The giant's voice thundered across the fairytale world.
"Overwrite, Battlefield Apocalypse."
The Overwrite embodiment that Veneri had been fighting simply disappeared, dissolving into red particles that scattered across the sky. The sky turned crimson, stretching endlessly over the world. Above that blood-colored sky hung a moon that made my stomach churn.
The moon was black and from its surface, rivers of blood trickled down its surface.
The fairytale farmland beneath us did not survive the transformation. All of it vanished. Where those villages once stood, there were now only endless plains of cracked black stone.
The villagers who had survived the collapse of the sky castle did not even have time to scream. They turned into ashes. Thousands of tiny gray fragments collapsed to the ground where they stood. The Overwrite was too strong for them.
I clenched my teeth as I watched the ash scatter across the black ground.
"Damn…"
The earth started moving. At first I thought the tremors were from Elyonari's battle with the giant somewhere beyond the mist. Long fractures ripped across the black stone plains. And from those cracks, hands emerged.
The first giant pulled itself from the earth slowly. It stood nearly six meters tall now, with its body made entirely of rock and fractured stone plates that formed crude armor over its body. Its eyes glowed red.
And then another one emerged. Five more materialized. Before I could even finish counting, the entire battlefield was crawling with them. More than ten thousand rock giants pulled themselves of the ground.
And when Veneri spoke next to me, his voice was calm in a way that felt almost absurd considering the apocalypse unfolding around us.
"Each one of them is around the Fifth Enlightenment."
Luciana immediately looked like she had just been sentenced to death.
"We're doomed."
I can't blame her. Ten thousand enemies at the Fifth Enlightenment level in a world rewritten by an Overwrite? Yeah, that math was not looking good.
But Veneri simply sighed.
"Not quite."
He raised one hand casually and a massive Mystic Circle appeared beneath our feet. The Mystic Circle beneath us rotated slowly, composed of structures that contained thousands of microscopic runic inscriptions constantly rearranging themselves.
Physical Runes began manifesting directly onto our bodies. They burned onto my skin like glowing tattoos, forming patterns across my arms, my shoulders, my back and even along my spine. My thoughts became clearer, faster and more focused. I was stronger and faster. Jack blinked several times in disbelief.
"What the hell kind of magic is this?"
Veneri didn't even look at him.
"It's not magic. It's Mysticism. To be more specific, it's my Tenth Mystic Circle, an Enhancement Mystic Circle."
Luciana stretched her fingers experimentally. Her eyes widened.
"This is ridiculous."
"I know. It enhances physical capabilities by ten times. Strength. Speed. Reflexes. Endurance. Concentration."
Jack slowly grinned.
"Okay… that's actually insane."
The rock giants began advancing toward us. Their footsteps shook the cracked plains as they marched. Veneri turned toward me then and his expression changed.
"Phae. Use my energy freely now."
"You sure about that?"
His answer was blunt.
"Holding back means death."
Above us, a massive shadow suddenly swept across the blood-red sky. Griselda descended in front of us. Her voice echoed down to us.
"We should assist Elyonari!"
Veneri immediately shook his head.
"No."
"That giant—"
"The only way we help her is by killing these. The Overwrite is fueling both the battlefield and the giant itself. The more of these we destroy, the weaker the Overwrite becomes."
"And the giant?"
Veneri looked toward the distant mist where Elyonari's massive silhouette clashed with the eighty-meter monster.
"The giant will be weakened too."
Griselda considered that for about two seconds. Then her giant goose form dissolved into golden light. The massive bird shrank rapidly until a human figure stood where she had been. Standing before us now was a woman with flawless white skin and long flowing white hair that reached her waist. Two enormous goose wings spread from her back. She was actually beautiful.
Jack stared openly.
"I did not expect the goose to be beautiful."
Griselda gave him the most unimpressed look imaginable. Veneri ignored the exchange entirely. He extended his hand toward Jack and Luciana. The Nanorunes he usually carried (we always had extras just in case we would meet allies and help them) activated instantly. Metallic particles moved around to them before assembling into sleek black armor that coated their entire bodies.
Luciana flexed her fingers as the nanotech armor finished covering her entire body, even the head.
"This is perfect."
Jack immediately tested his.
"How do I—"
"Your armor can generate weapons," Veneri said casually.
Jack raised his hand experimentally. A sword materialized instantly in his grip.
"Okay, this is nice."
Luciana had already moved on to something far more ridiculous. She opened her inventory. Thousands of her puppets emerged, armed and ready to fight.
"Let's play."
At that moment Veneri finally activated his Divine Transformation. His taller frame looked radiant. That was when I finally stopped holding back. I let myself access his pseudo-cores. Hie energy flooded into me.
"Oh… this feels good."
Griselda spread her wings. Luciana commanded her puppet army. Jack twirled his newly created sword. Veneri simply stepped forward.
"Alright. Let's clean this battlefield."
My primary body fought alongside the others on the fractured black plains but at the same time my awareness existed in dozens of places at once. I didn't recall my separated consciousness earlier when the castle collapsed and now those fragments become something invaluable.
They floated across the battlefield and through them, I saw everything. The first thing that became painfully obvious was something I had underestimated.
Jack was terrifying.
He was cutting through creatures made of solid rock. One of my consciousness fragments hovered above him as he moved. A rock giant lunged toward him. A fist came down toward him but Jack did not retreat. The blade cut through the giant's arm like it had sliced through soft clay instead of ancient rock.
