To say that they were mismatched would be a hilarious understatement.

On one side were two spiritists. Of these two, Lukas was the only one that could match these muspels in a one-on-one battle, and someone had to ensure they did not attack the svartalfars from behind. Tanya’s skills at close combat weren’t particularly useful here, and she was better suited to middle-ranged aerial bombing.

On the other side was an army of muspels. And ifrits. And dozens of creatures whose population was growing with every passing second. Just fighting one muspel had taught him that these creatures were pure economies of motion. Each one of them could move to support the other, leaving no backs unguarded and no weaknesses to exploit. Individually, they were strong. Together, they were unstoppable, and that was precisely the scariest factor in the equation.

Lukas knew the truth. They could not win. He did not stand a chance against this army. If he fought, he’d die. If they tried to run away, they’d die. If they stood where they were, they’d die. Their sole option was to get to the Well as quickly as possible without all of them on their trail. And the only way to do that was…

He exhaled.

“Tanya,” he said, “get them out. Take them to the Well. I’ll distract this lot until then.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Tanya snapped. “I’m not letting you die.”

“I’m too young to die now. You get them to safety. Then come back for me.”

“NO!” she said sharply. “I don’t care about them. I’m not leaving you.”

“Don’t argue!” He snarled. “We cannot keep fighting forever, and we need them to get on the other side. Get them close to the Well and then come back for me. I’ll keep them busy till then.”

“Lukas,” Tanya’s voice was troubled, which stood to reason. She didn’t have much clarity, not like he did. “I swear if you end up dying while I’m gone, I’ll kill you.”

“Gotcha!”

He could feel Tanya’s hesitation, and the suspicion in the svartalfars’ minds. Being the uber-logical creatures that they were, trying to understand his reaction was notably difficult.

He didn’t blame them. If anything, he was surprised at himself. All this time trying to gain power, and he was now returning to the fundamentals.

Tanya could fly at extreme speeds. He himself could jump high and fast enough to follow suit. It was really Kradir and Mori that were at the disadvantage. Even if they managed to terraport their way through, they’d be stopped the moment they left these grounds. The two svartalfars had as much chance of crossing the lava pools as he had of finding a sauna pool on this borderland.

Which meant he was going to have to give her time to get them to safety and return.

“We can—” she began.

“Do nothing,” he snarled. “We cannot keep fighting forever, and we need Mori and Kradir to get to the other side. Get them to safety and then come back for me. I’ll hold them up.”

“And how will you do that?”

Damned good question. Using fire on these muspels would be useless. The dranzithl was an option, but whatever advantage it gave in terms of firepower and regeneration, it took away in terms of rationality. It was a berserker, and perhaps the most difficult of the lot to control. Shatterpoint Intuition was always an option, but he lacked a weapon capable of hacking through muspel flesh. Besides, their flames would be a pain in the ass up close. Lukas concentrated as different images flashed across his mind’s eye in less than a second. Orocoran, Neothelid, Yurei— all of them were discarded preemptively for their uselessness. The kasha’s pyromancy was little more than a candle compared to their raging flamethrower, and trying to use the Muspel prototype against their kind would end him up six feet under. No matter what creature he sought, none of them were good enough to be the solution.

That left only one option.

Kinetomancy.

The muspels were fast, but nothing was faster than motion. Their blows carried enormous force, but no force was greater than inertia. The monsters could belch out flames, but no flame was resistant to the power of redirection.

And all of that was possible through one skill.

Kinetomancy. A power that brought down gods. Inanna’s skill.

Lukas closed his eyes.

“If you take them away, I can use everything I have without reservation.”

He didn’t need to look at her to feel her hesitation.

“You’re just wasting precious time,” he asserted. “The faster you leave, the faster you can return. I will probably be too weak to jump, so you’ll have to carry me out.”

“Quit ordering me around, will you?” Tanya scoffed, but the heat from her words was missing. “Even I cannot face them at full strength. You… are you certain you can…”

She trailed off.

Lukas turned and gave her a smirk. “I faced you at full strength and won. Give me a little respect.”

With that, all thoughts of her and the svartalfars vanished from his mind as he studied the ever-growing army around them. He had killed the muspel, so he was their opponent. So long as he was there on the field, he presumed the muspels would not go after Tanya and the svartalfars. And whatever did go after them, she could take care of it.

She was a big girl.

Lukas exhaled, feeling the lifeforce flow into him. The first stage of his reinforcement allowed him to move within his body’s limits without consuming his stamina or overworking his body. At that level, thanks to the micromanagement of the lifeforce he had developed, he could keep going nearly without limits as it took just a drop of his power to get the process started, and then he could continue by fueling it with pure anomalous energy. His resources would actually regenerate faster than what he consumed them at that stage.

