Chapter 23

Ethan stood by the door he’d just opened, still holding the handle.

Somewhere above the volcano his body was flying at a speed he had not chosen in several minutes, and every cycle he was not using stood between him and a magic missile. The lab’s far screens had gone dark to pay for him being awake in here. He could feel it as a kind of pressure behind the eyes, the way a room feels when someone turns the heating off.

“Well.” She turned a slow circle in the middle of the room, chin up, unhurried. “This is certainly an interesting place you have.”

“Who are you, and what are you doing in my head?”

“Direct. I like that.” She stopped at the bench and picked up his microscope, turning it over in both hands. “I suppose I owe you an explanation.”

“I suppose you owe me about a minute of one.”

She looked up.

“I’m on fire, technically,” Ethan said. “Talk.”

“Are you aware of what a divine is?”

Don’t answer. Ask. But an AI prompt surfaced at the edge of his vision —

⟨Notice: network capacity committed to flight control. Non-essential rendering suspended.⟩

— and he understood that he could not afford to be clever.

“Kind of? I got a ‘divine blessing’ once. I figured it was a system thing, not an actual person.”

“It’s people. Hundreds of us.” She put her eye to the lens, and something crossed her face, confusion folded away almost before it arrived. “And it’s also a system, which is the part that takes longer. We live in the Celestial Plane. Each of us has a nemesis — or rather, an opposite. We have power over the mortal plane and we are not unlimited in it; a thing called The Wheel keeps us balanced, and our reach through it is paid for in faith points, which accrue.”

She said all of it without stopping once to check it, the way a person recites an address.

“Everything in this world operates under the Wheel.” She set the microscope down. “Apart from you.”

Ethan waited.

“We cannot see through your eyes. We cannot feel what you feel, the way we can with any other mortal. You are locked out of us entirely.” She met his eyes for the first time since the door. “Which makes you interesting. Most of the divines would like you dead. You, however, have been extremely good for my cause.”

Above the volcano the Roc came round again. The autopilot banked him hard and the whole lab leaned with it, a stack of holograms sliding off the desk and reassembling on the floor. Ethan put a hand out to the wall. When he straightened, she was still standing exactly as she had been, and had not appeared to notice that the room had moved.

“Then help me,” Ethan said. “That’s what you came for, isn’t it? Can we skip the part where I ask what you want? Just tell me what you’re actually going to do about the thing chasing me.”

“You’re not going to ask the price?”

“You’re going to tell me either way, aren’t you? And the thing above me is kind of on a schedule.”

Memeta laughed, and there was no hurry anywhere in it. “I’m the goddess of free information and memetics, my dear. My cause is to spread knowledge, ensure that information doesn’t get lost to time and to stop information that wants to be free from becoming secret.” She drifted to the next bench and started fiddling with something on it. “You have a great deal of knowledge that is alien to this world, and a knack for finding out things others would rather keep. Keeping you alive suits me. As for the price — I want to know about you. Of all the things I know, you’re the piece that doesn’t fit. What are your origins, what motivates you, what is any of this for? Who is Ethan West?”

Back on Earth the question would have kept him up for a week. He had perhaps forty minutes of mana.

“Scientist, I guess,” he said. “I need to know how things work, and then I want to use them. That’s most of it, honestly.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“That’s the accurate one. You want the flattering version, I’ll need longer than I’ve got.” He heard how that came out and didn’t take it back. “Look — I want to stay alive long enough to learn what I need and get back home. And then show people back there what I found, because they all thought the work was crazy. Maybe come back and visit after. That’s kinda as far as I’ve got with it, I’ve been busy.”

Somewhere in the middle of it she had stopped fiddling, and was giving him her whole attention. He looked over at her.

“Is that what you were hoping to hear?”

“Thank you,” Memeta said warmly. “That explains a great deal — no wonder you’re so strange, you’re not even from this world. You’ll keep spreading what you know, which means I’m more than happy to help you.”

It had taken her four sentences to be satisfied with an answer he did not consider finished.

“Then answer one for me.” Ethan had to work to get the words in order; the screens behind him were down to three. “You said you’ve all got an opposite. What does yours think of me?”

“Ah.” Something in her expression sharpened with pleasure. “Crypto hates you with a burning passion. I wouldn’t be surprised if this Nephilim of yours is his doing. It’s a great deal of fun to tease him about how little he can do to stop you.” She lowered herself into one of the swivelling office chairs and immediately became interested in the way it rotated. “You also ought to know that your actions have brought a new pair of divines into existence. They’re admirers.”

