Dangerous.

That was the only word fluttering through Lukas’s mind, as he tried to keep his knees from hitting the floor. Terraporting had saved him from a gory death, but it was still an option on the table. He wasn’t foolish enough to consider himself safe, especially because he couldn’t leave the battlefield. Not yet.

And now they know I can terraport.

Information was one of the greatest tools you could hold in a fight and was as valuable as any weapon or skill in determining victory. By controlling the flow of information, you ruled the battlefield. The less they knew of his abilities, the greater his unpredictability and his chances of defeating them. So far, they had discovered he could do Motion Manipulation, both inner and outer; force-shielding, conjuration, and now terramancy. They also knew of Blob transforming into whatever shape he desired, so he was probably a terramancer skilled at motion manipulation.

He still had Hreidmar’s gravity control techniques, Pyromancy and Aquamancy hidden up his sleeves. Using his two-bit pyromancy would be slightly less effective than scolding these muspel, unless he combined it with the dranzithl’s corrosion. Maybe as a last bit of measure? Aquamancy…. He could technically perform it, but here in this fiery environment, he’d be hard-pressed to make it worth anything. Gravity? It could be a last-minute flight attempt if things really went south, but until then, he’d have to keep it hidden.

That meant the muspels had him figured.

He still had the Muspel prototypes added to his array. They were useless to him, not unless he got the chance to get the double Level-Ups and get his body to better reflect his skill set.

It was like being back at the Crypt all over again.

The more things change, he thought, the more they stay the same. Seriously, Inanna, why do these things keep happening to me?

As always, there was no answer.

“Earth walker,” He heard them exclaim. “The seidmadr can terraport!”

. “Yeah,” He shot back. “Which one of you saw that coming?”

The muspels looked at each other, as if physically confirming if there was anyone among them that had expected him to terraport. Lukas sighed at the rigid, blank faces, and sighed. Seriously, his humor was wasted upon these creatures. Like.. why? At least that could prove as a suitable distraction. For fuck’s sake, he needed some distraction if he wanted to stop shaking in fear and take proper action.

“As much as I’d like to give you candy for figuring that out, I really need to leave. There’s this portal I really need to catch.”

The sounds of growling coming from behind caught his attention. From the corner of his right eye, he could see a group of ifrit encircling him. The muspel in front of him raised his fiery club in the air.

“DIE!” It exclaimed.

“Figures!” Lukas mumbled. Let it not be said he didn’t try to be diplomatic. Slipping into a combat stance, Blob already reformed into the familiar axe in his hand, he surveyed the arena. There were easily a hundred monsters around. Maybe he would need to let the Dranzithl run free sooner than he thought.

“Do you really want to go down that route?” He asked. “The more you fight me, the more I kill your people. Just let me leave and we can end it right here.”

“We will fight.” It boasted. “And you will die.”

The club smashed downward.

“For someone so tough, you fellas are being awfully sensitive about— oh fuc—!”

The world exploded.

Fire and burning rock detonated out of the ground. Torrents of flame that could incinerate his body with the slightest touch, burning boulders that would reduce him to paste the moment they hit, and a gale of volcanic ash that just had to be bad for his skin — all of them came at him at the same time. And then there was one muspel that wanted to maul him into dinner by smashing its fire-laden fists into his face.

Kinetomancy took care of the flames, and Lukas was glad to see Blob had enough hardness to shatter boulders. He whirled and hacked a muspel’s arm off, before hurling it to an ifrit in the face.

But it wasn’t enough.

His ability to defend against projectiles using Shatterpoint Intuition was extreme, but even he had his limits. He could not be fast enough to defend against a simultaneous attack against every point of his body from all sides.

But Tanya or the svartalfars weren’t around anymore. That meant he didn’t have to limit himself. He had options. Gathering power in his legs, Lukas leapt straight backwards, employing friction manipulation to cut past the air resistance to increase the distance between himself and his attackers —

— only for another muspel punching into him from the right.

The hit left him bent into a bow, forcing all the air out of his legs as his body bent in half. Before he knew it, he was flung in front, raw force thrashing him into the terrain below, until he was buried between four feet of rabble.

“Die!,” said the creature. “Die!”

Lukas would’ve derided them on their neanderthal warcry and suggested them a good PR agency, but before he could so much as open his mouth, the muspel threw its club at its face, crashing against his half-formed force-shield, like a truck through a wooden fence. The sheer impact was deafening, and created a massive crater, pushing Lukas several more feet within the ground.

And then the crater began to heat up.

…

…

Lukas swallowed. The ground beneath him was going to blow up. And if he didn’t get away, he’d get blown with it. If he tried to stop it, he’d die. If he tried to escape, he’d die. If he stayed where he was, he’d die. There was only one thing he could do in a situation like this and that was to try to live by any means necessary….

