Prologue …of sorts.
Darquesse floated down to the surface of the red planet and …. Felt weak. Wait what?
Oh so that's what happened. That's what the feeling was while opening the inter-dimensional portal. She had been tricked. Hmmm….. So she was essentially much less stronger than she had been led to believe, she was on an alien planet inhabited by a race of gods. Angry, crazy and insanely powerful gods. She smiled. Oh well. This was what she wanted after all, a challenge. A good sincere and hard challenge.
Then she the featureless body walking towards her, the smooth face, the stiff movements and most of all, she noticed with ever widening eyes, the ridiculously awesome amount of magic. Wow.
Then the figure moved its hand towards her. And she felt the most excruciating pain she had ever felt, and from her, that was saying a lot.
And then she stopped the pain.
She focused on it. Narrowed her eyes and saw how the creature did it. She saw it from another view and saw something which she didn't even normally ever see. She saw its Aura.
She looked at herself this time and noticed a deep silver emanating from within her. Then she looked at the faceless one, she presumed it was a faceless one since nothing else could ever have hurt her like it did, she saw that it was shining with a bright, brilliant white that reached much farther than it should have. Suspicious.
Then she saw why. That was its magic sneaking out towards her. She narrowed her eyes again, and sent a tendril of her own powerful magic out. It wrapped around the white tendril and it pulsed and kept pulsing. She gave it another push and it dissipated the other tendril. Fascinating.
Then she went for the physical approach. She sent a thousand spears of darkness at it, tearing apart its body, ripping it to shreds. And it fell apart. Then, unbelievably, it began knitting itself together, healing itself. Faster than she would have thought possible. Ooookay she thought. Let's try something different.
She widened her view towards the faceless and was astonished at the amazingly complex network of magic that made up its consciousness. She set about dismantling it. Of course she hadn't expected that the faceless one would just lay still while she was busy killing it, but she also didn't expect it to respond so very ferociously. It took almost half her strength to keep its power at bay. And the other half was almost completely spent it untangling its magic. In mere minutes, she succeeded and the body of the faceless one stumbled and eventually fell down.
Nothing of its previous consciousness was left.
Darquesse sank down, exhausted. She would need a few minutes to regain her complete strength. Unfortunately, she would not get those few minutes.
Because just then she noticed the hundreds of others. They were surrounding her. She was ridiculously outnumbered. And they all glowed that brilliantly pure and harsh white.
And then she woke up.
The goddess stood up looked at her clothes, once a bright red, now in bloody tatters. Then she realized that not only her clothes but her skin and the flesh beneath it too were ravaged with seriously deep cuts. She concentrated and when nothing happened, she concentrated a little more, this time successfully healing herself. Darquesse looked up at the face of the creature standing in front of her. Looking directly at it would have driven anyone insane. But then again she wasn't anyone, she was Darquesse the killer of worlds, Darquesse who had survived for so long by herself against tens of thousands of faceless ones with no help whatsoever.
She jumped up and thrust a wave of pure magic, straight from The Source at it. And it fell back howling eerily and somewhat unnaturally. She calmed herself and focused; saw the intricate network of strings that tied it together. She then intensified her magic to a point where it would have obliterated anything near it. She concentrated and vaporized its life force. She sank down exhausted. Such sudden and intense magic had nearly drained half of all her power. She could do with another nap.
No. She frowned. Once, she had never even needed to sleep, but now she needed however much sleep she could get. She never had enough time to regain her strength before their next attack.
Over the years she had gotten better at killing those pesky gods, she could now do it in a matter of seconds with intense concentration. She had learned where and how to affect them. At which point to apply pressure and pull, yanking out their life source.
Oh but it drained her. It drained her considerably noticeably.
She repaired her clothes with ease and pulled out the blood stains from her jacket. She flew up and forwards to make camp somewhere else. She had long since given up trying to return to her own world. The portal just didn't open now for some reason. Perhaps it was the faceless ones or maybe something else. She didn't care so much now. She was more interested in surviving nowadays. She came to a sudden clearing and stopped dead.
For what she saw scared even her, at least to some degree.
It was a field full of those gods. Maybe around 70 or 80 of them.
"Well shit" said Darquesse.