When the description said it would drain all mana from our body, it wasn’t kidding. We were at a quarter of a percent of our maximum. It even drained our entire battery dry. I put a countdown clock at the top of our HUD for how long the spell was going to last.

“Scarlet, you have less than sixty seconds to kill her.” I’m sure she read it, but given her enthusiasm for drawing out her kills, it felt prudent to impress on her the time limit. “You can’t waste time on her. She’s already going to be very hard to kill as it is.”

There was a fraction of a pause in her step. “Of…of course I know.”

It seems making me act more like a demon doesn’t help make me a better liar.

Scarlet stopped strutting and started running. Elveil unleashed another one of her shadow bomb barrages. Scarlet just ran through them without flinching. Unlike our lycan form, the abyzgor form increased our weight and resilience beyond Elveil’s ability to damage. Her barrage continued until Scarlet’s fist collided with the top of Elveil’s head.

The force of the impact launched her almost a hundred feet into the air. Scarlet jumped up after her. She grabbed Elveil and threw her back down.

As Elveil crashed into the ground, Scarlet landed a moment later. Elveil tried to stand up, but Scarlet smashed her hoof into the griffon. The strike pushed her several feet into the ground, causing it to shake.

Fifty-four seconds remain.

“What are you doing?” I shouted in our head. “We don’t have time to inflict damage. Go for the kill!”

Scarlet growled. “First things first.”

She grabbed Elveil’s foot. Around one of her talons was a silver band with tiny crystals set around it and a larger, oval-shaped pure white crystal pulsing with a faint light. Scarlet wrapped her hand around the ring and squeezed. I could hear the shattering of metal and glass in high-pitched, reverberating pops. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve believed they sounded like laser beams from a sci-fi movie.

Elveil’s eyes went wide. “You…you couldn’t have.”

Oh. The ring that can store Elveil’s soul. That does make sense to destroy that first. Scarlet can think. I have to remember that.

Scarlet yanked Elveil towards her and grabbed her neck. “Oh, but I did. Now it’s just you and me. Winner takes all.”

Elveil pried Scarlet’s hand off her neck surprisingly easily. It seems she’s still stronger than us. She opened her mouth, and a massive beam of shadow magic erupted from it. It engulfed us whole. The attack shredded everything in its path. The city received yet another scar as what little remained was reduced to nothing more than dust and rubble.

The attack ended, and the dust began to settle. Scarlet stood, barely. She was on her hands and knees as she let out a pained growl. All four limbs were twisted and bent at unnatural angles. Even our mana battery had cracks through it.

Forty-eight seconds remain.

I noticed all over our body, tiny compared to our twenty-five-foot body, pools of Elveil’s magic clung to us. It was chewing at our shadow magic body shell. Scarlet pushed herself up. With a wave of the flowing shadow flames behind us, she wiped Elveil’s magic off us. At the same time, she repaired the abyzgor form spell.

Elveil attempted to take to the sky, but Scarlet jumped and punched her claws right through the section of where the lion met the eagle on Elveil’s body. As they dropped to the ground together, Scarlet dug her second hand into the same place and ripped Elveil into two pieces. Each half rolled through several piles of obliterated buildings.

Elveil’s reconstruction matched ours. Her body rebuilt itself with her nanites just as fast as ours would. She stopped trying to run as she flicked a wing to knock our feet out from under us. Before Scarlet caught us or our face hit the ground, Elveil’s jaw bit down on our arm, and she thrashed us back and forth savagely.

We flew away from her only because she bit through our shell’s arm to sever it.

Forty-two seconds remain.

Scarlet didn’t waste a moment after she reconstructed the missing arm. She leaped forward and slashed with both arms at the same time. They sliced through Elveil, but not enough. Only her front legs were severed.

The reverse griffon didn’t react. Instead, she hopped, twisted, and slashed at us with her taloned hind legs. They cut through our shell and almost hit our real body inside. If Scarlet hadn’t leaned back in time, we would’ve been split in half.

Scarlet stepped forward and kicked her in the chest. We heard a thick pop as Elveil’s torso collapsed. Scarlet then grabbed her head and smashed it into the ground. An explosion of shadow magic erupted between us. This one pushed Elveil away from us more than it did damage to either of us.

Elveil landed with everything repaired.

Thirty-six seconds remain.

“Elveil doesn’t feel pain. You’re not hurting her but only running out of time. Go for the brain!” I knew I sounded like a broken record, but Scarlet wasn’t getting anywhere, and she almost spent half of our time.

“Quit backseating!” Scarlet shouted for the entire obliterated town to hear—namely just Elveil.

She lunged forward, claws extended, and slashed in a flurry of attacks aimed at Elveil’s head and neck. Elveil dodged with unnatural precision, her wings creating bursts of wind that flattened the remnants of nearby buildings. One claw raked across Scarlet’s chest, splitting the shell cleanly and exposing us, the core, beneath.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Scarlet snarled and retaliated with a devastating uppercut, her claws tearing into Elveil’s jaw. She hooked her fingers to yank her down, but instead ripped it clean off. The shadowy griffon staggered back, but with a flap of her wing, she opened up some distance. Her nanites swarmed to repair her face. Scarlet pressed her advantage, pouncing with enough force to crater the ground beneath us.

Even as Elveil tried to dodge, we were faster. We collide in a tackle. The impact sent shockwaves rippling outward, sending more pieces of buildings out from us. Elveil hooked her talons and paws between us and shoved us away before we hit the ground.

