The Abode of Asinef tattoo was an unusual choice for most Shapers, especially before parties had started forming and going to the surface. It was in no way a combat-tattoo, offering no benefit to a performance in the Amphitheatre of the Sun. It didn’t hurl fire. It didn’t bolster strength to titanic levels. And, it certainly didn’t summon an S-Rank weapon of legendary proportions.

  It did make a mean breakfast though.

  One Hiral looked at on the table in front of the incredibly comfortable couch he sat on. As soon as his brain reminded him how dangerously comfy the seating was, he was on his feet again, pacing the length of the truly massive living room. While he was lounging in a luxurious, castle-sized, interspatial mansion—complete with dungeon-esque serving staff, hence the breakfast—his party was out there fighting for their lives against the Raze.

  Inside the Abode of Asinef, he couldn’t see or feel any of that. This tattoo created a completely separate space, a mini-dungeon, basically, that could be carried around by its creator. Great for ferrying around VIPs through dangerous territory, as it was basically undetectable and unbreachable unless somebody went through the front door. The construct even had auto-recall functions, sending the whole place back to where it was first summoned, if the creator was killed.

  The undetectable feature was everything Hiral had hoped for and more. Even though the windows showed nothing but black, empty space outside—a choice they’d made for stealth, instead of giving Hiral a view that also risked a way in—he was sure Left was in the tunnels under Visionary by now. That meant he had to be within range of the strange reset-connections stemming from the Heart of the City. But, there, within the Abode, nothing reached for him. His theory had proven correct, keeping him safe from the Raze’s powerful technique.

  Except, he didn’t want to be safe. He wanted to be out there fighting beside his friends.

  “Would the young master prefer a vegan option?” a man in a formal black and white suit asked Hiral.

  “No, thank you,” Hiral said to the Butler, by the name that came up from View. “I don’t even know what vegan means.”

  “Nobody really does,” the Butler said, reaching up to twist a manicured mustache. “Though the Chef claims he does.”

  “I’m sure it’s delicious, whatever it is,” Hiral said, already turning away from the man, and almost running into a Maid in front of him. Also in black and white—this time with an apron over an impractically short dress. How does she even do her job in that…?

  “Perhaps the young master would prefer a visit to the spa for a massage?” the maid asked, her doll-like features far too close to perfect to be natural.

  “I think I’m good,” Hiral said.

  “You look very tense,” the maid continued.

  “You could say that,” Hiral said. “World-saving and all that.”

  “I could…”

  “No,” Hiral said, a tiny flex of his solar energy making the whole interior of the Abode ripple like the surface of a pond after a rock got dropped into it. Even the maid and butler warped for a second before their shapes returned to normal.

  “As young master wishes,” the butler said, walking past Hiral to lead the maid away.

  Hiral glared at the back of the pair—What is this ‘young master’ nonsense?—until the maid peeked over her shoulder. As soon as she saw him watching them, she conveniently dropped something, then began to be…

  Hiral spun away. What in the Nine Hells was up with these service staff? What kind of service were they even offering?

  … is this why it’s considered S-Rank?

  That thought made him physically pause, before he stalked toward the front door. When Left opened it, he needed to be ready to go. To get to work. He’d have to get to the Heart of the City, shut it down, then back up to the city to help the others.

  By this point, he’d been the abode for… at least five, excruciatingly slow minutes. The portal back to Genesis would’ve been opened in Trevallen, his friends would be up in Visionary, and Nivian and his group might’ve even been recalled already.

  Aaaarg. Doing nothing is worse than being out there fighting!

  Part of him, suddenly, very much understood why Right enjoyed punching things so much. Hiral could really go for punching one of the Raze in the face. Or the nuts, as per Nulokin’s suggestion. Assuming they even have those as giant, crystal constructs. Ugh, did he have to find out for Gauto? That would be…

  The front door to the Abode slammed open, an explosion of sound and force blasting inward a heartbeat later. Another heartbeat after that, Hiral exited the interspatial mansion, Separation cutting through the force of the explosion at the same time his pseudo-aspect ignited, sheathing him in white energy and black lightning. He rocketed through a debris field, smoke clinging to his extended arms and the RHCs in his hands, to find Left—Wings of Anella on his back—swooping away from a monstrous humanoid within familiar tunnels.

  “Sorry,” Left said. “This appears to be a version the same guardian we dealt with in the dungeon.”

