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    My normal style, at least recently, had involved a lot of head on combat. Explosive charges and big flashy explosive battles. But after my earlier epiphany, I started to analyze my behavior a bit more. I realized that I had better tools for combat than just burst strength. As useful as that was when I needed it, some enemies couldn’t be overcome with brute force.


    Bethy, it turned out, was one of those enemies. Within an instant of the start of the fight, the entire clearing was full of copies of me. Half illusory and half real, as the real ones surrounded her and attacked from her blind spot.


    It was all a cover, not only allowing me to enter stealth but to give Murmur time to start adapting more deeply to the environment and erasing even more of my traces. With Dantalion having been enhanced by my first use of the staff, I was confident that even if I couldn’t hide from Bethy, I could at least slow down her noticing me by a bit.


    That confidence was shattered nearly instantly, because as my twelve doppelgangers, all in Sammael and using Mornax, attacked, things started to go wrong.


    Bethy, eyes a burning, hellish red, extended her fingernails into claws and just sort of…blurred. Two of the attacks, aimed at her kidney and shoulder respectively, slid past her seamlessly as she did a graceful pirouette between the blows, and as the lunging clones passed by, she neatly ripped out their throats.


    It wouldn’t have killed me. Not with my defense and my capabilities, but the clones couldn’t actually use the full strength of any of my forms. I hadn’t really noticed the gap until Sammael was completed, but the stronger I got the less they could keep up. As constructs, they weren’t as powerful, and unless I improved Beelzebub, they weren’t going to close the gap.


    Still, despite the fact that I would have survived, I couldn’t help but wince as Bethy’s claws effortlessly sliced the carotid arteries on the pair of clones, drifting past them like a ballet dancer as they collapsed to the ground, dissolving into fine dust.


    I made a mental note to experiment with a new pseudo Domain that merged Agares with Beelzebub, making stronger clones. Unfortunately, that would have to wait, because as I was thinking that another three of my clones had converged on Bethy from all sides, trying to lock her down by attacking from multiple directions at once.


    Bethy arched her back, bending backwards over the staff like it was a limbo stick, planting her palms and then popped up off her feet essentially curving her body around the still moving staff swing. She twisted on her hands, legs snapping out, and the heels of her shoes opened the throats of the two passing clones, whirling back up to her feet in time to spin and knock aside a powerful staff blow with her wrist and disembowel the third, her claws gutting him THROUGH his fucking armor.


    Now I knew that my clones didn’t have gear at the same quality as mine, my power couldn’t recreate C-ranked items, but that was still a suit of full plate armor made by someone above the peak of D-rank Impact wise.


    The other eight clones, being me and therefore not fucking idiots, backed off, creating a perimeter around Bethy at an equal distance. It was a solid move, it meant she’d have to move the same distance to attack any of them, giving the others time to react, and they all had Double Trouble to exploit to get close.


    Bethy licked one of her fingers, then grimaced and spat. “Gross, your blood is all dusty.” She stared at the clones intently. Her eyes had an odd shine in them, not the literal shine of the blood colored light, but a sort of fae madness, like a cat playing with a mouse.


    It occurred to me that while I’d seen Bethy fight before, I’d never seen her TRY before. She just brutalized anyone she fought against. While that might make it seem like I knew her capabilities, I realized now that if no one had ever pushed her past, say, ten percent of her strength, that would be the highest level I’d seen her fight at. It was a sobering thought.


    But I wasn’t out of this yet. As I sat and waited, Murmur deduced the world around me, slowly scrubbing more and more traces of me from the environment. Every second I became more completely hidden, more impossible to find. Bethy was an apex predator, but even C-rankers hadn’t noticed me after a certain point.


    Not to mention that Gluttony was active, along with Abomination Engine. Every time Bethy hurt or killed a clone the damage fed back through Beelzebub into me, slowly increasing my strength.


    It said something about her power that I still wasn’t sure I could win. Even with my slowly growing strength, Bethy was on a whole different level. Beyond that, I was starting to worry that she might have slipped too far into the bloodlust. The gleam in her eyes was beyond the normal play-crazy act she liked to put on.


    My Danger Sense was screaming at me to run, which wasn’t ideal, but I didn’t listen. I could do this. What I did do was activate Mornax, and tweak Abomination Engine to feed back into the defensive form. I should create a more powerful defensive domain, but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I was beginning to regret coming into this half cocked.


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    On the upside, I was absolutely not feeling invincible right now, so lesson learned, I guess. I just had to make sure I fucking SURVIVED it.


    I didn’t think Bethy would kill me if she had control of herself, but I wasn’t sure that she did. In fact, I was pretty sure the longer this went on the more blood mad she was getting. I could feel a sort of…aura coming off her, like the scent of freshly shed blood, and it was getting stronger.


