The island trembled under the weight of their clash, the air thick with the scent of ozone and the crackling hum of unleashed power. Waves crashed against the jagged cliffs, their frothy crests glowing faintly from the residual energy spilling into the sea. Above, the sky churned with dark clouds, split intermittently by streaks of lightning that seemed to mirror the fury below. Alex stood at the edge of the shoreline, his Necrontyr armor gleaming faintly under the storm's dim light. Across from him, Hecate floated just above the ground, her form wreathed in shifting shadows and flickering flames. Her expression was calm, almost bored, as if this were a mere diversion rather than a battle.
Alex's mind raced, his thoughts partitioned into a dozen streams, each calculating, predicting, and adapting. He knew he was outmatched in raw power—Hecate's divine aura alone was enough to make the air around her shimmer with distortion—but he wasn't here to overpower her. He was here to outthink her. His fingers twitched, and the ground beneath him rippled as he manipulated the atomic structure of the sand, turning it into a lattice of crystalline spikes that shot toward her with the speed of bullets.
Hecate didn't move. The spikes shattered against an invisible barrier, disintegrating into harmless dust. She tilted her head, her lips curling into a faint smile. "Is that all?" she asked, her voice echoing with an otherworldly resonance. "I expected more from someone who dares challenge a goddess."
Alex didn't respond. Instead, he clenched his fist, and the air around Hecate exploded in a cascade of nuclear fire. The blast was blinding, a miniature sun erupting on the island's surface, its shockwave flattening trees and sending debris flying in all directions. Alex shielded his eyes, his armor absorbing the worst of the heat and radiation. He didn't wait for the light to fade. With a thought, he summoned a construct—a massive hammer forged from hyper-dense matter—and swung it toward the epicenter of the explosion.
The hammer connected with something solid, and the force of the impact sent a shockwave rippling through the ground. Hecate emerged from the flames unscathed, her hand outstretched to catch the hammer's head. Her fingers tightened, and the construct shattered into fragments that dissolved into nothingness. "Clever," she said, her tone almost approving. "But crude."
Alex didn't let up. He snapped his fingers, and the fragments of the hammer reformed into a swarm of razor-sharp blades that spiraled toward her. At the same time, he manipulated the air around her, compressing it into a superheated laser that lanced toward her chest. Hecate raised her other hand, and the blades froze mid-air, suspended in a field of shimmering energy. The laser struck her palm and splintered into a thousand harmless beams that scattered into the sky.
"You're persistent," she said, her voice still calm. "But persistence alone won't save you."
Alex gritted his teeth. He knew she wasn't taking him seriously—her movements were languid, almost lazy, as if she were swatting away a particularly annoying insect. But that was fine. He didn't need her to take him seriously. He just needed her to make a mistake.
He dropped to one knee and slammed his hand into the ground. The island shuddered as he manipulated its very structure, pulling minerals and metals from deep within the earth and shaping them into a towering golem that rose from the ground like a colossus. The construct swung a massive fist toward Hecate, its movement slow but inexorable. She didn't even look at it. With a flick of her wrist, the golem crumbled into dust, its form unraveling as if it had never existed.
But Alex had anticipated that. As the golem disintegrated, he channeled the energy of its destruction into a concentrated beam of plasma that he fired at Hecate from point-blank range. The beam struck her square in the chest, and for a moment, it seemed to push her back. Her shadowy aura flickered, and her expression shifted—just slightly—from boredom to mild irritation.
"Enough," she said, her voice hardening. She raised her hand, and the beam of plasma reversed course, hurtling back toward Alex with twice its original force. He barely had time to raise a barrier of hyper-dense matter before the blast hit him, sending him skidding backward across the ground. His armor absorbed most of the impact, but he could feel the heat searing through, threatening to overwhelm his defenses.
He didn't let it slow him down. As soon as he regained his footing, he unleashed a barrage of attacks—constructs of every shape and size, beams of energy, bursts of nuclear fire—each one designed to test her defenses, to find a weakness, however small. Hecate responded with equal precision, deflecting or dismantling each attack with effortless grace. But Alex noticed something: her movements, while still fluid, were becoming slightly more deliberate. She was starting to take him seriously.
Good.
