The situation seemed utterly hopeless.

My eyes suddenly paused at the enormous form of the dead, red dragon. I sent the rest of my Infoscopes and scanned the massive beast. There were brilliant currents of magic radiating away from its gargantuan crystalline heart - its scales shimmered with magrad from within.

Aradria wasn’t fully dead, only knocked unconscious by the anti-magic pulse.

The creature was a furnace of power... power that I could use to save my friend!

[Help me bring Kliss to the Dragon!] I ordered, fighting the urge to pass out from the lack of oxygen.

[Why?] Delta tilted her head, strands of spider silk white hair curling from the heat.

[It's full of magical power... power that we can use to help her!] I barked.

[Ah... I see...] Delta mulled.

We grabbed the pale, broken body of Kliss, dragging her across the forest towards the dragon and set her against enormous ruby scales. I placed my hand atop Kliss and another on the scales of the unmoving beast.

"What are you trying to do, mortal?" Vovan and Frenny hissed, wrestling my tether with their divine-threads. "Let go of her soul!"

I connected another tether to the soul of the dragon, linking it with that of Kliss.

"You think that you can stop us?! She belongs to Equality!" The Archangels of Equality growled at me.

[Hold her body, nip the vows!] I ordered my twin sister.

Delta's spider-silk bound arms made from a thousand ants working together clamped down on the body of Kliss controlled by Vovan and Frenny.

Phantom silver thread-like blades stretched from her Astral body, slicing at the Vows and making them temporarily dive away from Kliss.

The forest around us burned. The thick, black smoke was making it harder to breathe with every passing minute. The rain now poured down hard, blurring my vision.

I shifted all of my Neurovista’s resources to computing the converter, slotted it into my skills set and maxed it out as much as I could.

My Infoscope’s all-scanning threads pushed deeper into the dragon.

The beast’s neck was broken, but there was still an unbelievable amount of mana in Aradria's crystalline heart - nearly two million of it. According to what I saw, the beast core of the arcane monstrosity was akin to a gargantuan mana battery from which the dragon drew power to cast its firestorm spells. She was still auto-casting a truly abyssal weather spell on the area and a healing [Vitality] pattern that danced across her entire, massive body.

The dark, thick clouds made sense, they hid Aradria's presence in the sky and allowed the creature to hunt and destroy Imperial magitek skyships with impunity. The dragon's core was also effectively healing the beast's broken neck - if I left her alone, in a few hours Aradria would awaken and return to her hunt.

The [Modify-Converter] I loaded into my skills was a Modify spell created long ago by Delta and me to turn Ogonek from a mundane, dying Fire-Bee to a crystalline, practically immortal, [Green-Vitality] bee.

As time around us slowed, I stole mana from the dragon, pouring it into my soul. This stolen power accelerated my mind further to compute more mathematical fractals, weaving a new kind of spell together, one that would fuse a sleeping dragon to a fatally injured human.

The Converter required an absurd amount of mana as it needed computational power to convert everything - bones, organs and flesh from a monster to a human.

Ordinarily, none of this would work well on a living creature but the anti-magic bomb greatly weakened Aradria’s and Kliss' flesh, making their souls and bodies more malleable. Both of them were currently weak to my modification spells, easy to carve up as an Astral Phantom.

I hummed the song of the Alanian magi with my soul threads and sliced apart the soul of the dragon and the girl like a surgeon armed with a thousand blades, reassembling both of them into something new and far greater.

When the Converter maxed out its level, the first thing I did was modify Kliss' soul, fusing, merging it to the sliced off soul-shards that were pulsating inside of the dragon's body.

My Phantom threads snipped at the connections between the remnants of Aradria’s soul and body, but I wasn't strong or fast enough to finish off the dragon's soul.

My fingers spun the Amulet of the Hunter Goddess on my neck, activating the Vow that lived atop it. I had been feeding Amari’s Vow all winter long with insects and local wildlife by setting traps in the forest.

“Goddess of the Hunt,” I sang in ancient Alanian.“I offer to you the greatest prey of all - dragon Aradria!”

A monstrous funnel suddenly manifested itself directly in the centre of the amulet. Gargantuan ghostly tentacles covered in hooks and teeth emerged from the vortex, grabbing at the soul of Aradria.

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

The shredded remnant of Aradria howled and thrashed as Amari pulled her through the Wheel of Samsara to Arxtruria.

Violet-gold eyes flashed at me through the Astral, promising me terrible vengeance.

“Have fun being reborn,” I bid adieu to the dragon.

Without the soul protecting the body, it was even easier for me to complete my work - to remodel the body and soul of Kliss so completely that no human Vow could possibly infect her.

A million mana vanished in an instant, pulled from the crystalline-organic core of the now soul-less body of Aradria.

The two divine, gold threads that were choking my friend's soul and pulling her away into the darkness of the void of the Astral Ocean towards Elysium started to let go of Kliss.

Delta saw what I was doing and targeted the Vows with her Astral blades, slicing their gold threads from the body of Kliss.

Time slowed even further, the world around me stopped, my mind accelerating as I dove into Neurovista.

