On the ground, Eastiel had stopped dry heaving.

It had taken considerable effort. The stench was still unbearable, burning the back of his throat, but right now, even vomiting was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

There were still zombies and monsters. There was still a pregnant girlfriend floating in the sky having what looked like a very intense conversation with his brother.

His lion ears swiveled forward and his tail lashed. He moved.

A zombie lunged at the screaming man, and Eastiel was there before the creature could close the distance, his claws raking across its throat in a single clean strike.

The zombie crumpled—"WAAAAAAAAAA—"The screaming man kept screaming, but Eastiel didn’t know it was because he noticed or because... well, he just screamed in general.

"Hey!" Eastiel shouted over the chaos. "Are you two hurt?!"

"EMOTIONALLY!" the man wailed.

"PERMANENTLY!" the woman added.

Eastiel decided that was good enough.

Arkai had already flanked to the other side, his wolf ears pinned flat against his head, his movements fluid and predatory. A cluster of zombies was forming near the treeline, eight of them, maybe nine, drawn by the noise and the light. Especially, the overwhelming scent of living flesh.

He didn’t give them time to organize. He cut through them, his claws finding throats and temples and the soft spaces between vertebrae.

One zombie turned toward him and he was already behind it. Another reached for his tail and he was already airborne, twisting mid-leap to deliver a double-kick that sent two bodies flying in opposite directions.

He landed beside the screaming man, who had just impaled a zombie with his shovel and was now trying to shake it off the blade without opening his eyes.

"You fight well," Arkai said. "Who trained you?"

"This is just the general existential dread, alright?!" the man screamed back.

Arkai’s wolf ears twitched. He exchanged a glance with Eastiel, who had just finished dispatching another wave and was now staring at the eye monster, dry heaving once more.

"I’m going for the big one," Eastiel called out. "The eye thing."

"Don’t let it touch you," Arkai said. "We don’t know what it does."

"Obviously it does something horrible. Look at it."

The eye thing was reforming from the slice Cecilia had delivered, its melted mass bubbling up from the asphalt like a blister. The popped eyes were already being replenished by the dark liquid, swelling to full size in seconds.

It turned its collective gaze toward the two beast-men now approaching it.

Eastiel and Arkai moved in perfect synchronization. They had fought together for a long time now. They knew each other’s rhythms and blind spots.

Arkai went high, leaping onto a broken section of road and launching himself at the creature’s upper mass, claws extended, targeting the largest cluster of eyes.

Eastiel went low, sweeping in from the side, his movements big and confident, his focus on the fingers that tried to grasp and trip and pull.

SLASH! SLASH! SLASH!

Arkai’s claws shot wind blades, raking through the eyes. They popped and the stench intensified. He gagged but didn’t stop.

RUMBLE—RUMBLE—BLAAAAAAAST!

Eastiel blasted severed fingers with the combination of his earth and lightning magic, each strike scorching through the joints where finger met palm, where palm met wrist and the whole appendage attached.

ROAAAAAAAAAAR—

The creature roared from all its mouths at once, and the sound was deafening.

"We need to push it back toward the rift!" Arkai shouted over the noise.

"Cover me with your wind!" Eastiel shouted back.

Eastiel drove his claws into the ground. The asphalt was already compromised, cracked from his first strike, softened and half-melted from the purple light of the rifts and the corruption seeping through. It yielded to his earth magic like wet clay.

He pulled his mana, shaped it, and thrust it upward. The road composite screamed as it reformed, jagged thorns of compacted asphalt and concrete and buried gravel, rising from the ground like a wall pushing the eye creature back into the rift.

Each thorn was as tall as a man, as sharp as a blade, and still humming with the residual energy of his magic.

But that wasn’t all.

He switched channels. Lightning magic crackled down his arms, arcing from his claws into the thorns, and then outward in a net of gold-white electricity that slammed into the eye creature’s gelatinous mass.

The thing convulsed. Its hundreds of eyes rolled back in unison and its fingers spasmed and locked, frozen in place by the current. The mouths let out a strangled, gurgling roar that cut off halfway through.

For a moment, it was immobilized.

But only for a moment.

Even stunned, the creature’s instinct was to survive. Parts of its mass began to melt, the same trick it had used against Cecilia’s telekinesis, liquefying and spilling forward through the gaps between the thorns, trying to ooze past the barrier and reform on the other side.

"I’m pushing between the gaps!" Arkai said. "ARWOOOOO—"

He howled, the wind that moved at his command. A controlled gale roared to life. A thousand narrow currents shot through, each one aimed at a different gap, a different drip, a different tendril of liquefied horror trying to escape.

