Then all hell broke loose.
Three demigods below me. Each one was built wrong, with slippery, water-stained scales, gigantic fish-like tails sweeping behind them, and mouths that almost resembled my own draconic mug, except twisted upward toward me like they were already tasting the air.
Rippling muscles glistened across their bodies, slick and sinuous, powerful legs and arms embedded with blade-like fins that caught the dim light. All three of them held tridents. Three different colours. Three different flavors of oh fuck me, because those weapons were radiating enough power to set off every danger alarm in my skull at once. So not only were they Gold Core, they were armed with weapons just as nasty as they were.
From the get-go, I knew I had no chance of winning this battle. No matter what trick I pulled.
Even with my entire cognition running in overdrive, feeding me every scrap of information I could physically process, I could only spare so much attention for them. Because I was also busy dodging massive spatial blades carving through the air from every direction. They were silent, invisible until the last half-second, when the space itself seemed to wrinkle before splitting open where my body had been. I'd already shunted the severed tentacle damage to Lazy, who stood behind the chaos, and for the first time she wasn't complaining about having to work. She'd serve as my damage sponge if I got wounded again.
The spatial attacks had to be coming from their leader. He was the only one who hadn't moved from his original position, trident raised, watching the battle like a conductor observing an orchestra. The other two demigods were already in motion. The bronze-scaled one wreathed in wild green mana sank into solid rock like it was water, and before I could even process the tactical implications, the entire battlefield erupted. Thick, pulsing vine-like tendrils exploded upward in concentric rings, each one dripping with a shimmering golden sap my senses immediately screamed at me to avoid.
But none of them actually moved toward me. Not yet. I twisted past another spatial blade and saw what those massive vines were doing. They were... terraforming. The ground beneath us softened into a writhing carpet of moss and rot, and the air thickened with spores.
Nature path. Had to be. FUCK. Just my damn luck. I'd tangled with a nature elf before and I knew exactly what kind of massive pain in the ass that path became if you let the battle drag on. This path killed you slow. They turned the environment into their weapon, and every second you spent breathing their air was a second you were losing.
I WAS FUCKED.
One of the vines shot toward me at breakneck speed. I phased, slashed it down, and immediately felt that familiar question bloom in my mind— the Waveform Strike offering me a teleport. It’d be a random destination within a certain radius around me. No time to second-guess. I accepted just as a cluster of vines snapped shut where my throat had been a heartbeat earlier. Dorrusk was still with me, clutched close to my stomach by one of my tentacles. My instincts said he'd teleport with me. I followed them.
Ten meters left. I materialized and felt a flood of relief that Dorrusk was still there, though his expression suggested he had not enjoyed the experience. Too bad. He'd be experiencing it multiple times.
Less fortunate was that I was now directly above the second demigod.
He was the thinnest and smallest of the three, almost skeletal, silver-scaled and sickly, but that didn't make him seem any less threatening. He had moved there like he'd anticipated exactly where I'd appear. His head tilted up, eyes locking onto me with a hungry expression, tracking me with the kind of precision that was all too familiar. My scales itched. That was the gaze of a predator, and I knew very well who was the predator here.
It wasn't me.
I immediately felt something land on me as my instincts screeched. Some kind of mark?
I phased out, wings snapping into motion, generating breakneck speed just as a massive blade pierced the space where I'd been standing a moment ago. But it didn't stop there. Piercing vines hunted me relentlessly. Metal blades tracked me through every dodge. They even followed me into the Shadow Dimension when I phased with Dorrusk clutched to my form. And the spatial blades, those I couldn't hide from at all.
I knew it now. The third demigod was definitely on the Metal path.
My cognition kicked into overdrive as I kept dodging. I wasn't pulling any of my heavy moves yet as I wanted to know what they were capable of first. Information was the only thing keeping me alive, and I wasn't about to blow my best tricks before I knew what I was dealing with.
Terrorist and Curious were doing the same. Terrorist had been charging Thunder Clap, aiming for the army, but the gigantic horde was shielded by both the third demigod and their leader. The spatial bastard kept shredding her approach, teleporting her to random locations the instant she built up any momentum, which somehow only made her glee burn brighter. The more they threw at her, the more her tail swung in those wild, delighted arcs.
