My Wives Are A Divine Hive Mind-Chapter 40: Allegro

The moment Kivas saw the monolith crush Beilan, her thoughts shattered and realigned into a rapid spiral of clarity.

Every sound became a bell, clanging through the cathedral of her skull. It echoed until the ringing became rhythm. Clanging, splattering, and smearing everything in every direction of her senses.

Her vision slowed. Her breath shortened. The air thickened, and so did her cold sweats.

Kivas was on the ground.

"Haa..."

Samael was on top of her, hair disheveled, eyes focused on a space that had changed just seconds ago. They weren’t on the same island anymore.

Samael’s arm pulsed with residual light from her teleportation. The surroundings shimmered, the curvature of reality bent just enough to recognize that the platform they now stood on hadn’t been where they began.

A moment later, a second monolith crashed down on one of the floating islands nearby—then another, then two, then ten more! Each slammed into different islands across the floating sea of flesh and stone, shattering the ground with each impact. Trees shaped like beating brains were crushed. Flesh-ropes convulsed and tore.

And a second after their landing, all of the Monoliths began secreting a thick fog to their surrounding.

Kivas tried to push herself up, disoriented.

Samael turned to her, voice direct.

"Call it, the Crumbling Judgment."

Kivas blinked, only now realizing all of her equipment were in her possession except for the ballistic missile that she left laying on the ground back then.

"Right." Her breath hitched. "Calling it now!"

She stretched her will into the space where the missile had last existed.

She could feel it, barely—somewhere far below in the layer of clouds beneath. Her soul-flame flared, and in response, the missile’s dormant spirit ignited.

The Crumbling Judgment lit its thruster.

Below the horizon, a streak of light cut upward, spiraling with scorching pressure. It roared through the air, burning past islands, flesh, mist, and fragments of shattered terrain.

With a hopeful arc and prismatic flame, it reached them.

Samael caught it with one arm, twisted her stance, and flung the missile toward the far side of a dense purple fog rolling toward their direction.

The missile vanished into the mass.

Then it struck something.

The fog dispersed instantly in a shockwave of displaced air. Beyond it, the grotesque shape of a crawling monolith revealed itself.

Its smooth face dragged across the ground, tentacles extending from every side, each one as thick as a grown man’s body, moving like limbs of purpose.

Samael didn’t hesitate.

"They are coming!"

She grabbed Kivas again, and carried her. Samael then shifted her stance into a low crouch and springing forward with immense velocity, leaping across the floating terrain.

Kivas clung to her as they moved. Her eyes darted from side to side, taking in the devastation.

The second outpost was gone. Nothing but fragments of scaffolding and the fading glyphs of their checkpoint remained. The island that once hosted their supply cache was now split into two bleeding halves.

Samael leapt again, legs pushing off from the edge of one cracked platform to another.

Kivas caught her breath enough to speak.

"Why—why aren’t you teleporting?"

"Costs Hemo and Mana Psyche," Samael said over her shoulder, her tone tight. "I’ve used it twice. I’m at half capacity. If I waste it now, we die later."

The ground behind them erupted as another monolith rose from a different angle, launching itself using tendrils to close the distance. Spikes of obsidian extruded from its sides like blooming claws.

Samael dodged intensively. Tentacles lashed across the sky, warping the air from their speed. One clipped the edge of the island Samael had just launched from, sending it into a downward spiral.

"Wait, why are they here!?" Kivas scowled.

Ahead, Kivas spotted two familiar figures moving toward the direction of the nonexistent second outpost.

Toriq and Joyhan.

They were running.

Kivas shouted, voice cracking, her hands cupped around her mouth. "RUN! GET OUT OF HERE!"

The distance was too far. Her voice dissipated in the wind.

"Too late," Samael snarled. "And they are barely moving around..."

Below Toriq, the space warped inward.

A black portal bloomed into existence without warning.

A single tendril launched upward from it, piercing straight through Toriq’s gut, lifting him into the air like a banner on a pole.

"Gyah, by the nine!!" Joyhan’s vaporous form reared back in shock.

He flickered, about to dissolve—only for the sky to darken.

Another monolith dropped.

It crushed the spot where Joyhan stood.

But under its weight, familiar mist scattered.

Joyhan’s essence fractured in a hundred directions, twisting into lines of escaping fog.

For a moment, he almost made it out—his pieces drawn toward one another in hopes of recombination.