The third hammer of force came thundering down upon him.

Activating Monster Prototype DRANZITHL

Initiating Consciousness Shift

Enact.

This time Lukas was ready. With a sudden leap, he instantly crossed a distance close to a hundred feet.

And then a second force-wall came crashing just inches away from him.

Lukas didn’t wait to see the results. He turned right, and accelerated, shifting through several dozen feet with a single step. Every time his feet left the ground, he crossed several hundred feet. The muspels rushed after him, yelling and howling, their clubs hammering against the terrain and tearing it apart. Individually, he was faster than any of them, but together, they were faster. Within the very first minute, he had already been hit in eight different points on his body. Several of his muscles were sprained and torn apart, and his tibia was close to fracturing. If he didn’t immediately escape, things would turn very bad for him.

Absolutely wonderful.

“Tch!” He grimaced as he jumped at another corner, mere moments before the ground beneath him exploded in a burst of magma. The molten rock had touched his clothes and burned a massive hole through it. If not for the dranzithl’s regeneration, he’d have been short of a leg. He’d need to get away from this place as fast as poss—

BOOM!

The ground before him exploded, unleashing a veritable wall of crimson, the flames surging higher and higher until it was the size of a small hill. The sheer force of the explosion was so great that Lukas was bodily lifted and sent hurling for several dozen feet. His back slammed into one of the craters, with half-melted rock and stone digging into his spine from behind.

“Urgh!” He groaned. It was the only intelligible sound he could make as he tried to regain his bearings.

His head was pounding, and he felt like he had just been spun out of a washing machine. Shifting slightly, he realized he was half-buried in stone and half-molten rock that was slowly corroding through his robes.

“Fuck!” He grunted, and stood up, vainly trying to keep some semblance of civility on his person. Kind of difficult to do when more than half of your trousers are charred and gone.

Then he saw it.

The blur behind the wall of flames. It was a massive, shadowed figure, larger than anything he had ever faced before.

And it was getting larger by the second.

He saw the face next, an eerie mix of charred flesh and bone. The flesh, if it could be called as such, was dark brown with flecks of crimson and blackened silver, with several horn-like protrusions jutting out at odd angles. The eyes shone with a mad, blue, almost primordial light, contrasting with the bright crimson surrounding it.

Slowly, the demented beast’s full form came into clarity. It took a single step out of the flaming wall, causing tremors on the ground. Then another step. And another. Its body was humanoid, but only just. Its limbs were thicker than oak trunks, and it loomed over him, his head barely reaching above its waist line.

“Uh,” he said, “you’re not… their mommy, by any chance, are you?”

The demon lifted its head and roared.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

One moment, there was nothing. Then violence permeated the air. The sound was loud — an inept description. Lukas was already on the ground, his ears and eyes and nose already bleeding, while the dranzithl’s regeneration kept healing them back at a spectacular rate. His heart felt like it would explode, and his hands shook as pinpricks ran along his skin.

The monster tilted its head slightly downwards, and Lukas saw its large, blue, skeletal eyes.

Something told him, yelled at him, that he should run. But his muscles didn’t obey his command. His legs spasmed as he tried and failed repeatedly to stand on his feet. None of it seemed normal, and his mind nearly slipped away in fear. He — what was he doing — he was forgetting something.

Danger.

Right. That was it. Danger. He was in danger—

The monster opened its maw again, and its eyes glinted like a predator. It wasn’t calculating how to fight him or how to avoid combat. No, it was akin to a starving man looking at an eat-all-you-want buffet, with layers upon layers of delicious and exotic dishes laid out just for it to feast upon.

Prey Found You

“Yeah…” Lukas mumbled. “Yeah, it did.”

Before him, merely thirty paces away, the monstrous muspel cocked its head in predatory curiosity. The spikes that adorned its skull and neck jutted out at odd angles, frill-like and menacing, making it appear larger than its correct size. Lava trickled down its body, kissing its skin like water, with an iridescent glare shooting out of its bony eyes. Jagged, serrated teeth loomed from its jaws, dripping thick, viscid lava to the ground. It had two pairs of hands, like one of those ancient Hindu Gods, and looked like the wrestler that juggled a train engine as a casual exercise. There was fire within it. Fire exploded outside it. Fire was it.

Lukas’s attention, however, was not focussed on those trifle details. Instead, he was gazing at the monster’s eyes. There was a feral cunning to those glowing orbs, an inhuman, alien intelligence that was primordial yet strangely disconcerting.

This wasn’t a stupid brute awaiting its turn to mindless attack and slaughter, like the ifrit herd. It was aware of its surroundings, to a level perhaps even greater than Lukas himself. Something about its stare spoke of a alien intelligence, almost as if it had shed off its structured and logical conscience, and replaced it with a shrewd, bestial wit, much like the flames that exuded out of it.

