I found myself having swapped positions with my foe. At the start of our battle, he had been the one in mid-air and I had been the one on the ground, but now as I spun towards him, blade out-stretched and clad in electricity, I was the one in mid-air. It was actually kind of funny that our positions had reversed.
Technos was continuing his bad habit of angrily roaring at his enemies like some sort of massive, robotic dinosaur rather than what he actually was: a dragon god of technology. His blades swung through the air at a speed much faster than the speed of sound and it was almost enough to be intimidating. Almost.
I was a god of a lot of things. But the thing is I had become a god of many of those things, I hadn't been born a god of them. That said, there were a few things I was born a god of. And two of those things were nature and earth.
As my blade closed in on Technos' body, his blades closed in on mine. His blades were enormous things far larger and more wicked-looking than my lone blade was. Even as I grinned savagely at my enemy he grinned savagely back at me, having done some sort of mental calculus that he would leave this trade of blows better off than I would. That said he was underestimating me.
As his blades rushed at me, slicing through empty air and meeting virtually no resistance from the wind, things quickly shifted for him. First, the wind began to fight back, nailing him with such force that they slowed his blades. He growled at me and redoubled his efforts, and right when things were starting to change for him the ground beneath and around him began to fight back as well.
The ground he was on began to quake beneath him, threatening to throw him off balance but that wasn't the real obstacle in his way. The real problem was that a portion of the ground I had been on shot upwards at a speed exceeding the speed of sound. This genuinely surprised Technos who hadn't been expecting such a move to come from me while I was in mid-air. However, his lack of imagination was enough to give me an edge.
The rocketing pillar of ground swiftly intercepted Technos' attempt to cleave through me, and his blades collided with the moving pillar. They were sharp enough to begin to cut through the pillar, but it was already too late. I had continued to move through the air while this was happening and my electric sword and I were now mere centimeters from my foe's body. There was a bloodthirsty look on my face as I shouted in triumphant joy and my blade made contact with my foe.
I watched as the electricity coating my sword was transferred, destructively, from my sword to his metallic body. Beyond that, there was the sheer destructive power of my blade itself, a potent weapon even in unskilled hands and my hands were far from unskilled. I had struck Technos square in the center of his mass, and before my eyes, he took a full step back from me. Electricity was beginning to course through his body. I was unsurprised when I detected more grass beginning to appear in the distance.
Technos made a new sound as he staggered backward. This time instead of roaring in pain and anger he released a deafening wail of agony, the sort of wail that someone who was being tortured might make. He actually let go of his blades for a second, but he managed to regain the composure needed to not be disarmed in front of someone like me and so he gritted his metallic teeth and grabbed his blades before forcefully yanking them from the pillar of earth that had intercepted his earlier swing.
My blow had dealt some real damage and in retaliation, the dragon god tried to aim another laser beam at me since his mouth was still open but I wasn't about to let up just because I had dealt some damage. I entered my true-speed mode and I began to mix and match abilities again. While I was still going fast I activated my powers over nature and called on a bolt of lightning to go ahead and crash down on him.
I felt the sky above me generate a real cloud instead of an illusionary one and began to chuckle. The cloud appeared fully formed at a speed that defied thought, and immediately unleashed its electrical payload on the robotic deity, whose laser beam hadn't even really begun to form and stunned him hard, all while dealing real, devastating damage.
The bolt of lightning did more damage to him than all of my previous hits had put together. All in all I sensed perhaps a tenth of the arena was now covered in grass. I chuckled and had to work to stay focused.
This beast was one of the two creatures I had ever fought who had the ability to deal real damage to me, the sort of damage that overpowered my normal immunity to pain or even harm, and for all of my efforts I had only done ten percent of the damage I needed to do to take him out. He really was a beast, even though I wanted to kill him and be done with this I could admit that much.
His attack that grazed me earlier didn't even deal two percent of the harm he'd need to do to me to kill me, but even that much was more damage than Morehammer's attack had done when he managed to hit me during our first meeting. Technos was a true beast, and I wondered how much more powerful I'd be when I was done killing him.
Technos was stunned for a moment, and I was tempted to just slam him with a barrage of lightning, but even as I considered that a voice chimed in. It was the voice of the domain of knowledge, who had been instrumental in preparing me for today.
"If you continue to hit him with an attack of the same basic type that isn't raw, brutal melee, or magical damage he'll eventually become immune to it. So even if you hit him with a barrage of lightning it'd eventually stop working." The domain revealed. That was quite annoying, but it didn't stop me from being creative.
I dashed at my enemy, while he was still stunned and I again aimed my blade at his core. He was unable to muster an effective defense against my approach even though he attempted to roar at me in an effort to dissuade me from getting in close. Unfortunately for him, I wasn't a coward and I was not deterred by his efforts.
