The atmosphere in the arena instantly shifted into a terrifying tone. Bernard stopped his defensive moves and stood motionless in the middle of the oncoming Jane. His entire figure began to resonate with an intense, pulsating magenta energy so bright that it simply burned away the shadows on the walls of moon glass. The bowler hat on his head suddenly began to float by itself and spin violently, with the bright magenta light slicing from its edges like lasers.
“With all due respect, young ladies,” Bernard spoke, his voice calm yet heavy with a pressing, royal authority that vibrated through the entire arena. “You underestimate the walls of this world. A true king does not move with the storm, he IS the storm. Allow me to remind you of the true meaning of absolute speed.”
Using only his thoughts, Bernard directed the hat. The object spun so fast that it transformed into a razor-sharp, whirring saw that began to multiply in midair. Two, four, eight, sixteen hats filled the sky until it became an impenetrable wall of magenta steel.
Then the most bizarre thing occurred: Bernard himself was snatched into one of his own hats with a loud swisssh and disappeared completely from sight. The swarm of hats immediately formatted itself into a raging, giant tornado of magenta metal and razor-sharp edges. The destructive force of the hat tornado was unprecedented. Lila’s meters-thick vines and creepers were mowed to shreds like thin grass and chopped into millions of pieces. Jane, who was running across a vine just a moment ago, lost her balance completely due to the brute suction and was dragged along with the wall at breakneck speed, fighting against the fierce gusts of wind that sliced her skin open.
In the middle of this absolute chaos, Abysia’s divine aura truly erupted. Abysia let out a cry that shook the dimension to its foundations. The feminine, elegant contours of her figure began to distort and crack beneath a sudden, brute heat surging from her deepest core.
“You think you possess the strength to survive?!” Abysia thundered, as her form began to morph and grow larger, her monologue turning into a divine decree. “Look at me! The gods of old were not fragile beings hiding behind pretty words! We were the architects of war! We forged the continents with the heat of our muscles and the brute force of our will! The form you see now is the foundation of pure destruction, the prehistoric truth that the Corrupted God wanted to erase!”
The silver light around her caught fire and burned into a blazing, cosmo-energetic blaze that sucked the oxygen out of the air. Her silhouette became titanic, broader, more massive, and terrifyingly larger. Her graceful figure transformed into an ancient, titanic warrior form: rock-hard, divine muscles lying like steel cables beneath her skin, her chest expanding into an impenetrable armor of pure energy. Her silver hair turned into a wild, flaming crown of lightning and her jawline became sharp, merciless, and dominant. This was no human change, but the awakening of a prehistoric monster from the beginning of time, a divine warrior defying the laws of physics with her sheer presence.
“Bernard!” roared the transformed Goddess of War, her voice now a deep, heavy bass that vibrated the bones of the girls. “Bring the tornado to me! Let us see if these teenagers break under the weight of a true deity!!!”
The girls flew backward from the brute air pressure, but panic failed to arrive. Although they had seen enough blood and misery to remain serious for the rest of their lives, the teenage adrenaline was now rushing through their bodies so bizarrely fast that they almost had to laugh. The ancient energy of the cake was unstoppable. As they braced against the storm, all three of them thought of only one thing: that ridiculous, divine pastry.
Jane recovered her balance on a snapping vine, her eyes glowing blue as she slammed her claws together and broke out aloud into her own monologue. “You cannot be serious! That woman is totally out of her mind with her prehistoric stories, but that cake? What the hell was inside it?! I feel like I just chugged an entire lightning strike and can wreck the world all by myself! If this is what a divine pastry does to your cells, I am eating ten of them every morning from now on! That old butler can spin around all he wants with his little hats, but I swear to you, I have become far too fast for that magenta nonsense. This is my field now!”
Lila landed with a smooth slide in the middle of her giant purple flower, her hands pressed deep into the pulsating energy stream as she shouted her own monologue across the battlefield. “Jane, shut up and focus! But seriously, she is right! My powers do not even feel like a burden anymore! It is as if that cake activated some kind of magical battery in my stomach that simply refuses to go empty! I recycle everything! I feel so bizarrely strong, like I can make this entire arena bloom with thorns in one single stroke and just pluck Bernard’s weird hat tornado right out of the sky halfway through! We are seriously not going to lose this, girls, no way!”
Nyx floated undisturbed through the icy gusts, her liquid silver hair dancing like flames while her ice crown glittered. Even her royal, proud posture could not hide the pure, sixteen-year-old excitement of the cake catalyst as she burst into her monologue. “It is the ancient bloodline. That cake has tamed the void inside me and turned it into a weapon of pure perfection. I feel no more doubt, no fear of the depth. Abysia can transform into whatever she wants, it makes no difference to me. With this void energy, I will freeze all of creation if I have to. We are not scared children anymore. We are going to show them who the real rulers of the night are!”
Shoulder to shoulder, the three girls stood amid the magenta tornado and Abysia’s blazing titan fire. Their powers exploded, their mouths were still tight with adrenaline and sugar, and with broad, defiant teenage grins on their faces, they stepped straight toward the divine chaos.
