Power, flowing from her swords, raced through Theresa's veins.
Energies churned throughout her being, uniting with her reinforced lifeforce. They shone with the essence of life and divinity.
Gabrian shrank back. “What is this?” he cried.
The world continued slowing around the huntress, filling her every muscle fibre with newfound strength. Her heart thundered, her bones hardened, her senses sharpened, growing clearer.
Power surged inside her core, linking her training, energy and will. It flowed through the link between her and Brutus, fuelling the connection, strengthening it. Together, their power grew, flowing between them, concentrating in the blades and the cerberus’ form.
Their energies grew to overflowing, spilling over, finally splitting.
As Theresa raised her swords, the blades shone with a strange witch-light that they’d never had before, it drifted off them, replicating their shape in phantom replicas around her.
The phantom blades hovered in the air as she held the swords higher, raising them above her head. Two shimmering blades of life energy hung suspended in the air on either side of her body, forming six blades in all; four phantom and two of solid steel. Three on either side. Three, like the number of heads Brutus had. Theresa felt giddy, elated. She was smiling. “This was your secret all along, great-grandfather, this was it.”
“I don't care about you or anyone related to you,” Gabrian snarled. “Every last one of you is going to die—but you’ll be the first.”
He lunged suddenly, his sword swinging down.
She blurred away, now a perfect union with the Twinblade—her swords a natural extension of her body, as united with her as her fingers and toes. The phantom blades trailed after her sword at first, then began striking from different angles.
Two flew up, joining together, locking onto Gabrian’s blade, deflecting it to the side. The First Apostle tried to free it, but the phantom blades slid down the metal weapon, catching it by the crossguard.
They tangled with it, while their master struck.
She slashed long draw cuts along his torso, opening deep wounds. He screamed, then muttered a prayer of healing, freeing his sword and springing away. Instantly, two phantom blades circled behind him, slashing the back of his thighs and calves. “Arrrgh!” he cried out, then began healing himself.
No sooner than his flesh had stitched together, the blades were on him again, carving his body like he’d done to Theresa in that snowy forest months earlier.
He became a blur of motion, but was being flanked on all sides. A pair of phantom blades appeared on either side of him, slashing his legs. Two more were behind him, cutting him from behind, and the huntress was in front of him, striking at his face.
He was now the one taking dozens of wounds, and though he was healing them, he was clearly off-balance.
Off-balance, but still dangerous.
“Enough!” he shouted, swinging at her side.
The sword came on in a blur. While she struck high; her swords arcing downward—slashing his back and sides—his foot drove up, aiming for her thigh.
But, she was already gone.
His foot passed through empty air, his sword found no physical weapons waiting, but they did find a pair of phantom blades in her place.
Had she made more?
Where had she gone?
His mind was racing, trying to understand what had happened when two deep gashes pierced his flesh, cutting him down to the bone.
He shrieked, quickly healing his wounds and spinning around, his eyes frantic.
The huntress was there, but how had she gotten behind him?
The pair of phantom blades on either side of him moved to one side, slashing at his right leg.
“Is this more accursed teleportation from you too?” he grunted, thrusting his blade at her face.
She parried with one sword, struck him with the other…then disappeared mid-swing. Where she and her physical swords had just been, only a pair of phantom blades remained.
To his right, where there had been one pair of phantom blades, now they’d been replaced by an enraged warrior, cutting deep into his ribs.
He hissed in agony, swinging at her, but she disappeared again.
Another deep cut split the flesh on his back, soon followed by shallow cuts from the phantom blades.
An answer came to him.
“You are teleporting! You're switching places with those illusionary swords!” He was so confident.
She shook her head. “No, priest. You're wrong.”
The huntress came at him with a fury then, burying him in a flurry of strikes from all sides. He was on his back foot, stumbling away, his sword twirling in his hand. The First Apostle was still faster and stronger, but the gap between them had lessened, and now he wasn’t only fighting off two blades, but six, with a single arm.
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The phantom blades hit nowhere near as hard as the huntress could, but they cut deep, he couldn't ignore them. He prayed to Uldar—feeling the accumulated divine power in the chamber flowing to him—he had to keep using it, healing his wounds; if he paused, he'd be dead.
“You are unworthy!” he shouted. “You are just some impudent whelp! The Fool conjured those hideous beasts and tricked me with his ill-gotten magic, but you are some yearling warrior! You’re green! I got the better of three Heroes just outside this very sanctum! You cannot compare to me!”
“Maybe,” she said, twisting her sword and slashing deep into his arm, nearly taking it off; his reflexes saved him. “You had two arms back then. Last time we met, you had your shield and armour. Both times, you seemed to be in your right mind. You seem off now, devoted servant of a dead god. If you weren't, you'd realise what's actually happening. I'm not switching places with ‘illusionary blades’, as you called them.”
The huntress brandished the Twinblade and the phantom swords spun around him. “These swords are a part of me. Both the steel ones in my hands, and their siblings around you. They're all me, and I’m one with them. It doesn’t matter if my hands are holding—”
She raised the Twinblade. “—these…”
She vanished, appearing at his side where a pair of phantom blades had hovered. Those blades emerged where she had been a moment before. “…those…”
She vanished again, as the other set of phantom blades that had been behind him appeared in her place. The huntress slashed at his back.. “…or that pair…we’re all one. It might look like we’re switching places, to a layperson, but you practise life enforcement; you should know better. The fact that you think I'm just switching…tells me just how off you are, but considering what you’ve done, you’ve always been off.” She shook her head and rushed him. Her assault was furious.
