I’m late to the party, I commented to Alsig as I stepped into Subgovernor Marias Maxion’s throne room. It was now demolished, the opulent golden throne in six scattered pieces, windows blown out, marble floor cracked and shattered, statues beheaded in some suspiciously deliberate ways, a Bronze crushed inside his armor into a ball of compacted metal.

There were thirty players here still alive, thirty-one counting myself, Alsig helpfully identifying them for me with indicators. Eight were Persias’s Imperators, fourteen were Solar Guardians, some of my friends amongst those fourteen members of the Guard, five were from another Great House of Iulius, Governor Claudion, Persias Fulvion and lastly, a warped monster that I presumed was the Subgovernor.

Marias Maxion had clearly taken whatever bioenhancing poison the Golden demigod Akhillos had offered to him, he was more silver scaled dragon than man, violet flames burning where his eyes should have been. As I entered the fray, the others connected me to their shared network, the processing power of our thirty Silicon Daimons connected versus Maxion’s one AI, and their predictive capabilities gifted to all of us. Even with a hivemind’s synergy, borderline precognition, twenty-seven other trained Bronzes in Adamantplate, myself augmented by psychic sorcery and Heracles’s fiery might, and our two Silver Imperators’ absurd physical power and teleportation, Marias Maxion was wiping the floor with us.

He teleported about the throne room in flickering flashes, whipping his metallic tail around like a Mach Two bladed whip, breathing violet fire that burned our armor like they were oiled rags, slashing with monoatomic sharp claws, and swinging around a nine-foot Keenblade crackling with the electrified Curse of the Skyfather.

Theseas Claudion and Persias Fulvion were carrying our team, dominating the dragon man’s attention by using our prediction algorithms to foresee where Maxion was going to teleport to and meeting him there with their electrified twin blades and their hammering left fists and merciless kicks, but the draconic mutant was more scratched than cut by our weapons and he hit like a Golden Campeador going multiple times the speed of sound.

The algorithms were placing me into the line of fire increasingly as Alsig electronically signaled when I was reaching the peak of my divine enhancement and when I was dimming it to retain focus and clarity. I could feel my bones cracking and hear my armor screaming as it was put under stress every time Maxion’s absurdly gigantic blade bashed into mine. As with the surgesabers’s ignited Jovium emissions, the holy lightning coursing through and around the Subgovernor’s Keenblade was counteracting my scarlet edged one, quite annoyingly so.

“Light your blades with psychic fire.” The Governor commanded us through the commlink as he did so himself. “His skinshields aren’t active for whatever reason.”

Following Antonias, I swathed mine with azure fire, memories of the theater he had burned down popping into mine. All thirty of us now wielded sapphire colored fire wreathed swords, though the Subgovernor did not follow our example.

His skinshields aren’t active… and he’s not using any sorcerous abilities like the Governor and the rest of us have been… I thought to my Daimon.

“Maybe the mutagenic transformation is interfering with it. Is he even truly an Imperator now?” Alsig said.

Dio zipped through the air in his gaseous windform, transforming back into armored flesh just in time to slam into Marias Maxion sword point first. It dug into the dragon-like Silver’s shining reptilian scales, causing Maxion to roar and spit flame.

Hmm. I thought, the dragon’s breath giving me an audacious idea.

“What are you doing? Adrias!” Alsig said as I unsealed my helm with a hissing noise and pulled it off.

Improvising. I said back to her. The Subgovernor had been irritating in how well he had devoted his attention to blocking my blade, taking hits from the others or ceding ground to Theseas and Lord Fulvion or abruptly teleporting when he had an advantage when I was about to get a meaty slice into his scaly hide. I suspected as a high official he had learned of my partially divine powers and was guarding himself carefully from any of my strikes, but now I had a new plan that gave me more reach and gave him no way to shield himself.

Sucking in a deep breath, I exhaled thunderously a stream of red and gold fire from my lungs, the fire of Heracles in its purest form, a projection of the same power that glowed fiercely on my sword. It poured over the Subgovernor’s back, charring the scales and eating into his muscle beneath. He flickered away, but just as my Keenblade’s attacks would not easily heal, this wound was close to permanent in the context of this fight’s time frame.