In the middle of the howling magenta tornado and Abysia’s blazing titan fire, something happened that the gods had not anticipated at all. Jane, Lila, and Nyx looked at one another. Their eyes locked, the absurd teenage adrenaline from the Mooncake surged through their blood, and suddenly all three of them burst into loud laughter at the same time. It was a fierce, overconfident laugh that sliced right through the brute violence of the battlefield.
They stood there in their full, terrifying forms, but the heavy gravity had completely vanished.
Lila opened her hands with a broad, defiant grin. “Catch them if you can, grandma!” she called to the transformed goddess, slamming her fingers deep into the obsidian sand.
The hundreds of seeds that had been floating through the air like innocent dandelions throughout the entire battle exploded in unison. The air filled with a blinding, deep purple glow as a dense, kinetic network of meters-thick, thorny vines erupted from the seeds in a fraction of a second. The creepers snapped right through the spinning magenta tornado with the sound of whip cracks, abruptly breaking the gusts of wind open.
Before Bernard or Abysia could react, Nyx shot forward at a terrifying speed, her liquid silver hair trailing behind her like a burning tail. With her pitch-black void hands, she grabbed Lila and Jane ruthlessly by their ankles. The void energy crackled around her arms as she began to swing her own body like a possessed axis.
“Wait, what are you going to do?! Nyx, not so hard, I am going to throw up!” Jane shrieked, as her legs lifted off the ground at breakneck speed and she sliced through the air like a living propeller.
Nyx ignored the complaining with a broad, mischievous grin on her face, brought her rotation to boiling point, and hurled the two girls free with brute, divine strength. They shot away like two glowing, destructive comets setting the sky ablaze. Right at the moment Jane and Lila reached maximum, unnatural acceleration, Nyx opened a pitch-black hole directly in front of herself. With a loud pop, she imploded into the void and teleported with perfect timing right into the shivering slipstream of the speeding girls.
The trio merged into a triple fireball shooting straight up into the sky. Jane, who was completely packed with adrenaline, let out a wild cry and fired a giant jolt of pure neon blue light. The electrical discharge functioned like a rocket engine doubling their speed once more, causing the air pressure around them to snap. At the absolute peak of the acceleration, the neon blue jolt returned in a hissing arc as Boa. The giant lightning snake wrapped itself roaring around the three of them, embedding the whole trio inside a pulsating, crackling armor of pure blue plasma.
“This is so epic!” shouted Lila, who was hanging upside down with fluttering hair while the lightning blasts detonated wildly around her ears.
With a brute change of course, they slammed hard into the floating web of vines Lila had left everywhere. The elastic creepers, filled with ancient energy, did not break; instead, they bent deep and launched them back in the opposite direction with insane momentum. They ricocheted like a possessed pinball at light speed across the entire arena, from vine to vine, the walls of moon glass vibrating loudly and spewing purple sparks at every impact.
While the three of them kept hunting through the space like a heat-seeking plasma flame, Lila was not sitting idle either. With giggling abandon, she tossed closed, heavy flower buds through the air during flight that remained floating like biological mines. Simultaneously, Nyx hurled massive, razor-sharp chunks of ice downward from her void hands, which embedded themselves into the obsidian ground as meters-high glacial peaks with a loud crunch. Just as the entire room transformed into a minefield of lightning, ice, and vines, Nyx stealthily opened a giant black hole directly beneath them and teleported all three of them in a single flash straight up into the clouds, high above the battlefield.
The tornado subsided and the titan flames dimmed a fraction. Bernard and Abysia, both with slightly tousled hair, looked up at the total, flashing wreckage. Abysia, still in her massive, broad warrior form, suddenly burst into a screeching, booming laugh that shook the walls. Bernard could no longer maintain his calm mask either and burst out laughing, trying to straighten his limp, scorched suit with a broad grimace.
“Phew,” Abysia managed between laughs, wiping a thick hand across her forehead where the deep muscles were still wet with sweat. “That almost ended badly!”
Bernard shook his head, his eyes glistening with pure amusement as he adjusted his tie. “It very well could have! What a bunch of idiots!”
In response, their gaze was drawn to the side of the arena, straight to the laughing, Grotesque Cat standing undisturbed beside the hourglass. The hourglass was almost finished; the last grains of sand hung on the verge of falling.
Abysia and Bernard took another close look. The Grotesque Cat had somehow gotten the legendary Shine-Block onto its furry snout. It was a clumsy, hand-forged frame of dark iron, without temples, strapped tightly behind its large ears with a leather strap. Instead of glass, it held two paper-thin, deep dark plates of obsidian that filtered the bright magenta light and the silver gleams of lightning perfectly. The cat wore these medieval sunglasses with an unprecedented, arrogant air, as if sunbathing on a royal beach.
As the two divine beings watched, the cat slowly raised one paw. A single, sharp claw of the cat pointed straight at the sky with a theatrical gesture.
Above them, the sky began to tear. The incoming, deafening sound of a crashing comet filled the dimension, combined perfectly with the loud, overjoyed, and harmonious laughter of Nyx, Jane, and Lila, who were clearly having far too much fun up there.