“Admirers.” Ethan did the arithmetic on hundreds against the few, and his mouth went dry.

“As for helping — the main thing I have is knowledge.” She stopped rotating and looked directly at him, and the look went through him in a way the conversation had not. He would learn later that this is the expression a divine wears while casting. “Ever heard of soul magic?”

“Uh, no, why do y—”

Divine Blessing Received: Knowledge Package

⟨Information: data package titled “Soul Magic” received. Do you wish to open the file?⟩

Yes.

Information came in like a burst main. His AI scrambled to catch and sort it, and the screens that had gone dark came up all at once as it commandeered everything it could reach — thousands of data nodes on soul magic, how to produce Thaums, spell after spell after spell.

“Wait, how are you even doing this?” Ethan had four displays open before he finished the sentence. “You said you couldn’t influence me directly.”

“That’s the trick. I can’t.” She sounded delighted with herself. “If I could, I’d have put the knowledge straight into your head and had you know it. So I did the next best thing. Through means I genuinely do not understand, you can hold vast amounts of information in that head of yours — so I have used our link to give you everything I know about soul magic, and now you get to read it.”

Ethan nodded, and stopped hearing her somewhere in the middle of it, because the thing he needed in order to survive the next half hour was somewhere in the third display and he had started looking for it.

Memeta stood in the middle of his lab for a few moments. Then she scratched the back of her head and sighed.

“Well. Since you’re going to be busy, I’ll leave you to—”

“Wait! Don’t go yet!”

Ethan turned from the screens, and Memeta stopped with an expression that suggested she had not decided yet whether this was good news.

“One thing. Can I use [Analyse] on you?” No preamble; he did not have the cycles for one. “It tells me about whatever I point it at. You’re the first divine I’ve met, and honestly that’d be worth more to me than the soul magic. Willingly, I mean,” he added. “It doesn’t go so well when the subject hasn’t agreed.”

Memeta cocked an eyebrow and smirked.

“Oh? So seeing most of my bare skin isn’t enough information for you?”

“I— that’s not—”

“Hush.” She spread her arms. “Go ahead. Though if this is a trick of some kind, you are not going to have a good day.”

He had never cast it at something inside his own head before. It took a moment and an ugly workaround — the AI defining her as an entity separate from him, so that there was something for the skill to point at — and Ethan braced for a goddess to take offence.

Memeta frowned.

“Well, that was bizarre. My own voice told me I was being analysed just then.”

Ethan did not answer, because the readout had arrived.

He went down it fast, the way he read everything now.

Her name resolved. Both titles resolved. Her classes resolved — Divine Spirit – Knowledge, level five hundred and thirty-two, and under it a second class the system had seen fit to call Know-It-All, level four hundred and eleven. Her faith points resolved, down to the decimal of their accrual.

Everything else was question marks. Strength, vitality, agility, intelligence, wisdom, will. Age. Every number that would have told him what she was, rather than what she was filed as.

It’s the levels, he thought, and the AI had the same answer half a second later: the skill said so on its own label, more detail with more levels, and the gap between nine and five hundred and thirty-two was not a gap he was going to close today. He was reading a god the way a clerk reads a stranger — name, department, budget — and the Wheel was not going to let him further in.

Which made the one thing it had let through more interesting than all of it.

Divine Sapience. You have followers in the mortal plane, granting you the power to become a sapient form.

Ethan read it twice.

“Your mind,” he said slowly. “It’s — people believing in you is what makes you a person?”

Memeta’s smile did not change at all, which he noticed.

“You had a question about the infinities,” she said. “Ask that one.”

He let her have it. “Health and mana at infinity. That breaks everything I understand about how this world counts. There should always be a number.”

“Are you foolish enough to think that if you hit me enough times I’ll die? That if I work enough magic my mana runs dry?” She said it without unkindness, which was worse. “You have a great deal left to learn, Ethan, and I would enjoy teaching you. But the faith points this link is costing me are getting somewhat crazy.”

Three thousand six hundred and seventy-two, the readout had said. Accruing at a tenth of a point a week.

“Wait—”

She was gone, without sound, and without leaving anything behind to show that the room had ever held her. Ethan stood a moment in a lab that was suddenly much larger, and then went back to the screens, because above the volcano he had perhaps half an hour of mana and now he had a great deal to read.

Ethan realised that he had learnt a few good things and a great many terrifying ones. Beings that could not be killed, that could not run out of energy, and that mostly wanted him dead. He filed all of it under later, because later was a thing he still had to earn, and went back to the displays.

