Year 1613 ISE

Anásazoís

The chains dissipated, no longer sustained by the Solares. Their former captive, however, was no more free: he thrashed in the magma, feverishly splashing, while his liquid titanium armor—covering him head to toe—continually flowed into the gaps in desperate attempts to mend him faster than he was breaking.

And on the land safe from the hellish ocean, a bloody masked phantasm shakily dragged himself closer to the edge. Solares, bleeding what looked like pints, forcefully gasping, had his eyes focused only on the man drowning in the pits. Although Anastasia saw his eyes glance her way for a few milliseconds, he may as well have not recognized her.

A breathy, wheezing yet guttural laugh chilled the air.

Then, Solares took off on all four limbs, like a natural predator, toward the pool of lava. He let loose a roar that rang the church bells of eternal torment along with the dying cries of a living man. Princess Vida, with a contorted frown and brows knit in fury, joined the Solares in cacophonous insanity: she screamed.

“Oh my fucking…” Anastasia sheathed her blades as the wounded Demon King continued his furious rush toward the edge of the cliff. “Matty! Snap out of it!” The Assassin Queen took off in a charge in the oncoming direction of the living cannnonball.

He ran like a hellhound. His hands were certainly blistering by now. Not giving two shits if this got her in the lava or not, the Assassin Queen threw herself into the air, and in the moments before colliding with the four legged Licentian avatar, she locked eyes with those now spinning spiral pupils.

With a battlecry, she crashed on top of the King of Demons, eliciting another roar from him. The Assassin Queen pushed leftover spirit energy through her veins and strengthened her calves and arms, leading to firmer muscles that held down her weakened and thrashing brother.

Anastasia now wrestled the damned Solares back and forth. “Snap out of it, Matty!” He growled at her and gnashed his teeth. “Stop it! Calm down!” If he could listen, then she reckoned he would have, but now her brother acted like a literal King of Demons and responded to her with a roar.

Today was just peachy, wasn’t it?

By some feat of sheer madness, Solares forced his already burning limbs to pull out of her pin. The Assassin Queen’s hand lunged for his hood only to be nearly pulled along for a ride with the masked man. She had never seen anyone rush death like this! Except of course, the one dragging her. She tried to remember the last time he went berserk like this. And what calmed him down.

“Hold him, Ultimatum!” Xeshna commanded. Immediately, Anastasia could feel the pulls on Solares’s limbs, punctuated by the Zoldamian’s strained grunts. Even restraining a wounded Solares took as much strength as Ultimatum had ever shown.

“What in the laws of physics is going on here?” Krystal thrust a stream of frost in Solares’s direction. “I was rooting for him to kill Attila! Fuck my luck.” Ice grew, crystallizing around the Demon King, quickly coating the points of contact between him and the ground.

Xeshna flew above the magma, harrying the Deathless Emperor as he tried to swim to the sides. Her twin swords slashed at his head and at his limbs.

The airborne battle was soon out of view however, as Krystal’s ice hardened around all five of them—herself, Ultimatum, Solares, Vida, and Anastasia—into thick walls.

“What has occurred…” Solares slurred. Thank the gods.

“You need healing, immediately, no questions!” Vida replied, placing her hands on him and pumping her energy into his cuts and gashes.

“Attila…lava…he still lives! He must be stopped! Lava does not kill—”

“Shut…the fuck up.” Vida’s voice was typically as gentle as the feeling of dipping one’s feet in a brook while listening to birds singing in the sunlight overhead. But this command struck with such a menacing aura that even half-insane, the Solares paused. “Let me heal you or you won’t like what I’ll do instead.”

The Solares remained motionless.

It was relieving to witness Solares being peaceful. The Assassin Queen had seen him like this before, and for his sake and hers the obsession with Attila had to be put on pause.

For now. For him.

“We’ve got it from here.” Krystal said, "Anastasia, gladiator playboy." She snapped her fingers, and a door opened in the crystalline wall.

Anastasia nodded as she walked into the infernal outdoors with Ultimatum following her.

Above Attila, a nebulous cloud of purple energy hissed from Xeshna’s form, sputtering and spitting more clouds in the heat of the melting world. The titanium man, Attila of the Deathless, had been holding his own for so long… and had even grown near to turning Anastasia’s beloved brother to paste after so many failed attempts to do so. Thankfully, his current opponent was not Solares.

