Less.

He was always Less.

No matter what the omphalos came up with, Lukas Aguilar was always less compared to the information the system was trying to write into him. It was happening over and over, tens and hundreds and thousands of times, and he was constantly being rebuilt in another’s image, only to be found lacking and deconstructed for the process to begin anew.

And again.

And again.

The loop went on and on, and throughout it all, there was always this constant attempt to match the construction with a certain set of attributes. Skills. Nature. Powers. Aptitudes. It was similar to the process of Alpha Condition only instead of the monster prototypes being raised to the forefront and having their instincts overwhelm his own, the opposite was happening. His own existence was being made to adapt to Skills, Power, Instinct, and Experience that belonged to someone so hilariously above his pay grade that even the omphalos system was having trouble trying to set things up without crashing. One might as well try to run a space station from a kid’s laptop.

His body was no longer his own. His thoughts, his memories, his desires and habits—it was like someone had taken every single component that was Lukas Aguilar and shoved it aside, leaving him nothing but a naked consciousness that had no choice but to speculate, unable to dictate the flow of his body. Floating in a web of raw energy, Lukas gazed through his own eyes, and at the same time, stared at himself, from a different vantage point. His eyes had lost their natural brown hue, replaced by an electric green that pulsed with familiar power and authority far greater than his own. Power that could burn, destroy, and annihilate everything that stood before it.

It was like watching a movie where the lead character was someone that looked exactly like him, and yet there was the knowledge, the absolute certainty, that he was not him.

And yet at the same time, he was.

Quite naturally, the Screen went crazy.

BREACH DETECTED!

INVASION OF FOREIGN SOUL PROTOTYPE

SOUL SIPHON ATTEMPTED…

FAILED!

ATTEMPTING BASE HOST AUGMENTATION—

SOUL SIPHON ATTEMPTED…

FAILED!

SOUL SIPHON ATTEMPTED…

FAILED!

SOUL SIPHON ATTEMPTED…

It went on and on as the omphalos relentlessly kept trying to assimilate this power—Inanna’s power—into itself. He could understand why it was happening, but there was nothing to be done. The last time Inanna had possessed his body, he hadn’t yet unlocked many of the abilities he had now.

And now, with available Soul Capacity, the omphalos would not be denied.

Initiating Parallel Matrices

Safety Off! Overclock Set!

Intercepting Routines

Enact

SKILL UPGRADE Registered!

SKILL

LEVEL

SOUL CAPACITY REQUIRED

Kinetomancy (FRAGMENTED)

APEX

177764

DESCRIPTION

Absolute Manipulation of magnitude and direction of Momentum Vectors

SKILL UPGRADE Registered!

SKILL

LEVEL

SOUL CAPACITY REQUIRED

Momentum Manipulation

4

50000

DESCRIPTION

Alteration of momentum of any force and objects within an established radius.

New SKILL Registered!

SKILL

LEVEL

SOUL CAPACITY REQUIRED

Alleviation

3

5000

DESCRIPTION

Removal of any and all unreasonableness of the Body to return it to its calculated original format.

The blonde transformed into a half-frosted, half-human thing, with a mini blizzard swirling around her like a protective cocoon. Two whips, one entirely of frost and the other entirely of wind, were in either hand. For someone that had felt a wide range of different powers ever since his arrival upon this world, Lukas had a sneaking suspicion that this girl’s power was unnatural.

Solana’s power was dominating. Inanna’s power was all-encompassing, as if the entire world was soaked in it. Ryu and Quonnan had been the flashy, destructive type. Every single time any of the powerful entities had slung major mojo around them, the elements would charge up the immediate environment and soak it up with raw mana residue. If the caster was strong, the mana would shroud around them like a cloud of violent power, manifesting according to one’s emotional spectrum.

This was different.

The blonde’s power didn’t fill up the place. Instead, it emptied it in a way that most people wouldn’t probably comprehend. Utter stillness spread out of her. Not peace, but something horrible and hungry and wrong, something that drew its power from being not. It was made from the emptiness at the loss of a loved one, the silence between heart beats and the inevitability of death.

And it was strong.

For the first time, Lukas truly began to comprehend why she was listed by the Screen as a predator and not prey.

It was when he noticed it.

The blonde was not moving.

Neither was his body—Inanna, that is.