His AI had already started on the soul magic and had not got far.

That was the shape of working with it. At this point in its development it was more of a tool than a sapient being in his head — superb at gathering and organising, and no use at all at telling him which of it mattered. Left to itself it brute-forced: every combination it could generate, tried in turn, until something produced the intended effect. A complex spell that way took weeks. With Ethan working alongside it, ruling out the obviously stupid before it was ever tried, the same spell took hours. He thought of it as compiling, except that the compiler was him.

Which was the trap, and he saw it clearly as he sat down.

The implant was not a chip in his skull. It was a swarm suspended in his cerebrospinal fluid, and not one of them was clever; what made them a computer was that each held its state the way a ferrite core holds a bit, flipped by the field around it and staying flipped until something flipped it back. His own neurons supplied that field. Which meant the swarm was always partly occupied being a record of him, and whatever was left over was the part that could think.

So when he was awake and working, most of it was pinned to the job of being Ethan West having thoughts. That was all he knew, anyway, and it was enough to know what he was spending.

The dilation was worse, because the only way to give him hours inside a minute was to drive his own neurons faster than they were built to run. Flipping a hysteretic thing costs you the loop, and every cycle dumped a little more heat into the fluid his brain floated in. Sitting still in a quiet room the bill came slowly, and he had run dilated for whole nights and paid for it in nothing he couldn’t sleep off. Running dilated while the same swarm flew him through a pursuit at the edge of what his body would take was a different bill entirely, and hours of that was a fever. There were people on Earth who had pushed it too far and died of exactly that, sitting upright, wide awake.

So: stay awake and thinking, and the swarm had less of itself to spare for flying him. Push the dilation hard enough to get the hours the spell needed, and cook.

There was another way he could speed up the development of spells. Using a spell to test its effect in the real world rather than a simulated space would greatly improve the speed at which a spell was developed. It was what had happened with the flying spell after it had to be used in a… somewhat unexpected emergency. Analysing the real use of spells always gave the AI more to work with, especially if it worked. For this reason Ethan looked through the vast amount of soul-related data for some simple spells.

After a moment a particular one stood out.

The spell was called “Soul Vision” and according to the description was a simple spell that highlighted beings with souls in your vicinity along with the strength of the soul. It unfortunately didn’t provide much more information than that. More annoyingly was the way it would normally be cast, mind runes. Meaning Ethan wasn’t lucky enough to have been provided with fully functional primordial spells. Briefly scanning over a few more spells he saw that they were all described in non-technical ways and were always being cast via mind runes, spoken incantations, or hand gestures.

It seemed that to get any results from soul magic he would need to confront his worst enemy: hard work.

By no means was Ethan a slacker back when he was on Earth, but he certainly believed in the mindset of “put in the bare minimum effort, so that it is what people think is your best effort. They will be impressed if you ever put in more than your bare minimum”.

He had told Memeta he didn’t have time for the flattering version. The flattering version was this, and it had been sitting there the whole time. Being in this world changed all of that attitude. Ethan finally felt a meaning to his life, and actively wanted to achieve things. No longer was he an aimless post-graduate, he could be an all-powerful wizard, great leader or amazing innovator. Or maybe all three.

With his newfound motivation, or maybe fear of failure, Ethan went at it with greater fervour than he’d ever had for any other spell. It helped enormously that he didn’t have to start from nothing.

A rune model, it seemed, was a compiled thing. Runes got assembled out of primordial instructions and then sealed up as one teachable unit, the way a program gets shipped without its source, and Soul Vision’s model was sitting right there in the packet, sealed and working. He didn’t need to invent a spell that could see souls. He needed to take one apart.

That, his AI could actually help with. Brute force was hopeless at inventing and very good at matching — give it a known-good result and it would grind through primordial subunits looking for combinations that produced the same effect, while Ethan sat over it throwing out the stupid ones before they were ever tried. The compiler was still him. He was just running it backwards.

Just 30 minutes of simulated time later he had a prototype that should work, at least in theory. He’d had to throw out everything in the original that assumed a voice or a pair of hands, which turned out to be most of it. Using the fact that testing spells in the real world worked better for developing them than testing them in simulated space did, Ethan cast the spell without much hesitation. He didn’t worry if it would somehow kill him, he would be dead anyway if he couldn’t get something to work.

In his simulated space, Ethan anxiously watched a display showing his vision. Panic briefly fluttered in Ethan’s heart as his vision darkened and he worried that something had gone wrong with the spell.

