The sight of his whole army cut to pieces set Chikshura, Mahisha’s own general, ablaze, and he advanced to fight Ambika himself. He poured arrows down on the Devi the way a thundercloud deluges the summit of Mount Meru with rain. For the Devi the whole assault was pure play. She sheared his massed arrows out of the air as if amusing herself, and her own shafts found his horses and his charioteer and dropped them where they stood. In the same breath she cut away his bow and his banner raised high aloft, and while his bow-hand hung empty she drove her swift arrows deep into the asura’s limbs.

His bow gone, his chariot wrecked, his horses and his charioteer dead, the asura still would not yield. He caught up sword and shield and threw himself at the Devi. His sharp-edged blade came down first on the crown of her lion’s head, then swung with furious speed at the Devi’s left arm. But so divine was that body, O prince, that the moment the sword met her arm it shattered of its own accord. His eyes went red with rage, and he took up his spear.

The great asura hurled it at Bhadrakali, and it blazed with such fierce light that the sun’s own orb seemed to have torn loose from the sky and come falling. The Devi saw it coming and let her own spear fly. One stroke, and his spear lay in a hundred pieces, and the great asura Chikshura was finished along with it.

With that mighty commander of the host slain, Chamara came forward, tormentor of the gods, riding high on an elephant. He too let fly his dart at the Devi, and Ambika met it with a single scornful cry. Struck by that one sound, the dart lost its glow and fell useless to the earth. The sight of it broken and fallen drove Chamara into a fury, and he flung his spear, and the Devi’s arrows cut that too apart in mid-air.

In that instant the Devi’s lion sprang, fastened onto the great boss of the elephant’s forehead, and closed with that foe of the gods in a grappling fight high above the field. Locked together, the two crashed down from the elephant and tore at each other with savage blows. Then the lion sprang skyward once more, and as it came down, a single stroke of its paw parted Chamara’s head from his body.

Now the Devi killed with whatever came to hand. Udagra she battered down with boulders and uprooted trees; Karala she felled with her teeth, her fists, and the flats of her palms. In her wrath she ground Uddhata to powder under the blows of her club, ran the bhindipala javelin clean through Vashkala, and pinned Tamra and Andhaka to the earth with arrows. Then the three-eyed supreme goddess raised her trident and slew three more, Ugrasya, Ugravirya, and Mahahanu.

Here the Devi took on the form of Kalaratri, the Night that gathers even Time into herself. Her sword lifted Bidala’s head from his body; her arrows sent Durdhara and Durmukha together to the house of Yama; and Kala she struck down with the staff of Time itself. With fierce strokes of her blade she beat Agradarshana to the ground, and Asiloma she severed with that same sword. For the Devi’s ganas this battle too was a festival, and the field rang with the victory-cries of the ganas, the lion, and the Devi together.

So it went until his whole army had wasted away, and then Mahishasura himself came down into his own buffalo form and set upon the Devi’s hosts. Every part of that buffalo body was now a weapon. Some he tore open with a drive of his muzzle, some with a stamp of his hooves, some with a lash of his tail, some on the points of his horns. Others he flung to the earth by sheer speed, by his bellowing, by the whirl of his wheeling bulk, by nothing more than the gale of his breath.

He trampled the Pramatha host flat and charged the Devi’s lion to kill it, and at that Ambika’s true wrath awoke. His own fury swelled to match hers. His hooves tore and gouged the ground; he hoisted whole mountains high on his horns and flung them, bellowing as he came. The earth crumbled to pieces under his speed and his wheeling, and the ocean, lashed by his tail, overflowed its shores and washed out on every side.

The clouds of the sky, ripped by his swaying horns, went to drifting shreds, and the gale of his breath brought mountains crashing down from the heavens by the hundreds. Chandika watched that great asura bear down on her, swollen with rage, and gave way to her own wrath, set now on his death.

The Devi flung her noose full over him and bound the great asura fast, and the moment it held him, there in the middle of the great battle, he shed his buffalo shape. The play of maya had begun. He was a lion at once, and just as Ambika moved to take the lion’s head he slipped out of that shape and stood as a man, sword in hand. In a breath the Devi’s shafts cut the man down, sword and shield and all, and at once he swelled into a huge elephant.

The elephant coiled its trunk around the Devi’s great lion and tugged, trumpeting, and the Devi’s sword severed that trunk at a stroke as he pulled. Then the great asura climbed back into the same buffalo body and shook the three worlds again, everything that moves and everything that does not, exactly as before. Maya had circled back to its own beginning.

Then Chandika, mother of the world, in her anger lifted the finest of drinks and drank, and drank again, and her eyes glowed ruddy as a wild laughter rose in her. Across the field the asura bellowed back, puffed up with his strength and valor and frenzy, and began flinging mountains at Chandika with his horns. She shivered each mountain to powder in mid-flight under showers of arrows, and then, her mouth reddened by the mead and her words coming unsteady, she spoke to him.

What she told him left nothing in doubt. Roar, fool, roar out your brief moment while I finish this drink; the instant you die at my hands, the gods will be roaring their victory on this very ground. With that the Devi sprang, came down astride the great asura, pinned his throat beneath her foot, and drove her spear into him.

Crushed under her foot, the asura began forcing his way out through the buffalo’s own mouth, his true man-form emerging, and the Devi’s own might held him fast right there, half out and half in. Caught between two bodies, he was fighting still when the Devi’s great sword swept down, cut his head from him, and laid him in the dust.

So ended Mahisha, who with his army and his allied hosts had held all three worlds in his spell. The instant he fell, every being in the three worlds, gods and asuras and humans alike, raised a single shout: victory.

The whole daitya army perished then amid cries of grief, and the entire company of the gods rose into the highest joy. Gods and divine maharishis together poured out their praise of the Devi, the lords of the gandharvas broke into song, and the troops of apsaras began to dance. The great slaying was done, though the Middle Carita would close only in the chapter to come, with the gods’ own hymn of thanks.