Stage two, however, was an entirely different matter. It employed his newly gained ability to alter his own motion, allowing him to travel faster than possible, even for his enhanced physique. Hell, he was sure he could easily keep up with a speeding car at this point. Enhanced momentum manipulation to reinforce the velocity vector. Friction negation to counter air resistance. Ether layering upon his body to prevent it from tearing itself apart. And finally instant bursts of acceleration and deceleration, coupled with tachypsychia and Shatterpoint intuition, guiding the blows at maximum efficiency. This wasn’t enhancement, this was self-weaponisation.

It was the style of fighting that Inanna preferred.

“Imagine what you wish to create. Push your ether into it. Give your imagination form.”

Blob slowly seeped down his hand, forming a thick handle. The tip expanded on either side, forming thick, sharpened edges.

A battle-axe?

Lukas looked at the weapon. No. Not just any axe. Inanna’s axe. How — Why had he chosen that weapon of all things? He wasn’t an axe-user.

He had a gut feeling that it was the weapon he needed right now.

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

Ether. True Ether flowed down his palm, percolating into the axe, fusing with it, strengthening it, making it denser and deadlier. Aqāru was a wonderful material, but nothing was better than ether when it came to instant reinforcement. A hardness, several times that of diamond, was added to the Axe’s attributes, at the same time, its weight was made perfectly proportional to its size, ensuring minimal loss of power during the swing. His fractals thrummed, supplying him with more power than he needed for his strongest attacks. Tachypsychia merged with Shatterpoint Intuition and Seismic Sense, taking his perception and elevating it to instinctive precognition levels.

“Tanya,” he requested, no, ordered her one last time. “I asked you to leave.”

“But…” the aeromancer trailed, possibly conflicted between trying to convince him and being awed by the power he was flaring.

“The muspels are here for a war. I am a warmonger.”

“Seidmadr,” Mori called out, a strange affliction in her tone. Lukas wondered if she used that term because the fallen muspel had done the same. “You are powerful, but no one person can face the might of Muspelheim. You have killed one. There are hundreds.”

“The Crypt of Fiendish Worms wasn’t an empty anomaly. I left it as one.”

And then he smiled. Instincts honed through surviving against a certain goddess overwhelmed everything else. All thoughts vanished. All questions silenced. There was no need to account for lives. There was only the battle, one which he would draw to the best conclusion he would see fit.

“My teacher had a phrase,” he said, eyeing the ever-growing army, the weight of the aqāru axe feeling oddly familiar in his hand. “An axe cares not where it falls, only that it is swung.”

His fingers clenched the weapon in his hands tighter.

Power emerged.

…

…

A strangely modulated shriek of displaced air was the only warning the muspels received.

A black blur hurtled towards them like a bolt of flung lightning. The two muspels on the left flank hurled themselves back barely in time. The projectile hit the ground, and instantly detonated, the explosion obliterating everything within its vicinity in scant seconds and sending massive shockwaves rippling through the crust. Before anyone knew it, a shaft of pure gray shooting through the air and slicing through a muspel’s throat.

It was the first to die.

“One done,” said Lukas Aguilar, “so fucking many left.”

He glanced back at Tanya and the stupefied svartalfars. “Why the hell aren’t you running yet?”

…

…

…

Combat had a strange way of playing tricks on the mind. The heat of it prevented the brain from forming coherent images with the added effect that the person fighting seldom remembered the bout in all its entirety. The danger of it caused the combatant to focus on specific instances when his situation was at its most perilous, with the auxiliary factor of him only remembering those instances. It was in rare agreement that raw recruits and grizzled veterans alike described battle as being involved in a series of photo stills, where the most memorable moments were captured in fleeting images as though frozen in time. Everything else was blurred. Everything else was made indistinct, unclear; distorted by a brain too busy working in overdrive and flooded with adrenaline.

Lukas would remember every moment of this fight with the muspels in perfect clarity for the rest of his life.

His body was in constant motion. Never stopping. Never halting. Not once did he give himself a chance to rest. The axe in his hands was a black blur in the periphery of his vision, darting for the muspel’s exposed parts in one instant and then changing course to strike another when something moved to block. His body was already moving at speeds that his normally astute senses could not keep up with.

And yet he continued doing it.

The muspel closest to him raised its club and let out a bestial roar. It leapt towards him and thrust it in his face. Lukas took a pair of quick pivoting steps, guiding the club’s front past him with one hand like he had seen Inanna do so often to him, and got into the muspel’s space, hitting it with a blast of inertia, making the club shoot out of its fingers.

And then he promptly spun around and decapitated the creature with one wide swing.

You have crossed the Threshold Barrier.

Level-Up Initiated!

Ordinarily that would’ve been great news, if not for his shit luck. Why? Because he had already leveled-up twice before, but neither of them had taken root. Instead, he had this.

A second notification sprang up.

