With a silent tear in the fabric of reality, they were instantly transported to a chamber that perfectly replicated the one in Luke's illusion. Upon arrival, the Beast Kings and Emperors' mangled forms began to stitch themselves back together with terrifying speed. Luke, disinclined to waste time in another tedious battle, cast a specialized amplification spell. This was no ordinary enchantment; it was a perversion designed to target the fundamental primal urges of hunger and lust, not merely heightening them, but saturating their very beings until the desires exploded beyond all control.
In the initial moments, the Beast Kings and Emperors, through sheer force of will, fought to retain their crumbling sanity. Their futile resistance ignited a new, sinister idea in Luke's mind. Activating his Marionette spell, he twisted their powerful forms into his grotesque puppets and issued a chilling, solitary command: "Stay." They remained rooted, rigid, but as time inexorably wore on, their sanity dissolved into a primal fog.
Luke then turned his attention to Mary, maliciously re-forging the severed link between her and the child. He applied the same vile amplification spell to her, but with a specific, cruel inversion: her lust was extinguished, plunged into absolute negativity, while her hunger became a raging, unbounded inferno. Every surge of this amplified hunger and lust, from Mary and the beasts, was meticulously funneled into the infant. For the next fifteen minutes, the baby was a symphony of agony, its small body arching and twisting, consumed by an unbearable, uncontrollable hunger and lust. Luke, anticipating the child's imminent collapse, swiftly cast a high-level, profoundly potent mind fortification spell to brace the ward's fragile mind.
Exactly at the fifteen-minute mark, the Beast Kings and Emperors, now utterly devoid of reason, were nothing more than pure, instinct-driven abominations. Luke's voice, a casual whisper of doom, granted their horrifying freedom: "Go wild."
Mary, the revered Goddess of War, possessed a hidden duality known only to a few: her insatiable lust and her near-absent hunger. Luke, with a chilling understanding of these traits, inverted them. During the crucial fifteen-minute window, Luke performed an act beyond the healing device's capability: he completely restored Mary's being, reversing all the burnout she'd inflicted upon herself.
He then seized her head with both hands, his grip impossibly strong, enough to shatter bone. Into her, he began to transfer an unknown energy. This energy was a miracle in proper application: it could profoundly expand and augment an individual's life force, lifespan, mana, essence, core, soul, and astral spirit. But it demanded strict conditions: the recipient had to be near death, utterly devoid of mana, and the energy delivered in precisely timed, short, strong bursts and minute durations.
Deviation from these conditions resulted in abject torment. If the recipient wasn't mana-depleted or if the bursts weren't short and strong, their existing mana would deem the new energy invasive, triggering an agonizing conflict that coursed through their very being. If the durations weren't minutes, an insatiable hunger would erupt, stripping the individual of all reason, leaving only a primal craving. And if the recipient weren't on their deathbed, the intended expansion of life force and lifespan would grotesquely backfire, initiating a slow, drawn-out demise.
Mary's fate, however, was tailored. This was another hell. Luke, perfectly aware of every potential side effect of improper transfer, manipulated time, rewinding Mary's existence to the exact moment they first encountered each other, bringing her back to peak condition. Only then did he begin the infusion of this insidious energy.
For fifteen agonizing minutes, Luke transferred the miraculous, insidious energy into Mary—a slow, deliberate invasion that never relented. Her very soul writhed beneath the clash of forces: her noble mana battling the foreign power now pouring into her like poison-laced honey. Internally, she was being unmade. Externally, the healing device pulsed with a cruel rhythm, instantly repairing any physical wound before it could give her even a moment's release. The pain was relentless, without climax or mercy.
By the end of the ordeal, Mary's mind teetered on the edge of collapse. She was exhausted in every way that mattered—except physically. Her body thrummed with boundless, unnatural energy, now rivaling or even surpassing that of the Beast Kings and Emperors. But the true horror was not her strength—it was the hunger. A deep, ancient hunger had taken root within her, born from the energy transfer and the amplification spell. It was insatiable. Monstrous. Primal.
Mariannette Roseblade—the Valkyrie Queen, the revered Goddess of War—was gone.
What remained was a starving beast in human skin. A feral creature whose every breath trembled with violent need, as though she hadn't fed in centuries.
Luke stood calmly in front of her, a conductor of cruelty, and held them there for five unbearable minutes. A silent, seething standoff. The primal beasts across from her, their lust and hunger magnified beyond reason, growled and trembled, staring at the fallen goddess before them. Mary, now nothing more than an apex predator in the shape of a woman, locked eyes with them, the bloodlust in her gaze sharpening with each second.
Then Luke raised his hand, and with a voice like thunder, commanded:
"Go wild."
The dam broke.
Both sides surged forward, crashing into each other with earth-shaking ferocity. Not as warriors. Not even as monsters.
But as animals, starved, frenzied, and desperate for the kill.