The battle turned when Lukas Aguilar bore the brunt of the enemy’s combined attacks and shrugged it off with a snap of his fingers. It turned into a slaughter when he started chopping through muspels one after another, swinging his impossibly hard war ax with the air of a man wiping sweat off his brow. It became wholesale butchery when Frost-Queen Tanya began throwing out vacuum bomb explosions like they were going out of fashion.
Despite that, the inhabitants of the borderland kept fighting with admirable courage. No, not courage, Lukas reasoned. Courage was a complex emotion best left for muspels and other superior beings. The ifrits and other kami were just… monsters, beings whose instincts were governed by the elemental spectrum. It just so happened that the Fire element represented and influenced powerful emotions.
Most of which were negative ones.
Rage.
Vindication.
Hatred.
The terrain was ridden with malignant growths. An ocean of twisted figures. Crawling on many jointed limbs, slithering across the terrain, swimming through the lava pools, the creatures were coming at them like a solid avalanche. Creatures clad in solid armor. Bare-chested horned demons. Looming, hulking, eight-legged canines. And those were only the ones close to the ground.
From the distant horizon, Lukas could see the raptors coming. Like the diseased skin of a plague victim, they came in vast numbers. Massive reptilian forms, twisting and contorting as they descended towards them. The sounds they were making were something no sane person should hear.
It was the sound of a world gone mad. A reality trying to kill itself.
Tanya howled a vicious war cry and shot up to the sky, before firing a rain of implosion missiles upon the crust, each of them detonating with the force of a small bomb upon impact. The next moment, she was down on the ground, striking left and right with her wind blades. She made flickering cuts as swift and light as the beating of a hummingbird’s wings, leaving nothing but little incisions in the depth of a fingernail’s width in spaces of hard flesh, but covering a pace as big as her hands around the wound with vicious, bitterly cold, frost. Wherever she went, a nexus of carnage followed. The abominations closest to her recoiled and were struck with bitter wounds, the alien frost growing in them and stealing precious lifeforce from their bodies. That left them in a half-frozen state, blocking their allies from getting close enough to strike her. This left her riding forward into a vacuum of space that could never quite close around her, leaving an opening for Lukas to exploit.
And exploit he did.
With frightening ease, Lukas traversed through the battlefield, employing terraportation to devastating effect. He slid out of the ground in front of a monster, grabbed its head and sunk back down, burying it upside down. Shooting out of the ground just behind it, he stabbed the next muspel through the neck, decapitating it for good measure.
Every move brought with it an increased aggression. One strike became three. A missed kick created a crater in the ground. The monsters twisted themselves in mid-air when he appeared before them, and instantly Lukas doubled his speed and sucker-punched it in the face, hurling it away by several dozen feet before it skidded to a stop.
Only to find an axe coming for its head.
The sentient liquid metal that he affectionately called Blob had forged into an oversized, ornate, double-edged axe, a faithful copy of Inanna’s weapon. It was an executioner’s weapon, Death sitting in sentient metal, held by him in a one-handed grip with a familiarity he did not possess. With flawless grace, it split through muspel and monster alike as effortlessly as a person would chop firewood; bifurcated twisted forms from head to feet, folded its victims in half with horrifying ease. Such was the speed of his blows that the creatures didn’t even bleed until after they hit the ground.
Limbs fell. Heads rolled. Corpses, physical and conjured, paved the way in his wake as he carved a bloody road behind him.
A hundred feet away, Lukas heard Tanya howling in fury, a sound that stunned and weakened everything around her, fully focussed on tearing the monsters limb by limb. Parts were flying in the air and her wings — four of them — were moving around like they had gained a mind of their own. Pulses of pure pressure, implosions of vacuum and blades of wind sharper than steel cut down anything and everything that came within her vicinity.
It was like… like watching a tornado in action. Absolute, deadly and bizarrely selective. The yells and shrieks around her were akin to a chorus that rose to an exultant crescendo as she whirled and struck down every single thing that got in their path.
Absolutely everyone.
Meanwhile, his screen kept popping up in the background.
Gained +18127 Experience!
Gained +13111 Experience!
Gained….
Level-Up Delayed until PRIME HOST is not in combat…
6 LEVEL-UPs in sequence.
And so on, so forth.
But the battle was far from over. Up there, in the sky, the clouds were shifting, moving, contorting into one another. Sounds of thunder reverberated across the sky, but there was no lightning to be seen. Instead. there was this strange throbbing hum of energy that grew in power with every passing second right above him.
His heart rate rocketed and his mouth went dry. As someone who lived in the Midwest for over a decade, Lukas had seen his fair share of twisters. People thought they were scary, which they were, but they were also very survivable provided one followed by some simple guidelines — warn people early, and when you heard the warning, to head for the safest place you could reach. Usually it was a basement or a cellar, or maybe beneath a staircase, or an interior bathroom. Other times, the best you could hope for was the deepest ditch you could find.
And right then, his instincts screamed at him to do exactly that.
The heavens were in turmoil. The clouds churned faster and faster. Screams, real and ethereal, exuded out into the atmosphere as strange energies soared up into the heavens to join the newly revolving mandala of power, lighting up the sky with every shade of white and blue and sea green.
