I found an ill-fitting suit of light armor on the racks and threw that on quickly, while I snatched up a nearby spear and pair of fighting daggers. It was all trash compared to my Order armor, and especially my hand-crafted Oninite blades.

But it would have to do.

When I was ready, I met up with the others at the door, similarly kitted out in Loyalist junk. Longstripe and his squad eyed us evilly for wearing their colors, but didn’t say anything.

Dusk barely waited a moment after we finished to kick open the door to the courtyard without another word. She charged out the door, with Longstripe and his loyal soldiers right after her. Sylvia, Crook, and Thirty-Two followed right after, but I paused for a moment before I left.

I looked over my shoulder at the gathered, frightened masses of innocent refugees that had been pulled into Nerexxa’s scheme. I…wish there was more I could do for them right now, but there wasn’t. I couldn’t reassure them that everything was going to be alright, because I didn’t know. I couldn’t get them out of here, so they were out of the line of fire. And I couldn’t even protect them, when Nerexxa was so much more powerful than I was.

The only thing I could do, was my best to deal with the Vampire holding us all captive.

I took a deep breath, turned around, and charged right out the door. I was hoping to see the battle going well. Either Baldric had been matching Nerexxa, or the addition of everyone who had joined the fight had turned the tide against the Vampire.

Unfortunately…

That wasn’t the case.

Illuminated by the menacing crimson glow of Nerexxa’s disturbing runes, I found the situation rapidly deteriorating.

I watched as one of the Loyalist soldiers following Longstripe was torn in half almost nonchalantly by Nerexxa, little more than fodder for her razor-sharp talons. At the same time, she grabbed the head of the mace that Longstripe had grabbed from the armory, as the man did his best to crush her head with a roar. She didn’t even flinch at the force of the blow, and I was sure that it was more than strong enough to kill me from a graze alone. Nor did she care about the other soldiers trying to hack at her with their standard-issue blades.

Longstripe was being supported by Crook, but it didn’t look like she was having much success either. Crook tried to attack Nerexxa with her combat stave, only to have to frantically block a sweeping blow from one of the Vampire’s four wings. The woman-thing was using her newly grown appendages to great effect, either blocking or striking out with them as true extensions of her own body. The hardened edge of the wing snapped Crook’s stave in two, causing the woman to stumble back and stare at the shattered wood in her hands in disbelief and despair. After a moment, though, she rallied herself and jumped back into the fray, swinging the splintered ends of her weapon in both hands.

Meanwhile, Sylvia and Thirty-Two were trying to pepper the Vampire with arrows from the Loyalist bows they had grabbed. They had found vantage points around the courtyard to do so, but…it didn’t seem to be very effective. Nerexxa was barely paying attention to the arrows that were arriving in a steady stream from the two archers. Most of the time she didn’t even flinch as they either ricocheted off of the scaled surface of her skin and wings, or were disturbingly absorbed by the nearly fluid surface of her blood-red ‘dress’.

I didn’t see Dusk, or importantly, Baldric for a moment. I only found them when I looked up at the remains of the balcony that I had been captive on, now resting in pieces on the bedrock of the courtyard.

I hurried over to them, barely skirting the furious melee in the center of the courtyard. I was able to see what was keeping Baldric out of the fight when I got closer to them, and I grimaced at the sight.

Dusk was frantically trying to treat a massive gash in the dwarf’s abdomen which threatened to spill his entrails all over the shattered stone below him. He barely seemed to notice it, however, and was struggling to push himself up into a sitting position.

I guess that answered the question of if Baldric could take Nerexxa by himself.

I hurried over to the two of them, dropping my spear as I did so and into a skid that stopped at his side. Over his protestations, I ripped off a section of his cloak, dissolved it into individuals with Aetherial Melding, and got to work stitching him up.

I did my best to ignore the sounds of battle behind me as I treated my leader.

With the practice I’d been getting recently, it only took me moments to do a slapdash job of stitching Baldric closed. As soon as I was done, he abruptly sprang to his feet and snatched up his hooked blades lying on the stone nearby.

I hissed at the movement. “Be careful, damnit. That isn’t exactly medical-grade thread keeping your insides from the outside.”

Baldric spared me a brief nod of acknowledgment, before his eyes lingered on Dusk for a moment with frustration visible in his gaze. “Shouldn’t have come back for me, girl,” Was all he said, before he rushed to join the fight with Nerexxa, uncaring for his wounds.

