by Porter, Jack
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, yet at the same time, Cyanne’s words had the undeniable ring of truth. What else could this monster be trying to do?
I felt my muscles clench as I strained to launch into action. Zavier was focused on what he was doing. He didn’t know we were there.
I was going to cut his head clean off his shoulders.
At the same time, I had tried and failed to do that before. In the event that I couldn’t end this with one stroke, I needed to make sure Piper was protected.
“Megan, take Kara, Velma, Elsie, and Fai with you. Look after Piper. Use the magic of the crystals against Zavier’s black dark magic. See if you can cleanse her, like you did with my crystal. The rest of you, follow me!”
I didn’t wait to see if they had any objections. I was too angry, too appalled at what Zavier was trying to do to wait any longer. With my sword gripped in my hand, I reached into my crystal and drew as much power from it as I could. That blue white power erupted along the edge of my blade, and I launched myself across the wide-open expanse of the room, a primordial bellow of hate and rage exploding from my throat.
At my shout, Zavier spun about before I had closed the distance between us and stood there with a stunned expression on his face.
“You!” he exclaimed. “But how?”
Forty-One
I didn’t feel any need to answer his question. Instead, I continued my charge and my swing.
Zavier couldn’t step back. The table upon which Piper was lying was in his way. It was all he could do to raise an arm to protect himself from my sword, and I had the pleasure of lopping off that newly regrown arm even as my sword didn’t quite reach the dark god’s neck.
Zavier howled in anguish, but I was in no mood to show any leniency. I swung my sword again and again, coming at him from the side to force him away from Piper and the table.
The dark god stepped back and away, ducking away from my fury for all he was worth.
I knew that the last time I’d been in his palace, Zavier had survived my attack by generating some sort of shield and keeping it active even as he slept.
Either he had forgotten to make use of that particular magic or it was only effective against astral attacks and not those of the flesh. Either way, he didn’t use the technique in this moment.
I had the pleasure of watching my sword bite into his flesh again and again.
With one arm already gone, I hacked off part of Zavier’s other hand, then nicked his elbow, and split his nose in half horizontally. And as soon as I had forced the monster far enough away from Piper that she would be in no danger, Yua and Cyanne got into the act as well, hurling fire at the god for all they were worth.
Zavier screamed as he ducked away from my blade straight into a face full of flame, and it warmed my heart to see the flesh burn.
I took a quick glance behind me to assure myself that the girls were doing as I asked, gathering around Piper to see what they could do about the dark magic around her.
But this fight was far from over.
“You dare!” Zavier bellowed even as his flesh continued to burn. I didn’t let up, instead swinging my sword again, enjoying the way that the tip of my blade caught him in the side.
He flinched, howling once more, and holding his hand up as if to command me to stop.
“You dare to attack me like this? In my own home?” Zavier bellowed, and despite how badly he was injured already, he had lost none of the haughty arrogance with which he spoke. It was as if even now, even as Hannah launched herself at him, raking his burning flesh with her talons, and Amandeep and Layla pounced together, we were nothing to him.
I paused my attack to ensure I didn’t accidentally hurt any of my goddesses, and that gave Zavier the space he required. He lashed out, casting an arc of dark power that blasted Hannah and the others aside. Then he took two quick steps away and glared at me.
“You are becoming a true irritation!” he sneered. “Just like my brother before you! Perhaps I have been too lenient in allowing you to live. Perhaps my hope that you would beget me more than one heir is misplaced. So be it, then! I am done playing games! Behold your doom!”
The dark god was bleeding from multiple wounds. His pallor was pale through loss of blood and perhaps shock. He had kept his head by the slimmest of margins, and I had no intention of letting him continue to do so.
I ignored his words, ignored his taunts as if they were nothing.
In earlier confrontations, I’d responded to his words with jibes of my own, but that wasn’t the game I was playing anymore. I didn’t care to best him in a verbal battle.
The only thing that mattered was Piper and my other goddesses.
I would not accept living in a world where they were in danger.
And if what he said was true, if he was intending to use me as a route to creating his heirs, then that left me with only one option.
I intended to see him dead.
Zavier was a god, an immortal creature of unknown power. But I had power as well, and intended to see if he could survive being hacked into thousands of tiny pieces, and perhaps burned into ash.
I launched myself after the monster again, whirling my blade around my head as if I was a barbarian from a Hyborean age fighting some kind of monster.
At the same time, I did what I could to cut down Zavier’s options, to drive him into a corner from which he could not escape.
As if sensing my intentions, Yua and Cyanne hurled their fire to help, and Zavier could do no more than scream in his pain.
I sensed victory and redoubled my fury, my face locked in a snarl as I sought to end the fight. But even as the tip of my sword found his flesh again and again, Zavier’s shrieks of pain turned into laughter.