Level-Up Delayed until PRIME HOST is not in combat

3 LEVEL-UPs in sequence.

Yeah. That’s what he meant.

“Fourteen,” he panted. “Tell you what? Why don’t we take a break for five minutes? That way, I can level up and we can have a more awesome showdown?”

The muspels answered by raising their clubs and raining blows at him.

He grunted. Fighting these monsters was like fighting Ryu all over again — a larger, stronger Ryu, only multiple of him. The muspels were now aware of the danger Blob presented and were wary of meeting it head-on. Instead, they used their unnatural flexibility to dodge and weave through his attacks and switch to mid-ranged combat, involving fiery clubs, torrents of flame and minor terramancy blasts.

Lukas glanced at the sky afar. Tanya was little more than a pale speck in the sky, her wind orb carrying both svartalfars with her. Now only if she got them to the Well and return quickly. But until then —

Lukas spun around, and threw up a force-shield sidewards, hoping to deflect the tsunami of flames one of muspel had unleashed at him.

Once upon a time, that shield would have been futile. Kinetic defenses were fairly simple to create, but they had limits. Barely months ago, he had been hard-pressed to deflect the flames shot at him by a half-burnt and full-angry Quonnan.

But times had changed. He was better now. He had learned the lessons the hard way and had the scars to prove it.

So when three of the muspel heavyweights unleashed a firestorm so massive that Quonnan’s attack would seem like a small candle in front of his inferno, he was not instantly scorched to dust. His shield dribbled with green-gold sparks as it flared out in a quarter-dome of blue-white, nearly coherent light, a barrier of raw, stubborn will merged with kinetic force.

Lukas grinned. “Nice. Here’s one of mine.”

He threw the axe into the air, mentally commanding Blob to instantly divide into five thin daggers without losing even a fraction of its tensile strength. With a speed enough to shock a professional gunman, Lukas launched the daggers at the muspel, Shatterpoint Intuition guiding their trajectories. Two of them were deflected by the clubs, with a third completely missing its target. The fourth ended up slashing through muspel’s eye, while the last one made a clean shot right below the nose.

The muspel was dead before it hit the floor.

He barely had time for a victory dance before the ground beneath his feet exploded.

“Seriously?” He yelled, leaping away from the explosion. “Didn’t your mom teach you that hitting below the belt is wrong?”

And then his ears suddenly twinged hard, like when the pressure shifts in an airplane, and the empty space behind him wasn’t empty anymore. Lukas whirled, calling on Blob to reform —

— and was flung backwards by several feet by a crushing force too powerful for him to even try to resist. He crashed against several boulders in an explosion of shattering rock that left at least a dozen little cuts all over his face, and several contusions on his limbs. Before Lukas could even try to see what was happening, three muspels were up in the air, clubs raised and slamming them down on him. His instincts flared, and a force-shield flickered between himself and the clubs.

It stopped from becoming a thick, gooey paste on the ground, but in return, he was being crushed into the ground, as if the weight of a fucking building was above him. He ground his teeth and fought against them, but the muspels kept hammering upon the invisible shield relentlessly like a raging insane lumberjack. The impact of the unstoppable forces and his immovable shield was deafening as the resulting shockwave sent cracks along the ground and dug him deeper and deeper into the crust.

For fuck’s sake, these monsters are going to bury me six feet under!

Lukas felt the shocks from the hit resonate with his body as several of his muscles spasmed under the damage. His chest felt like there was a small elephant sitting over it. Gritting his eyes, he tried to force more power into himself, not with his muscles but with his will. He pictured it as a great, dark hand pressing him down, and his defiance as his own hand, rising to force it away. He poured his will into the image, investing it with power, with reality and life. Gasping, one inch at a time, Lukas managed to get an elbow underneath him and snarled silent defiance up at him, his right hand raised against one of his attackers.

“Get off me!” He snapped.

A titanic wave of pure motion erupted out of the shield and punched the living daylights of his target, hitting him right in the chest. The creature bent in half, spitting blood out of its mouth.

Good! Let’s see how you like it!

A sudden golden glow in the sky distracted him. Tanya and the svartalfars must have sent it, signaling that they were on their way. Lukas considered escaping, but he needed to do it fast, or he’d be the one stuck here. But no matter what he did, he could not manage to get up. Something this strong could not be easily defeated and he was losing time. He needed to do something, and quickly. And in this situation—

Activating Monster Prototype SVARTALFAR

Initiating Consciousness Shift

Enact.

One moment he was being crushed into the ground. The next, his instincts and rationality were being substituted by Hreidmar’s. The svartalfar’s psyche was as alien as it came, and not even the first few times of using it made the experience any less uncomfortable. A strange earthly power thrummed through his body and Lukas sank into the ground, becoming part of the entire terrain.

Man became svartalfar.

Body became terrain.

And Lukas terraported.