"I've got only two organ regeneration potions." Vivikta sighed weakly as soon as we entered Bhairava's Space barrier, where she and Sickle Man were.
Pratyusha and I exchanged glances, finalizing our decision.
"Take one for yourself, Vivikta. For the final one... Let's give Jevin since he needs to regenerate two limbs instead of four." Pratyusha decided in a heartbeat after glancing once at Aditi.
The fight with the caterpillar chimera had already started.
When the faces of the beast started contorting, hellish chanting sounds overlapped, generating a cacophony of chaotic mantras.
I re-experienced one of the busiest railway stations I've often visited to travel across states for eye checkups.
It felt even weirder through my half-healed, half-busted eardrums, like thousands of couples fighting behind closed doors.
Wait—my eye.
I fed it some Kundalini to start it up, but the organ stayed dormant, fulfilling its usual boring functionalities.
Is this not one of those Event Intersections, then? Reviving the Saraswati River is supposed to be a significant event in the fight against Kali's corruption and should be present in all the Brahmands.
Bhairava disappeared in a flash of light, reappearing beside Jevin. Standing on the phantom platform created by Aditi's translucent water-ice rectangular barrier—a skill attached to her Makara Armor, he waved his Trident and created a ball of pure violet cosmic energy overhead.
To be able to summon a barrier at an exact spot under Jevin, surely must have required Aditi loads of practice.
She might seem aloof most of the time, but she's surprisingly diligent.
Bhairava pointed his Trident down at the caterpillar chimera, and the ethereal ball descended, picking up speed.
The voices coming from the caterpillar's hollow faces panicked and changed their tones of incantation, converting their magic midway and summoning hundreds of square barriers horizontally.
It separated the mountain dome into upper and lower halves at a measured elevation where the purple ball stopped short of picking up terminal velocity.
The cave rumbled from the enormous explosion, shrouding the upper level in a purplish smoke. Purple energy born from the interaction started consuming the barrier, disintegrating it at an atomic level.
In response, a whiny roar appeared from all the hollow mouths on the caterpillar as it chanted to create additional layers of barrier over it.
Unable to see anything through the foggy purple shroud, the Yeti Caterpillar took precautions by covering itself in detachable blood-red barriers made from its outer cloak, expecting the purple energy to spill over and attack it next.
The shields floated around the caterpillar, tethered to its body through thin strings of blood. They spread out and voluntarily made contact with the incoming purple smoke, letting it devour them before disappearing along with the destructive energy.
A flash of light appeared behind Pratyusha, distracting us from the ongoing fight.
We found Aditi and Jevin without their limbs, lying sideways on the ground, within the safety of our barrier.
"Light Kundalini is crazy." Jevin retched out green bile from Bhairava's teleportation spell's backlash.
"Arghh. It feels as though all my organs have shifted places." Aditi drew in multiple short gasps to stabilize herself.
"Aditi, Jevin." Pratyusha didn't even allow them to rest, "Bhairava doesn't have a drop of Divine Energy left within him right now."
"I figured," Aditi nodded at us while crawling towards us like a leech, "I've read that it takes some time to mix up all the different energies required for manufacturing Divine Energy inside one's body."
"Exactly. It all comes down to how we support him." Vivikta joined in while she leaned against the cave wall, staring at the otherworldly fight going on between Bhairava and the evolved Yeti caterpillar, "We can't let Bhairava use up his precious energy to only get rid of the Yeti's defensive blood cloak."
A ring of twenty fireballs surrounded Bhairava, lighting up our faces with a yellow-orange hue. Born from his split-second incantations, they traveled like projectiles and created the image of a spider's legs embracing their prey before devouring it.
The Yeti caterpillar rolled out of the way, narrowly missing a few of the fireballs—a gruesome sight with all its arms and legs sticking out of the massive wiggling body, cloaked inside a translucent cocoon of blood.
It simply tanked the rest of the fireballs and detached the burning parts of the blood barrier.
"He's indeed chipping off the Armor bit by bit. But that needs to be taken care of by us." Vivikta sighed.
She seemed to have already given up trying to control the situation, having surrendered to its flow.
"He afraid of destroying the Goddess' Remains the Yeti devoured. Otherwise, he might have ended things long ago." Aditi added. "We don't know where exactly the Peeth is hidden but Pratyusha and I can come up with something with Dhruva's help to solve that problem."
