Beyond The System-Chapter 275: Battle of Gods

The air felt cold with his words.
“What’s happening?” Mei whispered, pulling on her mother’s dress with small, shaking fingers. Amei didn’t answer, her eyes locked on the three in front of us. “Serith, I can’t Step, what—”
Serith cut her off with a stiff order. “Focus. Get ready to fight. I’ll take two.”
Drema began to laugh. Light at first, a thin, brittle sound, then expanding more and more until it was uproarious, then mad. He wiped a tear from his eye, straightening his posture after bending down. “Oh, Serith. You’re still so naïve. You really think—”
He didn’t have time to finish. A dark hole through space opened just next to him, its edges warping, a pulse-beam of dark matter shooting out. Serith had moved too fast for me to track, the precise formations of her arms forming in a sharp blur.
But Dream didn’t appear surprised. Neither did his older compatriots.
Boom!
The beam struck something solid, but not the man—elf himself. With his eyes narrowed and his voice gone cold, he chuckled. “I’ll admit your power has surpassed mine. But your ability to take advantage of what’s around you has not.”
A singular wall of ice now stood inches from his face, vapor curling off the cracked white sheet that had blocked my Guardian’s attack. The two men beside him began chanting in a deep tone, their voices low and resonant, the language unfamiliar and thick on their tongues.
The room began to change. Frost crept along the walls like an infection, spreading from their feet outward over metal and stone. My breath became visible in front of me, a pale cloud, and a chill ran up my spine.
“Peter, keep out of the way.” Amei’s went silent after that.
Her body shuddered in the next moment, muscles rippling beneath her dress as if something inside awoke. Alive and moving. Her pupils thinned, sharpening to vertical slits, and a low growl rolled in her throat. Fingernails elongated in a breath, curving into dagger-like claws. Blue bled across her skin in patches, scales surfacing along her arms and collarbone like a second, harder skin.
I was stunned looking at her, the resemblance in transformation to her daughter—other than the scales, but it didn’t end there.
Wings tore free from her back with a wet, sick sound. They were sleek and leathery, more dragon than bird. They snapped open once, throwing slivers of frost from the air around her, as if repulsing that cold energy.
Mei gasped, letting her mother’s sleeve go. “M–Mom…?”
Amei didn’t answer. Her eyes were sharp now. Predatory and fixed on the three elves.
Drema still stood between his two elders, smirking, frost crawling like veins from their feet across the metal floor and up the walls. The chanting from the older two deepened, harmonizing into a rumble that shook the air. Their lips moved without pause, hands tracing intricate, repeating patterns.
And somehow, even while chanting, they moved.
One elder slid to the side, boots leaving no prints on the forming ice. The other stepped diagonally, widening their formation.
One elder slid to the side, boots leaving no prints on the forming ice. The other stepped diagonally, widening their formation.
Serith moved at the same time.
She didn’t give any warning. There was no shout or signal. One breath she was standing in front of us, and the next she was gone. The air popped where she’d been as if space itself snapped back into place.
Dark tears split open around Drema.
Three at first, then a fourth ring of narrow, vertical slashes in the air, each one rimmed in a deep, pitch black. The pressure in the chamber spiked as they settled into place around him.
Pulse-beams of dark matter fired from them in rapid succession, lancing toward Drema and the elder at his left side from multiple angles. She had hung what was basically guns in the air, letting them fire all at once.
Drema’s smirk barely shifted.
He flowed between the beams, body tilting and turning with minimal movement, just enough to avoid damage. Like a ghost skipping through solid walls, he was efficient. Ethereal. Ice burst and reformed around him, the elder at his back dragging up slabs and plates of frost with each flick of his hands, patches of it thickening into armor as the beams struck.
At the same time, more portals bloomed around Serith herself. Two at her shoulders, one at her feet, another just ahead of her chest. She jumped through them with no understandable pattern, appearing in a blink at the flank of the older elf.
