“Ready? Three… two… one…” Two sets of footsteps to the right, another to the left. They are flanking me, typical. They are moving too slowly, staggering each other’s attacks. The left jumps to strike me and I form a blast of fire in their direction. The other two charge from my front right, leaping at the same time. I lift a hand to manifest water in it and blow towards it, then the attackers freeze mid-air, falling to the ground. I hear the shattering from the front two and the thud from the left one. The three, after a long fight, fall at my feet among the bodies of their other… oh, twenty or so allies.

I’m Emily, a woman of the Void. To put it very simply, the Void is a horrible place where nothing should happen and you should definitely not connect it to the living world, where mortal beings make the planet and the continent I live on, Mercelon, home. However, I do just that thing. Now, before you brand me a hypocrite and send me off to Descentia, the worst, most vile world of them all, let me explain my reasoning. I hunt very bad people: Descentian gods. To hunt them, I need to use a special set of magic types that allow me to identify, track down, and kill them.

I just finished up hunting down the gremlins, very mischievous beings, that are descendants of the Mother Goddess, a very, very evil woman. If you’ve ever heard the tale of Alsa’s Box, you would understand what kind of person the Mother Goddess is. She creates these disgusting, evil, ruthless little monsters that do her bidding far from her nest, which is now right in front of me. As I step over the scorched, electrocuted, and just plain stabbed bodies of her little demons, I hear her begin to speak to me in a wicked, but gentle voice.

“Your labor will bear you no fruit, mortal woman.” Uh huh, sounds about right.

I move forward, commanding the goddess to get out of her hiding nest. “I challenge you, Mother Goddess! Fight me in one-on-one combat!”

“Very well, Demigoddess.” Right, I forgot to mention that I’m a demigoddess- an honorary goddess but without all the strings attached. In having this title, which was coined by Lucelle, my best friend, and officially (but unofficially) given to me by the Goddess of Love, Yhannason, I can continue my quest to defeat Descentian gods and bring some kind of underlying peace to the living world. Before I went full power on this campaign, Goddess Yhanna and her brother, God of Humanity, Nazanth, offered me the title of Emily Everlock, Goddess of Mercy. However, if one of Ascentia’s goddesses, Ascentia being the heavens above, went around challenging Descentian gods, we would see an all-out war between worlds begin, which is what I was trying to avoid. It almost happened some years ago, though, when two Descentian gods coaxed and influenced me into mutilating Yhanna, but I managed to put a stop to that by nearly killing myself.

I guess this would be a good time to mention that I live an exciting life. I travel with Lucelle, a demon, Iyo, a Bellamute, and Allu, my… well, "love interest." Lucelle is half Demon, half Elf, though she usually travels in an Elven form to put off her enemies when the beautiful girl becomes a hulking, monstrous demon. Iyo, being a Bellamute, is actually two people that are married. When Bellamutes marry, they occupy a single space that flips between the two bodies periodically. Because of this ability, they can also completely camouflage themselves and their clothing, which is very helpful for scouting. Finally, Allu used to live in my body. Well, I occupy her body, and by her, I mean his. Like I said, I live an exciting life.

Allu is a lovely man, but I avoid relationships. I have found that my past and my personality restrict me from many of the simple pleasures of life, such as long-lasting love, sex, and… other things. I’ve tried plenty of times to get with someone like Allu, but I can’t get past kissing. Many- no, most people who have spent more than a few days around me just say that I’m uptight and won’t put out for anyone. The truth is that when I was much younger, I was ruined in a place called the Silver Panther. Allu has tried to help me, but even he, being the spirit that was inside my (his) body for so many years, including the ones in the Panther, can’t manage to fix my mind. I don’t care, though; my mind is long past that point.

I stand waiting for the goddess when she finally crawls from her hole. She has long, frayed white hair that covers her face and wears equally torn up robes over her small body. I would have felt sorry for her if she didn’t just begin to rapidly crawl and leap at me, which I quickly counter by slamming my staff against her head. I miss and strike her shoulder, but she stills falls to the side before screaming at me with a huge, four-flapped mouth. Eugh, disgusting. She catches me off guard with that appearance and tackles me to the hard, dirt ground and then I feel her vomit-like drool beginning to drip down on me, which made me internally gag.

“Ready to die, mortal?” She asks me.

I begin to heat myself up to the point of burning Mother Goddess’ body parts that are touching me. She jumps back and I kick her face, sending her to the ground. After, I get up and dive to stab the God Slayer, a blade made of Void material, able to cut through nearly any fleshy thing and most non-fleshy things, into her chest. “Ask yourself,” I say to her before getting up. Her gasps and gurgles made me feel bad again, so I place a boot against her body and shove her through a rift into the Void. Woah woah woah, but Emily, you can’t imprison Descentian gods and goddesses. Yes, I most certainly can. If they are stuck in the Void, they cannot use their magic aaaand while they are able to go back to Descentia, they cannot re-enter the living world. Something you’ll learn about me is that I am just as intelligent as I am powerful… and equally as humble, I promise.

