To be sure, the body condom had been a viable strategy to deal with the snares on him. And he wasn’t the only one that knew it. Hindsight was 20/20 and there was little doubt thinking back now on it, that his opponents had been able to use their Aural sight to see his three-part weave as they attacked him. They had fully intended him to neutralize their single Aura leashes in the exact way he had. So intent were they that they had pulled back their resistance when Josh had pulsed his Will. With no one resisting him, Josh’s braids had pushed through the tethers like a shot from a rail gun. Almost all the way to the crush rollers themselves. Josh could see the fuzzy edge of his gold/orange, violet, and indigo braid grazing the edges of his opponent’s launching ports even now.

  Expressions of malicious eagerness greeted Josh from all eight faces in front of him. From the four Aztecs as well as the tall, tan humanoids, two of which bore the heads of animals, in the other crush roller. Josh registered a crocodile and a jackal without giving it any more of his divided attention. All eight leered on expectantly. Their knowing half-grins told him in no uncertain terms that they had fully expected him to be foolish enough to blast them out of their limited crush rollers in their continued charade of holding him. An event that would have ended resulted in his destruction from their individual powers and strengths. His past experience with Utu and his leg chopping ways made it all too plain on exactly how bad that would have been…only with eleven more evil gods to slice pieces off me!

  Now that Josh could see it, he could tell that even the crowd had been in on it. The general mounting hubbub, showing no real excitement at his capture. In fact, the crowd still seemed to be waiting for the final shoe to fall based on their continued lack of response to him not having freed all twelve of the angry gods from their Tafl roller-limits…Something was still going to happen…But what?!?

  Josh straightened out of his fighting stance and a chagrined smile came over his face as he looked up at the two stone death-buggies in front of him. “You pack of evil bastard–”

  Josh’s eyes bulged in panic as a tall, lean female with eyes like electric sapphires, wearing a alternating striped onyx and golden-cloth headdress dangling lapplets to hang over her shoulders, raised a finger on her lion’s paw and slashed it in command. The cloudy air filled with power and all twelve opponents slammed their wills down the Essence tethers in joint assault against him.

  “URGHHHHH!” Josh strained as the point of contention of all twelve lines shot back like pile drivers into his barely re-raised resistance. Seeing that the true fight was on, the crowd went wild with cheers and boos. For who they were rooting for was anybody's guess. Off balance and not fully expecting the renewed attack, Josh fell back on his butt in a swish of fog.

  The spinning mass of his Mind-Space/Time/Earth triple-braid and the enemy’s fire and earth single Essence attacks wobbled on the tether line in front of him close enough to feel the burn and crush on his healing skin. Being continually out of his depth, and never knowing anything for sure about Essence, metaphysics, and how the universe of cultivation worked, Josh was far from certain. But he did strongly suspected that if that ball of wavering power reconnected with him in a direct way, his ability to continue cultivation would be squashed flat just as it had been when the Aztecs had gotten his foot in their fire smare at the start of everything in this arena.

  With hands raised in defiance and all five active divided consciousness chanelling his triple-braided-Will, Josh rose to a knee in defiance. With short, definite steps he pivoted to the left and pulled the tethers from behind him over his head and in parallel with the other eight in his control. Having the attack of all three crush rollers infront of him changed nothing from a cultivational point of view. But it did make him feel better to have all his enemies to the front. With a measured response he started pushing back. Overcoming their challenge to the half-way point–

  Josh fell on his face, open mouth and slitted eyes gritty as they filled with sand and gravel. King Tut’s evil, half-lion sister had slashed a second claw. Once again holding the conterattack in unison.

  Millions of voices shouted cat calls, razzes and bursting in belly laughter erupted from the watching crowd.

  “Yaa bunchhh of muthherrs!” Josh muttered around a mouthful of pebbles he had been less than successful in spitting out. But he had kept a tight reign of his Intent. Cutting off his own attack before his face had even hit the gound. His hands even now grasping the unified Essence tethers in two tight fists. Proudly still raised above his head.

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  He sprang back to a knee and growled like a kicked dog as he bared his teeth in challenge at the Sphinx woman. She tilted her head and raised a brow in respect as she apparently accepted it. Holding both paws before her she waggled all eight of her clawed digits randomly. All twelve opponeents acted individually on their own and the real fight was on.

  Uneven surges of strength, length, and even direction came from each of the twelve. Josh strained to maintain the highest degree of control. He saw through slitted, sand-filled eyes, the glowing knot Essence shift relentlessly. Alternating direction and location based on the overall outcome of their contention and his control. Back and forth it went over the twenty yards between them dozens of times in seconds. Slowly he finely tuned his responses in frenzied desire to reach any kind of status quo. It was almost impossible. Like having a tug of war with a toddler who would drop the rope an any time, while simultaneously standing on a floating two-by-four over a punji pit filled with poisoned spikes, active six-foot high sawmill blades, and circling sharks with ‘frickin lasers’ attached to their heads.

