Godslayer Lysette: Chapter 243

Chapter 243: War for the Future

Alan hissed and screamed loud enough to send shockwaves hurling across the borderlands, causing trees to whistle and birds to caw and fly off in every direction.  He seethed and clasped at his shoulder, which looked untouched on the surface but which was the site of a demonic wound upon his immortal Spark.

“What did you do to me?” he screamed.  “Answer me!”

Mirette didn’t answer.  As the eclipse broke for an instant and let the warm light of the sun shine down upon the battlefield, they charged.  Solanna followed behind them, covering their approach.   But Alan’s Lunar Bolts launched even faster and more erratically than before,  twisting and turning according to unnatural distortions in the fabric of spacetime.

Worse still, the approach was distorted by the presence of a massive barrier surrounding him, one which repelled and tore at Mirette much like Lysette had before been torn apart by Asterion’s teleportation glyph.  And as Mirette forced themself closer to their adversary, the repulsive force only grew quadratically.  By twenty yards, their and Solanna’s approach had been slowed to a crawl.  At fifteen, they were all but at a standstill, despite pushing forward with all their might.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Mirette messaged Solanna.

“It’s a gravitational barrier.  One of Asterion’s Domain Abilities which he’s granted to his enforcer.  Normally I’d just say to wait it out, but you probably can’t maintain that for very long.  I have an idea, though, and I’ll need you to buy me time so I can do so.

“Understood.”

Solanna flew higher into the upper atmosphere, leaving Mirette and Alan to again stare one another down.  Mirette grimaced as they again flew into Alan’s barrier.  And just as before, they failed to make any progress.

“You should give up and submit already!  Solanna has already forsaken you, and I know two demigods won’t be able to maintain a link nearly long enough to outlast my stamina.”

“I thought you were all about inviting false Hope in your adversaries.”  Mirette flew to the side and tried an indirect assault in lieu of charging headfirst into the distortionary wall.  “I thought you’d be all about how I’d be welcome to try and how you’d make me regret it.”

Alan smirked, but said nothing.  Mirette launched themself upward, lifting higher into the air and barreling down toward Alan with the benefit of Aimarion’s gravity accelerating them further toward her adversary’s barrier.  The attack had no effect, but instead of directly repelling their dive bombing strike, instead he deflected it away from himself.

They next tried conjuring thousands of shards of ice, holding them aloft from every angle, breaking them apart into tiny airborne particles no smaller than a grain of rice.  Mirette jumped between them in rapid succession, blitzing in and out of their pocket dimension with each passing half-second.  Alan stood resolute as Mirette tested various configurations, different sequences of approaches.

None of them proved successful.  Mirette understood better how their technique worked and how space and time warped around the presence of such a powerful antigravity.  But they simply lacked the raw power to overcome the outward force he imposed.

Worse still, their strength was fading after three minutes, and Solanna was still nowhere to be found.  She retained her trust in her friend’s great-grandmother, knew that she had not run off, and so she did not try to force her way through and possibly end her fusion early.  She continued testing different positions and movement patterns, but each was deflected or repelled.

Each except one.  The one angle she expected to be least successful.  An attack from directly beneath Alan seemed at first to be as unsuccessful as all the others, but as Mirette again tried to teleport through the barrier, the interactions between the two distortions twisted and negated one another.  Mirette’s fist found Alan’s stomach, followed by another grapple around his neck to absorb a bit more of his divinity.

He grabbed her hand.  He crushed it with enough force that the bones in Mirette’s forearm cracked and their grip released despite their best efforts.  But again, Mirette did not scream, instead stitching together their injury even as Alan caught his breath.

He scowled and screamed up to the heavens.  “So that’s it, is it?  You would attempt to steal my divinity with heretofore unheard of demonic technique?”

He teleported behind Mirette and threw a punch.  Mirette teleported out of the way at the last second, but Alan followed just behind.  The two darted around, blinking in and out of physical reality.  Mirette launched even more icy mist upon their aerial battlefield, but closed their eyes and waited, watching with their aura as Alan continued teleporting with complete abandon.

Alan was behaving erratically.  He seemed less interested in the fight and more with— Mirette didn’t even want to speculate.  He appeared behind Mirette and threw a punch, but before it landed, both of them had already blinked elsewhere on their battlefield.  Mirette dodged, but Alan again jumped mid-punch, grazing Mirette’s cheek before warping again.

Another attack followed, then another dodge, and Mirette understood.  Alan no longer cared about strategy or broader objectives.  He was frightened, terrified at learning what Mirette was capable of.  Of knowing that they had dealt damage that he would not so easily be able to recover from.  And better still, Mirette realized that their own reserves of Divine Essence had been restored to an extent that they could maintain their fused state for another half a minute.

Alan zipped in and out of reality, striking Mirette with everything he had.  He moved at such a frenetic, disorganized state that it appeared that their own body had detached into separate limbs.  His right arm emerged, throwing a punch from behind.  The next instant, a leg appeared, delivering a roundhouse kick to Mirette’s side.  And another instant later, his left arm followed suit with an uppercut aimed at their torso.  

Mirette dodged them, and the attacks came faster.  Appendages flew around disjointed from another, slapping and punching and even biting and groping at them from every angle.  He tried everything, from tearing apart their flesh with serrated teeth to assailing them with luminous elemental blades formed from the same process as their own weapons of fire and ice.