When I get back to the house, I’m going to be bombarded by a series of questions, I just know it. See, I decided to go out on my own this time. I didn’t think the Mother Goddess would be much of a fight for me and I was correct, but my allies won’t see my reasoning the same way. As I open a rift with both hands in front of me, I prepare for the worst. I step through, reemerging in a planning room, of sorts. Lucelle, with her pretty, pale face, is sitting at the table already. Gods, she is scary when she’s mad. I swear I can see the yellow glint of her demon eyes even in her Elven form when she gets like this.

“Where were you?” she asks.

“Out,” I reply. I wasn’t lying.

“You reek of blood.”

“Rough night.” Still not lying.

“I want you to tell me where you were.”

“I was… in a cave… with some bad people… doing bad things.” Something tells me I wasn’t about to get an award for the best beat-around-the-bush-er.

“Was one of those bad people a god or goddess?” The way she had her hands folded on the table told me she was ready to get her claws out. No arousing kitty claws, though... demon claws.

I put my staff down on the table and brush the hair away from my left eye. “Maaaaybe.”

“Emily, we talked about this.”

“Did we?” We did.

“We did.” She stands, careful to keep her fingers pressed to the table. “Why did you go out on your own? We have agreements with each other, something you can’t just brush off when you feel like being a hero, Emily.”

“Well, I have agreements with myself, and that is to always take on gods and goddesses in fair fights.”

She steps around to one side of the room. “Oh, so you’re going to tell me this particular one had no lackeys, or… some kind of bodyguards with it? It was just out there waiting for you to show up?” Oh, she’s good.

“Well… Okay, no, but-“ she gives me one of the ‘you’re pushing my limits’ looks. “Listen, Luce, I’m not some little girl; I’m a demigoddess, one that doesn’t like to be restricted.”

“You’re the only one at all. How long do you last before you get too confident?”

“First, Lucelle,” I begin while unstrapping my Anti-Magic-infused cloak. I made it when I took a fireball to the back a few months ago. Apparently, though, there’s some materials invented now that are supposedly ‘flame-retardant.’ “I’m not the only one. There are others like me out there. You just don’t seem to read up in the media.” I’m being a bit unfair; the media I am talking about is almost exclusively found in Ascentia since the world is a bit ahead of many parts of the planet in the living world. Not Everencia, though, the place where my mother’s former home resides. That country is beyond all other places in terms of technology. I don’t get it, though, I can do the same things with magic. “Second, I’m not ‘too confident’ and I won’t get like that. You know me, I know my limits.”

“I recall a few days ago, you tried to further your corruption so you could have the power to create a duplicate house here because you felt claustrophobic.”

“You know I like having my own rooms!” I am being honest- when I find my things out of place in my bedroom, my bathroom, my study, or my kitchen, I get anxious.

“Did your mother ever teach you how to share?”

“My mother is not the one to bring up right now, Lucelle.”

“Maybe she is. Sure, I don’t read up in Goddess Weekly or whatever, but I do hear words around the towns. Many people have been receiving some extraordinary enchantments on a huge variety of items. Someone in Ridgewood is making a fortune off house construction because of a shovel he has. If he digs out a square or rectangle or anything he wants in a flat piece of land, a whole building will come up out of the ground.”

“So, what?” I ask. I’m not too fond of the idea of my hometown being changed in such a way, but I guess I have to get with the times already. Gods, I feel old.

She purses her lips, then looks down. “Nothing, don’t mind. Iyo wants to go have fun tonight.”

“Isn’t Elysewhyr holding some kind of festival tonight? I didn’t catch what the occasion is, though.”

“There is no occasion and it’s called a party these days. They’re for people to get together and enjoy themselves.”

“And I suppose you want me to come with?”

She looks to me with a pleading eye. “Maybe call off the hunt for a night?”

I consider it, then decide that a night wouldn’t change much. “One.”

“Good. We’ll be getting ready.” She turns and leaves me alone in the room. I pick up my staff from the table and close the Beacon- a sort of artifact I created to travel quickly around Mercelon. There are identical beacons of the same type at my fortress, which is now ruled by past allies under Elyse’s control, Elyse’s kingdom, a hidden bar in Everencia, Ridgewood, and a special one that only answers to myself in Ascentia. Anyone else here is able to use the Beacon to travel; it’s their only way out, after all. I am the only one of us able to enter and leave the Void without an item to help. I have once before accidentally cut off the Beacon from the outside, leaving Iyo and Lucelle by themselves in the Void. They were shaken up, but it wasn’t like they would starve or dehydrate or anything like that- the Void is timeless.

I leave the planning room and walk through the hall connecting my new room to the rest of the house. The doors automatically slide open for me and I put my staff in the suspended case in the corner, then lock it with a twist of my hand. I know the worlds are changing with the ever-advancing technology, but what can this new technology do that my magic cannot? I can make firearms from my hands, I can create water from the air, and I can travel as quickly as I want, not even needing those ‘automobiles’ everyone seems to use these days. Or, maybe... am I just... getting old? Gods...