Eliza simply nodded, and coated her sword in the bright golden flame of her godhood. With a deep breath, Jonathan reached out with his mind, seizing the cloud of gold from the air. He wasn’t sure if this would work, but if it did, it would help immensely.

  As the Swarm Amalgam threw its titanic boulder, Jonathan directed all of the ambient Divinity into the space between his palms. A rotating, glittering orb of pure destruction was born from the ether, and Jonathan let it rotate faster and faster, crushing it down into a single point. Void’s Grasp was his strongest projectile skill, and with the addition of his improved Divinity, it was even stronger.

  A tiny black hole winked into existence as he forced Divinity and elemental energy into a new form. Gritting his teeth against the spiritual pressure of the attack, Jonathan launched it forwards with a blast of his will. The Swarm Amalgam threw its boulder at the same time, the air before it catching flame as the immense rock shot forwards at many times the speed of sound.

  Jonathan watched as his black hole spun through the air, slamming into the front of the boulder. The rock caved in beneath the attack, and its front was torn through the hole in the center as the black hole forced its way through. The entire thing turned into an unstable torus of dark energy and dust, looking like a cannon pointed directly at the Swarm Amalgam. Hopefully, when it fired, the battle would swiftly end.

  The Amalgam raised its bulky arms to block, but the orb of concentrated Void bored straight through, tearing a path towards the monster’s core. Then it exploded, tearing the entire Amalgam apart. Jonathan channeled more of his Void energy into Aegis of the Void’s Dichotomy, focusing it on the Amalgam. The insects melted away before the ravenous hunger of the Void, and the monster died. Jonathan stood there for a moment, unsure of whether the battle was over. Then the essence hit him, and he leveled seven times. It seemed like his Divinity upgrade had increased his strength to levels previously impossible.

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  ***

  “Again!” Edgar bellowed at a crop of fresh recruits. With a chorus of grunted acknowledgements, they went through another mana channeling exercise. All of the prospective mages were Tier 3s, and powerful ones at that. Compared to Edgar, though, who was a peak Tier 4, they were nothing. His goal here was to make them into something.

  He and the other elites, those fortunate enough to have ventured into Cessation with Jonathan, and those who were already quite skilled, were tasked with creating an army to be reckoned with. Arkanon was in charge of the whole operation, running the pugilist training corps. Needless to say, given Jonathan’s martial predilections, almost half of the recruits wanted to join this unit. After a few days of Arkanon’s ministrations, however, many quit. The Uthraki lord’s standards were incredibly high, as he modeled the training after both Jonathan’s and his own fighting styles.

  As Edgar watched in satisfaction, he made sure to keep the growing smile on his face from showing. Arkanon had many rules and creeds around training and other military endeavors, and Edgar had found that following them was highly effective.

  The fused realms of Mire and the Ash Heaps had been hard to properly unite, but now all of the stragglers from Slothari’s army were dead and buried. As a result, all of those who remained were loyal to Jonathan, or at least his quest. Nobody wanted to languish in the lowest realm of the Hells for the rest of their life, and now that two circle lords were dead, they had a choice in the matter.

  Training fervor was at an all time high, and millions had signed up. Out of those millions, Edgar and his allies had taken ten thousand of them to train up to the standards necessary to assault the higher realms. At the bare minimum, a recruit had to have an Expert Rank Pathway Skill, or a high stage Journeyman skill that could easily be upgraded to Expert with a sufficient challenge. About a quarter of them already had Expert skills, but none of the others had one weaker than Journeyman 8 or 9. This truly was the cream of the crop, at least out of those who hadn’t served Slothari.