Before I could even guess what the dark god found funny, it all became clear.
Zavier’s human form seemed to melt away from him. At first, I thought it was because of Yua and Cyanne’s flames, but it quickly became clear that it was not.
Dark magic burst from him in clouds, erupting first from the multiple wounds I had given him, but then from elsewhere as well, and in just a handful of heartbeats, Zavier had turned from his normal self into a roiling mass of dark power.
Even then, he continued to laugh as his new form grew larger. For the briefest of moments, I stood there and stared, but then I willed myself back into action, swinging my sword for all I was worth.
But now, in Zavier’s amorphous state, my most potent weapon seemed to pass through him with no ill effect.
Still laughing, Zavier swept a huge, darkened limb toward me and the girls, and if I thought that his amorphous self would lack impact, then I was immediately proven wrong. The six of us were knocked aside as if we were nothing, Hannah and Yua beating their wings to stop from tumbling, the rest of us bouncing painfully across the stone floor until we could regain our balance.
Zavier could have followed up his attack with another, could have kept us on the back foot, but his arrogance once again was his downfall. Instead, he stayed where he was and laughed, his vast, dark form seeming to shake with his humor.
But if he thought I was done, if he thought that swinging my sword was my only recourse, then this time it was him who was mistaken.
“Yua! Cyanne! See if this bastard burns!”
At the same time, I drew upon the magic of my crystal and poured it not into my blade, but through it, in exactly the same way I had done against Zavier’s guardian, Thornarm.
All at once, Zavier had to contend with great bursts of magic and fire heading his way.
At the least, he wasn’t laughing anymore.
Nor was he screaming or backing away. Instead, as if his dark magic form was a gigantic, less substantial copy of himself, the dark god moved toward us. He let out a howl that might have been a mix between anger and pain and seemed to erupt, sending more dark magic against the three of us.
For a moment, we were in balance, light against dark, each of us hurling as muc
h power at the other as we could.
But Yua and Cyanne couldn’t maintain their fire forever. After several seconds, each of them petered out, leaving just me facing the monster.
As if sensing his advantage, Zavier started laughing again, filling the cavernous room with the sound.
I redoubled my efforts, sending as much magic through the sword as I could, but it wasn’t enough.
“Yua! Get the others! Join all your power to mine!”
I had in mind the same technique that had beaten Zavier before, but this time, multiplied by the combined strength of all of my goddesses at once.
And Yua seemed to understand. She and Cyanne both left me for a moment, but were quickly back, one on each side, the goddesses reaching out for my arms as the others latched onto them.
I felt my power increase right away, and knew it would only get stronger.
Tapping into my crystal for all I was worth, accepting the strength of my goddesses, the beam of blue-white magical power expanded, growing brighter at the same time.
The balance shifted again, and this time, it was in my favor.
And there was nothing Zavier could do to stop it.
With a convulsive effort, I unleashed, hurling the magic at Zavier with everything we had.
Zavier tried to defend against it. He tried to counter my magic—our magic—with his own.
But together, we were too much for him. The dark god let out a shriek of ultimate despair and pain, a shriek so loud that it seemed to rend the very heavens.
Then, with a convulsive detonation, blue-white magic exploded into Zavier’s darkness, obliterating it all in an instant.
I allowed the beam of magical power, directed through my sword, to fade into nothing.
For long moments, we stood there, looking at the empty space where Zavier had once been.
Some of the girls seemed uncertain.
“Is that it?” Megan asked, her question echoed by some of the others.
“It looks like it,” Layla replied.
“I believe we have defeated him,” Yua said, her voice tinged with a measure of disbelief mixed with awe.
At her words, some of the others expressed their relief.
“Good,” said Hannah.
“Kara is pleased, if this is correct.”
“Serves the bastard right,” said Cyanne.
Then, in reaction to it all, Elsie and Fai started to laugh. The laughter was contagious, and soon every one of us at least sported a smile.
As for me, I wasn’t convinced. While I wouldn’t have called it easy, exactly, I had expected perhaps expected a little more fight. Zavier was, after all, a god.
That said, I was more than happy to accept a victory wherever I could get it.
With a smile to match that of any of the others, I was the first to turn away. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get back to Piper and get out of this place.”
Forty-Two
It turned out that Megan and the others had successfully purged the darkness from Piper before joining in with the rest of the fight. Piper was shaken, but conscious, and she looked around at all of us with an expression of open wonder.
“Look at you all,” she said. Then she looked down at herself. “Am I the only one who is still human?”
This generated another round of laughter. The girls took a moment to introduce themselves, those Piper didn’t know, before I gathered her up in my arms.
