With a violent motion, Herta hurled the Key with all her might. In the blink of an eye, it traversed hundreds of meters, arriving directly in front of the newly materialized Bird-Shaped Evil God.
The creature flapped its wings, but not to fly. Instead, a thick, viscous purple fluid erupted from the festering sores on its wings, splattering towards Herta in a vile offensive.
At Herta's command, all her Puppets converged around her, chanting defensive magic to withstand the incoming barrage. Simultaneously, the Key embedded itself in the Bird-Shaped Evil God's body.
Perhaps dismissing the tiny object as harmless, or simply failing to perceive it, the Bird-Shaped Evil God made no attempt to stop the Key. But even if it had tried, it would have been futile.
During its flight, the Key appeared visible, yet it existed outside this plane of existence, like a flat texture superimposed on reality. No matter how hard the Bird-Shaped Evil God tried to intercept it, none of its attacks or movements could touch the Key's ethereal form.
Herta pinched the air between her thumb and forefinger, as if touching something invisible. She recalled how, when repairing the Dimensional Rift earlier, the Key had flown horizontally and rotated vertically upon insertion, like a lock securing something in place.
Now, the opposite was happening. The Key flew vertically into the Bird-Shaped Evil God, and Herta rotated her fingers counterclockwise, as if unlocking something.
If it could mend space, it could certainly tear it apart. It could serve as a medical suture needle or a surgical scalpel.
Click—
A crisp sound echoed as Herta retracted her outstretched right hand. She casually flicked a strand of tea-colored hair behind her ear and recited one of her signature lines from the game: " Raise barriers of the unknown, and watch them crumble."
As her words faded, the space around the Key collapsed into a massive rhomboid rift. Unlike the pitch-black voids of Dimensional Rifts, this Space Rift revealed a dense network of rhomboid patterns within its depths.
This strike was a true instance of "defense-ignoring" and dealt "true damage." It was like playing a video game where a monster might possess exceptionally high defense or some bizarre mechanics, yet Herta's attack was essentially equivalent to the player outside the computer punching through the screen!
Nearly half of the Bird-Shaped Evil God's torso vanished instantly. The sudden assault forced it to unleash an ear-piercing shriek, like countless fingernails scraping furiously across a chalkboard—a sound that could drive a normal human insane or even kill them outright. Herta merely felt a slight tingling in her scalp.
While the attack caused her no actual harm, it still made her deeply uneasy, and her toes curled involuntarily inside her boots.
Despite losing over half its body, the Evil God didn't immediately perish. Instead, it began to drift slowly skyward, like one of those Featherless Birds.
Observing this, Herta couldn't help but speculate: could this world be like a magnet with matching polarity for the Evil God and the Featherless Birds? Perhaps they had to exert tremendous effort to "fly" downward, and upon death or significant loss of mass, they were repelled upward.
Herta beckoned, and the Key flew back into her hand. A few seconds later, the initial barrage unleashed by the Bird-Shaped Evil God finally reached her, slamming into the layers of Magic Shields conjured by her Puppets.
Hiss...
The sound of acid eating through metal filled the air as the shields shattered one by one. But new shields materialized in their place, and Herta paid little attention to the spectacle. Instead, she aimed the Key once more at the Bird-Shaped Evil God, now rising into the air, and considered whether to strike again.
In the end, she decided against it. The distorted rhombus of collapsed space where her previous attack had landed showed no signs of healing.
She recalled how her Portal Gun, developed in the Main World, had once fractured a small patch of space, but it had healed almost instantly.
It was like comparing a minor cut on a young person's finger, which would stop bleeding almost immediately, to the same injury on an elderly person. For someone in their seventies or eighties, even such a small wound would take much longer to heal.
But what if the elderly person already had a massive, life-threatening wound? Then the question wasn't whether the new injury would heal, but whether it would be the final straw that broke the camel's back.
Herta glanced at the enormous Dimensional Rift, then at the Space Rift she had created. She noticed a patch of inky blackness dripping from the Dimensional Rift, extending downward toward the Space Rift.
Is the Dimensional Rift spreading further?
Herta couldn't be certain her next strike would kill the Evil God. What if she kept fighting, failed to finish it off, and ended up surrounded by the "wounds" she had created?
She redirected the Key toward the Dimensional Rift, preparing to continue repairing it. The Bird-Shaped Evil God was already severely wounded and shouldn't pose an immediate threat. She could finish sealing the rift before resuming her attack.
But then Herta noticed the Featherless Birds, which had been charging toward her in a frenzy, suddenly scattering in all directions. Had their Evil God's injury convinced them this enemy was too strong, driving them to flee?
No, that couldn't be right. Theoretically, fear shouldn't exist in creatures under the dominion of these Evil Gods. Herta glanced up at the Bird-Shaped Evil God in the sky. She could sense it releasing a pheromone—a command—driving the Featherless Birds away from this place. Their target... the ground!
"It's planning to attack the humans on the surface?!"
These so-called Evil Gods clearly possessed intelligence. Yet, in Herta's eyes, they resembled slightly more powerful beasts than true deities. This was why she always referred to them as "it" rather than "He."
Cunning was a common trait among beasts. The Bird-Shaped Evil God's maneuver made Herta frown deeply.
Individually, none of these Featherless Birds could harm her. But if they scattered across the globe, they would become a considerable nuisance.