Curious had taken a more cautious approach, as she was dodging instead of going on the offensive, first thing she did was slap Observer's Mark and Suggestion onto every demigod she could lock onto. Good. She was building the picture while I stress-tested it.
I was making my own discoveries.
Metal was the concept of Hunt. I knew that much. And the Hunt demigod had devious, nasty tricks. That thing he'd marked me with was definitely what let his attacks find me so unerringly, a greasy little tether that whispered here, here, she's here to every blade in his arsenal. I deflected one strike aimed directly at my Quantum Nexus, it shattered on impact but kept coming, fragments twisting midair to try and pierce me anyway, while hundreds of identical blades streamed in behind it like a school of starving fish. I teleported. Upward this time.
I was certain now. Once he marked a target, his strikes found the path of least resistance. Dodging was temporary. Blocking was a suggestion. The only way to break the mark was to make him lose track of me entirely.
Which, coincidentally, was exactly what my random teleportation from Waveform Strike was built for.
I felt the mark land on me again like a cold finger tracing my spine. He'd found me. His blades responded instantly, screaming toward me with intent. I flickered the moment my claw raked across one of them, teleporting-on-hit, and the mark vanished.
But I couldn't afford to be happy about it. I reappeared and the mark came right back, landing the instant I materialized. A dozen spatial blades tore through the air, I dodged, but several still shredded parts of my torso before I could fully clear them. White-hot pain flared. I immediately shunted the damage to Lazy.
Curious had already engaged the Nature demigod's domain directly. She must have discovered something, because a prompt hit me— allow explosion?— and it took me a moment of impossible dodging to even find her in the chaos. She was on the verge of death, shredded to pieces, barely holding together. I allowed it immediately.
The detonation was supposed to rip across the battlefield.
Instead, space contracted around Curious's body like a fist closing, and the explosion happened somewhere above me. Harmlessly. In the sky.
My eyes widened. What the fuck? Did he just teleport the detonation itself?
But that wasn't supposed to work. Quantum mana interfered with Space! I'd run multiple experiments, I'd confirmed it. The disruption was reliable. And yet this bastard had just scooped up a Quantum explosion and relocated it like it was nothing.
Then my eyes landed on the trident the leader was holding. The sheer power radiating from it made my teeth ache. There was no doubt now. They were somehow circumventing the disruptive nature of my mana. A perfect counter, built specifically for me.
Just how much did this Water Leviathan know? Going this far just to kill me?
I had no time to think about it. Hell erupted around me again, with vines, metal blades, spatial blades, all converging like they'd been choreographed. And then Curious's knowledge bled into me as her clone-memories settled: The spores are parasitic, not poisonous. They seed in mana channels. Avoid breathing. The vines react to intent, not movement. Move without planning to move. The space mage is focused on shielding the army below, they are planning something bigger. Resummon me immediately. I must explore what they are trying to do there.
I resummoned Curious and she shot off without any prompt, already hunting the answer. But the intensity of attacks was increasing. Even Lazy was getting targeted in the back now, which meant I couldn't even switch positions with her anymore. They were covering every angle. I kept shunting damage to her, and just when she was about to die, I directed her below.
The massive verdant field the Nature demigod had set up, if we couldn't target the army, then blowing that apart was the next best option. She detonated. The shockwave ripped a crater through the moss, scattering golden sap in a wide arc. The Nature demigod didn't even flinch. The crater filled back in within seconds, denser than before.
Terrorist, meanwhile, had watched her Thunder Claps get eaten by the spatial shield one too many times. She'd given up on the army. Now she was targeting the Nature demigod directly, swapping Lightning mana for Quantum and producing results that were significantly more catastrophic. Entire fields were torn apart, vaporized, reduced to screaming nothing, but it was no use. The Nature demigod remained untouched, shielded by their leader just like the army was. Then another trap snapped shut and Terrorist died.
I exploded her. That explosion, too, was teleported safely into the sky somewhere above me.
Her knowledge slammed into my head a moment later.
It was mostly just the angry, outraged realization that the stinky fish was eating her booms. Nobody was supposed to eat her booms. That was HER boom. THEFT. BOOM THEFT.
By the Thalador. Why was the knowledge I gained when reassimilating her shouting in my head.