He pressed the advantage, weaving his attacks together in a complex pattern that forced her to divide her attention. A construct shaped like a massive spear shot toward her from one direction, while a swarm of hyper-accelerated particles closed in from another. At the same time, he manipulated the ground beneath her feet, turning it into a quicksand-like substance designed to trap her. Hecate raised an eyebrow, clearly unimpressed, but she didn't dismiss the attacks outright. Instead, she countered them one by one, her movements still precise but no longer as casual as before.
Alex's mind raced as he analyzed her responses, looking for patterns, for gaps. He noticed that while she could effortlessly deflect physical attacks, her reactions to energy-based assaults were slightly slower—not by much, but enough to give him an opening. He adjusted his strategy, focusing more on energy attacks while using physical constructs as distractions. He fired a concentrated beam of gamma radiation at her, followed by a burst of antimatter particles that annihilated on contact with her barrier, releasing a devastating explosion.
Hecate's barrier flickered again, and this time, it didn't immediately stabilize. Alex saw his chance. He summoned a construct—a massive, multi-layered drill made of hyper-dense necrontyr—and launched it at her with all the force he could muster. The drill spun at incredible speeds, its tip glowing white-hot from friction. It struck her barrier just as it was reforming, and for a moment, it seemed to pierce through.
Hecate's eyes widened in surprise, and she raised her hand to block the drill. But Alex wasn't done. He channeled more of his energy into a hopefully final, devastating attack—a miniature star, forged from the fusion of hydrogen atoms, that he hurled at her with all his might. The star exploded on impact, engulfing her in a blinding flash of light and heat.
When the light faded, Hecate was still standing, but her aura was dimmer, and her expression was no longer calm. She looked at Alex, her eyes narrowing. "You've made your point," she said, her voice cold. "But this ends now."
She raised her hand, and the air around her crackled with energy. Alex braced himself, knowing that whatever came next would be far beyond anything he'd faced so far. But he wasn't afraid. He'd pushed her, made her take him seriously. And that was all he needed.
The battle was far from over.
The air itself seemed to recoil as Hecate's fingers curled, shadows pooling around her like liquid night. Alex's breath hitched—not from fear, but from the sudden vacuum of pressure, as if the island itself were holding its breath. Her voice cut through the silence, sharp and resonant, like a bell tolling in an empty cathedral. "You mistake persistence for power, little would be human."
He didn't wait for her to finish.
Dropping into a slide, Alex dragged his palm across the fractured earth. The ground erupted in response, not in spikes or blades, but in a wave of molten silica that surged upward like a geyser. Hecate flicked her wrist, and the lava splintered midair, hardening into obsidian shards that rained back down. But Alex was already moving, sprinting laterally as he wrenched iron deposits from the island's bedrock. The metal coiled around his forearm, morphing into a cannon barrel that glowed cobalt as he supercharged its electrons.
Crack—
A particle beam lanced toward Hecate, its path warping the light around it. She didn't dodge. Instead, she blurred, her form dissolving into smoke just before impact. The beam carved a searing trench through the cliffs behind her, igniting the sea beyond in a hissing plume of steam.
Alex's eyes darted. Where—
A cold hand closed around his throat from behind.
"Predictable," Hecate murmured, her breath glacial against his ear.
He didn't flinch. His armor flared, its necrodermis surging outward in jagged filaments, stabbing toward her face. She released him with a scoff, dissipating again—but not before he caught the faint ripple in her shadow, a fractional delay in her reconstitution.
Got you.
He hit the ground rolling, fingers clawing at the soil. The earth buckled, then liquefied, swallowing him whole. Hecate paused, hovering above the sudden sinkhole, her brow furrowing. For a heartbeat, the battlefield fell still.
Then—
The island exploded.
Not upward, but inward, as Alex atomized the bedrock beneath her and triggered a fusion cascade. The shockwave flattened the surrounding terrain, compressing air and stone into a white-hot singularity that yawned open like a starving mouth. Hecate's shadows writhed, straining against the gravitational pull, her form flickering as the void gnawed at her edges.
"Enough games!"
Her voice cracked like thunder. Shadows solidified into talons, raking downward in a single vicious arc. The singularity split, its energy unraveling into ribbons of light that lashed the sky. Alex erupted from the ground thirty meters away, his armor scorched and steaming, but his grin feral.
'She's accelerating,' he realized. 'Reacting faster each time. Adapting or maybe she was slowly but surely taking me seriously. She is a goddess which means that she has a godly form, one she didn't use yet.'
