“THEN TO DUST YOU SHALL RETURN.”

Before they even had time to think, Azerath was upon them, its great shadowed form eclipsing the blood-red sky – driving its colossal fists the size of a house into Kiriel and Hora and Cyrus on her back, globules of blood-saliva suspended inches away from its fangs.

Chatterbox came in between them at the last second.

There rang the hideous sound of steel smashing against steel, and Chatterbox rocketed a thousand yards away into the sides of a rising mountain, breaking into hundreds of small pieces.

The link that held their minds together vanished.

Kiriel shut her palms and dissolved into smoke, riding away into the fiery landscape with the two children towards the burning roads west as fast as her blood steed could carry her.

Before the brothers nor Kaniya nor Cantor could utter a word, Azerath smashed the two brothers aside with the back of its fists and down into the burning city, pounded its colossal feet one after the other into the palatial steps, and exploded forth into a sprint that set fire to the earth.

The lycan Azerath vaporized the houses and roads in its approach, catching up with Kiriel on a pace of more than four hundred yards a second, impressing shockwaves into the air with every stride too fast for the human eye to see. It sniffed out the invisible trails left in the air, the faint twists and turbulence that Kiriel had left in her wake, and found her form riding her blood steed just in front. Clefting the rubble into powdery stone, Azerath leapt with its arm and claw outstretched and seized Kiriel with a ferocious snarl, dissolving her invisible form back into reality – and just as it'd begun to squeeze their bodies to explode them like balloons, Kiriel had protruded spines of blood from her skin like a sea urchin, protecting Hora and Cyrus in her arms.

“RUDRA!” Kaniya bellowed, throwing the divine poleaxe from the heavens like a comet at Azerath. It spiraled, humming the air as thunder roils, and drove itself into the giant lycan’s shoulder, cleaving off the entire arm that was crushing Kiriel and the children.

Kiriel plummeted, barely catching her fall and the children in her arms with a web of blood in the air.

“IRON MOUNTAIN!” Kaniya roared, smashing like a meteor from the heavens into Azerath, but the lycan-demon’s fist met hers, pushing out a gale that flattened the corpses of houses.

The dust thrown out cleared a split second later, only to reveal a visage of Azerath’s left arm regenerated and as hard as diamond, meeting Kaniya’s. Azerath smirked, narrowed its yellow slit-like irises, and delivered a series of pummels that left afterimages, one faster than the other – each consecutive punch being parried less and less, until they began to connect on Kaniya’s abdomen, shoulder, and left waist – finally kicking her away and into the side of a mountain next to the palace that only echoes could hear.

Azerath sighted Kiriel’s figure and the two children in her grasp, the Vakarite woman trying to inscribe the circle of blood on her hand again, and swung its claws at them, dividing the winds.

“MAIAR DUNYA-ARH!” Ahura thundered into the atmosphere, driving a thousand tons of awaiting air into its head and neck like an invisible fist, blood bursting forth from its nostrils, mouth, and eyes, staggering it if just for a little.

“Dance of the Kalpa Flame, Where Dawn Breaks!”

Mithra was upon them all before Azerath could turn its head back again, trying to slice off its neck with a flaming claymore, only it lodged halfway through.

Cantor slid like lightning into the rubble, lifting Kiriel and the children with a swirl of his staff and his robe billowing behind him, enveloping them in a conical crystal vessel with a pointed cap.

“Transmutation Art: Adda-Barud!”

Fleckles of white powder burst into existence below the vessel.

Azerath smashed its fist into Mithra’s torso just as his dancephrase lit the fuse of the vessel and launched Kiriel and the children miles into the sky towards their destination. The colossal lycan knelt as if to jump, and would have sprung itself into the stratosphere had it not been for Ahura who commanded the air to chain its legs. Azerath ripped off its arms and explosively regrew a new, longer one, and clawed at Ahura which Mithra blasted apart with an uppercut; but Azerath, using its legs before the chains of air cut them to pieces, pounced from the ground, grabbed the two brothers in both of its hands as it fell, and smashed them into each other. Explosively regrowing its legs, it hurled the brothers like a ball into the approaching Kaniya; it then pounced at the three, still in the air, and drove down its fists gathered together, pummeling them into the earth like a meteor upon a crater. Mithra felt his arm blow out and dislocate from his shoulders, and Ahura felt a hideous crunch in his ankles that told him they were no longer in their sockets.

Azerath raised its gathered fists again and prepared to deliver them to oblivion, if not for a colossal badger of rubble-stone that rammed full force into the lycan and drove it to tumble on the roads.

