Warrior princess Estelle Hellbane - heir first-in-line to the throne of Sunglory Kingdom and the Chosen Champion of the World Core of Arkenland - scanned the skies with her golden eyes, her magnificent red hair waving heroically in her wake as the leaps of her trusted crystal robot unicorn mount thundered on and brought the world around them to a blur. Ahead of them were the World Core Mountains, absolutely teeming with the singe-black mass of the enemy numbers; three days of riding were behind Estelle, three days of focusing on naught but this approaching moment and she felt her spirit boil with righteous fury, the weight of the impractically oversized 400-kg sword on her back a reassuring feeling as she savored the sweet embrace of her own rising bloodthirst. She’d known the situation was dire, for never before had the World Core sent out such a summon for defenders as it did now; for these past three days, and even now, the entirety of Arkenworlds skies had been swarmed with a shower of rainbow-tailed meteors howling furiously in a single direction. All of them shooting towards the skies above The Lair, the highest peak of the World Core Mountains, home of the World Core. Rainbow-tailed meteors had never appeared in such numbers before. Not in her lifetime, nor in her fathers’, nor in recorded history. Not even in legend.
And the towering heights of The Lair finally laid before her now, before the army of righteous men and women that had loyally followed on her heels for these past wearying days of restless riding.
To her side was a man riding on the back of an ebony-colored sabertooth tiger; Magnus, the High General of Sunglory. “It looks like an eye. A foul, evil eye of evil!” he shouted to her. And indeed it did; all the meteors were centered on this spot like a sky-wide iris of valiantly burning rainbows, and in the middle of it, looming over The Lairs peak, was a circular abyss, like a dreadful pupil. The breach. It crackled ominously with black lightning, spewing forth miasmic fog that condensed into more and more foulspawns. “How do we even stop something of such magnitude!?”
“Worry not of what does not concern us!” Estelle shouted back, her eyes not moving from the enemy. “We have been summoned; we simply fight!”
The great horde of night-dark foulspawn came closer, charging in all directions, including towards them. They rushed and poured down the mountain sides in such numbers that they looked like a corrupted river of darkness and death, so mad and crazed to kill and endlessly devour that they often fell off the cliffs on their own and splattered themselves against the sharp rocks. Yet, this did nothing to dent their numbers, those who fell after them simply landing safely on the corpses of their kind and getting back up with the same zeal. Individually, they were nothing to one such as Estelle, and even the weakest of her ten-thousand strong army of valiant warriors would see them as merely a temporary obstacle. But they existed. This was an unforgivable insolence.
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Estelle reached behind her and grabbed the handle of Helliondragonhoundbunnyslayer, her man-sized zweihander sword, and with a single hand held it high up in the air without looking back.
“Men and women and non-binary kin of Sunglory, of Moonfell, of the Divided Reaches and all between and beyond!!!” she shouted with her magically amplified Voice of the Champion, a rallying cry surely heard by all even over the din of beating wings and pounding paws and boots and hooves and wicked claws and slithering tentacles and whatever else there was in the great army that followed behind her. She could feel their gazes gather on her back like an intangible pressure and knew they were all eagerly waiting for the seconds to come. “My old allies, my old enemies! Our common foe stains the world right in front of us, every second of their existence here a stain upon our honor as Arkenlands defenders! Never shall an Arkenlander back down from such a fight; that day has not yet come, and it never will!!”
A sound as of an ocean rose; wave after crashing wave of valiant battle cries. The roars of beasts, the skill-amplified voices of fierce warriors, and the unyielding howls of those who lacked such skills but possessed the determination; they all rose and drowned all in a vibrating sea that shook the very bones. “With all the zeal with which we have fought each other, we shall fight together!! Nothing shall endure our might! GO! GO NOW!! AND SHOW THEM THE GLORY OF ARKENLAND!!!”
The battle cries grew ever louder, and Estelle brought Helliondragonhoundbunnyslayer down upon the neck of the first enemy that leaped at her, a house-sized creature that looked like a horse that had died in a tar pit and crawled back up half rotten and covered in the nasty black goo of all foulbeasts. The stench of the things were awful, but all warriors had leveled their stench resistance levels for this and it now barely registered to Estelle.
Her crystal robot unicorn, Stormshard, rushed on with unimpeded speed, the foulbeasts nothing to him. Some enemies were skewered on his horn, others were trampled. Estelle cut down hundreds more of them with the huge blade-shaped energy shockwaves created when she swung the glowing red Helliondragonhoundbunnyslayer, each shockwave cutting through the ranks and through the half-rotted monsters that towered and loomed above them. These common beasts were not her opponents; they were mere fodder for her blade. Surely, however, the World Core would not summon this army in such a showy way if these were all that threatened the world..?
It was at that moment.
The great abyssal circle of the Lair shudder and distorted, and crackled again and again and again with massive crashes of that ominous black lightning. And then came a great roar, demented and mad, vibrating across the battlefield, louder than anything else.
It appeared.
A crystalline dragon emerging from the void. It was deeply wrong, with crystals of several different colors making up its body, as if someone had made it, taken the parts of differently-colored individual ones and just… fused them together. Dark miasma seeped from the cracks between the different colors.
But whatever was wrong with it, all knew what a crystal dragon was.
A world core.
Estelle grit her teeth.