As I approached him I chuckled and I swung my sword again. I wasn't aiming to deal damage this time, though I did have a plan in mind. I aimed precisely where I had stabbed before and before he could recover from his stunned state I was able to finish my approach and push my blade into the robotic foe I was facing.
Technos roared in pain, slowly beginning to snap out of his present, feeble state and attempting to prevent me from inflicting further harm on him. I chuckled and ignored his efforts while I used my blade to cut a hole in my foe's chest, or rather where his chest would have been if he had been a living creature and not a ghost of a god. When I was done I retracted my sword from the hole I had just created and I stuck my hand into it.
As a god of acid and poison, I had a number of abilities that I almost never used. I could create acid and bring it to life in the form of an ooze-like monster that obeyed my commands. Until now I had never really had an enormous reason to use this extremely destructive ability but this was the perfect chance for me to use it to truly comical effect.
The acid I had put in my enemy began to pool in the hand that I held inside of the hole I had created, and then steadily began to drip into the robotic body Technos utilized in his battle against me. I felt the robot try to back away, feebly, but it wasn't enough to escape me with my unbelievably strong telekinetic power. As acid began to eat away at his body I sensed more grass growing behind me and I began to feel a bit happy.
As acid entered him I commanded it to come to life, and I felt faint auras begin to emanate from the drops of acid I had forcibly begun to eat away at my foe with. At the same time, I ordered my shadow to go on the attack. The creature whose entire duty it was to protect me eagerly obeyed my order and began to surge forward to keep my foe distracted right as he began to fully recover from my attacks.
I watched as my shadowy minion grew in size to become able to stand up to the barrage of blows that was no doubt mere seconds from being thrown at him. I didn't envy the shadowy creature's immediate future as those swords were no joke. Technos fully recovered from his stunned state, right in time to begin to slash at the shadowy giant that was his newest enemy, and I watched as the now mobile deific ghost turned his hateful gaze at me.
He immediately swung one sword at my shadow, even as my shadow roared in fury and began its own assault on him. His other sword was swung at me, and I smiled in admiration at my foe. He was a brute, to be sure, but he wasn't a fool. He knew that even as my shadow bared down on him that I was a real threat, the real threat.
His swipe aimed at my shadow was a show, a performance. It was a trick. The blow was a feint and his real attack was the one aimed at me. I could tell because my enhanced senses picked up the lack of power behind the blow aimed at my bodyguard. The real blow was the one aimed at me, which was where my enemy was focusing his power. The blow he aimed at me was a sharp, devastatingly powerful one that probably would have been enough to cleave me in half had it connected. That said, even as I admired the divine ghost, I knew that his blow wouldn't work.
I sped my body up just enough for me to take a quiet breath. Behind me grass was continuing to grow and spread as the acidic oozes I had infused my enemy with continued to internally ravage him. The pain he felt was only adding to the internal fire of his blows and his true strike.
His feigned blow stopped short of the shadow I had sicced on him, and he committed himself to his actual blow and his real target. As his blade sped towards me I smiled at him and for the first time I closed my eyes and I unleashed the power lurking within me, not the power I had acquired as a god, as an elemental overlord, or even as a demon lord, but as an archfey.
I became an archfey mere months into my journey building my empire. At that point I had rescued thousands of faeries and they had, by and large, become willing and happy citizens in the empire I was building. I became an archfey by gathering some of them and forming my own court made up of them.
When I did that I saw a table much like the one I had seen when I became a demon lord. I had filled it out with much of the opposite of what I had selected when I became a demon lord. I wanted to keep my powers diverse and to best do that I had mixed up what domains and subdomains I could influence as an archfey.
As a demon lord, I was a being of death, darkness, and endless hunger. As an archfey, I was the opposite of that. A being of life, light, and satisfaction. And that brought with it a number of unusual abilities, not the least of which I was ready to utilize for the first time to defeat Technos, who after everything I had hurled at him was still a staggeringly powerful enemy and who was still very eager to cut through me.
In becoming an archfey I had become the king of summer and spring, and inadvertently I had gained the power to cleave through the enemy in front of me. I focused on Technos and tightened my grip on my golden sword as I activated the somewhat new, true power of the blade in my hand.
As the distance between Technos' swing and myself dropped, the blade in my hand began to glow. Technos' eerie, electric eyes focused on the blade as it began to radiate a tremendous amount of light. I smiled and swung my sword so that it would parry Technos' own, committed attack.
My entire body began to glow as I moved to counter Technos' fierce attack. In releasing my power as an archfey fully for the first time ever some of my new abilities were beginning to splendidly manifest in my moment of need. Though I was certain I could foil Technos' attack, this was a do or die moment and it would take all of my power as an archfey to cleave through my enemy's attack.
