Chapter 466 - Epilogue - A Reluctant Truce

  Kael’ahruus scratched his head as he stared down the box before him. In his humanoid form, he was a towering beast of a man with a mess of dark brown hair and a body forged as tough as iron. His jaw was slightly misshapen, almost slightly snout-like, courtesy of an obvious extrusion. If not for that, the olive-skinned behemoth would have proven attractive in spite of the dark sclera that accompanied his golden eyes. He had a lion’s tail, a pair of hideously round ears, and forelimbs that were both hands and claws and once, shifting haphazardly between the two phases. The only article of clothing he wore was a loincloth, though even it was unnecessary, for his body was covered in a thin layer of fur.

  Biting his lips, he scribbled a series of numbers into his workspace. Astronomically large and ever changing, none of them made any sense at a glance. Still, the god of the hunt stared intently, changing his inputs and correcting his calculations as he struggled to predict the resulting output.

  To his dismay, his guesses were never on the mark. It didn’t help that the clock was ticking; there were only a few seconds left until he was supposed to arrive at his destination. In any other case, he would have simply relied on the system to spit out the numbers for him. The usual wrapper accounted for the nonsensical equations required to compute the movement of a trinary system. He shouldn’t have needed to go through all the trouble, but the clandestine nature of the upcoming discussion demanded extra attention.

  Growling, he swiped at the box and sent it away before inputting a series of approximate values into his spell. Stepping through the resulting portal, he found that he’d missed the planet by about half a lightyear. The lack of distance should have eased the following calculations, but he groaned as he gazed upon the star system. It was much too messy. Fifty different planets revolved around a single supermassive sun, with dozens of moons around each and any remaining spaces filled with asteroids aplenty. He almost wanted to give up on doing the math, but a second portal dropped him in front of his destination—a startling green planet with far too many satellites to its name—while a third placed him atop its largest continent.

  With only about a few hundred kilometers remaining, the lion decided to complete the rest of the journey on foot. He’d done enough math for one day and his surroundings were curious enough to demand his attention.

  He turned back into a giant golden lion as soon as he hit the ground. Even standing at a height well over a kilometer, his body was obscured by the undergrowth. Like a house cat in a field, he found that he could bury himself in the grass so long as he lowered his stance. The trees were so impossibly, atmospherically tall that he struggled to see through their canopies as he turned his gaze skyward. Had they been on Mara, they would have extended far beyond the sky, with the tallest among them threatening to molest the moon.

  After taking a moment to consider and dismiss his dignity, he climbed up one of the trunks and leapt into the branches. Exactly as he’d expected, it was the perfect vantage point. He saw the forest’s creatures, things that were as disturbingly familiar as they were completely distorted.

  The tree-dwelling ground squirrel he spotted was nearly half his size. Returning his gaze with the six red eyes sitting on its three-headed phallus, it barked and growled like a wolf whilst inflating its stretchy cheek pouches. It drummed its trident against his face and filled the surrounding forest with a deep, booming echo. The intimidation tactic was repeated a dozen times before it realised that he wasn’t going to balk. Suddenly spinning around, it released the air from the far end of its digestive track and catapulted itself into the undergrowth.

  For something with only 23 levels, it was absurdly fast—it broke three of the planet’s seven sound barriers and even ignited the oxygen rich air around it—but for its size, it was practically a sloth. Its escape was as lazy as a cat on a sunny afternoon.

  Similarly curious creatures could be found wherever he looked. There were giant insects that turned themselves into rings to roll along the ground, toads that split into two smaller individuals every time they sneezed, and tall, silo-shaped avians waddling in long lines whilst balancing stones on their long, sword-billed beaks. Together, they lived in harmony, enacting the circle of life in blissful ignorance of the laws of physics.

  They were so outlandish that he struggled to believe that they truly remained in Mara’s realm. Though twelve thousand light years away, they shouldn’t have been able to outright ignore the rules, at least not without divine intervention. Perhaps, he considered, it was that one celestial’s doing. Though restricted by Flitzegarde, the human still seemed to have his ways, and running an experiment on a distant planet would no doubt aid in avoiding her prying eyes.

  The lion considered the possibility for only a brief moment before looking for his destination. He could save the thinking for when he finally got to hunting.

  But just as he lifted his leg, before he could set off again, he caught a glimmer in the light. He was surrounded by wires. The individual strands must have been less than a millimeter thick—they were practically invisible, despite their faint pink glow.

  He didn’t know when they were put in place, but they were placed densely enough that he couldn’t move without slicing himself open. There was even one pressed against his neck and another touching the back of his head.

  There was nowhere for him to go.

  He was caught in her web.

  But he was the hunter, not the hunted. He didn’t think for a moment that he wanted escape to be in the cards.

  The delicate fibres snapped as soon as he unleashed his divinity. And with them vanished the surrounding forest. Rather than uprooting and flying away, the trees simply came apart, disintegrating as they came in contact with his aura. The forest’s floor was subject to the same fate; it couldn’t stand up to his power.

  That was half the reason the gods shied from the mortal realm. Lest sequestered within a divine domain, they would rip the world apart simply by undoing the first of their fetters.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Though most of his assailant’s body was covered in blackened metal, her coral glow gave her away in a heartbeat. Finding her immediately in the undergrowth, Kael’ahruus watched lazily as the tiny spider ignited her thrusters and dove for his throat.