He missed Dusk’s answer. Or…maybe he didn’t, considering how high his perception must be.

“I couldn’t leave you behind…” She whispered, before shaking her head. Dusk didn’t even look at me before she followed after him.

I sighed and stood up, snatching up my shitty spear as I did so. When I turned to face the battle again, I saw that in the brief moments I had spent patching up Baldric, all of the Loyalist soldiers but Longstripe had been slaughtered.

Now it was only Longstripe, Crook, Baldric, and Dusk in melee range of the monster in the shape of a woman. Longstripe and Baldric were working in a surprisingly well-coordinated attack pattern to try and keep her occupied, while Dusk and Crook were dancing around at the edges. They seemed to be trying to hit her from multiple angles, to at least take her attention away from our heavy hitters. The long-range attacks from Sylvia and Thirty-Two continued in the meanwhile.

Well, I knew where I needed to join in.

I ignited the head of this spear with The Scintillant Blade, and dove into the edges of the melee with Crook and Dusk.

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This close to the transformed state of Nerexxa, I swear I could physically feel the sensation of blood sliding against my skin. The world was tinged ever so slightly crimson, and the air was thickened somehow, even though I could still breathe. I wasn’t sure if it was just the copious amounts of blood that had already been spilled in this courtyard, but the scent of iron hung heavy all around me.

This…this had to be her Mantle. In the same way Grey darkened the world around him, and Honoka ratcheted up the heat, Nerexxa drowned the world in blood.

Baldric, and surprisingly Longstripe as well, had Mantles deployed as well. I was familiar enough with Baldric’s razor-sharp air scraping against my skin to recognize it for what it was, even if it was still unpleasant. The other sensation, that of a large, angry animal breathing heavily against the back of my neck, was new though. This must be what Longstripe’s own Mantle manifested as. It made me wonder in the back of my rings why he hadn’t deployed it during our duel, but I dismissed the thought.

Instead, I focused on trying to focus in the first place. The combined effect of all three Mantles weighing against me was beyond oppressive. Not just mentally, but physically as well. The sheer weight of their power pressing down on me was so great that I had to deploy Sylvan Vigor at half-strength just to move through it.

But I endured, and once I was in position, I struck out at the joint of one of Nerexxa’s wings guarding her back. She obviously somehow felt or saw the strike coming, but seemed to believe that her wing would be able to protect her from my burning blade.

I felt a surge of triumph at how she wasn’t taking it seriously.

Because it worked on her.

The head of my low-quality spear, enhanced by my racial Skill, cut right through the scaled membrane of her taloned wing. It reached the ball joint of her monstrous appendage at speed, and with a slice, completely severed the limb.

As it fell to the bloodstained bedrock below, the battle slowed for a moment as my comrades took in the sight of the first real wound anyone had dealt to the Vampire.

Nerexxa didn’t cry out in pain at the blow that had deprived her of one of her main methods of battle. Instead, she looked over her shoulder in bewilderment at the sight of her severed wing. “Well,” She blinked. “That’s new.” Her eyes shifted up to trace the path of the spear that had cut the wing from her back, meeting mine. “Nathan dear, I’m…afraid you’ve grown too dangerous to keep around.”

Nerexxa’s entire demeanor shifted at that. Where before she was as playful as she’d been since I’d met her, now she looked serious, as if we were no longer mere flies buzzing about her head. My Skill had shown Nerexxa that at least one of us had the ability to actually hurt her, which caused the Vampire to stop playing.

I nearly died in the next few seconds.

I didn’t even see the attack coming from the Vampire that nearly took off my head as I suddenly lost my novelty to her. I was only able to tell what had happened after the fact. In a move faster than I’d ever seen, from anyone on Vereden, she had wheeled around to lash out at me with long taloned fingers, sharper than any blade.

Baldric saved my life.

He appeared right in front of me, his daggers swirling with razor-sharp winds, to block the claws that nearly beheaded me. He struggled against the strength of the Vampire, but didn’t seem distressed by this. Instead, I was at just the right angle to see him grin at her with bloody teeth. “Got you.” He breathed.

The cadence of the battle changed, then. Seeing that I was able to hurt her, the efforts of everyone else fighting Nerexxa changed from trying to kill her with their own abilities, to protecting me.

Because Nerexxa had realized that I was the real threat to her. Not Longstripe. Not Baldric.

