Tiria tripped over the body of a Kobold as she raced towards the Twins. A gout of fire just above her head sent her diving towards the ground to stop it from incinerating her. Most of the Faithful and Angelic Mice around them were dead either from the demon princess or the Underbridge's attack in the sky-ocean, but that wasn't to say that the war had halted.
Leaf Elementals and Goblins were slowly coming awake, some started to flee while others resumed their violent attacks against their perceived enemy. The leaders of the two encampments above only seemed to increase the fervor of their battle.
Tiria finally slid to a stop at Gi's body. A massive two handed sword was embedded in his chest and blood leaked out of it. Somehow, he was still alive, his eyes flickering in a semi-conscious state. As carefully and quickly as she dared, she pulled the sword out of him, which immediately caused a hiss every time that he breathed in and foam started to bubble up around the wound.
[Bubble Cure].
His chest wound shrank, but didn't close so Tiria hit him with another cast of it. It shrank again to a pindrop, but blood still dribbled out. She paused before casting it once more, remembering how injured he'd been after the last time she'd overhealed him, but the Twins yelled in her ear.
"Keep going! His Aether is fading!"
Feeling like it was a mistake, she grit her teeth and healed him again anyways. The wound finally closed, but she couldn't be sure if it was enough. His eyes still seemed lazy and unfocused as he looked around at the battle going on.
"How's his Aether?" It wasn't the same, but no Aether would mean he was truly dead.
"Stable... we think...," the Twins said.
Tiria left her hands hovering above him as she looked to the Twins for any sign that he was truly dying, but when two heartbeats turned to several moments that Gi remained stable, her eyes looked to the sky.
Against the backdrop of the fiery ball that was the sun, Queen Siht had moved to engage the Myshkin Progenitor in an absurdly close quarters combat. Impossibly, the Queen somehow kept herself in the air using a combination of a single flap of her wings and her massive claws that used the Slenderman as a landing platform.
Despite their bulk, the two leaders moved impossibly fast as they fought. Shadows, flame, and claw seemed more blurs of motion than they were truly concrete things. While the Queen seemed to struggle to stay in the air, it quickly became apparent why she'd closed the distance.
All of the Fighting Drakes were superior when able to use the style of their namesake. Being the ultimate form of all the Fighting Drakes, the Queen was the one that proved the rule.
The Myshkin leader launched an array of shadows from its chest, but impossibly, the Queen rolled in the air without losing her proximity to her opponent while dodging his attack. Catching herself on his arm, her neck arced and then struck like lightning, biting deep into his torso.
The Myshkin leader screamed, his voice sounding like the shriek of a thousand hunting owls, and he grabbed at the Queen to try and remove her from him. His attempts achieved little.
Instead, the Queen growled in a way that seemed to be a return to the quakes of the Monster Surge before a huge pillar of fire fell from the sky and enveloped them both.
Tiria flinched backwards from the sudden heat as the Myshkin leader's scream reached a new height. A shadowy figure almost half the size of his original form ripped itself out of the pillar, its form flickering dangerously. Almost an entire quarter of him had been ripped apart by the Queen and shadows bled heavily from his missing shoulder, arm, and upper chest.
The Queen roared out as her foe fled, dropping heavily onto the Fort. The slendermen and moths that had been defending against the other Fighting Drakes followed their leader in retreat. Some of the Drakes rushed towards their wounded while the others split to go find the other Igna Elites.
Tiria's eyes widened. "We need to go."
"No," Galvina said, stepping over to them. "You need to cover my escape."
Even as she said it, the Queen was righting herself and struggling back into the air. She and over half of her remaining Fighting Drakes had locked eyes on Galvina and thusly to the Underbridge Clan currently on the mountain.
She placed her boot on Gi's mouth and levered it open.
"Stop!" Tiria leapt for the demon, but a kick she never saw coming sent her flying backwards. The Twins attempted a [Piercing Light] but Galvina's rapier intercepted it before it had a chance to land, absorbing the Aether directly from the attack.
Galvina drew a flask that had a yellow liquid sloshing around in it then popped off its cork with one hand before draining the entire flask into Gi's open mouth. He immediately started to splutter and cough.
"You'll kill him!" Tiria's shout fell on deaf ears as she closed Gi's mouth preventing her Progenitor from spitting any more of the potion out. The potion wasn't enough though.
Gi started jerking and his eyes flickered between focused and unfocused, but he didn't rise to his feet with a sudden second wind. Galvina snarled and then spat onto the mountain.
"Useless. You owe me your life, fucking otter." Gi didn't and couldn't respond. Instead, Galvina sent a swift kick off to the side that sent a charging Kumo flying before her eyes landed back on Tiria. "If you want to live at this point, you'd better be ready to fight."
It had only been at most a couple hours since the end of their attack on the Spiked Eagles, and despite her Vitality, exhaustion hung heavy from her shoulders. Every movement required a force of will from shaky limbs, but Tiria knew that Galvina was right.
The Queen and her retinue were already flying over and there was no way that their attack on the Faithful would be forgiven at this point. The only slim chance that she had to get Gi out was to fight.
But it was a slim chance. Probably non-existent.
