Karrel took a moment to digest this information.

"Well… I suppose I'm mostly surprised that's all it takes to be considered a god." He finally spoke. "I always thought that gods had to have a giant following before ascending, and the Old Gods were simply always there."

"We can't know that, unfortunately." Isabella shrugged.

"They weren't. The Old Gods weren't always there." Trader disagreed.

The other two looked at her with surprise, a feeling she too shared when her brain caught up to her tongue.

"You didn't sound like you were guessing. You know this, or at least you think you know. Who were you?" The demon asked.

"I'm honestly out of ideas on this one." Trader sighed. "I thought I was some sort of a healer, or an alchemist, or a biology scholar… but I also know stuff about the structure of magic in general? And about a lot of the common species? And now this. I'm not even religious. I definitely wasn't a theologian! I don't care about divinity, so maybe that's some knowledge that my kidnapper implanted? But again: why do any of this?!"

She grew more agitated with each word. Karrel stood up and laid a hand on her shoulder.

"It's alright, we'll find out. Won't we?" He looked at Isabella.

"I know a mind mage that owes me a favor. Figuring out this mystery is definitely worth cashing it in. And unlocking your full memories could help out with the upcoming heist." The alchemist demoness responded.

The symbiote woman took a few deep breaths to calm down.

"How soon can you get them?" She asked.

"I'll send a letter tomorrow, so he should arrive within a week." Isabella informed her. "Today, though, we should all do something else, to give our heads a break from the heavy topics. I propose exercise!"

Trader nodded with enthusiasm, while Karrel groaned.

----------------------------------------

"Are you fucking crazy?!" Karrel screamed.

"It's not my fault the two of you are slow." The demoness said, sticking out her tongue.

"YOU TOOK MY FUCKING ARM OFF!!!" He pointed at the stump that ended right under the elbow.

The wound was covered by a bit of Trader's body mass, the alien now working meticulously to regrow her host's limb. She would prefer to reattach the arm, but it was entirely disintegrated by Isabella's attack.

"I have to agree with him, this was supposed to be a sparring session, not an actual fight." The alien said. She formed her head next to Karrel's, so Isa knew who was speaking.

The demon rolled her eyes.

"Fine, I apologize for vaporizing your hand. I will try to restrict myself next time."

"I don't want a next time!" The smith protested.

"My turn, then." Trader said, unwrapping herself from around Karrel. "I'll fix you up on the way home."

The symbiote walked to the middle of the clearing they were in. She beckoned Isabella with a hand motion. The demon obliged, taking out her dagger once again. In response Trader extended her claws.

"Same rules as with Karrel. No aiming for the head, and we fight until one of us surrenders." The demoness announced.

Trader nodded. "Come at me, then."

Isabella grinned, and charged straight at her. A few steps before either woman could attack, however, Isa fell, as if a hole in the ground had appeared.

In reality, as Trader realized, she stepped into one of the many shadows that the trees cast. The alien strained her senses, trying to anticipate where the demon would reappear.

She sensed a subtle burst of mana behind her, but she wasn't fast enough to turn around. Instead, she dodged by leaping forward.

Trader managed to avoid Isa's blade, but regaining her balance left her vulnerable for a ranged follow-up. She turned just in time to catch a beam of light to her chest. The scorching heat burned hot, annihilating her skin, digging into muscles, and singing her left lung.

[Alright, letting her come at me was a bad idea.] She thought to herself.

"You don't have a ribcage?" Isabella commented.

Instead of answering, Trader roared, lunging at her with claws. The symbiote's hand was easily dodged, but then Isabella smelled pungent smoke. From decades spent in an alchemy lab, she knew this to be the smell of her leather jacket getting dissolved by acid. She afforded a glance, and, sure enough, there were charred spots on the leather.

"Nice trick. I hope it's not the only one you have." the demon said, disappearing once again into the shadows.

This time, Trader felt a burst of magic from multiple shadows at once. Left, right, and just in front of her. The only option, then, was to take a step back.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

Not a moment after she'd done so, two of the spots flashed with light, while the demon jumped out from the shadow in front of her, throwing her dagger at Trader.

Instead of dodging it, Trader decided to parry it with her natural blades. It worked well enough, with the dagger knocked away and falling somewhere in the grass.

The symbiote launched a counter strike, once more releasing acid from her fingers to extend the range of the attack.

It wasn't necessary, as Isabella had also decided to block instead of dodging, earning her a cut on her sleeve. It was padded, so she remained uninjured. Until the corrosive started working, that is.

Such small amounts would never be able to do much damage, but Trader did draw blood. And that let her go to the next step of her plan. The blue woman started making noises with her mouth, sounding like she was doing an impression of a person choking on live wasps. In other words, she was chanting to help her shape a spell faster.

Isa realized this. "Shit." She started making hand gestures to weave a spell of her own. It was down to who could finish her framework faster.

Buried memories or not, the demoness still had a few centuries more under her belt.

A flash of blinding light filled the forest. Karrel, who was watching the fight with bated breath, closed his eyes and still it pierced through his eyelids. Trader experienced it point blank.

There was a thud as her body hit the grassy ground, headless. Her neck let out a bit of smoke.

"I didn't kill her, did I? I really hope she wasn't joking about the head thing." Isabella looked at the hopefully-not-corpse with concern.

"You should have seen her the first day we met. I blew her up, barely anything left, and she was fine after a few hours. She's gonna need an awful lot of food though." Karrel reassured her.