A divine form was a god's true form. It was hen the essence of a deity was reunited in one place. It was when a god was at their strongest.
He sprinted toward the shoreline, feet barely grazing the water as he skidded across the waves. Behind him, Hecate pursued—not with haste, but with the inevitability of a tidal wave. Her shadow stretched across the ocean, swallowing the light, the water beneath her feet freezing into jagged obsidian reefs.
Alex pivoted, skidding to a halt. With a roar, he slammed his fists together.
The sea answered.
A wall of water surged upward, not as a mere barrier, but as a lattice of hyper-pressurized fluid, each molecule aligned into a crystalline matrix. Hecate's shadow collided with it, and for the first time, something splintered—the water held, refracting her darkness into prismatic shards that peppered the horizon.
Her lips twitched. Enjoyment? Amusement? Irritation?
Alex didn't care. He was already weaving his next gambit.
Darting backward, he tore a strip of algae from the waves, its cells mutating midair into a bioluminescent aerosol. The mist engulfed Hecate, clinging to her silhouette like phosphorescent paint. She waved a hand to dispel it—
—and Alex struck.
Every glowing particle detonated at once, a chain reaction of microscopic fusion. The blast stripped the ocean bare, vaporizing water down to the continental shelf. Hecate emerged unscathed, but now she glowed, her outline visible through the settling steam.
'Target locked,' Alex thought.
Alex's hands moved in a frenzy, sculpting the air itself into a fractal lens. Sunlight bent, magnified, focused into a beam so intense it ionized the atmosphere in its wake. The light struck Hecate's chest—
—and stuck, searing a faint smolder into her chiton.
She glanced down, then back at Alex. For the first time, something like respect flickered in her gaze.
"Clever," she conceded. "But as a moon goddess light is my domain."
Her fingers twitched, and the beam reversed polarity, flooding back toward Alex with the added fury of her own divine radiance. He crossed his arms, his armor shedding plates to form a mirrored shield. The reflected light collided with the incoming barrage, cancelling it in a deafening snap of annihilated photons.
The force hurled him backward into the cliffs. Stone, snow and ice crumbled around him, but he was already pushing through the debris, his mind racing.
'She's countering energy with energy, matter with matter. But what if—'
A shadow fell over him. Hecate stood atop the cliff's edge, her hair swirling like smoke. "You've forced me to expend a fraction of my focus,"she said, almost gently. "For that, you deserve a fraction of my strength."
She raised her palm.
The world bent.
Alex's vision fragmented as gravitational waves rippled outward, shearing the cliff face into dust. He threw himself sideways, his armor screeching in protest as the distortion field grazed his shoulder. Blood welled where the necrodermis failed—a shallow cut, but a warning. A cut when nothing less than something able to destroy the surface of the planet should have been able to do so.
"She's taking it more seriously," he whispered under his breath.
He launched himself skyward, matter coalescing beneath his feet into floating platforms of aerogel. Hecate followed, her ascent effortless, each step compressing the air into solid footholds.
Midair, Alex spun, hurling a cluster of blackened orbs—miniature neutron stars, their cores compressed to apocalyptic densities. Hecate flicked them aside, but their gravity wells warped her trajectory, slowing her ever so slightly.
He pressed the opening.
From his outstretched palm, a filament unfurled—a thread of metastable metallic hydrogen, whipping toward her like a razor's edge. It wrapped around her wrist, and for a heartbeat, she froze, staring at the glowing strand.
"Clever trick," she murmured. "But—"
Alex yanked the filament taut.
The hydrogen destabilized, detonating in a silent, sun-bright implosion. Hecate's arm vanished inside the blast radius—
—and reemerged unscathed, her skin unmarred.
"—insufficient."
She closed her fist.
The platform beneath Alex disintegrated. He plummeted, but not before hurling a dagger forged from antimatter-laced Necrontyr. It grazed her cheek—
—and left a faint, smoking nick.
Hecate touched the wound, her fingers coming away glistening with ichor. Her eyes narrowed. "You…marked me."
The air turned gelid. Shadows congealed around her, forming a corona of jagged, living darkness. Alex hit the ground hard, rolling to his feet just as the first tendril lashed out. It missed his torso by millimeters, carving a canyon into the earth and the ice.
