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Chapter 143 - Still Not the Final Bossfight
🕑 Added 2020-03-31 11:13:33 +0000 UTC
"What did you do?" I ask with a suspicious glare. It looked like he somehow swallowed Chaos-Juzual from the inside. But that would go against anything I've learned about my body.
"Think about it yourself." With a shrug, Mataku sneers at me. Then he looks past me toward Tokomaha's back before gazing at the incredibly close Earth. His eyes seem to show a hint of longing, which catches me by surprise.
But the moment is over when he closes his eyes and opens them again to show the blackness of his irises. He then shifts his gaze to me, and a sinister smile plays over his lips once again.
"So, what now?" He asks while spreading his arms. "The moon has been stopped. Should we get to fulfilling destiny now?"
At those words, Mithra appears next to him, and Flann warps out of space next to me. They disappeared earlier when the fighting began, and most likely only returned to ring the bell for the next round. As Flann said, she and her father serve our kind but don't do much more than teleport us around and observe us.
"Let me try out what you just did. Hold off on digesting me when I'm inside you." I remark in a sarcastic tone while running scenarios in my mind for how to defeat Mataku.
Aurelia suddenly wakes up in my arms and looks around in confusion. She's searching for the massive form of Chaos-Juzual, but all she sees is the distant Primordial Terror, accompanied by Mithra. But that's enough for her to tell that we were somehow able to take the third Crawling Chaos out of the picture.
"This isn't the best place for our final confrontation." Mataku states while glancing at Mithra beside him as if he's the one that needs convincing rather than me. "Put the moon back where it should be first. I will let you know when it's time."
"As if." I mutter more to myself than in response to Mataku's careless treatment of our deathmatch. But it seems that he heard it.
"What will you do about it? Do you think you can defeat me right now?" With a nonchalant shrug, he sneers at me. It's true that I don't see any way we can beat him, especially now that he has gained the overwhelming mass of Chaos-Juzual.
I wonder why he would want to postpone our fight right now when this is the perfect opportunity to take care of me once and for all. The only plausible explanation is that he can't. Something is holding him back, or he thinks I have an ace up my sleeve. Whatever the case, I can't let him leave right now.
"First, this." I shout out while at the same time aiming at Mithra with a pinpoint plasma beam. The former court magician warps away right as the beam was about to hit him, leaving behind Mataku. I didn't think it would work, but I succeeded in separating them from each other. That's the opportunity I've been waiting for.
My chest snaps open beyond my frame and spews forth a jet of water in the direction of the Primordial Terror, who stares at it in wonder. As the water evaporates and freezes into crystal mist in the vacuum of the moon's atmosphere, a lone figure flies out from within.
"It's time to smash!" I announce. That person is none other than Korenga, whom I kept inside my body for the past seven or so hours. The reason I didn't take her out to fight before now was to hide her presence from Mithra or anybody else that could have noticed it.
When I asked her how long she could hold her breath, she said that at one point, she had been tossed into the sea in her Black God form and walked on the bottom of the ocean for around a week before reaching an island. Thus, I circumvented her curse that makes her hard to touch and impossible to swallow for my kind by keeping her in a pool of water inside me.
Korenga launches at Mataku and throws a mighty punch at his face. He raises a hand to block it but is surprised when the Black God's fist rips straight through it. It seems that even with all his mass, it was unable to stop her rage-fuelled swing.
He takes her fist to his chest, and a hole is blown right through it. I have a sense of déjà vu, even though the last time that happened, it was to me. Still, it doesn't do anything to reduce Mataku's mass, as no piece of him is split off or pulverized.
I always took Korenga as mindless in her rage when in her Black God form, and even more when facing her most hated enemy. But she seems to realize the futility of punching him, and changes her tactics.
Just as he mends the wounds and moves to go on the offensive himself, she catches him in a bear hug. Last time, he defeated her in one hit, and his mass has increased even more compared to back then. She understands that she can't let him strike her, or she may be sent off into space this time.
But it seems that she understands the Primordial Terror's weakness. He suffers from the same unnatural apprehension against the Black God's touch as I do. His physical form recoils from her, and he can't muster the strength to break out from her grip. Instead, he seems to break under it; his top and bottom half are squeezed apart. I won't let this opportunity slip by.
"Aurelia, shred!" I say while shooting forward. The golden girl understands what I mean and raises her hand. The mass of shredding blades under Mataku that were suspended in midair when she fainted earlier begin to move again. They turn into a golden blender right underneath Korenga and Mataku.