Lava spat and splashed onto the ground. Magma flew from the pits, melting and molding the land into incoherent canals and channels as the person within thrashed and lunged in the molten rock. A strange strategy, animalistic, almost like an answer to her brother earlier.

And she thought the cannibals were bad…

Her blood chilled at a familiar, horrifying sound: the air was charging with electricity.

"Matty had his turn, now him. Nice!" Anastasia groaned.

Electric arcs fizzled and sparked around a singular location within the sea of lava. For a moment, the prisoner within had stopped his thrashing. Unsure of whether the distance was sufficient to prevent electrocution, she braced herself and watched white flashes throbbing within the clouds directly above, producing wave after wave of blinding fluorescence and centering on a singular point in the sky.

The sky had a beating heart.

Then, lightning.

A massive lightning bolt flew down from the skies and burned every bit of air nearby. If the planet’s ozone layer had survived the carnage of this war, then it surely was punctured by this sheer madness. The bolt crashed down onto Attila’s location and threw goopy, thick balls of lava into the air. They returned to the ground in a hailstorm of explosive flame…

Some chunks cooled into obsidian upon hitting Krystal’s ice castle. Others punctured the walls, eliciting a groan of rage from the healer within. Still others shot in Anastasia’s direction and hung in the air for a brief moment in Ultimatum’s phantom grasp, along with a few he was able to catch just short of the ice walls.

As for Attila himself, the lightning had helped him launch from his liquid prison onto the ground in front of her. His armor was melted enough to show a scarred and once chiseled build turned lacerated, walking forward with lava dripping down from him. All that time fighting Queen Helene and the Solares, and then the latter again one on one, had turned his body to a red and pulpy mess. If her brother looked bad, then the melted face, exposing skeletal structure, on the Deathless Emperor’s charred form made her want to vomit.

“Come out! Solares! Come out and fight me, you coward!” the burning, scarred and skeletal tyrant roared at the ice fortress.

As the man continued his trek, Anastasia felt the air grow uneasy—not from him—but someone more familiar. The same distinct voice had released a growl loud enough for her to hear from where she stood. Then, a hellish battlecry filled with bloodthirsty rage and pure hatred for the man taunting him.

The voice stopped and got replaced by another. “Stop it! You’re going nowhere till I’m done!”

Vida seemed to have Solares under wraps.

That left Attila to Xeshna, Ultimatum and Anastasia.

“Hey, Assassin Queen?”

Anastasia turned her gaze to Xeshna. “Hm?”

“I’m gonna do the thing,” Xeshna cracked her knuckles and stared at the visual of Attila in front of a burning world, “cover me.”

Xeshna was getting far too comfortable with Anastasia being the fall guy, but the so-called thing had better be good. With that in mind, the Assassin Queen charged spirit energy to her limbs, raised her daggers, and charged the Quatopedipan maniac. Attila continued his slow yet strong march toward the ice fortress, his eyes not giving Anastasia a hint of attention.

Perfect.

She jabbed both her weapons into the exposed skin of her adversary, causing a stagger, but his left hand snatched one of her arms and hoisted her upward. Before he could slam her down, a gravity ball hit him in the stomach and he recoiled. The Assassin Queen did not need to even glance behind her to know Ultimatum was there, sporting the hardest glare she could imagine on him, holding up a trembling hand toward the tyrant, straining to buy her half a second.

Xeshna had muttered several words of an incantation Anastasia had seen a dozen times by now. How long would she need? One second? Three? Anastasia could buy her that much, even now. “Xeshna! This had better work!” Releasing her knives, she turned in Attila’s grip until she was around his arm, wrapping her legs over his shoulder and pressing into his neck.

Attila stumbled on his left foot and whipped his head to face this new annoyance. With gritted, bared and bleeding teeth, he raised the arm Anastasia unrelentingly clung to. Their grapple soon became a test of speed and strength, an incoherent dance of one partner stumbling and the other shifting into one vice grip after another.

“I call to all the souls of the wandering…” went the words of Xeshna’s invocation.

