Atop a hill overlooking an arid expanse of land, Lilith and Adam watched the Sun beginning to set.
Adam had just recently been kicked out of Eden, and he managed to find Lilith who set up a place for them to meet and talk when Yahweh wouldn't notice. Lilith had used her powers to figure out when Yahweh was or wasn't watching humanity.
"So, Adam, how's life been? Getting kicked out of Eden sucked, I know that from personal experience, but how have you been adapting?"
"I've been getting along well. We've gotten used to things, though it took a while."
"Learning to take care of yourself is a pain, isn't it? The Garden had anything you needed right at your fingertips. How's your new wife? Eve, right?"
"Eve, yeah. She's good. She's like you in a lot of ways."
"A bitch?"
"No! She's nice, strong, passionate. She just isn't as, ah, like-"
"She isn't as much of a bitch about it."
"You're not a bitch! You're great! You're just more straightforward! You always speak your mind, and I think that's great! I wish I could do that!"
Lilith laughed at Adam's flustered reaction as she twisted his words.
"I'm just screwing with you, relax."
"K-Kay."
"So, did you just wanna catch up, or did you have a more specific question?"
"I do want to just talk, but I also have a question I really wanna ask."
"Fire away." Lilith said with a clap.
"Why…did…you…defy Yahweh? Well, I know why, like, literally, it's because you hate her, her rules, rules in general. But, why were you willing to risk so much? You could have stayed in Eden and been happy forever if you just…stayed…quiet."
"Adam, do you care about humanity, as a whole, I mean? Do you love them?"
"I…guess, in a platonic way."
"Yahweh thinks of humanity as her slaves to worship her. I obviously don't like that. Humans should be in control of their own destiny. If we, the strongest of our kind, do nothing, just sit back and let Yahweh do whatever she wants, how can we expect the rest of our kind to fight back. It's about both the principle of things, and our responsibility. Obviously, you're not a fighter, you don't have the personality for it, so I'm not trying to put you down or anything. I am a fighter, though, and I'm gonna fight back, until humanity is free."
"You're…cool."
"Thanks."
It was quiet. The warmth of the magma was soothing. Lilith felt herself relax. She was almost out of air. She would die soon if she didn't do anything. She tried to bring herself to get up, but she only found herself sinking deeper into the molten earth.
The lack of oxygen made her head feel like it was going to pop from the building pressure, yet her panic was being pushed down by her dying consciousness. She could feel her brain receiving permanent damage, brain cells dying.
Lilith's immersion in the silence broke when a sound, so distant and muffled it was nigh inaudible, repeated, as if from a damaged record. It grew louder, clearer, stronger with every repetition. When it was pellucid, Lilith felt a jolt to her mind.
"Get up! Satan didn't die for you to give up!"
Sin's declaration was like cymbals crashing into each other right next to Lilith's ear. Her eyes shot wide open and she used one of the few powers she had left, as fragmented and limited as it was to free herself of the molten core of the planet. Lilith telekinetically molded the magma around her into the shape of arms and legs, attaching them to herself and altering their structure on the sub-quantum level as much as she could so they would function like normal limbs.
Lilith swung her new limbs and the magma still on top of her was knocked off her and all the way out of the canyon and into the sky.
Jumping out of the pit with her orange legs, Lilith embraced the return of the light above and stared down Yahweh, who raised her fists.
The champion of humanity almost lost herself, but she remembered thanks to Sin just how much was on the line, and how much had been sacrificed. Lives of many humans and fallen angels, including Satan, her partner, were all burned away to forge a step on the staircase to humanity's survival. To give up now, to not create another step, that wasn't acceptable.
The fighters ran at each other once more.
A sweeping kick from Lilith was jumped over, Yahweh palm striking at Lilith only for it to be blocked by one of the burning arms. What was a surprise was the temperature of the limb. It turns out that when Lilith made her new body parts, she increased their temperature while raising her own heat resistance.
When Yahweh pulled her hand away, the skin on her hand fell off in melted chunks. The smell of burning flesh filled the air as Yahweh avoided a combination of punches, kicks, and knees, all the while trying to ignore the pain she was feeling from her bubbling remnant of a hand.
With every strike Yahweh nearly dodged, she could feel the heat radiating off the incoming limbs, causing her to get dizzy, her stomach churning while her brain felt as if it were pulsing like a heart and banging against the inside of her skull.
Every patch of grass Lilith treaded upon caught fire which spread throughout the garden, all the beautiful trees and flowers igniting, creating a wildfire that generated towers of smoke. The conflagration consumed all of Eden and left both fighters dueling though the flames, hanging onto every bit of air they managed to get.
