The raptor gnawing his leg was barrelled and smashed into by a flaming helldog, who promptly sunk its teeth into the creature and began to tear out its throat.

Ember. Good dog.

Markus felt the crystal still burning in his hand as the canine jumped out of it and began her assault, pulling the raptor off of Markus and shaking it so hard that its body began to rip in two from the force of the motion.

She healed his leg right after, enough so that it didn’t feel as if it were about to fall apart entirely, at the least, then in a flash of motion, grabbed Markus by his clothes and began to yank him up into a sitting position, separating him from the mound of fresh bodies that were threatening to bury him.

“H-holy fuck…”

It was all he could do not to drop everything and hug her after a save like that. Bravado was shot out the fucking window, Pride active or not. All he could feel in his heart right now was gratitude for this creature that had come to assist him when he truly needed it, that had jumped in to intervene right as the scales were about to be tipped against him.

Drathok might have counted on him getting stronger. He might’ve thought this fight enough to put an end to him.

He hadn’t counted on Ember. She barked as he dragged himself to his feet, aching, sucking air through his teeth as he stared through blurred eyes at the cavalcade of fresh raptors now eyeing him and her both as they shook off the gooey liquid of their separation and snarled with hellish ferocity.

If they acted anything like they had up until now, then Markus could be sure that they wouldn’t back down from this fight, no matter how strong either he or Ember might’ve been.

But this time, there were two of them. Two against fucking thirty, sure, but there was no reason they couldn’t trim that number down together.

A raptor broke from the main pack, rushing at Markus, and Ember immediately dove ahead to collide with the creature, smashing it straight to the ground and then clawing its throat out in one fluid motion, pressing her bloodied paw against the sand, singing the creature’s neck even as she tore it to shreds.

She burned hotter than a furnace, yet she stood with perfect calm, a sentinel of protection and loyalty. Markus watched as five more raptors rushed her, and activating his new [Dash] skill to close the distance and protect her, found she didn’t need protecting whatsoever.

With a slash of her tail, Ember made a crescent ring of fire around herself, then began to burn even brighter than before, orange flames transcending to a black fire Markus had never seen from her as she burned through the opposing creatures so thoroughly that their faces began to melt as they attempted to bite her.

Fuck. He’d almost been worried for his furred companion for a moment, and as it turned out, it looked as if he needed to be more worried for the raptors. That said, it wasn’t long until they were attempting to swarm him too, but Ember was too fast. She cut off the three running in Markus’ direction and rammed her horns directly into one, goring it, then leapt back and bit down on another so hard she tore half its leg off.

Damn. Ember was fucking brutal. He’d almost forgotten how crazily lethal she was in all the time she’d spent being a docile harmless little healer dog. Now, she looked like she could easily one-shot a pissed off bear, and compared to a bear, these raptors felt more like snacks than threats.

That said, it wasn’t long until the pair of them weren’t dealing with three or four at a time, but eight or nine instead. Ember took about as much punishment as she gave out, biting and slashing and clawing as she received the same treatment in turn, and as Markus watched her being bundled by eight raptors at once, all of them around the same size as her, he had an idea.

He located the Flame Mana within him, isolated the feeling, and targeted the flames upon Ember’s back, amplifying them.

She erupted in pure heat, fully immune to the fire and scorching everything around her, growling with incredible intensity as the closest raptors to her melted to the bone, falling down, dead before they could even hit the ground.

In this moment, she was truly above anything else fearsome, and Markus fucking adored her for it.

He slashed and shredded with his glaive in an attempt to beat back the raptors charging him as Ember chewed through her remaining foes, but in the mess of bodies assailing him, he lost sight of her, forced to tangle with multiple enemies once more as each of them ripped and bit at his flesh, both arms being bitten into at the same time, searing each of his opponents with the Caustic Mana in his bloodstream even as he attempted to shake off and dislodge them.

Markus had already dug pretty deep into his mana reserves this fight, and besides a single remaining D Grade Essence Stone, he didn’t have too many tricks left to pull out. Hell, his last ditch efforts had already ran off and called for backup, and that backup was literally fighting tooth and nail at this very instant not fifteen feet away.

