"You're strong."

Dashing forward, Lusia slides under another rapid swing of the Cloud Lion, ignoring as the blow shatters the earth behind her in favour of flipping her feet back under her and launching herself over the Beast's back.

A single swing of her sword is enough to cut the Beast in half, but in exchange it leaves her open to a strike by another Lion that sends her crashing through the earth and some trees.

She ignores it. Even as the bark of the centuries old trees cut into her back, she ignores it all, focusing instead on the Pride of Cloud Lions before her. Each Beast could match, or even best, a Heavenly Throne Cultivator, just one level below herself. Theoretically, that should make it an easy fight, as the difference between Cultivators' Realms is significant.

But this is the Dark Continent so things are never so simple.

Prides of Cloud Lions typically range from six to ten in number. Anywhere else, finding a Pride of more than twenty would be exceptional.

Here in the Dark Continent? She has been fighting this Pride for the past two days, and there are still about seventy left by her count. Still, even a thousand Beasts a full Realm below her should never pose much of a problem, mostly just an inconvenience really.

But she was fighting a Drum Ape that matched her Realm just before she started fighting this Pride. And before that she fought a group of Sphinxes that were each half a step into her Realm. And before that she cleared out a mountain that was infested with Chimera Ants. Before that was the Bezoar, and the Thunder Eagles and the Swamp Demons before them...

She tends to lose track of time when she trains, but by her count, she's probably been fighting for about six months now.

She hasn't stopped training since that day...

"You're strong."

Deep amethyst eyes stare into her own with such purity that she can feel in the very core of her being that the one who wears those eyes has never even considered lying. That he truly means his words.

Shaking her head to dispel the memory, Lusia Abel, the most skilled fighter the Realms have ever seen, charges straight back into battle. No battle cry leaves her lips, no taunts or jests. Instead, she just kills.

She swings and she slices and she slaughters.

Again and again, a single minded focus on conjuring as much death as possible.

Until, before she knows it, she stands alone. All around her is blood and death, and as she stands there, panting, standing on top of a hill of corpses each dwarfing her own size, she turns her eyes to the stars in the sky, ignoring the blood dripping off of her form.

Closing her eyes, she just stands there, finally taking a moment to rest.

"You're strong."

Dropping her head down, she opens her eyes and holds her hands out in front of herself.

"Strong, huh?" Her voice rings out, soft in a way no one who knew her would believe, only answered by silence. "I don't feel it, anymore."

---

Slowly wandering through a forest of mountain-tall trees, brushing away the untamed foliage, The Noita's head abruptly turns to a high up branch. Under the faint light that manages to shine through the thick canopy of leaves, Noita finds a large creature slithering through the trees.

It seems to be a strange mix of a snake and a praying mantis but with wings and being large enough that its eye has a diameter about even to Noita's height. He has no idea what it is called, but he's seen a couple of them traveling through the trees during his walk.

He smiles at the thought. Just one short walk and he has seen so many new and interesting things; it's such a novel experience for him, to see something exist that was not directly created either by himself or God before him.

Turning away from the animal as it ignores him in turn, The Noita spots a new plant hidden beneath some bushes. 

Humming softly to himself, The Noita smiles as he digs through the greenery, his gloves not getting scratched or dirtied even when he digs into the earth to retrieve the plant.

Its stem is thin, wiry and glows a soft cyan blue, while its five open petals shine with an ocean-deep blue, a number of pure white stamen poking out from the centre.

It's a pretty flower, but even as The Noita admires it, he understands that he cannot forestall the inevitable. That he has no choice but to finally acknowledge a single, irrevocable fact of utmost importance that he can no longer deny.

"I'm lost."

Of course, if he was really concerned about it, he could always just use his All-Seeing Eyes to map out the entire universe, but he doesn't want to do that.

It would ruin the excitement of adventure after all. It's been too long since he's seen anything new, so he wants to enjoy it all at his own leisure, rather than just observing everything new at the same time.

Why, he feels like he's just a million years old again!

Still though... 

As interesting as the new flora and fauna is, he also wants to see this universe's new culture. He only got a brief peak when he left the city he woke up in, and he only stayed long enough to overhear simple things, such was his excitement to explore.

All he's really learnt is that the dominant species here, like the ones he met earlier, are 'Humans', 'Elves', 'Dwarves', 'Beastmen', 'Long-Eared Beauties', 'Mutts', and 'Whores'. At least, those were the names that the people most used when describing a group of people that presumably from context were in possession of higher thought.

Oh well. If he just keeps walking, something interesting will happen eventually.

And not two weeks later, his thoughts are proven correct.

The trees are still just as tall around him, but they are much sparser now, allowing the midday sun to shine down on him in all it's glory. It also affords him a clear view of how the forest abruptly cuts away into a sheer cliff hundreds of metres in the air, looking down onto a barren wasteland of tall rocky crags, the colour of sand stretching all the way to the horizon.

The Noita is no stranger to biomes drastically changing across a single line, so the view itself doesn't draw his eyes so much as the beings present within it.

