I hung my head as I activated my lycan form. The surge of strength and speed washed over me. A shudder ran through me before I slashed my claws across the bars. They were so thick it took multiple cuts to make it all the way through.

What floor am I supposed to be on with this level of power? How much damage can Elveil do with even more?

Are you asking rhetorically?

I shrugged as I stepped out. Yeah. I don’t really want to know. That, and I’m going to ensure it doesn’t happen.

I followed the hall, keeping my lycan form active. The sphinx gave me a time limit. I couldn’t waste a second. My lycan form was much faster than my natural body, which was already quite fast.

Orange, how much attention do you need to spend on my alter ego to make her think like a demon?

We are still calculating that. But if you require an augment, we’ll still assist.

Just make it your priority. We need to work as fast as we can.

Understood.

The tunnel was dark but silent. I was the only occupant of any of the cells. A staircase led upwards out of the prison. The smallest pinhole of light waited for me at the top of the long climb.

Taking a trick from my alter ego and her kitsune form—the one Orange had me whisper into her mind to test her mental manipulability—I started jumping upwards from one side to the other, using the stairs as hand holds.

What kind of prison has no doors and is more than a half mile underground? Shouldn’t there be traps to keep people down here? Granted, I’m not the usual captive, but Killa would’ve been slowed down even less than me.

It still took me one minute to reach the top. As I stood in the sunlight, twelve ballistas, six cannons, and what I could only guess as a rudimentary flamethrower were all pointed at me.

Ah, found them.

The ballistas fired first. By the time the bolts left the machines, I was standing outside the circle they made, far away from any danger. The cannons fired second. They released blue mana spheres that looked suspiciously like mana batteries. Calculating that they would make a rather big explosion, I put another hundred feet of distance between me and the blast radius.

Heavy shock waves hit me as they practically collapsed the entrance. Four jets of flames from the flamethrower washed all the destruction down.

Okay, that was a bit of overkill. If any one of those hit, most anyone would’ve been killed. But I’m probably almost five times more powerful than that was designed to handle.

I looked around to see I was in a basin on the side of a mountain range surrounding the city with the arena at the center. From that vantage point, I could really see how large the city really was, and that I had barely seen a fraction of it.

The wind picked up, blowing my hair and tail back. Having a tail still didn’t sit well with me. My lycan form had one, but it was made of mana and could be completely ignored. Now I permanently had a physical one. That one couldn’t be ignored. Without a plan on what to replace it with, I was stuck with it.

There was a thought—a small one—where I gave myself fox ears again and accepted the half-beastwoman look. But I crushed that idea with extreme prejudice. Elveil wasn’t allowed to have any permanent effect on my appearance. I wouldn’t let her win even a little.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Annoying as its existence was, it had to stay. For now. I moved on towards the warehouse that led to Elveil’s base. The building was recognizable from the vantage point I had. From that same vantage point, I could see the extent of the damage done to it during Elveil’s coup.

There was a countdown timer with the hour the sphinx gave me. Whatever the sphinx was going to distract Elveil had better work.

I barely got down to the city walls before the entire world convulsed. Exploding into the air from the warehouse was the sphinx, followed shortly by Elveil’s griffon body. Waves of shadow magic poured off her only to evaporate in the sphinx’s light magic.

“If you think that I won’t kill you, you will be dead wrong.” Elveil’s screech reached my ears.

Memories of my encounter with Tasha and how she fought against a sphinx too. Elveil was going to kill the dragon down below the sphinx before I stole the kill from her. Is she really able to kill the sphinx? Which was stronger, the sphinx or the dragon?

The sphinx responded with a ball of light that nearly clipped Elveil’s wings. I don’t know what the sphinx said to her, but it got her attention. Well, now I know she’s out. Time to really get running.

One side effect of spending time on six legs was learning that quadrupedal—or in this case hexapodal—movement is inherently faster than bipedal. And through some twisted coincidence, my lycan form could slip into running on all fours or stay comfortable on just two. My lycan form was fast, but running on all fours broke it into a whole new level. Leaping from building to building was never easier, nor faster. Traversing the city was laughably simple, and much to my annoyance, my tail made keeping my balance much easier. Since it had weight, it could change my weight distribution.

Running at four hundred and fifty miles an hour is its own kind of exhilarating. If there was anyone in the streets, I sincerely doubted they were ever going to catch up with me. When I made it to the warehouse, I jumped straight down the hole the two opened up.I wondered if I would hit terminal velocity, but the fall wasn’t nearly long enough.

The ground splintered and cracked as I landed. My body suffered minimal damage that barely required any reconstruction. My nanites still filled in the minor cracks in the bones of my legs and hips as I sprinted off for “my room.” Elveil and I don’t require sleep, but there were times that I had nothing to do and Elveil had to take care of something without me.

So that’s where I would go and wait for her to come back. Kuljack often would sit and talk with me. It was never about anything important or meaningful. Just small talk about how he liked how my fur looked or if I had any ideas for equipment he could make for me.

I never asked for anything, because Elveil never said that I could have anything. But Kuljack always would make sure I knew that if I needed anything, he’d get it for me. Whether it was an extra cushion or food to eat.

But I wasn’t there to reminisce. I was there to grab my stuff and leave before anyone could stop me.

She never had any of it destroyed, but neither did she say I couldn’t use it. It’s just that guns are impossible to use without thumbs. So Kuljack put them in a chest for me. Did it help build my alter ego’s trust? I guess I’ll never know.

Whatever the reason, part of me was glad she didn’t just say it needed to be destroyed. If she said so, my alter ego would’ve done it without hesitating.

Nobody was around. I wasn’t even trying to hide or keep quiet. I was on a time limit. If anyone was stupid enough to get in my way, they would learn how powerful I really was. Elveil kept me quite weak by taking away my magic. But even with that handicap, I was stronger than everyone else on the floor.

I found my stuff quickly. After deactivating my lycan form, I got dressed and checked my guns. When I was done, I had only used ten minutes of the hour the sphinx gave me.

What now? Orange, do you have an estimate of how long it will take to finish with my alter ego? Is the brainwashing working?

Brainwashing isn’t the term we would use. However, we understand why you would think that. To answer your question, we will need to use the entire hour and may even require more time past that.

Why?

I may require some practical experience to get her to create the blade devil form. We suspect it might require unique circumstances to force her to, like it did for your lycan form.

Did you have something in mind?

No. Conditioning her requires almost all of our processing. You will have to come up with something that pushes her past that final threshold. Something that feeds the wrath growing in her.

Okay. I’ll think about it. Let me know when she’s ready.

We will.

I started to head back to the shortcut to the surface. Things were still too quiet, and I should’ve known better. Standing in the middle of the open space was a familiar stone golem beastman.