Markus might not have had another insane ability he could pull out to win this, but he did have grit. He had a lot of fucking grit.

Markus activated [Rend] as he slashed into a nearby raptor, dropping his glaive and digging both hands into the cut he’d made, activating Essence Drain and beginning to [Devour] the creature’s core, replenishing himself even as three more raptors took turns biting into his back and shoulders. He used the blood pooling around him to his advantage, firing it at the eyes of the monsters in an attempt to disorient them, though they only fought on through the pain, ripping at him further and scratching chunks from his flesh, possessed by blind rage.

As Markus’ blood spilt, he added it too to the swirling pool of blood that [Rend] generated, and rather than flow all of it back into himself, he attempted to use a portion as a barrier to fend off attacks from the left, immediately finding that the raptor attempting to strike him from there screeched and recalled after making contact with the blood wall, its head sizzling around the maw.

Markus didn’t take long to figure out what was going on… the Caustic Mana in his blood had mixed with the blood pool of [Rend], and now the blood he had command of was capable of burning his opponents.

This time, when he shot blood into the opposing creatures’ faces, he actually did fucking blind them. Served them right for having eyes.

When Markus realised the potency of his own blood, it made him stop caring so much about healing straight away. He instead drove it out, widening the circle around him and forcing the raptors around him back, then grabbing the big bastard that stood right ahead of him and pouring it into the creature’s mouth at such a rate that its eyes began to bulge yellow and its teeth began to crack from the acid’s intensity.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

One of the raptors eventually broke through, searing its body as it did so, piling into Markus and shoving him through his own blood wall out into an exposed area, the floating blood of [Rend] dissipating even as he landed, though he managed to maintain focus at least long enough to draw some of it back into him.

He felt burnt from the collision, but not enough that he couldn’t move, his natural resistance to corrosion keeping him afloat as he punched one raptor’s face and stomped another’s tail. He’d left his glaive inside the blood pool, and now he was far enough away that he didn’t have any chance of pushing past the group and retrieving it, so he instead used Manifest to conjure a short staff as he had before and started whacking the bastards.

He jabbed. He smashed. He swung his makeshift weapon with all the power of a baseball star, striking his opponents hard and sending them careening to the side or even toppling them entirely, surprised he had the strength within him to do such a thing to a creature of that size, even when attacking at full force.

That said, Pride was probably giving him a LOT of strength right now, and it wasn’t as if these creatures were exactly the most durable despite their size, strength, and speed. If Markus had to guess, the trade-off for their other impressive traits and abilities was their relative inability to tank damage, and Markus was happy to exploit that, using the fastest and most precise attacks he could to dispatch his foes faster than they could spawn.

But still they were spawning… was there no end to this? Had he put in a fight that was absolutely impossible to win? Was the plan to just have his enemy wear him down by sheer attrition, able to continually spawn replacements for as long as one still stayed alive?

Markus just had to kill all of them before they could spawn more backup, but that was easier said than done. If there was an obvious leader or prime raptor, that’d make a world of difference, but from what Markus could tell, all of them were capable of replicating the ability, and none of them looked distinct. It seemed that simply leaving any of these things alive invited fifty more to take the place of the dead ones, and Markus was beginning to wonder if there were any means by which he could rightly prevent all of them from being able to split at the exact same time.

Every time he tried to think about it, he came under attack once more. At one point, one raptor broke free from the pack attacking him and jumped at Ember, though Ember’s response was to teleport the creature fifty feet above the arena alongside her and drop it, teleporting back to the ground just as soon as she’d shook it off.

He landed with a crunch. Crowd fucking loved that one.

Shame they couldn’t drop them all at the same time like that. Hell, the only thing Markus had that could hit everyone at once was Frozen Tomb…

But maybe…

“Ember!”

She heard him immediately and came. She was pretty good at being a dog. He’d make sure to make a fuss of her after the two of them made it out of this.

