A rain of chaos swallowed the world in light and entropy.
Rave held onto Nightingale’s leg, the harpy beating her wings desperately as energy drops the size of grapes hailed down all around them. She created chains of purple as shields against the projectiles that she could not dodge. Like acid, the entropic magic burned through the spells, unleashing the mana as small suns that burned out in a flash, leaving heavy metals and horrid heat behind.
Space stretched and folded like a cloth creasing between the hands of a playful giant. John burned mana so the Ambassador Double’s flight could be accelerated and yet the distance between him and his women grew and shrunk senselessly. What he pushed into his speed suddenly turned into an increase in the second body’s intelligence.
It was disorienting. What had been an extension of him was suddenly smarter than him. Jack took a breath, inhaling sharply as something like self-conscious rose to the top. Was he truly the Gamer or was he something that pretended to be? Could he be his own entity if he tried? How many of his women could he take from himself in the process? How would he-
The thoughts of freedom were washed when one of the chaos drops struck him in the shoulder. Torment spread through the mental network and the true John back in the Guild Hall spat out blood.
It shouldn’t have been possible. Nor should the Ambassador Double ever entertain an actual independent thought. Such things were the understanding of his magic.
Magic did not behave the way it was expected to when Mother Chaos was involved. Metra had said that often.
John finally emerged from the dense rain, catching up to Nightingale and Rave. They were hovering above the great prismatic wastes now. Conceptual energy, flowing freely between Illusion Barriers, hardened at their presence into shapes and ground. The shattered walls of their battlefield did not lead back into the mundane. Was it another manifestation of Tiamat’s absurdity, the sheer might of the fight ensuing, or an intervention by Gaia that made it that way?
The trio landed on a shimmering island of purple rock and bright green grass. A singular tree grew from it, gnarled and twirly in ways that belonged into the mind of an artist, not reality. It was fascinating. John would have loved to at least study this space they were in now. This was the layer of reality that gods and higher dragons used to move from Illusion Barrier to Illusion Barrier without ever interacting with the mundane.
Greater matters demanded his attention.
What had been a devastating storm of entropy was the detritus of the true battle. The dragon of chaos and the Apex of the Abyss exchanged blows across hundreds of metres. Slashes of lunar light and martial might clashed with swirling breaths of disorder. The eyes of Tiamat’s wings stared holes into the air, creating vacuums that collapsed into stars of nonsense. Radiating the breaking of all rules, they distorted space around them until they inevitably burned out, creating novas in their wake that rippled over a two-dimensional plane.
The conceptual landscape hardened into something concrete wherever the opponents lingered. Prismatic lights consolidated into forests and warm fields around Romulus, while Tiamat turned everything around her into dust and saltmarsh.
For all of the explosiveness of what went on, for all of the ripples of colours and bending of space, the fight never got quite so abstract that John could not follow it. The scale of it all had long since left the scope of what the human mind was meant to comprehend. Ignoring the origin and the shape of the forces deployed, even this battle was fundamentally the same as all battles: two sides pushing forwards their power until one side broke.
“How do we make a difference?” Rave asked.
A splendid question that John did not have an immediate answer to. Shackling Tiamat down again was not a simple matter. Putting aside how much more active the goddess of chaos was now, fact of the matter was that pulses of her aura made any long-term planning difficult. He and Nightingale relied little on buffs, but they still relied on them, while Rave’s power from her Aura and her bodysuit got scrambled around, making her speed and power a spectrum that went from decent to overpowering. In this kind of battle, decent just didn’t cut it.
John opened his mouth to start formulating a battle plan.
Tiamat tore through the space in front of them. “No need to stay out of the play, little children!” Her claw slammed down on the flying island, tearing it asunder. John was up in the air. Rave was falling. Nightingale screamed, constrained in the claw of the dragon of chaos. The unstable energy of Tiamat turned parts of her skin into flaking embers.
“RELEASE HER!” John roared.
