Eris was already upon him, "I don’t sweat or leave waste either. You can’t choke me in your airless void, or even tear me apart with it."

Arad moved aside with a grin, and this time, due to Eris’s increased speed and accuracy, he failed to bisect himself and got one arm slashed off. "I can still starve you. Guess how?"

At that moment, Eris felt it: All the divine magic she was receiving from her followers and from the murders across the entire universe had halted. "You’re inside my expansion, and your heaven is within my stomach. I even have dominion over the vampires, who are the most devoted of your followers."

"Tsu..." Eris flew back and sent a wave of plasma at Arad to burn him. "Who taught you that?"

"An old friend, rival, and a mortal enemy." He replied with a smirk, as it was Nyar who told him that starving a god of divine magic was the easiest and simplest way to kill them, and it was easily achievable if that god was fighting and expanding a lot of their divine magic.

"You can kill a god like that?" One of the maids gasped, and Mathilde looked at her. "That’s true, but usually it is impossible to fully cut off a god from their divine sources. A lesser god of bread, for example, they get divine magic from bakers in every world, so to cut them off, you have to lock up or kill all of the bakers in the universe and erase the concept of bread."

"Or..." Diana stared at her, "Lock that God of bread in a space that you have authority over, and keep them trapped until they use up all of their divine magic. Arad isn’t trying to erase murder; he is simply trying to prevent the divine energy from reaching Eris."

"That shouldn’t be possible. Arad doesn’t have a higher authority than Eris since she is a goddess and he isn’t." Gabriella, the archon, jumped into the conversation, and she got a cold look from Diana. "Well, he got a higher authority."

"What authority?" Gabriella did know that Arad is AO, but she knew well that he shouldn’t know or be able to use that authority.

Who jumped in next was Isabella, who looked at Gabriella with a smile. "Well, Arad got many authorities over Eris, but I’ll count up a few for you. First, he is her Blood Lord, and she acknowledged his superiority. Then, when it comes to the divines, Kali and I are higher than Eris, and we have long since submitted to him."

She leaned back. "Murder is the brutal destruction of a body to end a life, and so, it is a lesser form of destruction. If Arad can get Kali to submit to him, Murder would find trouble trying to resist him. It is why Katal got instantly erased by Kali’s spear. Murder is just a lesser aspect of destruction."

But it didn’t make sense, since Arad before didn’t know that he could abuse divinity this way. Who was telling him?

If they knew it was Nyar, they would’ve already been freaking out. While everyone was against powering Arad quickly with knowledge about what he could do as AO, Nyar’s avatar was a rogue mass of knowledge that didn’t care about anything.

While he might not mean any direct harm, he could end up causing a massive disaster without even realizing it.

With that, Eris’s star collapsed on itself and then bounced off Arad’s elemental expansion that now replaced its nuclear core, shattering it. What emerged was a bleeding Arad that had one of his two pricolici hearts ripped off, and Eris, who was now exhausted and bloodied beyond belief.

Their expansions had both collapsed before any one of them could finish off the other. Eris wasn’t able to damage Arad enough with limited divine magic, and he wasn’t able to defend himself long enough to fully consume her star and fatten up the black hole.

"Guess we’re back to Zero." She smiled, looking at Arad with a grin as the blood covering her body evaporated, and he coughed.

"Not really, I’m learning more about myself in this fight than I expected." He looked at her as the wound in his chest healed. "Nothing beats training against someone strong."

Eris frowned. Does he consider this fight of theirs as just mere training? Isn’t he taking her seriously? She is the divine of murder, and is trying her best to murder him, yet every time he slips away like a roach, refusing to just die.

Just how deep does his bag of tricks go? Is he like Alcott is with dragons, just with everyone else? What can she do to surprise or catch him off guard? Where did she hear it? The saying that antagonizing a dragon is scarier than antagonizing a god.

In reality, she knew that she wasn’t fighting a mere dragon but a true god, the one who made the gods as they know them. Even if he was heavily weakened and nerfed, that doesn’t make her any stronger or credible enough to challenge him.

While sweating like a hog, even though she had said before that gods don’t sweat, Eris looked deep into her portfolio. Can Murder commit the vilest of sins? Can it murder the creator himself? The answer was murky, as even if the portfolio resonated with the idea, it wasn’t so keen on it, as if the words ’murder’ and ’AO’ can’t be put together.

What would happen if she murders him? She already got the answer long ago, and it was when Arad almost died at the core of her star and collapsed into a singularity. If she does push Arad to death, what awaits her is the consciousness of AO himself, and she doesn’t want to fight something that even Amaterasu doesn’t dare to challenge.

So, what could Eris do? What could she even hope to achieve by fighting an unwinnable fight? But it was then that she understood the true power of murder. It was anything related to strength, divinity, or fighting, but the very origin of the murder portfolio itself.

At the dawn of time, murder didn’t exist yet. Especially when the universe was still torn, fighting off the rebelling abominations and powerful beings like Asgorath, Adam, Yggdrasil, and Lucifer ruled. It only appeared afterward, when Cain, Adam’s son, killed his brother Abel.

That was the first time an evil portfolio was born, and that was Murder. For someone to kill their own flesh and blood without reason, without proper judgment, to steal the right of the divine AO and the job of Death herself, that was the sin of murder.

People always die at their fated time, not a second late or early; that was the rule of death. So why are murderers punished if their victims were already fated to die at that point in time? The answer was simple; they were simply killed before their time.

Murder is the portfolio that can break those shackles, and if the shackles of fate protect Arad, then Eris might be the only one capable of breaking them.

Eris suddenly froze in place, her eyes flashed bright violet, and her entire body jolted as her scythe disappeared and was replaced with two shivs.

[Run, she understood murder.] As Nyar’s voice rang in Arad’s head, it was already a moment late as Eris’s shiv was already heading toward Arad’s chest, and the fates couldn’t even see it coming, and Death couldn’t prevent it.

"This is how my avatar died. Murder can break the laws of Death and the Fates; that is why it is a sin. In our fight, Eris wasn’t aware of that fact, so she just fought and my avatar died. But now that she is aware, she can be more aggressive."

Neither Arad’s Pricolici’s immortality nor Tarrasque’s blood immunity to death nor his origin as AO was going to protect him from Eris any longer.

^{Arad! Eris just disappeared from fate!}^ Doma’s words also came a second too late, as Arad’s head was already flying with blood gushing out of his skull.