With a plasma blade, I cut off the lower half of the Primordial Terror hanging on by a small crushed section of his torso. He tries to grab for it with an arm turned into tentacles, but I surround the lower body with a light shield. Then, I throw it at the golden maws under me before undoing the shield right as it hits. Within a moment, the legs are shredded into a million pieces.
Even now, Mataku's mass should be substantially larger than mine. But if that eliminated half of it all at once, I can already consider this a success. The blender will continue to cut the pieces until none of them can hold a new consciousness. I can feel their presence through my Chaos senses and will eradicate them once we're finished with the main target.
The Primordial Terror loses his shape and roars in anger as he slips out from Korenga's grasp. He then consolidates into his true appearance of a roughly humanoid form made of dark gray tentacles for muscle strands. Delivering a backhanded strike at the Black God, he sends her flying across the surface of the moon and into a nearby mountain.
Even now, he has so much mass that Korenga's steadfastness means nothing to him. But whereas she's a hard target, I have a flexibility that will protect me from those hits. Holes will be opened up in my body, but nothing more should happen if he punches me with the surface area of a human fist.
"You wanted it this way." His true voice grates on my mind as he speaks in an angry tone. Even though we're both from the same species, it still affects me to a degree. In the next moment, he extends his palm toward me, which flares open like a trumpet and grows to massive proportions. He wants to swallow me whole.
I surround myself with plasma, aiming to do the same thing to the inside of Mataku as I did to Alverost's flying fortress. Even if he has the dragon template or knows how to shield himself, it won't be enough to protect himself from this immense heat. Spreading the heat away from me, I explode like a miniature sun.
But through a view hole I left in the plasma, I find that the inside of Mataku's growing palm is covered in metallic-looking plates. In the next moment, I'm assaulted by my own heat and quickly switch it off. Looking around, I realize that he must have created a magnetic field like the one used inside a fusion reactor.
The only reason I even know about fusion reactors is that it was shared around on social media. As if I'd ever pay attention to that if it came up in physics class. But it helped me identify the danger of this situation, so I'm grateful that this tidbit stuck with me even through a reincarnation.
Turning around, I find that Mataku's hand is about to close off around me. Once I'm inside him, I won't be able to get out no matter what I try. He was able to eat Chaos-Juzual from the inside somehow, but he also had thousands of years more time to learn how to do it. I won't try my luck in the middle of a life and death battle.
Narrowing into a spear as I did in the battle against Oinos, I shoot through the tiny remaining opening and escape Mataku's grasp. Once outside, I grow a multitude of extra arms and create plasma blades on each one of them. I don't think there's much else I can do to defeat him right now than to chip away at his mass piece by piece.
Suddenly, Korenga tackles his main body from the side and drags him with her. With Nymphy's eyes, I can follow their incredible speed and watch them impact somewhere in the crater left behind by Tokomaha's finger earlier.
Last time Mataku's punch hit her, it knocked her out in an instant. But this time, she bounced back almost right away and has the energy to strike back. If she has overcome her physical limitations, there should be nothing he can do to stop her now. Still, aside from punching and bear-hugging him, there isn't much she can do either. I have to be her follow-up and find a way to end him for good.
But before I can fly after her, I feel a hand on my shoulder and turn around. It's Aurelia, who can't speak in the vacuum of the moon's atmosphere and gestures instead. She's pointing down at the stopped blender made from her gold, to direct my attention to the wriggling pieces that remain of Mataku's lower half.
"Thank you." I realize that this is an opportunity. Flying down, I quickly scoop the individual blobs and masses of small tentacles up with countless tendrils. Making sure I don't gather them all into one place, I pull them inside my body and begin the absorption process.
It's a strange feeling, but somehow it gives me a sense of delight. This is my first time eating another of my kind, and it's quite unlike what I get from rejoining a piece of myself after it was severed. It's hard to describe, but it brings me satisfaction, and every piece I eat in quick succession raises that feeling.
Not good; I might get addicted to this.
Suddenly, the ground under my feet rises and lifts me on a pillar of gold. I look up to find Aurelia looking down at me with a disapproving gaze before pointing in the direction of where Korenga and Mataku flew earlier. It seems I lost myself in the feast and forgot that we're still in the middle of a battle for the fate of the world. Right now, the Primordial Terror is focused on pummeling the Black God into the moon dust, blind rage driving him to forget about the more significant threat that I should present.
