Sylaphine's Perspective:
1/1/2018 - 11:28 AM
Kaiser stood motionless.
The faint hum of bending space resonated around us, the stars still swirling from the illusion I'd conjured.
Of course, he was thinking — weighing the kind of choice that could alter the world's tale.
I brushed back my long strands of green hair, studying him. There was a rare satisfaction blooming beneath my calm expression. He'd fit perfectly into my grand design — a vital piece for the coming war… and for my own curiosity.
That dream again — of my childhood. The voice calling my name beneath that blinding light. Something about him... ties to it. I just can't see the thread yet.
Kaiser wiped the dried blood from the corner of his mouth, exhaling softly. The starlit reflection danced over his pale blue eyes as he raised his gaze toward me.
"I've made my choice," he said quietly.
My lips curled faintly. "Good. Then take my hand—"
He unsheathed his daggers, metal gleaming against the cosmos.
"I barely take suggestions," he interrupted, voice steady. "Let alone orders."
He smirked, stance tightening, shoulders rolling back with that same maddening calm.
"So yeah… Sorry." he paused, raising his gaze directly at mine,
"I'm not interested in milfs."
For a brief second, everything went silent.
Then my blood boiled — not just from anger, but from sheer disbelief. My eyes widened, and then narrowed into slits, my expression twisting as power flared around me.
"How dare you…" I whispered, my voice trembling with contained rage.
The stars shattered, reality snapping back into the labyrinth. The walls quaked as my mana erupted, flinging him with a silent incantation straight into the stone. The impact roared through the chamber, his body embedding deep, cracks spiderwebbing across the surface.
He fell, dust scattering.
I walked forward slowly — each step measured, the sound of my heels echoing against the fractured floor.
"A pathetic, worthless human like you dares to mock me?" I hissed, my emerald eyes glowing. "You think your insolence makes you brave? You're nothing but a worm trying to taunt the sun."
My words trembled between rage and pride. "I will not forgive such language… not until I see your entire body painted in blood."
With a flick of my hand, the air distorted — I gripped him with invisible force, the very space bending around him. In a fluid motion, I hurled him upward, slamming him against the labyrinth's roof. The crash was deafening, stones crumbling as he fell from above.
He landed… on his feet.
The smoke cleared — he stood there, slightly bent, but alive.
I froze. "How…" I whispered.
My eyes narrowed. Maybe he shifted midair — adjusted his momentum deliberately? Learned from the past times I'd thrown him. He absorbed the impact through his legs… calculating even while half-dead.
That infuriating smirk lingered on his lips.
"You really do adapt fast," I muttered through clenched teeth, rage twisting with a trace of admiration. "Like a cockroach that refuses to die… or perhaps something far more stubborn."
He met my gaze, expression blank — then that damn smirk deepened.
"That's why," he said coldly, voice low enough to sting, "I prefer normal girls over milfs."
The air snapped. Space itself distorted from the pressure of my fury — the labyrinth trembling, my aura tearing at the walls like claws.
I released my grip on space, letting the fabric of reality unfold in ribbons of blinding light.
Portals ignited behind me — twenty, thirty, perhaps more — and from them burst tentacles of celestial energy, radiant and merciless, lashing toward him like judgment incarnate.
This time, however, he didn't freeze.
He moved.
Grabbing onto one of the glowing appendages mid-flight, he twisted, spinning across the walls — daggers flashing, body flipping between strikes as light and shadow clashed violently. Each motion was instinctive, primal — like a beast refusing the leash of a god.
"You dare resist me?" my voice echoed through the shattering chamber, venom wrapped in velvet. "You truly are a disgusting parasite, existing within my divine realm."
The labyrinth trembled. The ground fissured from the sheer pressure of my mana.
I raised my hand again, the air behind me fracturing into ripples — twenty-seven portals, each birthing another spear of judgment, brighter and sharper than before.
"I am the purest form of life," I declared, every syllable searing the air. "My body has never been tainted, never defiled by any wretched race. I am the firstborn of the higher planes — a fairy of heaven, an angel carved from sanctity itself. And you—" my tone dropped, poisonous and cold, "—are a cockroach crawling through the ground, pretending you can touch the sky."
The tentacles surged.
Kaiser vaulted upward, daggers in hand, twisting midair. He parried one strike with the flat of his blade, used its rebound to propel himself sideways, kicking against another light tendril to redirect momentum.
He ran along the walls — fluid, impossibly fast — each movement deliberate, his body bending under gravity's protest but never yielding.
The air cracked from the shockwaves of his movement.
Stone walls split apart. Smoke and light swirled violently.
Even the core of my labyrinth began to quake, my perfect creation trembling under our collision. I couldn't let my anger destroy my own creation.
