My Wives Are A Divine Hive Mind
Chapter 71: The Age Of The Flesh God

Chapter 71: The Age Of The Flesh God

The red cloaks and robes were destroyed as flesh grew about and bubbled into existence.

The five figures standing at the border of the shrine’s consecrated ground no longer resembled anything that could be called human.

Their presence began to distort the geometry of the air around them, the vertical ridges of their robes twitching with independent muscle, their fused masks pulsing faintly like breathing wounds carved from metal.

Their arms trembled once, then twice, the hundreds. Bones split down the center. Fingers folded inward. Veins thickened into cords. Their entire frames convulsed under unseen pressure, twisting into something new, as though the bodies had been pre-stitched with hidden layers waiting to be pulled out.

Without hesitation, Samael initiated her assault.

Every arcane node within her soul ignited in sequence. Layers of skill activation churned across her body like rings of invisible fire.

Ethereal lines flared along her limbs as energy surged through her veins. Her movements accelerated to a blur. Her feet struck the ground in patterns laced with layered glyphs, as if there are tens if not hundreds of skills being attempted to be cast simultaneously.

In the space between seconds, Samael released half a dozen invocation chains. Piercing rays of condensed will shredded the air.

Threads of corrupted soul-light tore through the limbs of the convulsing Helots. Energy laced with entropy formed into spears and daggers, flickering with divine disorder, then ruptured outward in expanding blooms of disintegration.

All of it collided with the transforming Helots, but nothing dissuaded them.

Their mass absorbed the attacks with grotesque elasticity.

At the same time, the Blessed Limbo Tier Divine Constructs surged forward. Thirty of them moved as an orchestra of judgment from all sorts of directions, some formerly hiding before making any movement were not raging like a thunderstorm.

No orders given, only intentions shared through the Divine Hive. Each construct danced through the corrupted air, their movements flawless and valiant in their mimicry of the Divine Hive’s action.

But despite all of that effort, it didn’t seem to be a decisive action.

The abnormal Helot;s tendrils lashed forward, grasping at constructs with claws that resembled melted iconography, but every movement was countered with equal and opposite precision.

Divine Constructs weaved between their grotesque formations and retaliated with righteous force, scything through clusters of malformed tissue, deflecting bone-scythes and explosive marrow-shards.

Lyenar’s voice became a chorus. She stood firm at the edge of the shrine’s spiritual perimeter. Her eyes burned with gold, and so did her lips. She did not speak; the divine channeled through her did.

Her arms extended in a practiced arc, and a dome of light spiraled outward, expanding into a full sanctuary field. Glyphs embedded into the ground activated in a cascade, creating a barrier that shimmered like tempered glass, layering itself over the shrine.

Within seconds, the barrier became a celestial ward.

Arrows of prayer shot through it and struck any Helot who ventured too close, not to injure, but to slow—to delay and paralyze their coordination through divine interference.

From the rear of the shrine, Yoiglah raised his head.

The black hole nestled within the statue’s halo responded, expanding under the weight of his will. The light dimmed across the field. The sky began to reflect its inversion. As the void widened, a column of fluid light erupted upward, composed not of water or fire but of condensed memory and invocation—a reversed cascade of sanctified pressure that pierced the clouds.

Kivas in contrast, was stuck in place.

She stared at the space between the clash. She could see Yoiglah’s rising storm. She could feel Lyenar’s invocation crawling through the bones of the land. She heard Samael’s layered magic symphony tearing through the enemy. She saw the Divine Constructs weaving holy annihilation with surgical grace.

And still, her limbs felt weighted.

"Everything moved slowly..." Kivas felt a huge thump in her head, something cracking, prodding, and trying to claw out to the surface. "Everything is distorted..."

Something was wrong.

The air folded inward. Color inverted. Sound receded into echo. Time unraveled its grip.

She blinked, hoping that something would change, but the world remained slow.