"Let's ask him to stop wasting his energy and start conserving it to end the monster in one fell swoop." I said, "After the blood barrier is lifted, my blooming arrows can tear it apart to pieces anyway—revealing the Peeth that 'thing' is hiding inside. Once that is secured, Bhairava can pull out all his stops. So it's better you two focus on how to get rid of the blood barrier instead."
"You're pretty confident about what you can do. I like that. But your arrows can also harm the Peeth. They are not as weak as you think." Vivikta grinned through her dry, blood-caked lips. "Still, I feel proud as a mentor to finally see you participating in group activities."
"Wait till you return to the village. The handiwork Pratyusha and I left there will blow your minds."
"We will surely return. Thanks for adding your optimistic viewpoint, Dhruva. But can we not stray from the topic and focus right now? Aditi and I have a prototype idea ready. Since your weapons are risky for sensitive operations, it's better you use them to augment ours." Pratyusha ended her orders with a slight smile. "Jevin and Vivikta can reduce Bhairava's load while we are at it."
She had this hint of friendly playfulness in her expression, alongside her commanding nature. It was hard to feel like we were being ordered. And even harder to say no to her.
The fight between Bhairava and the caterpillar kept intensifying.
Blasts of fire, air, and small black holes from the Yogi-God kept chipping away at the blood barrier.
As if trying to imitate the attack that took her out, the white half of the caterpillar's main body—The Mage Yeti, who was in control of the chimera, kept shooting small arrows, thousands in number, made from the blood barrier.
They impaled Bhairava's seven-layered Kavach, present both over him and our immediate surroundings, and bloomed into fist-sized urchins, trying to forcibly breach the only thing separating them and us.
Behind its safety, Pratyusha picked up the potions Vivikta released from her dimensional storage and popped open one of the vials after struggling a bit with her loose gloves.
"Sorry, Aditi, but you'll have to manage using your Skill without your limbs." Pratyusha apologized to Aditi sincerely before moving over to Vivikta.
"You gave her your Armor?" Aditi asked in a faint whisper after she crawled next to me. "Your courting techniques are too obvious, you know."
I felt a bit offended.
"Stop assuming all our actions are to get something in return for it. Had it been Jevin, I would have also shared it in a heartbeat." I pointed out. "People can often do things for others without expectations. In my case, I hate it when people around me feel down or get wounded. It rubs off negatively on my mental peace."
She snorted and stared at the ceiling high above after turning to lie on her back. "I apologize. This painless state after hours of torment is messing up my head. I shouldn't have said that. I guess it's true that people are a product of their genetics and environment. To have a skewed mentality like that, it seems I pulled the shorter end of the stick on both fronts."
Her voice was empty, without her usual fiery color.
"How long were you hanging?" I asked, feeling unexpected empathy for the way she delivered those words.
"Who knows? Felt like an eternity." She chuckled like one of those drunk uncles back in the village.
Bhairava's battle cries reached us, interrupting our conversation.
He summoned an earth ribcage, trapping the worm inside. The cage started getting smaller, making dents over the blood barrier before breaking away, unable to fulfill its role.
Bhairava looked frustrated for a second. He pulled back his Trident and chucked it like a javelin thrower from the Olympics.
The weapon surrounded itself in a blue space aura before crashing into the blood barrier.
Pop! It reminded me of fireworks creating a commotion during Diwali.
The bluish aura expanded in an instant, removing a significant portion of the barrier and spilling it onto the dry land where the blood lake once was.
"After we take care of this, Bhairava will regenerate your limbs. He already has his hands full with protecting us and chipping away at the monster's barrier." I consoled her.
A symphony of singing voices started vibrating the dome itself, stealing our attention.
"What's happening now??" Pratyusha glanced up with the half-fed potion still in her grasp, and a few curses spilled out of her lips.
"Whoa, manners!! You shou..." We could only hear half of Vivikta's sentence; her cheeks bulged with the regeneration potion before calamity struck.
A dark brown layer of clotted blood around the caterpillar peeled off like an exoskeleton, exposing another bright crimson layer underneath.
Before it could touch the ground, the blood clot exploded like a sudden cloud burst, summoning a massive storm of blood needles that spread out in all directions.
The whole environment outside Bhairava's barrier turned brown as it wore down the cavern walls with its intense barrage of unending high-speed blood daggers.
I watched the needles sticking into our barrier halfway in, and an ominous feeling struck my heart.
