Loki looked around himself.
'This is not…ba-'
Right then Loki spotted a spirit body thread across the corridor, one he didn't immediately recognise and paused to change his words.
'...good.'
…
A few minutes earlier.
Loki ducked, barely dodging a flying eye that spawned out of the bloody mist in the air as it shot another thick beam of light towards his head.
In the same moment however, Loki felt his body freeze.
'Huh!?'
A strange sense of weakness washed over Loki's senses as he began to hear the quietness of death approaching within the distant echo of his mind.
His thoughts that had been flying at speeds comparable to light slowed down. The once chaotic mess inside his head started to turn into a soothing lullaby.
His control over the shadows around him blocked by the Mentor of Deceit characteristics shattered, but the tide of creatures they were holding back didn't arrive.
Instead, the shadows cascaded everywhere.
Like a smooth gradient, expanding ever so slightly in an infinite manner before covering his entire vision as if wanting to swallow him whole.
And he could do nothing but watch as his mind slowed down to a crawl since he had accepted the bribe in the form of a flesh rose earlier which made him weaker to his enemy.
Except Loki wasn't helpless.
Had it been earlier, when he was still a mere Sequence 5 and couldn't split off worms of time, Loki would've failed miserably to save himself.
'So Grindelwald's here? And he's interfering so blatantly? Why don't I see him then? Psychological invisibility?' Loki's mind spat out the conclusion his decryption abilities had given him prior to when his mind had slowed and concluded in an instant when the event had started.
And as such, the reaction his mind had prepared in that moment occurred belatedly.
Loki's hand automatically flicked, his mind pointed at his spirit body thread which he stole instantly.
Except a few excruciating moments of what felt like hours of silence passed as Loki watched the shadows slowly expanding in his vision before-
'...Huh!?'
-Loki's head slowed to a sluggish crawl.
He was barely having a thought anymore, much less a stream of ideas.
Nonetheless, his limited capacities didn't resort to fear.
Instead, Loki's figure flickered momentarily as the beam of light spawning from the eye he'd just dodged passed straight through him before solidifying right as it ended, giving any observers the illusion that he was formed of air and the beam of light had passed right through him.
A worm in the Sefirah Castle had automatically stolen his space and sent him into the Sefirot through their shared connection with the help of the Mentor of Deceit Characteristics.
He left an illusion in his place of course and since he was only gone for a moment shorter than a moment, it went unnoticed as he cleansed himself in the grey fog.
Loki who'd just reappeared in place of the now gone illusion, looked at the shadows that had already receded and then at the Demigod who had put him in such a state in mere moments and frowned.
'...death envoy?'
A shudder passed his spine as Loki realised the domain of Death seemingly had no effect on spirit body threads and brought death in more…mysterious ways.
He hadn't seen his fate get bent to death or even warn him about what had happened.
'Is it because the death was not confirmed?' Loki thought but immediately ruled out the question since he'd have at least felt a sense of danger wash over him if that was the case.
But he'd felt nothing, not even in the moment he was about to die if he did nothing. It had truly blindsided him and taken him by surprise in this case.
It was all a bit too…
'Sudden?' Loki thought but didn't have the time to pursue said thought since he suddenly felt a grave sense of danger from every wall around him.
Loki watched in surprise as the blood mist that had condensed on the walls and the ground suddenly solidified.
Not into blocks of ice or even rivers of blood.
No, they solidified into a flesh rug.
Loki cursed internally while thinking of the Demigod who was stuck inside the 'Safe Room'.
He'd initially thought that the demigod was staying in there since he'd been hurt by Loki's attempt at Parasitising him earlier, especially because of the loud heavy thud on the iron door from earlier.
'Never did I think they'd employ every technique to kill me…'
'They're even camping inside unreachable areas…'
'What the hell is this!?? Who balanced this level!?'
'First there's the True Creator camping in the Shadow Realm, then there's his minions camping in closed rooms. And then there's Grindelwald camping somewhere I can't see him, probably waiting for the right moment to strike when I least expect it!?'
'Why's this lobby filled with so many campers and tryhards!?!?'