The sword reversed direction into a horizontal cut. The giant's head was separated from its body but Jack didn't even pause to admire it. Another giant approached him from behind.
My consciousness reached him instantly.
"Left."
He shifted without hesitation. The giant's fist smashed into the ground where he had been standing half a second earlier. The blade tore through the creature's neck and shattered its skull from below.
"Thanks for the warning Miss Phaenora."
I didn't bother replying. There were far too many things happening at once.
My perception shifted again to Luciana, who had turned the battlefield into an actual one. Thousands of puppets moved under her command. A puppet twice the height of a human tackled a giant directly. Its reinforced limbs locked themselves around the creature's torso.
The giant crushed it. Stone fists from other giants smashed the puppet's body apart but not before the puppet's internal mechanisms triggered. The giants were blown apart. Another puppet leapt forward immediately, driving a spear through the others.
Luciana stood in the middle of the chaos, giving orders.
"Advance three rows. Move left. Sacrifice units twelve through twenty."
Her puppets obeyed without hesitation. Some of them were destroyed but every puppet that fell took multiple giants with it. Still, something felt wrong.
Every time one of the rock giants died, more rose from the earth. The cracks in the black stone plains widened further. New giants clawed their way out of the ground, replacing the ones that had fallen.
Luciana noticed it too.
"This is going to become endless if we don't reduce the Overwrite!"
She wasn't wrong. The giant's energy was feeding the battlefield itself. As long as the Overwrite remained active, this army would never truly disappear.
My awareness shifted again. Above the battlefield, golden light could be seen through the blood-red sky.
It was Griselda.
Her massive white wings sliced through the crimson clouds as she flew at high speeds above the battlefield. Her palms glowed with brilliant gold. Every time she thrust them forward, streams of molten golden light poured downward.
The beams struck the rock giants and instantly, the creatures were coated in gold. The metal spread across their bodies, locking their limbs in place.
That was when Griselda descended. Her wings folded sharply as she dove and she struck the ground like a meteor. Her fist slammed into the black stone plains with devastating force.The impact produced a shockwave, causing the golden statues to shatter. Entire clusters of rock giants were obliterated in a single moment.
Griselda rose from the crater slowly, flexing her wings.
"Next."
My perception shifted again and immediately, everything else on the battlefield felt extremely slow by comparison.
Veneri stopped holding back. Well, not completely but it was enough to make the difference obvious. He wasn't using Magecraft. Instead, he had chosen Weapon mastery.
One moment he stood surrounded by ten giants. The next moment, time slowed down and in that tiny window of altered time, stone limbs were separated from bodies.
When time resumed, dozens of giants collapsed simultaneously. And because of the enchantment Phase Slash embedded into Calimostria, they did not come back.
The weapon could cut incorporeal beings. That meant the Overwrite could not reconstruct the creatures he killed. Also, Veneri didn't stop there. He slammed the weapon into the ground.
Crystalline blue growths erupted across the battlefield, spreading over dozens of giants and encasing their bodies in hardened sapphire.
The creatures struggled, cracking the crystals. Many of them broke free but that had never been the point because the moment they shattered the crystal, they were perfectly aligned.
He used the First Plenituse Technique, Viridescence.
A perfect horizontal arc of blue energy came out from the glaive. The slash traveled across the battlefield like a sweeping wave. Thousands of giants were caught in its path. Stone torsos were separated cleanly. The wave carved a line across the plains that stretched for kilometers.
When it finally dissipated, thousands of giants were completely gone.
And then there was me.
My main body stood near the center of the battlefield, surrounded by shattered rock corpses and sapphire fragments glittering under the bleeding moon. Unlike Veneri, I spent far longer training with sapphire manipulation.
When the next wave of giants approached me, I raised my hand. Sapphire sprouted from the ground into a of crystal spears. Dozens of giants were impaled instantly. Their stone bodies were skewered and lifted off the ground by the rapidly growing crystals.
When I clenched my fist, the spears shattered and the trapped giants exploded into fragments.
Another group rushed toward me. Sapphire condensed around my arms, forming hardened crystalline gauntlets. The first giant swung its massive arm, causing me fist to collide with the stone limb. The sapphire coating and the enchantment amplified the impact so violently that the giant's entire arm shattered from the elbow down.
I followed with a kick. My leg, coated in blue crystal, slammed into the creature's torso. The impact crushed its chest cavity and launched the six-meter giant like it weighed nothing.
Three more giants surrounded me. My consciousness fragments immediately warned me.
I turned.
A sapphire projectile formed instantly in my palm. The crystal spike pierced through a giant's head and exploded out the back of its skull.
Another giant lunged but I ducked beneath its arm and drove a sapphire-coated elbow directly into its abdomen, shattering the entire torso. And while all of this happened, my distributed consciousness never stopped moving.
One fragment watched Jack. Another monitored Luciana's puppet formations. One hovered near Griselda in the sky and another was close to Darling and Ely. Whenever danger appeared, I intervened.
A sapphire wall appeared just in time to block a giant's attack that would have crushed Jack. A crystal spike appeared beneath a rock giant that had nearly reached Luciana's command position. A warning reached Griselda moments before a cluster of giants attempted to leap into the air toward her.
The battlefield was full of chaos. And somewhere beyond the mist, the massive silhouettes of Elyonari and the eighty-meter giant continued their titanic duel.
The real battle was still happening there but here, we were tearing apart the giant's army piece by piece. That's when I focused on my fragment with Elyonari.