Cantor narrowed his eyes as Azerath closed in upon him. The colossal demon was a mere hundred yards away in the blood-red sky. Time seemed to slow to a momentary crawl.
Not yet. Not yet.
Cantor’s eyes narrowed into slits, cognizant of every yard of Azerath’s advance, a rapid flurry of calculations sparking across his mind.
Atoms of metal detached themselves from the rubble, precipitating into the air in fine specks.
Not yet. Not until the very last moment.
His mouth began to move. His tongue began to twist and roll. The shockwaves from Azerath’s descent made their wavefronts known by quaking the earth some distance away.
Not. Yet.
Azerath opened its mouth to reveal a hundred fangs, carved into the roof of its mouth the contorted expressions of the children in their last moments as they were devoured.
Cantor focused the vision of his spell in his mind until the images of his thoughts began to shimmer into reality.
Azerath was just 30 yards away.
Just 29.
28.
27.
And –
26.
NOW!
Spantabruniralkahehopstara!
Screamed Cantor, leaping away as fast as his salamander legs could twitch, as the precipitated metal that was invisible to Azerath condensed instantly into colossal cones of pure steel, their lustrous tips pointed towards the descending lycan. The edge of each of the three cones sunk into Azerath’s shoulder, chest, and eye in its cometary descent, sliding through the creature’s body as a fork skewers a roast.
A shattering bang sounded off as the hind of Azerath’s body, still in motion, slung forward in their momentum and snapped off from the main torso, revealing the bone of its ribs, and underneath it, two pulsating hearts of an indigo darkness.
Azerath spared no second in breaking the leftmost cone of steel, ripping it out of its head, and shattering the next in the blink of an eye, but Cantor had finished muttering another spell, heralding the arrival of its doom.
“LIGHTNING ART, LEGENDARY FORM: PINIONS OF HEAVEN!”
Prongs of seven lightning bolts descended from the smog-laden sky, dyeing the atmosphere violet; hissing their tendrils and impressing the air to ten of thousands of degrees, each licked and searched for the perfect place to land – something metallic, something pointy, something oriented towards the heavens:
The middle cone of steel sticking out of Azerath’s back.
The seven lightning bolts snarled voraciously as they jostled to enter the tip of the giant metallic cone awaiting their arrival, and in a thousandth of a second, had squeezed themselves into the space of the metal, spreading their plasmic tendrils to every atom of matter in a hundred yard radius with ferocious bolts that sounded like steel smashing against steel. Cantor had caked himself with dust and was desperately holding out his wooden staff to repulse the oncoming reach of those bolts, but one thin tendril still connected to his robes, incinerating them in an instant. It made him yelp, and he wriggled to the earth below to insulate himself from their indiscriminate arrows, but not before his eyes caught sight of Azerath’s flesh boiling and sputtering like a thick soup – and the entire body of the colossal lycan explode into bloody paste.
Drums of thunder flattened the fires and rubble as the advancing lightning, greedy beyond its original domain, ate every organic matter in an additional radius of five hundred yards, connecting to the stumps of trees and to the broken canals of bloodied water, entering it, vaporizing it, searching for a new victim until its arcing tendrils grew thinner and thinner, blasting out of existence with a crackle of bangs.
A deafening quiet draped over the city.
Sooty smoke and scent of burnt meat entered Cantor’s nose as he popped his head out from underground, peeking cautiously. He licked his wet snout.
His eyes met the visage of Azerath’s colossal skeleton – bare, ivory, unmoving, suspended in its final moments with its titanic arms hovering around the central steel cone. Every bone from its forearm to where its hands must’ve been had been vaporized.
The smog and moisture of the air, having had their molecules rearranged by the call of lightning on a scale divine, turned the sky an overcast gray.
Droplets of rain began to splatter on the salamander arcanist’s face.
Cantor wasted no second in climbing out of his earthen refuge, calling a stream of water to race towards his friends nearly half a mile away.
Yikes, thank the tomes I didn’t try it out earlier, Cantor thought. It even changed the freaking weather.
He sighed with relief at his successful calculation from the moments before – that the lightning bolts wouldn’t reach as far as where his friends were. Azerath had committed a critical mistake – to close in on Cantor by itself meant that Cantor did not have to worry about the collateral damage from his spells, the most potent of which usually caused devastating effects on entire areas around the target. Previously, Azerath was never out of range of Ahura, Mithra, and Kaniya, making it impossible for him to use his spells…
As his head raced with the uncomfortable alternative of what could have been, he hurriedly poured colored powders from various satchels by his belt in a goatskin bag; shaking it vigorously, he rode the wave towards the remains of the ruined palace, rain splattering around him.
