He drops the Genesic Echo since it's no longer helping and does not in fact give him infinite mana.

"Okay, that's a start, but yikes," he says. "Is this an ongoing effect, can it be shut off at the source?" Wait, can Coventina even answer or is she too exhausted already? Who was that adventurer who was yelling at everyone to stay away from the tentacles, maybe she can answer his questions, either directly or by taking actions which he can observe and make inferences from...

Coventina is on her knees, unable to stand, but she's not completely incapacitated yet.

"Can't see..." she gasps. The portal, if it is still there, is obscured by all the tentacles. "Eelesia! EELESIA!!! Is, World Gate, channeled?"

Sky is doing such a good job of keeping Eelesia afloat on the roaring torrent of lust that's coursing through her right now, but she hears the question and her mind slips a couple of times before catching on the correct bit of trivia.

"Y-Yeah! Channeled. World Gate is channeled!"

The outspoken adventurer noted the point of origin of the clear space (and also who cast it) and runs over to them just as Eelesia is speaking. "She's right! If we kill Olando it'll close!"

Oh no he looked at Eelesia when she spoke and this was a mistake. Now he keeps having thoughts. About subjects other than handling the ongoing crisis. Subjects like kissing Eelesia. No nope come on focus—

It's not exactly voluntary, but it's not exactly involuntary either. There's just—a moment—when it fully properly occurs to him that he does not have time right now to deal with the distraction of being so turned on, that this is important and he can't let himself be distracted—and then something shifts in his head, disconnects, like a gear train coming uncoupled, and his body is just as turned on as it was a second ago but he no longer has to spend half his attention trying very hard not to think about fucking his teammates senseless.

Right then.

"So how do we kill Olando?"

"I... I don't know. He's level twenty. We might not have anything that can kill him. And I bet he's siphoning mana from his... congregation, back there." She points at the dozen or so naked nubile girls who've arranged themselves in a neat row of slave-poses, her hand shaking a little in time with the shaking of her legs. "We can't wait him out even if I could matchmake the entire city in the next thirty seconds."

"What is all this actually doing—I ask because depending on how bad it is if he wins, it might be worth taking out the congregation just to deprive him of the mana—what have we got, can we throw his own tentacles at him or will that just make everything worse—Coventina, do you have enough left in you to cast Flesh for Flesh, we could use that dirty trick I came up with for taking out a much more formidable opponent—"

"I have... enough, for at least one Flesh for Flesh," Coventina says, her voice ragged but with a vicious edge. "Ram you sword through my heart, then make sure I'm close enough to touch him before I pass out... his level won't mean shit."

"Fuck that's hardcore," she says, giving Coventina a knowing look. "It might work. We'll have to do it fast, though. This thing he's summoned, I think it's the Tentacles of the Twilight Ouroboros. A legend from an adjacent world that eats memories and then manifests from those memories. The Twilight Ouroboros is tentacles that form from memories of tentacles, an endless loop, see? But it overwrites all your other memories as it feeds, eventually leaving a blank slate ripe for indoctrination or enslavement or whatever. Empty shells with only that one, singular memory to define them."

"Horrifying—arguably worth taking out the congregation—try this first—what's the fastest we can get her there, do you have any accelerated movement options that take passengers? I don't think my dash does."

"I don't and... fuck, I think he's figured out where that huge Purify came from. Quick, here."

She lays a hand on Coventina's head, and mana flows from her into the goddess.

Coventina stands. She shoots the adventurer a suspicious glance. The other girl looks familiar somehow and that was a lot of mana for a mortal to just offload like that.

But that is hardly the urgent matter in front of them.

That would be the huge, nude, statuesque man stomping toward them.

"Oh good," he says, with a slight smile that is not all that different from his usual slight smile and yet somehow still deeply unsettling in context. "Problem solved. I'll defend you until I don't, then."

He puts up the Genesic Echo and the lightning pentagram again. He doesn't expect it to be much more than a mild nuisance, but that's not the point, the point is to make it look like he doesn't want the big scary man touching his healer.

Eelesia, noticing that they're more directly under attack than previously (and somewhat saner after cumming on Sky's face), musters the willpower to pull a dazed and glazed Sky off of her pussy and draw her wands.

Olando walks right through the lightning, only flinching a little, a sickly green spell of some kind gathering in his hand.

