Hamathael and Saet stood facing one another for a single long second, then as one they flew forward in silence. Hamathael conjured his weapon as he moved, a long rapier of pure shadow. Saet swung her own starlight katana in a gorgeous and lightning fast two handed sweep from her right shoulder. Hamathael parried the attack and the blades screeched against eachother as though the swords themselves bore their wielder’s animosity.
A chain of attacks and parries followed too fast for mortal eyes to follow. Saet dropped and spun on one foot, sending her lithe but deceptively powerful leg in a sweep even as her sword flashed up toward her enemy’s midsection. Hamathael laughed derisively as he dodged the maneuver by literally spinning his body so that he stood upside down in midair. He swatted the slash aside and resumed his elegant fencer’s pose while still upside down.
Saet, knowing what this meant executed a nimble somersault of her own as the gravity in the area shifted and she touched down with the floor of the throne room now above her head. her feet were supported by something invisible but the sensory inputs were all wrong.
“This is what my droll life has been missing!” Hamathael said as he lunged forward with a fluid thrust into a dazzling series of stabs that came from an uncountable number of angles. “You’ve always been a worthy playmate, for a filthy little bird.”
Saet danced and parried like a goddess of swordplay, her three eyes never leaving her opponent. Her movements were hypnotic, her gaze captivating and Hamathael found himself silent. He fought harder and pressed the tempo even more. The pair fought close and furiously with neither able to gain the upper hand. In the next twenty seconds, more strikes were exchanged than in a full scale war between mortal armies. Every so often Hamathael shifted where the ‘floor’ was and they would be battling parallel to the ground or upside down in the air, or back on the brown mossy carpet of the throne room.
For a battle between two super powered legendary beings it was remarkably conventional so far, albeit at inhuman speed. The overfiend was the first to exercise his demonic power.
“Spring never comes and the sins of winter are never brought to light. Snows of Caina!” He growled the menacing incantation, and the throne room was suddenly filled with drifting black snowflakes.
Saet spun a full circle and used her wings to blow the black snow away, but one from perfectly above her drifted down past her notice and lightly touched her shoulder. It instantly turned a coin sized section of her skin black where it touched. She gritted her teeth in pain as the Soul damage wracked her essence. She opened her mouth to begin her own incantation but the overfiend pressed in then with renewed ferocity, sensing his advantage.
Another snowflake touched her light skinned back and she gasped in pain. She saw Niiya’s prone form from the corner of her eye, and the deadly snow that was drifting perilously close to the little cat girl. Hamathael laughed his wicked laugh, shrill and horrible. A torrent of emotion rolled over Saet then. Horror, rage, and frustration swirled and felt as though they might overwhelm her.
In what felt like slow motion, a black snowflake touched Niiya’s bare shin and she whimpered weakly. Time stopped and the glowing pupils of Saet’s eyes dilated. Every emotion suddenly iced over in that moment. “No.” The simple denial echoed through her entire spirit. The emotion was replaced with a deep and growing power, a strength she had forgotten over the millenia of sitting and fretting.
“No.” She repeated out loud. The word silenced Hamathael and he grinned somewhat sheepishly.
“So you’re finally awa-...”
Three beams of crackling blue energy shot from Saet’s eyes, converging on a single point on the overfiend’s chest. He was hurled into the wall of the throne room, and the wood of the great tree cracked and groaned at the tremendous impact. The black snowflakes faded as his concentration was broken.
Before he could begin to recover, Hamathael felt another explosion of force on his already scorched chest. It was the edge of Saet’s starlight katana as she crashed into him leading with a back handed slash. Dozens of layers of defensive magic combined with his god like stats and baseline resistances kept the blow from being fatal, but oh the pain he felt as the tree trunk at his back gave way and they suddenly punched through ten feet of solid wood and into the open air.
They tumbled and fought like two inverted flames, each trying to devour the other. Great branches exploded into splinters, caught up in the titanic struggle as they tore through the canopy of the weakened celestial oak.
Then they were free of the canopy, somewhere south of the tree. As one they disengaged, flying two hundred meters above the dead jungle below. A sound had caught both of their attention. It was so low that it hadn’t even registered in their ears but vibrated their cells and distorted the air. They turned as one with widening eyes and dropping jaws.