He ran, not in retreat, but in a spiraling advance. Each footfall altered the terrain: quicksand pits, diamond caltrops, magnetic vortices meant to disrupt her shadowform. Hecate dismantled them all, but each countermeasure cost her a fraction of a second—a fraction Alex weaponized.
At the spiral's apex, he feinted left, then pivoted, hurling a sphere of compressed helium-3. Hecate batted it aside—
—and Alex detonated it remotely.
The resulting fusion blast dwarfed his earlier efforts, its electromagnetic pulse scrambling the very laws of physics within its radius. Hecate's shadows frayed, her form flickering like a corrupted hologram.
'Now!'
Summoning every shred of focus, Alex plunged his hands into the earth. The island screamed as he ripped its tectonic plate upward, forging a kilometer-long blade of uranium-laced basalt. He swung it in a colossal arc, the edge igniting from atmospheric friction—
—and Hecate caught it.
Bare-handed.
The blade shattered against her palm, but the force of the blow drove her backward, her heels carving furrows through the bedrock. For a single, impossible moment, goddess and mortal stood locked in equilibrium.
Then she smiled.
"Finally," she breathed. "A worthy stroke."
Her free hand snapped forward.
Alex's world dissolved into pain as her fingertips brushed his chestplate. The necrodermis didn't crack—it unfolded, its alien composition, its atomic bonds untethering in a spiral of disintegrating particles. He stumbled back, clutching the gaping wound, his mind racing to regenerate the armor.
Hecate advanced, her shadows knitting into a spear of pure entropy. "You've danced well, would be mortal. But even stars burn out."
Alex spat blood, his grin unbroken.
"Yeah? Then let's go even further, until what remain is a nova."
He slammed his fist into the exposed ground.
The island erupted—not in fire, but in light.
Every atom, every molecule Alex had tampered with—the mutated algae, the aerogel platforms, even the residual energy from Hecate's own attacks—flared in unison. The air itself became fuel, a chain reaction of matter-antimatter annihilations that lit the sky like a supernova.
Hecate's shadows recoiled. For the first time, she raised both hands in defense, her divine aura flaring to contain the cataclysm.
Alex didn't wait to see if it worked.
He was already gone—burrowing through the earth, his armor shedding mass to outpace the shockwave. Behind him, the island ceased to exist, reduced to ash and ionized plasma.
But he knew. He was sure.
'She's not done.'
As the firestorm subsided, Hecate's laughter echoed through the void—a sound like shattered glass and tolling bells.
"Run, little would be human,"* she crooned. "Run until your legs give out. Run until your will and defiance dry up. It changes nothing."
Alex ran. And schemed.
The fight wasn't over. He would not allow it to the be the case.
In his opinion, It had barely begun!
The ground beneath Alex's feet screamed as he remade it.
He didn't run—he unmade his own path, flesh and armor dissolving into a swarm of nanoscopic constructs that tunneled through molten bedrock. Behind him, Hecate's shadows gnawed at the earth, devouring stone and everything that dared interpose itself, but Alex was already rewriting the rules. He used the knowledge not native to this world, the one from the stars in his mind. Matter bloomed in his wake: synthetic elements, isotopes that shouldn't exist, lattices of carbon woven into razor-thin monofilaments that hung in the air like spider silk.
Hecate's footfall cracked the island's spine. She descended into the newly forged labyrinth, her shadowform slipping through cracks in reality—only to recoil as the walls bit back. The filaments ignited, slicing her essence into ribbons that hissed and spat like live wires.
"You copied the parasite's work," she snarled, her voice fraying at the edges.
Alex rematerialized ten meters ahead, his armor reassembling atom by atom. He didn't turn. Didn't flinch. His mind was a hive of cold calculus, every neuron partitioned to track her movements, her tells.
She seemed to reconstitute, faster near light sources. It was like Shadows stabilize her. It was like she favoured them even though she didn't need them. More than that, weren't the gods in some way living energy? Golden light?
So he drowned the tunnels in radiation.
Gamma rays, neutrinos, hard X-rays—all invisible, all lethal. The air itself became a weapon, ionizing her form with every nanosecond. Hecate's silhouette flickered, her edges blurring as particles tore through her. For a heartbeat, her divine aura dimmed.
Alex struck.