His world was a flurry of slashing swords as she moved around him with the Twinblade’s phantoms.
She was cutting him to ribbons.
Blood poured from a deep gash along his forehead, filling his eyes, blinding him. He fled, uttering a Flight spell and shooting toward the sanctum’s ceiling, his chest heaving as he called on his divinity to heal his wounds. The phantom blades hovered around ten feet away from the huntress, straining to chase him, but he was too far from the swords.
She glared at him.
“Coward,” she muttered, turning toward Brutus, rushing to help him. The cerberus was on his feet, he’d been empowered by the Twinblade’s energies and was stronger, bigger, and moving faster. He was speeding around the monstrous looking fae, snapping at his legs from all sides.
“Stop it, damn you!” the fae hunter cursed the hound, grabbing at him, trying to snatch him up with his claws. “Keep still, you—” He looked up, seeing Theresa and the phantom blades coming for him. “Uh oh.”
Fire suddenly rained down from above.
Theresa skidded to a halt when flames landed in front of her, forming a straight line, erupting in a wall of roaring flame.
She glared up at the First Apostle, he was looking down on her. “You are right, I am not in my right mind. Both my mind and soul are wounded, but while I cannot best you with my sword now, I can still wield divine miracles. Uldar’s might is always with me!”
Chanting a powerful incantation, he sprayed a cone of energy at her, forcing her back. At the same time, holy fire encased his blade—extending from it like a whip—lashing at her.
In seconds, the huntress was dodging spells and fighting for her life.
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“Here, puppy, puppy, puppy,” the Stalker whispered, stalking toward the three-headed hound.
The infernal beast was darting around his legs, rushing in to bite him, then moving out of reach. How’d he get so much faster all of a sudden? So much bigger and stronger? It seemed he’d changed…when his master changed… They’d transformed somehow…
Whatever it was that had happened to them, the three-headed beast was more dangerous now, and he was having trouble catching him. Especially with those infernal sonic blasts.
“You know, this ain't rightfully fair,” he growled at the dog. “I don't rejoin the other half of my body every day, so I'm still getting used to all this, to being in my true body. It's like putting on a shirt you haven't worn for a while and finding it’s not fitting quite as comfortable as you remember. It seems to me you’re just taking advantage of that: I don't know how you're managing to adjust to…whatever it was that happened to you so quick.”
He watched the hound closely, trying to keep control of his mind. A range of bestial urges were rampaging through his thoughts, distracting him, telling him to drop down on all fours and rush after the hound like a ravening monster.
But that wouldn’t do, that’d be a losing game: he'd be acting like an animal, looking to face an animal on its own terms.
He needed to think like a fae. Think like a hunter.
Think like he thought when he was hunting their quarry…wait, that was it!
He grinned at his prey, pursing his lips and whistling.
Much of Uldar’s white floors had been chewed up by spells and maul-blows. The god’s body was lying still on a patch of untouched floor, like a calm island in the middle of a storm-wracked sea.
The Stalker could make use of the ruined stone.
As he whistled, a cloud of stone chips and debris suddenly rose into the air like a swarm of wasps. With a flick of his finger, he swept the shrapnel toward the cerberus, surrounding him in a cloud of shredded stone.
Most of the chips bounced off his bone armour, but some cut into the hound’s wound and struck his eyes, noses and mouths. He bucked and shook, snapping at the air, lashing out with his sonic blasts…and was blind to the Stalker’s headlong rush.
The fae swept the cerberus onto his antlers and charged, bending down, running straight at a wall.
Bone crunched and the cerberus howled, yelping in agony. The Stalker was laughing again, grinding his hooves against the stone, pinning his prey between the floor and Uldar’s wall, crushing him and driving the breath from the creature's lungs. He reached down, slashing at the hound’s wound with his claws.
“Either a crushed carcass or a butchered one,” the Stalker said lightly. “Either way works for me.”
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“Brutus!” Theresa screamed, panic surging through her. She tried to get away to help him, but the First Apostle’s storm of magic kept raining down on her.
It was all she could do to save herself from the flame.
The Stalker’s antlers pinned Brutus between the floor and wall, ramming his bone armour without mercy. A shadow appeared above the transformed fae, growing, descending over the Stalker and cerberus.
Theresa’s mind flashed to a sparring match between herself, Hart, and Grimloch.
She remembered how it had ended.
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“What the…?” the Stalker muttered as a shadow fell over him.
He glanced to his left.
His eyes flew wide.
The sharkman was there, leaning over. The decidedly not dead sharkman.
The sharkman whose jaws were wide open.
Before the fae could spring away, his world turned dark.
Those enormous jaws closed on his head and much of his torso.
They bit down, powered by bone crushing force.
The Stalker panicked, struggling to get free, but—bent over as he was—he had little leverage. His cloven hooves scraped uselessly against the stone floor.
“No!” He screamed, clawing at the monster that had him in its jaws. A powerful hand grabbed one of his overly long arms, three sets of fangs grabbed the other one.
“Let go of me!” he shrieked, sounding like he was in a cave as the sharkman’s jaws continued to bite down. He felt his bones begin to pop. Row after row of razor-sharp teeth shredded his tough hide. “Not like this!” His words sounded muffled. “I’m the hunter, not the prey! Gabrian, help me, my hound! Come to me! I'm the hunter! I'm—”
A single word—grunted by the sharkman biting down on him—reached his ears.
“Lunch.”
His body gave way.
Flesh shredded.
Bone collapsed.
Agonising pain gripped his skull, an impossible pressure built until…
…pop.
The Stalker knew no more.