"Die, both divine and mortal! DIE!"—the great sphere proclaimed.
The being was intoxicated, drugged by the torrent of recovered energy. In its frenzy, its mind held only one idea: to reclaim its "rightful" place in the firmament and subjugate the world.
A shockwave of terrifying magnitude was born from the center of the sphere, razing everything. What remained of the temple, the scorched earth, and the skeletons of the withered trees were reduced to dross in a blink.
Elise and I, side by side, raised a joint barrier. Not just to protect ourselves, but to halt the spread of the attack and prevent the deflagration from reaching the girls. That was no simple blow… it was large-scale devastation.
The destroyed area extended for kilometers, leaving a gigantic crater. The zone became saturated with necrotic energy. Any living being that crossed that place would likely die… or worse, turn into one of those ghouls. And that's without counting other side effects, like those that would occur at the site of the battle against the Yakuruna.
We felt the pressure of the impact, but we stood intact. Elise wrapped herself in a membrane of pure divine light; I, empowered to the limit of my capabilities, conjured a Protego. Under normal circumstances, a shield charm would be paper against a god, but to my surprise—and confirmation of my suspicions—my spell absorbed 80% of the damage.
The truth was irrefutable: the divine power of death that previously emanated from the sphere… was now diluted. Mixed. Corrupted by common magic.
The previous absorption should have restored its divinity. But the siphon had not found the primordial energies that the ritual demanded for divine transmutation, and the process failed: instead of transforming magic into divine power, it barely managed to generate small fractions of it. What it actually obtained… was, for the most part, simple magical energy.
Believing itself invincible, the sphere began to perform extravagant boasts of power in unnecessary demonstrations. It forced the flow of time at the epicenter of the crater to reconstruct its temple, returning its ancient glory stone by stone. That place had no special value beyond being the point of its invocation, but its inflated pride led it to consider it worthy of becoming its sanctuary—a place where mortals would perform sacrifices for it.
It was an act of pure pride, an attempt to intimidate us by demonstrating it could undo destruction at its whim. The zigurat rose again, imposing and macabre, but when the spell tried to roll back even further, toward the era where primordial energies were abundant, the process stalled.
The sphere felt a sudden vacuum, as if it were trying to drain its own marrow. Its impure power could not interact with the purity of the remote past. Confusion clouded its aura. For an instant, the terrifying sensation that something had gone wrong assaulted it, but its divine psyche refused to accept it. For a god of faith, conviction is the foundation of existence; it decided the failure was a simple calculation error, an overload caused by its own "magnitude"... that it simply chose to stop to avoid damaging itself. It convinced itself… though a tiny splinter of fear had already lodged inside it.
Its gaze refocused on us. Arrogance transformed into an urgent need for extermination. In its twisted logic, if it managed to eliminate us, any error in the ritual would cease to matter; it would have all eternity to amend it… as long as no one remained capable of challenging it.
Elise and I had not interrupted its arrogant display; we took every second of its theatrical reconstruction to catch our breath. The previous phase of the combat had been costly, draining our reserves, but now that it prepared to resume the extermination, we weren't going to remain static.
Around the sphere, whips of energy materialized, snapping toward us like lightning. They were different from its previous attacks. Before, the mere presence of its power triggered my instinctive alarms, screaming at me to use every gram of my being to defend myself or it would be the end. Now, that aura of absolute death had evaporated.
The attacks were still dangerous, but they were no longer absolute. Their color, too, had changed: they were now ethereal beams of multiple hues—unstable… impure. The visual change betrayed its degradation: the divine essence had been diluted by common magic. And magic, no matter how potent, can be countered by other magic.
Renouncing my human form once more, I allowed my body to mutate into that winged aberration of raw power. I glided between the attacks with fierce agility, parrying the whips I couldn't dodge. I had absorbed the Jarjacha wands into my own organism, using them as internal catalysts; although in this state my body was an arcane focus so saturated that their benefit was marginal, every bit of potency counted.
I charged against the sphere like an unstoppable tank, assuming the role of the provocateur. Without the suffocating weight of pure divine power, my confidence skyrocketed. I began to employ physical attacks and short-range techniques that would have been suicidal before, striking the surface of the deity with unleashed violence.
Elise traced a different trajectory, flanking the enemy while I monopolized its attention. Although the sphere possessed omnidirectional perception and lacked physical blind spots, our roles were defined. I would act as the anvil, containing and wearing it down, while Elise used her divine light to overwhelm this god who, by accident and desperation, had degraded himself.
We were no longer facing an unreachable divinity; now we were fighting a being whose overwhelming power, however vast, had the "quality" of a legendary wizard. And in that field, we were the masters.
...