I grabbed Jevin and Aditi and threw them toward Sickle Man, Pratyusha, and Vivikta.
"Utility. Barrier!" I summoned three barrier fogs from my dimensional box and wrapped them around us, just in time to find the needles changing their shapes into worms, slithering inside through the holes they made, and approaching my barrier inside Bhairava's.
They jumped, trying to gain enough momentum to pierce through my barrier, but, fortunately for us, were unable to breach it. Pratyusha aimed her palm at the little critters and summoned a gushing fire like a flame thrower, burning all of them to ashes.
Even though it worked for only five seconds before sizzling out—powered by only 2 points of Kundalini, it was enough to take care of all the worms inside Bhairava's barrier.
Cracks on the cavern walls resulting from the blood needles bombardment started spreading next, making their way down from above to meet the floor below, eliciting another round of curses.
This time, it was Vivikta herself.
"Grab on." She warned in a panicking voice, higher in pitch than usual.
"Wait, why??" Jevin asked, perplexed at her panicking voice.
It didn't take long for us to know why.
My PTSD kicked in as soon as the ground underneath gave away.
The free-falling sensation in my chest and the sinking feeling in my stomach reminded me of the moment I had lost my first life. But I was ready this time.
Swallowing the erupting bile in my mouth back into the esophagus, I Willed the three barrier fogs around us to change materials, transforming into a sponge with loads of air bubbles trapped inside to provide cushioning.
Luckily, the descent didn't go on for long.
The reaction force from hitting the new muddy ground almost broke my legs, and a huge weight from above started pressing down on us.
Even though a few of us bumped into each other inside the spherical barrier while descending, the damage was not life-threatening. But, my knees kept throbbing, imitating the beats of my heart.
"Pratyusha!" Aditi called out her name.
"On it." Pratyusha's voice was a weak whimper, making me wonder whether she was grimacing in pain.
It wasn't helping in the dark.
This is the second time we were trapped under tonnes of rubble. Last time, it was the ravine wall, and now, the cavern walls.
But we already knew how to get out of this, thanks to Pratyusha.
Her barrier opened up an upward path above us in the shape of a cylinder, shifting away loose soil and even boulders from its path of expansion.
Several of the side walls in the previous chamber seemed to have peeled off, falling right on top of us and our immediate surroundings, creating mounds of dirt under the hole in the ceiling of the current cavern we were in.
I clawed my way out right after Pratyusha, my barriers now converted into ropes and wrapped around all of us. One wouldn't believe Pratyusha's strength after watching her slim build.
Reaching the top first, she pulled us up, one after another, resting only after the job was done.
We stood there—some crawling or lying because of missing legs, our mouths agape, from witnessing a scene made out of dreams.
"Are those bubbles floating?" Jevin gasped, his jaw already threatening to detach itself from his skull.
"Bubbles do float, you know..." Aditi sighed at first but the palpable excitement in her voice returned soon enough, "But bubbles of that size—I haven't seen before. They are hanging pretty high up in the air instead of coming down gradually!"
Jevin suddenly twisted around without his legs, his fingers pressing different points on his head as he looked around frantically for something.
Did Aditi's common sense deal a mental attack on him?
"What's up with him?" Aditi became perplexed.
"It's like a water fountain show... Without physics." Vivikta nodded, clearly ignoring Jevin's plight and gawking at the serpentine tubes of blue, glowing water rising from multiple points of the lake, creating an arc to meet a massive lotus several hundred feet away from us.
Its silvery color was pulsing in regular intervals like a quasar, lighting up the whole cavern with its radiance.
"One thing right after another." Pratyusha was frustrated yet awed at the beauty of the scene before us. "Atleast we found our objective. The thousand-petalled Lotus."
I glanced again to study the ceiling—so vast and grand that the floor of the previous cavern we were in was just a small hole.
"The scale of this is crazy." I muttered.
The boundary walls of this vast space were shrouded behind a floating silvery fog, which was reflecting the thousand-petalled lotus' rays. Like a fog shrouding the horizon during a sunrise on the beach.
From one of the hill-sized mounds of dirt on the shallow silver Lake that evidently trapped the caterpillar underneath, the monster burst out and started looking around until finally setting its sights on the lotus.
"Shit!! It's heading directly for the Lotus!" I heard Aditi's panicking voice and felt a subconscious jerk in my body, anticipating all our efforts till now going down the drain.