A head, covered in immense red and black obsidian crystals was level with them even at this altitude. It was connected to a body that dwarfed the landscape and radiated such power that it made the pair suddenly nauseous. Simultaneously they muttered “Appraisal.”
“Oh dear.” Hamathael broke the silence. “My little pet cyclops has gone out of control and become a World Eater somehow.” He turned to Saet and raised his hands in a shrug. “Temporary truce? I can’t very well conquer the world if he eats it.”
Saet’s reply was a grim nod. Inside, she could guess what had forced such a terrible evolution. Zurg must have destroyed a certain infernal count. She felt an unexpected grief and rage at the realization. The little girl would be absolutely crushed.
“Were you able to see his resistances?” Saet asked Hamathael coldly.
“No. Just his name, title, and more Health than I’ve ever seen in one place.” The demon replied with a chuckle.
“Damn.” Saet cursed.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“Nothing should be resistant to this.” The overfiend said, flying closer and stretching his hand out toward Zurg, who seemed to be uncomfortable with his new body and was thrashing his head back and forth erratically. “Spring never comes and the sins of winter are never brought to light. Snows of Caina!”
A cloud of black snowflakes drifted into the titanic red scaled body and vanished.
“You’re right he’s not resistant to Soul damage.” Saet frowned. “He’s immune.” She added as she lifted her arms overhead, palms facing skyward.
The sinking sun’s last rays fell behind the distant mountain range in that moment and the stars made their first appearance of the night. Twilight was the hour of the celestial, when Saet’s power reached its crescendo bathed in the light of the sun and stars.
A tiny spark appeared above her outstretched palms, and flickered as though struggling for life.
“All death is in service to life. Return this lost child to your loving embrace. “Merciful Sun!” Saet spoke the incantation and the flickering light roared to life, swelling in size and intensity to become a pure white sphere the size of a small house.
Hamathael unconsciously floated several feet away, the holy energy was incredibly strong. Just standing too close to such ultra tier holy magic would give him the demon equivalent of a sunburn. Zurg still didn’t turn his gaze on them even with the miniature star being born so nearby. He was seriously distracted by whatever was happening to him. Could his body be simply collapsing under its own unearthly size? He had heard of some giant growth spells killing their casters in that exact fashion.
With a gentle flick of her wrists, the blinding orb floated gently at first toward the titan but built momentum with each traveled inch. Suddenly like a strong magnet released near iron, the orb shot forward and smote Zurg directly in his chest.
The entire world flashed white. Hamathael and Saet had the good sense to snap their eyes closed and turn their heads at the moment of impact. Another jarring, ultra low pitched roar shook the region. When the celestial and overfiend opened their eyes, they found Zurg’s immense eye glaring at them from behind a crystalline blood red lens. A patch of scales where Saet’s attack landed had been vaporized, and an angry burned welt twenty meters in diameter seemed to be refusing to heal. Scales formed at the edges and simply fell away. Holy magic to Zurg was like fire to a troll it seemed and could not be recovered through regeneration.
The roughly featured mask of obsidian suddenly showed a horizontal jagged crack of light where the mouth would have been and it opened impossibly wide. Black and red energy crackled from within, building in power.
Saet and Hamathael flew to either side as fast as they could, sensing the coming calamity. A fifty foot wide beam of destruction instantly filled the space they had just been hovering in, stealing the air and burning hotter than lava. The beam punched a hole through the celestial oak’s canopy, barely missing the great trunk and continued on to strike the mountain range beyond. A series of distant mushroom shaped explosions erupted as the beam impacted the rock and vaporized it, leaving a smoking unnatural valley behind.
“You got his attention!” Hamathael shouted as he surveyed the destruction. “Now what?”
Saet was at a loss. That spell was a trump card, and she had expected it to do much more than burn away some scales. Perhaps if she cast it once more at the weakened area she could reach his heart and cause enough unhealable damage that it would put the beast down for good. It was most likely futile she knew, and the cost of casting the spell a second time would mean her own almost certain death.
“All death is in service to life...” She began the incantation and the beginning pull of the magic strained her soul, twisting it discordantly as though attempting to stop her. Return this lost-” Saet halted as a strange rumble emanated from Zurg’s body.
