Prologue: Joanna (Part 11)

The massive maze started becoming small and her avatars started to encounter each other, coming to each others aide and carrying along their own burdens. She discovered something new, ganging up on the minotaurs ensured they stayed dead once killed. Even though getting killed by a minotaur still counted into splitting her soul.

The final piece of the puzzle was when she accidentally killed herself and discovered that the murderer grew stronger by absorbing the murdered fragment,

It became a desperate battle, as she formed squads of herself and started ganging up on the minotaurs and trying to collect herself. She was heavily outgunned, 4:1 by minotaurs 4x as powerful as her; and a cold hunter was chasing after her.

The cat had evolved into a leopard, and become more troublesome, and rather than preying on her when she was weakened, it had begun to take the advantage. It was a desperate battle for time.

A year later, the minotaurs had turned into prey, after she'd discovered that killing a minotaur improved her own strength. Her fights with the tiger grew fiercer.

Her soul started to feel like fragments of loose spaghetti, and each battle was stretching the spaghetti apart. She'd been able to slay the monster multiple times before, but as it grew stronger, uninhibited by the minotaurs, the battles became more even. The scary thing was that she could feel a growing resonance with the white-striped black tiger cat.

The labyrinth walls were now 5 metres tall, and the cracks on the wall reformed to reveal runes and pictograms etched into and curved out of the wall. As she looked at the images, a splitting headache accompanied by screams and whispers filled her mind. Massive volumes of knowledge started to swarm into her mind, images and visions of rituals and spells fogging her mind.

The tiger cat tried to ambush any avatar that got paralysed in this way, but she'd almost always manage to recover enough strength to fight back. However, she still suffered losses, and she was finally down to 3 avatars, no minotaurs, and engaged in mortal combat with a terrifying tiger cat. The voices were louder, and the visions and hallucinations were growing more and more vivid and divergent.

There was a new dynamic in their combat, magic.

The walls and floor of the labyrinth showed craters and cracks as collateral damage from spells traded between the cat and the three combatants. The magic paradigm also allowed them to reinforce themselves and modify their avatars with magic to display superhuman and supernatural feats. Including multiple arms, fiery molten army, and extremely high durability and speed. The only downside was the increased strain and rate of evaporation of her soul avatar constructs, weakening them.

She'd lost track of the number of attacks and counterattacks, they'd battled until finally the cat successfully consumed her weakest remaining avatar. She watched in horror as it evolved, forming a cocoon around itself. She could sense the surging energy within the egg, and it steadily thrummed as it evolved within, etched on its surface was arcane runes. The labyrinth walls crumbled away, leaving behind a large open obsidian arena, with lightning bolts flashing across the red overcast skies and occasionally striking the arena.

When the two avatars tried to attack, three minotaur golems grew out of the ground and rose to the egg's defence. They tried to fight the minotaurs, but they couldn't get any headway. Eventually, the pair came to an agreement, and the stronger one killed the weaker partner.

Joanna was finally whole again, after 39 years in this hellscape.