Were Solares in Anastasia’s position, he would likely have begun choking this lizard king, but under her much weaker grip, the tyrant growled and swung his limbs back and forth. This dance surpassed the strip clubs on Haven. Every lunge and thrust of the arm, she held firm or sought a new grip—like the galaxy’s worst tic. He tried to use the ax, tried to land on his own arm before she wriggled out of the way: nothing worked.

“With the rage of the dead and still living…” continued Lady Xeshna’s phantasmic prayer. Widening cracks in the earth, piles of rubble, and the cadavers strewn about the city all whispered in reply.

Attila cocked a fist.

Move. Anastasia crawled across the tyrant’s arm, delivered an incidental kick to his belly, and made for the shoulder in time for Attila’s punch to land only on his own arm.

“The Third befriends such rotten rats!” Attila cried as he threw a punch for her face.

Anastasia twisted herself to his lower arm this time. Upon looking up, she saw the Emperor’s fist go straight for his own shoulder yet again, and the furious scream that came after made her whistle. Some people were just too slow.

The Assassin Queen cackled. “You’re easier than the Haven police!”

Not a wise taunt.

“I’ll show you how easy I can be, you little gnat!” Electricity fired up, treating Anastasia’s ears to that again.

“Uh oh,” the Assassin Queen broke a sweat and flared her leftover spirit energy, “have fun! Gotta go! Bye-bye!”

Flash. Electricity. Lightning. Anastasia jumped, stuck two hands on the torn ground, and then tucked herself in for a roll. The electrifying sounds of lightning sparking and arcing took over her hearing, a luminous flash blinded her for a second, and the one constant was a single cry of mortifying agony. Such was just like cooking, for the smell of food and an oven finished with its meal gave a ring so beautiful that she had to love it.

Maybe Ogdona gave her a token for being a good girl.

In the wake of this electric flash, Attila heaved.

“To all the raging souls of Hell!” Xeshna finished, “Feed me your energy!”

The whispers became murmurs, and those quickly rose into growls. The cacophony rumbled beneath the ground, until cracks formed and emaciated bodies dragged themselves through to the surface, leaving pieces of their own flesh behind like sheets of paper. The bodies of fallen combatants stood to join them, bathing the dirt in hacked blood. Whether Deathless or Cruvelian, long buried or newly felled, the dead were rising, and the sheer sight of a literal swarm of such creatures stumbling toward Attila turned Anastasia’s stomach and put her heart on pause. Even though she knew they were allies, it was hard not to imagine them devouring everyone in sight, allies or not.

“Thanks, bitch! Love you!” Xeshna shouted.

“Third! What is this?” Attila said through gnashing, cracked teeth. “You developed a new power, Solares?” Giving a glance to the zombies coming closer to him, the wounded warmonger’s left eye twitched. “Did the Zudrian witch teach you that?” A roar replied to that one. “Answer me, you conniving son of a bitch!”

The so-called sorcery didn’t bother slowing down for a response. Arms by the dozens seized Attila with so much force that they may have been a chain of their own. The Deathless Emperor sparked electricity in his body, crackles audible even over the splitting earth created by the rising dead, but the ions barely affected his captors. The fissures created around Attila by the emergence opened even more chasms beneath him, and Anastasia jumped from firm ground to firm ground, following Xeshna’s legion and mounting the distracted emperor all over again. Her legs locked around his neck and fought to keep him immobilized.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere churned the sky like a pair of sears slicing the puffing and mighty clouds to miniscule bits. The Assassin Queen and Attila struggled with one another, swaying and clutching at each other’s limbs for control; the Deathless Emperor's feet only dodged the canals of magma by either sheer luck or a boost of strength he applied to himself.

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The Emperor drooled and fought to win back his own limbs from Anastasia and from the grip of the undead around him. Their bloodthirsty odor, a scent harsher than sulfur, assailed the Assassin Queen’s nostrils. Their screams and unsettling limbs brushing against her as they locked around their target—along with the tensing muscles of the possessed hero battling her leg hold—similarly overwhelmed her senses. All the while, her eyes kept flicking, worried, to the icy fortress housing her allies. If Anastasia could hold on long enough, Vida could heal the Solares. She trusted their science girl to outsmart a god, but had no desire to let Attila escape long enough to test her faith. Her feet kicked at the ax, nudging the weapon in the owner’s grip, but not enough to take it away.

