Drade and Luuko are forced into one body as something rejects her soul, forcing them to track her down, along with Onei, who is just along for the ride. They anger Kai’Vra during their search and barely escape into the sewers, where a strange creature stalks Onei. In the sewer, Drade recruits Kaleb to the team to help battle Kai’Vra. They eventually are guided by a spirit that Luuko spoke with the day before to a laboratory under the ground, where they are encouraged by a letter from ‘Law’ to resurrect the creature within the laboratory. She is very aggressive and tries to kill Onei, prompting the spirit to engage in battle using a strange power, while the three escape through an elevator.
Meanwhile, Therin, a ‘supervillan’ who worked under Gau, Drade’s father, invades Changeton, causing its residents to begin evacuating at a, frankly, ludicrous pace as The Great Water Elemental threatens to flatten the city with a meteotsunami. Superpowered grunts run around the city along with Hilda, who can teleport to locate people and work to evacuate the city to make his conquering of Changeton as bloodless as possible.
When the gang reaches the surface, they learn of the tsunami. Drade isn’t worried and keeps looking for Luuko’s body while Kaleb risks his life defending them. Uffield arrives with Drade’s mom(for some reason) and Kaleb barely survives with the help of Dou Van Arc, the archdruid. Uffield uses her Momentum Reversal Wave to easily stop the tsunami, prompting The Great Water Elemental to battle her, a fight which she wins before getting distracted by a well-laid trap from Therin, who knows her only weakness is fluffy kitties.
Drade, Onei, and his mom run through the streets but are located by Hilda, who intends to capture him to neutralize The Friends as a potential resistance group. They eventually meet with Tabitha, who is definitely not Kai’Vra in disguise and escape Hilda’s superpowered grunts with the help of Dou Van Arc, who bails Drade out for the second time in the series. He flies them to the highway, where they search desperately for the one bus they need to find in the city, which happens to be the first one they look at. Luuko’s body ends up stabbing Drauko, and then Luuko and Onei have an existential crisis for a few minutes before they are picked up by Datai and his cool car and drive off after barely escaping more shockingly incompetent grunts.
Livia, one of Drade’s old friends, is picked up on the way, during which time Drade and Luuko fuse souls and become Drauko. They eventually get stopped by Kaleb, who is apparently more competent than the entire army of superpowered grunts chasing after them because he nearly kills all of them on accident by flipping the car over with his surprise attack. Miraculously, everyone is knocked out except for Drauko and Kai’V- I mean Tabitha, who sneaks behind him and threatens to end Kaleb’s bloodline before being talked down by Drauko. Livia heals everyone with her ludicrous healing magic, and they split up into two groups to save time, leaving Drade, Onei, and Livia on their own while Kai’Vra fights back the approaching grunts and Datai, Sara, and Felix go the other direction never to be seen again. Oh, I mean Tabitha.
Tabitha is mean to Livia, splitting her from the party, and then goes back to the party and discusses fate, at which point she learns that fate is a massive and powerful force that seems to be influencing every event as it occurs, mostly in Drade’s favor. Seeing him as a threat, she tries to unalive him.
The story continues, but first, we have to talk about parallel universes.
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In the universe where Onei doesn’t exist, Drade gets stabbed and dies rather uneventfully, with Therin being just a moment too late to save him. Therin lets her get away, and while he realizes how fucked his relationship with Uffield is, who he had been a guardian of for about seven years beforehand because he indirectly caused her brother’s death. He then steels his resolve, making his way to Uffield before threatening to kill her, seeking to carry out the plan he’d prepared for twenty years by taking out one of the largest threats to it. He can’t do this, however, giving in at the last moment because she means too much to him, seeing her almost as his own daughter. He refuses to be nice to Uffield, however, too terrified to alter anything he had planned to remain friends with her. After he leaves, so does Uffield, who decides to enact a spiteful campaign against Therin, ruining his plans exclusively to prove a point while refusing to believe that Drade is dead.
Meanwhile, Vertai, Hilda’s daughter, works with The Friends to escape the clutches of Therin’s grunts.
In the universe where Onei does exist, she buys just enough time by blocking Kai’Vra’s attack, getting herself killed temporarily to save Drade, Therin arriving in just enough time to threaten the careful plant monster away. At this point, he abducts Drade and takes him into his invisible warship so he can give Drade a glorified PowerPoint presentation to convince him to join his cause. Conveniently, everyone forgets to do anything with Onei’s body, allowing the loose god to possess her and regain all her godly power, as well as become a ‘fatebreaker.’ The god is easily the most powerful creature yet, and blows a hole in the ship to confront Drade, seeking Chaos, the true god which is inside of Drade, because she needs to survive Onei’s curse through its power.
Another small thing I forgot to mention is that there’s a twelve-year-old girl called Lumia who is part of The Friends but was sent to Brazil by Drade to help with an investigation regarding magitech in a remote nation of elementalists. Lumia sees a big fire dude and kills it using a nuclear explosion, prompting an annoyed Therin to confront her and ask her to help him invade someplace, which the girl, who is apparently the current god of the sun, agrees to do, mostly because she’s bored and he promised her candy. They manage to peacefully enter due to fate-aided bullshitting, and Lumia must apparently perform some sort of test to obtain the Divine Water, which allows one to kill a god.
Meanwhile, the goddess of life, the ominously named ‘Great Mother,’ tries to break Drauko’s mind by making them see an eternity of nothingness, but that fails due to Drade’s ability to see through illusions. She doesn’t notice this, however, and is tricked by Therin into waiting for Lumia to arrive, who matches the god easily in combat, but fails to kill her. The two gods have at it, turning a good portion of America and Canada into a nuclear hellscape, but The Great Mother is immortal, and Lumia eventually is forced to revert to Luna due to the sun setting, who is far weaker and forced to escape to The Far Realm.
Drauko is taken to The Black House, where his father is. Gau tries to protect him using Greta, but both she and him die rather unceremoniously to the vicious god. Unfortunately for her, Gau prepared a room that would keep Drauko safe by teleporting away any time The Great Mother approached. After failing to catch Drauko, they decide to catch them the next day by traveling forward into time using The Far Ream to circumvent her curse.
Drade and Luuko separate and find themselves in the fifth spirit plane just before they cross The Gates of Law, along with Law, who rules over the plane. After dying, Drade learns that he can still think, and later that Luuko remains with him. They realize that they can cross the Gates of Chaos back into the real world by sacrificing part of Luuko’s soul, and do so out of desperation, and potentially through Onei’s prayers.
They appear back in the world, along with Onei, who got saved by them(somewhat accidentally and to little consequence) and get thrashed by Kai’Vra before standing up and somehow becoming capable of combating the plant monster in physical combat.
Which is where the story ended.