The red lightning peeled her body off the ground and reformed her at the Wraithstride’s flank in the same heartbeat, Stormblade crackling crimson in her grip, and the second Calamity strike came in at the throat where the dorsal plating ended and the unarmored neck began.

The detonation went off inside the body cavity this time. The Wraithstride’s spine separated at the base of its skull, the head rolled across the floor, and the lower body flopped sideways twitching.

[Companion Kill: invading Wraithstride (Level 95). +820 DMP.]

Then the Brute hit the Safe Zone.

Quadruped, stoneflesh hide running in slabs across a torso the size of a delivery truck, four legs the diameter of pillars, no neck and a flat broad skull that came forward like a battering ram. Each stride landed hard enough that Kaiden felt the tremor through the soles of his boots from twenty meters away.

It planted both forelimbs and stomped.

The seismic wave rolled outward in a perfect ring and the rock in front of it cracked in a fan pattern that ate Calypso’s first lunge whole. Her footing went out from under her at the apex of her swing and the axe missed the Brute’s forelimb by half a meter as the floor under her dropped six inches in one beat.

She rolled with it down to one knee, shoulder dipping under the second stomp, and her axe drove up from below into the forelimb’s joint with the full weight of her frame riding the haft. The blade bit clean through the slab plating along the joint seam and chunked into the bone-and-tendon underneath in a wet two-foot gouge, black ichor erupting up the haft and across her arms. Her own ribs cracked against the ground tremor on the follow-through. The Carnage Feast siphon lit her up.

Her grin was full Manifestation of Carnage now, all heat and laugh and no fear in it at all. Blood was running down her chin from where her teeth had bit through her lower lip on the impact, and it was already smoking on contact with the air.

The Brute’s forelimb did not come off.

The hide closed over her gouge while she watched, stone slabs sliding back into place along the cut, the bone-and-tendon underneath reknitting in real time.

"It repairs?!"

"Use your eyes and stop asking obvious questions, horned brute."

Bastet’s voice came clean from her stationary perimeter, the bite she still owed her favorite rival riding under regal calm she had already read three steps deep into. "Use your brutish body to fight the brutish enemy and become my aide. Keep him pinned and I shall take care of the rest."

"Haha! This kitty’s ego is growing bigger by the day!" Calypso roared but complied.

Despite their attitude, neither were acting truly feisty toward each other. This much was just their casual banter with zero bite.

Their running fight about who counted as Kaiden’s main monster lover was parked at the perimeter the moment the Brute had crossed the kill line.

Calypso closed.

She came in low under the Brute’s recovering swing, axe catching the leg above the joint, weight planted forward, body angled to draw the Brute’s pivot onto the line Bastet would need it on.

Bastet moved.

She had not taken a step since planting at the chokehold, and when her right foot lifted off the abyssal stone for the first time in the entire engagement and set itself down half a meter ahead of where it had been, the bare sole on the rock made a sound that did not belong to bare skin on stone.

It was a low resonant pulse the Cavern carried for three full beats, the abyssal floor itself answering her the way the court tile answers its sovereign, and the radial crack jumped outward by a full meter in the wake of the step. Her left foot came down next. Same echo. Same answer. The dominion field bloomed wider with every footfall.

She walked toward the Brute.

The translucent gold-threaded skirt lifted off her thighs in the pressure rolling out from her, gold anklets chiming against her ankles, bare midriff catching the Cavern’s amber haze and her chin tipped at the angle that meant the conversation was over.

Each unhurried step was its own Dominion strike, the ground bowing thirty meters in every direction under the woman who had decided to leave her plinth, and the Brute’s weight tripled, quintupled, escalated as she narrowed the distance between them.

"Now."

Calypso’s cue and Bastet’s next footfall landed on the same heartbeat. The Divine Dominion field caught the Brute mid-pivot, and the forelimb missed Calypso by inches and slammed into the rock harder than the Brute’s own muscles could brake against, the joint Calypso had cut and Bastet had now pinned blowing outward through the regenerating slabs from the inside.

Carnage Feast read the second wound as her own and stacked the buff again.

"You’re great, kitty!"

"I know."

Calypso came up off her knee with the axe rising and her ribs grinning blood through the smoke. She brought it down on the exposed shoulder joint while the dominion field held the Brute pinned, and the axe went through the slab plating on the second strike where it had bounced off on the first. The Brute screamed, low and rolling, and the Cavern’s haze shook with it.

[Companion Kill: invading Crag Brute (Level 107). +2,800 DMP.]

The pool jumped past six thousand.

The chat was outright enthralled.

— Thirsty247: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

— LapdogOfTheEmpress: ⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️

— NyxWorshipper: THE QUEEN PINNED IT FOR HER DEMONIC BESTIE WITH HER BARE FEET 😭😭😭

— TouchGrass: BROOOO

— Thirsty247: I need a monster girl lover in my life.

— Thirsty247: Curse you, Kaiden Ashborn!! Share the wealth! Stop hoarding!

— TouchGrass: Didn’t you beg him to be your master or something?

— Thirsty247: Yeah and I got ignored!!!!

Behind the cooling Brute, three more silhouettes were already crossing the threshold.

Two Wraithstrides came in fast, identical templates to the pair Aria and Luna had buried. Behind them, something that did not run.

It walked.

Spindle-thin, robed in a hanging veil of dark cloth, no visible feet, and a flat empty face that turned toward the chokehold and held the look one beat too long.

Kaiden read the body language and understood instantly: this was a caster.

Behind him, Nyx’s fingers had spread at her sides the way they only spread since the fusion, when the Spatial Drain reached out past her grip to taste the mana in the room around her. The Drain was constantly listening for mana to siphon, scanning every spatial fold within thirty meters of her body, and it had picked up two things the rest of the line had missed.

"Kai, his mana is doing two things at once. He’s casting under us instead of throwing and he’s wrapping a veil-shield around his body..." Her voice was sharp, working. "The wrap is going to eat hits. We have to crack the wrap first or the body underneath doesn’t take damage."

Then she tilted her head and grinned slyly, "Or so I believe. My new powers are weird..."

The Veilbinder’s robe answered her in real time. The dark cloth tightened into a layered shield around the spindle-thin body that ate ambient haze and gave back nothing, and at the same moment a single ribbon of dark mana detached from the veil’s hem and slid into the floor like ink into a sponge.

The floor under Kaiden went black.