  Hiral didn’t need to respond to the double, his feet slamming into the side of the ten-foot-tall, hulking, lizard-man abomination thing. With arms that would make the Hulking Behemoth proud, a lizard-like tail, scales across its body, and a slobbering mouth full of finger-length teeth, the thing radiated power. It wasn’t something Left could handle on his own, the familiar reset-connections visible to Hiral’s eyes.

  It also wasn’t something Left could’ve just run from, the Heart of the City visible through a doorway into the next room. They had to deal with this monstrosity here and now.

  And, his blind-side dropkick was an excellent start, the momentum of the ambush crunching into the thing’s exposed ribs—thanks to it having its arms above its head in an attempt to smash Left—and sending it barrelling into the wall. Before it even had a chance to realize what had hit it, Hiral let his knees bend, absorbing some of his inertia, while blades of Separation formed on the bottoms of his RHC barrels.

  While his weapons couldn’t withstand merging with his unmaking concoction, Energy, Separation, and Expansion made for some fine blades. Blades that sliced into the creature’s hide in a vicious arc, before getting drawn back and stabbed straight in. With all those blows landing within the blink of an eye, the beast only just started to look down in Hiral’s direction when he pulled the triggers.

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  Even though they were only A-Rank death beams, they came at a rate of ten-per-second, from each barrel. White and black fallout from each hit splashed off the monster’s scales, before those shattered beneath the barrage, and it became the softer flesh underneath taking the brunt of the assault.

  Finally reacting to the pain and shock of its side getting blasted open, and its other side getting smashed into the wall, the thing reached over for Hiral with its massive paw of a hand. With only two fingers and a thumb, each of the digits looked as wide as Hiral’s forearm, and strong enough to crush Tomorrow’s brass.

  They didn’t get more than a few inches in his direction before a spear of charged lightning stabbed into the open palm. On its own, the spear in Left’s hand probably wouldn’t have been enough to stop the grabbing gesture. Strength was never really his forte. Luckly for the double, he had a certain Herald of the Endless Cycle floating behind him that had the perfect solution for the problem at hand.

  Formed of the combined Herald of War and Herald of Peace, complete with eight arms, each representing a different ability, Left was the only person who could fully summon—and combine—both Heralds. This left him with a powerful combination of abilities at his disposal. Each possessed an aura, a circle, and a single target ability, as well as a legendary fourth ability. For the Herald of Peace, the third ability was of course the Shield of Peace, which prevented any damage to a target for six seconds. Incredibly powerful when used by a smart fighter such as Left.

  From the Herald of War, though, the single-target buff thought nothing about protection, and entirely about destruction. This was the ability Left used as he struck the monster’s open palm.

  Force of War

  Your next strike cannot be stopped.

  The description for the ability was sparse and vague, to say the least. It was also effective. As Left’s Spear of Clouds struck the monster’s palm, fine scales parted, and the muscles of the arm bunched, but couldn’t stand up to the unstoppable ability. There was a violent crack of breaking bone, before the spear continued its path, until it struck the wall, pinning the monster’s hand in place.

  In that instant Left bought Hiral, his RHC blasts absolutely shredded the right side of the beast’s chest, but he didn’t stop there. Flexing his own strength, Hiral ripped his RHCs straight up, the blades of Separation parting skin, scales, and muscle at the same time his blasts punched serration-like holes the entire way.

  Green splashed against the back wall, the lizard-human practically torn vertically in half from waist to left shoulder. For a tanky-looking S-Rank, the thing hadn’t been nearly as tough as it appeared. Which, considering the situation, Hiral wasn’t complaining about, both barrels going to the beast’s face.

  A full-second of point-blank trigger-pulls from both weapons left the thing headless on the floor, and Hiral flipped off it. Feet touching down, he immediately looked in the direction of the Heart of the City at the same time. All around him, the tunnels shook from powerful explosions and impacts above, health and solar energy in the Party Interface rising and falling as the battle raged.

  Given the colors of the names in the corner of Hiral’s vision, Nivian’s group had joined up with the other two, and it felt like a full-on war above him.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” Hiral said to Left about their fight, then immediately cursed his own words, with the monstrous protector of the Heart standing up behind him in his sensory domain. Once again whole and undamaged, it had clearly been reset back to before Hiral met it.

  “It’s all offense,” Left said, lashing out with Way of Light to burn a dozen scars of melted scales across the creature’s chest and arms.