A blade materialized in his grip—not metal, but Necrontyr sheathed in a magnetic vortex, made better by the reinforcement spell of the nasuverse, hundred of minuscules anti-divine and anti-monsters etched on it. He pivoted, driving it upward in a lethal arc. Hecate twisted, but not fast enough. The blade grazed her ribs, and reality itself shuddered as matter and antimatter annihilated.
Her blood, her golden ichor—liquid starlight, incandescent and searing—splashed across his chestplate. The necrodermis hissed, corroding where it touched. Alex grinned through the pain. Ichor. She bled.
Hecate's eyes flared nova-bright. "You dare—"
He didn't let her finish.
Snapping his fingers, Alex triggered the labyrinth's final gambit. Every synthetic element he'd seeded destabilized at once, their atomic nuclei unraveling in a chain reaction of forced fission. The tunnels collapsed into a kaleidoscope of light and sound, the very air splitting into quark-gluon plasma.
Hecate screamed, not in pain but in outrage, as the false vacuum around her decayed. Her shadows recoiled, compressing into a singularity at her core—a black hole no larger than a marble, its gravity clawing at the fabric of space.
Alex lunged, his armor shedding layers to forge a spear of neutronium. He aimed not for her heart, but for the singularity.
The spear struck true.
For a moment, the universe held its breath.
Then—
The black hole ruptured, vomiting forth a jet of Hawking radiation that seared the sky. Hecate's form disintegrated, scattered across dimensions—but Alex didn't celebrate. He knew that it was not enough. He was already rebuilding, his armor harvesting raw atoms from the void to forge a new body.
A hand—skeletal, shimmering with borrowed starlight—clamped around his throat.
"Enough theatrics," Hecate hissed, her voice raw, half her face stripped to bone. "You think yourself a human? Experience their plight then when they anger gods.
She thrust her free hand into his chest.
Alex's world dissolved into static as divine energy flooded his veins, as his existence became pain. He used his alchemy on himself to heal as the time as he was destroyed. His cells ruptured, mutated, rebelled—but his armor helped, cannibalizing, turning into a focus, a way for the energy to forge something new instead of hurting. Necrodermis fused with flesh, his spine elongating into a fractal scaffold, his eyes burning with stolen starlight.
He laughed—a sound like shattering glass—and bit into her wrist.
Hecate recoiled, but Alex clung on, his teeth sinking deeper. He wasn't eating flesh—he was eating fragments of concepts, the raw mathematics of her divinity. Her shadows thrashed, lashing his body, but his armor adapted, spinning the darkness into fuel.
"You—!"
He headbutted her, their skulls colliding with a crack that split the horizon. Blood—his now having turned iridescent, hers still golden—sprayed across the ruins.
"You're right," Alex rasped, his voice layered with a hundred harmonics. "just like a human would."
He slammed his palm into her chest.
The necrodermis detonated.
Not outward—inward.
A microsingularity bloomed in Hecate's ribcage, its event horizon shredding her essence. She convulsed, her divine body fracturing, but Alex didn't let go. He rode the collapse, his body disintegrating atom by atom, until all that remained were their entwined skeletons—hers gilded, his now obsidian—spiraling into the void.
Then, light.
Alex awoke kneeling on a plain of glass, his armor regrown, his lungs heaving, the stars in his mind, his alchemy and his magic going overdrive. Across from him, Hecate stood whole once more—but her chiton was torn, her hair unbound.
For the first time, she looked at him not with amusement, but with something like hunger.
"Again," she commanded.
The island reassembled itself as if nothing had occurred.
How unfair.
Alex despite the pain and the exhaustion rose so that the dance would begin anew for its last round.
The world became once again a blur of motion and sound, a cacophony of destruction and divine fury as they clashed. Alex stood amidst the chaos, his body battered, his armor cracked and smoking, but his mind sharper than ever. He could feel the weight of the fight pressing down on him, the realization that Hecate, even holding back, was a force beyond anything he had ever faced. Her power was vast, her presence overwhelming, and yet—he couldn't accept it. He couldn't accept that this was his limit. That a single deity, not even one of the most revered or feared, could be the end of him.
No. He refused.
His mind raced, calculations and strategies unfolding like a fractal, each thought branching into a dozen more. He had fought with restraint, with cleverness, with every trick and tool at his disposal. But it wasn't enough. Hecate was still standing, still calm, still untouchable. And if he continued like this, he would lose. He could see it now, the inevitable conclusion of this battle if he didn't change something. If he didn't do something that was
more.