I snapped, clenching my fist — and in an instant, space folded again. The scene inverted.
The labyrinth dissolved into sky — an endless void above the clouds.
He fell through it, no ground beneath him now.
Hovering above, I watched as his daggers slipped from his grasp, tumbling beside him.
"No more walls to run on," I said mockingly. "No tricks left, no surface to crawl upon. Fall, cockroach. Back to the dirt you came from."
But his expression never cracked.
Mid-air, he exhaled — then twisted his body, kicking one dagger upward, catching the second mid-rotation. Using pure momentum, he launched himself off one of the falling stones, spinning through the air toward me.
I smiled coldly. "How desperate. I've seen these moves already."
He parried another wave of radiant tentacles, each slash creating explosions that rippled across the sky.
"A pest that refuses extermination. But let's face it—despite all that crawling, not once have you managed to even scratch me."
The tentacles shattered. He pushed through the explosions, face still calm, expression unreadable.
Then — a flash of steel.
One of his daggers left his hand.
Throwing it directly at me.
It spun through the air, cutting through the halo of light surrounding me — the blade slicing through the layers of my defensive forcefield.
A sudden shimmer — and then it broke, glasslike, scattering shards of energy into the air.
The sound was sharp.
I blinked — momentarily stunned.
He landed, one knee hitting the fractured surface of floating stone. His blue eyes burned like frozen fire as he looked up at me.
"I might be a cockroach," he said, voice low, deliberate, "but you're no better than a pedestal queen."
My glare deepened — I could feel the pulse of my mana spiking again.
He tilted his head slightly, tone turning colder, crueler.
"I wonder," he added, "whose leftover mistress you've been — to show such pride. Just another attractive old toy pretending to be pure."
Silence.
The world shook.
My vision narrowed until the world was nothing but a red, pounding drum inside my skull. Seven thousand years of measured patience, of cold calculation, of being feared and obeyed — and a single human dared to smirk at me.
A cockroach. An insect. To mock The Mother of Sylaris. To mock me.
"You presume to insult me?" I hissed, my voice a blade. "You—little piece of stubborn flesh—who are you to stand and call an avatar names? Do you not know the names carved in the bones of history? Do you not know what I have done for my people? I am Sylaphine Blossom, avatar of Myriacron."
The time froze.
I flew toward him, wings swinging. "You call me a pedestal queen. You call me a toy. You think that mockery will be unjudged?" I laughed — a cold, sharp sound.
Rage braided around the amusement; something deeper stirred that I had not felt in many lifetimes: a raw, personal fury. I had been angered before, yes — but never with such arrogance, never with such contempt directed at the heart of what I was.
"You cockroach," I spat, each syllable a grain of ice, "you will be crushed for that insolence. I will grind you until even the memory of your arrogance is dust beneath my feet."
I seized the world again — space bending, folding, the ocean rearing up at my command. I flung him down into the deep, darker than before, where pressure would have broken lungs and bones. I wanted him crushed by the weight of the sea — a fitting punishment for such insolence.
"How dare you? How dare you—" My words spilled faster, jagged and hungry. "You do not understand the blood that built this land. You do not understand the bargains I made, the lives sacrificed, the darkness I held at bay for my people. I have kept them safe for millennia while other races decayed in selfishness. I am their savior and their avatar.
"I am not to be mocked by a cockroach!"
But he had learned. He held his breath like a man who had rehearsed dying and found that his will could outlast the body.
From the blackness below, the beast rose.
It swam like a shadow given teeth. Its bulk was monstrous: skin like burnished onyx, scales overlapping like armor, a maw so wide it could swallow a man whole. Nine snake-like tentacles unfurled from its back; each was a column of muscle ringed with rows of smaller mouths and serrated teeth, mouths that hissed and gnawed even underwater. Bioluminescent veins pulsed along its sides, lighting its head in a terrible blue glow. When it opened that cavernous jaw, the air around the water seemed to boil.
I watched him in the dark and felt a pure, cruel satisfaction. "Now—drown," I whispered. "Let the depth take you, insect."
He spun like a living thing in the water. He was faster than last time. He ducked and folded, his dagger flashing even as he was missing one. The creature lashed, a tentacle whipping for his torso; he twisted, slashing the limb with a knife, but the thing's flesh was cruelly tough—mythic hide that swallowed steel.
Another tentacle snapped toward his leg. He hooked his foot and used it to lever his body away, turning the attack into momentum — a spinning slash that sent him skittering off the beast's flank.
A smaller mouth lunged at his shoulder; he plunged a dagger into it, the teeth closing around steel and tearing him as they did. Blood bled in the water, red against the blue, traceries of life unwinding.
"Is that all? A fight for survival and you think yourself a warrior? You are a flea fighting a god's shadow." I loved his desperation — the way his face twisted with pain, the way he refused to let it break him.