'....whatever…I'll definitely have the last laugh since time is in my favour…I just need to bait out the last demigod…'
Loki paused for a moment before he added while feeling a little ominous.
'....at least until the True Rapper doesn't show up…'
While Loki raged about the shitty matchmaking, the Demigod who'd just unleashed the Death Envoy wasn't so calm.
His eyes widened as he realised that Loki seemed to have tanked what was a summon of a fully digested Sequence 5 Gatekeeper after being debuffed by a bribe and then proceeded to stand there normally like nothing had ever happened with all the damage fully reversed.
Even he'd have been coughing up bits of flesh to force his body to discard the pieces touched by death if he were to be touched by the call from beyond the veil.
His eyes narrowed as the heat in his blood burned with a raging frenzy.
'The boy has already learnt not to mess with our thoughts after the first time he used it on 'E' and was detected…it's just like Lord Templar told us! The boy learns fast!'
'...but we must not let Lord Templar down…for that would be letting down the Lord!'
While the plan had been shifted slightly ahead of schedule because of Loki arriving so deep into their trap unharmed and without any interruptions, time was still on their side.
As long as they could stretch the battle out even to just a few more minutes, Loki would slip eventually, and with the three of them there they'd make sure they'd do their darn best to make it happen right when Lord Templar arrived at their location.
He'd wondered why Lord Templar hadn't just arrived through the shadows, but kept the thought to himself for he wasn't a traitor who would question his authority.
The demigod suddenly raised his hand while making a strange gesture towards the now freed shadows.
His fingers first just bent unnaturally, as if flexible to the point of being able to flex backwards, but soon they bent enough to touch their own knuckles causing Loki to almost gag at the demigod in disgust.
With his fingers bent backwards, the shadows that were once stuck to the space around them bent unnaturally causing the walls they were a part of to crack visibly and audibly.
Loki kept one eye on these new shadows as he nimbly dodged the flesh and blood bombs exploding on the fresh flesh rug that was created to encompass the entire area.
He thieved the flesh from a couple dozen, causing them to explode on the spot, sending flesh and blood flying in a smaller range than otherwise as they splattered on to the rug itself and merged with it to form another fresh new round.
He ducked underneath another batch of thick fleshy projectiles that were flying towards him and about to explode before deceiving them of their targets, sending them barreling towards the second Demigod who was striking the same pose from earlier with his fingers curling backwards.
Loki frowned lightly and checked the shadows.
'No movement?'
The shadows hadn't budged after they'd cracked the concrete.
'What is he doing?'
It seemed that whatever the Demigod was doing hadn't worked, yet.
'...Emoting?'
'But he hasn't even killed me…'
'...at least not yet.' Loki thought as he sent a few more projectiles the Demigod's way while exploding a few more by thieving their flesh away.
And while he hadn't expected the projectiles to do much of anything, Loki frowned when the Demigod simply let them collide with his body and then merge into it.
'What is this? Anti friendly fire!?'
He was about to flick his wand at the demigod who was stuck posing when a vague premonition of danger however alerted Loki's senses.
Not from the shadows, but from the air around him.
Though he wasn't given time to think about it since, almost instantly, Loki felt a shift in fate of the world around him.
The explosive flesh and blood all around him had corroded the floor which caused him to misstep.
His feet, usually extremely balanced and well positioned for escape at a moment's notice, had not expected to lose footing so suddenly.
His posture followed his slip.
His knee buckled as he landed directly in the path of a freshly forming fleshy projectile.
At that key moment just as Loki was about to recover and dodge the projectile, the posing demigod's head snapped in his direction.
In an instant Loki felt his feet slip magnified.
What was a movement of a few centimeters turned into nearly an entire couple meters as Loki performed a mid battle split as his entire body tumbled towards the fleshy rug that was simply waiting to entrap and merge into him.
Loki fought for control but only managed to change the outcome by a little.
He was still in the projectile's way, however he managed to save himself from the rug, holding back at the last second as he only stepped onto it with a single foot instead of planting himself face first into it.
In the time it took to think about a reaction, Loki's hands moved automatically.
