Avarana watched as her foe, as small as a gnat in comparison to her, wielded forces that no mortal of his level should have been able to. She had been the undisputed hegemon of her realm for eons. Now that she had a challenge, she wasn’t sure how to feel. Avarana was not like some of the other Circle Lords, so lost in their ennui that they would do anything to feel the thrill of a fight once more. She was content with her games, taking pleasure in watching millions fight and die at her behest. Her happiness came from her pride in being above the rest of her servants, and knowing that at her Tier, there was no equal. Only, she had found one, and he wasn’t even at her Tier.

  Jonathan Harlowe was a mystery to her. He had arisen from nowhere, rising to prominence as he began slaughtering Circle Lords one after the other. There was no precedent for this, as countless heroes had tried to escape the Hells in the past. None had even gotten past Granath, the weakest of their number. Avarana had never even encountered someone close to her strength, even before Angranor had imparted his Divinity upon her.

  Now, she was forced to admit that she couldn’t go about defeating Jonathan with the normal carefree abandon that she usually used on her vassals. She had to take this fight seriously.

  “I grow tired of this farce,” Avarana said. “My baptism in the fires of Divinity have given me many new abilities. Ones which I am more than happy to demonstrate on you.’

  Avarana’s ego swelled as she funneled her Divinity into her elemental mastery, summoning flames wrought not from heat, but from the pure energy of godhood itself. Flickering with golden light, they spread across her body. She felt her strength surge, muscles growing and scales creaking as they were reinforced with power beyond her Tier.

  “That’s cute,” Jonathan called back. “You can use Smite? Well, I went beyond that skill a year ago. You’re going to have to do more than that to keep up.”

  As Avarana watched, incredulous, Jonathan’s body flared with a mixture of gold and purple, a towering avatar of Divinity forming around his body. Not only did it contain Divinity and the energy of the Void, but Stamina and Mana, tinting it with flecks of red and blue.

  Jonathan took a single step that seemed to force the air apart before him, taking him all the way to Avarana’s vulnerable underbelly. His fist snapped up, imbued with so much kinetic force that when it struck Avarana, a detonation of plasma washed out in every direction as the air compressed to the point of nuclear fusion.

  The dragon, used to being the queen of the air, found herself shocked as she flew through the air not of her own volition. Such was her momentum that Avarana found her wings pressed against her body by the air pressure, rendering her unable to fly. Jonathan came hurtling up, another punch impacting her stomach. Flesh tore and scales snapped, a bloody hole hammered into the dragon’s stomach.

  Avarana retched, feeling something she hadn’t in a very long time. Pain. Long forgotten memories came flooding back, from the time she had spent in Tartarus, billions of years ago. When she had not been the apex power of her Tier. When she could be hurt. When she could die.

  Rage whited out her mind, mixed with savage, unrelenting fear. Immortals had few terrors, but chief amongst them was an end to their unnaturally long lives. Some responded with craven cowardice, while others, like Avarana, fought to the very end.

  “Enough!” the Circle Lord roared. She tapped into her vast stockpile of vital energy, stolen from the lives of billions. Every time she slaughtered entire armies, Avarana saved a small portion of that strength, keeping it for a time that she would need it. The limits of her unique ability kept her from accumulating more than the equivalent of a few lives every time, but over billions of years, that added up.

  Before, using all of that power in a single moment would have torn her apart, rendering both her and the world for a thousand miles in every direction nothing but dust. Now, with the power of a Lesser God thrumming through her veins, Avarana could bear it.

  The sky bent downwards beneath the force of her will, preventing her from going any further. In the glimmering void beyond, a meteor formed, billions of spirits crushed together into a single orb of ethereal flame. The identifying features lost meaning as the screaming, writhing forms of the souls merged with one another, transforming into pure power.

  Jonathan fell back, finding his momentum coming to a halt as the air thickened, repulsing him like a trampoline. Avarana hovered above him like an angry god, pulsing waves of light leaving her body and flying up towards space. All of it gathered around a rapidly growing ball of light, strengthening it until Jonathan could feel the pressure from hundreds of miles away.

  He remembered the technique that Granath had leveled against him, all that time ago in the Ash Heaps. It had nearly killed him, and destroyed a good chunk of the Ashen Citadel. Now, if this meteor of soulfire hit, it would wipe out a sizable portion of the entire circle, not just a fraction of a single city. Then again, Jonathan had grown much in the time since Granath. He could handle it.

