Amazon Apocalypse 7: Chapter 80 Part A (Patreon)

Jade drew her sword.

"Merely being qualified for transcendence does not make one transcendent. This creature cannot be permitted to advance any further. Let us slay it here and now."

"Agreed," Seraphyne said.

"What's the plan, ladies?" I asked.

"I will cut my way through to that rift and disrupt whatever's happening on the other side. Otherwise, the birth of a Kindling Dimension transcendent could destroy this entire solar system," Jade said.

"Creatures like this are dependent on their minions. If we kill them all, it should be relatively weak. We should target them first to reduce the overall threat," Seraphyne said.

But Jade shook her head. "The minions won't be an issue if we kill the puppet master fast enough. We should rush in before we've exhausted ourselves on minor foes and take out the leader."

The two women looked at me. This wasn't the sort of fight where they could each do their own thing. We'd all need to work together or defeat was a certainty.

The pressure in the air was palpable, and I felt both of these women would remember which of their plans I thought the smartest.

Thankfully, I had an idea of my own.

"I'm going to go in there and talk to the thing. Maybe it'll leave." I shrugged.

"Talk to that monster?" Jade scoffed.

"Why not? It talked to me before. And if it's willing to talk, it'll be willing to let me get close. That's a lot easier than sneaking in there."

"It's not going to leave. Things like this one would never abandon a world so ripe with potential," Seraphyne said.

"It'll try to eat you," Jade added.

"I don't actually plan to negotiate with it. But if it wants to eat me, then that's all the better. It'll let me get close and I can take a good look at what's going on. Then, I can come back and tell you how close this thing is to reaching S-Grade, however that works." I looked at the two of them, waiting for disagreement.

I could see the objections in their eyes. But in the end neither spoke them aloud.

"Just make sure you get out of there in one piece," Jade said.

"Hold still a moment. This might increase your odds a little." Seraphyne clapped her palms together like she was praying and muttered under her breath.

A dull golden light enveloped me before moving through normal space and surrounding my soul like a protective barrier. It felt a bit like a magical safety line which I could yank to be pulled back to the location I was currently standing at.

"Thank you both. I'll be going now. Good luck to the two of you."

***

I approached the horde of undead gods with hands raised overhead.

"Hey, Godhollow Faith Devourer! Last time we talked, you offered me forbidden knowledge. Well, I'm ready to listen."

The lines of B-Grades and A-Grades stared at me, then slowly parted ways. One by one they stepped aside and made a path for me toward the dark portal. Glassy dead eyes stared at me expectantly, and I walked past them one unnerving step at a time.

When I finally reached the portal, I stuck my hand through it. There was no sudden transition, this portal was as real as a hallway. I stepped through it into the domain of the Godhollow Faith Devourer.

What I found on the other side was a stormy world in flux. There were purple clouds overhead and the ground beneath me was half-formed. Stone shifted to grass, then to barren earth, as though it hadn't quite decided what it was.

The very laws of reality in this place seemed in flux. Anyone below the C-Grade would die quite rapidly in a place like this, and even B-Grades would have to treat every gust of wind like an attack. Only an A-Grade like me could impose enough conceptual weight to be unaffected by the chaotic space.

Despite the malformed nature of this realm, it was far larger than the Divine Domain of any of the Natural Divinities I'd visited before. Those had never been larger than a building and its outlying land. This was large enough to be considered a mystic realm, though I got the sense there was more to this place than that.

Then the purple clouds swirled overhead. Several tentacles curled in and around them, though from so far away and the way they dangled down, they looked like strings from a puppet master. A shadow loomed among the alien clouds, giving brief glimpses of the monstrous fish that had led me here.

"Like my world? Soon, I will be the true god of it. This is my little island in the sea of infinity," said the voice in the clouds. Its words had come on ill-formed aquatic lips before, but now they flowed smoother. This thing had learned a lot from its recent meals.

"It could use some work. The physics seem a little off," I said while casually scanning my surroundings and the giant extradimensional fish high overhead. I wasn't sure what marked someone's progress into S-Grade, but I planned to have a thorough report to share with Jade and Seraphyne.

"A trivial concern. Your reality is no different from this one. The stars, galaxy, all of it is just one more bubble in this endless sea. A large one, but still just a bubble." The Godhollow Faith Devourer's voice echoed through the misshapen surrounding lands.

"Is this the forbidden knowledge you promised me?" I asked.

"Just a taste. I have more to give. From me, you could learn the true names of great void monsters and bind them to your will. You could learn forgotten spells lost in pocket realms long since abandoned to chaos. You could change the laws of a firmament and make yourself godlike beneath your heavens."