Then came the attack.
Before Lukas could even comprehend what had transpired, something slashed through the air, its fury palpable. All he heard was a blood-curdling shriek of fury and power, before a thunderous fork of lightning streaked through the sky.
Right at Tanya.
The force behind the attack that condensed on her was so dense that Lukas thought it was going to break something. Like maybe the universe. It was a whammy of pure power and pressure so intense that he knew that if they had directed it at him, it’d have compressed his mind into something too dense and inert to function, like a tiny diamond formed out of crushed coal. It wasn’t a question of weakness or strength.
Blinking his eyes against the dazzling leftover image of the lightning bolt, he saw Tanya’s slender body arch into a bow, curling around the spot where the lightning had struck her, her long, thin-fingered hands clenched around a ball of white-hot vacuum, the edges of her nails blackening and smoking with the heat. Then, with a wail of pure, terrifying scorn, she straightened again and sent that ball of intense nothingness raging through the lightning itself, devouring its power while pushing it backward, resulting in an apocalyptic detonation.
The ethereal manifestation around her faded and Tanya swooped down to the ground, her face splattered with crimson blood, and her left side, right from the shoulder to her elbow, was scorched, looking like a meshwork of rotten flesh and bone. Already frost was coating those areas. She looked at him and let out a scornful snarl.
“We need to leave. Quickly.”
Lukas was in complete agreement, and stood next to her, when his senses were assaulted by a serious, heavy-duty pulse of pyromancy.
There wasn’t even time to shout out a warning. He called upon lifeforce and kinetomancy for strength and speed. The world around him exploded in a shower of molten rock and lava. Lukas watched in awe as Tanya lifted both arms, slim and pale, fingers spread evenly in a defensive gesture. Frost gathered upon her, and expanded outward, as the crimson flares washed over them.
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The sound alone, as the two sources of power met, was enough to drive a powerful mind mad. He couldn’t even tell what it sounded like, specifically. It was too loud and too huge a noise for that. Besides, he was too busy screaming in pure reflexive protest against that sound, and his voice had gotten lost in the din. Fire and lightning and wind whirled in a cyclone centered upon them, but her frost-shield kept everything at bay.
He was like a man standing before a floor taking desperate shelter behind a rock. His shield, covering him in a half-dome, was dealing with more backlash than it could normally handle. Blisters were forming all over his skin, but he knew that if the shield vanished, he’d be vaporized in an instant.
Tanya stood slender and deadly, defying the power around them with a cold, pure light, a sphere of diamond radiance forming around her, dispersing the most vicious efforts of the firestorm. It was like a fast-flowing stream crashing against an obdurate stone. In that withering light and fury, she was a being of distilled determination and defiance, a shadow, an outline, dark and terrible, standing against the tide unmoving.
In that one moment, Lukas realized why Inanna had called her a worthy prey.
It also reminded him just how little he understood of Kinetomancy. Even at the peak of her strength, Tanya had been little more than an annoying insect to Inanna, and here he was, standing in awe of Tanya’s power.
And then, the massive firestorm faded away, leaving—
“.... fuck me!” said Lukas.
Standing around them were more bylestyr.
Seven of them.
“Oh fu—” Lukas said, just before the storm began.
The bylestyr attacked, a seemingly endless stream of flame and force. Lukas’s ability to block those flames with kinetomancy was extreme, but he had his limits, and his own weapon simply couldn’t be fast enough to defend against a simultaneous attack against every point of his body. He grabbed their motions and pushed himself against them, using the reaction force and his relatively lighter mass to propel himself out of their vicinity, but failed to intercept the hastily thrown punch to his arm.
Crack.
His shoulder shattered.
Regeneration activated.
—And it was back to normal.
Lukas somersaulted above the monster, Blob transforming into a chain connecting both hands, and he wrung it around the giant’s neck, right in time for the monster to unleash a wall of force backwards to blast his face.
Snap!
Soul Siphon Success!
Absorbed Monster Prototype BYLESTYR
Multiple specimens of Prototype BYLESTYR found
Amalgamating…
Amalgamation Success!
Nice, thought Lukas. “One down. Six to— ”
It was in time to avoid being killed by a pillar of flame that he terraported. He appeared ten feet away, vanished again, then to the right, then left, then right and right and kept doing it, as a salvo of crimson rained in his direction, and his rate of terraportation was only getting faster with each shift. He was already moving through the ground fifteen feet away from the latest buckshot, already having dodged eight buckshots while staying underground in rapid succession as he tried for a way out.
Only to stumble on the ninth, and be bombarded with innumerable flame blasts aimed for his freaking face—
…
He opened his eyes, and found himself safe and sound, at least several hundred feet away from his opponent.
“Wha—”
“Linear displacement,” Tanya said, sauntering slowly like the predator she was. “Application of pressure and wind mana to travel at extreme speeds in a linear direction.”
“Interesting,” Lukas observed, wondering what other skills she was hiding.