Her heartbeat became a metronome without rhythm. Her breath caught between inhales. Light distorted into streams of paint.

The motion of the Divine Constructs fractured into slow frames, each movement isolated, dissected. The sky turned grey with pulses of gold.

She stared at her own hands.

There was a tremble.

And then a presence.

Someone stood beside her.

A figure barely taller than her chest. Cloaked in a red hood. Armor plated across delicate limbs.

Their aura was neither hostile nor peaceful—it was the stillness before a god’s gaze. A quiet too deep to be comfortable.

The figure looked at Kivas.

"Have you ever felt pain?" the voice asked. It was young, sharp, clipped by intent.

Kivas couldn’t speak. Her throat refused to produce sound. She turned her head slowly toward the figure, trying to understand what stood beside her. She tried to question, but her voice emerged as thought instead.

What kind of pain?

Kivas had encountered them, the pain of loneliness, the pain of losing someone, the pain of hopelessness.

Kivas wondered if there were more pain that she needed to befriend with, for she felt like a curse made manifest.

The figure stepped closer, hands behind their back.

"Not the pain of a broken bone. Not the pain of a body pierced. Not even the pain of loneliness," the figure said as if reading Kivas’ mind.

Kivas tried to answer. She had felt all of those. But the figure shook their head.

"I mean sorrow. I mean betrayal. I mean the agony of devotion destroyed. I mean the grief that no god can wash away. The pain of a brother slain by your hands. The pain of being slain by your brother’s hands. The pain of a daughter turned into a stranger. The pain that exists in silence, but can only be murmured in darkness.

Kivas’ mind spun.

The world around her continued to unfold in slow frames, each step of Samael’s fight frozen, each flinch of the constructs dissected. Even the convulsing Helots hovered mid-transformation.

The red hood moved again. They reached toward Kivas and pushed her down without hesitation.

Her back hit the ground.

"Urgh!"

Then her face was pressed into the earth by force.

She could not stop it. Her strength vanished ever since the world slowed and became distorted.

The figure grabbed her by the flaming halo. Lifted her head without gentleness. Their fingers twisted into the shape of dominance.

Gritting her teeth, Kivas opened her eyes and saw the battlefield from a new vantage.

Not the safety of her allies.

The center audience, like watching an unfolding tale of a theater.

Directly between the collapsing shrine defense and the invading divine abomination taking shape.

Smoke and limbs collided like poetry written in rage.

The red hood figure crouched behind her and grabbed her jaw.

Fingers dug into her cheeks, forcing her mouth open slightly, tilting her head toward the scene.

"You recognize this pain," they said. "But you haven’t befriended it enough. This is the kind that never leaves. The one you tried to outrun when you forged a god’s name."

Kivas struggled, but no force answered her.

"This is hopelessness."

And with those words, the world shattered from its slow unravel.

Time accelerated with a scream of reality pulled back into alignment.

The battle exploded into motion.

And Kivas, caught between gods and monsters, was forced to witness it all.

The shattered tempo of time no longer constrained the battlefield. Reality lurched forward all at once, ripping through the dam of suspension that had held the violence in check.

Motion collided with sound.

The Blessed Limbo Tier Divine Constructs stormed the sky and earth alike. Dozens of them cut through the distorted field with movements honed through divine intelligence, a single thought radiating through the Divine Hive.

Their blades churned with Mana Psyche, carving through clouds of twisted essence, severing limbs born from nothing, striking with patterns too complex for any mortal mind to follow.

But the transformation at the center had finished.

The five Helot elites—once humanoid, once cloaked in purpose—were now something else entirely.

Their bodies no longer obeyed anatomical logic. The flesh had turned gelatinous, swollen, feverishly active. Tendrils as thick as temple pillars whipped outward in every direction. Dozens of mouths grew from their torsos, some vertical, some horizontal, others blooming open like petals revealing concentric rings of fangs.

Within those mouths were eyes. Beneath those eyes, more mouths.

