The sheer quantity of magical power born from the 50 chain links broken was such that the wind around me was pushed away, and black smoke, magical waste of some kind, rose from my body like a torch of black flames.

I pushed the jaws that had closed on me open with just my hands, and split them apart, sending broken shards flying everywhere as the black smoke surrounding me healed the wounds of my body. And I just stood there, floating in the air.

“Yes… YES! You finally showed your true self! Now, give me the highest war, God of Death!”, Tanka screamed, opening his mouth, and shooting an orange beam of burning light.

The attack looked as if it was moving through honey, however.

I looked at my own two hands, feeling lost. Half of me was not the same anymore… No, the memories of a long, lonely torment for beyond time were just as part of me, as that Coyote who couldn’t hurt a crayfish from months ago. I hadn’t lost anything, it was just that I had gained so much more, the time I spent as Skyblue seemed smaller and smaller, less and less significant, and what lay beyond the fifty-first seal called for me like a morbid obsession. I was forgetting something, and it lay just beyond that barrier.

But a tiny portion of me refused to be diminished anymore, it clang for control over that body, and it wished to save the only people in the world whom I could still care about. Skyblue insisted on doing at least one thing right in his lifetime.

So, I extended my palm forward, and stopped the beam of fire coming from the wolf’s mouth, the attack diverging in between my fingers and bellow my palm, and hitting the city around with third level explosions and fire that exterminated the untrained just by perceiving it.

“Oooh! You can stop a concentrated dragon’s breath with just one hand…! Great! Great! Give me your all, God of Death, attack me! Let’s fight! Let’s wage war right here and right now! I have waited enough!”

“There’s no war to be waged”, I said, flying straight to the huge wolf, already just centimeters away from his face when he noticed me. “BOOM!”, I punched Tanka in the face, and sent him flying a hundred meters away, his body digging a long trench in the ground. I could have killed him with that hit, but I would surely send the whole city into the sky if I did so, and I preferred to avoid unnecessary losses if possible. Plus: “Tell me where Mari and the others are.”

“Hua!”, Tanka got back up on shaking limbs, and spat a mouthful of blood on the ground. “M-Marvelous! I’ve only ever felt this overwhelmed once before!”, the wolf conjured six balls of fire around itself, and with a bark, they all shot forward in pillars of fire straight against me.

I, however, opened both hands and conjured a single projectile, but thirty meters across. My flames engulfed Tanka’s, and hit the wolf like the ocean against the coast, the fire breaking its form, and scattering all around the grass plain around the Bear Mountain.

“Argh… A-Argh…!”, a carbonized carcass of a wolf wheezed, half sunken into molten glass.

I floated closer to the enemy, and questioned him once more: “Where are they?”

Before Tanka could move its blackened jaws to answer me, however, I saw a string of red shinning magical waste flowing from the huge wolf, and a thousand more places, straight to the top head of the Bear Mountain. His life's magical energy, and that of many more people, were being absorbed somehow.

“What…?”,

“It is… Too… Late… Now”, Tanka whispered with its last breath, and completely sank into the molten sand below him.

I flew to the Bear Mountain faster than the wind could move, and there I found every apprentice and visitor clinging onto the leathery walls of the place and looking sickly pale, being drained almost to death. Looking around, I saw that the victims were using cursed items and that they were draining their users and turning them too weak to even take their cursed items off.

Having a bad feeling about what that meant, I flew to the head of the Bear Mountain, where I found a group of people around a certain familiar object: the shrine from the Rock with Wings. All the stolen energy seemed to be concentrated inside the object. And around it…

“Grace”, I found the kind old tree woman touching the shrine, while Mari, Dam, Dust, Splash, Gailardia, and Glance were around her, tightly locked in place by thick wooden branches covering even their ears and eyes. “So, it was you behind Tanka all this time?”, I slowly floated to the ground beside the tree-woman, but she didn’t spare me glance.

“Yes, god of death, it was me”, I didn’t need to hear anything anymore. I threw a punch at her that should be strong enough to explode her body and vaporize her blood, but before I could touch her, I felt something wrong, and I fell to one of my knees. “And I was the one who made sure this relic would be put inside the Bear Mountain with its other treasures when Tanka’s pack invaded this place.

Do you even know what this relic does, Coyote? It is a preying device from tribes long gone. It allows many people to prey to a single deity, to share their magic and move the god with their will alone, for the deities understood there was nothing to gain from helping lower beings. I just used it in the reverse way, to drain all of the fools who sought power through someone else.

And I was the one who made sure the Great Games would happen, that you would see your friends die before your eyes, that you would unlock enough of your true power to fuel my plans, not differently from the fools whom I supplied with cursed magical items.”

For the first time since I woke up as Skyblue, I felt as if my magic had a limit, I knew I wouldn’t be able to conjure as many spells as I wanted, and that felt so extremely claustrophobic, tight, imprisoning.

“But I still have more than enough power to deal with you”, I forced myself up, feeling as if chains were pulling in the opposite direction of my every move. I tried to look for whatever was sucking my magic up, and my hands found a small green pebble inside one of my pockets with a prea sculpted in it. The same stone Grace gave me when I became part of the Order. I crushed it with my bare hands, and the relief was instantaneous, and I felt as if I had finally broken through the surface of the water and filled my lungs with breath again. “It’s over.”

“Yes, it is. You are too late”, Grace said, still fixating her gaze on the relic before her.

I readied myself to finish the tree-woman with a single punch once more. I lunged. And I was thrown a full kilometer away from Grace in the blink of an eye.

I hit the ground below with such a force, that even my basically divine body was harmed, hairline fractures appearing in my ribs and spine. I gasped for air, my mouth and nose full of blood. I curved myself forward, and my left arm was hanging lose. I put my shoulder back in place and, confused, searched for what had happened.

Then my eyes ended up on what seemed to be the result of all my actions up to that point. Something inevitable, something that sent chills down my spine even at that moment.

My sealed destiny.