The battle had been raging for fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes of blood, fire, and screaming that felt like hours.

  Casualties were mounting on both sides.

  Soldier count: 412 remaining. Cultist count: 627 remaining. Spawn count: Uncountable. They kept emerging from the fissures Wilhelm had opened.

  Axel stood in the center of the crater, his cleaver dripping with ichor and blood. His body was covered in cuts and burns, but he barely felt them. Every wound just fed more power into his Dominion of Wrath.

  "Is that all you've got?!" Axel roared at Wilhelm, who stood fifty meters away surrounded by a writhing mass of spawn. "Your Mother's 'blessing' is nothing but parlor tricks!"

  Wilhelm's charred face split into a grin. "Parlor tricks? You haven't seen anything yet."

  He raised his stump toward the sky. The blackened flesh began to crack, revealing pulsing red tissue beneath. "The Mother whispers to me. She says... you are worthy fertilizer."

  The roots covering the crater floor pulsed in unison. Every corpse, every severed limb, every drop of blood began to sink into the biomass. The battlefield was literally consuming the dead.

  "Shit!" Daniel screamed from his position near the crater's edge. "He's absorbing all the casualties! We need to burn everything!"

  "On it!" Steven thrust his hand forward. The temperature dropped so fast that moisture in the air crystallized instantly. Frost spread across the roots in a wave, freezing them solid. "Let's see your garden grow through absolute zero!"

  But Margarethe countered. Her umbilical tendrils, still extending from her ruptured abdomen, began secreting the black ichor. Where the fluid touched the ice, it melted. Where it touched the frozen roots, they thawed and resumed growing.

  "You cannot stop life with cold," both her mouths said in harmony. "Life always finds a way. The Mother ALWAYS provides!"

  She gestured toward a cluster of frozen spawn. The ichor splashed across them, and they began to move again, their bodies steaming as warmth returned.

  Ralph's eyes narrowed. His runes spun faster. "Law Inscription: In this designated zone, all biological regeneration is reversed."

  The effect was immediate and horrifying.

  The roots began to wither. The spawn started decomposing in real-time, their flesh sloughing off their bones. Even Margarethe's tendrils began to necrotize, turning black and crispy.

  "NO!" she shrieked. "What have you done?! You've twisted the Mother's blessing into CURSE!"

  "That's exactly what I did," Ralph said coldly. "Because your 'blessing' is an abomination that shouldn't exist."

  Brother Klaus roared in fury and charged directly at Ralph. His massive frame covered the distance in seconds, fists raised to smash the Archon into paste.

  But Axel intercepted.

  The collision of two Mythical-rank fighters created a shockwave that knocked nearby soldiers off their feet. Axel's cleaver met Klaus's chitinous fist, and the sound was like a cannon firing.

  "You want someone to fight?" Axel grinned, his eyes completely red now. "Fight me, goat boy!"

  "You dare mock Mother's gift?!" Klaus swung again, his other fist coming in from the side.

  Axel didn't dodge. He took the hit directly to the ribs. Bones cracked. Blood sprayed from his mouth.

  And he laughed.

  "That's it! Hit me harder!" Axel's Endless War Engine passive activated. The damage converted into pure rage energy, making his muscles swell even larger.

  "Every hit just makes me STRONGER!"

  He swung his cleaver in a brutal uppercut. Klaus tried to block, but the force was too much. The blade cut through the chitinous armor on Klaus's arm and bit deep into flesh.

  Klaus staggered back, his goat eyes wide with pain. "Impossible! The Mother's armor is—"

  "Worthless against real power!" Axel pressed the attack, his strikes coming faster and harder. Each swing released crimson shockwaves that carved through the ground.

  "You're just a big goat in fancy armor! And I'm the butcher!"

  Their fight carved a path of destruction through the battlefield. Soldiers and cultists alike scattered to avoid being caught in the crossfire.

  Meanwhile, Sister Helena had found her way to the medical tents at the crater's edge. Wounded soldiers lay there, being tended by field medics.

  Easy prey.

  "Blood Orchard," she whispered, her split tongue flickering. She touched a wounded corporal's chest.

  The soldier's eyes went wide as he felt something change inside him. "What... what did you—"

  His chest burst open. Black tendrils erupted from the wound, writhing like snakes. The tendrils lashed out, catching another wounded soldier, then another, spreading the infection.

  "MEDIC!" someone screamed. "THE WITCH IS IN THE MEDICAL AREA!"

  Kai, Ash, and Jack rushed toward the commotion, their weapons raised.

  "Get away from them, you crazy bitch!" Kai opened fire, his rifle on full auto.

  Helena moved like liquid, dodging between the bullets. Her filed teeth gleamed in the firelight. "You cannot kill what the Mother has already claimed! We are ETERNAL!"

  She lunged at Kai, but Ash tackled her from the side. They hit the ground hard, rolling, Helena's claws scraping across Ash's armor.

  "She's stronger than she looks!" Ash grunted, trying to pin her down.