A spiral tower of seething, devouring god-flesh began to emerge from the center mass, each second adding a dozen meters to its height.

It grew without end.

Every pulse of its bulk filled the sky with red mist. Its veins radiated sacrificial energy—energies stolen, altered, repurposed. They throbbed with stolen rites and divine signatures devoured across uncounted lifetimes.

A god had been born.

Not named.

Not summoned.

But willed into life through a sheer curse and reality intervention.

The constructs charged. They engaged with every tool they had. Blades cleaved into the body, divine fire was summoned, evocation chains ruptured, entire chunks were vaporized. But each wound healed faster than the previous.

Each rupture birthed two new limbs. Each counterattack only deepened the complexity of the monster’s growth.

Samael fought at the apex of that storm. Her form blurred through the chaos, her entire body wrapped in glowing channel-lattices that moved like armor. She conjured blades from her shadow, hurled entire slabs of compressed entropy, whispered the names of dead gods and used their echoes as curses.

Her wounded wings unfurled, each beat carving through the tendrils that reached for her.

She battled with willpower sharpened by violence, composed of thousands wisdom and experience for her current state of power.

And even then, it wasn’t enough.

Lyenar screamed.

A cluster of tendrils pierced her holy domain. The golden light shattered. Her arms rose to cast one final invocation, her lips parting as if to scream a name, or a blessing.

But before it came, her voice silenced.

Three tendrils struck through her torso.

Her body lifted into the air like a broken offering. Her shrine maiden robes split at the seams, divine threads trailing behind her like wings unformed.

She reached toward the shrine, but her hands never met the soil again.

She was pulled into the sky, disappearing behind folds of living meat that closed like an eye around her shape.

Yoiglah roared with tremors. The earth beneath him cracked.

He turned to retreat, but his body had already begun to deform.

His left hind leg had been bitten through—not by a single mouth, but by a dozen, all hidden beneath the god-flesh now entangling him. Teeth formed and dissolved by the second.

The major shrine atop his back splintered, vines torn apart by digestive fluids being secreted from coiling stomach-limbs.

He tried to collapse the shrine into his shell for safety. It didn’t matter.

More mouths grew.

More teeth gnawed.

He began to vanish in pieces.

The sky had become its own organ, by what seemed to be the anger of heaven and meaningless striving.

Clouds were replaced by red membranes. Rain was transformed into mucus. Wind itself no longer carried scent, only heat and the suffocating breath of something too divine and too hungry to be reasoned with.

Kivas couldn’t look away.

From where she was pinned in her spectral vantage, surrounded by the chaos of a battlefield tearing itself open, she saw the impossible tower of flesh reaching for the stars, and the ever-shrinking presence of her allies fighting against it.

Samael still moved. Still fought.

Kivas watched her soulmate slice through tendrils the size of spires, one after another, each blow an act of defiance so intense it carved the air in lines of fire.

But even Samael was beginning to falter. The strain showed. Her maneuvers became narrower. Her invocations stuttered as she strained to manage the entire Divine Hive while sustaining her own attacks.

The red hood figure behind Kivas chuckled.

"What do you think about this sight?" they whispered. "Painful, isn’t it?"

Kivas gritted her teeth. Her hands clawed at the ground, but her limbs had no strength.

"You thought that this is a brand new world, a brand new life, a brand with no choice." Their voice dipped. "But Fathomi isn’t anyone to rewrite. You are standing in the marrow of something older than memory, Kivas Chariot. And every road here leads to pain."

Tears spilled from Kivas’ eyes.

They ran freely down her cheeks, unprovoked, unacknowledged, not wiped away.

She saw the inhabitants of Vaingall dying. She saw the shrine corrupted. She saw the remnants of divine essence torn from the sky like burned cloth.

"I..."

Her voice cracked.

"What am I supposed to do...?"

They tilted their head.

"You strive."

They smiled.

Their hand covered Kivas’ face.

And so Kivas chose to stop breathing.