A spell slipped out wandlessly, torching the rug underneath his feet that was reaching over while his eyes locked onto the flesh bombs flying his way.
'...it's so poorly made..' Loki commented mentally, noting how the flesh bomb wasn't as spherical as before as if created in a hurry.
'…are they even trying to stall me anymore?' His thoughts wandered mid battle.
'It's becoming so obvious that they're holding back and waiting for the Templar to gang up on me all at once…' Loki frowned.
He reached out with his mind and stole the flesh of the bomb like before, causing it to blast with him just out the radius, except-
'Huh!?' Loki exclaimed as a throbbing ache filled his head.
Fate seemed to have interfered again.
The flesh bomb that Loki stole this time was different.
In retrospect a different shaped 'grenade' should've instantly sent Loki's bells on alarm but he wasn't a flesh connoisseur.
You couldn't fault him for not noticing changes in one piece of meat from another, at least not until you factored in his sensitive vision.
Loki's nose bled in spurts as an explosion of corrupting information hammered away at his head.
He flicked his hand in a quick attempt to save himself but even after he'd attempted to steal the information bombarding his mind the theft after a long time-
'Damnation!'
-failed.
And as if on cue, the corrupting information in his mind exploded in a raging tide.
Occlumency helped almost instantly as Loki's mental defences he'd formed using runes pointing to Salazar and himself worked along with the worms of time on standby in the Sefirah Castle to keep his sanity as he was bombarded with images of the True Creator.
Loki flicked his wand this time.
His spirituality poured into his mind to strengthen his mental defensive framework that was being rapidly corroded while in the real world Loki flicked his wand again.
Mens Velox Acus
Loki used the spell and targeted it at the corruption within his own mind.
However fate betrayed him once again as the spell meant for the corruption in Loki's mind was Distorted!
Loki sensed the distortion at the last second as he intensified his control over his spell to fight it off, alas he could only do so much while his mind was listening to a Rap God.
The spell targeting his own occlumency defences barely veered off course and exploded inside his mind in the already corrupted region.
It happened in the 'enemies' territory of the corrupt information, but given its uncontrolled nature due to him empowering it so heavily at the last second, Loki felt even worse.
He felt a strom surge up in his Body of Heart and Mind.
If he were to wager, Loki was sure not even the bravest of souls would go surfing in his polluted sea of subconscious right now given the dust that had just been kicked up.
Loki remembered seemingly random things.
From the pattern of dust on Chadwick's tactical gear to the number of times he'd blinked. From the dark night of the second year when the flying car crashed into the whomping willow to crimson moonlight on the willow tree right before his reincarnation.
His mind was a mess of memories.
He felt nostalgic about simply living as his memories of settling into this life floated by while simultaneously feeling distraught at the fact that it had changed him into something completely unrecognisable from before.
He felt anger, the small spark of dissatisfaction at his innocence being ruined was amplified and distorted further!
An undetermined amount from an undetermined source as the chaos of information in his mind mixed with the flickers of corruption that tried to use his memories as embers to spark fire within his own mind.
'Which one is it!? I'm gonna murder that coward and leave his camping body to rot in the sun so that he can touch grass!!!!!' Loki complained to himself with seething rage!
'This whole thing would've been so much easier if I simply stole their abilities! But no! Their stupid pathway loses control instantly if I do that!!'
His senses worked overtime to think while combating the raging storm within.
But he didn't have to think for very long, the answer was clear.
Loki decided almost immediately that the demigod inside the MCCC's office was responsible for manipulating fate.
Firstly because the demigod in front of him was still posing like there was no tomorrow.
Secondly because Loki traced the spirit body threads of the things around him which had had their luck suddenly changed, and instantly felt them all bend in a single direction, towards the inside of the MCCC's office.
If he couldn't decrypt things after this he should've just parasitised a bug and lived its life until it died.
However, Loki wasn't given time to breathe , collect himself or even directly retaliate.
With a sharp spazz, the world around Loki shattered momentarily.
Space itself fell through as Loki found himself staring at the top of his head and the back of his head at the same time while also seeing himself in a mirror that was reflecting his arse.
