‘Time - how do I fight for time,’ John’s thoughts raced while the last traces of Sylph’s attack flickered in the air like embers of a dying fire. The melee combatants immediately went to confront Lucifrena again. With the trees of Gnome’s Unleash now fully bloomed and melded into a proper wall behind her and the four women coming from the front, she had nowhere to go. Cornering a desperate animal was often a bad idea and cornering an angel perhaps a worse one.

Three pairs of wings fused into one. Feathers spawned and spread with such immense force that all of the charging women were halted in their attack and the trees were blown to pebbles. A second shockwave followed, as the spell-crafted wings beat a single time and launched Lucifrena into the air. A streak of gold, she rose high into the sky, eventually opening her wings and hovering in a fashion that physics would have entirely disagreed with.

‘What are those, five, maybe six metres each?’ the Gamer couldn’t help but think, his curious mind mingling with the combat strategy. Different facets of his analysis communicated bits of information between them in steady search of a strategy that could guarantee him his clearing of the victory condition. He was coming short. ‘I have absolutely no idea what the limits of someone with over four thousand Spellpower is. All I can garner is that she has certain limitations on her wings.’

“You’re a wise decision maker,” Vita complimented, finally fully healed and standing next to John. Nothing remained of the hole in her stomach. The dress had repaired itself and the healing slime did its work wonderfully. Undine didn’t get a moment to relax in her duties, instead having to tend to Siena, who had managed to both free herself and retreat back to John’s position, several dozen metres removed from the main battlefield. The moonshade elemental had been back for a little bit, but John had to heal the pariah first. “A more begrudging person would have healed his woman first.”

“Siena wouldn’t let me hear the end of it if I let love override the chance at success,” he told the blank, while keeping his eyes on Lucifrena. They only had the leisure of talking because she was staying still. “Our enemy is pure magic, neutralizing of which is your speciality. Defensively or offensively, I need you.”

“You truly are an attractive man,” Vita stated and smiled her empty smile. “You take command then, what should I do?”

“What should WE do?” Moira asked, her and everyone else approaching John’s position. On a raised eyebrow, she added, “Don’t mistake my question for me joining your cause. As it is, you hold command over basically all forces on our side of this test. It would be foolish of me to act on my own.”

“Alright, the first thing we need to all understand is that we cannot win,” John told them. “Level wise, that angel is closer to Romulus than to us.”

That caused surprise among the three present women not directly hooked up to the Gamer’s mind. “Seriously, tiger? The way we managed to get her on the ropes in melee doesn’t scream Romulus to me…”

“She has basically all her Stats in Spellpower,” John retorted.

“Oh,” Vita looked up at Lucifrena. From her hair began to ooze a black liquid that ran down her neck in winding patterns. Like poison ivy that climbed down, rather than up, it spread over her back and connected the network of thin silver lines. More of the dark liquid curved through the air in front of her face and formed a visor.

“If there is one good thing about this, it seems that her powers are pretty predictable,” John continued on his findings. He wanted to ask why Vita was only now putting her pariah vision into action, but that seemed like a waste of time and (depending on the answer) brain cells. “I haven’t quite worked out at which pace the feathers restore yet, too few data points, but at least we know that she is limited to certain wing configurations that make her next actions more predictable.”

“I may have terrible news for you on that front,” Vita said, just as Lucifrena began to glow. It started quite simple, a bit of golden light in front of the overcast sky, radiating from her body and wings. “You know how you can lift a bottle of water without feeling any strain?” The intensity grew to incandescent levels and soon it didn’t matter how many clouds they were. A new sun hovered right below them. “That’s just about how that one has been approaching this fight so far.”

“Fucking fantastic,” John sighed, just as the light was discharged into new manifestations of power. Two new pairs of wings, just as gargantuan as the ones already present spread throughout the sky. “Okay, listen, all we can do is delay. I have reason to believe we only need to get through another minute one or two of this. Our priority-“ He was interrupted by a sound like shattering glass and the wings all expanding twice in size. Singing metal and vibrations filled the air, and he had to shout to overpower it, “-OUR PRIORITY IS TO KEEP THOSE WITH LOWER DEFENSES AT THE BACK. ALL OF OUR OFFENSES ARE TO BE SEEN AS DISTRACTIONS ONLY, DO NOT ENGAGE HEAVILY!”