It wasn’t long before Cantor sighted his three friends in the middle of the cratered palatial steps, hanging on by mere threads of life.
Mithra was croaking a subdued chant by his brother’s side, near the precipice of his strength, pulling and pushing air from Ahura’s lungs for his brother’s diaphragm had collapsed and therefore could not breathe on his own; Ahura was hanging on for his life, laying on his side lest the falling rain pool in his mouth to drown him. Kaniya’s nose had been broken, bruised with violet splotches, her left ear torn, her fur-cape tattered. Her midriff and almost every exposed part of her flesh was purple with contusion, blood threatening to spill with just a minor cut.
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She made an effort to stand as she saw Cantor.
“Dontcha move. The thing’s dead. Take a swig first,” he hurriedly said, filling the goatskin bag with conjured water and shoving it into Kaniya’s hands.
She took large gulps, the stopgap medicine streaming down her chin in iridescent rivulets.
Cantor filled the bag with more water, shaking it further and handing it to Mithra. “I’ll take over, ya drink this up. Your arm, yikes. Hunir, sahir, hunir, sahir,” he began to chant to Ahura to let the air continue to flow into his chest as Mithra began to drink.
Blistering pain from Mithra’s broken bones began to subside like an outgoing tide, and seeping blood began to clot on his cauterized stump where his right arm used to rest. Mithra sighed, taking over the chant with his Ayumastra again for his brother.
“Aaaaand directly into the bloodstream it goes,” said Cantor, weaving a thin rivulet of the liquid medicine and piercing it into Ahura’s veins, running it until color returned to Ahura’s cheeks.
“I can’t fix everything, ya gotta wait for Kiriel. Hold on just a little longer bud. Hey,” said Cantor, poking Mithra, “take a breather while I take over.”
Mithra shook his head, pointing to Kaniya.
Kaniya grimaced as she struggled to stand. She shakily got to her feet.
“Is it dead?”
“Oh yeah. Roasted and turned into paste.”
“Great… job…” Kaniya croaked, trying to clear her throat. “Ru…dra… return…” she said, stumbling, collapsing and hitting her knee on a spiky piece of stone.
“Oh jeez,” yelped Cantor, sliding himself under to lift Kaniya, his legs almost giving way themselves, “You’re heavier than Chatterbox!”
“…Where is he? Is he alright?”
“I’m gonna go stitch him together. Shouldn’t be too much of a challenge with my terraformer arts, if I narrow down where all of his body went…”
“Rudra can resonate with his jewel, I’m certain… shame on me for failing to defend you and everyone with honor,” Kaniya sighed, clenching her fists and shuffling herself off Cantor’s back. “A tarnish upon my soul as a warrior…”
“Hey, shuddup with the mollygaggling and help me find your axe. We’re just happy you’re alive.”
“It’s ‘lollygagging’…”
“Lollygagging, mollygaggling, who gives a crap about human grammar. Ah-ah-ah,” Cantor continued, putting a finger on her lips before they could part, “before you say anything, lollygagging doesn’t even come close to your moping, so I made my own lexicon, compredi?”
Kaniya couldn’t stop a chuckle from flashing across her face. She nodded, raising her head and wiping blood off her brow. “Can you make a metal beam?”
“What resonance?”
“No resonance, just something like 4.5 feet long by 2 feet wide…”
“Spantabrunira!” Cantor chanted, ripping the atoms off the metal of the ruins and gathering them piece by piece in a rectangular beam.
Kaniya punched it hard, once, twice, and another, drumming it like a deep bell.
From some fifty yards away, an echo of a clang rang clearer than the others. Kaniya began to shuffle herself towards the source, but a fit of coughs arrested her in her tracks, driving her to one knee. A pool of blood issued from her mouth with every cough.
Cantor pulled her to sit and shoved the goatskin bag into her face. “Siddown and drink everything,” Cantor ordered. “I’m getting your axe.”
The salamander arcanist bounced from boulder to boulder towards the source of the noise, and prying a loose rock over a pile of debris, found the gleaming blade of Rudra with its broken handle sticking out from the dirt.
Cantor gripped the tishirite shaft with his sticky hands and pulled it.
Rudra didn’t budge an inch.
He pulled on it with a lasso of water conjured with his staff.
Still nothing.
“Jeez, this is why I hate martials,” Cantor huffed, shaking his head, carving out the mound of earth underneath and lifting it to float like a miniature island with the axe embedded on top. He glided it next to Kaniya and dropped it.
The axeblade broke loose of the crumbling stone and embedded further into the ground below.
Kaniya tugged on the broken handle and pulled out all of Rudra with a single yank, balancing it on her shoulder. Cantor sighed, shaking his head.
“Happy now?”