The world seemed to have become a kaleidoscope of reality.
It was in this moment where his perception was heavily distorted by the second posing Demigod that Loki felt the fate of the world around him rapidly shift.
This time however, instead of seeing their fortune, Loki noticed their clear and assured plunge to death.
And so, Loki used the Mentor of Deceit Characteristics once again to deceive the Beyonder ability distorting his senses and did the next best thing he could do immediately, he flipped it back at his enemy.
Loki's world cleared and he was given a short pause as the fate of the world around him started to recover once again but he didn't allow for it to be manipulated.
With his arm outstretched, Loki split off even more worms of time from his body, irrespective of the consequences and threw them into the room with the help of his mentor of deceit characteristics.
Loki felt his mental stability decrease rapidly but it was nothing beyond what he could handle.
Instead he focused on a singular thing.
He needed to take out the Demigod who'd grazed a Beyonder of the Monster pathway as soon as possible.
He couldn't let something as silly as luck ruin his carefully thought out plans.
Loki's concentration reached its peak as his mind split on maintaining the several worms of time that had split off from his body while also simultaneously keeping an eye on the posing demigod to prevent him from using any crowd control or distortion abilities to ruin the precarious balance he'd set up.
But he didn't really have to worry about that since the Demigod was currently reeling on the floor. Retching and pouring everything into his own orifices while screaming 'LORD!'
The worms of time teleported into the room, expanding Loki's senses to give him a complete image of what was inside it-
A half broken man, split right down from the middle vertically, lay in a pool of his blood on the floor, fused with it completely, as his remaining body was slowly being unraveled like a ball or yarn by the Demigod right beside it to 'fund' the heavy consumption of flesh and blood that was being used in a fight beyond his understanding or comprehension.
The MCCC was alive.
And he was horrified.
His half lips moved. Barely. As he tried to speak his astonishment and surprise to the voices in his rapidly devolving head, but even that failed after the demigod suddenly pulled a large amount of flesh from the body to form a wall of flesh and blood!
The MCCC could only look on with horrific terror as he saw and felt his body split apart, cell by cell, before being reconstructed into a thick cloak around the Demigod which blanketed him completely.
The MCCC was still alive!
His eyes hovering around like loose buttons, dangling from their nerves, spinning on the flesh blanket, looking eerily at everything around they could look at.
They soon paused however since they met another pair looking directly at them. These ones were a deep crimson red and carried the slightest but sharpest hint of danger.
A slit for the mouth opened underneath them as a tongue slipped out and licked them.
On the other side of the heavy metal door, 'He defended!?' Loki thought, surprised. 'How did he detect that?!'
Almost in the same instant Loki felt the dip in his fate smoothening, as if it never existed.
'Coincidence?' Loki almost believed, but stopped when he remembered what he'd just seen on the other side.
The MCCC was on the floor near the door.
Which meant that what produced the THUD from hitting the thick metal door at the start of the fight wasn't the Demigod being infected by Loki's parasite attack and flinging himself on it but him throwing the MCCC at it.
'He grazed a Beyonder from the Abyss pathway?' Loki concluded since if the Demigod stopped cursing him with misfortune, it could only mean that he'd chosen to use the abilities of another grazed soul, one which could detect danger after he'd enhanced his own luck.
Loki's however continued with his plan as he remained unconvinced for the need to modify it and within moments, the worms of time teleported previously to the MCCC's location who he thought to be the Demigod, were stolen once again and split apart with one group sent under the flesh cloak that the Demigod wove to protect himself, while the other went directly into the spirit world.
Since the other party was a demigod, Loki could damage 'Him' as long as he damaged his Physical, Mental or Spiritual bodies.
And since the Mental body was left hard to attack since Loki was currently dealing with his own Body of Heart and Mind being in turmoil, Loki chose to directly attack through the Spirit World.
With his rapidly recovering luck, Loki's plan worked!
What was a case of a Demigod of the Hanged man pathway simply using someone from the Abyss pathway to detect danger instantly turned into a nuisance as his radar simply fired off a large amount of warnings that overwhelmed him.