I didn't have time to complain. I resummoned Terrorist and she went back down with vengeance in her eyes, screaming something about boom thieves that I chose not to parse.
Back to work.
I needed to hit the army. After Curious's warning, I kept one eye glued to them at all times, even while dodging the endless barrage and shunting wounds to Lazy and sometimes Curious herself. The Depth Dwellers were doing something down there, standing in a too orderly and too synchronized formation. A ritual, probably. I wouldn't know for sure until Curious died again and fed me the details, but right now, assuming the worst felt like the safest bet.
I'd deployed Observer's spells too, Marks and Suggestions woven into the chaos. But for whatever reason, nothing was coming back. I couldn't infer anything from the demigods' heads. Couldn't infiltrate them. Which meant— of fucking course— that the Water Leviathan had given them mental protection. Mind shielding. Because why wouldn't she? She'd thought of everything else.
Fuck.
I dodged another barrage of attacks, spatial blades screaming past my face close enough to shave scales, while my eyes kept tracking the army below. That task was getting harder by the second. A layer of thick, impenetrable fog had begun to swallow the battlefield, coiling around the army's feet and rising. My spatial sense couldn't pierce the barrier surrounding them. The ritual, whatever it was, was happening beneath that fog, beneath their feet, and the longer I let them cook, the worse my situation became.
I locked onto the mass of Depth Dwellers, still standing in unnervingly perfect rows, and decided it was time to test just how strong that spatial shield really was. I wove Observer's Mark and Suggestion, dodging more attacks, and issued the command to Terrorist mentally.
She grinned. Already wounded, already furious, she moved exactly where I wanted her to.
The Space demigod twitched a finger.
I expected it. The detonation never landed. The explosion bloomed beautifully, violently, a cataclysm compressed into a fist-sized singularity, then folded inward and popped harmlessly somewhere in the sky. The leader's many-faceted eyes met mine across the distance, and I could have sworn the bastard looked bored. He hadn't moved from his position above the army. Hadn't even shifted his weight.
Fine. I resummoned Terrorist. She already had her prior orders and moved without hesitation. I needed to see how long this filthy fish could keep going before he ran out of mana. Teleporting away catastrophic Quantum detonations had to be costing him something significant. I just had to outlast him. I could do that. If I was anything, I was exceptionally slippery.
But I wasn't getting a chance to run.
I was constantly being engaged.
So the dance began anew. I held my breath whenever the vines closed in, lungs burning as the spore-thick air pressed against my sealed throat. I flew constantly, never still, striking down metal blades and teleporting the instant my claws connected, shaking off the Hunt demigod's mark even though it reformed moments later every single time. I kept my senses stretched wide, scanning the surrounding space for any disturbance— because the Space demigod was already doing too much, and I didn't trust him not to have another trick waiting. And through all of it, I kept resummoning Terrorist.
Again. Again. Again.
Each time she detonated. Each time the explosion vanished into the sky. Each time I watched the Space demigod's expression, searching for the faintest flicker of strain, the smallest tell that his mana pool wasn't infinite.
Nothing yet. But he had to crack eventually.
He had to.
I was badly losing here. Even with my enhanced mana recovery and Core Stabilization running on the fly, I was still bleeding mana faster than I could pull it back in. The math was simple and it was ugly. Meanwhile, these three demigods had perfectly complementary roles, they were a full team build designed to shut me down. The Nature one reshaped the battlefield to limit my mobility and drain my resources, turning the very air into a slow death. The Metal one hunted me the instant I tried closing distance on the army, or tried to run, his mark was a constant weight on my spine. The Space one vetoed any attempt to hit the army directly, scooping up cataclysmic detonations like they were mildly inconvenient weather. And the army itself was calmly, methodically doing something below, with a low hum of mana building in patterns I couldn't quite read but definitely didn't like.
I couldn't shake the feeling. A gnawing unease I couldn't pin down. Was I really about to blow my trump card this early?
But they already knew everything I was capable of. She'd made that abundantly clear. So hiding it was pointless.
Fuck it.
A massive surge of mana gathered in my throat. The world held its breath.
"Mana channeling is not allowed here!"
