A flash of blinding light.
Larfleeze glanced over at the sound—and watched one of his bull-shaped constructs split cleanly in two. Lantern-wraiths could regenerate quickly enough that under normal circumstances he wouldn't have cared. But the two halves of the bull construct caught fire instantly, and in under three seconds they were ash. No amount of orange-light energy poured back into it could restore it.
"That sword—I want that sword! Somebody take it from her!"
He didn't grasp the danger. He was already screaming orders.
His constructs were unlike anyone else's—they possessed genuine life and awareness, yet remained under absolute ring-control. The skills of their original bodies carried over, however dimly, and so the attack that came now was not a mindless swarm. Energy blasts, projectiles, blades, and blunt weapons converged on her from every angle.
Thea didn't flinch. She hadn't used the holy sword seriously in a while—most enemies she'd encountered lately didn't require it. A few required something no sword could fix.
But somewhere in that barrage she heard Larfleeze's voice again—sharp, possessive, dripping with bottomless want—I want that sword—and the last of her patience burned away.
She hadn't felt anger like this in a long time.
It rose without warning, total and consuming, as though a furnace door had been thrown open in her chest. She didn't fight it. She let it in.
Worm-shaped constructs: bisected from head to tail. Eye-cluster constructs: she plucked out the eyes. Ones with too many tongues: she cut the tongues off. Ones with too many limbs: she cut those off too. Her sword carved through the horde in wide, unhurried arcs, and everything it touched turned to burning ash. The lantern-wraiths were phantoms—cutting them down didn't bleed off her rage. It only made it worse. She cut faster.
The planet's surface was being reshaped around her. Her blade-wind gouged channels into the rock, pulverized boulders to powder, and sent debris spiraling into the pressure, which used it as ammunition. The already-ravaged landscape grew more desolate with every pass.
"You piece of garbage. I'm cutting your head off today."
Her divine presence blazed. Over a thousand ring-wraiths had fallen to her blade—possibly closer to eight hundred, but the number stopped mattering—and she carved straight through the outer layers of Larfleeze's defenses without slowing, heading directly for him.
Behind the wall of constructs, Larfleeze looked into her eyes. What he saw there was not just killing intent—it was contempt at the level of a higher life-form regarding a lesser one, looking through him as though he barely counted as a subject of attention. He had never once experienced that before. And for the first time since he'd claimed the orange ring, he felt it: real fear. Did I miscalculate? Should I run?
The golden radiance of her Wealth divine seat was blazing in his mind like a second sun. He'd never seen anything like it—and having seen it, he knew on some animal level that if he let it go, he'd spend the rest of his life in agony for it.
Greed crushed the fear. He gritted his teeth and held his ground.
He sent the God of Hunger forward.
"Where do you think you're going!" She switched the sword to her left hand and thrust her right palm outward, channeling divine power into a wide-area soul pulse—targeted directly at Larfleeze's position.
The invisible shockwave rolled through the constructs without touching them. Ring-wraiths had no independent souls; the pulse passed through them like wind through smoke. Larfleeze was another matter. He was still alive, still his own being, and the direct hit launched him backward a dozen meters (roughly forty feet), blood pouring from his mouth, his mind a white blank.
"I'm taking your head!" She kicked off the top of a construct's skull and shot forward. One clean strike, and this ended.
A colossal suction force hit her like a wall.
The God of Hunger had moved. It crossed her path at an angle, and now its mouth—ten meters (thirty-plus feet) wide, gaping open to maximum—was between her and Larfleeze. The suction that poured from that maw was immense, irresistible, forcing her to break off and strike back rather than push through.
The angle of her approach became untenable. She stopped, turned, struck back—and bought Larfleeze just enough time for his constructs to regroup around him. Seven or eight different energy barriers snapped into place. Whatever trick she'd used on his mind earlier, he'd fortified against it.
"Ha!" She didn't even sound surprised. "The Guardians told you where to find me, didn't they. Those miserable old cowards."
It wasn't really a question. Those ancient meddlers had been alive for hundreds of millions of years. Planting a surveillance device or two in her general vicinity was nothing for them. Setting an orange-ring lunatic against her cost them absolutely nothing. If it played out badly for Larfleeze, no loss. If it kept Thea occupied—also a win.
"Today, there's no one coming to save you." The anger in her chest burned green-edged and red-hot together. She raised her gaze, eyes lit from within, and fired two beams directly at Larfleeze.
Green channels with traces of red fury: the light was more vivid than any she'd ever produced, burning brighter than before. The beams curved around the constructs lunging to intercept, tracking their target, converging on Larfleeze —
"AAAHH —!"
He ran. For the first time in his long, greedy life, Larfleeze ran. His survival instincts were strong—he'd climbed from a small, cautious creature on a lawless planet to the undisputed king of an entire star system, and those instincts had saved him more times than he could count. Nothing had ever set off his internal alarm the way this did.
He dove, twisted, sprinted. The beams tracked him perfectly.
In less than two seconds, he would be out of time.
The God of Hunger lunged sideways and put itself between him and the beams.
She tried to angle past it. The Hunger God opened its mouth to maximum width, and the suction that poured out was enough to bend the beams' trajectories—to pull them off course through raw gravitational force, strong enough that debris tore from the planet's surface and the planet's orbital path visibly shuddered. The construct's blank, dead eyes flickered with something that looked briefly, impossibly, like relief.
The beams disappeared into that vast maw.
The God of Hunger crumbled from the center outward, cracks spreading in all directions. Then it was dust.
"Ugh—"
Thea pressed the heel of her hand against her temple. It felt like someone had driven an iron rod through her skull. Her vision went dark at the edges, and her thoughts scattered. Her spirit force surged into turbulence, and she had to force it flat again through sheer will.
A God of Hunger—not a fake or an inflated lesser being, but a genuine New God, even a depleted one. Annihilating it left a mark.
She stood with her eyes half-shut, slowly rubbing her temple, frowning hard, pressing the disturbance in her spirit force flat a fraction at a time until the worst of it passed.