His demand was mocked for its impotency. The dragon pulled back through the dimensional rift she had made, putting kilometres between them as swiftly as she had breached it. Rage demanded he give chase. He forcefully calmed himself, diving after Rave instead. He caught her quickly and the two of them began to head towards the fight immediately.
“I have no idea what exactly we can do,” he told her. “We’ll have to do this your way!”
“Alright then – throw me!”
John did not even hesitate. He launched his first fiancée forwards with all of the power that he could muster. Ground manifested beneath her and she hit it running. She was a gold-sliver-technicolour streak in a world of colours, turning the ground into grassy, mountainous plains as she bridged the rapid distance at an accelerating pace. The Gamer could not keep up, but he kept close enough that he could make out what happened next.
Clutching Nightingale in her right claw, Tiamat kept Romulus at bay with gestures of the other arm. Eyes upon the membranes of her flowing wings switched to the approaching Lightbearer. Operating purely on instinct, Rave swerved around the collapses in space that were spawning around her. Illuminare burned under the rays of entropy from the stars that followed, but the Fusional bodysuit withstood the pressure.
Trailing behind, John could still offer support. He launched two charged Arc Lances across the divide, the arcane projectiles crossing the vast distance and striking Tiamat in the side. The impacts were like the bites of rats upon a fully grown human – little, but far from without effect.
Tiamat twisted around, her jaw wide. Rave did the only sensible thing and stopped in her charge. The yellow teeth of the Lorylim dragon whizzed past her, only for Tiamat to keep on moving, following the half-meant bite up with an immediate strike of her tail. The appendage of fused spines would have caught the Lightbearer, had it not been for the Apex.
Descending on wings of golden light, Romulus rammed his sword into the tail. Without missing a beat, Rave charged forwards again. Tiamat beat her wings, but something about the way the Apex had staked her kept her anchored to the ground, the silver sword remaining and keeping her tail in place.
Rave slalomed through a final barrage of collapsing space. The ground beneath her tore open, but the claw of the dragon of chaos that came through missed her. Rave was fast and her combat reflexes impeccable as always. One of the entropic voids sucked at her, ripping hairs off her scalp, but she advanced anyhow. She made it to Tiamat’s side, drew her fist back and punched.
The goddess of chaos was blown back by the impact. More than that: she bent. The metal that put her body together bent without springing back. The grip of her claw involuntarily released Nightingale, who spread her wings in a flutter of divine might just as Tiamat was made to fly into the explosion of the internal organs that ruptured from her side opposite of where Rave’s fist left a person-sized dent.
Rave stared at her own fist in the aftermath of the punch, not even trailing the dragon of chaos as she bounced over a conceptual landscape. A dense, borderline liquid glow surrounded her clenched digits, so much more potent than even her radiant Aura around it.
Screaming, Tiamat spread her wings wide, ripping all of them out of their impressed stupor. A thousand projectiles loosened from enormous eyes, arcing high before coming back down in a carpet of aimed chaos bombs.
The scream and the world dulled. A massive shockwave of nightly energy spread out from the harpy that had landed besides John. Furious was the sight of the harpy, whose purple feathers had been matted with crude fluids and whose gorgeous face was marred by the absence of pale skin. Purple eyes glowed visibly with power.
Nightingale was not a combat-oriented god.
She was still a god and of a Faith that, by all rights, should have been among the strongest of all. Not as strong as chaos, which beat in every human’s heart and thoughts, certainly, yet the night was its own object of veneration and fear in every cycle of every day.
The night that the lady brought.
The conceptual landscape was swallowed in spontaneous darkness. The seeking chaos projectiles impacted the ground all around, suddenly incapable of finding their targets. Even Romulus took shelter in the embrace of the midnight black. Spells died around them like fading celestial bodies. Only two lights were accepted by the fury of the lady of all nights. One belonged to her matriarch, a blazing sun welcomed eternally, the other was the visiting blaze of the Apex.