    Callie was watching from a distance, and I felt her worry starting to build as Bethy blurred forward, engaging four of my clones at once. They lashed out in a picture perfect formation, condensing their power into a single whole using some of the tricks we’d learned in the Imperial Army. It didn’t matter. Bethy dipped gracefully under an attack, and as one of the clones went by, ripped his arm clean off and spun to smash the disintegrating stone limb into the head of a second.


    Her head snapped forward, neck twisting like a snake and slightly ELONGATING as she ripped out a third clone’s fucking throat with her teeth and left it choking to death on dust as she pounced on the forth and tore him apart with her claws.


    The other four rushed her, obviously terrified and trying to end things quickly, but she dismantled them, seeming to get stronger and faster as she killed. She was inhaling something from them as they died. Not blood, but…death, maybe? Like a conceptual life force that she was able to steal with their demise.


    Which was when it clicked for me. I had a way to fix this. Bethy had gone over the deep end. I wasn’t sure why, maybe I was too strong and she’d gotten too into the fight, maybe killing the clones had been too close to killing me and she’d snapped. Whatever the case, she was currently being overwhelmed. Taken over. Corrupted.


    I pulled on Abomination Engine, shifting it so it fed back into the pit in my stomach instead of my defense. Mornax was reinforced heavily, and with C-rank armor I should survive at least one attack. Hopefully. In the meantime, I triggered Zagan, and pulling on my connection with Archie, I started to form the Life Nova.


    My companion’s power, my own power, the damage Bethy was doing to the clones, I funneled all my strength into that single burst. And as I did, knowing I didn’t have much time, I closed my eyes and fell into the staff.


    Inside of it I was a king. A grand demonic lord sitting atop a jungle pyramid, lording over a wild world of predators and animals. The trees grew dense and vicious beneath the green sun, and I felt the world evolving, growing and shifting to become more dangerous, more deadly, with every breath I took.


    There was no disease, no poison or rot, simply the purity of combat and the growth of species, selecting for the strongest and most powerful beasts to come to pay supplication. I ignored it all, forcing my eyes up to the sun. That was the Life Nova, the beating heart of the world that Zagan ruled, the manifestation of his constantly overflowing life force and the basis for this world of evolving horrors.


    It was…terrifying. One of the most awful things I’d ever seen. It was TOO MUCH life. Like I was looking at something that had transcended the state of life and become some sort of conceptual predator that lorded over the concept of living itself. This was life two point oh, the next stage of life, and there would be no more room for the rest of us when it finished its ascension. Because it WAS Ascending. Growing even now, becoming more alive, more vital, creating a vitality so potent it would kill your average person, overwhelming their pathetic bodies with power, running them ragged like an engine trying to function on jet fuel.


    I fixed that image in my mind, created a parallel just to hold it, and then I opened my eyes. I triggered Double Trouble, appearing behind Bethy, and reaching out with one hand, I grabbed the back of her head and dumped the most powerful Genesis Burst I could manage right into her skull.


    Bethy’s head jerked in my hand, her mouth opening in a scream as green flames ERUPTED from her mouth, eyes and nose.


    Genesis Burst, at its core, was a technique created to erode the soul damage done to my cousin Felicity by her father. It fundamentally repaired an aspect of her that was broken in such a way that normal healing couldn’t fix it.


    This time, I altered the intent of the technique, aiming it at Bethy’s nature. Bethy HATED her bloodlust. The only times I’d seen her cry were in regards to hurting people she cared about because of the overwhelming bloody madness in her bloodline that I’d eroded with wishes up to this point, but I hadn’t been able to figure out how to fix it beyond my wish power. It was too complicated.


    A mix of the vampire’s bloody hunger and the maenad’s belligerent battle madness was too much for one person to handle. If it had been before, I wouldn’t have had any way to deal with it, but now I was different, for several reasons.


    First, I had a Chronicle. I wasn’t a B-ranker, but my techniques were qualitatively around that level. I was lucky Bethy’s madness had prevented her from using her Domain because this wouldn’t have worked. Second, I’d pretty much created a racial trait. I knew enough about how they functioned to know where I should aim this Genesis Burst.


    And finally, I wasn’t doing this alone. I knew my friend, and there was no way that the real Bethy wasn’t somewhere in her head, raging at the bloodlust for trying to kill her ‘bestie’.


    The power from the dead clones lasted about ten minutes, and when it lapsed, I dropped her, letting her collapse bonelessly to the ground. She lay there, twitching, and then her eyes opened and the madness was gone. They fixed on me, tears beginning to well up as she whispered. “Thank you.”


    My technique didn’t fix her. There was no way I could cleanse the bloodlust from her bloodline, let alone with a single purge. But I had HELPED. Her control would be better, and she’d be able to tap into more of her power without losing it. Once she was feeling a bit better, I helped her sit up, and then I got straight to the point. “Ok…what the FUCK just happened?” That had not been a normal sparring match.