Amazon Apocalypse 7: Chapter 81 (Patreon)

Our mission was simple. To kill the Godhollow Faith Devourer.

With the protection of Seraphyne's spell, we stepped through the rift. I immediately felt better than I had the last time I was here.

"Little dragon, you return. And bringing gifts," said the Godhollow Faith Devourer. The ground shook and quivered, and I realized there were more tendrils than ground now.

There was no point in exchanging words with this thing. I remained silent, but Jade replied to it.

"Foul creature. You should have stayed in whatever unholy realm you spawned in. Your aspirations for transcendence end here and now!" Jade proclaimed with her sword raised high overhead. Green light swirled around it more and more by the moment until her blade split the sky.

"Crude, ignorant, and ugly things. Be silent," the Godhollow Faith Devourer replied.

With those words, the battle was joined. Jade struck the first blow, even more devastating than the one she'd demonstrated before. I could feel the destructive mana in the air, which flooded our surroundings and felt as sharp as blades. It was like the mana carried Jade's intent with it.

"Heaven Splitting Sword!" Jade shouted as mana shattered the sky. Her sword struck the Godhollow Faith Devourer's body high in the air. The ugly fish was cleaved in two by the single blow, and the halves began falling like a pair of meteors.

The two chunks of fish-like body crashed into the ground with a thud, and for a moment there was silence.

Jade sheathed her sword, and her eyes showed some confusion.

"That looked almost too easy…" Jade started toward the corpse.

"Not just looked. It shouldn't have died to that." Seraphyne walked forward to join her.

Before both women could do something foolish like get any closer, I rushed forward, grabbed them both by their waists, and flew upward.

"That's not its body. The world itself is!" I carried them both into the sky just in time.

The moment we were clear, the two halves of the fallen corpse exploded in a fountain of gore, tendrils, and diseased flesh that carried an affliction very similar to my Destined Death spell.

"Timely intervention, Carter. You have good instincts. The corpse was a trap. The entity has already fused with its inner world," Seraphyne said.

"Sharp eyes. But unfortunate news. The first two steps toward a monster's Transcendence are already complete. Killing this thing will be no easy feat." Jade scowled.

The praise of two beauties was always appreciated, though I didn't have time to enjoy it now. I had spotted the Godhollow Faith Devourer's trap through a combination of experience, keen extradimensional senses, and my fate bloodline.

"I will weaken it," Seraphyne declared. She pointed her hand, and the buzzing futuristic drone around her started firing a series of laser beams at the ground.

At first the quick pulses seemed like random fire, but a moment later I realized Seraphyne was burning a pattern into the ground that would cause a large-scale mana fluctuation. It was a quick and dirty attack that reminded me of what I sometimes did with Lightsculptor's Brush.

But before Seraphyne could finish, the earth shifted as blades of grass turned into tiny tendrils. The tendrils moved into an esoteric pattern that might have made sense to a completely alien mind, but to me looked like magical gibberish.

Whatever the pattern was, it had some magical significance in this world, because the charge that had just started to build into a bomb was released upward in a beam of purple lightning that scorched Seraphyne's drone and left it tottering in the air.

"Mister Blinky, no!" Seraphyne cried out. Before she could save it, a thick tentacle the size of a tree swatted the tottering drone out of the sky.

Seraphyne's hands curled into fists at her sides, and a dark look crossed her face, like someone had just crushed something irreplaceable from her childhood.

"I will avenge your machine." Jade conjured another massive blade just as before, but this time she brought it down on the land itself like she planned to split the ground in two. And from the deep furrow in the earth beneath us, it seemed she was surprisingly close to succeeding. Where her sword strike was deepest, every tentacle on the ground had been severed, and the false ground had split apart to reveal the sea of primal chaos beyond it.

But then the ground swelled, and the tentacles writhed and knitted themselves back together. From each severed end, a hundred smaller tendrils sprouted and reached up for Jade. She was in the middle of another swing of her enormous sword, but from the looks of things, she would be overwhelmed before she finished it.

