Chapter 35: Bruce Mends the Barrier
The transition wasn't smooth. It was a ripping, a violent rearrangement of molecules. One moment Bruce was anchored by the heat and scent and sweat of his wives, the next he was elsewhere.
The air hit him first. It didn’t breathe. It clawed. Thin, acidic, carrying the burned-sugar scent of decaying magic and the iron tang of ozone. He landed on one knee, the impact jarring up through his bones onto stone that wasn’t stone. It was a fused, glassy substance, the color of a day-old bruise. The sky above was a swirling canopy of those same sickly greens and purples, lit from within by no sun he could see.
First Gate.
The vista was a jagged nightmare of crystalline spires, towering like the broken teeth of a buried giant. And in the distance, a wall. It was miles high, etched with impossibly complex geometries that pulsed with a feeble, gold-white light. The source of the fading seal. Even from here, he could see the cracks—veins of pitch darkness webbing across its face. And things moved on it. Dark, scuttling shapes, relentless as ants on carrion.
He had seconds.
The awareness came as a pressure, then a shriek in his mind. He spun, his body already moving on instinct honed in the Bali compound. Shadows detached from the deeper gloom between the spires. They weren’t formless. They had too many legs, too many snapping, needle-toothed mouths, eyes like chips of frozen void. They moved with a rustling, skittering sound that set his teeth on edge. Dozens. Pouring toward him.
His hands came up, empty. He’d brought no weapon. A stupid, human thought.
The first wave of shadows leaped. Gnashing maws aimed for his throat, his eyes. He braced, a snarl forming in his throat.
A thrum resonated through his core, warm and gold. It burst outward from his skin not as light, but as a palpable, shimmering barrier. It was the color of Camille’s favorite morning sunshine.
The shadows slammed into it. The sound was a wet, sizzling crunch. Where they touched the golden hue, they vaporized into wisps of foul smoke.
Protection. Her voice was a whisper, strained but clear, through the bond. A thread of pure will spanning dimensions. I’ve got you. For now.
“How long?” he grunted aloud, his eyes scanning as more shadows gathered, testing the barrier with claw-tipped tendrils.
It’s a drain, she shot back, her mental voice tight. Like holding up a collapsing roof. They keep coming.
As if to prove her point, a larger shadow, thicker than the others, hurled itself against the golden dome. The barrier flexed inward, glowing filaments straining. A hairline crack spiderwebbed across its surface with an audible ping.
Pain lanced through Bruce’s temple—Camille’s pain, echoed across the connection. He felt her stagger, far away in a sunlit cavern.
Rage, cold and precise, replaced his initial disorientation. This was why he was here. Not just to fix a wall. To erase this infestation at its source.
He reached inward, not for Camille’s protective light, but for the ocean they had poured into him. The fused power of five goddesses. It answered, a torrent of heat and potential. It needed a shape. His will forged one.
From his clenched fist, liquid gold and searing white fire erupted, stretching, lengthening, solidifying. It became a spear. Not like Idris’s weapon of darkness. This was a thing of vicious, beautiful light. Its shaft was braided energy, its head a concentrated star. It hummed with the buzz of a high-tension wire and felt like an extension of his own furious spine.
He hefted it. The weight was perfect.
The golden barrier flickered. Another crack.
Bruce— Camille’s warning was a gasp.
He didn’t wait for it to fall. He dropped the shield himself.
The surge of power that had been sustaining it snapped back into him, and he channeled it straight into his legs. He moved. Not like a man. Like a strike of lightning.
He met the next wave not as a defender, but as a farmer scything rotten wheat. The spear was a blur. It didn’t just pierce the shadows; it un-made them. Where it passed, the corrupted forms dissolved into screams of nullified energy. He carved a path, spinning, thrusting, the spear’s light leaving afterimages in the thick air.
But for every one he erased, two more seemed to coalesce from the very gloom of the place. They were endless. A cold calculus settled in his gut. He could fight until the power they’d given him was spent, and he’d barely make a dent. He was a distraction. The real work was the seal.
A tendril, faster than the others, slipped past his guard. It wrapped around his ankle, icy cold, and yanked. He went down, his shoulder hitting the glassy ground hard. The breath exploded from his lungs. Shadows piled on, a smothering, biting weight. He felt a dozen pinpricks of corrosive cold as needle-teeth found purchase on his arms, his back.
Fuck this.
He roared, a sound that was part man, part something far older. Divine fire exploded from his skin in a concussive wave, incinerating the immediate pile. He surged to his feet, panting. The wounds sizzled, healing almost as fast as they were made, but the drain was real. He could feel the reservoir within him dipping.