The Court of Quantum Edicts snapped into existence. Mana thundered through my veins as I carved a boundary across the air itself, a shimmering dome almost two hundred meters wide, crackling with entangled lightning. I was genuinely surprised at how massive it was. Had it… grown? When did that happen? Maybe it scaled with my level? For fuck's sake, I couldn't even check my own capabilities anymore with the system missing. Not that I'd get it back if I died here.
I deployed the simplest, cruelest rule I could think of. The one that would tear their entire formation apart.
It worked.
The effect was immediate. Massive violet lightning strikes hammered down everywhere within my range, and I shot upward to maximize the field, spreading the dome as far as it would reach. The trident in the Space demigod's grip shook as hundreds of violet bolts slammed into his barrier, because everyone beneath it was channeling mana, and my Edict did not care about shields. The other two demigods didn't even flinch as the lightning rained down on them every other second. The Space one wasn't helping them either. He trusted their own prowess to handle it.
Which, unfortunately, they did.
The Nature demigod's vines convulsed as the damage transferred into them, absorbing the punishment while he stood his ground, still puppeteering the battlefield. Some of them withered and died as the constant mana flow sustaining them was severed. The Metal one's hunting mark flickered and died briefly, as he'd had to redirect attention to defending himself, and even if his blades still chased me, their precision had dulled. The strikes weren't landing quite as cleanly.
I resummoned Terrorist one last time and redirected her toward the shield. She needed no further instruction. She closed in, grinning, and detonated.
And for one beautiful, glorious second, the Space leader's shield wavered. The explosion hit before he could redirect it, and in that fracture of a moment, Curious slipped through into the protected space.
She didn't last long.
Lazy died. Then Curious. Both detonated, and both detonations were once again scooped up and teleported harmlessly away. I didn't have the mana to resummon them this time. I had to wait. Let my reserves crawl back up while I kept dodging and kept bleeding.
Curious's knowledge flooded into me. And there was only one warning this time.
Their ritual is almost finished, Main Body. I have no idea what they're trying to do, but they're already mass-sacrificing themselves, you can't see it through the fog, RUN. IT'S ALL A PLOY. THEY WERE NEVER TRYING TO KILL US.
The knowledge hit with an almost desperate edge, something I'd never heard from coolheaded Curious before. It was enough to make my very heart slam against my ribs.
What the fuck did she mean, they were never trying to kill us?!
AND EVEN SCRATCHING THAT, HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO RUN?! Every time I tried to break out, the Metal one's mark locked on and forced me to teleport, even though violet lightning kept hammering his transformed body. He'd become a gigantic metallic fish-dragon thing, all jagged scales and gleaming fins, and the lightning just sank into him like water into a sponge. The Nature demigod had transformed too, becoming a bloated draconic fish with bloomed and rotten roses erupting all over its grotesque body, petals falling and regrowing in cycles of decay that made my stomach turn. I immediately felt something new permeate the air. Looking down, I watched my own scales darken, necrosis creeping across them like spilled ink. The scent of rot clung to me, and it was coming from me.
The Space demigod hadn't transformed. He didn't need to. He just stood there, smug as ever, folding away any attack I threw. I couldn't land a single hit.
I still made my way, dodging and weaving, trying to run, but the Nature demigod's domain had spread further than I'd realized. The edges of the battlefield were now a solid wall of thorned, pulsing growth, thick as a fortress gate. I phased. Nothing. Thunder Clapped it. Nothing. Overcharged my mana veins and blasted with everything I had, and the damn thing regenerated faster than I could tear through it. I didn't even have the mana to gamble on a clone detonation anymore.
I was being boxed in by inches. And I hadn't noticed until now because they'd made it feel like I was still fighting. Still had options. Still had a chance.
I never had a chance.
FUCK!
Was this what Curious meant? That they weren't trying to kill me— because they were never supposed to? This whole thing was a cage, and I'd flown right into it.
My eyes narrowed on the bastards, hatred surging hot and bright through my chest. I rushed in. The Court was still active, violet lightning still screaming down, and I coated my claws in Quantum energy, targeting the Nature demigod's gigantic form. He twisted faster than something that bloated had any right to, vines meeting my rapid strikes, and I shredded them with vengeance. I teleported randomly, again and again, striking from angles that shouldn't exist, ThunderClapping, sometimes charging the spell with Quantum for that extra kick. I damaged. I pulled back. I held my breath. And none of it changed the fact that I had no winning condition here.