Loki had simply designed a million different methods for each worm to kill its target, trapping the man in an endless cycle of prophetic illusions and visions unless he stopped using the Grazed soul, but to stop he had to first exit the visions, an endless loop powered by the rate at which Loki was thinking of new ways to kill the demigod.
It might not have been enough on its own, but Loki used the Mentor of Deceit Characteristics once again to deceive the Demigod's sense of danger, making him confused about which of the worms were more dangerous than the others! Forcing him to rely on the visions to attack or dodge them!
Right at that moment however Loki acutely felt his legs sink.
Not because he'd lost footing this time, but because the ground suddenly turned into a toxic swamp.
Except before he could pull his legs up Loki felt the world around shift at a drastic pace, moving upwards until he hit what felt like a truckload of poison as his entire body drowned in pain.
Something had grabbed a hold of his shins and dragged him under!
Within moments Loki found himself gurgling in a thick sludge filled toxic lake that constantly corroded his skin and attacked everything they touched.
It proved to be a struggle simply to stay alive.
His eyes were first after his skin as they began to melt, his teeth and nails were next as they rotted while small fungi began to sprout from their insides filling his mouth and throat, choking him as they showed no signs of stopping.
They rushed to his head, hoping to amortise his mind!
Forced to keep his eyes shut as they continued to melt, Loki stole a bundle of fungi with a swift theft, but since that didn't do anything to stop them or put a dent in their progress, he directly deceived them!
Except, in doing so he had to stop his assault on the previous Demigod who he was using the Mentor of Deceit characteristics to make the eventual parasitisation easier.
Amidst this assault Loki felt an indescribably large sense of danger rushing towards his back.
His melting skin curled up with the chills he felt as he ducked low barely dodging the fast moving black Greatsword that was aimed at chopping his head off.
Except, it seemed to have been a feint.
The Black Greatsword that had attacked Loki suddenly exploded!
The already close black blade suddenly shattered into tiny fragments, each shooting at Loki with speeds capable of putting any automatic rifle to shame as they reached his already corroding body and put several more holes into it.
However they never went past.
Instead like the fungi and the sludge they lodged into his wounds and began to fester within them to weaken him faster, attacking his already weak mental body by stirring up the degenerate thoughts in his mind and giving him a hard time to defend himself and know right from wrong.
To the degree that as soon as Loki attempted to steal them he felt that he was wrong and that it was right to be subservient to the all knowing and all seeing omniscient Lord that was the True Creator!!
And just as the shards were about to explode and dissolve into his wounds to amplify the degenerate thoughts in his storm of mental instability; Loki reacted.
He thieved just enough of them to brave through the mounting pressure of the storm in his mental world, while splitting another worm of time, just one this time, as he raised his near decayed hand holding his wand towards the Black Knight, the third Demigod who had finally revealed himself!
Having the third Demigod in his sights, Loki could afford to go all out and end this fight with no hesitation.
Except even before Loki could launch his spell the sludge around him suddenly churned! And with no anchorage, his body spun and his aim shifted from its target while a dreamy song echoed in his ears.
But it was nothing sort of soothing.
Despite the pleasant underlying tune, the hellish vocals made Loki feel like clawing his ears out.
The song however did not stop and continued to reduce the sanity of its audience.
In a fit of madness, Loki jabbed a bony fleshless fist into an exposed wound on his throat and pulled a fist full of fungi festering and growing inside it.
He then jabbed the fungi into his ears only belatedly realising that he'd just helped them reach his mind.
Almost instantly, the fungi grew tenfold. Each sprouting its bulb before bursting in a dazzling explosion to send spores towards his brain.
Loki thieved hundreds if not thousands of spores except he couldn't thieve the sea of them that erupted inside his head.
The fungi grew so much that Loki felt them poke out of his empty eye sockets and against his holed eyelids.
His mind slowed as his body sent hordes of miscalculated signals to every other part of his body causing it to spasm as Loki did everything in his power to command his arm to finish his spell.
A powerful and condensed force of light erupted from the tip of his wand.
The spell Loki was using was a simple one.