Blades of darkness formed around her hands, long and curved, thin as razors and absolutely black. The flashed at the rim with white, rotating like saws. She cut downward, a precise twin strike aimed to end the fight in one movement.
But even then, the chanting never stopped.
Ice surged up from the floor in a layered dome, catching her blades. The impact sent a deep vibration through the chamber. Cracks spiderwebbed through the ice as they strained against Serith’s power.
Drema’s voice rolled out over it all, calm and amused. “You really don’t understand,” he said, eyes tracking Serith and Amei both. “Even now. Your insistence on fighting like that is why you can’t win.”
He inhaled the next moment, chest expanding like a toad.
The air around his mouth warped, condensation freezing in place before it could drift away.
Then he roared.
But what left him wasn’t just sound. It was a torrent of cold so violent the metal floor beneath him cracked, bending at the will of the power. Frost raced ahead of the blast.
Serith pivoted, one of her portals snapping open behind her. The breath-attack slammed into it and vanished, swallowed whole, and then reappeared, funneled out through the smaller portals still hanging around Dream like an orbit.
The ice-blast hit him from three directions at once.
For a split second, his eyes widened. Frost erupted around him, wrapping his form in wild, uncontrolled sheets. Both elders shifted focus to assist, but Serith forced the other to stop.
Amei took that moment.
She was gone from my side in a blur of motion. Her beast-half carried her forward, wings tucking close, claws flashing.
She broke across the space like a mirage, her outline stuttering as she pushed against the frozen air. One instant she was mid-run; the next she was already in front the remaining elder, dagger-like claws arcing down toward his chest.
He smiled, his assistance perhaps already complete.
Hands continued their intricate patterns, fingers weaving sigils into the freezing air.
Clang!
Something stepped between them.
A humanoid figure formed out of the frost. It towered over her form, armor layered thick across its body, all of it a deep, unnatural blue. A knight of solid ice, helm smooth and faceless. It raised its arm as it finished coalescing, a shield snapping into being just in time to meet Amei’s strike.
The impact was difficult to describe. All of it was. Not the sights themselves really. But the power behind it all. Very blow shook space. Every strike sent a wave of motion that forced me a step back. It was all I could to even keep my footing, while assuring Mei’s as well.
The frost knight didn’t shatter. It held, feet grinding lines into floor as it was pushed back. It reacted just after, moving with unnatural coordination.
A longsword of the same frozen blue flicked into its other hand. The blade blurred as it slashed for Amei’s side.
CRACK!
It struck her scales with a sharp sound which sliced clean through the layered chaos of the battle.
Amei hissed, a mix between a human exhale and an animal snarl, staggering half a step.
“Mom!” Mei screamed, voice breaking, fingers clawing at my arm.
Amei’s head tilted just enough to see her, expression softening for the barest fragment of a second when it landed on her Mei. Then it hardened again. She pushed forward.
Her right hand began to glow, fire leaking from her fingers in wild tongues. At first it was the deep, familiar orange of normal flame, but it condensed fast, sucking in on itself, growing smaller and impossibly bright.
The color shifted from orange to yellow to a searing white that hurt to look at. The air around her palm warped, the edges of her claws blurring, heat so intense it turned the frost around her to steam.
She punched the golem. There was no sound this time. Existence itself refused to tolerate the summon. With a touch, it vaporized.
The knight’s forearm and shield disappeared in an instant, that whole section of its body turning to mist and scattering. The remaining ice couldn’t hold form. Fractures raced across it from the point of contact, and the entire construct exploded into glittering light.
The elder’s chant faltered, a syllable catching in his throat. His expression twisted, control slipping. He went pale.
But only for a moment.
His jaw clenched, hand moving to slice the other open. He forced the cadence back into place, words resuming at a faster, almost desperate pace. His hands blurred as his pallor grew even whiter.
Two more shapes rose from the ice at his feet.
More knights. Each one slightly different. One broader, shield larger; the other leaner, sword thinner and longer. Both charged Amei at once with frightening speed.
