The earth rumbled under our feet as the deluge of sand dislodged itself from within the city. Oddly, it passed right through the protective bark layer like it wasn’t even there, leaving the tree undamaged in its wake.

Meanwhile, the shaking of the ground grew worse and worse, until an entire section of the battlefield caved in. Demons, locals, and jinn alike all fell into its depths. The fissure spread so quickly that any reaction other than instant flight would have been a vain hope.

I could only be thankful that it stopped before reaching our section of the sands.

The collapse revealed a sight as beautiful as it was harrowing. A vast underground lake chamber stretched underneath us, sparkling under the desert sun like a gem. The many bodies of the collapse’s victims floated on the water. Few were still alive. Their blood stained the oasis red, spreading through the beautiful blue-white lake water in a coruscation of scarlet.

Then the water rippled, and a golem core unlike any I had ever seen or imagined emerged from the depths.

The core was only roughly spherical. Many of its runes were mostly gone, absorbed directly into the material. It looked like one solid chunk of crystal, reminding me of a soul crystal more than anything else.

It drank in all the blood, draining the water of the scarlet intrusion in order to power itself with sufficient mana. Then, gently, it lifted into the air, spinning as it rose higher and higher.

The sand flowed down to meet it.

This wasn’t quite the sand I was used to seeing, though. Rather than a monotonous gold, this deluge of magic-ending catastrophe melted from one color to the next, cycling through every hue of the rainbow several times per second.

It’s like the sand was determined to reflect all the colors of the world within itself, and it was making an admirable attempt.

I glanced at Crewe, eyes wide. Most of us were spellbound by the show. It was difficult for anyone to move, on account of the absolutely massive amounts of mana the golem core was throwing around. Hells unholy, even Glaustro was looking green in the face as he tried to stagger forward.

But if there was a single being in both armies that could still function, I guessed it would be Crewe.

I was immediately proven right. While I was struggling just to take a breath, the lieutenant general was twirling his massive battle axe in a casual manner. With a smile on his face.

I wanted to curse when I caught onto what the lieutenant general was doing.

Something of this scale, involving this sheer amount of power, had to be related to the information I had brought him with the help of Glaustro and Graighast. Crewe was prepared. If he wanted, he could stop this thing in its tracks.

But he didn’t.

Whether to pay back a humiliation or because he was simply bored, Crewe was allowing the summoning to happen.

“Emotions. High to low, weak to powerful, we’re all slave to our emotions.”

The quote rang in my head. I couldn’t remember where it came from, but I knew I had never understood it as starkly as at that moment. I also knew that as long as he could leave unharmed, Crewe would sacrifice every last one us happily to speed along the thing forming above out heads.

I guess I should be glad he didn’t need to. There were already enough dead on the field to fuel the thing’s growth. The floating golem core drained them all of blood at record speed, reducing them to mere mummy dust as it swelled and bulged.

Finally, bits of the golem began to coalesce out of the special sand, slamming into place. Its torso formed first, then its limbs, and finally its head, eyes igniting with power.

“Fight.”

The word shook me to my core. I felt like I had been gutted. Like some massive hand had reached inside me and simply plucked all my organs away.

“Struggle. Never surrender. Protect. Your. World.”

Words echoed out of the thing. I couldn’t tell if it was remembering its own orders, or giving them out.

It didn’t matter, because every single member of the opposing army suddenly looked ready to lay down their lives, just on the off-chance it would please the hovering golem.

The locals hadn’t exactly fled before. That was the jinn’s contribution to the battle. But they had given into their panic, running around like headless chickens that could be easily harvested.

Now, as newfound determination filled them, that weakness vanished. They closed ranks, coordinated, and advanced much more steadily towards their deaths.

I say deaths, because there would be no other outcome for them unless the golem could somehow finish off Crewe… which I seriously doubted.

With a new rabid look in his eyes, the lieutenant general unleashed a whole new spell of his own.

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“Gather!” declared the mass of living shadow, with more force and personality than I could achieve in multiple lifetimes.

What followed was less fun. Dozens upon dozens of demons simply exploded, gore and bits of bone raining down on the people unlucky enough to get caught in the blast radius.

People like me and my unit.

None of our troop exploded. That was good. But I was still reeling in a new round of trauma.