My entire form had almost blackened by now. Scales dying one by one, the scent of rot thick in my own nostrils. I was rotting alive.
And they were adapting. The Court's lightning strikes weren't just being defended anymore— the demigods were actively hunting me through them. Predicting my dodges. Herding me. They knew exactly how I moved, and they were just keeping me busy.
I looked down.
The fog had swallowed everything below. But one thing glowed through it: the mana beneath the army had coalesced into something geometric. A gigantic, translucent golden shape, inscribed with characters that made my eyes ache just to look at. It was beautiful. But also horrifying. The kind of beauty that doesn't belong in a world with breathing things.
I surged upward, wings screaming, every instinct howling ESCAPE! The Metal mark locked on. The vines followed. The Space demigod raised both hands, and the air around me turned thick as tar, distance stretching impossibly so my desperate flight barely moved me at all.
The golden geometric shape rose to meet me. Enveloped me.
I still held Dorrusk, shielding his form against mine, and I felt him shiver in sheer terror, on the verge of death himself from necrosis. His small body trembled like a heartbeat about to stop.
My claws scraped against something that hadn't existed a heartbeat ago. I felt my throat constrict, struggling against whatever invisible and absolute thing it was that had pressed against me.
I couldn't move anymore.
Couldn't break free. Couldn't thrash. Couldn't even tell where my body ended and the nothing began. I was suspended in a space that felt wrong in ways I lacked the vocabulary for, just me, and Dorrusk, still clutched against me, still on the verge of death. And that was where my senses ended. That was the boundary of my world now.
Was it over?
Even thinking was hard. Doing anything was hard. Breathing was hard. No… breathing wasn't hard. Breathing wasn't happening at all. I just hadn't noticed until now.
Everything had… stopped.
I didn't know how long I stayed there. Time had turned slippery, oozing past me in increments I couldn't measure. Thinking was like dragging thoughts through wet clay. Moving was a memory of something I used to be able to do.
I had become a rock that was alive enough to know it was trapped.
I felt resistance. I thrashed against it. I don't know for how long. Eventually, even the thrashing stopped. Every effort I could make, I made. And then every effort ceased to be.
I just… couldn't do anything anymore.
What happened?
When did it happen?
The cognition that once ran thousands of thoughts at a time had slowed to a crawl. Barely able to form a single coherent sentence. Despair flickered somewhere in the sludge, but even that didn't last. It was too much effort to sustain.
I tried to guess what had happened to me. The thought slipped out of my mind before I could finish it.
Time passed.
I didn't know how long.
And then— there were hands.
A pair of hands emerged from nothingness grasped my neck and pulled.
I was somewhere else immediately. Every feeling of hopelessness vanished like a held breath finally released. Thoughts that had turned to tar rushed back in a flood, too fast, too many, and I gasped for air, panicked, scrambling to make sense of anything. What the fuck just happened to me.
Had that happened just now? How long had I been in there? Time and thoughts were still tangled and weird, but at least they were moving again. At least I was moving again.
I was also in my humanoid form. Naked. Golden hair loose around my shoulders. Feeble human skin instead of scales. Horns curling from the sides of my head.
My eyes whipped around.
I was in my dreamscape. It was unmistakable. The grassland below, the buildings in the distance, the gigantic black dragon lounging there and looking up at me with an expression I'd seen a thousand times before.
The pair of hands that had pulled me in—
I followed them.
A familiar face stared back.
She wore my face, but she had no horns. A shirt. A short skirt. Those familiar heels I'd seen her wearing in the lab before. My doppelganger, the one from my evolution space, the one who lived in the mirror of myself. She was glaring acidly, grip around my neck rough and impossible to break.
But she wasn't glaring at me.
She was glaring at the black dragon in the distance.
"How long are you going to keep meddling, you insufferable, scaly fucking fossil?”
The word came out dripping with so much venom and hatred that I almost flinched. And it was directed at Lotte.
Who eyed us both with that same amused smile. Like she always did. Like this was just another conversation.
"Such language," she said, her voice was still smooth, like silk dragged over gravel. "And here I thought I raised you better."