The Daimons started prioritizing this new tactic, the Governor and Persias and Dio’s windform pressing and hounding Maxion every moment he transitioned back into physical reality from his teleportation and the rest spreading out to limit where he could escape to in the throne room. All of this combined to herd Marias into my line of literal fire, inflicting burns with my exhalations that left large areas of his body unprotected to the rest of the pack’s blades.

Marias Maxion started pummeling me with punishing blows and scrapes of his claws, but every moment he spent on trying to kill me was giving Theseas and Persias openings to score hits on the Subgovernor’s back and sides. Governor Claudion got a particularly wicked attempt at beheading the dragon man which forced Maxion to teleport hastily into a waiting group of fifteen Bronze Imperators diving onto him like a pack of hungry wolves.

Marias might have been an impossible task for a single one of us, certain death to try even for me in his base Silver form, and as the Regent told me, a fated murder was set to happen if Theseas had engaged the Subgovernor without me in the Subgovernor’s new mutated shape, but all of us together in one vicious, coordinated bunch was proving a challenge to him. To his credit, the Subgovernor did not flee to force the rest of us to be left behind and render Governor Claudion and Lord Fulvion to have to follow together without us.

“He’ll run out of teleporting leaps soon.” The Governor said grimly over the comms. “Silvers only get a limited amount per hour and he’s running through them like mad.”

I had not known that. Had never heard that at all.

“They probably don’t want knowledge like that escaping into the wild.” Alsig commented in my head.

“He’s out.” Persias reported. “Bring him down.”

The Governor chopped off his tail and Persias cut off his sword hand.

Dio and Antonias stabbed Maxion in the gut and I scorched his draconic face to the bone.

Roaring, the Subgovernor released a conflagration of violet fire and a storm of shrapnel from his scales that pushed all of us back. In his wrathful anger, he reached out for the closest target and punctured Antonias’s helmet with his claws. My friend slumped to the ground, and the virtual indicators in my vision informed me that he had died.

I screamed, my voice echoing throughout the throne room, falling to my knees. Though Marias had destroyed his scales in the explosive attack, he seemed to tap into a new well of energy that gave him the upper hand.

I did not care though, did not respond even as more of the other Bronzes died and Lord Fulvion had half his face ripped off. My vision narrowed on Antonias’s corpse, the pain threatening to overwhelm me. I remember how I had made him vow that he would become a Golden Imperator alongside me. That memory was bitter now, a dark joke that brought tears to my eyes.

“Adrias…” Alsig said hesitantly, but I blocked the rest of what she was saying out.

I only wanted to stop the hurt. The pyre flames beckoned within me. They seemed to call to me, to promise that they could put an end to the way I felt. I let them rush and surge through me like I had never before called upon them, the divine heat burning my mind more than my body.

The fire cleansed away the pain, the sorrow, the anger, searing it out of my brain.

When the inferno passed, all that was left was a cold void wrapped in the charred remnants of my receding mortal identity. To be human was to feel, and my violet gaze was as distant as starlight and my face as unfeeling as stone. There was no emotion. There was no fury. Only the simple realization that the Subgovenor was a dead man walking and that I was the knife that fate had ordained would release his soul.

My armor turned red and then white hot and then melted into molten metal that rapidly expanded in a flood of superheated metallic fluid as the spatial folding unraveled and the armor decompressed from its dense state. I wasn’t truly naked though, for I was as much flames the color of blood as I was physical flesh and bone, shifting back and forth in a quantum state between a blazing firestorm and organic matter.

“Marias Maxion, lord of Amatias,” I said in the tongue of Grecia. “Give Hades my regards when you see him.”

Then I stretched out my hand and a blade of golden light appeared in my hand. It felt right in my hand, familiar and comforting like I had held it there for ten thousand years.

“What are you?” Marias said in horror.

“Let’s find out.” I said with the deep voice of Heracles himself booming from my throat, for I no longer knew what I was either.