Feeling the incredible amount of mass I took from Mataku, I should now have enough to overcome his when I eat him. But there's still the unknown factor of what he did to Chaos-Juzual when she had already swallowed him whole. Maybe I should keep chipping away at him until there's not enough to hold his consciousness before finally consuming him.
"Please reconsider." But before I can move, Mithra appears before me and speaks into my mind. Flann warps out of space right next to him and looks up at her father.
"You want to beg me to show him mercy now?" I glare at the bandaged man, but since I can't see his expression, there's no way to tell what he's thinking.
"You have defeated the third wheel. Now is not the time for you two to fight." He explains in a neutral tone, and Flann turns her gaze toward me, her green eyes piercing mine while awaiting my answer. I have no idea what he means, but we took Chaos-Juzual out of the picture. The moonfall has been stopped, so we no longer have a common enemy.
"Why should I spare him?" I know that I'm in no position to talk as if I have Mataku on the ropes when he's barely weakened. But it's better than to think that I'm the one at a disadvantage, now that I most likely have more mass than he does.
"You talk big..." The Primordial Terror's voice speaks into my head, and I look past Mithra to find that the former stopped his relentless assault on Korenga and is now staring at me across the plains. At least that's what I assume he's doing, as he has no face in his true form either. Even now, my mind isn't Crawling Chaos enough to perceive our kind's appearance as it truly is. "... for somebody in eating distance."
In the next instant, he zooms across the landscape and stops a few steps in front of me. Thanks to Nymphy's eyes, I could follow his movement even at that speed. But it was to show that he has all the abilities that I have at his disposal, and more. I can't even glance past him to check on Korenga; his overbearing presence has my eyes glued on him.
"I have more mass than you now." Standing my ground, I grow to my true appearance to match his. We're around the same height, though he appears slightly bulkier still.
"See how that helped your predecessor." Even though I'm just as tall as he is, Mataku still manages to look down on me. Chaos-Juzual had overwhelming mass, but he was somehow able to eat her from the inside. If I were to swallow him whole, he could do the same to me then.
"And you think I wouldn't do the same to you?" The moment these words leave my mouth, something in the Primordial Terror changes. His face is indiscernible to me, but something tells me that he's smiling. It seems that he has seen through my bluff, but to my surprise, he isn't calling it.
"We're at a stalemate then." Shrugging, he shrinks down into his human appearance as if saying that there's no point in fighting at this point.
"Do I have to remind you that you lost half your mass already?" Matching him, I turn into my blonde appearance and cross my arms defiantly. Past Mataku, I spot Korenga rising from the crater she was pummeled into without a hint of damage. But I quickly return my gaze to him to hide the fact that the Black God is up again. If she could only rip off his head and reduce his mass by a lot at once, we could be done quickly.
"As Mithra here said, this isn't the time for us to fight." Anybody else saying it would have come across as attempting to get out of a losing battle. But why does the Primordial Terror sound as if he's in a stronger position? "You have somebody to rescue."
"Who do you mean?" I narrow my eyes and glare at him. Don't tell me he pulled an Alverost and used this world-ending situation as a distraction for another goal, such as kidnap Kamii or Hestia. Tokomaha is still carrying the moon on her shoulders, and Aurelia is right here with me, so I don't know who else he could refer to.
"Maybe that person isn't too important to you, but she can change the course of fate." With a nonchalant glance past me, he leaves me hanging with this cryptic statement. Then he turns on the spot and extends his arm to catch Korenga by the throat just as she charges at him. The surface of his hand recoils from her, but he keeps his hold through sheer willpower. "You were a most useful case study. But I found a better alternative, so you are no longer needed."
At those words, my eyes widen as I suspect that he's going to take away her powers. But instead, he easily lifts her off her feet and tosses her up into the sky at such a velocity that she's already a tiny speck against Tokomaha's tan skin when I look up. Don't tell me that's who I'm supposed to save? I don't doubt for a moment that Korenga can survive falling from orbit.
"What do you mean by case study?" I can already guess that he's talking about her properties that make her inedible to our kind. He somehow applied that to the starving artificial Crawling Chaos that I found in the cellar of Kairaki palace. But what even was be the point in doing that? He made her his own natural enemy.
"In time, you will learn." Mithra answers for Mataku as if trying to prevent him from disclosing anything else. Then he turns to Flann, wordlessly staring at her for a moment as if wanting to say something. His silence tells me that he either can't find the words or has reconsidered, as he then turns back to me. "The solar winds heading for Earth are of greater concern. Until then, your battle will have to wait."