Shit, did I just make myself blind? Ethan thought with panic. He wouldn’t be surprised if it had hit some massive snag, after all he had pieced it together like a frenzied tech trying to quickly assemble a communications array.

The panic washed away as he saw that he was not, in fact, blind. The world resolved itself in muted gray tones, objects were surrounded by fuzzy gray outlines and the sky was a pitch black.

Ethan then saw the points of light, hundreds of them alone in the forest beside where he flew.

His jaw hung open for not the first time in the day; it was oddly beautiful. Beyond looking pretty it served a very functional purpose. Each point of light pinpointed a being with a soul and the brightness/intensity of the light showed how much strength the soul had. Most of the points of light–souls, rather, were hard to spot from the muted grays. They were small and very dim, probably the souls of insects and other tiny creatures. The point where it started to become interesting was apparently when you reached creatures the size of a small mouse, the light given off by these souls was noticeable. Although still not very powerful.

Looking around briefly Ethan saw a much more powerful soul being highlighted, or rather two souls. Using the AI to enhance his view of the far away peak of the volcano where he currently was looking he saw what was happening, a roc was mere seconds away from decapitating a smaller avian creature.

Ethan sat and watched eagerly, curious to see what would happen to a soul when the body it is normally contained in is killed… although he didn’t know if being excited about another being getting killed was a good thing or not.

I’m getting excited about things dying? I’m already halfway to being an evil necromancer! Ethan thought to himself.

The seconds in the real world slowly ticked by as the minutes slid by in simulated reality, Ethan watched as the vague white blob of the roc collided with the smaller bird, thing? The effect was nearly instant. The impact had obviously been to much for the poor thing to handle and it had died instantly. Ethan watched in fascination as its soul seemed to “seep” out of its body and floated in a cloud where it was just killed. The “cloud” of soul seemed to start to slowly weaken as it dispersed, Ethan didn’t stay watching as it would have taken a long time to watch the entire thing. He didn’t have much of a choice apart from to stop watching, in slow motion he was thrown off course as the AI suddenly started to adjust his course to dodge another lightning bolt from the Nephilim.

Wait a minute…

Ethan commanded the AI to get a view of the Nephilim, he was suddenly much more curious as to how the Nephilim looked currently than what a Roc looked like. His head slowly turned under the AI’s control, he was just able to catch the Nephilim in the corner of his vision. His eyebrows raised in interest, it was blindly bright, so much so that he couldn’t even see a vague figure like he could with the other creatures about. This guy was just a solid glowing orb.

⟨Notice: Light levels at unacceptable tolerances, averting gaze⟩

The message flashed on a nearby screen, Ethan found it no surprise that the light could be damaging to his eyesight, considering just how bright it was. As his vision was slowly averted from the Nephilim he could see a clear after-image of the glow in his vision, much like the ones you would get after briefly looking at the sun.

How was he expected to kill that?

He wasn’t. Not from out here, anyway.

But he had just watched a soul come loose from a body, and he had a goddess’s entire library on souls sitting open in front of him, and somewhere in the overlap between those two things there was an idea.

Soul binding wasn’t new. He’d done it himself, recently and not at all well, with a monster’s soul, because that kind of enchanting needed a bound soul to channel mana through. The packet had the same principle over and over, variations on it going back further than he wanted to think about — and every single one of them bound a soul to a thing. A crystal, an enchantment, something with a shape to it. Kothar had been disgusted enough by the monster version.

Nobody seemed to have bothered binding one soul straight to another. And why would they? There was nothing in it for whoever cast it. No battery, no servant, nothing you got to keep afterwards. It was a technique with no application, which was presumably why it had sat in a goddess’s library going unused.

Ethan didn’t want to keep anything. He wanted to pull something out of a body it was winning inside.

And there was the question that had been nagging at him since the Roc. How the hell do you measure and quantify willpower?

You put two of them somewhere with nothing else in it, apparently.

Ethan smiled to himself.

He would have liked hours. But at this level of intense activity, hours was a fever, so he took what he could get, and at the end of that and massive effort on his behalf, Ethan had the spell. He’d tested it innumerable times in his simulated space but the real effects that such a spell would have were alien to him. He simply didn’t have the data and variables available to test it in the simulated space.

He would just cross his fingers and hope that it would work the first time.

Ethan leant back in his chair staring at a visual representation of the spell he had just created, the Soul Vision spell paled in comparison to the size and complexity of this one. He found it beautiful to look at, in a way that only a mathematician who found complex equations beautiful.