The draconic god before me began to frown as he began to feel quite confused. He had never seen me utilize my true power over light, he had only seen me unleash light-based powers in the form of the burst of "Disintegrating Radiance" which was how I had destroyed his robotic servants, but the truth was that that was just the beginning of my powers over light.
When I became an archfey I chose powers over light, fire, and air, and that synergy didn't just give me new powers over light it gave me something new. It gave me powers over the very concept of a "day" itself, as well as power over the seasons of summer and spring. That was in addition to new, breathtaking power over light.
One of the changes that those new powers gave me was the birth of a brand new artifact: "The Sword of Spring and Summer". The very blade that I held in my hands, the other form of my staff, the "Staff of the Lifebringer". My blade flew through the air dramatically and made contact with Technos' own blade, preventing it from successfully cleaving through me and he and I entered into a contest of strength and skill which made me begin to laugh.
I felt Technos' metallic body bear down on me as he tried to overpower me but that wouldn't happen. I had absolute physical strength, which was a way of saying that I had infinite strength on a purely physical level. And as I had learned during my first fight with Morehammer vestiges were not gods and could not match us in contests of pure physical power.
The fact that he himself was once a god and presumably he had some of the same basic traits as me and he chose to do this anyway struck me as quite odd. For a second I had to wonder if his memories were missing some things that would have caused him to behave differently during this battle. That said, his ignorance or his lapse in judgment was excellent for me.
As Technos continued, in vain, to attempt to overpower me, I audibly laughed at the futility of his efforts. As I continued to laugh I fully activated one of my powers: "Day inducement". This power was one that caused wherever I was, unless it was a dimension of absolute darkness, to be bathed in daylight, as if it were midday and the sky was perfectly clear even if there was no sun wherever the power was used. It was an incredibly powerful power under the right circumstances and was amazing if used for dramatic effect.
The skies above the battlefield, which had previously been ashy and overcast with a moon shining through a layer of clouds, were abruptly and supernaturally cleared, a process which took mere seconds. Impossibly, even without a visible sun in the newly clearly skies, daylight began to shine into the arena.
I finished repelling Technos' blade and the deity himself backed away from me and my shadow. There was a look of malice on his face as he backed away from us. I saw his eyes flash behind my ally and me and take in the sight of the grass behind us. When he gazed at it his eyes were subtly invaded by a spark of fear.
As he backed away from us his chest opened again and he opened his mouth. He was preparing for a new phase of our battle. Behind me perhaps a quarter of the arena had filled with grass.
"Ugh... I see that you are stronger than I believed. And also either a liar or a strange being capable of being contradictory things. That said, I shall slay you! Come, Althos... Let us end this battle!" He roared, as his own aura finally sprang to life in the form of a flood of tiny, transparent, robots, nanobots, that surrounded him and wrapped him in a forcefield or barrier of sorts.
I rose my hand holding my sword and pointed the tip of it at my foe. There was a calm smile on my face as I took in my enemy's fear and desperation. He was becoming unnerved and losing his edge, and now he was activating his abilities in a truly sincere effort to stop me. I was ready to end our battle and to claim the powers I would take from the corpse of my enemy, as well as a greater level of power and influence over death.
"I... The King of Spring and Summer, shall cut you down! I'll acquire victory, here and now!" I declared, excitement and pride audible in my voice.
My blade, already radiating primal, ancient light, was quickly coated in a layer of fire, and the shield in my hand began to exude an aura of gale-force winds. I was also an archfey with power over fire and air. I would use the powers of an archfey to cut down this infernal ghost and to become even greater than I had been when I entered this gravesite.
I knew that one way or another my battle with Technos was nearing an end and that to win I'd need to cleave through him. As my acidic oozes continued their unenviable task of devouring him from the inside out I knew that they were making my job easier second by second. I sped my body up to its maximum speed and I prepared myself to deal a crippling blow to my enemy, when he surprised me.
I had never seen an enemy capable of tracking me when I entered my true speed mode. At least not until today. Technos' eyes, which had frozen when I had done this before, moved slightly to follow me when I began to move at my true speed. That caught me off guard and caused my eyes to widen and my muscles to tense in outright surprise. Technos had adapted to me enough over the course of the fight that he was now capable of at least detecting hypersonic motion.
It turned out that Technos had a few tricks up his sleeve as well. What a strange, and annoying surprise. That said just because he could see me didn't mean he could stop me. If he could I was about to find out and it'd probably be less than fun, but if he couldn't then that just meant that he'd be able to watch me as I finished cutting him down.
