The immobility of my body was all the green-eyed wolf needed to show me power.
His blade-tail slashed across my side, carving through the weak film of defenses I had layered around my body like they were made of paper.
My barriers could normally have been strong enough to save me from a meteor strike.
But these creatures—they were crushing them like glass bottles underfoot.
And then—
The leader appeared once more.
No sound.
No warning.
Just sudden, merciless force.
His paw struck me, sending my body rocketing into the air.
'Curses!'
I tried to control my momentum, attempting to use my wings to propel myself higher, out of their range of influence.
If I could just flee the battlefield—
Nothing happened.
My wings flapped—but there was no lift.
What?
That was impossible.
Originally, there had been a certain pressure applied on me, from the moment the Supreme Lord released his magic and began his experiments...
But this time was different; my wings weren't damaged.
By all logic, I should be flying.
But something had changed.
A new rule had been imposed on me.
I couldn't fly.
Not anymore. Even with natural wings.
I began to plummet.
And then, before I could make sense of it, ice spears filled the air, like white cruel stars dotting the sky.
Dashing towards me, swarming me like a rain of pain.
I poured everything into my barriers, layering them with the strongest reinforcement I could fathom—
And yet—
The ice spears tore—no, like nails dipping into water, they maimed me.
Ignoring the barrier altogether, like they weren't even there.
They pierced me mercilessly, sinking into flesh and bone, a gruesome violation of my defenses.
'Why?! My barriers were ignored?'
Another conceptual magic—like that black lightning?
No…
I could feel it—there was nothing wrong with my defenses.
Which meant—
These spears weren't breaking through my barrier. They were designed to bypass them entirely.
A predetermined rule.
Her ice had been warped in a reality-bending law.
At this point… I'm I not battling god-class individuals?
Pain erupted in my body, ice spreading inside me, freezing my organs before I even hit the ground.
The wind screamed past my ears as I forced my magic to respond—
Hellfire swirled in my hands, hovering at my wounds: the heat barely keeping the cold from consuming me whole—
But before I could touch the ground, they were on me like the black on charcoal.
*
Three Specters.
They slammed into me midair, fangs digging deep, twisting and ripping through my flesh like starved beasts.
I was crushed into the ground hard, and I wasn't given any moment to recover.
The Blue-eyed wolf pressed me down with a paw, keeping me pinned—
Then, with sickening finality, she tore my wings off.
CRACK.
SNAP.
The sound reverberated through my entire body.
Pain I hadn't felt in centuries—
Pain.
A reminder.
A price for existing in a physical vessel.
A cost I had long accepted.
But that didn't make it any less excruciating.
I could feel my mass dwindling, my strength leaking away.
I refused to let it continue.
With a burst of hellfire, I expelled them—searing flames forcing the Specters to back off before they could devour me whole.
Hellfire was different.
A dangerous cursed flame.
Once lit, it burns eternally—consuming everything in its path until the caster wills it to stop.
Even my magic wasn't necessary to sustain it. It was self-sustaining, even if I died.
Slowly, I rose.
Standing in the swamp of my own blood,
I tried to piece together what happened.
Why had I halted mid-step then?
Why couldn't I fly?
Many answers were still shrouded in mystery, but I could speculate something.
The Blue-eyed wolf.
Her freezing ability had more to it than just ice—
It must have interfered with my body's mobility somehow.
But there was something off.
If it was a full paralysis, I should have been immobile more often, no?
Yet, she had only stopped me once—
Meaning, it had a timer?
Or worse—
She was waiting.
Waiting for the right moment where I'll be caught unaware and unable to resist.
But as for my inability to fly—
My gaze shifted to the fox spirit standing several feet away, one of her tails was glowing—
A soft, eerie blue at its tip.
She had been brewing disaster.
A realization settled in.
Each of her tails probably had different abilities.
And then, she spoke.
"You've had your fair share of fun. Let me trample on him too."
And trample, dear readers, she did.
*
Sharp winds slashed at my barriers, piercing through like invisible blades, their edges grazing my flesh—tearing from within.
The earth itself became my enemy;
Devouring, crushing, slamming—
Like I had been cursed by Pison itself.
Mysterious forces halted my movements, twisting my evasions into mockery.
I was like a hapless rodent caught in a trap.
Dark metallic shards—deadly, precise—shot toward me, some shifting mid-air, turning into a caustic mix of acid that burned through my barriers like molten steel through wax.
Magic strikes—each more brutal than the last—obliterated my limbs, tearing through flesh and barrier in a single instant.
And the worst part—It wasn't just my body she sought to violate.
A foreign presence slithered into my mind.
Subtle at first.
Then a full-scale invasion.
To seize control.
All while the physical attacks persisted, I was undergoing a severe mental war.
Several hypnotic attempts to seize my will, to drown me in obedience.
A hundred voices whispered commands into my mind—insidious, suffocating—each one meant to break me down from the inside out.
I resisted.
Only barely.
And for every moment I fought it—
A new brand of torment replaced the last.
No matter how fast I moved—
No matter how unpredictable I sought to become—
It was meaningless before the Fox Spirit.
As if she already knew.
As if she could see my future.
Her left eye shifted.
The purple pupil fractured—
Seven irises overlapped, spinning, focusing—
And then, the abyss came for me.
Actual waves of void surged forward like a blanket of vacuum.
A darkness that was alive, one could say.
It reached for me like the hands of forgotten gods, attempting to consume me—
To drag me into and endless, empty maw of oblivion itself.
And at the other end of that abyss?
Nothingness.
True erasure.
Not even death would be my salvation.
I somehow managed to escape and fell to my knees.
Tattered.
Wounded.
Breathless.
Even my regeneration—once my ultimate defense—was struggling to keep up, lagging behind the relentless onslaught.
And then, in final mockery—
She showed me the distant gap between us.
This incarnate of shade—
This being of absolute darkness—
Wielded the holy attribute.
I watched, disbelieving.
The very power that purified us darkness-attributed Principalities on contact—that reduced my kind to dust—was now held in her grasp.
And she was going to use it against me.
"Now, perish by my divine light, understood?"