His eyes lock on Coventina, and there's a flicker of surprise on his face as he takes her in. He slows, holds his glowing hand behind his back and forces a smile onto his face.

"Such prowess! Come, my slut, let me get a look at you. Yes. Yes. Perhaps you have more potential than the rest of these heathens. Repent of your prudish companions, my slut, and I shall spare you from judgement. Join me in showing them the Truth of the First Axiom, and you shall be rewarded!"

Coventina almost spits in his face. Almost. It's a very close thing.

She just barely manages to master her rage before it can show, instead twisting her growl into a fearful, "You'll, you'll spare me if I rape my friends?"

       "Heresy and folly, my slut, there is no sin in the defiance of evil! And defiance of sex is, inevitably, evil."

Coventina would agree except for how this is NOT WHAT THAT MEANS and she wants this twisted asshat to suffer for what he's done to her ideology.

Ugh, the worst part of tactics against a language-using opponent is the part where you have to deceive them about things and can't just openly make suggestions to your teammates. This would be so much simpler if he could call for a distraction from someone who isn't him.

It would also be simpler if his dash took passengers, but it doesn't.

It would also be simpler if he could loop a few dashes through the man to distract him before throwing a stabbed Coventina in his face, but whatever that garbage is he's holding, Laurent doesn't want to touch it, and while he could probably manage to dash through him once without intersecting the mystery blob of badness, he doesn't want to trust that probability any more than he has to.

So. What are the options he has? What are the strategies not ruled out?

...looks like it's gonna be acting. Dammit, he hates acting. It's so—shallow. Coventina probably isn't any happier with it, though, and she's doing all right so far.

"How dare you," he hisses furiously, as though he's forgotten the greater threat completely in the face of her wavering loyalty. "How could you even think of doing something like that!" Rush her now, or draw it out, what are the considerations—he wants the introduction of stabbed Coventina to this man to look as little like an attack as possible while maximizing the chance that she successfully makes contact while conscious—draw it out it is. "Come and get me, then, if that's what your loyalty is worth!"

It is so good that Laurent is good at this.

"You think you're worth this?! Why would I sacrifice myself for you when you've spent so long neglecting me?! I'M DONE WAITING FOR YOU!!!"

       "Yes! Yes! The spirit of the goddess is with you! He has sinned against your very humanity by refusing you!"

Coventina lunges, hand thrust forward. Seafoam Barrage! Has to cast silently; if Olando doesn't hear the skill name he won't immediately recognize it even if he knows what it does.

A wall of white-green bubbles hits Laurent with all the force of a mild gust of wind, passing over him and obscuring him just long enough for him to...

...run her through with his sword and then kick her off it with a snarl of very believable rage.

Okay. Ow.

The thing they don't tell you about getting stabbed in the heart is that the heart is actually very difficult to convince to stop beating. Those powerful muscles do not stop just because a sharp piece of metal is impaling them. All the blood that's not going into her arteries just makes the heart think it needs to beat even harder.

Three seconds. That's how long she has once her heart stops. But the pain is so bad she might not even make it that far.

She feels startled arms catch her, and she's forgotten why but she still hisses, "Flesh for Flesh."

And suddenly, she's fine.

And suddenly, Olando very much isn't.

Unlike her, it takes him a moment to notice. He has a passive skill that makes him immune to pain.

"Wha- YOU-"

He shoves her away and brings his other hand around, launching the spell he'd kept at the ready.

"Mirror of Planes."

The green bolt is sucked into the magic circle on Sky's palm. Then it shoots out again, striking Olando in the chest. It blows him off his feet, and by the time he stops skidding over the earth, he is well and thoroughly dead. The countless black tentacles evaporate into nothing, freeing the city in a wave of interrupted tentacle rape.

Sky just looks at the dead High Priest sadly. It's funny. If she weren't already consumed by lewd urges all the time, if she weren't already the sort of person the High Priest was saying everyone should be, she never could have acted. She was only able to keep her head because the way Frenzy Nova made her feel wasn't all that different than how she's accustomed to feeling in her daily life.

Sky understands why Coventina is so angry, but Sky herself is just... she can see the beauty in it, in what could have happened, if certain details had been less... evil. A profound waste.

"Is everyone all right?"

Belatedly, he drops the Genesic Echo. Lightning dissipates.

"I'm fine but let's not plan on doing that again. I think that hurt worse than literally anything I've ever felt. And that fuckless fuckstick didn't even feel it before he died."