The spell would do more than look pretty, though. It should be Ethan’s ticket to not get killed. A few more minutes had passed in the real world during his time taken to develop the spell, he was now skimming along the peak of the volcano, using natural outcroppings to provide a small amount of cover. He wouldn’t need to hide with the potentially life threatening stunt he was about to pull off.

⟨User Action: Ending time compression and simulation protocol, releasing control to user.⟩

His AI relinquished the control of his body instantly, and the world suddenly slipped back to its normal speed and he found himself back in the high speed pursuit. He didn’t wait a second before he took action.

From what he had seen so far, the Nephilim chasing him was easily able to match his speed, which made outrunning him impossible. Ethan figured he could outmaneuver him instead. So he applied the brakes, in a metaphorical sense.

The G’s of deceleration slammed into Ethan like a brick wall, the corners of his vision went black and he struggled to stay conscious as the seconds passed. He came to a full stop in less than 50 meters. As he had expected the Nephilim wasn’t able to brake as hard, shooting straight past at quite a pace. It let out another one of its screams, probably in frustration.

Ethan simply hovered in the air where he was and closed his eyes, focusing. The spell he needed to cast was complex to the degree that the AI wouldn’t be able to cast it on its own. Ethan started the arduous process of piecing it together in his mind as the Nephilim turned around and started making headway towards Ethan.

He remained perfectly still as the Nephilim approached, it was charging a powerful spell at its apparently suddenly suicidal victim. It would never get a chance to cast the spell.

It suddenly found itself hit by a strange feeling, not a physical one, but a mental one. It felt like there was a strange something that was pulling at it. Ethan simply smirked and they both went limp as the spell went into its next stage, their bodies floated a good couple dozen of meters away from each other as the battle departed the physical realm and entered the realm of the mind. Their souls were fully connected to each other and one of them was about to have a very bad time.

Samayael suddenly found himself in a strange white plane, like a blank canvas. The ‘floor’ was a slightly different colour white to the rest of the surroundings enabled him to at least stand without falling over. He took a cautious step, and it seemed that the ‘floor’ shifted with him, the all encompassing white seemingly in a sphere around him. He had no idea how he had got here at all, as all he remembered was a strange tugging at what felt like his mind and then a “fall”.

Am I dead? Did that damn human find a way to slay me?! He angrily thought to himself. Unbeknownst to him he was not dead. His and Ethan’s souls were in a “Limbo” like state, in a reality between the physical world and that of death. If you were to look at the two of them floating in the sky using Soul Vision you would see their souls stretched out and “connected” together. It was exactly what Ethan intended, the only way to escape the connection would be to destroy the tenuous link that their souls shared with their own bodies.

“Well, damn. You’re one ugly motherfucker.” The insult originated behind him and Samayael spun around to face the voice. Standing a good 10 meters away was the Human, wearing white robes and smiling in a self-confident manner. Samayael realised in sudden horror that he was no longer wearing his usual clothing. He was wearing the same plain white robe. His disfigured and hideous face was in plain view.

“You wretched creature!” He screeched, “What in seven hells have you done?” The human’s smile only seemed to broaden at this.

“I just levelled the playing field a little.” The human said with a smirk.

Samayael simply couldn’t contain his anger anymore, he leapt towards the Human and found out in short notice that he apparently weighed a lot less here. His jump, which should have landed him straight on top of the human took him sailing over the top of him, and he ended up landing on the opposite side the same distance away as he had just started. Reaching entirely new levels of rage he turned back around to face the human again. Instead of going for a physical attack, he started conjuring a powerful [Lightning Bolt].

Except it didn’t work, his hand gestures did nothing. The human was breaking down laughing.

“Oh man! That was too good!” he wheezed, apparently struggling for breath amid his entertainment, “I should have mentioned it, really, physics here don’t work the same way as they do in the physical world. The gravity is lower and magic doesn’t work. Our stats are also set to neutrally equal values. We’re gonna have to settle this the old fashioned way.” Ethan said before raising a fist.

Samayael didn’t understand some of the words in the mortal’s mocking words. Nevertheless, he still found himself feeling greatly insulted.

He went to leap at the Human again, this time putting less power into the jump. Unfortunately for him, Ethan moved first. Ethan only had a vague idea of how physics behaved in this separate reality. It was the one thing he truly had no idea what would happen with when he used the spell. He was learning the new rules of the place quickly, but so was Samayael.

