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For all her bravado and happiness at getting a new training ground, Lilith had to admit that this << All-Encompassing Hatred>> was truly problematic to deal with. 

Lilith’s boots dug into the vitrified earth as another quake rippled beneath her. The tremors weren’t random anymore. The land shook in anticipation of her movement, trying to misalign her footing before every strike.

Above, the clouds thickened unnaturally, casting odd shadows that flickered and shifted like living things. The light turned traitorous. Blades of sunlight concentrated only on their eyes. The wind screamed in reverse, carrying back their sounds and making it harder to speak or cast.

They were not just fighting against Euphoria but against the world itself. It started with just mana or light. However, the power gradually increased, and its effects became more diverse. 

Gravity keeps increasing to slow them down. 

The earth kept shaking whenever they moved. The sand tried to enter their eyes and obscure them. 

The air became scarce, then poisonous. 

With each passing moment, the world turned more hostile to a point where Lilith was seriously starting to wonder how far this could go. Every element of reality twisted to inconvenience them, hinder them, break them.

Lilith clicked her tongue, eyes narrowing. “I’ve had enough.”

She slammed her sword into the ground, and for a moment, the world flinched. The rhythm of the battlefield skipped. Like a record stuttering.

Her sword resisted this world. More than that, it denied it. Sol’s Dragon Scales, embedded with the power of a Concept, refused to be bound by artificial laws.

A crimson-gold ripple spread outward. Where it passed, the lies of the world peeled back—just a little. Enough for Lilith to breathe properly again. Enough for Ambrosia to light a spark without hemorrhaging mana.

“I can’t do this much more than once,” Lilith said. “But it gives us a window.”  

Even as she spoke, the gold in her eyes continued to grow. She was getting more and more attuned with the power of Sol. That of the End. 

Normally, this should have been impossible. But making the impossible possible was becoming something normal since knowing Sol. 

All of this was the result of multiple coincidences. Her Concept of Severance fits very well with the End. Sol’s blood flowed in her veins, and she was holding his sword. Finally, she had been meditating in Sol’s dimension. At the exact place where Deus manifested. 

Thanks to all of this, she had grasped many small insights, and this fight with a true goddess was helping those insights coalesce into something greater.

And yet —

“I was only able to create a 10-meter free zone.”

“10 meters is more than enough.” Ambrosia didn’t need more explanation.

A miniature sun formed in her palm once again—smaller, more unstable, but even hotter than before. She was burning her own blood as fuel now.

Euphoria narrowed her eyes as she watched this. Her expression was back to divine serenity, but her aura trembled, ever so slightly.

“Even now… You fight,” she said, stepping forward. Her crimson aura crackled, distorting reality wherever she walked. “Why struggle so much? What would you gain even if you won?”

She could not understand. There was literally no logical reason for them to fight at the moment. It wasn’t as if they could truly kill her even if they won. 

This entire fight was completely and utterly futile. 

“You could not understand even if we tried to explain.”

“Is that so?” Euphoria became completely expressionless. “Then let’s continue.”

“I will give you an occasion.” Ambrosia launched the miniature nuclear bomb in the form of a railgun. The light reached Euphoria before she could even properly react. Since it was all focused on one point, the ray immediately pierced through her shield and her shoulder in one go.

Euphoria grunted more out of outrage than pain. But this was far from others as Lilith was already upon her. Lilith had used the moment of destruction to cut the conceptual distance separating them by using the technique of her daughter, Lilin.

Then once she was in the right range, 

<<God Slaying sword: Crescent Moon.>>

Lilith fully infused all the insight she had in her sword and attacked. 

It was too late for Euphoria to fully dodge, and she could only watch as the beautiful trajectory of the sword cut down from the right side of her face to her chest, drawing an arc of blood. 

Then, for the first time since the start of the battle, true pain hit her.

Euphoria screamed, and the world screamed alongside her. Until now, Lilith had been careful about using her concept so that Euphoria would not be on guard, and this tactic was paying off now. 

She wanted to immediately use another attack, but Euphoria instinctively switched to Encompassing Love, causing her to miss at the last moment, and Euphoria flew high in the sky while golden blood continued to flow.

Even as she flew, the pain continued to hit her. It was a soul-tearing pain of the like she had only felt once in her life. Her mind became even more chaotic when she realized that no matter how much Divine power she poured into the wound, it was refusing to close and heal.

At most, she was able to stop the outpour of blood. 

“Miserable wretch!”

She touched her now slightly disfigured face, and her expression became that of a devil.

She understood. In that one instance, if Lilith had used just a little more power, she would have been cleaved in two and might have been forced to fall in limbo for a few decades or even a thousand years. 

A goddess dying to someone who was not even fully a Demigod? 

“Don’t joke with me!! I am going to kill you!” Euphoria screamed as rage filled her mind.

Her aura intensified, and the world trembled. All along, she had been holding back a part of her power out of fear of irreversibly affecting the world. If she did, she would become an enemy of the world and would lose the free access she had managed to get from it. 

Furthermore, she had been sure that just a small part would be enough to keep in check Lilith and even Ambrosia if necessary.

But now?

All light vanished from her eyes as the rage and hatred were replaced by an eerie calmness.

They should just all die. She thought as she brought all the hatred she felt and called out to the sky.

***

While the fight between the three women raged, and Euphoria was on the verge of literally snapping because of the relentless attacks she was receiving, Hypnos was not having the best time of his life either.

Elysium. 

This was the work of his life. The peak of his art. The strongest technique born from his Divine authority.

That power could trap someone in a prison of their own mind, making them live through a dream world created based on absolute probability.

What made those dreams so realistic was that they were not just dreams but rather a glimpse at another reality. A parallel universe that could have actually existed had things been even slightly different.

A dream grounded in reality.

This is what made them so insidious. They were not mere impossible dreams but real possibilities, and because of that, they were all the harder to leave.

Once the prey was twisted and their narrative assimilated, then modified, they would lose their power or might even go berserk and die because of the incongruity in their mind and Truth.

Hypnos sighed as he observed Echidna. Though she was not in her true body and was not even a true demigod at the moment, her presence was something he had to respect.

She was standing leisurely in the void of the dream world. No matter how many possibilities he tried to subject her mind to, all were denied and then devoured before they could even properly form.

It was as if she were rejecting all possibilities for an alternate future. As if her very core could not even accept the existence of a different possibility.

Or rather—

It felt as if there existed no other reality where her dream could be realized.