WHOOOOOOO—SH—

The wind caught the drips mid-ooz and hurled them backward, slamming them against the main mass. Where the creature tried to splatter, the wind contained it. Where it tried to seep through cracks, the wind sealed the cracks.

"MORE CONTROL!" Eastiel shouted, pumping another surge of lightning into the thorns. "DON’T LET IT SPLATTER—"

"LESS NAGGING, MORE LIGHTNING, BROTHER!"

Above them, Cecilia hovered near the other rift, staring down at the flesh mound, the limb monster with its core darting frantically through the mass like a terrified rodent.

She had tried reaching for it directly. She had tried tearing the bodies apart. She had tried slicing through the fused limbs to expose it. Every time, the core dodged. Every time, it burrowed deeper, hid behind another ribcage, another skull, another tangle of arms that had once belonged to someone.

She frowned, her mind racing.

Direct attack wasn’t working. The core was too fast and too aware. It could sense her telekinesis the moment she reached for it, or somewhat maybe even before. It was like trying to catch a fish with your bare hands, except the fish was inside a mountain of corpses and the water was black ichor.

"I can’t pin it down," she muttered, frustration bleeding into her voice. "It keeps moving. It’s like it knows where I’m going to strike."

Oathran hovered beside her, his draconic wings beating slow and steady and his eyes fixed on the mass below. He had been silent since she’d grabbed his face. But now he spoke.

"You’re telegraphing."

Cecilia turned to him. "What?"

"Your telekinesis. You’re focusing on the target before you strike." He said. "The core can feel where your attention is gathering. It’s reacting to your intent, not your action."

"It can do that?!"

Was the core sensitive to mana or something?!

She had been gathering her mana, focusing her will, locking onto the core’s location before making her move. But the pause between focus and action, that tiny, half-second window, was enough for the core to slip away.

"Then I need to strike without aiming," she said slowly. "But how the fu—"

"Don’t miss."

She shot him a look. He met it with infuriating calm.

"Don’t aim," he clarified. "Strike everywhere. Flood the whole mass with your telekinesis at once. The core can’t dodge if there’s nowhere to dodge to."

Cecilia’s eyes widened. Flood the whole mass.

"That... needs a lot of mana..." she whispered.

It was a brute force solution, exactly the kind of thing she would avoid now because the egg was already draining her reserves.

Were this world deliberately trying to force her to increase her capacity or something? The School Romance world trained her precision and mastery. In the end, it also forced her to control an enormous amount of mana by holding an entire magic conference from falling.

The reservoir, and then now...

It made sense. The core was fast because it had room to move. Take away the room, fill every gap, and saturate every fold of flesh with her power simultaneously—

This needed more than brute force. She must also hold the entire flesh mound in a cocoon of her controlled mana so the core won’t run outside.

She turned back to the limb monster. It was still pushing through the rift, the opening widening with every passing second. The core pulsed somewhere inside it, a dark heart beating in a body made of bodies.

"Okay," she whispered. "Okay."

She reached out with both hands. She pictured the entire mass, every limb, every torso, every head. Every inch of corrupted flesh and black ichor.

Then she squeezed.

Her telekinesis flooded into the creature from all directions at once, compressing. The limb monster screamed, its bodies writhed. The core, finding no space to flee, began to spasm, bouncing against the walls of telekinetic pressure, trapped like an insect in a jar.

"There," Cecilia breathed, her eyes lighting up. "There, there, there—"

BLAAST!

The space around the mass ignited.

Blue fire erupted from nowhere and everywhere, roaring to life in a perfect sphere around the flesh mound.

It was dragon fire, and it burned like the north star. The flames didn’t flicker. They turned the night sky blazing cerulean, painting Cecilia’s face in shades of holy destruction.

Cecilia whipped her head toward Oathran, her eyes faltering.

He was grinning.

He was lending her his fire—

"It can’t move now," Oathran said. "Finish it."

Cecilia smiled back and closed her fist.

The compression intensified. The flesh mound began to collapse inward, bodies folding and crushing and compacting, and the blue fire intensified with it, feeding on the compression. Oxygen was being forced out of the mass, and it accompanied the mana Cecilia was pouring into every cubic inch of corrupted flesh.

Dragon fire and telekinetic force worked in harmony, scorching everything that tried to escape, burning every limb before it could flail, searing every mouth shut before it could scream.

The mound shrank. Writhed. Died in layers.

And somewhere in the center of it all, the core—

Cecilia found it with her mind, wrapped her power around it, and squeezed.