It was superior to him, and it knew it.

Lukas had faced impossibly powerful beings before. The Guardian of the Crypt. Solana. Ryu. And of course, Inanna herself. But even with the Goddess, he had never lost his defiance.

But standing before this monster, Lukas could admit he was unnerved.

“Yeah…” He said, “shit’s really hit the fan this time.”

Like Solana, there was something utterly unnerving about it. Unlike Solana, the power exuding out of it was utterly unrestrained. This was a destroyer in the genuine sense of the term. If there was anything that would be an accurate test of his abilities, this was it.

Faster than it took a normal person to blink, Lukas went through his Prototype Array, verifying every single monster he knew,right down to their meanest skill, but nothing came even remotely close to being useful. The only thing remotely close was the dranzithl with its instant regeneration, but even that would be useless if that thing actually attacked him. Just its will alone had been enough to crush him into a crater. The only option was to run, but how could he outrun something that could attack him faster than he could perceive it?

No. No monster prototype could fight this.

Neither could his strength. Nor his limited kinetomancy, nor Hreidmar’s gravity. Nothing.

As if sensing the turmoil in his mind, it took a single step in his direction, the motions heavy with menace. From the corner of his eyes, Lukas spotted the other muspel standing on ceremony, backing down. The ifrit populace had already escaped, their prey-instinct overwhelming their desire to hunt.

As soon as it sees me running, it’ll scorch me to death, Lukas mused. It knows it’s cornered me and wants me to react. I’m its entertainment. The only option is to keep its flames from touching me.

The monster clawed another menacing step towards him.

Yes. That was the only way available. He had deflected flames before with minimal knowledge of kinetomancy. He had grown since then, but the flames he’d face now would be magnitudes, no, a dimension greater than Quonnan’s. Nothing he could use — lifeforce, terramancy, pyromancy or aquamancy — nothing would be remotely useful against this monster. None of his monsters would last even five seconds against this being.

Lukas focussed on Blob, connecting with its constitution.

Shield me.

Blob rose out of his form, expanding in all directions, forming an exo-suit to cover him, head to toe, leaving his nostrils, eyes, ears and mouth as the only openings available. Aqāru would not be a moderate choice of armor against lava, and wouldn’t last long against flames this potent. Not even when augmented with lifeforce.

But perhaps, he didn’t need lifeforce for this. Aqāru was a metal that conducted all elements. And against these flames, Lukas could only think of one.

Earth.

The terrain.

Terramancy.

His fractals went into overdrive, churning out mana in massive volumes, covering every inch of the aqāru armor — reinforcing it, filling in the intermolecular spaces, increasing the attraction between them, the density between molecules, the bindings between multiple molecular layers that made up the Aqāru.

What was once a fluid was now denser than diamond.

And yet, still not enough.

Lifeforce burned bright within him, pouring more than he’d possibly need. His muscles became denser, more agile, more resistant to tear and fatigue. The bones of his body hardened. His senses got dialed to eleven. His current form was nearly impervious to conventional weaponry, his skin was strong enough to deflect Bergott’s blades. Even most kami-based attacks designed to kill would bounce off him.

It’d all be moot if he couldn’t deflect the flames first.

Lukas braced himself. Reinforced himself to the nth degree. Surrounded himself with a dome of rocks. Created a shield of pure inertia that could stop a running train in its tracks.

It barely halted the first blow.

Lukas was almost knocked back by the sweltering heat, his senses overloaded by its sheer intensity. Sweat poured down his brow, beads of perspiration clinging to his face and running down his cheeks. Despite that, he did not falter, did not take a single step back. He weathered the heat that would have evaporated a river and faced it with sheer, defiant will.

The flames stopped suddenly. Not because the beast was tired, but because it was observing him. Like it was a scientist, and he was the guinea pig.

Then came the second blast. It launched from the sides in a wide beam of liquid crimson, scorching the rocks themselves, smashing against the dome in waves of concussive force, buffeting it with fire so thick that it obstructed the world from view.

His eyes watered. His skin blistered. The dome was half-molten already.

The monster let out another growl. It came across as mocking in Lukas’s ears. A mocking, steely, howling laughter.

“I am not so easily killed, beast,” he spat back.

The monstrosity craned back its head. It stared down at the warrior as it challenged, its fiery pupils flashing. With a rumbling growl, it struck with all its might.

The world went red and howling.

Lukas raised both hands, touched upon the reservoir of power that the anomaly had gifted him, and called upon Ether.

Ether was the most dynamic element in the universe, capable of changing into all other elements, as well as transforming the unreal into the real. It was what allowed spiritual creatures like ifrits to bear physical form and embody physical properties. Ether was best used to create and protect, and what he had in mind was going to take a lot.

