Free Web Novel"She's a Sacred?!!"
The Daemons looked at Victoria and her wonderland with their eyes wide, the smugness from thirty seconds ago completely gone.
Upon reaching the divine stage there were two ways to gauge strength.
The first was divine energy output. Raw and measurable, the kind of thing you could feel the moment someone entered a space.
The second was the wonderland.
For those below the high god stage, a wonderland would expand and contract but always held a spherical shape. Contained. Boundaried. It influenced the space inside it but left the real world sitting exactly where it was.
Above the high god stage that changed.
Wonderlands at that level began to exert real influence on their actual surroundings. Not a constructed space laid over reality. Reality itself shifting to accommodate what was being projected into it.
Victoria hadn't masked the moon.
She had turned the real moon red and was now in direct control of it.
The weight of that landed across all of them at the same time.
"Die!!"
She moved before the word finished leaving her mouth, crossing the distance to the nearest Daemon in a blink, blade already committed. She stabbed through him and opened his guts in the same stroke, one motion, and pulled back before the body had finished processing what had happened.
The divines broke.
Every Daemon in the group below high god level turned and ran the moment it happened. No discussion. No signal between them. Pure instinct making the decision before rank could override it. Thirteen became seven in under two seconds, leaving only those whose standing didn't allow them to flee without consequence.
Seven high gods.
They held their ground.
"Sacred or not, you're mine."
One of them pulled wind in from all four directions simultaneously, the currents converging on Victoria at the center, pressure building until contact became explosions that cracked the mountain air.
Boom
Boom
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Victoria didn't dodge.
She lowered her head and walked into it, arm raised, taking the hits across her armor and covering the ground between them. The moment she was close enough she swung down hard.
He escaped by the thinnest margin. The blade passed near enough that he felt the air it moved.
She was already turning.
She cut at another without establishing a pattern, direction shifting mid-motion, nothing readable in it. The weight of the red moon hanging overhead moved with her, its influence pressing down across the field, and the Daemons inside that radius were beginning to feel it.
Disoriented. Slow in the way that isn't about speed but about certainty, about knowing where you are in space relative to everything else.
She held the upper hand.
But one person against seven high-god level Daemons was bad no matter how the exchanges were going. The math on that didn't change based on momentum.
Thankfully.
—woosh
Enzo broke through the cloud of flying creatures and arrived.
He took in the scene in a single second. Victoria moving between them, the moon overhead, the seven still standing, the ones that had already run.
"She forced the moon to come out, damn it!!"
He cursed and the notification arrived in the same moment, like it had been waiting.
[Last Night]
It didn't elaborate.
It didn't need to. The shape of it was immediately obvious. Once Victoria deactivated her wonderland, pulled the moon back, his seven days would complete themselves and he would be sent home. The wonderland was the only thing holding the count open.
She was burning her own time to keep fighting.
"I have to make sure she survives!!"
His eyes had gone blood red.
He turned and found the Fire Daemon in his peripheral, standing slightly apart from the others, watching the exchanges with the particular stillness of something that hasn't committed yet because it doesn't need to.
From what Enzo knew, he was the strongest one here.
"I just have to distract him long enough."
He said it to himself once, quietly, then blasted forward.
The Fire Daemon didn't see him coming.
Enzo's full bodyweight hit him and drove him into the ground hard, both of them going down together, the impact shaking the rock beneath them.
The Daemon recovered fast.
Too fast.
"You imp!!"
He got himself upright and headbutted Enzo directly on the nose before Enzo could pull back, the impact sharp and immediate. Then he switched their positions in one motion, flipping them, and drove Enzo into the ground instead.
Flames came next.
They bathed him completely, pressing into every gap in the armor, finding skin, an intensity Enzo hadn't felt before. Not hot in the way fire is hot. Something deeper. His skin churned under it.
He didn't move away.
"Wonderland Creation: Silent Void."
He said it through gritted teeth, barely, the words forced out by will rather than breath.
A dark dome expanded around the two of them, shutting out the red moon, shutting out the sounds of Victoria's fight, creating a closed space that belonged entirely to this.
Enzo disappeared inside it.
He pulled distance between himself and the Daemon in the same motion, reappearing across the dome and taking one second to breathe.
He looked down at his armor.
A crack ran along the side panel. Clean and deep.
"Why am I always getting into tussles with fire users."
He said it to nobody, a low exhale of self-mockery, then looked up.
The difference between them had registered clearly. He wasn't pretending otherwise.
"Come, boy!!"
The Fire Daemon came forward without hesitation, tearing through the space of the dome like it wasn't there, utterly unbothered by the wonderland wrapped around them.
"I'll lay you to rest!!"
—woosh
Enzo moved.
He dodged. Kept moving. Kept his eyes on the Daemon the entire time, reading the way it shifted weight before committing, the angle its shoulders dropped before a strike, the small signals that existed in every fighter whether they knew it or not.
He was buying time.
He needed it to work.
'I hope this works.'
Something surfaced in his memory. An ability sitting unused since he had acquired it, waiting for the right shape of situation to fit into.
"Beast Transformation."
After the second voyage Enzo had spent time trying to find a suitable form to use with Kilgar's ability. Most things he had encountered didn't fit. Wrong frame. Wrong output. Nothing that matched what the situation usually demanded.
But now.
His body began to expand.
Not wildly. Not losing shape. It held the outline of a human but the exterior changed, the shell of the Gore Beast forming over him layer by layer, dense and thick, the healing factor of that creature threading itself into his biology alongside it.
He was bigger.
Harder.
And the damage the Daemon had already put into him was beginning to close.
He looked at the Fire Daemon across the dome.
"Let's throw hands!!"
He threw himself forward.