Then, bending his head down, Attila launched both hands and clenched Anastasia’s ankles, which made her scream as bones cracked. He tossed her aside, her head slamming on rock. The Assassin Queen stumbled to her feet only to witness the glinting blade of an ax raised overhead.

“Take this, you gnat!” Attila screamed.

She rolled away from his falling ax the first time, but Attila’s boot caught her stomach and his leg held her still after it missed. Using his shoulders and free arm to punt aside Xeshna’s thralls, he fought to lift his ax again and end this annoyance. The Assassin Queen heaved her chest and seized whatever small amount of air possible. Her golden eyes only focused on the ax and the shining, toothy smile of the madman as he finally succeeded at raising it above. Anastasia Velos Parazonum made eye contact with her end.

She took one, last painful breath.

The churning sky intensified all at once, reverberating a thundering battlecry as tremors shook the surface of Anásazoís. Even the maddened tyrant standing over her, dominant and victorious, turned his head to face the flaming flashover coming closer by the second. The quakes swelled in power, blossomed in destructive force, and shook the rock into either lava or further down the earth of Anásazoís.

Instead of keeping Anastasia trapped under his foot, he planted it on firm ground, and instead of dropping the ax, he swung it in defense. What happened next created even more fissures that exposed the magma beneath them, and the Assassin Queen’s eyes snapped wide open like a window shade while her ears reeled from the collision.

Who wouldn’t stare at the sight of a massive sword, composed entirely of hungry flame that burned the air for more fuel, colliding with an ax loaded by electricity that could kill a battalion in one swing? What creature’s eyes wouldn’t be held captive? Helene pushed through the resistance, both air and the edenite of her rival’s ax, and got Attila to step back.

Holy shit, the Assassin Queen thought as the Amazon’s flaming locks flew past her, she’s back. And that ambrosia packs a punch.

Helene only acknowledged her with a glance as she threw her reptilian opponent back several feet. Anastasia planted her right hand on the hot soil, staggered back onto her legs, and coughed blood and phlegm onto the terrain.

“Helene…” she prepared her blades for another clash, “...I’m coming.”

Orange light, not from Helene and certainly not from Attila, danced across both of them. Despite an eye wounded from battle, the Assassin Queen barely needed to scan the battlefield to recognize its source. Her attention immediately focused on the ice fortress, now glowing a dull orange, light playing through its cracks and holes as a low rumble climbed up the frequency to a high-pitched, throbbing, reverbing screech. The walls were already melting into water and mush when an orange blade slashed across what was left of them, like a hot knife through butter, dropping chunks of ice to the ground, where they evaporated. The castle was forced open.

Spirals, glowing red and changing white, rotated in a counterclockwise direction as their shrouded owner made slow steps out. Swords became skeletal claws, and an orange glow radiated from every vein and tissue. They moved in a deliberate slowness, heart pounding calmness, and cold intentions. The Assassin Queen witnessed Attila, even in the heat of his battle with the massive Helene, lock eyes with the shroud.

“Guess who?” the phantasmic figure said.

The Assassin Queen stumbled, heaved, and upon seeing Solares in whatever he called a decent condition, she laughed as if she were a wicked witch or just batshit. "Matty's back, back again. Ready to destroy someone's history, Solares?" Attila’s eyes flared, as between the Amazon Queen's strikes and parries he shot stares of unbridled excitement at the freed Solares. Attila was a predator, ready to lunge at a potential meal. "Woooooo!" What was wrong with her? "Let's claim our stake! Go!"

Some people liked fire too much.

The word 'go' turned out to be timed like a battle horn, for Solares cracked his neck and flew down the battlefield toward a glare that held the intensity of a wildfire. Yet even with all the damage done to his glorious body, the Deathless tyrant still mirrored the Solares’ speed and charged into his approach. The King of the Demons collided with his rival with a kick that shoved back the Deathless Emperor, leaving his skidding feet to break apart asphalt before he heaved his ax in a sideways strike. Solares, eyes widening, dropped under the swinging blade, and left the ax to cut only air.