Elveil flared her wings and unleashed another beam of shadow magic. Scarlet barely dodged most of this one, the edge of the blast searing off part of her right arm. It dangled uselessly for a moment before it was rebuilt and reconnected.

Thirty seconds remain.

Scarlet snarled in frustration, her burning eyes locking onto Elveil’s fully reconstructing body. She crouched low, the shadow flames behind her spiraling into her hand. Soon she was holding a massive greatsword made of our shadow magic.

She can do that? “You can do that?”

“Abyzgors can manipulate the fire of their bodies into weapons,” Scarlet grumbled. “Now stop talking. I’ve got to hack her up.”

Noted. Orange piped up.

In a blur, she charged forward with the sword lowered. She doesn’t really know how to use a sword. She dragged it through the ground and swung it upwards as Elveil hopped into the sky with another barrage of bombs. Chunks of earth and rock exploded outward, like shrapnel. It intercepted the majority of the bombs that mattered.

It couldn’t have been about blocking the attacks; they weren’t going to hurt us. But then the sword turned into a clawed whip. She snapped it out, and it caught Elveil’s talon.

Before she could pull Elveil, Elveil pulled her. It seemed Scarlet was ready for it as she readied a fist for when she got close to Elveil. The griffon slashed off the talon that Scarlet was attached to and rose into the air before slamming into our back.

Elveil raked her talons across our back. Once they grabbed on, she flapped forwards and drug us through the ground for six seconds. With the deep furrows we were leaving, I was doubting that a city could ever be built in this place again.

Twenty-four seconds.

Scarlet twisted the whip back behind her and latched it on the space between Elveil’s wings. She then pulled, causing the griffon to roll backwards into a somersault, launching us into the air. The griffon landed on the ground face first as Scarlet twisted to land driving her hoof into Elveil’s spine.

Elveil managed to roll onto her feet and pull her head out of the ground just before we landed on her. Scarlet turned the whip into a giant hammer and brought it down on Elveil’s head. There was a thunderous crash as the front half of her body was buried into the ground.

Then Scarlet started tearing her claws down Elveil’s back, severing one of her wings, and leaving a deep trench through her lion-like torso. Before Elveil could recover, Scarlet grabbed the exposed spine and wrenched upward. The sound of tearing metal mixed with the hiss of nanites desperately trying to knit the body back together.

“Still regenerating?” Scarlet growled. “Let’s see how you handle this.”

Eighteen seconds.

She slammed a hoof into Elveil’s back again as she pulled on the spine even harder with both hands. With one last heavy wrench, Elveil’s skull popped out on the end of her spine in Scarlet’s hands.

I flinched at the sight.

Elveil’s body went limp, but her nanites quickly started to rebuild herself from the skull and spine. Scarlet tilted her head back and fed the spine down her throat. Elveil’s head was reconstructed enough for her to allow for speech.

“Not like this!” She wailed as Scarled pressed a finger on her forehead and pushed her down our abyzgor body.

At first I thought it was a bad idea. But as it traveled down towards our actual body inside the shell, the entire time the shadow magic of our body continued to ground down Elveil’s bones as they fed them down our throat.

We were eating Elveil. I was completely stunned at what Scarlet was doing.

Twelve seconds.

The head was more difficult to swallow, but Elveil’s nanite reconstruction couldn’t keep up with how fast we were breaking her down. Eventually the head and brain were filtered down our throat, where our nanities broke her down to energy. I could tell that Orange didn’t assimilate the nanites and instead consumed those too.

Then it appeared. We gained twenty stat points and forty-seven million, six hundred and twelve thousand and one shards.

“We did it?” I couldn't believe it.

Scarlet chuckled. “I guess she really was consumed by power.” She burst into full-on laughter until the abyzgor form ended. “Wasn’t she delicious?”

It was now or never. I pulled on Scarlet’s consciousness and ripped her back into a simulation as I took over and held on as tightly as I could.

“What’s the big idea?” Scarlet screamed from inside my head as she used one of the eye projectors to appear in front of me. She pointed to her chest. “I did what you wanted. I killed Elveil. And this is how you say thank you?”

I shook my head. “You’re wrong. We did it. But this isn’t about that. Were you going to give me control if I asked?”

She scowled. “No. Let’s face it, you’ve lost your drive. So while you moped around in our head, I was going to enjoy myself.”

I pursed my lips. “Thought so.”

I looked at our energy levels. We had used a lot of our energy during that fight. We were down to just under a thousand percent after eating Elveil, who gave us six hundred percent of that.

“This is about making sure you’re never released to slaughter mindlessly again.” I made my way to where the sphinx was landing. “What I did was wrong. I used you to be a means to an end. There’s no redemption; there's nothing I can do to undo what’s been done. All that’s left for me is to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Scarlet got up in my face. “I’m not going anywhere! You can’t get rid of me! You won’t!”

I ignored her. I know that.

I calculated that I could cut my head off twice and not be able to regenerate, but I couldn’t do it. I’d cut my head off willingly before, but that was to live. Something in me wouldn’t do it to die. In truth, I was terrified of dying. There was one who could grant my request.

With step I took towards the sphinx, Scarlet screamed louder and louder. But I ignored her and kept focused on the sphinx. Orange, mercifully stayed out of it.

Among my greatest regrets is that I won’t say sorry and goodbye to Killa and Shadara. They’ll never know and wait for me forever. One day, I hope they learn to move on. Something like me shouldn’t exist. I see that so clearly now. Now only if I wasn’t such a coward and end it myself…