It was satisfying.
He adapted faster than any insect should. Each strike he parried was not random: he read the rhythm of the tentacles — the order in which the mouths opened and the microseconds between lunge and recoil. He used the beast's weight against it, throwing himself under a sweeping limb to slash at the base where it met the body, ripping muscle.
A tentacle closed around his arm and he did not scream so much as bite down on his breath, raising the dagger and severing the snake at the shoulder. The water exploded with blood as the tentacle parted, and he spun, using the severed column as a club to strike the creature's flank.
He was pushed back afar from the beast, his eyes meeting mine.
The space around me cracked — splintering like glass under a storm's scream — as I stared down at him, my chest heaving, my composure fractured.
He looked up from the swirling abyss of the ocean floor… and smirked.
Even through the blood, through the pressure, through me, he still had the audacity to smirk.
His mouth then opened to say something.
For a brief moment, I couldn't hear him — only saw the shape of his lips moving. Curious, I invoked a whispering spell to read them.
And the words appeared, shimmering faintly in front of me like cruel poetry:
"You must be very… experienced, milf."
My jaw slackened in disbelief.
Then his eyes — those detestable blue eyes — dropped. Looking at my chest.
And again, his lips moved.
"For someone so old, you're shockingly flat."
The veins in my temples pulsed. The water around me vibrated. The faint serenity of the deep turned crimson as my fury rippled through it.
That was it. The moment the last thread of grace snapped.
"Judicium Abyssum. Pulveriza."
The ocean itself roared.
The beast convulsed, its eyes turning pure white as circles of burning blue light spiraled around its body. The tentacles twisted in unnatural geometries, their maws opening, exhaling pure annihilation. The sea boiled from the intensity.
Even the oxygen bubble shielding me quivered and shrank under the sheer magnitude of the coming blast.
It was going to erase him. Not just kill — erase.
"Mock your own demise," I hissed, voice trembling with hatred. "Do you think your childish insolence will echo in my realm? You'll vanish like all cockroaches do — without legacy, without meaning. Even your ashes will dissolve in the depth."
The beast bellowed — and then… he moved.
Kaiser swimmed forward, twisting through the chaos with that maddening, infuriating adaptability. He grabbed one of the tentacles — grabbed it — using his dagger to slice into its living flesh, pulling himself inside.
I froze.
"What…?" The words left me hollow.
The creature convulsed, roaring in agony as blood and azure flame spiraled together. He was inside the tentacle — where a thousand rows of teeth lined every inch — yet he was advancing deeper. The blue light of its attack flared and imploded, but his silhouette was still moving, burning, bleeding, learning.
"This doesn't make sense," I whispered, more to myself than anyone. "He should have died the instant I attacked. His body—his mind—shouldn't even function under this pressure!"
The beast shrieked again as one of its massive outer scales split from within. A line of red light traced upward through its body like a vein of magma bursting from the core.
"He's… cutting through it?"
The realization hit me too late — the mad human was learning its anatomy, reading its movement patterns, adapting to its insides.
He'd entered the smaller tentacles earlier just to study how they worked. Which meant—
My words died in my throat.
The ocean shook violently, roiling with the pressure of a deep-sea storm as the massive creature thrashed, its jaws wide. I expected him to scream, to crumble under the force, yet… he dove straight into its gaping mouth.
Impossible.
The beast's scales groaned and cracked under the immense stress of its own bulk. Its voice — a grinding, echoing roar that felt like stone splitting — reverberated through the water, yet inside, the creature was already injured.
I could see it: the smaller, snake-like tentacles that twisted around its maw were shredded, scarred, still twitching with unnatural spasms as they lashed futilely at him.
Using my Nature's Heart ability I saw what was happening.
Kaiser's form was a blur, slicing with his dagger through the pinkish, raw flesh of the mouth. Water bubbled violently around him as he carved, each cut sparking blue arcs of energy as they met the creature's bio-electric fields.
I realized he wasn't trying to kill it immediately — he was testing. He moved with surgical precision, navigating between rows of teeth, dodging each snap and twist of its jaw, and cutting from within.
Every strike left a trail of red, every pull of his blade a flare of blue flame as the creature convulsed, water shaking violently from the impact.
The sounds were unbearable — the grinding of bone, the tearing of muscle, the deep, almost sentient growl of pain as it thrashed against his impossibly small form. Even the smaller tentacles, now shredded and smoking from his strikes, writhed and hissed like snakes in torment.
And yet, he pressed forward, deeper, dodging arcs of pressure, pivoting with a grace no human should possess. For a moment, I could see him stop, crouched inside the creature's gullet, using the curves of its flesh as leverage to drive a slice straight up through its throat. The beast roared again, bubbles of boiling water cascading into the abyss as its massive frame twisted in agony.