  "That's because she's S rank, you idiot!" Jack fired point-blank into Helena's side.

  The bullets hit, tearing through flesh. But Helena just smiled. "Pain is a gift. Wounds are gardens. You're just planting MORE SEEDS!"

  The bullet holes in her side began to sprout. Small mouths opened along the wounds, tiny teeth clicking together.

  "Oh that's fucking disgusting!" Jack backpedaled, his face pale.

  Helena kicked Ash off her and rose to her feet. The mouths on her body began to hiss in unison. "Feed. Grow. Multiply. The Mother's will be DONE!"

  A shadow fell over her.

  She looked up just in time to see Steven descending from above, his entire body coated in ice armor. His blue eye blazed like a star.

  "Eternal Polar Sovereign," Steven said quietly. "Flash Freeze."

  The temperature around Helena dropped to negative two hundred degrees in an instant.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  She didn't even have time to scream. Her body crystallized, ice forming inside and outside simultaneously. The mouths on her wounds froze mid-hiss.

  Steven landed in front of the frozen statue that used to be Sister Helena. He tapped it with one finger.

  She shattered into a thousand pieces.

  "One down," Steven said. "Three to go."

  But the cultists had seen. Dozens of them surged toward Steven, screaming their devotion.

  "HE KILLED SISTER HELENA!" "BLASPHEMER!" "FOR THE MOTHER! AVENGE THE MATRON'S SISTER!"

  They threw themselves at him in a suicidal wave, weapons raised, eyes blazing with fanatical fury.

  Steven sighed. "You people really don't learn, do you?"

  The air around him dropped to freezing. The charging cultists slowed as hypothermia set in. Their limbs grew stiff. Their breath came in gasping clouds. One by one, they collapsed, their bodies shutting down from the cold.

  "You're all insane," Steven said, looking at their frostbitten faces. "Throwing your lives away for a god that doesn't care if you live or die."

  A dying cultist looked up at him, lips blue but still smiling. "The Mother... cares... she welcomes us... into her garden... we are blessed..."

  "You're delusional," Steven said.

  "And you... are blind..." The cultist's eyes glazed over.

  Ralph saw Helena's death from his position. Three Mythical-rankers left: Wilhelm, Margarethe, and Klaus. Good. The odds were improving.

  But the spawn count was still too high. Wilhelm's Thousand Young Eruption was maintaining maximum capacity. Two hundred minor spawn and ten elites, all constantly being replaced as they died.

  "We need to kill Wilhelm!" Ralph shouted into his radio. "Take out the source and the spawn will stop!"

  "Easier said than done!" Daniel's voice came back. "He's surrounded by those things! We can't get close!"

  "Then we don't get close!" Ralph raised both hands. Runes materialized by the hundreds, forming complex patterns in the air. "We hit him from HERE!"

  The runes aligned into a massive array. This was high-level magic, the kind that took minutes to cast and consumed enormous mana.

  "Starfall Manuscript: Final Chapter!"

  The sky above the crater turned white. Not with light, but with magical density so intense it was visible to the naked eye. Constellations appeared, but these weren't the ones from before. These were larger. Brighter. More ancient.

  Wilhelm looked up and felt something he hadn't felt in years.

  Fear.

  "PROTECT THE SHEPHERD!" Margarethe screamed. Her remaining tendrils whipped toward Wilhelm, trying to create a shield of flesh.

  But Ralph's magic was faster.

  The constellations descended as pillars of pure erasure. Not fire, not force, not any elemental magic. This was the magic of deletion. Of removal. Of unwriting.

  The first pillar hit the biomass around Wilhelm. The roots didn't burn or explode. They simply ceased to exist, as if they had never been there.

  The second pillar hit the spawn. A hundred minor spawn vanished in an instant, their existence scratched out of reality's ledger.

  The third pillar was aimed directly at Wilhelm.

  The Black Shepherd raised his stump, and from it erupted his ultimate defense. "Black Meadow Awakens!"

  The battlefield transformed.

  Black roots exploded from underground, so many and so fast they created a forest in seconds. They intertwined, forming a dome over Wilhelm and the remaining cultists. The roots were thick as tree trunks, pulsing with eldritch power.

  Ralph's pillar hit the dome.

  Reality itself screamed.

  The roots resisted deletion. They had been empowered by Wilhelm's ultimate, infused with the authority of Shub-Niggurath herself. They couldn't be simply erased.

  But they could be damaged.

  The pillar burned through layer after layer of roots, carving deep into the dome. Wilhelm felt every root that died, the backlash hitting him like physical blows.

  "MORE!" Wilhelm screamed, blood pouring from his eyes and nose. "GROW MORE! THE MOTHER PROVIDES!"

  The roots regenerated as fast as they were destroyed, pulling nutrients from the corpses buried in the biomass below.

  The two Mythical-rank powers clashed directly. Deletion versus Creation. Erasure versus Growth.

  For ten seconds, they were perfectly matched.

  Then Ralph coughed blood.