  The old gods knew what Josh had learned, and what Sen didn’t yet understand. Braiding differing Auras into a unified Essence weave resulted in an exponential increase in strength with each new layer. With a triple weave under his authority, Josh was about one-hundred times stronger than his opponents. There was no way for them to overpower him… Thus, their disturbingly effective attempts at get him to overpower himself. But that ship had sailed. Right now it had been several beats since his adversaries had been able to get Josh to substantially shift the focal points on the condensed tethers he was fisting with a death grip. And like the Sumarians before them, Josh could tell that the effort of fighting someone who was relatively, at the moment, so much stronger then you, was taking its toll. Even for angry old school gods like they were. The obviously slowing surges and counter surges, reduced frequency of course changes, and decreasing strength in their overall assaults was evidence that matched the beading sweat on their brows and increased gritting of their teeth.

  Josh had to admit that there had been a fair amount of intimidation going up against beings that had such a history on his world. That were so much more powerful than him in all ways. All ways… But right here and right now. No, in this fight, Josh was large and in charge. And more than that, he was a pissed off lawyer from the South Side of Chicago with a freakish talent at cultivating in physical matter iterations. And it was just about time for him to start acting like it.

  Leaving his five active divided consciousness to continue the waning see-saw contest, Josh got a mildly throbbing headache in his temples as he partitioned a sixth awareness to move on to step four of his plan. Six was alot for him to stretch out his mind to. True, he had once expanded it to seven while running for his life from the Xsias, the rabid, blood-feeding undead. But that had been for less than five seconds, and he had ended up recovering for several days after. How much had been due to over taxing of his mental faculties and how much was due to his slow healing wounds from a way stronger undead being, was anybody’s guess. The insane monster had just about cut him in half, after all. But, in this case, six was necessary and he was willing to suffer the pain and any possible backlash to put these annoying deities and demigods in his review on the way to Safety and Sen.

  A wicked grin plastered itself on Josh’s face. Step four was going to be as easy as getting stuck in the mud.

  Now that he could combat their only offensive weapon, the solution to stopping his oponents was simple. Especially when Josh finally had realized what he was dealing with. Tanks. Despite their fusion of Tron and Flintsone universes, the crush rollers were really just that. Armored cars that had been first designed and discussed on his world by Leonardo Divinci in his letter to the Duke of Milan in 1482. And the living machines that were created with updated designs used to drive over the trench-warfare hellscapes of World War One.

  While most people considered tanks a sign of irresistible mechanical power. The simple truth was that physics applied to them just like anything else in the iteration. And as Josh knew from more than one occasion in his recent life. Physics could be a real bitch when she wanted to be. And to the point, this was a lesson he was very willing to teach to the claw waving lion lady who would probably have eaten him alive if he had accidentally let her out of her Tafl limiting cage.

  Smiling wickedly, Josh promulgated his Space/Time skill in large ovals under the three crush rollers and backed slowly away from them. Stuck stationary in their active crush functions, big front wheels up and spinning, he didn’t think they could follow him. And they didn’t. Battle still raging, he edged to about fifty yards, what he was pretty sure was their outside range. Then he focused his will and PUSHED the space around each individual particle of dirt and rocks under them to get the subsidence that he needed. It wasn’t even hard moving the dirt and rock particles away from each other. The Space/Time attunement was really designed to achieve the same manipulation of distance between EM attracted and repelled particles at the quantum level. Making space in the dirt and the solid crystalline structure of rocks was child’s play.

  Slowly each one of the rollers began to shift and sink in the pools of quicksand Josh had created. The mind aura roller, occupied by several humanoids wearing gold conically shaped headgear and multicolored robes, shifted so far that its tethers fizzled and shorted out when its front crush wheel ended up pointing straight to the sky. Apparently it had shifted out of range and was unable to reach Josh’s retreated form. Finally even his weary adversaries noted that something was rotten in Denmark. Cries shot up, including a high-pitched roar from the sphinx leader filled the air as Josh’s sixth divided consciousness cut the flow of Essence to the Space/Time skill. The land firmed up around the sunken tanks, trapping them in reformed cement.

  Josh jumped back on enhanced legs severing all the remaining eight single Aura tethers as he left their range. A devious gleam showed in his eyes as he looked back at the outraged star children shaking their fists and paws in front of him. Josh pointed to the Egyptian god, Sobeks reptilian head. “Catch you later alligator!” Then he beat his feat in the direction Sen had gone minutes before. The direction Safety lay.

  Explosions of applause followed him. Some probably begrudging, but applause none the less.