She watched in awe and horror along with Hamathael as Zurg’s great chest began to glow and expand like an overfilled bladder. What horrible attack was he going to unleash now!? The titan staggered backwards and threw his huge head back to scream, and a jet of dark red flame erupted into the sky from his mouth. His chest continued to distend, and a grotesque bubble began to form where Saet’s attack had taken his protective scales. It grew and grew like a balloon, and the pair of observers realized that it was time to flee what was obviously coming.
The behemoth began to fall backwards. The bubble finally burst, rocketing Zurg onto the ground with the force of a meteor. Fire and a concussive shockwave tore through the sky, lighting the entire valley as though the sun had suddenly appeared full in the sky. As their vision returned after the blinding flash, Hamathael and Saet were the sole witnesses of the catastrophic aftermath of the great titan’s fall. His great body rested in a smoldering heap of glowing bone and obsidian, with an empty black cavern where his chest once was. Zurg’s aura had vanished, and the handful of rook horrors and two of the stronger cyclops that had survived the blast were wandering in aimless confusion.
The area seemed utterly surreal, and bereft of all color aside from the glowing tips of Zurg’s blasted ribs. An empty silence that rang the ears settled over the land, and the groans of the monsters sounded magnified like the cries of infants in the dead of night.
Saet and Hamathael could find no words. The overfiend opened his mouth and promptly closed it as he noticed something happening inside the black cavernous chest cavity of the fallen cyclops. Then suddenly the world turned black. It wasn’t the slow forming of clouds casting a shadow. It was as if the stars and moon were mere candles doused by a bucket of water. Both Saet and Hamathael had the ability to see in darkness, and neither could see their own hands an inch before their eyes. The darkness had a viscous, tangible quality and it caressed their skin with cold velvety softness as it traveled past them down, in the direction of Zurg’s body. A moment later, and the darkness fully passed them, and they recognized it for what it was.
“That can’t be.” Hamathael whispered. “That darkness that swallowed the whole valley. It was a tendril of evolution!?”
“Gray’s getting strong again.” Saet and Hamathael flinched at the unexpected voice of Niiya behind them. They turned to see her hovering perfectly in place, her hands and feet were both surrounded by small clouds of ash.
“The Ash Huntress!?” Hamathael balked. “How did you overpower my sleep enchantment?”
“I was never asleep.” Niiya said simply. “I was pretending and meant to attack before you got knocked outside. That snow hurt me, Gray won’t like that.”
“The Count is alive?” Saet turned to look once more at the writhing black tendrils in Zurg’s chest. “I see you’ve learned to fly, Niiya. That is very impressive.”
“I leveled up alot killing those demons.” Niiya nodded.
“So the thing that killed the world eater is about to wake up, and I’m a little outnumbered here so...” Hamathael cleared his throat and spoke up. “I suppose I can just call this little outing a misfire and be on my-” A cold shadow fell over Hamathael and he squeaked involuntarily as a suspiciously familiar aura caused him to spin in alarm.
A large, muscular hand was around his throat then. He began to use an ability, but a slight squeeze from the hand caused a million alarms of panic to scramble his ability to think. His eyes followed the powerful forearm to the god like physique. The face was mostly hidden in a deep hooded cloak, save for a pair of piercing lights for eyes and a row of grinning sharp teeth so white, they seemed to glow. The most telling piece was the cracked black halo gently spinning above its head. His grandfather, the Grand Overfiend had employed such a creature on occasion to eliminate rivals or display a grand show of force to his peers. Had the old bastard sent this one to punish him for acting on his own? Whatever the purpose, this monster was known as a fallen Dominion and there was one absolute rule of dealing with one. Never, ever let it touch you. The teeth moved, and a voice came forth like a needling breeze.
“Niiya.” It spoke past him to the Ash Huntress. “This man hurt you?”
“You look scary Gray.” Niiya answered. “Did you get hurt too?”
“There was... pain.” The fallen Dominion said, and a slight shudder coursed through him. The movement made Hamathael spasm as the flow of energy in his spirit body was being disrupted by the horrible grip.
“Are you going to kill him then?” Saet spoke up after steeling her nerves and finally resolving that this unspeakably terrible thing was indeed the former infernal count.
“There is no death for a demon.” Gray replied. “I will send it home. For hurting Niiya, it won’t be a pleasant trip.
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