Then, a new voice slithered into the bond. Not helpful. Tempting. It was the voice of the realm itself, dusty and vast.
Alone… you are alone here, little godling. Your pretty anchors are far away. Their light will gutter. You will be consumed. Or… you could let the hunger in. This place thrives on consumption. Take it in. Use it. The power here is infinite, if you stop fighting it.
An image, not his own, flashed behind his eyes: him, swollen with the realm’s dark power, tearing through the shadows like paper, striding to the gate unchallenged.
He shook his head, spraying sweat and black ichor. “Not my style,” he gritted out.
A particularly massive shadow, a shifting blob of claws and eyes, loomed before him. It gathered itself to pounce. Bruce planted his feet, spear leveled.
And then she was there.
Not physically. In the bond. A silhouette of pure potential superimposed over his vision. Lena.
Her presence was a cool, sharp knife in the heat of the fight. You’re thinking like a man with a spear, her mental voice chided, laced with an affection that felt like a smirk. Stop it. You’re a god with a shadow who can use all the powers. So use them.
Understanding bloomed. The gift of possibility.
As the beast-shadow leaped, Bruce didn’t thrust with the spear. He reached through the bond, through Lena, and pulled.
Ketut’s earthy solidity surged into him. He sank his will not into the air, but into the strange ground beneath him. The glassy substance ruptured. A spike of raw, sharp crystal the size of a redwood erupted directly beneath the shadow, impaling it mid-air. It writhed, shrieking, before dissolving.
Another group swarmed from his left. This time, he pulled Freya’s essence. Creation. But not of life. Of force. He didn’t shape it, he simply unleashed it. A concussive wave of raw, concussive possibility slammed outwards, not as fire, but as a silent, distorting blast that simply erased the shadows from existence, leaving a clean, quiet semicircle in their place.
He laughed then, a wild, free sound. This was it. This was the fusion.
He began to move again, not just as a warrior, but as a conduit. Each step was a symphony. Earth to shatter a platform under a cluster of foes. Protection to flash a momentary, blinding shield to deflect a volley of spine-like projectiles. Creation to mold the very acidic air into a whirling vortex of razors.
And through it all, he felt them. Not just their power, but them.
Camille’s steadfast focus, a golden thread holding the tether. Ketut’s deep, rooting certainty. Freya’s playful, devastating creativity. Sophia’s fierce, healing resolve.
And Lena, his Sombra, the prism through which it all flowed, whispering in the heart of the storm.
Show them, she murmured, her voice a thrilling current in the chaos, what happens when they fuck with a god who has five goddesses at his back.
He was getting closer to the base of the immense wall. The shadows grew denser, more desperate, their forms larger and more coalesced. They were no longer mindless scavengers. He saw flickers of malignant intelligence in their void-eyes. They were guarding the cracks.
A new type emerged from a particularly wide fissure in the wall. It stood on two thick, backward-jointed legs, with a torso of writhing tentacles and a head that was just a single, giant maw. It radated a palpable aura of dread that even made the other shadows hesitate.
The Sentinel’s words echoed. A catalyst. Your fused energy, at its peak.
The plan formed in an instant. A reckless, perfect plan.
He opened the bond wide, not to draw power, but to issue an invitation. A demand.
I need the peak, he sent, the thought blazing across the connection like a signal flare. Not memory. Now. While I fight. Give it to me raw. Give me the scream.
Back in the sunlit cavern, the five women, still intertwined and recovering, felt the pull. It wasn’t a request for help. It was a call to war. To worship in the midst of the barrage.
Their eyes met. No hesitation.
Camille was on her feet first. “You heard him. Circle. Now.”
They didn’t bother with the stone. They formed a ring on the smooth cavern floor, knees touching. The connection between them, still sensitive and alive from before, ignited instantly.
“Focus through me,” Lena said, her voice taut. She was the conduit. She lay back, pulling Sophia on top of her. “Sophia, take me. Hard. Let him feel it.”
Sophia, her body still aching from Bruce, moved with a warrior’s grace. She lowered herself onto Lena’s face, grinding her wet cunt over Lena’s mouth. Lena’s tongue speared out, licking and thrusting with a desperate rhythm. At the same time, Sophia reached behind her, guiding Camille’s fingers to her own ass. “Here, Camille. Stretch me open for him.”
Camille, behind Sophia, spat on her fingers and pushed two inside Sophia’s tight rear hole, fucking her with them in time with Lena’s tongue. “He feels this,” Camille chanted. “He feels how open we are for him.”