The body of the dragon was powerful and ancient, each cell–a battery filled with magic. I hacked away at it with Soul-Devourer, modified it, and converted it into usable mana.

I had no regrets in demolishing Aradria - she was an abomination that had turned people on the skyship into charred bones and did not deserve to exist.

It took hours from my perception, but a mere minute had passed on the outside as Kliss' soul fused to the remnants of the dragon's soul, becoming something completely new and beautiful.

“Another snack for my Goddess,” I offered, pointing Amari's amulet at the now untethered Archangels of Equality. “Two miserable, unbound Vows.”

There was no vortex to Arx this time. The fat Vow atop of the amulet simply grabbed the two Vows drawing them into its maw.

With primal, alien-sounding screams of terror that arose from the mouth of Kliss, the Friendship and the Overseer's Vows fell silent forevermore.

Due to my modifications, the Vows could no longer recognize Kliss as a human, and could no longer wrap themselves around her soul. The Vows of Equality sunk into Amari's amulet. In another moment the gold color faded completely as they began to dissolve inside the now far bigger Vow of the Hunter. The grotesque process reminded me of how white blood cells consumed body invaders.

The Hunter Goddess' amulet around my neck ignited, absorbing all liberated magic that spilled across the local Astral from the corpse of the dragon, feasting on it.

“My thanks, hunter,” I heard Amari’s voice twinkle from the amulet.

I didn't reply to her. I wasn't done yet.

Another million mana burned away as I destroyed the dragon's excess mass, compressing and relocating everything that was useful. My hands pushed the half-body of Kliss deeper into the corpse of the Dragon, fusing the architecture of the human into that of a monster - creating completely new life as the dragon’s heart core shrunk.

I moved the remaining crystalline-organic core of the beast into the chest of my new construct.

[She better be thankful when she wakes up. If... she is even Kliss. Not sure what the dragon-soul-merger will do to her perception of self…] Delta mulled from beside me as my mind began to run low on mana, decelerating.

I ignored her snide commentary, preoccupied with my work.

The Infoscope fractal superstructures I operated observed every cell, every atom of my new creation, functioning as my omnipresent eyes.

The dragon's bones formed a new human figure.

The corpse of the dragon melted from within, deflating and ossifying.

I now knew why the Empire prized and hunted these beasts - their flesh was absolutely packed with magic. The scales of the dragon were truly unique, they collected magic from the environment to grow more of themselves very quickly. Each red dragon-scale was an incredibly unique crystalline-organic structure that was soft and hard at the same time, a perfect combination between crystal and cells.

I reshaped all of the dragon's organs, made them smaller to fit into a human frame.

I modified the crystalline-organic spikes of the dragon, fused them into Kliss' new hair, burning the excess dragon scales to power the Converter.

A bit of the darker scales went to replicate her freckles. I forged even smaller microscopic crystalline-organic structures all over her skin, giving it a very distinctive orange-red tint.

The dragon's eyes became the gold-tinted-emerald eyes of the girl in front of me. I wove the magic-seeing spell and parts of the Infoscope into them, so that she could see the currents of magic, peer across the Astral Ocean just like Delta and me.

For my final touch, I adjusted the soul, added barrier-defences to it against Vows.

Even if Giovashi once more forced Kliss to declare a Vow to Equality, it now simply would not be able to tie itself to her - Kliss would now be forever free of their vile, divine influence!

I also made her soul's threads more malleable, rearranging them to work far better with the magic-tracking System of Novazem. The new soul I was forming would not be that of a human - it would have no limitations of skills.

Kliss' System access would be truly unique, limitless. With enough practice she would be able to reshape soul-threads into whatever she wanted, making her own stats, survive in the Valley of Death, endure the [Decay] radiance projected by the magogenic zone.

The System confirmed my effort with a new window and a congratulatory musical tone that seemed to exist in the moment between eternity and two heartbeats:

[Life-forger stat gained for creating a completely new species - the Chimera!]

I wanted to do more, wanted to make Kliss invincible, indestructible, immortal - wanted to coat her entire exterior in crystalline-organic scales. Alas, the dragon's old body had completely run out of mana, leaving an enormous, discoloured, completely empty husk.

I glanced at my own stats and saw that my own mana had dropped to zero.

[Delta!] I mentally ordered.

[On it,] my sister leaned forward to grab me with ant-controlled hands as I began to fall.

[Mana-Wine!] I whined as I felt myself drowning in exhaustion.

[You drank it all already, you big idiot,] she commented as my mental facilities began to fail me.

I tried to recall when I had finished the entire bottle and couldn't.

I felt myself spinning and my vision suddenly filled with dancing, immeasurably distant stars. I sensed countless, somehow familiar echoes beneath the darkness of the Astral Ocean. I felt that they were calling out to me, a billion hands reaching out to me across eternity. Who were they? My unseen observers? Other phantoms? Myself? Various shards of my soul, necromage anchors that I've liberally been spreading out across Skyisle?

I wasn't sure.

My NeuroVista flickered and dimmed, falling apart as my mind and body shut down, completely drained of magic.