She protested at first, saying she wasn’t an invalid, but I wouldn’t hear it.
“You can complain about me fussing and being overly protective all you want once we get you back to the cabin, and once I’m completely sure you’re okay. Until then, just relax and enjoy yourself.”
It seemed that Piper was about to protest, but instead, she gave me a small smile. She relaxed in my arms, and the twelve of us made our way out of Zavier’s palace, heading back to the spirit line.
But almost as soon as we stepped outside, I realized that my instincts were correct. We hadn’t vanquished Zavier at all.
Somehow, the dark god had survived our attack. Somehow, he had found a way to escape the combined magic of me and my goddesses.
He could have run. Could have used the spirit lines to disappear to some unknown spot in a far corner of the universe. Instead, he had gathered himself together, forming a sort of dark maelstrom in the sky, a swirling cloud of dark power above us all.
It was like being caught in a hurricane, an evil wind that buffeted us about.
Nor was it silent. The dark maelstrom seemed to moan, either in displeasure or pain, as it loomed above us. Even as I watched, the darkness seemed to reach down, like a tornado trying to touch down, or a god looking to smite those who had angered him.
The girls collectively shrieked in panic, but for some reason, I wasn’t afraid. Perhaps because part of me had almost been expecting something like this. Or perhaps because I already knew what to do.
Almost casually, I lowered Piper to the ground.
“Goddesses, lend me your power!” I shouted.
I drew my sword once again, if only because I was growing used to using it to direct my magic. For this, I didn’t truly need it. It was just that I had grown familiar with it as a tool.
Without waiting, I once more unleashed my magic at the maelstrom that was Zavier. I felt that magic grow stronger as each goddess lent her strength to my own, but this time, I wasn’t trying to blast Zavier into nothing.
This time, I fashioned my magic into a net, the same kind of net that I’d used in the spirit realm to keep Megan’s astral self from dissipating.
I cast the net as wide as I could, gathering up all of Zavier’s dark being, and then, like a fisherman with a huge catch, hauling him down to earth.
Hauling him down toward the fountain filled with poison strong enough to take down a god.
At the last, it seemed that Zavier understood my intent. I felt his panic.
But I didn’t care.
“What was it you were saying about my doom?” I asked him.
If he bothered to answer, I didn’t care to listen. I just brought his amorphous, dark form down ever lower, until there was no space at all between him and the waters.
He sizzled a bit as if the water was acid, his shrieks echoing through the heavens.
Before the end, he managed to find his voice, and he begged me for mercy.
This time, I did listen. And I responded.
“Why would I show you mercy?” I demanded. “You who murdered your own brother. Who killed all the goddesses of your time. You, who drowned an entire city out of pure spite, and who have gone after more than one of my women. Why would I show you mercy?”
Zavier begged as his substance boiled in the fountain, as he slowly shrank, as my magic held him in place.
But I was deaf to his pleas.
Finally, his voice shrank in volume to almost a whisper, his substance shrinking ever further, with me and my goddesses all standing resolute.
Then it was done.
Zavier was no more. And this time, I was sure of it.
Epilogue
We made our way back through the spirit lines to the cabins we called home, and lived happily ever after.
Thankfully, my crystal headaches were a thing of the past. I presented Piper with her crystal, and in due time, transformed her to her goddess self as well. It turned out that her goddess form was that of a chimera. She had the tail of a lion, horns of a goat, and feathers. And she bore me a son, a perfect, human-looking son who showed no sign at all of the contaminant of Zavier’s magic.
But it wasn’t all plain sailing. Yua, Cyanne, and the others had maintained control over their animal selves during the battle with Zavier, but from time to time, some of the more predatory goddesses would fight, or look at the gentler goddesses with something other than friendly intent.
In an effort to head off any real conflict, we got to work building additional cabins, and soon had an idyllic little community starting to form.
Layla and Kara both turned up pregnant at about the same time, and in the end, I had to pick a head goddess to keep everyone in line.
I ended up choosing two, Yua and Cyanne, as neither would have been happy with the other in charge. But that was mostly for the girls’ benefit. As for myself, I continued to treat them all the same.
The island, of course, kept throwing up surprises now and then, and sometimes those surprises weren’t little.
But mostly, it was a very pleasant life, punctuated by occasional journeys to the stars, mostly just to see what was out there.
And, not long after my first son was born, I found out the cause of the wreckage I’d seen on the beach.
Piper’s twin sister Bonnie had come looking for my chimera goddess.
The first we knew about it was when she turned up, unannounced, in our village.
But that’s another story, for another time.
The end.
* * *
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-Jack
Books by Jack Porter
Champion: Training
Champion 2: Tournament
Champion 3
Monster Girl Hunter