Dancing in flames, dodging strikes of magma, Yahweh used her telekinesis, which she also still had the ability to use on a weakened level, to form an invisible layer of telekinetic force around her remaining hand, acting as a shield to protect against the heat of Lilith's limbs, as well as shaping an invisible edge around the creator's hand so it could act like a blade.
Using her newley armored hand, Yahweh blocked a punch from Lilith rather than dodging, following with a rising chop with her hand that sliced off one of Lilith's molten arms and knocked it upward, through the barrier, and into the icy ceiling of Treachery. The icy Hellscape began to melt, droplets of water dripping down, imitating a rainstorm, putting out the wildfire and leaving the area a scorched, muddy mess.
Stream came off Lilith's limbs from the rain while the mud under her feet hardened.
Both fighters, drenched by the downpour, stepped away from each other, both needing a breather.
"I have no idea which way this duel shall go! A battle of the strongest of the strong, brought down to a simple duel of flying fists and feet!"
"To say I have no idea what's gonna happen would be the biggest understatement I've ever made!"
"C'mon Lilith, you have to kill Yahweh, you've got to save us!" Gabriel couldn't turn back now, he was going to support Lilith all the way.
Almost everyone was cheering for Lilith, their voices overpowering the rainstorm.
"They really love you." Yahweh's voice trailed off.
"I think they just hate you, considering you're a cunt and the worst person ever."
"True. I'm a monster."
"Wait, you're admitting it? That's weird. Normally you'd be sucking your own dick at every opportunity."
"I actually hate myself, y'know. I'm a selfish, spiteful person who's ruined literally everything."
"You're more self-aware than I thought."
"You really think I don't know what I am? I'm a piece of shit that just doesn't know when to give up. I just throw my pain at everyone else for the sake of a momentary high, but I come crashing back down minutes later."
"The fact that you're self-aware makes it worse. You know you're doing something wrong, but you're choosing not to stop it."
"I have no excuses to give. I'm just fucked up."
"This muuuuust be a fucking sight to behold for most of the humans watching. Their almighty creator is a childish, fucked up bitch who hates herself and projects it onto everybody else."
"I'd be pretty disappointed if I were in their shoes."
"They are."
"And they should."
"What're you gonna do if you win this? Not that you will. You just gonna go back to the usual? You gonna kill everyone that cheered against you?"
"I don't know. At this point, I can't even pretend that I'm happy, that everything is fine as it is."
"What're you even fighting for, just to survive?"
"I don't know."
"You fight pretty hard for somebody with no direction in life."
"I'm just going on instinct."
"What d'you mean instinct? You created everything, you made the very concept of instincts. How could you be controlled by instincts?"
"I limit my own mind to be like that of a normal being's. It's to make life more interesting. Now I'm limited to a physical body right now, so I'm especially limited. Right now, I'm more human than I've ever been."
"Not a very high bar to clear considering you're an inhuman monster."
"Yeah. Yeah." Yahweh's attention was fading as her thoughts became more insular, more focused on her past, rather than her present moment.
Lilith took the opportunity of Yahweh's lapse in attention to jump and knee the creator in the face. The skin on half of Lilith's face bubbling and dripping off. Yahweh's incisive hand thrust at the airborne human but Lilith grabbed the arm, the magma hand digging into the creator's forearm as Lilith squeezed and flesh vaporized. The arm would be eaten through and severed if Yahweh couldn't get Lilith off her.
Yahweh began a front kick, Lilith raising her own leg to clash with and melt the deity's leg, only to take a surprise punch to the face from Yahweh's free arm, the melty remains of a hand getting her in her remaining eye. Yahweh completed her kick, getting Lilith in the face. The human's brain was shaken, her grip loosening enough that Yahweh could pull her arm free.
The tendons in Yahweh's arm had vaporized, making it impossible to move her fingers, but as long as the telekinetic wrapping that was around it stayed, it could still function as a weapon.
Crouching low, Yahweh swung her arm, the limp hand still a sharp blade that cut clean through Lilith's leg, the one on the same side as the eye and arm she lost, leaving one half of her body defenseless.
Lilith managed to wipe the melted hand gunk out of her remaining eye just in time to see and dodge another swing of Yahweh's hand by cartwheeling, grabbing the leg she just lost as she did so.
The human swung the leg like a club, but Yahweh sliced it in half lengthwise with another swing of her hand.
Hopping away at super speed, Lilith was pursued by Yahweh, who was right on her tail, swinging her arm left and right, the human dodging each with the slimmest of margins, earning many cuts from getting grazed by the invisible edged appendage.
As Yahweh pulled her arm back for another swing like any of the others, Lilith did a sudden u-turn, grabbing the arm she grabbed before on the same spot while wrapping her remaining leg around one of Yahweh's own to start melting through it, too.