He sent a large series of mental commands through his internal networks. As much as it pained him, he instructed all of the elementals to take the front lines, no matter what he had just said about defences. The elementals had one advantage nobody else here had, being that they just needed him alive to respawn.

In an effort to avoid casualties, he commanded everyone but Gnome and Undine to Combine. The feathers in the sky spread out, while the forms of Salamander, Siena, Stirwin and Sylph coalesced. While the elements of fire and air complimented each other, the fusion came to be dominated by the clashing powers of light and shadow.

The mixing souls birthed a single entity, too unstable to last long in this world. A woman of short stature and long, straight, white hair, interwoven with greyish pink streaks, now stood in the midst of their ensemble. She had a snow-white face and lips of grey. The absolute majority of her body was hidden under a dress whose black and white colour shifted with every passing moment. Only her hands reached out of widely cut sleeves. They were pitch black, with nails of white.

“At least you use me when it’s necessary,” Twilight hissed and immediately set her eyes on the target. “Survive, got it.”

Lucifrena’s wings went through one final expansion and then, like the sun dissolving into a star-filled night sky, the feathers scattered everywhere. The energy bones were left as massive arcs of energy, all centred around a comparatively tiny human frame. Each feather was a tiny dot, over a hundred metres above them, glowing.

“DOWN!” John commanded and threw himself to the floor. Everyone else followed his example. All of the mana that the recent lull had allowed him to regenerate had been flowing into Gnome in anticipation of this moment. As the entirety of the plain grass landscape was hit by a cascade of feathers, a thick sheet of stone rose above the heads of the group and shielded them.

The quills themselves didn’t penetrate deeply, that much John had learned at this point. As long as the stone layer was thick enough to isolate them from the consequent growing of crystal crosses, something not too fancy would do. His mana would not have been required for just that task. Instead, a hole opened underneath them. Under the cover of the defensive sheet, he aimed to vanish underground. If survival was the name of the game, there was no better strategy than being hidden.

His plan was utterly foiled by two cracking sounds. One came from the sudden expansion of the quills into crosses, completely tearing apart the structural integrity of the stone shell. The second was Lucifrena’s arm ripping through the shaken shield and grabbing whatever she found first.

John was violently dragged through stone and then tossed away like an unruly child onto a bed. Except that this bed was a field of golden crosses of sharp crystal. To avoid landing stomach first on one of them, he expended one of his Shifting Momentum charges and teleported directly onto the floor. He was on his stomach, but that was quickly fixed.

Behind him, he heard Rave shout, “I did NOT sign up for the Third Impact happening today!”

John was not quite sure if this was the time for obscure anime references, but his girlfriend fired up all her buffs and engaged in melee combat regardless of what he thought. Her fist flew towards the nearly empty face of the angel and sliced through nothing. Lucifrena dodged without an issue, grabbed Rave’s hair and rammed a knee in the Lightbearer’s stomach. Letting her fall to the ground, Lucifrena then shielded herself with her three pairs of, back to normal size, wings from the counterattacks.

Light magic and weapon thrusts bounced off the shielding feathers as if they were tank plating. When Vita moved in to perhaps repeat her success at stabbing the angel underneath her shield, the protective cocoon opened with a violent shockwave. The pariah had to disengage before she was caught up in it.

Lucifrena, by her will or Gaia’s nagging, was now taking this fight at least mildly seriously. The upper ceiling of her capabilities remained unknown, but she had now manifested all six wings in a feathered state and her halo. She had all the resources and the physical prowess to be untouchable while wiping the floor with them.

While dust, dirt and grass were scattered by the shockwave, the crosses were unfazed by the kinetic energy. Only two of them moved, when Lucifrena put her hands on them and pulled them from the ground, wielding them as a pair of swords.