A more difficult attack to dodge came in a shockwave blasting the air and earth in the ax’s wake. Anastasia howled and leapt clear of the rope of lightning, but Solares lacked the time to do the same. He roared in pain and would have suffered worse had Helene not intercepted the monarch's next swing for him. A few traded blows later, Helene became the target: a shock again filled the electric ax, and it swung at the level of the Amazon’s neck. Solares, however, regained his composure and extended a leg.

"Damn it!" Attila howled, tumbling along the ground.

Meanwhile, Solares looked at his enemy with sparkling eyes and unleashed the most eerily childish laugh Anastasia had ever heard from him, breaking the limits of what she thought his deep and guttural voice was capable of creating. Her spine tingled. Attila spat mouthfuls of dirt to the ground before tearing his way back up to grab the Demon King's cloak. Like a pair of rabid dogs, Solares thrashed with the ax-wielding lizard clinging to him and attempting to use the poleaxe. Their struggle turned into an arm wrestling match for the weapon in a matter of seconds. More electric arcs clung to Solares and to everything else they could find. In equal response, from where Solares’s claws met the ax, Licentian flames glowed black and orange, heating the weapon’s edenite handle to a similar hue, like a metal forge. Between the fire and sparks, it was hard to imagine that the handle of the blade would be possible to touch without a scream. With the glow of the handle, it was easy to imagine that the blade itself was at risk. Now, Attila was fighting for the life of his weapon because if this continued…

"You fucking bastard!"

He'd have no weapon. What a sight to see.

Helene smiled at those two warriors' struggle and laughed. "Beautiful!" The only word she said before marching her flaming form to the tug of literal war.

If anything proved infinite, then Attila’s electricity made itself a runner up to the title. Even Solares, healed and revitalized, could only go on for so long. The walking carcass fighting him kept his hand on the weapon, hanging on for dear life while electric bolts coursed across both their bodies, hailed by a demon's blood curdling scream.

Both the radio and the battlefield got taken hostage by the cry of a flying Xeshna. "Holy fucking shit! This again?! What is wrong with this Solares? My bond, get on them, now!" Her undead responded, wrapping themselves once again around the tyrant. Hopefully, Solares would see them as allies because at this point Anastasia doubted his cognition. With a single breath, the Assassin Queen stabilized herself, shaking the daggers in both hands, and looked at the animal fighting the brother she loved so much.

Solares's right elbow jerked back. Then his left. In the past minute, the Assassin Queen’s mood had changed between mirth, alarm, and concern more than she could count: now she was wondering why this lizard didn’t just die already! Her head hurt too much and her limbs were barely obeying her. Though she struggled with her arms and thighs, she knew she would be too late to intervene before whatever was about to happen. This show was Matty's now, at least for the next few seconds.

Solares's right arm whipped back; his left buzzed with electroshock and followed. Attila finally possessed the ax once again. The Assassin Queen braced herself for whatever shockwaves came her or anyone else’s way. However, a savage, gnawing growl said one thing: not quite.

Before Attila was able to shake off Xeshna’s horde, those same claws Solares had wielded earlier shot out and raked their foe. Attila stumbled, his muscles caught off guard like a slowly losing street fighter, too tightly gripped in undead arms to fully retaliate, too obsessively clenched around the hilt of his weapon to parry. Again, that same bellowing cry, that she swore came from hell, returned to haunt her ears and this entire world.

To add to the barrage of clawstrikes, the flames of Licentius in their pure, black form scorched the air and dug into the Deathless Emperor's chest, slowly forcing his arms and ax in front of himself in a desperate bid for protection. Their sender, a charred and electrified Solares, gave out a sinister laugh. Anastasia’s hairlines spiked, not from static this time but from some primal recognition of her brother’s bloodlust and rage. His cloak was torn into strips and rags which curled in the fire streaming out of him. His eyes cried tears of blood, but they flickered red and white.

“Holy mother of fuck…” the Assassin Queen said through heavy, swelling heaves.

As the flames died down, however, Amazon hands substituted for the grip Solares had recently lost and latched onto the ax in his place, tugging it, the embattled monster, and all of the ghouls still gripping him up off the ground. Helene was the one now challenging this thing’s grasp. Anastasia’s feet finally obeyed her, and she propelled from the ground before she had time to analyze the logistics of her own move.

