God Crafter

The eight came at him together, and the first thing that died was any illusion that this would look like the fights before it.

The nearest one didn't claw at him. It channelled mana into its claws and made a grabbing motion and a section of water forty meters behind Kai simply *rose*, compressed instantly into a spear of solid pressure that would have punched through a mountain, and arrived at his spine before sound could have carried the warning.

**[Skill: Abyssal Lance]**

He felt it coming a fraction of a second before it landed — not through sight, through the Soul umbral sense which had passive read of Mana density gathering behind him — but knowing and doing wasn't the same thing as his mind processed the danger but his body couldn't react fast enough. He took the hit but he did not leave himself open like that he covered him self with thin but thick layer of shadow which absorbed a fifth of the power but It still threw him twenty meters across the water.

It still cracked something in his shoulder that hadn't been cracked before, pain arriving late and enormous the way real injuries arrived, nothing like the clean abstraction of a stat panel absorbing damage. He tasted blood, his own, coppery and real, and understood in the same instant that the shadow shield he made had only taken a fraction as it had been hastenly made. The rest had gone straight through into his body.

He didn't have time to catalogue the injury properly before the second one was already on him.

---

This one didn't use a named technique. It used its body — six-limbed, low, faster than anything its size should have been able to manage — and closed the distance while he was still skidding across the water's surface, jaws already open around the exact width of his skull.

He didn't dodge this one either.

He let it bite down.

The jaws closed on nothing. His body simply wasn't fully present at the coordinates the teeth arrived at — Phase Existence, passive, automatic, the thirty-five percent chance that had been quietly saving him all night finally landing on the roll that mattered most. He felt the disorientation ripple through the creature's Mana signature, a predator's confidence shattering in real time as its most basic sense of *did I just kill something* returned an answer that made no sense to it.

He used the half-second it cost the creature to reorient.

He dispelled the katana and conjured a dagger and drove the dagger up through the underside of its jaw, Void Blood activated doing what conventional force couldn't — the blade meeting no resistance at all where armor should have stopped it cold, sliding through scale and bone and whatever passed for a brainstem in something this old, and flooded it with his purple flame the creature's death was not clean. It's brain was liquifying in real time. It thrashed. Its remaining limbs tore three long gouges down his forearm before the nervous system finally understood it no longer had orders to give them, blood — his, thin and red, and its, thick and nearly black — mixing in the water where they fell together.

The Flame found the body and devoured it hungrily before it finished sinking.

The energy feedback was monstrous as this was a true A rank existence it almost overwhelmed him he pushed it towards the world system the attributes climbing up again so fast.

One down. Seven left, plus Voss watching from the edge like something keeping score.

---

The third and fourth came at him from opposite sides simultaneously, and this was the moment his kit finally started working the way he'd built it to.

The one on his left opened its throat and *screamed* — not sound in any conventional sense, a wave of Mana-borne pressure that hit every nerve in his body at once and should have locked his muscles solid long enough for the one on his right to finish him.

**[Skill: Drowning Wail]**

He felt his body start to seize.

He reached for Void Incarnation before the paralysis fully landed, and his body dissolved into the shadow network a half-second before the lockup would have finished, the Wail passing through absence instead of a target it was intended for his comrade got caught up in the skill and was immobilized for thirty seconds making it a sitting duck waiting to be plucked.

He reformed six meters away, already moving towards the one that had been immobilized and used Void Sovereign's Grasp on the one approaching from the right — a full thousand pounds of unseen force slamming into its flank from an angle it hadn't been watching, sending it careening sideways into its screaming companion, both of them tangled together for the half-second he needed.

He didn't waste it on subtlety.

He pulled his katana from a nearby shadow—using his Primordial Shadow Creation, activating both his Void Blood needed to ignore their defense and his purple flame for more lethality, he directly teleported above the creature that was immobilized separating it's head from its shoulders the purple flame devouring it's essence hungrily feeding the pure energy back into him almost overwhelming him again he sent it again to the world system.

Seeing it's brother die because its mistake made the creature go mad with rage losing its composure making an overcommitted swing, in a high stakes battle like this one mistake can cost your life and this one did Kai ducked and swung his katana upwards cutting off it's arm it shrieked in pain and stumbled backwards trying to put space between them but Kai created Shadow hands to keep it from running and then with another swing he killed the creature it's corpse devoured by the flames.

