The rishi says: Shumbha had watched it happen. His brother Nishumbha, dear to him as the breath in his own body, was cut down and gone, and the army that had marched out at their side lay hacked apart across the field. Rage climbed in him, and the words that broke from him were meant to wound.

He said: You reek of the arrogance of strength, wicked Durga. Carry that pride no further. You fight the way a vain woman fights, propped up by the strength of other goddesses, and nothing out here was won by your arm alone. It was the last taunt Shumbha would ever throw, and it called up from her the answer the whole Saptashati has been moving toward.

The Sri Devi answered: I alone am in this world. What second is there beside me? Look well, wicked one. What you have been calling other powers are splendors of mine and nothing more, and even now, while you watch them, they are pouring back into me. Here is the note that sounds under the whole of the Saptashati. The many powers are a single power, wearing many faces.

Even as the words left her, it happened. Brahmani and the rest, every Mother-power on the field, thinned into light and sank back into her body, and where a moment before there had been many there was now only Ambika, one figure alone on the trampled ground. Then she spoke again. By my own splendor I stood here in many shapes. I have drawn all of them home, and I stand in this battle alone. Now steady yourself, and come. His own taunt had been turned around and handed back to him, and with it the challenge of single combat.

So it began, the last single combat of the Saptashati, with the massed gods on one horizon and the massed asuras on the other, and not one of them able to look away from a fight this pitiless. Arrows came down in sheets. Then the honed weapons, then the merciless divine missiles, until the duel between the two of them had climbed to a pitch that put every world in fear.

Ambika sent her divine missiles out in their hundreds, and the lord of the daityas met each one with a weapon that broke it in the air; strike for strike, to this point, he had matched her. Then he loosed his own divine missiles, and Parameshvari broke them in play, with a few fierce cries of power and nothing else. The effort that drained Shumbha barely reached her.

The asura buried her now under hundreds of arrows. That drew her anger, and she answered by shearing the bow itself out of his hands with arrows of her own. Bow gone, he caught up the spear called shakti; her discus took it apart while it still lay in his grip. One weapon, then the next, cut from his hands before he could use either.

Then Shumbha, sovereign of the daityas, snatched up a sword and a shield worked with a hundred moons and bright as the sun, and drove straight at her. He was still closing when Chandika’s arrows, loosed in a blur from her bow, cut the sword out of the air and cut down the shield behind it, both undone before either could touch her.

She brought the chariot down after that, horses and charioteer with it. Horses dead, bow gone, no one left at the reins, the daitya set his whole mind on killing Ambika and came on with a dreadful mace. Her sharp arrows caught it mid-swing and cut it apart. Still he came, fist drawn back, and threw himself at her. The weapons were finished. What was left was his hands.

That bull among daityas brought his fist down on the Devi’s heart. She answered with the flat of her open palm against his chest. The one blow dropped the daitya-king where he stood, and almost before he had touched the ground he was on his feet again, whole, as though nothing had landed.

Then he did what none of the watchers had seen done before. He sprang from the ground with the Devi locked in his arms and rose until he stood in the open sky; and there, with nothing at all beneath her feet, Chandika fought him on. High in the air the daitya and Chandika closed and grappled, and the siddhas and the munis watched a wrestling the like of which they had never seen, and it left them astonished.

For a long time she wrestled him up there. Then Ambika got her hold, lifted him clear, swung him round and round, and threw him down the whole height of the sky onto the earth. He struck the ground and was already moving, fist up before he had fully risen, running at her again with the one wish still in him, to see Chandika dead. The fall had not touched what drove him. It was the last time he would rise.

She watched him come, the lord of every daitya on the field, and this time she did not wait. The Devi ran her spear clean through his chest and put him on the ground. That was the end of Shumbha, and the end toward which the whole Final Carita had been moving. Torn open on the point of her spear, the life gone out of him, he came down all at once, and the earth shook under the weight of his fall, its oceans and its islands and its mountains shaking with it.

The instant that evil soul was gone, the whole world eased. Creation came back into its health, and the sky cleared and turned pure again. The omen-clouds that had hung overhead full of fire went quiet, and with Shumbha down the rivers drew back inside their banks and ran their proper courses.

With him dead, joy ran full through every host of the gods. The gandharvas raised a sweet song, others took up their instruments, and the companies of apsaras gave themselves to the dance. Clean winds began to move, the sun came out in its full brightness, the sacred fires burned clear and steady, and the strange sounds that had troubled the sky through all of this fell silent at last. Over the whole of creation, the sign was good.