Lumos Maxima
The blinding light flared in power as Loki pulled out a sacrifice from within his pouch while holding out as he launched the first spell he'd used of this kind after Nicholas had taught him about it.
The spell was originally modified to be aimed as a beam directly at his target, the Demigod, but Loki was forced to abandon the idea now that he was blind, deaf, and losing control of his most basic senses fast.
The world lit up for a moment as the sludge around Loki evaporated to a small degree around him.
The light had lasted only for a moment before the shadows around completely engulfed it and dragged the whole place into darkness once again.
But the damage was done.
Loki 'looked' at the pitiful third Demigod who was kneeling on the floor and spitting out a mouth full of flesh and blood and he smelled like cooked meat.
Seeing the pause in the fight, Loki gave a cursory glance to his surroundings and once he found no more immediate threats to address, teleported directly into the Sefirah Castle to heal himself.
'...fifty Worms of time lost…' Loki sighed as he stole all the left over Beyonder Characteristics in the real world to quickly reabsorb them so that he could come back to full power for the finale.
He left an illusion in his place just to keep watch over his 'spoils'.
The demigod looked at Loki whose figure just flickered for a moment, questioning if he had seen something wrong given the tiring situation but when he saw Loki open his eyes and appear fully healed his whole body shook with fright.
'He healed from damage to the soul so quickly!?'
One had to understand that the swamp that the Demigod had created wasn't just an ordinary transfigured pool of poison and or some flesh and blood magic, it was an ability that formed from the combination of two abilities of the Sequence 5 Druid of the Planter pathway, Underground Slink and Poison Hair Incineration.
By turning the ground into a swamp and burning his hair inside it, the Demigod had created a sludge capable of rendering even the hardest to kill Demigods like those of the prisoner pathway useless in mere seconds.
But Loki had not only tanked the ability with his bare body without so much as flinching during the entire process, he had even proceeded to withstand an Ocean Songster's Siren's Song that would've rendered an ordinary Demigod in that situation into madness by making them expose at least their mythical creature form.
Loki had done all of that while he had been caught off guard by the attack with the help of the item that Grindelwald had given them to keep them hidden from fate.
And he had done it without so much as a scratch after he'd brushed off all the damage that the previous attacks had caused him.
He appeared to be in pristine condition while the Demigod himself had been cooked by the Holy light of the Sun Goddess herself created by Loki through some weird unknown spell!
The Demigod shivered, but some semblance of sanity remained as he looked in the direction of his two colleagues.
'That's right…as long as we tire him, Lord Templar will be here at any moment and help finish him so that we can sacrifice his head to our Lord.'
"Wondering how long it'll take for your friends to join in?" Loki asked with an amused expression while twirling his bone wand.
'Huh?'
The demigod looked back at Loki with some confusion, and it was only then that he realised that the colleagues for whom he had done all this hadn't launched their attack yet!
The Demigod who had been struggling on the floor earlier after Loki distorted his senses had recovered fully, but!
He hadn't moved!
The blood mist from the first demigod scattered in the air along with the flesh rug that had formed out of it and clung to the walls and the floor had vanished.
The demigod looked back at Loki with an expression of shock and horror while Loki just smiled.
"Oh you poor thing…do you still not realise?"
The demigod was too stunned to even say no so Loki continued as if he were explaining to a baby.
"You lot are remarkably easy to defeat. Simply steal your ability to graze souls and you lose control over yourself. But too bad for me, I don't want uncontrollable monsters, I need you to be human so that I can turn you into part of a larger democracy."
"Great isn't it?" Loki said with a smirk, however when the Demigod remained silent he frowned in annoyance and asked, "Still don't get it?"
"..."
"Arggh. Fine let me show yo-" Loki tried to take a step closer to the demigod but that seemed to have knocked some sense to him as he rushed towards his 'steady' colleague causing Loki to bend over and laugh heartily.
"Hahaha Hahaha HAHAHAHA~!!!!! Seriously!? You think that'll save you!?" Loki asked dabbing the edge of his eye to wipe his tears as he flicked his wrist.
