60 A Free Meal

It took us just minutes to reach the fortress where Augusta and her allies are staying. It's a fortress of carefully carved stone bricks, randomly built in between a lake and a dense forest. It looks entirely out of place, but it's remained untouched because of the magical arrays that hang over the entire fortress.

Of course, such magic is useless to Akeno and I. She can sense the souls living inside, and my eyes can pierce through all illusions.

I glance at her. She doesn't notice my look, fully focused on noting each and every target. It's an odd look for her to have. She'd usually have some sort of smile, whether it be sadistic or manic or otherwise, but that isn't present here. She looks like a woman ready to plunge herself straight into the battlefield.

There is no fear. There is no uncertainty.

She's plunging headfirst, and she'll turn the entire place into a bloodbath.

I gently pat her head. "Good luck." I say. She gives me an odd look, as if she's offended I implied that she needed luck of any sort. I just laugh then, and she only pouts.

We share no more words after that. Her jet black wings suddenly sprout from her back, and she gives me one last smile before she takes off into the clouds. The sky seems to turn darker by the second, and the smell of ozone becomes almost unbearable.

I take a breath. My lungs tingle with electricity.

The sky lights blue with lightning.

My skin lights up with white lines, my Primal Energy filling every inch of my body.

I can see the building panic amongst those inside the fortress. From the Sacred Gear wielders to the Fallen Angels to the stray Magicians. Even Satanael looks uncomfortable, quickly realizing who it is up there, and that he'll need to make a choice on who to save.

Then, a massive bolt of lightning strikes down onto the fortress, shattering right through the magical defenses floating around it and bulldozing through the hardened stone. The stone melted. The walls crumbled. The facilities hidden inside were destroyed. Those caught unaware are burnt to a crisp in an instant.

And in the wake of that, I leap forward, blurring through the air as I rush towards the partially melted tower at the eastern edge of the fortress.

I smash right through the window at the highest floor of the tower, and I come face to face with the flame witch herself.

Augusta quickly turns to me, her eyes wide and her lips twisting to a scowl. But she was too late of course, and I only grinned as I grabbed her face and flung both of us out into the open air. I continued flying then, hopping across empty air as I sped farther and farther away from the fortress.

Eventually, Augusta does gather her wits, and she melts my entire hand. From skin, to flesh, to bone; all of it turned to ash by a concentrated blast of divine flames. Not even my enhanced flesh allowed me to resist that.

She falls down, but then uses her flames to slow her descent. I land right before her, cracking the earth under me as I stand up.

The old woman's face twists into a grin when she sees my melted hand. The expression crumbles when she sees my hand regenerate, reforming the flesh and bones in mere seconds. It's followed by that familiar rush of euphoria from absorbing the corruption, and I can't help but crack a slightly manic grin.

But, oddly enough, there's something else my eyes have picked up on, and it's just-

It's too funny.

"Hey," I call, my eyes zeroing right into her soul. "How many bodies have you taken over?" She stills when she hears that, and my grin grows. "Maybe…sixteen? You kept trying to find the perfect vessel, but nothing's ever enough." I tilt my head. "I wonder if you even remember what your true name is?"

She doesn't, of course. The human mind can't handle that much information, at least not normally. The old woman's forgotten a lot of things at this point. Some amusing, some disgusting.

"You imbecile." She glares at me. "How do you know that?"

"Who knows." I say. "Also, look down."

She does, and she quickly leaps into the air as hundreds of blackened roots rise from the soil, sprouting towards the sky like giant tendrils. She sends a cascade of divine flames towards them, only for the roots to burst right through without even a sign of being damaged.

"They're not normal plants, as you might gather." I say conversationally, watching the old woman try her hardest to avoid getting herself crushed. "They're seeds I cultivated inside the heart of a volcano. Took a bloody long time for me to do, but I'd say the results are worth it."

Augusta screams some curses, but I can't quite make it out over all the tearing and shrieking my blackened roots were causing.

Naturally, I'm not being this aggravating on purpose. If anything, it's taking quite the mental toll to keep this up. I hate speaking during a fight, but right now, I can't help it.

Because ultimately, Augusta isn't the problem here. It's her Longinus, and the god that's snuck into her soul. I need to draw the latter out, and then spring my trap so I can get myself a nice, free meal.

