Michael’s obsidian hand reached out and easily passed through the superplastic barrier, stabbing directly into the center of that cybernetically enhanced brain. When he pulled it out, there was a pure-white wisp, which looked similar to a tiny human skull.

All of the nanites in the room suddenly converged in front of him. They swirled around and condensed until they ended up in the form of a four-foot tall, grey-skinned woman. She had short elven ears, silver irises, and long white hair. While she wasn’t particularly well endowed, her breasts were still perky and relatively large for her small stature. That girl was in decent physical shape, but she wasn’t overly muscular.

He casually shoved the skull-shaped soul inside of her forehead and blindingly bright-red tattoos erupted all over her flesh. She gasped for breath and jumped away from the floating brain-ball, unable to even see that illusory obsidian man.

Talia asked “Miguel, what exactly have you done? Were you afraid of me finding out some deep, dark secret from your past?”

Azriel yelped, before screaming “What did you do to me?!” When she walked over to a mirror, she shouted “Why the hell did you turn me into a weird grey hobbit woman?!”

Michael’s spirit entered inside of Talia’s chest and the High-Elf’s eyes turned crimson. She complained “Oi, dafuck’s wrong with that body?! I designed it after a character I wrote about in a web-novel a year ago… You’re a ‘Dark Dwarf’! Like part Dark Elf, part Dwarf? Anyway, I made it totally out of nanites and there weren’t really enough of them in this room for me to make you the size of a human, so I picked something a bit more interesting, hehe~…”

The little girl muttered “That’s absurd… No, it can’t be ‘that’ simple, right? Hmmm, I need to perform some extensive research.” Then she walked over to a workbench which didn’t have any robotic arms flailing around it. There were microscopes, scanning devices and all sorts of strange contraptions that varied from simple pocket-watches to what appeared to be hand-held plasma-rifles.

Talia’s irises had turned green again, symbolizing that she had retaken control of her body, as she asked “Now that you have your new body and seem to have regained some semblance of sanity… Can you please give me the location of my acquaintance Rachael?”

Hearing that, Azriel shrugged, grumbling “Can’t you just locate her via the tracking device in her brain? There’s also a GPS in her cell-phone, which would most likely be inside of her ear or mouth… Why did you even come here in the first place? This complex is under my control and I don’t even have anything to do with all that nonsense going on out there. The whole damn city could get annihilated and it really wouldn’t affect me… Now that I think of it though, how did you get inside of here? I really should improve the security, huh? I didn’t take into account that people would be able to teleport and all sorts of other outrageous magical bullshit.”

A pitch-black wisp floated out in front of Talia and asked “Seriously, why didn’t you just tell me you wanted to find Rei-Rei? Actually, you probably should have talked to Hiro first… I’m sure that he would have been able to find her pretty easily if you hadn’t just, randomly decided to cause a mini-apocalypse, hehehe~.”

She blushed slightly, gazing down at the floor and muttering “Estaba tan jodidamente enojado y realmente no pensaba en lo que estaba haciendo… Miguel, I apologize for my foolish behavior.”

Azriel turned around and yelled “Hey, fuck off already and stop talking to yourself in Spanish, it’s freaking me out! Ugh, I need to concentrate! Stacy! Stacy where the hell are you?!”

At that moment, a gigantic monstrous robot entered the room from a metallic door on the eastern wall. It had sharp and massive talons on its relatively small hands and feet. The arms and legs were extremely skinny, practically just bronze tubes; the chest, shoulders and pelvis were all very bulky, with shiny gold plating. Then the head was essentially just a large egg, with a camera lense in the center. All over its limbs and body were steel gears. In fact, the entire creature was devoid of any wires and functioned entirely through mechanical energy, provided by the enormous steam engine in its chest. There were loud and obnoxious clunking noises constantly reverberating throughout the room, and it seemed to put the little girl into a ‘serene’ state of mind.

After glaring at the mindless machine for a few seconds, Talia finally let out a long sigh and turned into a thin mist. Then she traveled up through the ventilation system and casually left the gargantuan pyramid behind.

As she rematerialized a kilometer above the city, she frowned deeply. The majority of the town was still intact, but there was a huge ‘scar’, which she had created by accident. That disaster-zone was filled with death, rubble and loud sirens. Bright-green lights illuminated the land and sky, while she gazed out into the distance.

A few moments passed, before she wondered “Miguel… Would it not be better if we destroyed this world now, rather than waiting? I fear that… I may end up becoming ‘attached’ if we linger any longer.”

The pitch-black, shadowy Nephilim appeared to her left. He snickered, “Well, I’ve spent twenty-three… erm, I guess it’s technically twenty-six years on this planet. I can tell you that there are certainly a lot of amazing and wonderful things in this world, but… The truth is that Arcana has everything that this Earth had to offer. Trust me, okay, before the apocalypse, it wouldn’t have even been possible to live in Antarctica. I mean, sure, there were some tiny outposts, but that was about it. Now, there are all kinds of neat creatures, magical craziness and awesome sci-fi bullshit… Actually, now that I think about it, is this really ‘my’ world? Like, I didn’t really think about it before, but this might not be the exact universe that I came from…

“Oh well, I’m sure it doesn’t really matter either way. So~, after we go grab Rei-Rei, we should go on a little vacation. I’ve never been to Japan before… Shit, never mind, forgot that it doesn’t exist anymore. Hehehe~, we are in ‘New’ Tokyo, so it’s close enough I guess. Hmmm, we could check out… South America? I hear it’s all jungle-ey… We’ve been to so many rainforests though, maybe it’d be cool to go visit the radioactive wasteland that used to be the Middle East? I think Africa is mostly desert now too, which could be neat…” As he rambled on, Talia equipped her green insect-like helmet and her wasp-wings caused her extraordinarily light body to be propelled at the speed of sound.

Of course, Michael was just a wisp and didn’t even have to put forth any effort to follow beside her. He suddenly pointed to her right and casually mentioned “By the way, it seems like we’ve got a bit of ‘company’, if ya know what I mean…”

She turned her head and saw a squadron of seven silver fighter-jets soaring towards her and firing not only guided missiles, but also machine-guns. Since she was only a little bit larger than a normal ‘human’, she was incredibly small compared to planes. Thus, it was fairly difficult to actually strike her body, even if she didn’t swing her sword and create massive defensive wind-blades. Although that was unnecessary, because her heat signature wasn’t high enough to actually be tracked by the missiles and she couldn’t be picked up on radar either.

If it wasn’t for the new mana-sensory technology, it would have been impossible to find Talia in the first place. However, even if they knew where she was, there still wasn’t much that they could do about it.

They fired salvos of rockets that spread out and exploded over a huge radius, but with a gentle wave of her hand, the blast was counteracted by a gust of supercooled air. In the distance, several gun batteries were spread out around the wall, but they weren’t allowed to fire towards her. The reason was fairly obvious: If they missed, then there would be a rain of metallic hellfire that would cause all sorts of damage to New Tokyo City.

Swooping down towards the ground, she slammed into the roof of a fairly wide and short building. There were a myriad of similar structures all along the wall; their main purpose was to act as simple outposts for the guards who were stationed in the area. However, they also had a tiny jail-cell that was rarely used.

After she landed, Michael smirked, whispering “Not this one, Hiro said it was like… Two miles to the north of here. Why don’t you just let me take over? I’m kinda afraid that you might get angry and start going on a rampage or something…”

Next