“Maintain this night,” Romulus ordered. It was a command with a requesting undertone, worded for efficiency not an actual sense of superiority. A simple nod was her response and the Apex turned the Luna sword in his grip.
John had no idea what exactly was about to happen, but he knew it would be big. His gaze pierced through the night, spotting Tiamat while they remained hidden in return. The chaos dragon thrashed and unleashed her breath attack in multiple directions, seeking to smoke them out. For now, they were at a relatively safe distance – and Tiamat was stationary enough that he could take aim.
“We live under the silvery protector,” Romulus’ voice echoed with the feminine, cool voice of Luna. “Shield above, become as the blows you take – strike from the heavens, my moon!”
John did not have to adjust where he was looking to see what had happened – the celestial body entered his field of view all on its own. It was gargantuan. He did not dare to make even an estimation of its size. It was an idea forced into a physical form to deliver an impact to a dragon that was like a dog caught under a bus by comparison.
Tiamat was flattened under silver stone. A blinding light tore through the world and the night faded, the goddess incapable of maintaining it any longer. Moon turned to dust, and into the centre of the rippling shockwave of divine might, a star of an arcane silver fell, adding a secondary impact to it all.
“UNRULY CHILDREN!” Tiamat tore out space again, collapsing on top of the group. Her form was like molten wax, full human torsos and rolls of fat now the dominant fact of her torso. Scales were replaced with fungal fruits, the true nature of the goddess of chaos showing. Open veins gushed foul brine.
Romulus caught the strike on his shield. A solar counter-blast blinded the dragon. Chains of arcane and night launched at her shoulders. Magic and Rave’s brawn pulled the bindings back, forcing Tiamat fully through the portal. Wings sloughed off her spine. Skin fell in chunks from her ribcage. In the middle of it, John spotted something different, something lead grey and so much more defined in its shape than the fused mush.
The Apex saw it as well and charged forwards while the three of them pulled at Tiamat. Valiantly, the warrior leapt into the maw of Tiamat’s melting body, carving his way through shifting forms. The goddess of chaos was aware of what was happening, flooding the space with entropic waves – to no avail. Romulus’ wooden armour cracked and broke, but it protected him as he reached the Metracana that served as Tiamat’s heart.
He ripped it out and the form of Mother Chaos trembled.
There were no words to be put to her rage. The metal and the Lorylim matter that had fused together to make her form began to violently reject each other. It was the nail in the coffin of her chance of victory. It was also a brutal release of energy.
Romulus made it out, partially aided by the violent shockwaves. All of them ran. Any further fight would have been unnecessary. All that mattered was keeping their distance from the mass of hands and rage that Tiamat bloated into.
The conceptual space around them had narrowed considerably. Everything led back to the origin point, to the only piece of this that they were supposed to be at. It was a patch of glass and barren dirt, a swirling fountain of sand and water in its middle. It was the only place to head to, all other directions swirling prismatic that would have to manifest into an escape route first.
All of them shot back at Tiamat as much as they dared while keeping their distance. Injuries lamed them. Nightingale was hurt worst of all, but all of them had caught strays during this fight and even Romulus moved with a slight hobble. Tiamat was gradually gaining ground, fuelled by the energy of impending doom.
Just as the crawling chaos was above them, the last bit of internal coherence collapsed. The body of the goddess was sucked into a singularity that then exploded into dead Lorylim matter and human remains. Everything rained down on them. John clenched his jaw at the downpour of bodies. Molten bodies, fleshy bodies and broken bodies, all raining down on the Illusion Barrier.
John sprinted straight to the edge of the spring. Everyone else had the same thought he had. He arrived just in time to watch a body decompose on the surface of the sands of time, flesh decaying until only a blank skeleton was left. It was sucked under the surface and the eternally swirling sands of time suddenly smoothed over. The layer of water above was clear and rippled softly.
To the ivy and the spring, the death of Tiamat incarnating had added bone.