Victory didn't come to those who were born strongest or fastest or smartest. No. It came to anyonewho will do anything to reach it.
He reached into the depths of his mind, into the well of his Inspired Inventor ability, and invested. Three mental charges, each a fragment of his will, his creativity, his soul, poured into the concept burning in his mind.
The knowledge flooded him, alien and unholy, a torrent of information that no mortal mind should ever hold. It was too much, too vast, too wrong. His brain screamed in protest, his body convulsing as blood poured from every orifice. But he didn't stop. He couldn't. This was his only chance.
Alex's lips curled into a savage smile, blood dripping from his nose, his eyes, his ears. The strain of his thoughts, the sheer weight of the knowledge he had dared to invoke, was tearing him apart from the inside. But he didn't care. Pain was temporary. Pain meant that he was still alive, that there still was chances that the present of him could see his daughter again.
Failure was not something he could allow himself.
A weapon. Not just any weapon, but one that could cut through gods, through planets, through the very fabric of reality. A weapon that had felled beings like Aristoteles, archetypes of planets, entities that dwarfed even primordial deities. A weapon that could win.
Slash Emperor.
The name echoed in his mind, a whisper of power, of destruction, of victory. He understood it now, the weapon's nature, its purpose. It was a blade that grew in proportion to its target, a weapon that consumed the world itself to fuel its power. It was not just a tool of destruction—it was a statement. A declaration that no matter how vast, how powerful, how divine the enemy, it could be cut down. It could be ended.
Alex's body shuddered as the knowledge took root, as the weapon's design unfolded in his mind. He could feel it, the weight of it, the cost. To wield Slash Emperor was to sacrifice everything. The island beneath him, the air around him, the very atoms that made up his body—all of it would be fuel. But he didn't hesitate. He couldn't.
He dropped to one knee, his hand slamming into the ground. The earth trembled, then screamed as he began to draw on its vitality, its essence. The island was dying, its life force ripped away to feed the weapon taking shape in his mind. Trees withered, rivers dried, the air itself grew thin and lifeless. And still, he took more.
His magical energy surged, a torrent of power that he funneled into the weapon, into the idea of Slash Emperor. The blade began to form, not in his hand, but in his mind. It was a seed, a spark, a fragment of something vast and terrible. And as it grew, as it took shape, Alex felt the world around him change.
The sky darkened, the clouds twisting into unnatural shapes. The ground cracked and splintered, the island itself groaning under the weight of the weapon's creation. Hecate paused, her shadowy form flickering as she sensed the shift, the danger. For the first time, there was a flicker of something in her eyes—uncertainty. Fear.
Alex rose to his feet, his body trembling, his mind alight with the weapon's design. He could feel it now, the blade's presence, its hunger. It was ready.
"Hecate," he said, his voice raw, bleeding, but filled with a terrible certainty. "You wanted to see what I could do. Let me show you."
He raised his hand, and the world screamed.
The ground beneath him erupted, not in fire or stone, but in light. A blade of impossible scale and power burst forth, its edge shimmering with the light of a thousand suns. It was not a physical weapon, not in the traditional sense. It was a concept given form, a weapon that existed to cut. To destroy. To end.
Hecate's shadows recoiled, her form flickering as the blade's presence washed over her. For the first time, there was true panic in her eyes. She began to shine gold as she began to assume her true form. She raised her hands, the world around them shifting her power surging to meet the threat, but it was too late.
Alex swung the blade.
The world split.
Somewhere far away, a little girl with electric eyes looked at the horizon, at the dark tower that had appeared and only felt sadness.
Hecate forgot that more than showing their true selves, people when being cornered, when they feel the world is closing around them either break before it or become at their most dangerous and swing back. Hope y'all like the chapter. I tried to make Alex use his powers cleverly against Hecate. He didn't use as much magic as he could have because he may have been in a bad situation but he was not so stupid as using magic against a goddess of magic that could probably with two glances deconstruct and remake it.
PS: I got a p.a.t.r.e.o.n.c.o.m / Eileen715 with two more chapters. With less than 5, you have access to everything I write in a month. Don't hesitate to visit if you want to read more or support me.