“Hit the handle!” she heard Ultimatum call. Perfect. Flying into the air once again, she delivered a bone-shattering, supersonic kick and fell to the ground in agony. The tyrant’s hands twisted—pulled by Ultimatum’s telekinesis, crushed under the full force of her kick—and were swept off the ax: he fell away stumbling. His last hurrah, still sparking and crackling, was now in the hands of an Amazon Queen wearing a deceptively endearing smile.

“Never thought I’d say this, but thanks, Solares!” said the Amazon. She then turned her attention to her victim: “congratulations,” she said as she swung the ax against the emperor’s breast, fracturing it with lightning and brute force, her skin glowing with fire and sparks, “you get to be a warrior slain by their own weapon!”

The strength of Xeshna’s skeletal army surpassed Attila and pinned his arms and legs as the Amazon Queen unleashed her unbridled fury, slash after slash, shattering what remained of his armor.

In the wake of the attack, the emperor was no longer bidding for power. Attila coughed blood and yanked his broken arm forward to clutch the hilt of the ax between Helene’s hands with a glare at his nemesis. Portions of his once invincible armor melted into hot slag and ate through the damaged, lacerated skin beneath. His chest peeled, chunks coming apart in red blotches, and eyes bloodshot and dry.

“You think you won, Amazon?” rasped the grotesque figure—the deep gold of his eyes invisible behind the reflected flames—as he brought what remained of his face near Helene’s.

Solares seemed to choke, sputter, and then break out into a series of maddened cackles, shuffling toward Attila like he was another of Xeshna’s summons, “I was ordered to defeat you, but now what? Look at you! You can’t even be put back together! All that effort, for nothing!” his laugh was choked by another bloody coughing fit. Xeshna, for her part, spared her ally an alarmed glance.

Attila gritted his teeth.

“Can’t even be put back together.” Attila spat the words out like phlegm, bringing his gaze up to stare at his longtime rivals. “I never expected the Solares to be humble in the slightest.” Between the pain of her broken feet and the multiple concussions, the Assassin Queen heard the words through something of a haze, curled up on the ground. “But I suppose, you’re just like the second one of your kind… no humility, no satisfaction with any victory, just ever-increasing violence in the game of war. This is why you are my worthy enemy. You fight even when the odds are against you. When you fall, you get back up. You have no idea just what role you have brought upon yourself, Solares. As ignorant as you are powerful. Cruvelia deserves you, Third. The powers that accept you as a reward, and the ones that view you as a punisher and rattle their chains – they all have it due.”

“They can rest easy: I never fought to join whatever politicking this galaxy does! I fought to end you for erasing my home planet!”

“You think…” Attila wheezed, “the galaxy will give you any choice?”

“... what is it that you mean?”

The Deathless Emperor pointed a glare at the bloodied Amazon above him. “Helene…” His eyes then moved on to the winged Nashiyega approaching Anastasia. “Xeshna…” Finally he locked his gaze on the masked mass of skin and blood standing before him. “Solares… For all you deny it…” Solares made a slow march closer to the Emperor. “...and embrace the monsters the universe says you ought to be…” The King of Demons stopped walking.

“Your aspirations, idealisms and ambitions will make you an enemy or ally to all the cosmos.” Xeshna curled her lips in and exhaled in the face of those words. Attila laughed, a series of weak gasps escaped him, but a laugh nonetheless. “The universe will rally to destroy your vision as it did mine. It will rally to eradicate your dreams and hopes as much as it did mine. And when it does, it will run to a power that equals or exceeds yours. That power will fix its eye upon you. It will show itself and challenge you… and when that eye raises… no running, only fighting.”

“Then one of us will die. Whichever is weakest—” Solares muttered.

“You want to better the universe, Xeshna.” Attila ignored the Solares, “Fighting for equality, just society, and whatever naive idealisms you have. Just like the Ecumene, you are, Lady X… just like the Ecumene at its height. And like this old enemy of my people, you will fight. They fought until they dissipated. So what I say to you is that your war… will never end.

Always remember that.”

“We will succeed even where you failed, Quatopedipan.” Xeshna said.

