Amanda’s spear of red fire struck David from behind, piercing a large hole in his abdomen and shattering the remains of the barrier he had left.

David’s head turned unnaturally, as if swiveling on a broken neck, to face her.

“Why here, why now?” he asked in a flat voice.

Amanda did not respond.

A second slightly smaller ray pierced his jaw and left his neck attached to the body by nothing more than two narrow strips of flesh clearly incapable of supporting it. The content of the light was frayed as if an uncontrolled fire, which left the pillars jagged. David’s head collapsed to the stump of his new neck much closer to the torso. Though his tongue had been burned away he continued to speak.

“I love you, you know.”

There were no tears as David’s eyes were blown away, but his torso remained and the torso simply grew a new neck. Amanda shot at the stump, but as the body began to fly erratically it became hard to aim. She successfully blew the stump and neck apart each time they regenerated, but David’s head simply began to grow from the torso instead. When she aimed for the torso it grew inside his chest. All the while he continued to speak.

“We could have done so much together.”

She blew apart his chest.

“We still can.”

A beam arced around his back to blow apart the tail of neck-vertebrae growing from David’s spine.

“I’ll forgive you for this.”

“Would you at least tell me why you’re doing it?”

Amanda groaned and finally began to reply, but her allies refused to let her speak.

“Don’t give him the luxury of a response.” Chen-Thai interrupted while joining her from behind.

“He knows why we’re doing this,” Zi-Lor began, “David just wants to test you, find the depth of your resolve.”

“Even if you win,” David continued, speaking over them all the while,

“Will you live in this world of children alone forever?”

“How many years will you last with no one to keep you company through the long centuries?”

Zi-Lor began throwing rocks where David was flying while summoning a barrier along the outside edge of his path, forcing him into a more graceful and curved arc. Chen-Thai, meanwhile, was sitting cross-legged, meditating with his spear gripped tightly upright. His eyes were open, studying David’s every move.

“Will you forget Sion and allow Xevis to continue his conquest unabated?”

Amanda couldn’t stay silent any longer. “You know as well as I do—” but Chen-Thai stood up as soon as she began to speak and quickly covered her lips with his hand. She did not resist or object.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“You should take this seriously,” he said softly, leaning in.

“This fight won’t end well if you’re not calm when the moment comes.”

Amanda’s voice stopped, and her jaw locked in place. Chen-Thai continued to study David from the upright position as Amanda’s rays of red fire and Zi-Lor’s barriers and rocks forced David into an extremely damaging and uncontrollably smooth flight pattern.

With the next volley the situation changed. David stuck out his left wrist and allowed it to be severed, then caught Zi-Lor’s rock with his right. Amanda fired another shot at his falling hand, but the rock came directly for her face the moment it was released. Zi-Lor intercepted it with one of her own, but this delay bought David enough time to pull off and throw two of his fingers in opposite directions towards the group.

“I’ll take the torso,” Chen-Thai shouted as he jumped forward towards it, gripping his spear tightly to prepare for what was to come.

“Left!” Zi-Lor shouted in response, but Amanda also shot left. This allowed David’s right finger to approach Zi-Lor on his left. Chen-Thai maneuvered in mid-air with the help of a summoned platform, but by the time he reached the finger to intercept it David had already taken full control of the initiative and they all knew it.

David took the opportunity to quickly gain altitude and begin summoning his death-barrier once again, but it didn’t take long for Zi-Lor to halt his ascent with a barrier of her own. He flipped over quickly and jumped downwards, holding his hands together as he pulled off and threw another finger backwards.

To Chen-Thai’s back the leftward finger was wholly destroyed, but he didn’t think it was worth wasting time on destroying something so inconsequential as a single finger when it’s body was right there, so instead of pinning it and calling for magic, he sliced the digit in two and batted it away from his comrades.

The back-side of the digit fell softly to the ground; the front began to circle back, but by that point Chen-Thai had already begun to maneuver towards the main body again, flipping over on his own barrier as David had above.

Amanda punched through David’s body again as Zi-Lor destroyed the freshly-thrown digit, but as the digit was some distance away and able to fly extremely erratically was able to dodge the shot, forcing Amanda to react with a ray of light far too fast to escape.

Zi-Lor switched targets to the main body just as Chen-Thai himself reached it. A spear flew towards David’s head, but in the movement to dodge a rock struck its bottom side to force it deeper into the paper-thick edge. Amanda took the opportunity of seized initiative to take control of the essence of Yaldabaoth and begin conjuring it back into the arena of battle.

Chen-Thai’s blow eviscerated David and turned him into a pile of gore. All he had done was slice from the head down as if splitting a pig, but the technique was enhanced specifically to render regeneration meaningless. It would take far too long to come back from something like this, at least far longer than a shot from Zi-Lor would require to prepare.

Something strong enough to disintegrate an entire body from the front would be slow to fire and hard to aim compared to something small and powerful, but she could do it, and it wasn’t like he could dodge.

And yet when the shot fired the upper-left quadrant of David’s head was able to escape as if operating with sight and sound despite lack of both eyes and ears. The remaining body was gone, but while Chen-Thai was able to react and begin thrusting his spear once more, Amanda was still preoccupied.

Zi-Lor, fortunately, was able to entrap the head in a box.

Amanda finally brought Yaldabaoth into the field of play in the exact moment the spear was poised to strike, and yet in the same moment the box of force Zi-Lor had summoned shattered like glass, and David appeared fully-formed out of the destroyed shards to catch Chen-Thai’s spear in his left hand.

In the same moment David gripped the old man’s throat. He shouldn’t have had time to react, but even still his eyes remained cold. He would greet death as a friend, as an old acquaintance with which he was long familiar and fully prepared for. But this moment would not be in vain. His hands shot upward as if Mike Tyson was delivering a final knockout, and with it his spearhead just grazed David’s forearm.

Zi-Lor clenched her jaw and fired another yellow wave of destruction at the moment of contact. She was aware of what would happen next.

Both bodies vanished, and the fight was over sixty seconds after it began.