She was glad that Samba and the rest of the clan had made it out. Even if all of the Underbridge on the mountain died, the clan would live on. That brought acceptance to her heart.
Kumo stepped up beside her. "What's the plan?"
"We have to fight."
Kumo gave her a strange look. "That's a terrible plan." Tiria blinked. The violence obsessed Kumo was telling her that her plan to commit violence was bad? She didn't even have any words to respond. "I'll keep the Drakes off. You and the Twins get to Poe and Georgia and use them to escape. Let Poe fly the Boss off the mountain if needed."
"You're going to sacrifice yourself?"
"No, I'll kill them all myself. Now go!" The Drakes had closed in and Galvina had already readied herself at the front, waiting for her enemy to arrive. Kumo sprinted forward to catch up to Galvina while the Twins huddled over Gi, arms extended to blast any monster that came close.
A flicker of hope bloomed in Tiria's chest and warred with a matching explosion of guilt. It was impossible for Kumo to kill all of them, but her actions might just save Gi. Tiria looked around the battlefield and found Georgia battling back a mob of Leaf Elementals that were less trying to fight and more trying to swarm past her to leave. Poe floated just above her head.
"POE!" The little dragonfly perked up at his name being yelled and spun around until he saw her. "You need to get the Boss!"
Boss! Poe's voice echoed through all of those present as he realized that he was barely moving and flew across the battlefield towards him. Georgia watched her partner fly across the mountain and started yelling out commands to her Rhinos and the group slowly started to fight their way over to where Gi was.
Before any of that happened, the Fighting Drakes struck.
Kumo used [Quick Steps] to dodge from a Drake's dive, but the same Drake turned the attack into a roundhouse slash that followed Kumo's dodge. Activating [Commander] allowed her summon to kick her out of the way, but the Drake simply cut through the summon before it could do more than eat the attack and its follow up strike scored Kumo's face.
A [Piercing Light] from the Twins was the only thing that saved Kumo from dying. Her entire face was covered in blood from the attack and it was all she could do to run from the speed, might, and skill of a single Fighting Drake. Tiria rushed forward to help her, but another Fighting Drake found her and immediately she could feel the pressure.
Every movement Tiria made was countered by the Fighting Drake. Her [Waterborn Armory] could slow its attacks, but it couldn't stop them. Each dodge or parry of her strikes brought the Fighting Drake unerringly closer. She was hopelessly outmatched.
They never had a chance.
The Twins were doing the best out of any of them. Wax and Wane stood over the Boss's downed form, shoulder to shoulder, as they sent beams of light slicing towards any Fighting Drake that dared get close. Fighting Drakes dove one after another, but the Twins were forcing out [Piercing Light]s much faster than should have been possible, pushing their Skill well past its limits.
Tiria's Soul seemed to creak in sympathy as her fellow Elites bit back the pain of pushing their Skill so far.
Both Wax and Wane growled and grit their teeth as they sent out an impossibly fast and overcharged [Piercing Light] at one of the Fighting Drakes as it attempted to dive. A beam of light blew through its snout and the monster didn't even cry out as it fell lifelessly from the sky to crash into the mountain.
A strange wail went out from the surrounding Drakes at the death of one of their own and Tiria watched helplessly as three of them organized into formation.
"RUN!" Tiria's shout didn't reach them over the battle and only gave her opponent an opening. Its claw cut open her side and sent her sliding across the rocky ground. Compared to her fear, the pain was nothing and even as she scraped herself off the ground, she couldn't keep her eyes off the Twins.
Aether must have churned in the three regimented Fighting Drakes as the Twins seemed to squint against the sudden light of their coming attack. Yet, they didn't back down.
"DODGE!" Tiria called out again, but Gi was below them. She'd never have left him to die in their position either. None of them would.
"WE PROTECT THE PEAK!" Wax and Wane yelled in unison and they released a bar of light that seemed to be made of the same liquid hot fire as the sun. Simultaneously, all three of the Fighting Drakes released their [Breath Attack], a fire that quickly shifted from red to blue as its temperature sparked upon leaving their collective mouths.
That blue fire shot forward like a missile to collide into the bar of light of the Twins. A pure white flash blinded all those that looked on and an explosion sounded just a heartbeat later like a thunderclap following lightning.
All three of the Fighting Drakes still hovered in the air and Tiria's eyes fell to the Twins and Gi. Gi remained miraculously untouched, protected by the overpowered attack of the Twins.
The Twins were not.
Half of Wax's entire body had been scorched black, leaving all of his fur burned completely off and the revealed flesh cooked through. Tiria's Soul senses were practically non-existent, but as Wax's body fell to the side dead, she could feel a snap in the air as though something unbreakable had been broken.
Wane dropped to his knees and blank whiteless eyes looked up to the sky as he screamed. Since Tiria had spawned, she'd heard terrible things. Monsters being killed through slow, agonizing deaths was, if not common place, common enough.
After the Dungeon when Gi's entire left side had looked like it had been scraped across sharp rocks, his pain had been strong enough to cut through his unconsciousness for him to scream. That would sit with her for the rest of her life.
This was still worse.
Wane's voice cracked as his throat tore, but still he didn't stop screaming. His cry continued on without ending because compared to the pain of his Soul being torn apart; the destruction of his body was nothing.