“I know. You already have, in a way. My people are yours now. And if you would give a favor to a dying king, I ask for the survivors’ protection.”

Xeshna nodded. Helene bowed her head as well. Even Solares, his restless dissatisfaction mulled in favor of expressionless emptiness, gave the same gesture.

“I also request for my soul to be brought to the Garden Eneth. If any of you have the slightest bit of honor, you will let me free there where I can return to my ancestors instead of being trapped again for yet more centuries in some vault. I do not wish to relive that torment.”

Once again, he was answered with nods. “It will be so.” Helene said.

“You have my gratitude. End it, Queen Helene.” Attila said.

Like an executioner, the Amazon Queen planted her feet and raised the electrifying ax—crackling and sparking in the hot air. The Deathless Emperor looked her straight in the eyes as it fell. He did not even flinch.

Attila was dead, but the bones of the undead holding him rattled, as though the body beneath their grip were still struggling. Their matriarch stepped to him while a golden orb, conceived entirely of plasma, gathered itself just outside of the body. It grew as wisps of the same stuff slipped through the gaps in their undead fingers, adding volume and brightness, and would likely have slipped away itself had it not been for the many, greedy, skeletal palms that smothered it before it could escape. The undead legion made way for their mistress, who gave slow nods to each member of the battlegroup (while raising her palm at an all–too–restless Demon King).

Xeshna’s claws clasped the hissing orb, folding it into her hands. “Stop staring at me like that, it gives me the shivers.” The Assassin Queen followed her gaze to witness her bloody brother looking at the soul with an unreadable vendetta in his eyes. Meanwhile, Krystal wasted no time presenting Xeshna a cylindrical tank. After a few buttons were pressed, the lid slid open and revealed a crystalline interior. The orb fell inside and the cylinder slammed shut. Solares was watching every movement of the orb and its new container with an unusual level of precision and focus. He was like a lion, hunched low in the grass, all eyes and anticipation.

Xeshna noticed all of that, “Hey! Matthias! Masked bitch! Down boy. The fight’s over. You can stop glaring at your lizard obsession…you won, he doesn’t rule the galaxy anymore—and if we are planning on following his last wishes, there won’t be a rematch…”

“Don’t worry,” Solares eventually said, crossing his arms over his chest, shifting his weight back again into a casual stance, “I can let him rest.”

“Is there something… wrong? I mean, are you okay?”

“I had help. My sponsor expected more of me, and so I have failed the Licentian Order. I was made for war against sinners, given a single task to fight and triumph again and again with my own power. Had I proved strong enough, I would have emerged victorious. Had I been too weak, then I would have outlived my usefulness, and my death proved no great loss.

“My time would have come.

“But worry not: I will have my penance for this dishonor. I have proved strong enough to conquer a chaotic world filled with war and crime like Haven. If anyone dares think I have grown weak, I will prove my strength to them again.

“Whether I will be received with pride or disgrace is lost on me. Whatever piece I played is done.”

Xeshna blinked. As she recovered from the shock of his words, she responded, “Whatever strokes your ego, hun.” After muttering something to herself that the Assassin Queen swore was what the fuck', she crouched by Anastasia and brought her face close. “I knew this man was damaged… but this… nobody ever fucking told me it was this bad!”

“Don’t worry Xeshna,” Anastasia said, upright in a sitting position by now, not daring to rise to her feet, “I’m going to be keeping an eye on Matty for a while.”

“More like I’ll be keeping an eye on you…” Solares laughed, gesturing to her wounds, “You and Sotismia both.”

“Thanks Assassin bitch,” Xeshna said, still dumbfounded, “but I have a feeling that our alliance isn’t going away anytime soon.” Anastasia began sweating in the face of the stony glare of the woman crouched inside her personal space. “He won’t be going out of my sight at all, especially sounding like that.” She tried to appear as innocuous and unassuming as possible until Xeshna’s claws seized her shoulders and she whispered, “Once you’re healed, help Vida fix up the bloody mask, fuck his opinions on that, no one asked. After that's done? I want you and Sotismia to come to my quarters. Both of you are telling me everything, no sugar, no bullshit. Don’t be fucking late if you know what’s good for you.”