  Roaring at the pain, but doing nothing more than raising its forearms in front of its face for protection, the thing lunged at Hiral. Those arms that had been up for protection? Yeah, that hadn’t been the reason it lifted them, both fists coming down like warhammers where Hiral had been a second before.

  The shockwave from the impact blasted dust and stone shards away like shrapnel, though a counter of Rejection made short work of that. A-Rank death beams were the creature’s reward for its efforts, the white and black lances of energy splashing across it with thumps like the hoof-beats of a charging Runeocerous. Except, where the beams had torn the beast apart before, they were barely cracking scales and drawing blood.

  “It’s adapting faster than the Endless,” Hiral said at the same time Left drove the Spear of Clouds into the side of its skull. Into, but not through. In fact, with electricity crackling along the side of the thing’s face and ear, the spear hadn’t penetrated more than half-an-inch.

  Left barely had time to process the fact the blow wasn’t nearly as lethal as it should’ve been, before a dog-sized backhand whipped in his direction. Unstoppable as the fist was, it smashed into Left’s side, exploding the double in a… flock of black crows.

  A dozen of the birds created by Moonlit Murder were utterly pulped by the passing fist, but the rest escaped, one of them growing in a flash to reveal the double. From his hands—now empty of the S-Rank weapon—beams of chaotically bending light lashed into and across the monster. Some of them slashed like liquid whips to leave long scars, while others drilled into the flesh to leave a dozen holes, making the barrage both brutal and decisive.

  It also wasn’t nearly enough to stop the rampaging beast that leapt from the crater it had just made to continue after Hiral. Green blood trailing the lunge—even as more scything beams of light criss-crossed its back—the thing reached for Hiral. With the RHC blasts practically bouncing harmlessly off it at this point, it had a look of confidence painted on its face with a wide grin of its horrific mouth.

  The grin faded in an instant, the RHCs vanishing from Hiral’s hands—a heartbeat before Hiral himself vanished—and an uppercut laced with the Edicts of Impact, Increase, and Breaking drove into its chin. A punch that would make Right proud, the blow cut off all the beast’s forward momentum, and exchanged it all for upward momentum, slamming it into the ceiling. Whole body splaying out across the stone, more blood jetted out in all directions from the impact, before gravity took hold of the thing.

  It hadn’t even fallen two feet when massive Claws of Separation cut from one side to the other, bisecting the thick body in four places. Knees, hips, chest, and neck, the four blades passed through with barely a whisper, leaving body parts raining to the ground along with a series of wet thuds.

  “I’ve got to get the Heart…” Hiral didn’t even get to finish the sentence before his opponent was back on its feet. Not even a scratch from where it had been cut apart, a rumbling growl joined the cacophony from the war above Hiral and Left. “Oh come on, I do not have time for this.”

  The beast didn’t seem to care at all about Hiral’s schedule, its hands spearing down into the stone of the floor at its feet. With even less resistance than Hiral’s Claws of Separation had found against the monster’s body, the thing drove its hands—wrist deep—into the floor, then heaved. A section of stone—big as a house—tore free from the ground, then got launched down the tunnel, filling it wall-to-wall, in Hiral’s direction.

  Separation reduced it to cubed stone with a distracted thought, and Hiral strode through the gently-falling rubble. Big as a house, huh? Should’ve thought of this sooner.

  He almost chuckled at his own witty thoughts—and the plan that came with them—but his attention instead went to something connected to the Heart’s guardian. Two somethings, in fact. Tendrils of connection tied to its back, a pair of them. One of them went straight to the Heart of the City—obviously some kind of empowerment—while the other… didn’t. It almost did, but instead seemed to vanish into the floor beneath the Fallen’s powerful device.

  Unfortunately, the two tendrils looked similar enough, it was impossible to tell which of them controlled the reset ability—or where the second connection even led to. A mystery for after Hiral dealt with this thing that was basically a Mid-Boss. From the continued rumbling above, the battle really had gone into full swing.

  “Left, stay out here and make sure there aren’t any more surprises,” Hiral said. “Testing a theory.”

  “Understood,” Left said without question, at the same time Hiral blasted off with Rejection. Impact sent a shockwave bouncing off the stone walls where Hiral collided with the beast, ripping it from its feet and carrying them both directly back into the room where their fight had started. Then, through it—and a certain door—and straight into a luxurious living room.

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