Despite being ethereal, Lukas kind of drifted forward and watched himself, and then the girl. It was then that he realized that the quality of the light around him had changed, and had frozen. Chips of stone that were fluttering were stuck midair, and even the Wind around the blonde appeared to be little more than a sedentary congealed mass of something viscous and translucent.

The hairs at the back of his spiritual neck didn’t go up so much as they let out tiny, hirsute whimpers and started trembling violently as the rest of him.

“Incredible,” came Inanna’s voice in a basso rumble from behind him. “Your luck knows no bounds.”

Slowly, Lukas turned. Behind him stood Inanna, just as spiritual as he was, with motes with crimson light exuding out of her form. Lukas gawked at her, and then at his own body that was still under her control, and then back to her again. He felt his stomach twist, and suddenly, had to fight not to throw up. Or fall down. Or weep.

“Wh—” he stammered, “bu—are—how?!”

Her stare made him forget what he was about to say. She looked at him for a breath, her eyes unreadable. Then she looked searchingly up at him, and spoke in a slow, quiet, ever so slightly jealous tone. “Somehow, despite your repeated denial of my offer, events turned out in such a manner that allows you access to skills you’ve done nothing to deserve. Again. I find this most vexing.”

“I’m sorry?” Lukas tried.

“Perhaps this is for the best. You shall now see something the world has not seen in aeons.”

“What’s that?”

“The goddess Inanna at war.” She glanced at his body. “The creature that stands before you is a shard of something just as ancient as myself. A pity it is in such a sad state. It’d have been a worthy prey at the peak of its strength.”

That, Lukas decided, said all one needed to know about the Supreme Queen of An and Ki.

“But now, it is feeble. Grounded. Trying to crawl its way into this world. Nothing to be threatened about, but something that could harm a god if given the chance.”

“Even you?”

“I am immortal, not eternal. This is power that belongs to the ancient world. A fundamental force of the universe. If left alone, the things it could unleash would be…unsettling.”

Lukas tried to think of the kind of situation that would unsettle Inanna.

The sigils came to mind.

“The sigils. The legends. Your own puzzling existence. And now…this. I know not what the future holds, but it is shaping up to be rather intriguing.”

“What are you going to do?” Lukas asked.

Inanna’s face blossomed into a carnivorous grin. “This creature is one of instinct. Ugly. Hateful. Unruly. It needs a firm hand to teach it balance. I intend to be that hand.”

An image of Inanna spanking the blonde came to mind. Lukas shook his head, discarding it as quickly as it came. He already had enough nightmares to deal with. So he looked back at the frozen view and returned to meet the goddess’s eyes.

“Time is relative. Do not be concerned with its passage. It currently passes very, very slowly in the real world, compared to here.”

“Right,” he said. “That’s…good.” He wanted to ask what “here” meant, but decided not to annoy her with more frivolity. Instead, he settled on accepting it as a fact. “Is there anything you want me to do?”

“Pardon?”

“You said she’s dangerous and of the ancient world. Plus, she has a wind kami. And you’ve said before that my body is frail and you can only use the minimum of your power. So…”

The Supreme Monarch of An and Ki cast back her head, her eyes going wild, her smile widening to inhuman proportions. “The numbers stand at one Inanna to none. That advantage shall be sufficient. I confess, it has been aeons since I have taken the field in earnest, mortal.” Her teeth gleamed. “I shall enjoy it.”

“Enjoy?”

Inanna turned in a wave of silken black hair and starlight and strode toward where his real body now stood, before merging with it. And just like that, time unfroze.

And the fight began.

The blonde was like a swift wind. Even when Lukas had faced her at maximum acceleration, her speed had been nothing short of absurdly unfair. Now? She was even faster.

Lukas watched wide-eyed as she brought down her whips from above at Inanna, aiming for her shoulders. The whips slammed home with such force that the floor beneath her feet cracked. By all logic, his body should have been bereft of arms.

Instead, the goddess gave her a shark-like grin and twisted her body, looping her left hand in an overhead chop, shattering both whips and hurling a spinning boomerang of pure force at her. The ice-eyed girl spun a shield of wind to deflect the thrust, projecting a wind blade at Inanna’s knees even as she knocked the kinetic boomerang skyward. Inanna mirrored her movement, using the momentum of the now-deflected blow to shatter the wind blade, while bringing a new slashing wave wheeling around to decapitate the blonde’s head.