"And what do you want in exchange for this forbidden knowledge?" I asked.

The tendrils crept lower, slowly closing in on me.

"Be the first and over-god of my new realm. I am ill-suited to creation, but you are not..." the Godhollow Faith Devourer said.

I was increasingly getting the sense it was time to get out of here, and I decided to listen to my gut and do exactly that.

"Being a god for a creature known for eating gods sounds like a bad idea to me." I took a step back and nearly slipped on a tentacle. It was small, but I was certain it hadn't been there before. It had just poked its way through from the other side of reality.

It wrapped around my ankle and pinned me for a moment. I twisted, drew my dragonbone rapier, and sliced through the tendril in one quick swing before jumping to my feet and using Shadowrealm Stride to escape.

Only I found the path blocked.

"There is no Shadowrealm under my heavens," the Godhollow Faith Devourer said.

I turned with a grimace and tugged on the tether that Seraphyne had made for me, but that tentacle around my ankle tugged right back. The rules were different here in this realm in flux, which Seraphyne's spell couldn't have accounted for.

But now I had a better sense of how it worked. So I reached inside myself and switched to my other body. The body of an Apocalypse Dragon.

The tendril wrapped around my ankle snapped as the human leg was replaced with draconic talons. My black scales burned with inner heat, each hot enough to turn steel molten.

The fire went everywhere as I roared in desperate angry fury. Even the Godhollow Faith Devourer seemed taken aback by my sudden transformation. And in that moment of surprise, the clouds parted and I finally caught a good look at the giant fish in the sky.

I saw a bulbous eye shot red with blood, and further down in the bulk of the entity's mass was a tightly bound mass of energy. It seemed like the inverse of what was inside of Jade. Instead of concentrating energy from the Kindling Dimension, this concentrated divine energy stolen from gods and A-Grades.

I spat fire at the giant fish's face, though it was bigger than me even in dragon form. Tendrils tried to lash out at me, but I flapped my dragon wings and true dragon fire consumed the chaotic realm in fire. What had been an eerie shifting landscape moments ago was now a hellscape filled with fire. Hopefully that would disrupt whatever this giant fish was doing to reach S-Grade.

That one glance was all I got as I pulled on Seraphyne's thread again and pulled myself back to regular reality and switched back to my human body as I did so. I came hurtling through space at speed and crashed into the dirt behind Seraphyne and Jade, both of whom were positively glowing with power and barely concealed violence. Nearby, dozens of minor gods lay dead already. While I was gone, the battle had already started.

"There was a lot of energy swirling around him and a strange half-formed realm. Also, he's really angry now," I said as I coughed and pulled myself to my feet.

Seraphyne and Jade were fighting, but I could tell they heard me because they started fighting even more fiercely.

I was still getting to my feet when one of the A-Grade puppets rushed me. This one was Jahn, one of Tadrik's dead bodyguards. He was just about to reach me when something huge swept in from the side and grabbed him with razor-sharp teeth.

"Thanks for the rescue, Sharky," I said as Sharky tore into the A-Grade puppet. He was having trouble chewing Jahn, but with my help we destroyed what little was left of the former member of House Kethril.

That fight took us nearly thirty seconds, which was ages in a battle of this magnitude. In the distance, Jade and Seraphyne were working together to deal with several A-Grade god puppets all at once. Most of the attention was focused on Jade, who was using lightning-quick flashes of her sword to dismember one god after another.

This was a planet-shaking battle. If the ground hadn't already been destroyed, it would be now. The sheer friction of A-Grade movements boiled the air, and each collision with the ground split the earth. Several of Jade's strikes had already carved deep fissures in the ground.

Seraphyne's magic was less obvious, but no less powerful. Golden threads filled the air and wound around each of the enemies, inflicting them with some peculiar curse that made them more likely to be struck by Jade's attacks. I could feel the power in the spells that she was casting and knew that they would linger in the air around this battlefield for generations to come, assuming the planet survived this fight.

I hopped on Sharky's back, drew my sword in one hand and pulled a swirling mass of mana together in the other.

<Note>

Part A because I want this to be a big, double-size chapter. Sadly, I wasn't able to finish the next part in time to share the whole thing at once.

I've talked about this elsewhere, but I've been pulling apart an old cabin deep in the wilderness and it's loaded with asbestos, secondhand smoke, and dead rats (probably from the asbestos) so I'm basically living in a gas mask and a tyvek suit until this is done. I'm pushing hard to get it all taken care of soon so the place can air out for a bit and I can come back to put in new floors and walls. Anyway, I had to do a lot of that this week. Once things are more together there will hopefully be more chapters.