“I’m not sure you liked that though,” she teased, “you were enjoying yourself a bit too much. Corrosion, Hreidmar’s techniques and now bylestyr strength. Using the skills of your previous kills to gain power. Using a combination of all of them with your force techniques to create openings in your opponent’s stance to exploit. Targeting their weaknesses with suitable counters from your ever-increasing arsenal of skills and finally adding the skills of your latest kill to your Schema. What a vicious and merciless mindset you must possess to think this way! It’s adorable!”
As if to underscore her point, she licked her lips.
The difference between the Tanya who he talked to on a daily basis and the seductive and cruel frost wielder before him made him distinctly uncomfortable. As if it was a different person.
“Are we running?” He asked.
“Why?” she asked, “I’m starting to enjoy this. Finally, we’ve got some time to ourselves. Fighting together, butchering monsters, making a hill of corpses—”
Prey Found You
Damn it.
A second fork of lightning crashed at them, but this time, missed them by several feet. By the time the dust would settle, the bylestyr would be there.
His heart went into his throat as he saw a bylestyr bring its large claws upon Tanya from above, and wedge it into her naked shoulder, digging into flesh as if she had been a block of ice. Tanya contemptuously touched the limb attached to those claws, before slapping it away. The limb shattered into fragments of frozen limb. Casually knocking the limb-less claws out of her flesh, Tanya let out a chill, hungry laughter before moving to her next kill.
There was no way he could have taken himself through the mess without making it a hell of a lot messier. Tanya made it look easy.
“Distract them for a moment, will you?” she asked, shooting up into the air.
Lukas whirled around and slammed his axe against the immediate attacker, slipped down into the ground like it was made of sand, and hacked into the creature’s knees. He shot out of the ground from behind and decapitated it with a sweeping slash.
Gained +19218 Experience!
“Well,” he said, turning around at the rest, “you heard the lady.”
He would be lying if he said his confidence hadn’t faltered in the slightest. This wasn’t the first time he was facing overwhelming might. The khorkhoi had that honor. But this was definitely the first time he was facing a mix of overwhelming might and numbers. More to the point, the Omphalos in him was going berserk. The mantle of the Prime Host didn’t just come with access to unlimited soul capacity and nifty functions. An anomaly was home to all things related to creation and hunger and savagery. It thought the incoming hordes to be a fantastic idea. That someone needed to butcher their way through them, and it thought that someone ought to be him. His body was already backing up that concept. Lifeforce was flooding his veins with the same rush that mana surged through his inner ley-line networks. The fractals on his arms began to heat up, and assuming they could all but double his total mana, that was saying something.
He flexed his power. Dust and pebbles began to rise into the air around him, creating a helical sine wave of power around him. It didn’t speak much about his skill, but the sheer power was enough to make his opponents freeze and take note.
“You. Will. Not. Win.” spoke one of them, its voice reminding him of heavy, rusted metal being dragged through asphalt.
“Oh, I know that, but guess what? I made you look.”
He winked, pressed his feet into the ground, and propelled himself into the air, just in time to see the ebon missile streaking through the air, traveling so fast that it appeared to be little more than a black blur. In a single second, it crossed over half the distance and impacted a bylestyr, with two more standing in its vicinity.
The result… was not an explosion. It was not even a massacre. Both terms implied the possibility of there being more than one probable outcome, and from the instant Tanya unleashed her fury, there was only one way things could end.
This was not an attack. It was an act of God.
The ebon streak hit the fiery defense and imploded, power and winds rolling into it like a tsunami, and a wave of blackness and destruction expanded out, devouring the crimson out of the terrain, engulfing everything within its vicinity. The bylestyrs used fire, and then tried to jump back, growing increasingly desperate as the wave kept hungrily claiming the land beneath their feet, consuming it, ripping it down into nothing but raw energy. The bylestyr had defenses in place, their power protecting themselves like a wall against the siege.
It was blown away like cobwebs in a hurricane.
The land for half a mile in every direction had vanished, a sea of flames taking its place. The force of the resulting explosion was so powerful that even from where Lukas stood, several hundred feet up in the air, he was buffeted by a wall of air so solid that it sent him reeling.
When the dust settled, the land was gone. The entire zone was destroyed, leaving a giant lava pool in its wake.
Gained +29218 Experience!
Level-Up Delayed until PRIME HOST is not in combat…
8 LEVEL-UPs in sequence.
“So,” said Tanya, floating down until she was at his level. “What’s next?”
Lukas looked at her blearily. “Get to the portal? Make sure the svartalfars are still safe, and that there’s no fallout? It’d be terrible if we did all this and ended up getting one of them killed by mistake.”
“There will be no fallout,” Tanya said confidently. “The hard part is over. I expect everything to go smoothly from here on out.”
Fifteen minutes later ⸻
“...I swear the portal was here,” said a flustered Tanya, the glacial features reverted to her normal appearance. “I left those two on solid ground since they could terraport the rest of the way. I told them to hold the Well open until I get you back.”
“Well,” said an unamused Lukas. “There are no svartalfars. There is no well. And unless my eyes are deceiving me, there is no solid ground either.”
“But—” Tanya mumbled.
Lukas sighed.
Tanya looked at him sheepishly. “We’re stranded. Aren’t we?”
“Yup.”
“This is gonna suck.”