Ketut and Freya flanked Lena. Ketut leaned down, taking one of Lena’s small, pert breasts into her mouth, biting the nipple, her hand sliding between Lena’s own thighs. Freya mirrored her on the other side, sucking the other nipple, her fingers finding Lena’s clit, rubbing frantic circles.
We’re with you, Freya’s thought sang across the bond, bright and fierce. Take it!
On the other side of reality, Bruce braced as the massive maw-creature charged, tentacles whipping toward him.
Then the wave hit him.
It was not a gentle flow of power. It was the direct, unfiltered sensory overload of five women driving each other toward climax, with him as the focal point. He felt Sophia’s ass being stretched by Camille’s fingers, the burn and the bliss. He felt Lena’s tongue fucking Sophia’s pussy, tasted Sophia’s juices secondhand. He felt the twin points of suction on Lena’s nipples, the frantic pressure on her clit.
It was too much. It was perfect.
He didn’t fight the creature with skill. He simply stood his ground as the tidal wave of their shared pleasure crested inside him. His skin glowed, incandescent. The spear in his hand blazed like a fragment of the sun.
The creature’s tentacles reached him—and vaporized upon contact with the aura of pure, sexual divine energy radiating from him. It shrieked, a sound of absolute wrongness meeting an absolute right.
Bruce took one step forward, then launched the spear.
It wasn’t a throw. It was an expulsion. The spear, carrying the concentrated peak of their distant orgasm, became a line of annihilating light. It pierced the creature’s giant maw, erupted out the back of its form, and kept going, impacting the base of the great wall.
The effect was not an explosion, but a cleansing. A ripple of gold-and-white fire washed outward from the point of impact, scouring the shadows from the wall’s surface for a hundred yards in every direction. The cracks in that area sealed with a sound like a million bells chiming, the dark veins replaced with molten gold that cooled to a solid, radiant seal.
Silence, profound and startling, fell in the immediate area.
The connection settled, thrumming with spent energy and profound satisfaction. Bruce stood, chest heaving, in a circle of purified ground. The wall before him was healed in a significant patch. A beachhead.
From the bond, he felt their exhaustion, their triumphant sweat, their deep, satiated smiles.
Lena’s voice, thick and drowsy with pleasure, was the last whisper. See? Told you. Now go fix the rest of the wall, big guy. We’ll be here… recovering.
Bruce looked up at the miles-high gate, at the countless remaining cracks, the infinite shadows still stirring in the distant spires. It was impossible. A task for ages.
He picked up his spear, its light steady now. A smile touched his lips, reflected in the newly-burnished gold of the seal.
He had five goddesses at his back. He had their fire in his veins.
Impossible was just a word they hadn’t burned down yet. He started walking.
He started walking. The silence around his cleared patch was an illusion, a bubble in a boiling sea. From the jagged spires further out, new shapes detached. These were different. They flowed like liquid tar, absorbing the faint light rather than reflecting it. Their approach was silent, which was worse than the skittering. He could feel their hunger as a cold pressure against the warmth of the bond.
“He’s tiring,” Camille’s voice came through, thin with strain. The golden thread of her protection felt frayed.
“We just came ten minutes ago,” Freya muttered in the background, her words slurred with exhaustion.
“It’s not about that,” Sophia cut in, her Spanish accent more pronounced. “It’s the realm. It’s eating the energy as fast as we send it. Like pouring water into sand.”
Bruce knew they were right. Each step forward was a battle of attrition. A clawed shadow-lurker lunged from a crevice. He vaporized it with a thought, channelling Ketut’s earthen spike, but the effort cost him. He felt a tangible dip in the reservoir. He gazed up at the impossible wall, at the galaxy of cracks still weeping darkness. The math was brutal. He could spend a century here, a leaking faucet trying to fill an ocean.
A cold certainty settled in his gut, heavier than the strange gravity of this place.
This isn’t enough.
The thought wasn’t panic. It was a dreadful, final assessment. I’ll be here forever at this rate.
He stopped walking. He closed his eyes against the hostile landscape. He shut out the whispers of the encroaching shadows. He turned his perception inward, away from the bond that connected him to his wives, and dove deeper. Past the vibrant, familiar channels of their shared power—Camille’s gold, Lena’s prismatic potential, Ketut’s verdant pulse, Freya’s creative spark, Sophia’s resilient blue. He sank into the silence beneath them, the foundation upon which their connections were built.
There, he found it.
It wasn’t a stream or a reservoir. It was the bedrock. The source. A deep, humming, infinite well of power that had no color, no personality. It was pure potential, anterior to gods or goddesses, the universe’s raw, silent hum. His birthright. His father’s legacy. Not borrowed, but inherent.