Thankfully, Seraphyne started casting a protective golden bubble around both herself and Jade. Both peak A-Grade women blazed with mana as they battled the approaching tendrils, attracting all of the Godhollow Faith Devourer's attention.

That was good, because it let me point a finger downward and do a little touchup work on Seraphyne's half-finished enchantment. Her drone had laid the foundation. The pattern just needed finishing. Something as direct as a laser beam would draw another counterattack, but I could be subtler using Lightsculptor's Brush. All my work on power armor taught me a lot about elegantly tucking enchantments where nobody would see them.

When I finally completed the pattern, all the mana in our surroundings was drawn inward in one sudden flood. Thanks to my passive effect, Mana Overload, the pattern continued charging with more and more mana for several long seconds past when it should have detonated. When it finally blew, it did so with the force of several nuclear warheads.

In one massive blast, the ground split along the line Jade had made with her sword strikes. The stormy, chaotic sea of the Kindling Dimension was in full view down the middle of the broken world. The tendrils and tentacles woven throughout the ground were reaching for one another to pull the broken world back together, but Jade was cutting the biggest of them as they revealed themselves.

"Well done, Carter!" Seraphyne smiled at me for a moment as she drew the laser sword she'd used before. She pulled another component from her sleeve, a rod of some kind, and when attached to the laser sword it created a staff pulsing with blue and golden light. A huge blue crystal in the center of the staff burned brightly as its power was consumed, and it seemed like every one of Seraphyne's spells had doubled in intensity.

The staff must have been some secret weapon of Seraphyne's that she'd been holding back to avoid using up that blue crystal, but now that her drone was dead and the battle was proving more difficult, she was willing to use it.

Seraphyne twisted her staff around so the tip pointed down, and more fate-altering magic spilled out of it like sparks from a firecracker. To the mundane eye it was merely a shower of golden light, but my body tingled at the sight of it. My bloodline seemed certain that this was a fate-aspected offensive spell unlike anything I had ever seen before.

The spell had no visible effect, but the gem in Seraphyne's staff had dimmed by half, and her shoulders slumped like she had just been carrying a heavy burden.

The results of her spell became most apparent in the damage Jade was doing nearby. Cuts that previously would have dug shallow fissures now carved wide canyons. The tentacles fighting back at us moved slower, too.

"There has to be a weak point somewhere. Can you spot it?" Seraphyne asked.

I looked the remaining landmass over in search of a weak point. Thankfully, I had an ability to help with just that sort of thing.

With Exploit Weakness active, my eyes glided right to a vulnerable mass hidden under an unremarkable fake swamp. It had been well disguised, and my ability would have missed it if it hadn't already been disturbed by a few of Jade's sword strikes.

"There!" I pointed.

"Got it. Let's see how it handles this..." Seraphyne muttered as she held her staff like a rifle. The blue gem she'd attached burned up completely, leaving behind nothing but dust. But the result was the most raw physical attack I'd seen from her thus far. A golden laser beam shot forth from her staff and struck the vulnerable mass beneath the fake swamp.

It was deceptively simple. On the surface, it was nothing more than a powerful beam of light that burned on contact. But in truth it interacted with the spell she'd cast previously to overload whatever biology kept the Godhollow Faith Devourer alive.

What followed was the opposite of the healing magic Seraphyne usually used. Instead of blood flowing back into wounds and reconstructing healthy tissue, fluids left every living tentacle and tendril all at once. What remained were twisted desiccated husks frozen in place.

"Keep it up, both of you! I think we've nearly killed it," Jade called from afar as she waved her sword left and right like a scythe through a field of grain. With the tentacles dry and frozen in place, she could chop through them unopposed and was rapidly turning this little alternate reality into chunks of destroyed debris.

Things seemed to be going well, but the Godhollow Faith Devourer wasn't out of tricks yet.

Jade charged a particularly powerful sword strike that she seemed to think might finish things. With one mighty slice, her blade plunged into the ground. But as it sank deep, a giant humanoid hand reached up and grabbed her.