  With the power of his upgrade Ephemeral Quartet skill coursing through his veins, Jonathan felt invincible. Altering the skill had not only increased the efficiency of swapping out various energies, it had actually granted him boosts depending on which type he converted into.

  Void energy swept through the skill matrix and was converted into Stamina. Rather than being the normal red color, this Stamina was tinted purple. When it touched his muscles, they were imbued not just with supernatural strength, but with a fraction of the power of the Void itself.

  Jonathan clenched his fist and punched a hole in the world, creating another behind the veils of condensed air surrounding Avarana. He flew through, blindsiding the dragon with a vicious right hook to the base of her chin. Using Void Piercer, Jonathan smashed a hole through Avarana’s mouth and into her skull. Had she been a normal dragon, not that there was such a thing, she would have died there and then. As a Tier 8 Lesser God, she simply powered past the damage.

  “You won’t reach it in time,” Avarana gloated. “It will atomize you, and your foolish allies, but will leave me unharmed.”

  “I don’t need to reach it,” Jonathan said. “I only need to kill you before it goes off. If you can’t direct the power, it will just loose its energy in the air.”

  Avarana’s flesh snapped back into place in an instant as she supercharged her regeneration with her stockpile of life force. Jonathan was suddenly trapped, in a cage of flesh and bone. The dragon’s body was incredibly hot, and it seemed to be growing hotter as time went on. Jonathan felt his skin start to sizzle under his armor, baking as Avarana tried to cook him alive. As he fought to break free, he realized that the unconventional method of imprisonment was very effective. It was like the time he had been captured in the Ash Heaps, where a mage had kept him in a prison designed to combat his Void abilities not with durability, but with regeneration.

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  Jonathan, however, was not the same man he had been then. His eyes burned purple as he summoned his element, a wave of destructive force consuming everything around him. Avarana’s jaw broke apart, and Jonathan flew out through the hole. His armor melted to his skin, but he was alive, and still had time to do something about his predicament.

  Avarana did not let him escape easily, and opened her cavernous maw, breathing out flames so hot that they burned a blinding white. Jonathan was forced to shield himself with Aegis of the Void’s Dichotomy. For the first time, he found his elemental reserves being overtaxed as Avarana’s flames burned through his Void energy faster than he could summon it. His shield broke, letting the fire sweep over him. Whereas being trapped within Avarana had left him scorched, this blast evaporated his armor, and turned flesh to charcoal. Jonathan’s health plummeted to under ten percent in an instant.

  He hung there, transfixed both by the force of the blast, and by the pain. It was almost all-consuming. Worse than his thresholds, the pain seemed to sear past his body and into his very soul. As Jonathan fought for clarity against the ocean of agony, he realized that was the case. The accumulated potential and power of millions warred against his soul, seeking to erase it entirely.

  Jonathan looked deep within, trying to find something that would let him survive. Battles of the soul were exceedingly rare, and there was no real way to ensure victory other than overwhelming force. The fact that he hadn’t already succumbed to the force of Avarana’s technique was a feat that could go down in song. However, he would have to do a lot more than avoid death from the soul assault. The burgeoning sphere of soulfire above would spell his end if he did not stop it.

  A sudden kernel of realization crystallized within Jonathan’s mind. He was not alone in this battle. While he had the soul of a Lesser God, that would not be enough. Not at his level. What he had was his connection to the Void, a boundless force that he could tap into as its God. Could he not also use it to reinforce his soul?

  Trying not to focus on the pain and his imminent demise, Jonathan let his mind sink into the cold embrace of the end. The Void had no feelings, no prerogative save to consume. It was far simpler than the other elements, not having to worry about different interpretations. While the Void had different concepts folded into one cohesive whole, they were all facets of the same ideal. Other elements did not have that. For example, Fire had so many different interpretations that to find the one true meaning of the element was the journey of a lifetime. An immortal’s lifetime. It could preserve and destroy, save and kill. One flame could cook food for a starving child while another could burn that same child to ash. With the Void, the only outcome was inevitable destruction.

  As Avarana crowed in victory, her voice thundering through the air, Jonathan turned out the dragon. He had to escape within the next few seconds, or he was dead.

  He scanned the metaphysical gate within him, the one that led to the world of the Void. It was limited to his Tier, preventing him from tapping into too much of its power. Within his mind’s eye, the image sharpened by his pain, he saw a rotating purple circle, outlined with runes so complicated that he couldn’t even parse a fraction of their meaning. The gate was in a state of constant war, trying to expand beyond its limits. As Jonathan looked at it, he realized that those limits were imposed by his own soul. Half of its strength was locked away, keeping his elemental connection to the Void from degenerating into a two way passage to the realm of annihilation. If that happened, his body would come apart at the seams, and the boundless Void would seep into reality. Without a way to stop it, it would continue to grow in strength, with Jonathan as its mindless avatar. Eventually, it would destroy the entire universe, reclaiming it.