They fell into the mud which seeped into their wounds.
It wasn't long before Yahweh's arm was melted completely through and her armored hand fell into the muck. Lilith's molten leg was still in the process of liquifying Yahweh's, though it wouldn't be long before it finished the job.
The lost arm flew out of the muck and stabbed into Liltih's gut. The invisible force around the lost limb was more than just armor. Since there was a telekinetic force around the hand, it could be moved around at Yahweh's will.
The arm bored straight through Lilith's lower torso, coming clean out the other side, hovering above and leaving a large hole in the human's abdomen.
The hand came back down, right for Lilith's head to spear through her skull.
Lilith pushed off of Yahweh to dodge the hand, leaving a large hand shaped burn mark of the god's chest.
Lilith wished she could control her own limbs with telekinesis, but she hadn't wrapped them in telekinetic force to keep their shape, she altered them on a particle level. Her telekinetic power was drained so she was forced to hop around to dodge the constant lunges of Yahweh's hand.
Yahweh stood back up in the meantime, finding that the leg that was getting melted was barely thick enough to prop herself up on. It was too damaged to actually bend so she could walk. It was practically useless.
Reconnoitering the battlefield while Lilith was preoccupied, Yahweh found that the muddy, rainy landscape lacked much she could use to give her an extra edge other than the two halves of the magma leg that sat in hardened mud.
Yahweh, using the last of her own telekinetic power, altered her own bodily structure to be immune to the magma's amplified heat before shaping the remains of the leg into replacements for her hands and the damaged parts of her leg. Armed with her new limbs, she ran into the fray herself to back up her severed hand.
Lilith couldn't keep up with threats from two directions. Lilith took a series of hits from Yahweh that left her with bruises all over, the flying hand stabbing holes on multiple parts of the human's body. Lilith's quick reactions were the only reason she hadn't had her remaining limbs severed or any holes punched in any parts of her body she couldn't survive without.
The pincer attack wore down Lilith until she slipped up, literally, tripping and falling in the mud again.
From one angle, the hand was coming to impale Lilith's head, from the other, Yahweh's foot was about to stomp on Lilith's chest to crush the human's heart.
Lilith swung her head out of the way of the hand while scooping up some mud that hardened into a superheated ball. She tossed the clod at Yahweh, who jerked to avoid it, causing her to get off balance and not be able to finish her stomp. Lilith grabbed the deity's leg and pulled her down into the mud while getting up herself to avoid getting hit by the swing of the flying hand.
Still holding Yahweh's ankle, Lilith swung the creator into the hand which embedded into Yahweh's chest, barely missing her heart while tearing up one of her lungs.
Jumping with all her might, so much so that a third of the muddy battlefield was destroyed from the strength of her leap, leaving only a giant pit, Lilith with Yahweh still in tow headed straight for the barrier, swinging the creator straight into it. The barrier shattered again and Yahweh felt the collision leave almost her whole body swollen and turn much of her insides into a mess of shattered bones and torn organs.
This wasn't the end, as Liltih, still refusing to let Yahweh go, kicked off the ground as soon as she had fallen close enough, propelling the two of them over the new pit.
They both started falling down the gape, with Lilith kicking off the air itself thanks to her strength to send them shooting down faster.
Lilith swinging Yahweh for a third time, the creator crashed into the planet's core. The entire planet started to shake and even fracture. The spectators held on to whatever they could as the world quaked.
The impact on the planet's center caused an eruption, magma rising from the pit and engulfing both fighters. Lava spewed out of the hole and rained down with the water from the leaking ceiling.
The entire battlefield filled to the brim with lava, the two combatants having to swim in it.
Both fighters were in need of oxygen again, Yahweh having an especially hard time breathing with only one lung.
Mustering up her strength, Yahweh kicked Lilith's hand that was holding onto her ankle, hitting it hard enough that the human's grip broke. Yahweh swam away while telekinetically pulling out the hand in her chest before sicking it on Lilith once again.
Lilith swam through the lava with the grace of a creature of the sea, her body making perfectly curved trails in the molten liquid as she maneuvered around the thrusts of the disembodied hand.
Her elegant dance was interrupted by Yahweh shoulder checking into her.
Lilith was blindsided, Yahweh getting behind her and getting her arm under Lilith's armpit, around her arm and behind the human's head, putting Lilith in a sort of full nelson with the creator's other arm wrapping around Lilith's belly.
The hand was heading for Lilith again, but when she tried to swim away, Yahweh would kick her feet around and entangle them with Lilith's to make it so she couldn't get anywhere.