But then tendrils burst from the monolith’s surface. Dozens, then hundreds, erupting in impossible directions, faster than sound.

They wrapped around each mist-line, sealing every route of escape, closing in until the mist turned solid and silent.

"Dammit!" Kivas gritted her teeth, watching it all unfold helplessly. "Waah—!?"

Samael shifted her grip, hoisting Kivas over her shoulder like a sack of feathers.

"Be fret not," Samael said with conviction. "We’re not dying here."

She reached for her cinquedea with one hand.

The blade sparked with radiance.

Samael hurled it forward, the weapon trailing a beam of focused light like a tethered anchor. It latched onto the branch of one of the brain-trees two islands away.

Reality convulsed, and their positions swapped.

Kivas blinked—and they were now standing where the brain tree was. Kivas looked back and saw the tree fumbling around in their former spot. And in that same instance, one of the monoliths behind was now impaling the space they had just abandoned.

Kivas gasped as the Crumbling Judgment reformed along her shoulder. "Aaaa! The missile, it returned!"

"We’ll use it!" Samael took it, cradled the weapon, and commanded Kivas, "Thrust to maximum!"

Kivas closed her eyes. Her will expanded. The missile reacted to her call, its thrusters igniting again.

Samael let go of her footing, and piloted the missile that she hugged with one arm on her side.

"It’s too fast!" Kivas shouted as air friction trying to drag her away.

"The better!"

The pair flew forward under the screaming force of the missile’s propulsion, dodging the swarm of heat-seeking tendrils with mere inches of space to spare.

The tentacles crashed into the path behind them, smashing through the floating islands and snapping the entire thing in half.

And with every second, the tendrils became more and more denser, creating a maelstrom of walls upon walls of extending eldritch tendrils.

Samael, witnessing how the tendrils began to creep from every single direction, began to swivel and did a U-turn before releasing her hold on the missile.

She then cast an invisible sphere of force around her and Kivas.

"Now!" Samael barked. "Detonate it!"

Kivas obeyed.

"Detonation!"

The Crumbling Judgment’s will clicked. The missile, still locked in full thrust, detonated.

Light erupted.

A wave of kinetic energy crashed forward, launching them through the air as the barrier absorbed and redirected the blast. At the same time, massacring the waves of tendrils was about to be their doom.

They stumbled across another platform, landing in a bruised heap but alive.

"Stand up!" Samael rose first, dragging Kivas to her feet. "The longer we stay in a single spot, the faster we sprint to our death!"

"Waaaaa...!"

Kivas readied her shotgun.

Samael retrieved her cinquedea.

Below them, the surface tore again. Mini portals opened, tendrils surged upward from it in dense waves.

Kivas narrowed her eyes and activated her Fate Weaver skill.

Threads of probability twisted around her, guiding her steps, allowing her to slip through near-fatal strikes with micro-adjustments. She twisted her torso. A tendril missed her by a hair. She jolted a step. A tendril missed her by a nail.

She pulled the trigger.

The blast from her shotgun severed two tentacles in a blink. The weapon fed off her Mana Psyche, turning her fear into fire.

At the same time, Samael danced between attacks, blade slashing like silver lightning. She reached for Kivas, catching her by the wrist mid-strike, before pulling her up and over the next advancing platform.

"Brace for impact!"

"Gyaaaaaaa!"

They landed hard again.

But at this point, Kivas was already quite exhausted. And in this scenario, where they need to maintain the same speed and efficiency without a single loss of momentum, it could be fatal.

Samael saw Kivas’ despairing face, or at some angle—anger, the cumulation of helplessness turned wrath and hatred.

Where was this hatred pointed at? Why did this anger exist?

Then, before Samael was about to learn the meaning of that expression Kivas wore, she heard a reinforcement.

Kivas also heard it, the sound of hope.

The sound of a katana being brutally hissed from its sheath.

"Kai—"

At the speed of 75,000 meters per second, or 46.602839 miles per second—an invisible arc of pressure streaked through the atmosphere, slicing through 29 advancing monoliths, cleaving 78 islands, and dismembering 12,873 tentacles in one single stroke.

Panting, Kivas turned her head—and saw a familiar figure above her, silhouetted by fractured light.

Azulus stood there, katana gleaming with unreal heat, eyes calm and unblinking—storm and flame unflinching.