“CONJURATION ART: GRAND SLAM!” Cantor was in the midst of finishing his spell, as Azerath struggled briefly under the weight of the conjured being, and locked its jaws upon the neck of the badger. Cantor held his staff and his hands in invisible torsion, in the same pain as the badger, wrestling Azerath down and further into the earth so as to expose the heart in its left leg that had crawled up to its waist –

“NOW!” Shouted Cantor, but before the brothers and Kaniya could shake their heads from being pounded into the earth – saved by Ahura’s softfall sonir at the last second – Azerath had ripped the stone badger’s head off, impaled its stone belly with its claws, and ripped them open as one tears open a curtain.

“RUDRA, RETURN!” Kaniya’s voice rang out amidst the rubble, as the hefty poleaxe boomeranged back to her hands, humming the air.

“FROST OF THE WINTER MOON!” She roared at Azerath, as she swung her axeblade upwards, dividing Azerath’s hand in an ice-blue brilliance of light. Azerath countered her with a swing from another gargantuan fist, regenerating the other, but Kaniya countered it with a swift strike of her own, each accelerating their strikes and cleaves until the air was saturated with hues of frosty blue and bloody red, the winds rumbling with shockwaves as their strikes met true dozens of times per second like a cyclone, blasting everything away.

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Ahura grimaced as he snapped his ankle back into place, buffeted by the winds of impact, and so did Mithra as he breathed the fire of his body into his broken arm, animating it with his continual dance of the Kalpa Flame.

Azerath punched Kaniya in a split opening and ragdolled her back towards the brothers; sparing not a single breath, the lycan clawed at the air, ripping a lake’s worth of blood from the corpses strewn in the flaming ruins, sending them towards the three like a hurricane of crimson ink, ripping the earth, the houses, and roads like a carpet being unfurled.

“BASTION STANCE!” Kaniya roared, pushing her feet into the earth and swinging her axe like a typhoon. “MANGETSUZAN POLEARM ART: AVALANCHE!”

The mass of screaming blood flattened against Kaniya’s relentless axe swings, but it was driving her back, licking away at Kaniya’s face, leaving dozens of cuts on her cheek, tigerlike ears, and slicing off the ends of her hair.

“ASHMANA VISHAMKARUN!”

“KALPA FLAME: RAYS OF ABSOLUTION!”

The two brothers bellowed, parting the swarm of blood and vaporizing it with fire.

Azerath was already on top of them, scraping the buildings in its oncoming strike of claws.

“DEATHSTALKER ARRAY!” Ahura commanded to Kaniya and Mithra, spitting blood, blasting away Azerath’s claws with furious winds.

Kaniya nodded without question, vanishing into the shadows with her weapon, prompting Azerath to recoil for an incoming blow. Whatever the cost, they had to give her a good opening in the next seconds.

“CANTOR, READY CANNON!”

“AYE!”

The brothers shouted to Cantor as Azerath drove a fist down where they had been standing.

“ASHMANA HAOPTKE!” Ahura clapped once and then raised his right hand, imploding the atmosphere into a gigantic hand that refracted the image of the city. The giant hand seized Azerath’s wrists in their descent and held them up, and in the brief moment that Azerath was distracted, Mithra impaled the demon with two lances of radiant flame. The demon tried to leap back, but Mithra had bent the ends of his lance into a hook that drove into Azerath’s flesh, and seeing the opportunity, the two brothers pummeled away in rhythm with one another at the demon, dodging its wild clawing, blowing out its left ear and right shoulder, leaving house-sized holes in the demon that filled again with umber flesh and fur as soon as they were made.

But the brothers weren’t going for Azerath’s heart on their own.

In a hundredth of a second gap between the brothers’ relentless strikes, Kaniya emerged from the shadows, her axeblade gleaming a lucent red and cyan. She swung Rudra directly into Azerath’s left leg at the socket, dividing it cleanly off, clapping the air like thunder; and as the axeblade raced through its accursed flesh, it formed a layer of adamantine frost that imprisoned Azerath’s flesh, preventing it from bursting forth to regrow. Azerath’s eyes went wide, howling in rage; it swiped viciously at where Kaniya was going to go, but Ahura and Mithra had impaled its eyes with lances of fire, and Kaniya melted into the shadows again. Another strike emerged like a cannonshot into Azerath’s right leg, dividing its thigh and encrusting the stump in frost, splattering the brothers with violet-black blood.

Azerath stumbled and fell, half-blind, its primary source of mobility temporarily denied, expecting another strike from the shadows. It sniffed at the air, seeing the world in a dimension of color and depth, and smelled the figures of the two brothers leaping backwards for some indistinguishable reason – perhaps the strike was coming from the back?