The Demigod was on guard against Loki, but when he felt movement on his right, he grew surprised at first before becoming terrified as he looked at his own colleague pulling a Black Greatsword out of the shadows and placing it on his neck.
Loki looked at the Demigod with a bemused expression as he spoke.
"They're all mine now."
"..bu-"
"'But how?' That's what you want to ask right?" Loki asked softly, his expression delighted like a child ready to share their exploits while he continued-
"You could've hidden your spirit body threads from me, but do you really think fate's such a fickle thing? You intertwined your fate with mine the moment you attacked me, and the bond only grew stronger the more you tried to kill me and push me closer to death."
"The first guy died the minute he tried to mess with the fate of the world around me. He left behind too many traces for me to not decrypt the position of his threads. The second guy, your posing friend, bribed me and created a link to me which I exploited by feeding him a few parasites by lodging them into the flesh bullets he kindly absorbed for me."
"And you, well you were just too careless. I simply sent one through the swamp. You used the ability to damage the soul, Poison hair incineration right? An ability that lets you burn hair to create poison that can even damage the soul?..well you know too little about the soul to even qualify as a dark wizard…"
"It's almost like you're using abilities you don't truly understand…." Loki found it in himself to joke as if he wasn't just a hair's breadth away from death.
"...The three of you work well together, one for controlling my fate, one for attacking me directly and another for finishing me off with one big move, a perfect Mind, Spear and a Shield, but…"
"...in the end it was your own undoing that got you killed. I simply deceived your fates into believing that I was a part of your plans and then parasitised you through me. The rest was just….a part of the performance?"
In reality, Loki was actually acting what he felt it would be to be a parasite. Either multiply fast enough to overload the enemy's defences, or make a distraction and focus on a one pointed all out attack.
In this case since his enemies were just Demigods Loki could afford to focus on both at once, he overwhelmed them with the numbers of his worms of time while also taking enough damage to make his enemies believe they'd won just when he pulled out the rug from under them.
Loki then looked at the Demigod and smiled as he pulled out a monocle of nowhere and slowly placed it on his right eye.
Within moments the Demigod felt a sudden upheaval of his entire body.
His mind felt sluggish to control while his body felt unresponsive, as if he were a passenger in his own vehicle.
The last thing he saw was Loki's smiling face as he whispered the words-
"...theft completed."
There was only silence in the hallway for a few minutes as Loki undid the damage that had occurred in the place, cleaning up Chadwick who had remained unharmed throughout, something Loki couldn't understand but swallowed and kept it at the back of his mind after he divined using worms of time in the Sefirah Castle that it wasn't unnatural.
He made the demigod open the door from the inside before entering the MCCC's office fixing everything in it, making a new MCCC using an illusion and then kicking the Demigod turned marionette out.
As the doors closed softly, Loki looked at the sea of slowly pouring in Beyonders from the Hanged man pathway through his spirit vision.
They were all his marionettes.
A few were ordinary Beyonders who still hadn't been converted, but Loki truly couldn't spare a few more Worms of Time to turn them too, instead he let them be, for now since they were part of his greater plan.
At least that was until he spotted a rather inconspicuous spirit body thread mixed in the sea of Beyonders.
The thread appeared normal, but it was connected to nothing.
Loki instantly realised that it was someone or something using psychological invisibility, and it was at a particularly high level since he couldn't see the person even after spotting their spirit body threads.
'....this is not so good…' Loki muttered under his breath.
Loki's muscles tensed a little but he remained calm and collected, turning off his spirit vision before settling into the room while looking at Chadwick with an annoyed expression.
"You are quite the annoyance…aren't you?"
"Huh? Me?" Chadwick asked in a confused tone pointing at himself, having been completely unaware of what had happened around him for the past few minutes.
"Well whatever…since you're here anyway, you might as well help me out."
"Huh?" Chadwick looked confused. "I'm already helping you…Weren't we here to be bait?"
Loki frowned for some reason, then shook his head lightly as he enjoyed his last few minutes of peace for now.
He was just a little worried about everyone on the top floor since they seemed to have vanished elsewhere.
…