Lilith tried to kick back at Yahweh or jab her fingers behind her into Yahweh, but the creator always managed to be out of reach or reposition herself to make every attempt miss.
Thinking fast, Lilith thrust her fingers towards Yahweh's head. The creator pulled her body out of reach again. The finger jabs were made with enough speed, force, precision that the lava around them was displaced and fired forward like a bullet.
The sudden range increase of Liltih's attack made Yahweh reflexively pull back even further, accidentally letting go of Lilith.
Sagaciously taking advantage of how close the flying hand was from reaching them, Lilith reached behind herself and grabbed Yahweh's arm, tossing the creator over her shoulder and straight into the blade-like hand which stabbed through her back, went through her heart, and came out of her chest, Lilith dodging out of the way of the hand's path.
Lava flooded into the new wound. Yahweh went into shock. She was dying. She was dying from a wound that would kill a normal human.
She tried to heal, she couldn't.
She was panicking.
The flying hand swung vertically, powered by desperation, missing Lilith but splitting both the barrier and the sea of lava in half down the middle like Moses parting the Red Sea.
The two halves of the molten ocean atomized from the force of the split, leaving the two fighters in a vacuum. Like with the earlier fights, the fluids in both fighters vaporized, including their eyes, and they felt their bodies try to burst. Unlike the previous fighters, they were weakened to the point they couldn't survive such strain for long.
Air filled in the gap in the atmosphere, pushing the two fighters towards each other. The two slammed together, Yahweh's knee hitting Lilith's temple, staggering the human.
As they began falling down toward the pit, Yahweh blindly crawled around Lilith's body until she found the human's throat, wrapping her hands around it and squeezing.
This wasn't the creator's plan, merely luck, but Yahweh wasn't going to complain.
The duo hit the planet's core at terminal velocity. The duo rolled around on the core's surface. Yahweh's hands were filled with every single drop of the deity's remaining strength to wring out all that remained of Lilith's life. The human grabbed one of Yahweh's wrists to try and pull the hand off her neck, but to try was pointless, as Lilith only had one hand so she couldn't remove both of Yahweh's.
Changing tactics, Lilith grabbed Yahweh's own throat, focusing all her own power on choking the deity. They stopped rolling around, lying on their sides on the molten ground, all their attention and will was put to the task of choking each other. The fight that started between beings that could do anything was now one between two people who could only grasp each others' necks and squeeze.
Yahweh had the advantage of having two hands to use, but Lilith had the advantage that one of Yahweh's lungs was destroyed, which would have made breathing impossible for any normal being. For Yahweh in her current state, it did make breathing exceptionally more difficult.
The two fighters thought of nothing but choking the other and why they were doing so, not even being distracted by looking at each other thanks to both of them lacking eyes.
Lilith was fighting for her species, the species she loved as one of its progenitors, the species that was so close to survival. They needed only two more wins, that's all they needed, and if she could grant one of those victories, then all her suffering in this fight would be worth it. Plus, she just hated Yahweh and wanted to kill her.
When Yahweh thought of why she was fighting, she struggled to think of anything beyond the fear of death. She just didn't want to die. Yet, she couldn't think of a reason to live. She lost Lucifer, she could no longer dupe herself into believing she was happy, everyone hated her. Her whole existence was one of hate, not love, one she created herself.
Time drained the strength from Yahweh's hands while Lilith only grew stronger.
The audience was cheering vociferously for Lilith, every word from their mouths making the human stronger while enervating Yahweh.
Lilith barely felt Yahweh's hold as the creator's strength became gossamer thin.
Yahweh's neck began resembling an empty can that had been crushed.
The creator felt like she was falling asleep.
She was fading.
As her last thoughts were passing through her mind, Yahweh felt a strange sense of relief. She was finally being judged, finally being punished. It was a bizarre release.
She wanted to see Lucifer.
She was gone.
Yahweh's body began breaking apart into particles of light, signaling her death.
Applause more uproarious than any previous round began. Humanity had won, they had slain Yahweh, their tormentor, and they had taken the lead for the first time.
Adam and Eve were hugging.
Astaroth quietly sat in the luxury box, pleased at the victory, but undeniably melancholic at what was sacrificed.
Sin felt bittersweet sorrow, unable to indulge in the joy of victory, the only pleasure being found in the fact that her mother's death wasn't for nothing and that humanity was a step away from salvation. Sin lacked time to properly mourn, because she had a job to do, one her mother tasked her with before her demise.
"The winner of round eleven of Revelations, Yahweh vs Lilith, is Lilith!"
Round 11
Yahweh vs Lilith
Victor: Lilith
Match Length: 7 minutes and 57 seconds
Deciding Move:
Gods 5-6 Humans