  The standard defense against such an attack was stasis, but Vella’s glowing saber shimmered with enough divine force to distort the essence of spacetime around it. Her blade’s position was uncertain, and its place in time indeterminate. It was everywhere and nowhere at once. Every viable superposition could be adopted at a moment’s notice, including one hidden beneath a veil of frozen time.

  Matching the attack with one of his own was just as pointless. She had stolen the riven blades’ concept when she hunted him. Anything he threw her way would be classified as a weapon and rent by the borrowed technique.

  With her speed far greater than his own, his best standard choice was to simply take the attack and counter.

  But the hunter was far too proud.

  He would much sooner reveal his hand than capitulate to Vella’s blade.

  Focusing on his circuits, he unchained his divinity and allowed it to remake his flesh. One moment, he was in range of her blade. And the next, he towered over the planet, returned to his true, full size. Suddenly, it didn’t matter if she cut into his flesh. His teeth were massive enough to take the world in his jaws and crush it between his teeth.

  He was so large, so filled with pure power, that he became a constellation. Thousands of years later, astronomers would debate the identity of the cat briefly made visible to the naked eye.

  But despite having every intention, he never managed to close his jaw.

  Engaging her thrusters’ second phase and unleashing her own divinity, Vella catapulted into his nose and kicked him into the resident sun. Perhaps if it were Rikael, he might have been burned by the flames, but with no divinity to back its strength, it only shattered when they touched.

  A growl escaped the lion’s lips as he kicked off the broken stellar core and swiped a claw at the tiny speck of a goddess before him.

  She threw up a glowing pink shield just in time to block the attack, but her defense was insufficient. He sent her crashing through the planet he had failed to bite. One giant world alone was hardly enough to negate the force of the blow. She didn’t stop until she blasted through six moons, forty asteroids, and one of the planets on the other side of the system.

  Still, she was upon him in a heartbeat, her blade buried into one of his eyes, and the guns on her hips charging a burst of light.

  The mega particle cannons fired in the moment after he recognized them. They blew apart his face, their rays burning a thousand times hotter than the exploded star.

  A given conclusion.

  Each of the thirty bullets loaded into her magazine was endowed with the full power of a magnetar. The energy was condensed into a ray of subatomic particles barely five centimeters across. A lesser god could very well have found their existence extinguished, but Kael’ahruus recovered with a scoff.

  “Oh. You survived.” Vella nonchalantly sheathed her sword and lowered her guns without a care in the world.

  “Mad your little ambush didn’t work out?” The lion growled his response as he flexed his claws. He hated the fool’s mask she wore. It only made everything she did all the more insulting.

  “I was just checking if you’d gotten any weaker.”

  The lion growled. It was a flimsy excuse. She had attacked him on sight and used enough force to completely destroy a star system. There was more than enough grounds to file a dispute and see her punished by Flitzegarde. And, in fact, he planned to do just that. He didn’t care much for the near assassation, but her suffering and imprisonment would be music to his ears.

  “So?” he asked. “Why have you summoned me?” He made a point to twist his lips and snarl as he posed the question. “Surely it was not just to orchestrate a half-hearted attack?”

  “Of course not,” she said, with a devilish smile. “You’d be long dead if I really wanted to kill you.”

  “Bark all you want, weakling. Your threats mean nothing.”

  “Excuse me?”

  His body was split into ten pieces by the time the words left her lips. Even with his perception accelerated to the upper limit, he found it impossible to catch the accompanying attacks. Not even the system was able to track them; only their outcomes were marked in its history.

  “Call me a weakling one more time.” Suddenly, they were the same size, not because she had grown, but because she had forced him to shrink. She held her glowing blade against the base of his throat, its tip already half buried in his body. She poured her divinity through the weapon at regular intervals, psychotically burning his flesh with its pure power. “I dare you.”

  Kael’ahruus clicked his tongue. It was the exact same thing that had happened the last time he challenged her. He couldn’t make heads or tails of how she managed to move at such impossible speeds, let alone control her movement precisely enough to sever the tendons in all of his limbs. It wasn’t just his physical body that suffered the damage. His astral form was rendered equally inert and his divinity struggled to flow.

  He knew the effect.

  It was Vella’s poison—the divine rot that flowed from her fangs and into her victims, and one of the weapons she’d refined from the moment of her birth. Perhaps he could have neutralized it more quickly had he possessed a different concept, but as he stood, he couldn’t keep up with its rate of application. It slowly seeped into his flesh, eating his body from the inside out.

  Just as during their first encounter, Kael’ahruus was forced to yield.

  A growl escaped his throat as he backed away and reforged his body, his eyes on hers all the while. He would never admit to raising the white flag. So long as he didn’t roll over and beg for his life, the engagement would remain ongoing.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, with a snort. “Now give me your report.”

  Kael’ahruus clenched his teeth hard enough that he thought his body would shatter. He didn’t want to answer.

  But still, he did.

  He didn’t have a choice.

  “I doubt Aurora noticed. She was focused on me throughout the battle.”

  “I guess you can be useful after all,” said Vella, with a smirk.

  The lion fought back a snarl. He wanted nothing more than to rip out the spider’s throat.

  He didn’t know how much longer he could bear with the constant humiliation.

  But he clenched his paws and endured.

  All the pieces were finally in motion.

  It wouldn’t be much longer until he swallowed her flesh.

  The Blood of House Augustus. This volume is going to be a little more laid back, but will include all of the duels and the conclusion of Vel'khan's conflict with Cadria. It'll also mark the end of the third of the four story arcs. I can't wait to finish writing it!