And just as the thought of the lizard arcanist entered its head, a titanic bolt of blue lightning tore through its waist from behind and emerged out front, incinerating its lower heart in a wreath of flames. The wails of tens of thousands of devoured souls flooded the air like a tide, in them numerous clamors of children – and every grisly vision and anguish of their deaths assaulted Ahura and Mithra’s minds, making them clutch their heads and crumple to the ground.

The blue lightning scattered into the blood-red heavens, dyeing the sky purple for a second; the air seemed to drum with vibrations as each of the Kaha of the devoured were released to their freedom, tendrils of black smoke emanating from the destroyed heart.

Azerath made a primal roar so loud that it nearly burst the brothers’ eardrums. Rending the city ruin around it with a tornado of claws, it chomped down on its own leg-stumps covered in frost and tore them off. Flesh wriggled forth like leeches twisting and entwining themselves into trunks; reassembling and reatomizing, its two legs were making themselves whole again, while yards-long quills emerged from every inch of fur on its body. Without a second to spare, the lycan demon fired them all off, covering the atmosphere in a carpet of quills like an expanding black sphere.

A clang of a quill on an axeblade, and Azerath knew where to hunt. Regrowing its eyes in a fraction of a second, it leapt backwards, somersaulting with demonic celerity, and dashed on all fours, swiping at the air.

Kaniya emerged from the clouds of debris and swung Rudra, cleaving the air with frost with the force of ten thousand tons compressed into the blade’s fine edge, but Azerath caught the axeblade in its jaws, chomping it down so fast that its teeth made blue sparks upon the swinging blade until it lodged halfway. Azerath headbutted Kaniya once, twice, and again, picking up speed on all fours and struggled her back, smashing her into the base of the palatial steps with fury.

It pried the poleaxe out of its jaws, and grabbing its ends to drive it upon its knee, snapped the handle in two and flung it away, driving a punch into Kaniya that she stopped with her knees, beginning to fail under the weight of the lycan’s gargantuan fist.

The handle-less axeblade cleaved the rubble as it fell, making a metallic clang.

Azerath pulled its fist back and punched Kaniya, punched her once more, punched her again and again and again, faster and faster, cratering the granite palatial steps, grabbing her by the throat and smashing her down upon it before she could adequately react, whereupon Mithra rocketed into the demon’s waist with jets of fire from his soles and made it stumble, releasing a luminous brilliance of crimson flame with an anguished scream. The flame burst through the lycan’s body like a spear of light, making it growl; it twisted its arm back and grabbed Mithra, preparing to flatten him, but Ahura was already on top of the demon and had brought the atmosphere together like a crushing clap of gigantic hands, turning Azerath’s head and snout into a mist of blood with only a stump on its neck.

Violet blood sallied forth from the stump as Azerath, standing on its hind legs, stumbled backwards and loosened its grip on Mithra; Ahura caught his brother mid-fall, pried Kaniya’s half-conscious form out of the cratered steps, and flew towards the sky. Surely one of its remaining two hearts must have been destroyed when he atomized its head. Surely. But there were no wails of souls released like that from the other heart.

Ahura saw the giant lycan demon keel backwards as if to fall, its torso bending back, the stump of its neck out of his view, but to his dismay saw it halting midway. Veins began to bulge and pop from its legs and arms, all flooding towards the base of its neck as it began to raise its torso again – until Ahura could see not the stump but the twisting mass of flesh reassembling into the head and jaws of a wolf, its musculature wrapping around newly formed bone, fangs emerging one by one, eyes coming alive in brilliant crosses of red. As the last of its flesh began to wrap around its throat, drums of mocking laughter and cackles assaulted their ears; and before Ahura, Mithra, or Kaniya had any time to react, Azerath was with them in the sky, kneeing Ahura in the throat and belly, crushing his diaphragm.

Mithra sliced off its upper jaw with a claymore of fire, but Azerath caught him with its fangs, grabbed Mithra’s right arm with its left and ripped it off, hurling off his Quan to the ruins below. As Azerath was about to shred Kaniya to pieces with its claws next, a surge of blue lightning burst forth from its left, shot by Cantor in the distance; Azerath grabbed Ahura, Mithra, and Kaniya and shoved them forth in the path of the lightning, making them bear the brunt of the shock – and which would have killed them if not for Cantor who immediately extinguished it.

Azerath hurled them down onto the broken palatial steps to die, crumbling the entire structure with its monstrous thrown force. It flexed its body, agile, lithe, invincible, and threw its arms wide open as if to embrace the sky; making a feral roar, with its eyes emblazoning the heavens like crosses of red and saliva spewing forth from its fangs, Azerath split the smog in its descent towards Cantor like an angel of death.