

He didn’t get it, but he didn’t take offense because ‘he’ wasn’t all that good with people either.  Except for Edna and Elena and a few others he felt comfortable with, he pretty much avoided social interactions, unless there was a pressing need.

Thus just like always he simply shook his head, walked through the gate and headed into the wood.

His tail whipping about, extending itself and repeatedly coiling around him and piercing through him, as he got farther away from the village.  Dark Blood and bright nothingness flowing out of him as a radiant, churning mass.

A few miles out, in the usual spot, the trees all groaned and the winds gathered as sleek dark gray form rose up into the air.

A million limbed, million eyed serpent took flight. Flying away from the Katia.

It turned its sights towards the heavens and myriad formidable opponents that flew above it. Intending to punch upwards because there really wasn’t any point in punching down.

*****

Hours later, while the sun was sinking below the horizon, Billy dropped towards the ground, bleeding quite badly. A bit of bone showing beneath his torn clothing.

He’d nearly lost that last fight. The opponent had been a dragon of things. An elder dragon, not an emperor of anything. Maybe an emperor to be.

This one was still a little green around the gills. Relatively young, if one could call an accrued million years young, which in Billy’s book was pretty much the case.

The ‘young’ Elder Dragon lacked the seasoning that would be required for it to be able to go against him. To its credit dragon had known this, for the creatures were clever beasts.

It had brought help,  a flock made of peers and lesser-kin. Which was why Billy almost lost, that fight. There’d been too many of them and they’d filled the sky with flame and lightning.  

Enough to almost overwhelm his senses. Enough to blind his billion..., well billion as of three weeks ago, eyes.

Then things went from bad to worse when a large corpse-grinder, a massive vulture with a  roaring, whirring, wood chipper for a face, came and tried to take advantage Billy’s moment of weakness.

It actually managed to take one of Billy’s wings. Though Billy made sure to get even and take both of the corpse-grinder’s. The earth shaking when its building-sized body hit the ground.

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In any case Billy ate well, all the mass that entered his maw, was absorbed into his bestial flesh, getting transfered over to the world within his shadows. Some of it would be used for magic item and potion creations. Most of it would be used as raw material for continual process of body refining.

Making his physique increasingly strong by allowing his mind to try and see if it could create something like the body he’d had at his peak. As he’d definitely need to reach his old benchmarks, if he sought to surpass them.

He was still far from that, but he was getting closer, getting stronger, with each reprocessing.

Even unassisted by aether, His muscular tissues had reached a state where the energy stored in a single fiber could be used to tear down a castle.

Fairly meaningless achievements in the grand scheme of things, but impressive enough to wow anyone who didn’t really know the true scale of power in the cosmos.

His bones strong enough prop up mountains. His nervous system steadily reaching an efficacy that would allow faster than light processing.

*****

Billy lay on a rock, siphoning a just little of the world’s life core-flow and objective-continuity for his cultivation’s sake.

Stealing a bit of its ‘realness’ so he could help the world within his shadow grow more concrete and stable.

Also taking the time to restore the damage he’d taken during his flight as the million armed, millioned-eyed beast.

His skin crawled as his old tissues were pushed aside and cannibalized by newly improved flesh. Each cellular generation, just a little stronger, and more resilient than the last.

His body’s regenerative abilities having grown even more impressive since his progression to the fourth realm.

His genetic structure was becoming increasingly adaptive. Reacting to threats and damage in a manner that was almost thoughtful.

Shifting base parameters about and slowly honing the whole of his biological being to an apex that lay in the far future.  

He was still being careful not to take enough to mess with the balance of things, but he found himself growing impatient.

Less than a month ago, with the help of the old woman’s divine spark he’d broken through to the fourth realm.

Less than a month ago, he’d also been reminded of why such a piddling level of power was below what he’d need if he was really serious about seeing that the things he’d cared for were protected.

All three of the Bone Tree Company’s executives took the incident hard.  Edna and Elena asked Billy to help them with their training. They insisted he do so in a way that took off the kid gloves.

They insisted he help them get strong enough that scares like what almost happened couldn’t happen any more.

He’d said that it really couldn’t be done, since there was always, always someone stronger and even Billy at the top of his game, was still far from omnipotent.

Then they insisted he tried anyway. Now the two were in his inner-world. In a place where even he couldn’t easily help them.

In a hellscape made of his memories, being chased down by shades and a small number of specially created grand-shades.

Powerful, remotely controlled creatures similar to the million limbed, million eyed, Jormugandr-Cocoon that lived in Billy’s tail.

The only caveat, the only thing that he, Billy had insisted on, was that it be a place where they couldn’t die, but that wasn’t as much of a mercy as one would think.

It would be hard going and he wasn’t sure if they’d make it. He wasn’t sure ‘he’d’ have been able to make it. The zones they were in were made from his very worst nightmares, places that he’d barely been able to struggle through while he was younger.

Places that would be difficult to pass through simply as a consequence of their alien-ness.

And he was trusting the control of the grand-shades and these nightmare areas that the creatures controlled, to the crueler portions of his being.

If the girls ‘did’ make it, it guaranteed progress into the next realm, the establishment of a very firm cultivation base and a smoother transition into the realms beyond.

If they didn’t make and were forced to simply evacuate, then he’d already placed a barrier that would completely strip the memories of the place from their psyche upon their exit.

Hopefully keeping the chance of any permanent spiritual or psychological damage down to a minimum.

*****

If the girls were going to work that hard then Billy decided that he’d have to work ten times, no, a hundred times as hard.

He couldn’t rest on his laurels because he knew that he’d only barely begun to actually start being a contender in this race.

His need for more power was even more dire, because the power of his inner-world, the main source strength was being split between himself and the girls. Currently slaved to the purpose of helping them with their cultivation.

Unfortunately the main options for quick growth that he knew of, were fairly apocalyptic. Ultimately requiring the destruction of entire worlds, to feed the growth of the world within his shadow.

That wasn’t going to work here of course, burning down his own home just so he wouldn’t quote so ‘cold’ would be idiotic.

Fortunately there was the option of using a little to make a lot. Extrapolating a rich energy source to create an even more energy abundant reaction.

The experience with the Divine Spark had gotten him thinking and within Billy’s head a new plan of action was starting taking form. Like a half-formed song, it just needed a little extra polish.