Down below, so far away that to a mortal they would look as distant dots, is a group of beings engaged in combat. The Noita struggles with the word, finding it hard to accept what he's looking at as 'combat'. It's only with the benefit of hindsight that he's realised that first female entity that he met after killing God was probably attempting to engage him in 'combat'.

It's just that she was so weak he subconsciously refused to acknowledge that he was being attacked.

Oh well, that's not important right now.

The fight below involves two sides from what he can gather. On the winning side is a tall, maybe five metres by his guess, bipedal thing.

It has grey, rocky skin and is incredibly bulky with what looks like armour plating covering its entire body except for its front that shows purple muscles. The armour on it's back and shoulders looks segmented and of its four arms, the upper pair are hulking monoliths with no apparent shoulder reaching down to the floor and looking like natural shields while the lower pair are much smaller, likely used mostly for holding food.

All together it looks as if it can roll into a defensive ball if it wanted to. Not that it seems particularly inclined towards defence at the moment as it smacks away another of its opponents, who crashes through two rocky hills before coming to a stop, and roars.

Its face has two tiny beads for eyes at the top of its head, right below where the armour plating ends. Immediately below the eyes and taking up most of the face is a wide diamond-shaped mouth open wide to show razor sharp teeth as its roar echoes through the land.

The Noita honestly has no idea what he is looking at, he's never seen anything like it before, and he has seen a lot of stuff. Created even more too, but even his imagination has limits.

Fighting this Beast is a group of four. The one who just got slapped through a pair of rocky spires seems to be what Noita believes is a 'Dwarf'. He is mostly covered in simple grey armour, with the only distinguishing features being the horned helmet and the dirty red cloak wrapped around him.

He wields a double sided axe bigger than he is tall and bounces right back at the Beast with fervour, launching an overhead swing that is blocked by a single raised arm. However, even if the attack was blocked, there was enough strength behind it that the ground craters around the Beast for over a hundred metres in every direction, tall walls of rock crumbling as the aftershocks of the battle spread.

Luckily for the Dwarf, even though his attack did no damage, it still succeeds in holding his foe down long enough for one of his allies, a man Noita believes is a 'Human' with blue hair and dressed in resplendent blue armour covered by a white robe, to dash in close, glowing golden, and thrust his heavily adorned spear right into its face.

The Beast manages to turn its head just enough that the spear only manages to gouge a line across the side of its head from the eye back, where the thrust continues as a streak of light for thousands of metres.

The Beast lets out a roar of agony that shakes the very earth as it steps back, flailing its arms in anger, managing to clip the shoulder of the human, sending him spinning away in a spray of blood.

Before he can fly too far however, the human starts to glow white until his entire form looks like that of a silhouette, whereupon he zips in a different direction, coming to a stop beside another Human(?) who quickly begins tending to the man as his form returns to normal.

The Beast, apparently smelling weakness or something, Noita doesn't know if it can do that, lunges at the pair of humans, crossing the distance in an instant. The very air itself shatters around the Beast as it forces its way forward.

The Dwarf attempts to defend his allies but only manages to make the Beast pause long enough to swipe him away, a mighty boom following the impact. 

Yet, that moment of pause seems to be what the final person was waiting for. She can only be one of the 'Long-Eared Beauties', for she seems pretty much the same as the Humans, but has longer ears. She's dressed in an earthly brown shirt tucked into a similarly coloured skirt with a green and golden sash tied around her waist. Over this she has an open, forest green jacket with wide, open sleeves and a trim of elegant golden filigree along its edges.

On top of it all is a short brown and gold cape that covers her shoulders, all while her light brown hair falls straight down to her mid-back. 

In her hands she holds a tall staff of gnarled wood adorned with trinkets, and with a flourish, she slams her staff butt first into the earth.

Immediately following this action, at a speed that defies all reason, a veritable wave of thick vines grow out of the ground, immediately wrapping around the Beast's every limb before going further to simply bury it alive.

However, even as the tide of green attempts to hold it in place, the Beast pushes forward until it is standing above the pair of Humans, arm poised to crush them both.

The Noita is pretty sure that the two Humans would make it out of this situation alive without his interference, but he's just realised that he's just been watching them get dismantled without doing anything to help and feels kind of bad about it.

So he decides that it's about time to help out. Not that he intends to do any fighting anytime soon, but he can play living shield just fine.

With that thought in mind, he takes a step forward off of the cliff and then he is in-between the Beast and the Humans. To be clear, he didn't teleport, he can only do that with a Wand or with a Portal. That was just pure speed, honed over billions of years.

Without really paying much attention to the Beast, The Noita faces the two Humans and decides to attempt a Human greeting he saw in the city earlier.

He raises one hand in the air, curling his little and ring finger, and then sharply rotates his wrist to the side.

"Yo."

---

A/N: He~llo! Dear readers!

Noita really doesn't know how to be human (or elf or dwarf yadda yadda) but he's gonna do his best!

Also, this story isn't going to have an upload schedule of any kind, as it's not really something I'm focusing on, just something for when the muse strikes, so don't expect any kind of regularity with my uploads lol