Both of them died together, badly, the sound they made together worse than either alone would have produced.

He sent the energy once more towards the world system accumulating more attribute points with every kill

Three down. Six left.

---

The fourth one changed the entire shape of the fight.

It didn't rush him. It stood back, six eyes narrowing, and Kai understood through Soul Umbral Sense a half-second too late that it wasn't hesitating — it was casting.

**[Skill: Trench Collapse]**

The water beneath him didn't rise this time. It *fell away*, an artificial abyss opening beneath his feet with no bottom his senses could locate, pressure gathering at the edges of the void like the ocean itself had decided to become a mouth.

He didn't have time to teleport clear of a hole that had opened directly under him.

He fell.

The pressure hit him from every side at once as the trench began to close — not water anymore, something closer to the crushing dark he'd read in the Abyssal Horrors' signatures hours ago, except concentrated, deliberate, built specifically to fold a target smaller than itself into something that no longer had a shape.

He felt his ribs go first. Real pain, not abstraction — the specific, animal wrongness of his own body being compressed past what it was built to survive, blood forcing itself up his throat, his vision narrowing to a single point of purple light he refused to let go out.

He reached for the Domain itself. Not a single ability. All of it, at once, the way he hadn't yet allowed himself to use it tonight — Eternal Night Cascade, the pulse doubling his claimed territory outward in every direction including down, into the collapsing trench itself, his sovereign edict riding the cascade's wave and declaring, with everything he had left to declare it with, that this space did not belong to the thing trying to crush him.

*It belongs to me.*

The trench didn't obey completely. The edicts power and his domains suppression only bought him half — but half of an infinite crushing weight was still finite, survivable, the kind of force his fortified vessel could scream under instead of simply cease existing beneath.

He used the half-second the Cascade bought him to phase.

Void Incarnation, full commitment this time, his body ceasing to be a body at all in the middle of a collapsing trench that had nothing left to crush. He felt himself pour upward through the network, reforming above the water's surface with three broken ribs, blood running freely from his mouth, and a level of pure animal fury he hadn't let himself feel since an alley four months and one entire lifetime ago.

The creature that had cast Trench Collapse was still recovering from the Cascade's counter-pressure when he arrived behind it.

He didn't use a blade this time.

He used his bare hand, wreathed in the Flame at full compression, and drove it through the base of its skull the way he might have driven it through wet paper, the purple fire not waiting for the strike to finish before it started consuming, the creature's death arriving somewhere in the middle of being touched rather than after it.

It's essence being devoured by him directly

Four down.

His ribs were still broken. He didn't have time to let them heal properly — the Voidwalker's Constitution was already working on it, slow and steady beneath the adrenaline, but slow wasn't the speed this fight was moving at.

Five remained. Voss. And four more, watching what had just happened to the one who'd tried to bury him alive, recalculating with the same cold thoroughness as before — except now there was something underneath the calculation that hadn't been there an hour ago.

Something that looked, if he was reading it right through the blood in his own vision, almost like fear.

---

"He's killing us faster than we're wounding him," one of them said. Not to Kai. To the others, quiet, urgent. "The Wail should have held him. The Trench should have finished it."

"Nothing has held him," another answered. "Nothing we've tried has worked the way it should."

Voss, still at the edge, finally moved.

Not toward Kai. Toward the water beneath him, sinking half his body into it, gathering something Kai's Soul Umbral Sense read as a second casting building slowly, deliberately, nothing like the desperate first attempt hours ago.

"Then we stop trying what worked on other humans," Voss said, voice steadier now, some of the exhaustion bled out of it by whatever recovery the standoff had bought him. "This one isn't other humans."

Kai stood in the ruin of the last exchange — bleeding from a dozen places, ribs grinding audibly with every breath, the Flame's hunger pulling harder at the edges of his control than it had all night — and felt something in his chest that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite exhilaration.

It was closer to recognition.

*This is the actual fight,* he thought. *Everything before this was the warm-up.*

He raised both blades.

"Then let's find out," he said, "what does work."

**To Be Continued…**