Eris fell to her knees, blind, deaf, and disoriented. She didn’t know what hit her, no, she couldn’t even think about trying to figure it out. Her golden blood flew out of her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth as she buckled down, and even the foundation of her divinity was failing to heal the damage.

Arad smiled as he opened his mouth, and his long, proboscis-like pricolici tongue extended forward to lick her blood. With each lick, his wounds slowly healed, and he could feel a lick of his energy coming back. But even Eris’s divine blood couldn’t supply 1% of his lost energy.

He knelt down and started licking more and more of the blood pouring out of her body, and in seconds, his entire body started emitting black smoke, and that smoke expanded outward to tear the crust of the universe and digest it for energy.

While the crust of the universe looked thin compared to the dimensions of the entire universe, like an egg shell, it was still millions of light-years thick, and proving impenetrable without divine or eldritch magic of extreme proportions.

What that meant for Arad is that he was standing on a massive buffet of matter. His void digested the matter as quickly as possible, but still, it was far too slow. To digest matter, Arad needed energy to start with, so with what little he got from Eris’s blood, the start is very slow, but should ramp up the more he eats.

But how did he manage to knock out a full-powered Eris who just got a boost, and without even triggering her murder and getting wounded? The answer to that was drawn on his neck, a strangely living tattoo that looked to mirror reality, showing off the smooth and clean hand of a woman shrouded in darkness, and it was just the hand.

He had taken a page from Agnar’s book and engraved the form of his Nymph on his own body. But, since he still couldn’t perfectly control the Nymph’s beauty, he chose to only show her hand, hoping that would be enough to stun Eris and allow him to run, but he didn’t expect it to do so much damage.

So, how did Arad manage to summon the Nymph and integrate her into his body even though he was out of energy? The answer to that was far too simple; he already had her out when he went all out against the hordes of murder, and like the rat he is, he had her hide beneath the pile of corpses in case Eris ambushed him, as per his previous predictions about Eris’s plan and if she lost control or not.

There was also the fact that a Nymph didn’t consume energy to unleash her beauty, the same way a beautiful woman doesn’t spend energy for people to see her.

But why didn’t Arad get damaged? Eris’s portfolio of Murder should’ve damaged him in response. Well, that only works if Arad did damage Eris, but he didn’t. The same way if someone saw something so beautiful that they doze off and ran off a cliff, that won’t be the beautiful thing’s fault. Arad here only showed Eris true beauty, and it was her divine brain that failed to comprehend it and burned itself trying to grasp the extent of the allure.

Eris’s subconscious brain burned itself trying to comprehend the beauty, which brought her down without hurting Arad.

Dark Matter, the unseen nothingness holding the universe together, regulating gravity, and keeping everything whole. What Eris saw was those dark tendrils holding billions of worlds, stars, and galactic structures of unfathomable size.

In that fraction of a second, her mind transcended to gaze upon the machinations of the universe at in its entirety, and that... was too much to fathom.

Eris might be a divine, but she isn’t the kind of divine being that could fathom the expanse and influence of Dark Matter on the universe’s structure, and so... her mind was unable to process the beauty of Arad’s Nymph.

Up in the sky, only three gods were able to look at Arad’s Nymph without getting blinded. They were Amaterasu, an equal Nymph, Kali, whose power could destroy the entire universe, Dark matter included, and lastly, Yog, who knows everything. Kossuth and Zaleria had to close their eyes, since even they couldn’t endure it.

Now that Arad had already hit Eris with that beauty, he removed the tattoo so he wouldn’t just cheese the fight. As much as he wanted to win, he wasn’t willing to take such an easy win, since otherwise the fight itself would lose all meaning.

The more matter and blood he consumed, the more energy he got, and the faster he could consume more matter, slowly bringing him up to shape. But even with that, he was barely hovering over 5% of his full power, barely able to even move his heavy draconic body with any grace.

Eris didn’t have a better time either, since the damage done to her brain had spread not just through her, but through all the angels who were used as passive information processing units. That was how gods worked, since they can’t respond to everything at all times. Each god, even Amaterasu, had hundreds of angels whose only job was to think for them, listen to prayers, and respond, which allowed the gods to focus on more important things, like fighting in the war.

As a new goddess with relatively few followers, Eris could spare some of her angels to help her mind during a fight, which was how she could masterfully control all of the spawns of murder. But now, all of those angels were down with her, and they weren’t going to recover anytime soon.

The result of all of this was that even though Eris got stronger after Arad’s massacre, she now had less brainpower to use all of that power, weakening her.

The majority of Eris’s followers had felt her weakening, and they started praying to fuel her with divine magic, and the angels who had other jobs had now switched to supporting Eris’s divine consciousness, further accelerating her recovery.

Arad, on the other hand, had an even simpler recovery path, and it was incremental. The more matter he consumes, the more he can digest for energy, and the quicker he’ll be able to absorb more matter and recover even faster. But unlike Eris, his mind was still fine, so he could consciously take measures to recover even faster, like sucking on Eris’s blood, and disabling any spells that he had active and would consume his mana.

What that meant was the Nymph’s twin, who was in the abyss, had to hide underground and disable all of her defensive magic for a while. He also had to stop forming [Ho-white Nova]s inside his stomach, so the night sky of his inner world had turned starless, and the flow of energy there grew weak enough that the wizards inside couldn’t recover their mana from the air.

Kali and the spirits inside him wanted to give him some energy, but he refused their help, since he wanted to stand back on his own.

As Eris remained on the ground, her muscles twitched, and butterflies started appearing around her body, feeding on her sweat and blood, competing with Arad. But unlike many mortals, those butterflies weren’t here for Eris’s death, but to prevent Arad from sucking her blood to recover. They were a sentient part of her power.

As Arad saw them, he paled. They weren’t regular bug, and they weren’t monsters either. They were something else, something touched by death, something that shouldn’t be allowed to exist outside the river of death itself.

Those were the spawns of Eris’s Styx Hunters. They looked like normal butterflies, but each one was at least a C-rank monster, near-immortal, and had wings of pure compressed plasma and black blood.

And then, the big ones started to land. Fifty meters long, as tall as the great trees, and with legs thicker than Arad’s arms, and there were thousands of them. Every single one of those butterflies was as strong as a wyrm, and they were all at their full power.

"Eris had been feeding them in the Styx for a while now." Amaterasu smiled, "And those are just a few of the army of monsters she raised."

Kali sighed, scratching the back of her head. "The Styx is in the lower layers of the abyss, when she asked me to take her there, I didn’t expect her to make those things. They are both demonic and divine, and..." She threw a glance at Eris.

"And the ones that killed my avatar." Amaterasu giggled. "Those things sit at the edge between life and death; they can both snatch souls trying to cross the river, or pull living ones in to drown them. Arad, who is at the edge of his life, is their prime prey."

When the full army of Death Butterflies arrived, there were already hundreds of thousands of them surrounding Arad and Eris, and what made them even more horrifying was that they looked intelligent enough to reason. One pulled Eris away from Arad’s body, and the rest surrounded him, ready to attack, but still cautious around him.

Arad smiled. "So... I guess this is her trump card? Too much to defeat a god..." He lifted both of his hands, as if he was about to surrender, but then, he clapped his palms. "Then, I’ll pull my trump card as well."

From Arad’s void, something horrifying emerged.