"Ghwjhhhhhhgh…" a gibbering could be heard from the symbiote's body. The neck reshaped into a large mouth, coughed, and then Trader spoke. "Hhhh-I'll be fine. Good fight, even though you broke the rules. Karrel, come here and bond."

[You won't make it back home on your own?] He sent when she melded with him.

[I could, easily. But now it's time for round three.]

The artificer's stump got covered in dark blue flesh that mimicked the lost hand. In fact, his whole body from the neck down was now obscured by the symbiote.

[Make the hammer.] Trader instructed, and Karrel obliged after just a moment of hesitation. He also wanted revenge.

"Two on one? Not exactly a fair fight." Isabella commented, taking out another two daggers from who knows where.

"If you didn't blast my head off, I would have won, and you know that!" Trader retorted through Karrel.

"Alright, fine. Let's do this quickly though, I have a schedule, you know?" The demon said, and jumped into a shadow.

She once more repeated the trick with multiple exit points, but this time the alien noticed one of the spots had more energy than others.

[On the left. You swing, you have more experience with this thing than I do.]

[Not by much…] Karrel replied, already willing their shared body to swing the large hammer to the left of them.

The demon emerged in the predicted spot. Her only reaction was her eyes widening in surprise as her body was squished between two slabs of conjured steel. As soon as the anvil dissolved, she took a step back and disappeared once again.

[Okay, she underestimated my perception, but that won't happen again. But now we know she can't see us when she's in the shadows.] Trader analysed.

[What are we going to do about her beams, though? They move instantly!]

[I don't know. The light itself isn't even magical, so my resistance doesn't work. We might just have to keep her close.]

She pushed mana into their legs, enhancing the strength of their muscles.

Isabella appeared ten meters away. She shot two beams at them. The shots were focused, so even if they were somehow fast enough to dodge light itself, the attacks were nearly invisible.

Just as Trader and Karrel felt their torso light up with pain, their opponent ducked into nothingness to reposition.

[Alright, I've got an idea, but it's a stupid one.] Trader said.

[How stupid?]

[Wild magic surge.]

[Yep, it's awful. Let's do this.]

Wild magic occured when mana residue from many different disciplines mixed. It was impossible to predict what would happen. In a way, it was the opposite of casting a spell; instead of shaping mana with purpose for a specific effect, one just tossed everything one had into a large pot and hope the explosion would hurt one's opponents more than the caster.

The clearing was already full of light mana from Isa's shadow jumping, and Karrel's hammer was steadily leaking abstract mana. Trader began to pour body-aligned mana into the air, not bothering to shape it. Her host did the same with firmamental mana. It didn't matter if he didn't know how to use it yet, if the result would be something beyond their control anyway.

Four different types of magical energy collided, mixed, and pooled together. Isabella couldn't see when she was hidden inside the shadows, but she could clearly feel the magical vortex forming. She knew what it meant, and decided that it was safer to leave the space between space before the fabric of reality got twisted like someone wringing a wet cloth.

"What the fuck are you two-"

She was interrupted by the magic surge.

It was hard to describe the feeling. The three of them smelled the pungent taste of blue as the air was filled with the shape of sweet. Karrel felt the grass tickle his tail, making him realize he now had one. Trader was pretty sure she had aged five years, despite her species' immunity to degradation over time. They then looked at Isabella, or rather what stood in her place.

It was the same silhouette, except composed entirely of steel.

[Here's to hoping she just got encased, not turned into the stuff.] Trader walked up to (presumably) the demon.

From close up, they could see that the metal statue had Isabella's clothes, intact and unchanged. It even seemed that her jacket got fixed. The statue itself was very life-like, on her face a look of shock. Her eyes were unchanged, and followed the duo's movement.

Karrel extended an acid-tipped claw and scraped on the steel that formed the statue's hand. When the corrosive penetrated the metal, a small trickle of blood leaked out.

"Holy fucking Goddess Above," he cursed out loud, "it turned her skin into steel."

It wasn't unheard of to bolster one's defenses by imbuing the skin with the toughness of iron. However, it was actually done by borrowing the conceptual strength of the metal. No one literally transmuted their skin into steel, because that resulted in this exact situation: the user getting trapped in an inflexible shell of alloy.

There was some mumbling from within the statue, and the eyes disappeared. Soon after, Isabella jumped out of the metal installation's shadow. She was naked, her skin bloody red. No, they realized, she had no skin.

"Fuckin' nine circles of hell this hurts!" The flayed demon shouted. "What the fuck possessed you two to cause a wild magic surge?!"

"Well, we won, didn't we?" Trader defended herself.

"Sure, you fucking won! Now slit my throat so I can stop feeling like I'm in the middle of a fucking star. Fuck!" Isabella screamed, her muscles spasming from pain.

[Right, this has probably severed most of her nerve endings.] The symbiote thought.

"C'mon! Kill me already!"

"Umm…" Karrel hesitated.

"I have a soul shell! It's fine. Just please, end it! I can't fucking move." It was a wonder she was able to speak at all.

Finally, Trader walked up and slit the demon's throat. Isabella quickly expired, or at least her body did.

The symbiote separated and knelt down by the corpse.

"What are you doing?" Karrel asked.

"We need to get rid of the body, and I need to replenish biomass." She pointed above her mouth, where her head should be.

"You are fucking disgusting, you know that?"

"I prefer to think of it as pragmatism."

The smith turned around to avoid looking at the grisly scene. He shivered when he heard the crunch of bones.