The girl hastily raised a rime-covered hand to deflect the blow, and was sent skidding across the floor by a hammer blow in the face.

Inanna stared down at the blonde, her expression one of confused annoyance. “So stubborn for one so frail.”

“Don’t tell me I wounded your pride, False God.”

“Far from it,” Inanna said, “In fact, I am actually starting to enjoy this. It has been quite some time since I have been so entertained.”

The windcrafter vanished, leaving a furious roar of wind in her wake. She appeared right before Inanna, stabbing a wind blade at her chest. Right, left, up, down, sidewards, backward—the blonde kept up a relentless stream of attacks, every strike carrying within itself an unspeakable ferocity that made Ryu seem like a small sardine in an ocean. Hoarfrost coated her limbs in thin sheets, a frigid tundra air moving around her like a dark, firm, undeniable outline.

Lukas watched her pierce Inanna with half a dozen icicle shards, while conjuring a cylinder of vacuum around the goddess’s body, causing the air around them to slam into her from all directions with all the might of a sledgehammer, all the while hurling more than a dozen arcs of pure energy toward her.

The space around Inanna exploded.

“Tch!” The blonde grimaced. “That was easier than expected—”

“Was it?”

Lukas witnessed the gale of dust scatter off, revealing Inanna, standing there, completely unruffled. None of her—his body parts were missing. Even his clothes looked unruffled.

“How are you doing that? I felt my shards pierce you. The vacuum should’ve obliterated you. All of my attacks hit. I know they did!”

Inanna smiled playfully. “To put it simply. You missed me.”

“NO! I DIDN’T!”

“What a stubborn one you are. You did. Not that I expect you to perceive it. You are rather weak, after all.”

The blonde responded to her questions with techniques that could only come from decades of bone-breaking practice. The grace, the power, the efficiency—it made Lukas wonder how he had even survived against her earlier.

The girl quickly became a blur of images, each one acting out its own chaotic dance that was also somehow graceful. It was awe-inspiring to see potential, possible realities overlapping while the girl fought to predict the future, adjusting and counter-adjusting her actions based on what she could perceive.

It didn’t even touch his body.

“It feels so good to be back after so long,” Inanna exclaimed, casually grabbing the blonde’s right arm and throwing her into a wall. “Surely you can put in a little more power when you strike me?”

The blonde gritted her teeth and raised her arms, conjuring dozens—no, hundreds—thousands of ice shards. With a wail of pure rage, she converged all of them toward Inanna.

Every single one of them was stopped by invisible hands.

Without Inanna even lifting a finger.

Balance Reality Foundation—Counterbalance

Equalizing…

Ingrain supplementary protocols.

Establishing…

The skills Inanna had been commanding were powerful, requiring Soul Capacity well beyond what the omphalos was comfortable with unleashing. Reflection or not, this was a goddess, and her skills weren’t something that could be taken by any ordinary Soul Siphon.

Something different was required.

Something that could accomplish the most while maintaining the base state unchanged.

Initiating…

Maximizing Free Soul Capacity Allocation.

Soul Capacity: +10000

URGENT!!!

REGISTERED SKILL

LEVEL

SOUL CAPACITY

ISSUE

Kinetomancy (FRAGMENTED)

APEX

177764

Insufficient Soul Capacity

Alleviation

3

5000

Requires Confirmation before Assimilation

Momentum Manipulation

4

50000

Insufficient Soul Capacity

Host Body requires calibration!

Lukas wanted to laugh at the sheer irony of it. A gift of ten thousand Soul Capacity from the omphalos as a last-ditch effort to balance the scales, and it still made no difference whatsoever.

He glanced back at the ongoing fight, and found the blonde lunging at Inanna, blades in each hand.

Inanna did not move, the girl slowing down as she approached her, the very motion that propelled her draining from her body. The goddess gazed at her contemptuously. Then she raised her hand slowly—

And slapped her across the face.

“I must say, this body took to my skills rather well,” Inanna commented. Blood and spit escaped the blonde’s nose and mouth as Inanna casually grabbed her by her neck and smashed her against the floor. “It instinctively channels Kinetomancy without the slightest resistance.” Then, she looked down at the fallen blonde in abject disappointment. “You’re not finished already, are you?”

Lukas swallowed.