They immediately were put to use. Vita appeared behind the angel, knife slashing at her wings, only to find herself blocked by one of the cross swords. Colour faded away where the pariah weapon hit the golden crystal. That there was enough magic inside that crystal to even block the attack was impressive. Vanishing as quickly as her attack had come, Vita backed off.

Lucifrena swiftly switched her attention to the next closest opponent, pointing her sword right at Wendy’s throat. The redheaded goddess was just lying on the floor and raised her arms in surrender. “Look, I just got caught up in this, I’m here to sass and cook, not to get my knuckles dirty,” she explained.

Simply nodding Lucifrena lowered the cross and shifted her attention to the Warden now charging at her. Backed up by a series of light spells fired by Twilight, Moira came like a battering ram towards her opponent.

Four of Lucifrena’s wings changed shape, from those of a proper bird to something slightly more mechanical and pointier in look. Their movement felt like a stuttering video, sudden and with gaps between states of rest. As flexible blades, two of the wings brought the charge to an end, the other two slamming into the shield a moment later and throwing Moira back.

Without any warning, the angel’s attention suddenly shifted to John. The lowest row of wings extended, just as her verdant eyes fixed on him. Feather for feather, the wings dissolved and flew towards him. Not as a salvo of straight shots, as before, but as a steady and curving storm like missiles fired from machine guns.

John ran for it. A task made nigh impossible by the sheer amount of obstacles around. The pointy side of one cross tore through his pants as if they were cardboard. With a bit of resistance, sure, and had he stayed clear, it wouldn’t have happened, but neither was it the biggest difficulty of the world.

The majority of the feathers stopped seeking him as their target after a few metres, but a few of them stuck to his back just long enough to embed themselves in it. John felt the minor pain, not much more than the prick of a needle, and braced himself for what would follow.

Skin, muscle tissue and organs were all ripped apart, ribs broke as a several centimetre-wide thorns expanded into and inside his body. It wasn’t the pain that made John fall, he was used to and had Perks against pain, it was the sheer force of the expansion. Landing on all fours in the rubble of the church, he took a moment to appreciate that this had only reduced him to a third of his health and called out with his mind, ‘Beatrice, teleport to me!’

His command was heeded and the passive maid appeared by his side and used her speed to remove the crosses from his back as quickly as possible. Every second they remained there cost him yet more health points.

Vita, Moira, Rave, Aclysia and Twilight, they were all involved in a battle with Lucifrena and none of them managed to land any proper blows on her. Using her wings like additional arms, she kept most assailants at bay, and where they failed, the swords and yet more feather storms did not.

It bought enough time for the last cross to be removed from John’s back before the golden figure decided to once more focus on John. Effortlessly breaking out of the circle of other combatants by just beating her wings and rising up into the air for a moment, Lucifrena descended on John’s position.

As he couldn’t survive as much as a second strike, the Gamer decided that it was time for a desperate manoeuvre. ‘Really like to call a pattern on just two previous instances,’ John thought and ran towards the altar. Amidst the absolute havoc that her field-wide attack had caused, the one mundane cross had yet again gone unscathed.

John was still far away from the altar when Lucifrena landed in the rubble of the church and still several metres after the few seconds it took her to completely dominate Beatrice. Turning to face her, the Gamer stood his ground as if he was defenceless. The angel pointed both of her weapons at him and prepared herself for a lunge.

There was a second angle through which John saw the situation. The one from the pillar that he had possessed all the way at the start of this. Although it was mostly rubble at this point, the Possession still held for the largest chunk of it. Jutting out of the remaining pieces of wall and ceiling was the intact half of the pillar, giving John a view of the space behind him – the space behind the altar.

Lucifrena charged and John used Shifting Momentum to teleport several metres backwards. Suddenly it wasn’t the angel in front of him, but the gentle, unscratched wood of the altar. Had she just smashed through the altar, she would have gotten him. Instead, her supernaturally quick lunge came to an abrupt and awkward end. Beating her wings and digging her heels into the ground, she just barely managed to prevent herself from smashing right into the mundane shrine.