This time, before I can react, Mithra and Mataku both disappear in a vortex. The tension from the situation was already gone, so I didn't feel the need to try and stop them. For now, I need to catch Korenga so that she doesn't fall into the ocean or something.
I glance at Aurelia, who looks dissatisfied with this conclusion. The silver lining is that we saved Earth, and Chaos-Juzual is now gone as well. Now, the only Old Humans standing against me are Shelnir and Areteniha. But Mataku is still a danger to this world, and we should have dealt with him when we had the chance.
With a nod at the golden girl to stay put, I fly up into the air and use Hestia's eye template to locate the falling Black God. But I notice that her trajectory is changing, slowly bending toward Tokomaha's exposed backside rather than falling straight at the blue planet below. Her body has a gravity field of its own and, I realize that where her feet are firmly planted on northern Ceogath, the atmosphere seems to be swirling about her.
Quickly catching up to Korenga, I extend a hand to catch her, only for her to grab my wrist with crushing strength and pull me in. It seems she has entered her berserker mode, in which she can't tell friend from foe anymore. She's going to try to bear-hug me as she did with Mataku before.
But I separate myself into two pieces before she can do so. It's the return of one consciousness inhabiting two bodies at once! My lower half takes Korenga's legs while the upper half grabs hold of both her hands. With a perfectly coordinated swing, I toss her back at the moon, aiming at the golden spot that Aurelia created. I'll let her keep her in check while I work on something more important.
Merging back into one body and flying around Tokomaha's back, under her armpit, and toward her front, I look up to find her face showing a strained expression. She seems to have a hard time carrying the moon's weight as it's still being pulled toward Earth by gravity.
"You can push back now." I call out to her as loudly as I can, causing the leaf-haired goddess to blink in surprise. Only at her size, a blink seems to take several seconds to complete. She's used to communicating through Senka at this point, so she doesn't try to look around.
Still, her expression shows irritation, as if wanting to say that she would have done so long ago if she could. She's still much smaller than the moon and doesn't seem to be able to grow further. The fact that she can even carry it in the first place is an incredible feat. I wish I could help her, but I can't even begin to imagine how to move this celestial body with my mind alone.
But then an idea comes to me, and I prepare myself with a few deep breaths of vacuum. Making the physical motion is just for show.
"[Let's have lots of sex after this is over!]" I give her an incentive to do her best, causing Tokomaha to blush from ear to ear. Her grip nearly slips, but she catches herself at the last moment and turns her head slightly as if searching for me. Then she gives up and grinds her teeth before pushing with newfound vigor while still looking embarrassed. I almost doomed the world with that one, but it seems to be working as intended. "[You can do it.]"
This time, I speak quietly, more to myself than to the little goddess turned titan. But I can see in her gaze that she heard it as her lips curl up into a smile. Gone is the blush, as she focuses her body and mind on this monumental task.
With a silent roar, Tokomaha straightens her legs, back, and then her arms. Ceogath, the continent the Dominion is located on, cracks under her feet. The web extending around her are visible even from space, and my eyes nearly pop out when I think about just how big of an area that affected. But finally, the moon moves and soon leaves the hands of the giant goddess.
I watch as it drifts away from Earth for a while before realizing that without anybody stopping it, it's going to leave Earth's gravity well. One can't judge the speed of things in space because reference points are few and far between, so it's hard to tell how fast the moon is moving now. In either case, Senka said that it would be bad if the moon were gone, as it affects many things like tides and gravity.
Looking to the side, I see that the sun seems brighter than before. That must be because of the solar winds heading here, which will most likely take a few more days to reach us.
It's just one thing after another.
"[Good job, Tokomaha.]" I'd love to pet her leaf hair, but she's just too big for that right now. I'll give her lots of love later when we're all back in the palace of Arkaim. "[Stay where we last parted. I'll come to get you soon.]"
With these words, I fly to the moon once again to pick up Aurelia and Korenga before having Flann teleport us back home. We'll have to solve the moon problem with Senka's help once again.
As I approach the golden lake, I find Korenga encased in a sphere of gold with only her head sticking out. She must have given trouble to Aurelia, so she did that to make her stop. Binding her like that does seem to be an excellent way to end her rampage without having to knock her out, but only the golden queen can do that.
"It's done." I sigh even though no air escapes my mouth since I have no lungs in this form. Looking up, I see Tokomaha shrinking toward the surface of Earth, the planet we all saved together. "Let's go home."