Cold blue light shone from within him. Within his thoughts, Lukas merged the power of Ether with raw, undiluted anomalous energy.

If Ether was the most versatile element in the universe, Anomalous Energy was the very fabric of creation. It didn’t make things more potent, but it made them more real. And when combined with Ether, the results could be pretty interesting. Had he not been fighting for survival, Lukas would have worn a pair of lab goggles, gotten a workbook and begun taking notes.

Activating Monster Prototype Marid

Initiating Consciousness Shift…

Enact.

Instantly, Lukas accessed the Marid’s skills. He already had them listed in his arsenal, but he was really looking for the kami’s instinct more than anything else. Lukas grabbed the surge of Anomalous Energy and Ether within him, and with a command that could only be from the Marid’s instinct, coupled with a Level-2 Water Creation skill, pushed it out all at once.

Ever seen a tidal wave crash against a volcano? Lukas hadn’t either, but if he had, he was pretty sure it would look like this.

His head exploded with raw agony as the energies met and fed upon each other, growing into a thunderstorm in his thoughts. With a kick, he pushed himself into the air, bent his knees and went into a crouch, crafting an orb of pure lifeforce all around him, just in time for the wave to crash against the legion of fiery shadows that was the beast’s skin, and turned into an explosion of steam. Lukas could see the flames raging all around as the explosive force hurled his orb shield like a cannonball into the sky. The entire area behind him exploded sky high, raining down broken rock fragments and flames all around.

Nearly half a thousand feet above ground, the protective orb reached its apogee and then fell back towards the ground. Lukas hissed in pain from the stress of maintaining and controlling the shield. The Marid had no clue what to do in this situation and so Lukas let it dissipate.

Switching to Monster Prototype Svartalfar

Initiating Consciousness Shift…

Enact.

Yes. Level-5 Alpha Condition was a wonderful, wonderful thing.

Seamlessly, the instincts of a kami trapped in mid-air vanished, replaced by one that was so comfortable standing in mid-air that his fellow compatriots called him a sorcerer for it. Hreidmar’s instincts sharpened his focus, and instantly exacting its position ‘with respect to the center of gravity’ of the terrain. He’d need to make sure he didn’t overdo the height, or the speed, or else the sudden change of pressure would cripple him. However, even being temporarily disoriented was significantly preferable to being incinerated violently by that fire demon.

Higher. Higher. Higher.

He rose through the sky at tremendous speed. He couldn’t consider what he was doing to be flying. Flying was the action of keeping off of the ground. A process. What he was doing was merely adjusting the position of where he was and keeping the object he was on a constant relative to the ground. His changing in location was merely applying a velocity to the constant that was the sword he had made. It would be immensely difficult to perform terramancy like this in the air, with minimal proximity to the terrain, but Lukas had the advantage of drawing from his Omphalos reserves. He was moving higher and higher.

He did not notice that his lungs were not taking in enough air. They already had trouble with that because of the wounds he had suffered. He did not notice the damage his body had undertaken in trying to survive the past blows. Instead, his entire focus was down on the ground where the fire demon was looking up from the ground and—

“█ ██████████ ██████████”

With an earth-shattering roar, the beast charged forward, hunched down, and then launched itself up into the air at its prey that was rising at speeds that would kill a normal human being.

“Shit!” Lukas swore, seeing the giant rapidly approaching him at an impossibly fast velocity. He had put enough distance between the two that he had thought he might have been out of reach. Turns out he had once again ignorantly forgotten how little such beings cared for the laws of physics. As it stood, Lukas only had a few seconds before it caught him unless he did something quick.

And only one thing came to mind.

“Push!” he grimaced, preparing his already battered body for the strain that was about to hit him.

A wall of pure force expanded between himself and the beast. Of course, it did absolutely nothing to the beast, but that was expected. Instead, it was the reactive force — Newton’s law at work, that pushed him in a parabolic trajectory far, far out of its reach. How he stayed on all fours and not black out or break his limbs as his body rocketed away. He would never know, but that was exactly what happened. The moment it hit him, Lukas’s entire being felt like it was being crushed and his vision temporarily went white from the strain. Breathing was a luxury as the unwanted pressure on his body forced his brain to focus on ensuring his vitals could still function properly, and this was after he had reinforced his body beforehand. And the demon was still getting closer and closer and closer—

It happened in an instant.

A blue blur streaked through the air, traveling so fast it appeared to be a bolt of lightning. It struck right at the giant’s chest, ripped through its body, and buried itself deep within its heart before the monstrosity detonated. And when it did, the world beneath Lukas simply vanished, a sea of flames and wind taking its place. The force of the resulting explosion was so powerful that even from several hundred feet above, a wall of air so solid that it blew the wind out of his lungs buffeted Lukas.

The Screen pinged.

Soul Siphon Success!

Absorbed Monster Prototype BYLESTYR