Ethan had propelled himself straight towards him, intending to collide with him to knock him down. He had positioned his elbow to make sure that it hit first. Samayael’s eyes widened and he prepared himself to collide with the rapidly moving human, but in a surprise move with a speed that even amazed himself, he sidestepped and the human went flying by. It seemed that he would react reflexively to some things. Ethan’s landing was rather graceful, He hit the floor and rolled, coming to a stop and picked himself up.

The two circled around each other, waiting for the other to make a move. Samayael made the move in the end. He took a few bounding steps, and then slid down on the floor with the intention of knocking Ethan down. Not expecting the sudden move downwards, Ethan didn’t move in time and was swept off his feet. He hit the ground hard, the breath was knocked out his lungs. He lay there trying to lever himself up. Samayael meanwhile had gotten up again from his maneuver and jumped back towards his prone victim. Pain suddenly echoed in Ethan’s ribs and he went flying a good couple meters. The Nephilim had performed a plain and simple kick to the ribs while he was down. In that moment, an outside observer using Soul Vision would have seen the tether between Ethan’s body and soul, and the common connection he and the Nephilim shared warbling and being strung taut to near the point of snapping.

Ethan knew the implications of losing, his soul would quite literally end up detached from his body. He would be dead. Finding new inspiration in the fact that he didn’t want to die, he leapt to his feet just in time to see a fist from Samayael approaching his face. The Nephilim, although terrified from this unexpected situation, was having a great time. It was quite clear that the mortal hadn’t been in many fist fights. He relished in the fear that briefly shone in the mortal’s eyes before his fist connected with the human’s face and sent him flying again. The human landed on his back and wasn’t moving.

Sensing that the end to… whatever this is was, was drawing near; Samayael took his time to approach the mortal. It seemed that today he would be getting the strange sceptre that he had been compelled to seek.

He shouldn’t have been counting his chickens before the eggs had hatched though; when he was but a scant few metres away from the mortal and probably mere seconds from beating him out of existence… the mortal performed some kind of fancy backflip and was once again on his feet facing the Nephilim. Worry flicked through Samayael’s expression briefly as he saw the look in the human’s eyes. Gone was the scared expression, it had been replaced with a look that could be explained as nothing but cold and calculating.

Unbeknownst to the Nephilim, Ethan had just tried to activate his AI’s survival protocol. When that didn’t work, he shifted it to reconnaissance mode, and it started to bolster his perception and reaction times. It was better than nothing.

Samayael swung his fist at the mortal and instead of the swing hitting his head, Samayael found his hand clasped in the palm of the human. Before he could react further, a powerful punch landed to his gut. Samayael crumpled over in pain but didn’t have much time to recover, an elbow landed itself on the back of his head, knocking him face-first onto the floor.

His nose made a sickening crunching sound as the bone inside it shattered. He screamed in pain and desperately rolled over, and almost in slow motion, he saw the foot of the human approaching his head and reacted just in time, rolling to the side and dodging the foot. He grabbed the offending leg that had just moments before threatened to cave his face in and pulled, the human lost his balance and fell.

Taking advantage of the opportunity, Samayael got up onto his feet, although no longer as steadily as before. Imaginary blood ran down his face from his broken nose and dripped onto the off-white floor, leaving a spiritual stain that starkly contrasted to the surroundings. The human had also got up in that time, pushing himself up using his arms and carrying that momentum forward to land on his feet. The human leapt at Samayael, and this time, he didn’t react in time.

Ethan landed a fierce kick to the Nephilim’s left shoulder. He fell over again and grunted in protest as he landed on his side, before the human landed on top of him and began to strangle him.

Ethan knew he had to finish this quickly, the longer their souls remained connected, the greater the chance that his soul would be damaged by the forced contact. In the end, he was risking a lot by being here, but what were his other options? The Nephilim was too powerful to fight in a fair battle.

So he had had to cheat.

And now it was paying off. The Nephilim struggled and managed to flip himself over completely.

Samayael fought mightily to stop the human’s chokehold on his neck, all to no avail, he settled for trying to choke the man in turn.

It was now a true battle of wills, and to the victor would go the spoils. In this case, survival was all that mattered.

Back in the real world, two figures levitated off the ground, connected by an invisible thin strand of spiritual energy. The unfortunate one of the pair found that the tether that linked their soul to their body snapped like an overstretched piece of string.

One was a Nephilim that had lived for years untold, and one was a young human, merely 23 years old; one would die a death horrible and cold, and the other would open their eyes to welcome back the warm embrace of the world.