“Gotta fix this thing. Need to find the other handle…” Kaniya remarked, rubbing her eyes. “Say, Cantor, where did you kill that thing?”
“That hyena thing?”
“The lycan thing.”
“Eh, no difference roasted or fried or turned to dust. Its skeleton’s over there. Do ya see?”
“Great. I can fashion a new handle out of its bones.”
Kaniya suddenly stopped in her tracks, squinting her eyes in the direction of Cantor’s finger.
“Say, did your lightning vaporize the bones too?”
“No, why?”
“Because all I see is a giant spike. Is that the bone?”
“No, of course not. A spike’s just a spike. There’s a skeleton on the spike. The spike’s skeleton.”
“That’s strange, it must have melted or something or blown to dust…”
“Ya sure ya can’t see it? It’s not there?”
Cantor squinted hard and made out the faint outline of the giant metal cone-spike half a mile away. But there was no trace of Azerath’s colossal skeletal form.
A shadow fell around their figures.
“WITTY LITTLE LIZARD,” pronounced a voice, thrusting into their consciousness, “YOU SHOULD HAVE FINISHED YOUR JOB IF YOU WERE SO SMART.”
Before they could even register the reality around them, Azerath drove his skeletal fist squarely into Cantor from the side. Cantor felt the midsection of his spine protrude and snap cleanly, rocketing like a ragdoll with no more word than a ‘bleurgh’ a hundred yards away.
Kaniya swung Rudra with whatever little handle was left, but Azerath pinched the blade with its bony fingers, wrested the axe away, and brought the sharp shaft down into Kaniya’s abdomen, impaling her and pinning her onto the rock.
“YOU GO LAST, HALF-BREED. FIRST, SING YOUR SCREAMS FOR YOUR LIZARD FRIEND.”
Kaniya grunted and screamed, grabbing the handle with both of her hands and struggling it out of her inch by inch, witnessing the colossal skeletal form of Azerath marching towards Cantor’s broken form, devoid of flesh and color except its luminous crimson eyes.
Giant spikes rose from the earth, accompanied by Cantor’s desperate voice, but Azerath broke through them like boulders to wood.
Cantor flailed as Azerath seized him from the ground with its bony hands.
Cantor bellowed a spell that set off a firestorm around Azerath’s head, making it momentarily stumble; but Azerath tightened its grip on Cantor, squeezing his body and his organs, forcing him to retch. Pinching Cantor’s tongue and pulling it out, Azerath sliced it off with a flick of its claws, and threw down Cantor to the cold hard earth. Cantor’s head met the ground, his right eye blowing out.
“GO ON. SAY SOMETHING. SAY A WORD. UTTER A SPELL,” mocked Azerath, leaning in his ears with an open palm, gesturing as if to listen. “NO MORE LIGHTNING, NO MORE FIRE. IF YOUR ONLY INSTRUMENT IS A TONGUE, YOU SHOULD KNOW YOUR PLACE, LOWLY ATARSK.”
Rain blinded his remaining eye as Cantor felt Azerath grip him again, and this time, seize him with both hands – one on the top half of his body, the other on his lower half, turning him to stretch him and pull him to opposite ends.
Kaniya yanked out the shaft from her abdomen and threw Rudra with all her might into Azerath’s femur, but the axe lodged into the bone. The demon paid no notice to it as it tightened its grip on Cantor and began to pull him apart with increasing glee.
From away, Mithra threw a lance of fire, but it burst apart to smoke as it met the demon’s ribs.
Azerath hummed a melody as it pulled and pulled.
Cantor screamed as the protection spell he cast on himself before his tongue was cut began to shatter piece by piece under the demon’s unassailable grip; the remainder of his tongue slapped frantically against the interior of his mouth in an effort to pronounce a coherent spell, gurgling in blood, as he felt his skin and bones and all his flesh begin to split and tear apart, the pain of distending flesh skewering his body and increasing until something had to give way–
Kaniya punched Azerath in its foot, blowing it out, but the demon viciously kicked her away with the other into the rubble, impaling her back on a protruding pipe–
Azerath doubled down on its grip and began to pull Cantor apart harder and harder, bit by bit, inch by inch, almost there, just a moment before Cantor’s insides would spill forth and the light of his eye would extinguish to cold marbles–
From away, drumming gallops filled the atmosphere, swelling to a formidable rumble.
Kiriel materialized into the air, riding her blood-red war steed with wings and a mighty horn; she set the sky aflame with the friction of her oncoming velocity, slamming directly into Azerath’s form in an explosion of blood and fire, the ends of her billowing black hair glowing crimson with unbridled fury.
“LEAVE YOUR CURSED HANDS OFF OF MY BELOVED STARS!”