I blinked.
How is he still alive?
Every instinct screamed at me — he should be gone, shredded, fried, drowned. And yet… he was methodical, careful, precise, calculating every angle of survival while destroying the monster from the inside.
Minutes—or maybe seconds, I could no longer measure time in this chaos—passed in horrifying slowness. Then, finally, the creature let out a final, soul-shaking roar as a long, clean gash split along the top of its skull. Blue flames erupted, smoke and water boiling, but the cut held.
Kaiser emerged, clawing himself out through the jagged wound he had carved. His body was shredded, burned in places, and his left arm bore a deep cut where one of the smaller tentacles had bitten through. Blood mixed with seawater and energy residue, clinging to his battered frame. His hair floated wetly around his face, his daggers still in hand, and yet… he stood.
His eyes wide open. Mouth open loss of air evident.
I stared, wide-eyed, pulse hammering.
Seven thousand years, and I had never seen anyone survive this. He should have died multiple times over, yet here he was, emerging victorious, wounded.
I released control of the illusion. The sea shattered, and the labyrinth reclaimed us.
My knees trembled as we returned, standing amid the cracked stones and floating shards of my once-perfect domain.
I stared at him, my mind blank, my power unstable.
My jaw dropped.
He stood there, soaked, battered, eyes half-lidded.
Kaiser dropped to his knees, his dagger slipping from his fingers and clattering against the marble‑like seabed. His breaths came out in ragged bursts, wet and uneven — ghhk…haah… each inhale scraping his throat raw after the pressure had crushed the air from his lungs.
He blinked furiously, unable to close his eyes fully; the seawater burned against them, yet he refused to look away from me.
I tilted my head, lips curving into something that was not quite a smile. "Well now," I murmured. "The cockroach managed to crawl past one of my weaker creations. Congratulations… You made me use ten percent power, perhaps?"
He lifted his head slowly, blood running down his chin. "…Ten percent?"
I nodded, the gesture deliberate, cruel. "Barely that."
I stepped closer, "You will be punished," I said softly. "Judged for every sin, every insult, again and again until I am satisfied." I raised a single finger, letting the energy hum at the tip.
He tried to rise, unsteady, the fangs of the creature still embedded in his back like thorns of defiance. His jaw clenched, his entire body shaking from pain.
"I'm done playing games," I muttered.
A faint smirk crossed his blood‑smeared face. "Oh…? Then should I call you a saint… or a slut?"
My pulse spiked — the air itself seemed to still.
He coughed, barely able to hold himself up.
"Being a good piece of meat must be exhausting… milf."
My eyes widened for a fraction of a second — then narrowed into cold fire. "It's over," I whispered. The word came out like a verdict.
"Die."
In a single, absolute instant, his body exploded— the soundless collapse of a candle snuffed out. His upper body completely decapitated, lower body falling to the ground.
A few drops of blood drifted upward and touched my cheek, faintly warm against the cold of the labyrinth.
I stood there, silent, staring at what remained of him.
…
tWhy did he persist? Why did he choose mockery over mercy?
He had known he could not win, and yet he kept needling, provoking, dragging me to the edge of composure. I should have enjoyed this — but I felt only the faint irritation of being forced to act myself, to waste energy on something so beneath me.
I exhaled, the sound laced with contempt. "Pathetic. A waste of my magic… a smear on my presence."
His dead body was left on my labyrinth ground as I promised.
I wiped the smear of blood from my cheek with the back of my hand, and the red slid across my skin like a stain on marble. It did not disgust me. It did not make me flinch.
It was merely an annoyance — proof of a momentary distraction I had allowed.
I looked down at the ruin he left behind, the wet dark of his blood pooling, and my mind arranged itself into sequences, like pieces on a board.
I'll resurrect him.
Then…
Destroy him.
Repeat until the scream becomes a sound only I can savor. Then deal with his friends — the witch first. She will pay more than the insect ever could.
My fingers tightened. I could already feel the threads of space knitting in the back of my mind, the slow careful art of unmaking and remaking a breath.
And yet — there was something else, a movement at the edge of my senses that was wrong. A presence like coal-smoke on the wind, alien to the sanctity of my labyrinth.
Demons??!
I turned. My wings prickled. How—? Demons do not stroll through a Sylaris domain unannounced. My labyrinth had mazes, layers of traps inside. It was impossible they were inside.
Then the voice slid inside my head, cold and unmistakable.
"Bring him back."
The witch's voice — not shy, not pleading.
A laugh threatened to tear out of me. Of all the insolence — to order me, in my own halls, to return the thing I had just crushed.
To demand mercy for the insect.
"He is mine." the voice repeated, murderous.
Let's see how strong the Queen of Curses truly is.