At a certain distance, Helena and Hannah moved away in haste, one running and the other levitating beside her. Helena had let Hannah run on her own a few minutes ago; prolonged contact with her spectral body was beginning to be dangerous, as she still had not mastered the residual cold of her essence and feared draining the young witch's vitality.
"Are we... are we far enough yet?" Hannah panted, stopping for a moment to drain another revitalizing potion. The battle, added to the flight, was leaving her exhausted. Still, she didn't allow herself to stop for a single second.
As an immediate response, the earth shook again with violent magnitude. The surviving trees collapsed and the ground cracked beneath their feet. Beasts fled in panic, and Hannah had to grab onto the first thing she found to keep from falling. Helena, on the other hand, floated without trouble, intangible before the chaos… though even she perceived the magnitude of the energy that had caused that tremor.
"It seems not," the ghost replied with somber calm.
"Will they be alright?" Hannah asked with a lump in her throat, suffering from the heat flashes and the bursts of absolute dread that emanated from the epicenter of the battle intermittently.
"I don't know..." Helena admitted, fixing her gaze on the imperious red sphere and the two flashes of light attacking it. "But I know that Red is the strangest creature I will ever meet. He does things that defy all logic. I have decided to believe he will win, as he always does." Helena turned her translucent face toward Hannah. "As his women, the least we can do is trust. Or at least, send him our best wishes."
Hannah remained silent for a moment… and then nodded. Everything she discovered about me surpassed the last. Now I was fighting a god… and yet, she decided to trust that I would win, just as I did with the Yakuruna.
"Let's go," Helena said suddenly. "The journey to the Fief is not yet enabled. And from what Red said, that means we are still not out of danger. We have to move further away. We cannot become a burden to them."
Without waiting for a response, she grabbed her by the armpits again and rose. It wasn't the best for Hannah's health, but it was preferable to being caught in some collateral attack.
"Ugh..." Hannah shuddered violently as the spectral cold penetrated her bones again. The pain was sharp, a sting of ice that cut her breath. "How I wish I knew how to use Apparition to get out of this hell," she complained through gritted teeth.
"I don't think that's a good idea. Space is... broken. If you try and fail, we'd be two ghosts in Red's harem," Helena joked to lighten the tension. "Sex with ghosts isn't very well studied, but we could give him a phantasmagoric lesbian show."
"No, thanks... I'd rather he be able to feel me for real... and I feel him. If I couldn't fuck him... I'd die," she responded with a mix of embarrassment and mischief.
"Hmm… lucky you," Helena huffed, but there was no real resentment in her voice. Her studies on necromancy had already given her a couple of ideas for recovering a certain physicality with me, though none especially pleasant or effective. At the end of the day, her desire was not carnal; after so much time as a ghost, she had forgotten that. The only thing she really wanted… was to make me happy, to repay me in some way for everything I had done for her.
...
The battle in the skies dragged on, and the scales began to tip definitively in our favor. The great sphere, aware that its divine essence was contaminated, felt its will falter. That impurity was not something it could heal easily; even without opposition, it would have needed centuries of constant faith to purify its core.
In other circumstances, its failure would not have been fatal. In a world void of rivals, its immense amount of energy, though of low quality, would have sufficed to subjugate anyone... but we appeared.
With each exchange, Elise and I perfected our assault dance. We learned to read its movements, to anticipate its attacks… and to respond with increasing pressure. Elise did not stop hammering the enemy with blinding bolts and hooves charged with divine power that resonated like thunder. I am almost certain I heard her whisper through gritted teeth: "Take the power of friendship, motherfucker!", though I know she would deny it until the end of time.
For my part, in addition to the physical impacts that now tore at its body—more composed of clouds and magic than divine substance—I unleashed bursts of energy charged with the malice of the Jarjachas. I wasn't just looking for raw damage, but to sow states of weakness, hindering its capacity to respond.
We noticed the sphere was losing defensive density. It was then that we understood its true intentions: the God planned to flee. He had hidden the formation of a magical teleportation circle within his own gaseous body, camouflaging it with his constant attack and defense maneuvers.
We reacted at the last second, unleashing our ultimate attacks in lethal synchrony.
Elise channeled every last ember of her divine power and the remnants of faith accumulated in her avatar, projecting a continuous blast of lightning that immobilized the surface of the sphere. I, for my part, emptied my blood reserves to forge a titanic spear above me. It wasn't common blood; it was a distillate of my most potent reserves, with the essence absorbed from the Yakuruna as the main ingredient.
I seized the precise instant the sphere remained paralyzed, divided between maintaining its defense, activating the teleport, and enduring Elise's punishment. I fired.
The red spear cut through the air like a scarlet bolt, penetrating the deity's aerial body with surgical precision. The clouds covering its surface stopped dead. For an eternal moment, the world seemed to hold its breath as the God's magical energy began to leak violently through the open wound, bleeding out into the void.