Me.

She was serious now, in her assault. Baldric had shifted almost entirely to protecting me, his blades flashing in movements too quick for me to follow as he deflected her talons and wings. Longstripe, meanwhile, had changed his approach. Instead of merely trying to crush her under his might, he was now attempting to box her in. I was so much slower than Nerexxa, after all. I couldn’t be relied upon to land regular attacks on the Vampire. Instead, she had to be funneled into the path of my spear blade, so she had nowhere to dodge.

Dusk and Crook shifted to emulate Longstripe, even though they weren’t as strong as him. They started to do their best to harry her in whatever way they possibly could. Skills and Spells and Arts I didn’t know started to pepper the monster before us, trying to at least distract Nerexxa.

Sylvia and Thirty-Two abandoned their long-range assault to join in. The three of us may be the three weakest combatants on the field right now, but they still had something to contribute. Illusionary Skills and Arts from Sylvia may barely affect Nerexxa at all, but even a fraction of a fraction of a second of distraction from the Sculpted woman was invaluable. Meanwhile, Thirty-Two began to display previously unseen abilities with fire, of all things. She lashed out with large, diffuse fireballs aimed at Nerexxa’s face, trying to blind her with either the flame itself, or at the very least the smoke of it.

With this combination from everyone, it was slowly, slowly working.

We began to push Nerexxa back and corner her. She was surrounded at all times by others trying to practically force her onto the length of my spear, and it was working. I was managing to land more and more strikes against the vampire, my brilliantly burning spear carving chunks of already rotted corpse from her inhuman frame. The shreds of the facsimile of humanity that she clung to began to fall away, bit by bit, until all that I could see before me was beast.

A monster.

Unfortunately…

This made Nerexxa desperate.

And the desperate do desperate things.

Nerexxa exploded, a vomit-inducing haze of Aether charged blood forcing us back from her. In the midst of it, she suddenly lashed out with all of her remaining limbs, moving even faster than she had before. I…don’t think anyone was prepared for this sudden display of reserved might.

Not even Baldric.

I saw a wing sever Crook's right arm at the shoulder, sending the woman staggering back in a cry of agony.

I saw a talon scrape across the face of Dusk, removing her left eye in a haze of gore.

I saw…another talon pierce the Mithril abdomen of Sylvia and wrench outward with a tortured shriek, opening the metallic surface of my partner for the world to see.

And…

I saw Baldric’s throat release a spray of blood, as Nerexxa opened it with the swipe of a taloned wing.

I was so shocked by the sudden incapacitation of half of our fighting force that I froze for a single, solitary moment.

And that nearly cost me my life.

It was only thanks to my solid gold, enhanced prosthetic that I didn’t die. The blow from Nerexxa came from my left side, and impacted the fake limb in a shower of sparks. I instantly lost feeling in the mystical limb, and went flying to impact the far wall of the courtyard, near where Baldric had been laying earlier.

I hit the stone and nearly blacked out.

Nearly.

Groggily, I looked up from my resting place, a distant sense of panic growing in the back of my rings.

Across from me, in the center of the courtyard, I saw that Nerexxa had grasped Longstripe with both of her taloned lands. They had pierced straight through him from both sides of his abdomen, almost as if he had been run through with the bars of a sharpened cage. He was still alive, if only barely, and staring up at the creature holding him with dull eyes.

“I wanted the final sacrifice to be the dwarf,” Nerexxa hissed, in a strangely resonant tone that carried across the courtyard. “But…you’ll have to do.”

She wrenched outwards with both of her monstrous hands, and Longstripe came apart in an explosion of gore.

The instant his life’s blood touched the runes below, their glow…

Vanished.

Instead, a rumbling began to emanate from deep within the earth, originating from somewhere below the palace. The world began to shake around us, as more and more of the palace started falling apart into rubble.

Nerexxa threw back her head and laughed. “FINALLY!” She screamed into the heavens. “IT COMES! AWAKEN, OH HARROWER, AND BRING OUR MOTHER HOME!”

The ground below us began to fall away, as the stone of the courtyard revealed itself not to be built on bedrock after all.

Just…the roof of a cavern.

I was too stunned and weak to do anything, as the world fell away from me.

Into near infinite darkness.

And as I fell, a shadow rose. It rose and rose and rose, until the crimson tainted light of Tarus above….

Winked out altogether.