  With this realization, Jonathan found that he could adjust the amount of suppression that his soul leveled against his Void affinity. While removing all of the limitations was a terrible idea, he could remove some.

  The purple gate expanded within his mind’s eye. The constant assault from Avarana faded away as Jonathan’s soul was reinforced by the Void itself. His skin steamed, purple vapor rising up as his body began to turn purple. His flesh transformed into energy, starting at his fingertips. Jonathan had left barely enough of his soul strength behind to keep his body from detonating, but it was a close thing. He could only sustain this level of power for a few seconds.

  “What are you doing?” Avarana asked, a note of fear in her voice. “How?”

  Jonathan was unable to reply, as his mouth was already discorporating, turning into purple light. Instead, he pointed one finger at the sky, aiming for the center of Avarana’s final technique. The Void thundered through him, and erupted from his fingertip. A beam of light the width of a toothpick sliced through the air. When it touched the orb, all was silent for a moment. Then the titanic fireball vanished without a trace. Jonathan turned his gaze towards Avarana, and snapped his fingers. For a moment, the Void entered reality in its true form, and Avarana suddenly disappeared. There was no sound, no final words. Just nothingness.

  Jonathan lost consciousness, falling from the sky like a bird with its wings clipped. His body continued to smoke, his regeneration fighting with the corruption of the Void. Even unconscious, his will and soul continued to battle, fending off the encroachment of his element.

  ***

  A few hundred miles away, Jonathan’s army clashed with one of Avarana’s vanguard. The two forces were evenly matched, at least in terms of power. Numerically, Jonathan’s soldiers had the advantage. It was rare to see armies with less than a million soldiers in Bloodspill, but it did happen on occasion.

  Arkanon and the other Uthraki were the fulcrum around which the conflict turned, a rock on which the river of their foes broke. Like a mountain of obsidian, flame and stone, they fought with wild abandon. None could match them. Explosions of molten rock erased entire battalions, while fists clad in night-dark obsidian smashed through torsos like a sledgehammer clad in obsidian. Few could match them, and none could defeat them.

  As cataclysm after cataclysm was leveled at the world by Jonathan and Avarana, the smaller war raged on regardless. Neither side would surrender, even if their leaders died. For Jonathan’s forces, there was no way home. For Avarana’s, there would be no quarter given.

  “You will never defeat our god,” one of Avarana’s Chosen said as he traded blows with Arkanon. “Your leader is dying even now, his soul flensed by Lady Avarana’s might.”

  “Realy?” Arkanon replied. “Look at the skies. The purple flame of the Void still burns bright. As long as that remains, Jonathan will not die.”

  The Chosen’s face twisted in rage, his eyes burning with hatred. His twin swords danced in a flurry of blood and steel, trying to work their way past Arkanon’s defense. A few weeks ago, the Uthraki would have fallen in a matter of moments. Now, with far more levels under his belt, Arkanon could not only block and dodge, but counter.

  Still, there was a chasm of a level gap between them, and Arkanon started to falter, his body lacerated all over by his opponent’s swords. Luckily for him, Arkanon had allies.

  Hushar and Tukar blindsided the enemy warrior, their greatswords coming in at the perfect angle to prevent escape. The weapons, crafted out of summoned obsidian, were as sharp as razors and as hefty as logs.

  The blades sank into the Tier 8s flesh, trapping him just in time for Arkanon to strike. The Uthraki warlord clenched his fist, and when his fingers loosened slightly, the light of a dying star streamed out. With a cry, he punched, slamming his Supernova Fist into his foe’s torso. Like a cannonball had been leveled at a windowpane, the man shattered, coming apart at the seams. Gouts of flame atomized the scraps of his body until there was nothing left.

  Arkanon opened his fist, letting the remnants of his technique dissipate into the air. As he did so, the titanic orb hovering in the sky vanished, obliterated by a tiny ray of purple light. A split second later, Avarana died, erased from existence. A figure so small that it was barely visible fell from the sky. As it fell, so did the world around it. The realm warped and shifted as Bloodspill was torn from the fabric of the Infinite Hells, claimed by Jonathan as his own.

  The battle continued on, but both sides knew how it was bound to end. Bloodspill had been taken by the Hellbreaker. It was free, now and forevermore.