Jade yelped, as did Seraphyne next to me. Then the giant stood. His body was made of tentacles and tendrils clinging tightly over something more solid. He seemed misshapen, like we had interrupted his creation just before completion. As he rose, the swampy area I'd pointed out to Seraphyne washed away to reveal what her laser had truly struck. The giant's head had already been blasted to bits above the nose.

But the wound didn't seem to slow him down as he gripped Jade in his hand like a mouse in the claws of a cat.

God Devouring Titan (800)

"Jade!" I yelled as I darted toward the giant.

He raised his other hand and smashed both massive palms together with Jade between them. Jade coughed up a mouthful of blood from the blow, and her sword fell limply from her hands. Seraphyne's golden buffing magic guttered out as it attempted to heal and prevent damage, but was soon overwhelmed.

I brought my Dragon Bone rapier down on one of the giant's wrists, but for once my sword did little. I could saw at these giant hands for an hour and still not free Jade. She would be crushed into paste long before then.

"Look what you've done to me," the giant said. He turned to me with pinpoint accuracy, even though the top half of his head was missing.

I stared at where the giant's eyes would be. I spoke in the hopes of buying Seraphyne time. "This was going to be your new body after reaching S-Grade?"

The giant sneered. "I had grander designs. But this will do. It is too late for you to accept my earlier offer, little dragon. The time has come for you and your two companions to take your place as the first new puppets in my realm."

The God Devouring Titan must have been the evolved form of the Godhollow Faith Devourer, now less fish and more twisted and deformed humanoid.

His body was in rough shape, but given how he was manhandling Jade, I shuddered to think what the entity could have done if it had been allowed to build a fully functional body.

Behind me, Seraphyne was furiously casting spells to keep Jade alive and to weaken the God Devouring Titan. But Seraphyne wasn't more of a support than direct combatant. As strong as her spells were, someone needed to fight to make those spells work. With Jade out of the picture, that job fell to me.

"You keep calling me little dragon. I guess it's about time I showed you what that means," I said.

It was time to stop holding back. I switched to my dragon body.

In an instant, I traded my teeth for fangs, my hands for claws, and my skin for scales. I grew larger and larger still. The giant was still a giant, but I was large enough now to sink teeth and claws into him.

I grabbed onto the broken stump of his head and breathed my hottest dragon fire straight through the wound and into his body. Mana poured off me in angry, hungry waves, and the giant's body illuminated from within with the scarlet hues of licking flame.

The giant stumbled as strength left his limbs. His body swayed from side to side. With Seraphyne's help, Jade wriggled free, wounded but alive.

I grabbed the giant and held on like a tiny pest, but my flames were far more than an annoyance. The titan tried to swat me away, but I crawled onto the small of his back, keeping my fire pouring into him the whole way. Every arm and tendril that came at me, I dodged or burned away, nimbly dancing between his clumsy swings. While I wasn't as high-level as Jade or Seraphyne, I'd been stacking extra stat points through Soulchain Nexus since the battle against his puppets began outside, and an Apocalypse Dragon's fire was as destructive as fire came.

When the titan finally grabbed me and tried to crush me like he had Jade, I merely grinned and detonated my Corrupting Marks. They had been silently growing in quantity ever since our first encounter, and now they were unleashed in full force.

Half-made flesh exploded off a skeleton of stone. At its center, the titan had drawn in material from our world to stabilize his uncertain existence. But now all that had been burned to ashes in dragonfire.

The battle was over.

I sat atop the ruin with my claws digging through ashes for something. I wasn't sure what it was, but dragon instincts told me it would be valuable. Eventually, I tore free the largest core I had ever seen. The core was big enough to fill my dragon claws instead of just my human hands. It would be a worthy addition to my hoard.

Satisfied at last, I shifted back to human form. To my surprise, both Jade and Seraphyne were looking at me warily.

"What's wrong, you two?"

Jade leveled her sword at me with a tired arm, her skin covered in tiny cuts from the battle. But her eyes were as fierce and piercing as ever.

"Are you Carter Smith with an Apocalypse Dragon body? Or are you an Apocalypse Dragon that can take on the form of Carter Smith?"