The thing is, Augusta is stubborn. She might've accepted the help of a god to make her flames stronger, but she has no faith in him. Her personality won't easily allow her to just call upon a god's strength to aid her. I need to break that, to make her so vulnerable and desperate that she finally sucks up and calls for him.

So this horrid plan is the result. I'll physically assault her with these roots I personally modified using Divine Energy, and I'll constantly berate her with all sorts of insults about her past that she can't even remember.

And it's working great! Augusta's getting more and more angry as time goes on, and I can tell that it won't be long before she snaps.

But it's also true that I'm hurting my own psyche by doing this. And considering I have the ability to perfectly recall anything I remember-

It's too much!

Well, at least I can keep this entire debacle to myself. It'll be some dark history I can laugh at when I'm older.

Eventually though, it happens. All the anger and paranoia the flame witch feels culminates in a single moment of surprise, and I make use of the chance to pierce a root straight through her heart. She gasps then, and she turns her eyes to mine. The rage contained in those eyes is clear to see.

So, knowing she's moments from dying, yet unwilling to let someone as enigmatic as I remain alive, she whispers those damning words,

"My pyre…is yours…" She coughs out, glaring at the skies above. "Take this body…of mine…and burn all…"

And suddenly a great flame bursts around her, burning through the roots that held her in place. The old woman slowly descends to the ground, and when she opens her eyes, her eyes boil with piercing orange pyres.

In an instant, Kagatsuchi descended.

"What a foolish woman." Kagatsuchi says, with a grin that doesn't match his vessel's face and a voice that echoes unnaturally. "To give me control over her Longinus. Ha! Such short-"

"Before saying something like that," I interrupt, pointing my thumb towards my chest. "Check yourself first. You might find something."

He stills. He can still remember the ludicrous situation he found himself in the previous time we came to conflict, and he immediately turned down to his vessel's body. The wound I'd punctured through Augusta's chest is still there.

Except, somehow, it's healing. Flesh is reknitting in a grotesque manner, growing like mold and twisting around itself in a vain attempt to hide something. He quickly tries to claw the thin vinyl of flesh away,

But it's too late. Kagustuschi feels a heartbeat echo throughout his body, one that didn't come from his heart.

And suddenly he screams as unimaginable pain courses through his vessel's body. It feels like his body is being churned, each inch crushed and torn with excruciating brutality. It's a pain incomparable to even the suffering I inflicted on him when he possessed the Vermillion Bird.

From my perspective though, it's a lot more interesting. As I expected, the Infernal Arm I jammed into Augusta's body using that root had taken hold, and it's now competing against the Longinus. One wants to consume the body's resources and turn them into Curse Energy, and the other is doing all it can to maintain the status quo.

The result is this. With Kagutsuchi left to scream in pain as his body quite literally begins to break, with cracks forming all over Augusta's body. A fight between the physical and the soul, and the clashing energies are creating fissures all along that mortal vessel of his.

Then, finally,

With one last pain-filled scream, Augusta's body explodes in a cascade of black and gold, expanding outwards like a giant cloud, adorned by black tendrils that you can almost mistake as hands that are reaching out towards the clean air.

What's left behind is a blob of formless orange energy, floating just above the ground. Despite that, the sheer heat it radiates is enough to melt everything close to it. The dirt, the stone; they've all turned to lava. Even my clothes have caught on fire. My skin would've suffered similarly had it not evolved before all this.

That blob is Kagutsuchi. Or, to be exact, this is a fragment of his consciousness, now unbound from his physical vessel and left as a bubble of pure Divine Energy.

Despite everything, this is his most dangerous form. He's unbound by the mortal coil now, and essentially unkillable. This would've been impossible normally, but since I destroyed his vessel before he had a chance to fully integrate with it, he's free to roam this world as an indestructible blob of divinity.

There's just one issue.

I happen to have the ability to absorb Divine Energy, and since Kagutsuchi no longer has a mortal vessel to physically stop me from grasping all that delicious Divine Energy,

Well, it's no surprise that the blob immediately begins zipping away from me, rising towards the sky to try and escape my reach.

But I just grin. I've already promised before; I won't let this free meal go. I've worked really hard to make that damned Infernal Arm, and I'll be damned if I don't get back what I deserve.

So, with a breath, I use my eyes to lock on towards the fleeing blob of Divine Energy, and I leap into the sky to follow.