Primordial.
He didn’t ask. He tapped it.
The effect was instantaneous and absolute. His body didn’t glow. It became a focal point. The air around him warped, reality itself groaning in protest. The shadow-beings converging on him didn’t vaporize. They simply ceased. One moment they were nightmares in motion; the next, they were an afterimage, then nothing. No scream, no smoke. A silent, total erasure.
He opened his eyes. His hazel irises had gone completely white, swirling with the static of creation itself.
He resumed walking. He didn’t run, didn’t charge. He simply moved with a terrible, deliberate pace toward the base of the First Gate. Shadows massed before him in a frantic, seething wall of teeth and talons. He raised a hand, palm outward. He didn’t channel a specific power. He simply expelled a fraction of what now flowed through him.
A pulse of colorless force rippled outwards. It made no sound. Where it touched, the shadows and the crystalline spires behind them disintegrated into their component atoms, which then winked out of existence. He left a smooth, clean corridor of nullity in his wake, the ground now featureless and dark.
He reached the wall. He placed both hands upon it. The cold, failing stone trembled.
This time, he didn’t repair. He commanded.
He tapped the primordial power again, a deliberate, focused draw. He directed it into the labyrinthine fractures. The sickly dark veins lighting the cracks were not sealed. They were overwritten. Molten light, whiter than plasma, flooded every fissure, every hairline split, coursing through the wall’s structure like divine fire through a circuit board. The cracks vanished.
But he wasn’t done. He saw the wall’s fundamental weakness, its weary, ancient fabric. Reinforce it.
He poured the power in, not as a patch, but as a new reality. He felt the wall’s structure groan, then sing as it was compounded. Tenfold. Its material density increased, the stone taking on a pearlescent, metallic sheen. A hundredfold. The etched geometries blazed with light, becoming three-dimensional, then hyper-dimensional, their patterns now moving, alive with defensive intelligence. A thousandfold. The wall was no longer a barrier. It was a declaration. Its light was no longer a fading glow but a constant, sun-like radiance that pushed back the very gloom of the realm, casting stark, long shadows from the remaining spires for the first time in eons.
The work was complete.
The tap closed. The infinite well receded, a door shutting on a star. The white void left his eyes, his hazel irises returning, now holding the ghost of that staggering depth. The backlash was immediate and total.
Every muscle, every nerve, every cell screamed in simultaneous agony and depletion. The transition between dimensions was a blurred, nauseating smear of non-sensation.
He stumbled forward, back into the warm, damp air of the Bali cave, the roar of the waterfall a deafening assault after the absolute silence of his erasures.
He took one heavy, shuffling step on the smooth stone. His legs gave out.
He collapsed.
He didn’t crumple gracefully. He fell like a felled tree, hitting the ground with a sickening, meaty thud, his head snapping back before lolling to the side. His eyes were open, but saw nothing. A thin trickle of blood seeped from his nose.
The five women, still tangled together in their circle of recovery, froze.
For a heartbeat, there was only the sound of water.
Then, movement. The air beside the now-placid pool shimmered, and Idris, the Sentinel, stepped forth. He looked diminished, his form more solid but also more worn. He glanced at Bruce’s prostrate form, then at the terrified women scrambling toward him.
“The Heir has done well,” Idris said, his voice a dry rasp, devoid of its earlier monumental gravity. “More than well. He did not just mend the First Gate. He remade it. The breach is sealed for a thousand generations.”
Camille cradled Bruce’s head in her lap, wiping the blood from his lip. “What’s wrong with him? He’s ice cold.”
“He drank from a well no mortal-born consciousness was meant to touch, even one with divine blood,” Idris said. He knelt, his obsidian fingers hovering over Bruce’s chest. “He is not wounded. He is… emptied. Scoured. The vessel is intact, but the contents were spilled to accomplish the task.”
“What do we do?” Lena demanded, her hands trembling as she clutched Bruce’s limp fingers.
Idris straightened. “I’ll bring him to the house. I have to get back.” He looked at the wives, his void-like eyes pausing on each of them. “Protect this one. Heal him. Use your bond, your bodies, your shared essence. Pour your life back into him.” His form began to flicker, dissolving at the edges. “The universe needs him.”
His gaze locked on Bruce’s pale face one last time, and when he spoke, it held a note of something like awe.
“He’s special.”
With a final crackle of displaced air, Idris vanished. The women were alone with Bruce’s utterly still form, the colossal truth of what he’d done hanging in the air between them.