Markus cast Frozen Tomb, bringing the area around him into a static ice field, waiting and watching as the other raptors drew closer, dodging strikes as the ones nearest him continued to swipe at him, stepping over fresh and flailing bodies as they struck.

“When I say so, I want you to get really, really hot, okay?”

Ember didn’t respond, but he knew she heard him. She always seemed to know what he was thinking, and even now, even while the pair of them actively fought, he knew he could count on her to do her part.

Now all he had to do was wait, wait and be a good piece of bait, throwing himself into the carnage and enacting bloody warfare, bringing each and every raptor in the vicinity marching towards him like he was the Pied Piper of Freaky Dino Cunt, locking each of them around him, bringing his own Blood Mana to the surface and causing his wounds to bleed further and more profusely, only invoking a stronger and more crazed response from the raptors that eyed him.

Yeah, that’s right. I’m a big dumb piece of meat, aren’t I? Fucking delectable. Come on. Come get me.

He didn’t even have to shout now for Ember to start heating up. She understood the mission. As Markus weathered multiple new attacks, he felt the ice beneath him beginning to charge with incredible levels of molten energy, the ice refusing to melt but instead steaming as he struggled to maintain the connection to his ability.

The entire area around him became a sauna that all but melted the nasty little fuckers stood inside of it, Markus dropping to one knee in an effort to stay conscious. He placed every ounce of energy he had spare into maintaining this connection until each and every raptor before him was beginning to wither and fall to the ground, burning and rolling and screeching as their wills were superseded by mounting, dreadful anguish.

Markus maintained the connection as best he could, surrounding himself in as much of the Frost Mana as he could to prevent himself from burning up entirely, staggering his way over to his glaive and bending down to pick it up, almost falling over in the process.

He began limping through the bubbling geyser of energy pulsating around him as he paid a visit to the necks of each struggling raptor, leaving each of them a present—a stab to the throat, precisely positioned at first, but soon incredibly messy as even attempting to hold his weapon became a challenge in the debilitating heat, as he had to resort to using it as a walking stick between executions from the rate at which his body was attempting to give out beneath him.

He executed five, ten, fifteen… he soon lost count entirely, barely able to keep his eyes open through the stifling mist that baked his skin and constricted his airways, resorting to beating and clubbing some of the remainders with the handle when he found that he could no longer summon the energy to move and reposition the glaive.

Ember eventually began to join in the efforts, executing raptors side by side with him, running out like an attack dog and leaving precise bite and claw marks on the enemy’s vital areas, killing them before they could retaliate, before they could recover, soon burning through a majority of the remaining raptors and leaving only one stood before them, attempting desperately to split itself in half even as Markus stumbled his way over towards it.

Markus lifted his glaive for this one. Aimed the weapon. Brought the blade down.

He bisected that fucked before it could bisect itself. Ended this shit once and for all. The moment the blade met flesh, Markus let up Frozen Tomb, and immediately fell to the ground, barely feeling the impact as his face impacted hot sand, his body barely responsive, jolting with small spasms from the intensity of the punishment he’d endured.

He could hear the crowd losing their minds in the background, almost like a distant memory from another life, heard from a distant room for how abstract the sounds felt with his eyes so unresponsive, his legs so stiff, and his mind so bleary. He could hardly blame them for cheering. He thought he might even cheer if he’d seen such a thing, whether he’d go to watch it intentionally or not.

That had been fucking insane. Jesus.

Wasn’t long until he felt a fluffy burning canine licking his face. It slowly brought him back to focus. Hell, was she even worse for wear? When he was able to open his eyes and look at her properly, besides the fact she was covered in blood, she looked totally happy and healthy.

Which was… really fucking reassuring, albeit in a creepy way.

Wasn’t long until Drathok found his way into the arena, hoisting Markus to his feet, staring at him.

“Ah, you survived.”

With that, he turned. Looked at Ember.

She licked her jowls.

“And what exactly is this creature doing here with you?”

Well, shit. Guess the cat was out of the bag. Or rather, the dog was out of the stone.

Either way, shit.