The flash of fear triggered Marcus' battle-forged instinct to take the offensive. The love he had been feeling for Venus instantly turned into rage at the adversary. His erection remained at maximum calibration throughout the maneuver, and now it was primed for war. But with his inner eye he saw that Kali was about to strike with an exactly-matched counter-weapon: vagina dentata, with fangs as formidable as those protruding from her mouth, and razor-sharp incisors which he knew from a murky ancestral memory could bite through the leg of a horse. In the split-second before the yoni-jaws closed on his lingam he worked a spell to transmute its flesh into indestructible plasmant, a substance derived from the pure nothingness which underlies all creation. The teeth shattered as they clamped onto it, inflicting nary a scratch on the plasmantine cock while Kali howled in pain and outrage.

     Marcus tried to withdraw his Shivalingam from the Kaliyoni, but found he could not ~ he was bound into it by a kind of suction, which was drawing him toward an orgasm that would suck out his seed. He felt sure that Kali knew of his intent to not ejaculate, and was determined to foil it. If she ingested his physical essence in this way, she would be poised to dominate him body and soul. If only he could hold out against the pull, could retain his semen and induce a mutual upgasm, the divine love and light would surely break the Kalispell, and Venus would become herself once more. As hopeful as this strategy seemed, he soon realized that it would be impossible to execute. Not only was the suction getting intolerably stronger, but he would have to actually feel a sense of loving oneness with the loathsome creature who was vampirizing his vitals and trying to destroy him.

     As soon as he accepted the futility of the plan, he was able to concoct another. If Kali wanted his seed, he'd give her more than she bargained for ~ he'd marshal all his warrior-force and fire it into her like a guided missile with an atomic warhead. This, after all, was the purport of his vision in Vietnam when he incorporated Shiva the Destroyer in the image of a nuclear explosion. Since Kali was an immortal Goddess it wouldn't kill her, but it would certainly blow her away.

     The sexual intensity was rapidly approaching the point of no return, but just as he psyched himself to deliver the blow, he thought: What about Venus? It was a mystery why Avice had become the mortal vehicle of Kali, but the assault he planned would kill her body, and do terrible things to her soul. He couldn't do it!

     Instead he gritted his teeth and battened his hatches, and succeeded momentarily in resisting the pull of Kali upon his lingam. She flared again in rage, and conjured such a mighty numenal Charybdis that it began to suck Marcus' entire body into her gaping womb, starting with the lower half. He was aghast ~ now she would swallow him totally and steal his soul. He would be imprisoned inside her forever, just like... like....

     He recoiled from the memory as from a snakebite, but the awful truth was that he had inflicted this fatal karma on himself ~ it was his payback from an event on the battlefield when he had eaten the soul of a noble enemy, and still held it captive inside himself. It was a Viet Cong who was a spiritually advanced Buddhist and martial artist, whom he had fought and killed in a gruelling one-on-one conflict. Summoned by the thought, this soul now arose within him and became aware of the situation. Would it gloat at the prospect of Marcus reaping his just desserts? No ~ it became a radiant presence, a harbinger of redemption. And Marcus knew what he had to do.

     While maintaining a vice-grip on Svadhi, his sex chakra, he opened the whole length of the Shushumna above it, the subtle tube running up his spine to the top of his head. The soul of the VC flew up the passage with the speed of thought and escaped through the aperture of Brahman. There was a burst of brilliant light, for the being attained the supreme liberation in that moment, and vanished into Nirvana.

     Kali was blinded by the flash and recoiled, releasing her hold on Marcus. He swiftly extricated his legs and butt from her Gorgoncunt, but she recouped just in time to grab his cock again with her labia. So here they were back in the stalemate, but Kali upped the ante: the magnitude of her form increased and grew even more diabolic. She was now a part of the Earth, as Venus had been in beatific mode; but the Kaliform opened up its deepest bowels, where the creatures of Hell disport eternally in the layers of magma.

     And then she became the tree. Marcus found himself fucking the great fallen trunk of the Shakti Tree, which transmogrified into a horror out of Sleepy Hollow or the realm of C'thulhu. Clawed branches tore at his flesh and writhing limbs imprisoned his body in the bark of their grip. Furthermore, the monster reeked of the racial essence of those who had imprinted it into the tree with their rites. As noble as the Amerindians might have been in their own proper sphere, they were still dasyus ~ non-Aryans. Even if the imagery was all an illusion wrought by the Kalispell, Marcus' flesh crawled with the sense that he was repeating his other great sin in Vietnam, when he raped a native woman after a battle.

     At last he realized there was no escape for him. Kali was a numenal being, not dependent on a physical body for her life and energy. Even were he able to counter every weapon she used against him, his stamina would inevitably flag ~ she would wear him down and finally slay him, just as he had done with the Viet Cong warrior. He had no choice ~ he would have to launch the bomb while he still had enough energy, and he was already seriously depleted.

     What, then, of Avice? His heart ached with the prospect of doing her harm ~ and this empathy shone like a beacon through the gruesome Kaliform, enabling him to see her. She was still deep in erotic trance, though her face displayed pain and distress. The sight of the Venus-girl infused Marcus with heart-melted love and compassion. Would this hinder the martial force he had to hurl at Kali? Maybe ~ or maybe it was a solution to the devil's bargain that was foist upon him.

     In the Asgartha ashram a key mental exercise was to contemplate the personal beliefs that carried the strongest emotional charge and egoic investment for you, and then to embrace the opposite of each with equal fervor. It was incredibly difficult, but when successful it broke the bond of attachment to the original subject. So now in this life-and-death challenge could Marcus sustain his raging hatred for Kali simultaneously with his love for Venus? If only he could, it might protect the innocent girl from the blast at the adversary, even though these two were nested as one. Without pause for a further thought, he plunged into the effort with all his heart and soul and will.

     His body verged into orgasm, and the two forms of erotic stimulation, the martial and the sexual, fluidly melded together. This inner alchemy happened in tandem with a change in the aspect of his lover: Avice expanded back into her Venus-form, her ravishing beauty now of the same magnitude as Kali's ugly demon-form. And at the very instant that Marcus began to come, the features of the two Goddesses merged into one.

     There she was, a seamless amalgam of light and dark, of all the good and evil rendered to men by women: she was the voluptuous lover and the castrating bitch, the adoring spouse and the faithless slut, Penelope and Medea, Aphrodite and Medusa. Yet somehow her face was perfect and whole, on a plateau above the conflicting antipathies.

     Marcus was utterly mind-boggled, but his orgasmic fusillade was beyond recall. His nuclear-powered ejaculate struck home in the womb of KaliVenus, and she convulsed in ecstatic agony. "Yes!" she screamed, "let me have it, let me have it all! Fuck me, kill me, fuck me, kill me! I love you, I hate you, I love you, I hate you! Yes, yes, yes!"