Mirette coated their body in rockvine stalk to protect their body from the worst of his attacks, but they still sustained significant damage to their body in the process.  Their regeneration was hard at work repairing their injuries, but even that was being pushed to its limits.  They struggled to maintain their sense of direction through it all.

But the battlefield was changing, so subtly that they wondered if Alan had even noticed, in their infernal ferocity.  The sky had grown warmer, a little brighter.  And throughout it all, Alan had slowed down, grown sloppy, failed to fully obscure their true movements under waves of illusion and teleportation.  And so when Mirette was attacked again by the same tripled assault that Alan began with, they caught the third attack with both hands and pulled.

Alan was yanked out of their spacetime distortion and dragged back into physical space, where Mirette grabbed them by the neck.  They activated their Essence Siphon and they drained with abandon, engorging themself fully on Alan as he struggled to break free.  He did after about ten seconds, but the heaviness of his breath and the way he clutched onto himself revealed that he was in far from great shape through it all.

“This makes no sense!”  He screamed a blood-curdling howl up at the heavens, biting at the fiery disc above them like a rabid animal.  “My Lord’s Eclipse of the Heavens should last for at least another half hour!  So why?  How?  What did you do!  Answer me!”

“Yeah, no shit I realized that this eclipse was going to be a problem,” Solanna said, dropping down from far higher above.  “So I eclipsed it!”

“You eclipsed it?”

“Well, it’s not like my power extends to being able to destroy the moon or anything like that.  But creating a temporary sphere of flame to block out the moonlight and simulate the daytime sun?  Yeah, such is well-within the power of a fiery goddess of Passion like yours truly!”

“You–  You are a traitor, Solanna!  You would side with this demon against your own kind?  You know what will happen!  So why?  It’s not too late!  Help me eradicate this threat to everything we have and are before she kills us all!”

“This might be the last chance we have!  Solanna!  Please, I am literally begging you.  Strike her down before she kills both of us!”

“Kills both of you?” Mirette asked.  “I don’t understand why I would want to kill Solanna.  She’s my best friend’s family.  A friend herself, a mentor, a teacher, and a fellow demigoddess.”

Solanna crossed her arms and harrumphed.  “Always thinking about Number One, Alan?  Like I don’t know that you weren’t planning to stab me in the back the second I did the same to Mirette.”  She squinted.  “Don’t try to deny it either; I might not be quite as old as you are, but I wasn’t born last century!”

“You–  You will live to regret this, Solanna.  You, and this entire world!  And you, demon usurper, one who would defy the will of all of Aimarion, I give you one final gift of despair before I die.”

Alan stumbled amidst his levitation and pointed his finger at Mirette, then down toward the ground, firing a single Lunar Bolt down toward the center of Ft. James.  Solanna made an attempt to intercept, but the attack was too quick, and she could only watch as it darted toward the surface.  The bolt was weak by divine standards, leaving only a distant rumble and a small plume of smoke in its wake.  But he seemed ominously pleased as he grinned toward Mirette.

 “A curse upon you for the entirety of your existence!  May you and everyone you’ve ever known know only despair and suffering from this moment forward!  From…  From this day forward, all of Aimarion is your enemy!”

He began to laugh, but Mirette grabbed him and latched onto his neck, drinking in the rest of his Essence of both varieties.  He struggled for a moment, more reflexive than anything, and then went motionless.  His eyes tilted backward, his breathing stopped, and his body turned to dust and then blew away with the high-altitude gusts.

“Why did he die?” Mirette asked.  “I’ve used this on others before.  They lose their strength, but they’re still alive afterwards.  That was why I created this technique in the first place.  So–  So I didn’t have to keep killing.”

“I thought I told you before,” Solanna said.  “Cultivation is literally the power of the gods.  Humans are mortal, physical beings, separate from the power they’ve accumulated.  They are their physical bodies and brains and minds.  But we are different.  We are still tied to our bodies to an extent, but we are more our Spark than any physical form.  That’s why we can change that form if we so will it.”

Mirette split apart into Lysette and Mirae, still holding one another’s hands as they maintained their flight.  Lysette was tired, but not quite at the point of collapse, and judging by Mirae’s appearance, they were about the same.

“Our Cultivation, our Divine Essence, is literally our lifeforce.  Just as humans need food and water to survive, so too do we need the prayers and worship of mortals and the Divine Essence they generate to prolong ourselves.  When we overuse our Divine Essence reserves, whether in battle or otherwise, we fatigue as a failsafe.  We go into stasis until Omnia’s system feeds us more to sustain ourselves.  But if we cannot do so, if we are drained to absolute zero and cannot refresh ourselves, we die.  In that regard, gods are even more vulnerable to demons than mortals are.”

“I–  I didn’t know,” Lysette said.

“I know you didn’t.  And I’m sure you have even more questions for me.”  Solanna sighed.  “As much as I would like to get out of here before Miss No Fun Prissy Pants gets here, I suppose I have no choice but to pay the old crone a visit.”

“You mean Saffron?”

Solanna spat.  “Don’t remind me.  And, Lyse, Mirae.  I’m sorry I couldn’t stop him.  Please, before we head down there, take a moment to prepare yourselves.”

Chapter 242: https://www.patreon.com/posts/114242865

Table of Contents: https://www.patreon.com/posts/101896170

Chapter 244: https://www.patreon.com/posts/114358461