  The spell was too much. Too complex. Too powerful. Even for an Archon, trying to delete something backed by an Outer God's authority was pushing the limits.

  "Sir!" Daniel called out. "You're overextending! Cancel the spell!"

  "Not... yet..." Ralph pushed harder. The runes around him began to crack, the magical structure destabilizing. "Just... a little... MORE!"

  The pillar broke through.

  It pierced the dome of roots and struck Wilhelm directly in the chest.

  The Black Shepherd's body began to erase. His charred skin, then the muscle beneath, then the bones, all of them simply ceasing to exist from the point of impact.

  Wilhelm looked down at the hole forming in his chest and laughed. "So this is the power of the Archon! Magnificent! TRULY MAGNIFICENT!"

  He raised his head toward the sky. "But even if you erase my body... my faith remains! The Mother has already SEEN US!"

  His body convulse.

  He activated his last ability.

  "Womb of the Outer Grove: RELEASE!"

  All the parasitic entities he'd been storing inside his body burst out at once. Not spawn. Not minor creatures. These were eldritch horrors that Wilhelm had been cultivating for years. Entities that should never have existed, fed on his own vitality and now unleashed upon the battlefield.

  Five of them emerged from where Wilhelm's body had been. Each one was unique, each one was nightmarish, and each one was hungry.

  They hit the soldier lines like a tsunami.

  Screams filled the air as the horrors tore through ranks. These weren't mindless spawn that could be gunned down. These were intelligent predators, each with their own abilities, each designed to kill efficiently.

  "FALL BACK!" someone screamed. "FALL BACK TO THE PERIMETER!"

  But there was nowhere to fall back to. The crater had become a killing field, and they were trapped in it with monsters that shouldn't exist.

  Axel saw the chaos and roared in frustration. He was still locked in combat with Klaus, neither able to gain a decisive advantage.

  "Your shepherd is dead!" Axel taunted. "Give up! Your god abandoned you!"

  Klaus headbutted him, their skulls cracking together with bone-shattering force.

  "The Black Shepherd is not dead! He has returned to the Mother's embrace! He is MORE ALIVE THAN EVER!"

  "Then join him!" Axel activated Cataclysmic Bloodstorm at full power.

  The battlefield around them turned red. Not metaphorically. The air itself took on a crimson tint as Axel's rage manifested as physical reality. Every swing of his cleaver released shockwaves that carved trenches in the ground.

  Klaus took hit after hit, his armor cracking, his body breaking. But he was Mythical rank. He could take it.

  Until he couldn't.

  Axel's cleaver finally found a gap in the armor. The blade bit deep into Klaus's neck, severing arteries and cutting through spine.

  The massive cultist fell to his knees, blood gushing from the wound. But he was still smiling.

  "I die... for the Mother..." Klaus whispered. "My body... becomes... her garden..."

  Axel raised his cleaver for the final blow. "Your body becomes FERTILIZER!"

  The blade fell.

  Brother Klaus, the Goat-Eyed Warrior, died.

  Two Mythical-rankers down. One to go.

  Margarethe stood alone now, her body a horror of ruptured flesh and pulsing tendrils. The Grand Birthing was still active, but she was weakening. Her body was producing spawn faster than she could sustain.

  "IT DOESN'T MATTER!" she screamed, both mouths working in unison. "YOU'VE ALREADY LOST! LOOK AT YOUR SOLDIERS! LOOK AT THE BODIES! WE'VE ALREADY WON!"

  And she was right.

  The soldier count had dropped to 298.

  Nearly half the force was dead or dying. The crater was covered in bodies, and Margarethe's tendrils were still converting them. Every soldier who fell became another spawn to fight against their comrades.

  Ralph collapsed to one knee, his mana nearly depleted. "We need... to end this... now..."

  Steven stepped forward, his ice armor cracking from damage but still intact. "I've got her."

  He walked toward Margarethe, frost spreading with each step. His blue eye blazed brighter than ever.

  "You're the last one," Steven said. "Surrender. Let us treat your wounds. We don't have to keep killing each other."

  Margarethe laughed. Both mouths, laughing in harmony. It sounded like madness given voice.

  "SURRENDER?! To you?! You who deny the Mother's love?!" Her tendrils whipped toward him.

  "I would rather DIE than abandon my faith! My body is HERS! My life is HERS! Everything I am BELONGS TO HER!"

  Steven dodged the tendrils. "Then you'll die for nothing."

  "NOTHING?!" Margarethe's body convulsed.

  "I die for EVERYTHING! I die for the future! For the transformation! For the day when the Mother walks this earth and remakes it into PARADISE!"

  "That's never going to happen," Steven said quietly.

  He raised his hand. The temperature plummeted.

  "Because we're going to stop you. All of you. Every cultist. Every spawn. Every last trace of your Mother's influence."

  Margarethe screamed and charged, her body a mass of tendrils and mouths and writhing flesh.

  Steven met her head-on.

  The clash of ice and flesh echoed across the crater.