Amei met them head-on, wings flaring, claws igniting in residual heat as she darted between their swings and thrusts. Each clash sent out rings of sound and energy.
The battlefield had become too terrifying. The difference was too clear. I was nothing to these people. Serith’s past indifference made sense. Beyond sense—it was natural.
Her dark tears and beams carved lines through the air; Dream and his other elder turned the environment into a shifting fortress of ice. Amei was locked in a brutal, close-quarters dance with summoned frost warriors, fire and scaled flesh against living ice.
And me?
I held Mei close, my arms tight around her shoulders, keeping her pressed against my chest.
I was shaking.
Not from the cold, but from helplessness.
I knew why this was happening. It tugged at me from within. The same way the Kingdom’s attack on the island did. This is because of me.
If there had been a plan laid out before, a conflict building, then it had been hurried at most. But even that I doubted. Something had shifted because of my presence in the layer of creation, because of what I was.
Drema didn’t care about some treasure
on
me.
I
was the treasure.
Not a weapon to wield or a tool to bargain with, but food for something beyond him. A demon from a higher plane that saw me as a nothing more than a resource to be consumed.
Anger twisted with fear. I didn’t know what to do.
Luna’s presence was quiet at the edge of my mind. Wyrem’s coiled inside me, his usual bragging nature gone. They’d both told me the same thing.
Keep back. Protect the girl. Don’t be stupid.
I could feel their emotions too. They weren’t unlike mine. We all felt… useless.
So I stayed where I was.
The ground shook under another collision.
Ripple.
It rolled through me. A feeling in the air. In my empty surroundings. But it was—something was off.
The sounds of the battle pulled thin for a heartbeat, like they were being dragged away down a deep bog.
Step. Step.
The sound was faint. But it felt wrong. Distant yet close at the same time, like it was happening in another room but bleeding through the walls. I tried to turn my head toward Mei.
Nothing happened.
My neck wouldn’t move. My eyes stayed fixed ahead. My fingers dug into Mei’s shoulder, but not because I told them to. It was like my body had been caught mid-action and pinned there.
Terror spiked through me.
It was familiar. Carved into me from my ending moment. I had felt this before death.
Kris.
His power. Time was locked down. And yet, the god-like beings moved without care. Only Mei and I were frozen.
Energy began to circulate inside me in slow, stubborn loops. Force, pushing against the invisible pressure that held everything in place. Panic overwhelmed me.
Move.
My thoughts didn’t reach my internal passengers as I tried asking for any kind of help I could.
Move.
Step. Step.
The steps came closer.
Step.
Step.
They stopped just behind me.
I screamed at myself in my own mind.
MOVE!
Force surged inside my body, straining against whatever Kris had done. It moved faster than ever before, breaking some restraint I’d never felt before. Water, Natural, and Fire Force suddenly twisted with one another, threads tightening.
Something inside me clicked.
Changed.
Connected.
Harmonized.
I blinked.
My vision had changed. A river of flow and color. My Spiritual Sense detecting something pushing against it from behind.
Then, I moved.
My arm snapped back on instinct, body twisting with a speed that I’d never experienced. My hand closed around something solid mid-swing.
A hoof.
It was inches from Mei’s head, frozen there, muscle bunched in the middle of a kick that never landed.
Fury bloomed within me.
My promise was forgotten.
Kris’ eyes were wide with a shock on his twisted face.
I didn’t think.
I pushed that energy within me. Using the clarity of this breakthrough to its full advantage.
Force roared down my arm in a perfect mixture of Water’s smoothness, Natural’s grounded assistance, and Fire’s explosive bite. It converged in my palm, wrapping around the hoof like a vice.
Cr—cr—crackle.
BOOOOM!!
The detonation shook the chamber.
Light and pressure exploded outward in a focused blast. Kris was hurled back, skidding across the metal.
“AHHHH!”
A raw scream tore from his throat as he clutched at his leg, now a brutalized mass of shredded flesh and shattered bone where the hoof had been.
Finally, the chanting had stopped.