I have no idea where these demons have been, and ewww, I can taste them in my mouth!

Middle of the battle or not, I cast the cleansing spell on myself and immediately felt profound relief. After some intense tugging on my arm, I recast the spell on a very disgruntled-looking Mia.

The rain of demonic bits and essence all landed on Crewe, making his own aura swell. By the time it stabilized, it was several times stronger than usual, and the lieutenant general was not done yet.

“Merge!” he screamed again.

This time, it was the worms that responded to his call. Those close enough to him slithered at their top speeds. The others erupted into strings of black flesh, tearing through the air in their eagerness to reach their master.

Regardless, their fate was the same.

They all slammed into Crewe and vanished straight into his chest. For all of a second, nothing happened.

Then the lieutenant general started to grow.

His body shifted, elongated, and mutated, until he resembled some weird chimeric mix of a lamia and one of his worms. Just… bigger, in every way. Bigger muscles, bigger body, and bigger weapon.

The ground had produced the largest golem I had ever seen, but the transformed Crewe towered over the construct, still twirling his massive battle axe casually.

“Let us see what kind of challenge you can present!” Crewe declared. Then, his shadow-mouth ripping open into a terrifying smile, he dove down at the golem.

Every single grain of sand on our battlefield started to shiver and rattle in place. He was drawing the wrath of the entire desert world upon himself, but he didn’t seem to notice. He just kept smiling as he charged the golem that threatened the success of his conquest campaign.

I could only partially pay attention to their battle. The apocalyptic ringing of blows and the devastating swipes of what seemed to be all the sand in the world were, at least for the moment, of secondary concern.

My primary concern was the golem’s effect on local morale.

The defenders were going all out with a ferocity that would match a demonic recruit on their first invasion day. And remember, demonic recruits have a command planted in their brain, whipping their emotions into a murder-frenzy, so…

They just kept coming. Swipe after swipe, dodge after dodge, wound after frustrating wound. I mostly received those because I got sloppy, or because I got stupid, or because I was plain old not good enough. Mia, Bronwynn, and Glaustro rescued me from almost certain temporary death several times, throwing themselves in front of me or blocking attacks long enough for me to respond.

At least I could reciprocate when it came to Mia.

The cat girl needed her own fair share of saving, especially when her bloodlust got to her. It didn’t happen often, but there were definitely a few times when she devolved into little more than pure murderous instinct. It was then that I intervened, both to protect her from unexpected blows she seemed incapable of caring about, and to remind her of where she was and what she wanted to become.

Ironically, my emotions were fine. I definitely felt prickly at times as instincts and desires brushed uncomfortably across my mind, but the danger was actually helpful.

I couldn’t help but stress over the people who were important to me. So, whenever I was tempted to give into my own murder-y impulses, I channeled those less-than-stellar urges into helping me keep an eye on those people.

Was it a healthy way of coping? Definitely not.

Could it lead to some severe codependence later on, especially with how my heart already thundered in my chest when I lost sight of Glaustro, Bronwynn, and Mia for even a second? Yes.

Did I care? No.

If it meant boosting their chances of surviving this mess of a battle, then I didn’t mind what it would do to me long-term. It didn’t make any sense, considering that we could all just resurrect in the Abyss, but I wasn’t exactly a creature of sense and logic at the moment.

Overhead, the battle between a golem and a monster continued to rage.

The golem seemed to have all the abilities of the baser variants, including the large scale area attacks, sand whips, and more. In spite of that, Crewe was doing a wonderful job containing it. Every time the golem tried to send out a sand wave, keratin shielding popped up all over the lieutenant general’s snake body, halting the attempt in its tracks.

When the golem attacked with whips or other physical attacks, Crewe deflected and dodged around them with monstrous ease, behaving like they were barely an inconvenience. And when it came down to a physical brawl, the golem couldn’t afford to engage him for longer than a couple exchanges at a time. Glowing, red-infected cracks littered its form after every blow, spreading until it could absorb enough sand to heal.

Soon, the golem looked like one of those expensive eastern vases which were broken on purpose and then fixed with gold lines. It had no source for more of the higher quality sand, after all, which forced it to rely on the local variant to heal all the damage Crewe was doing.

Most shocking of all, however, was Crewe’s relative immunity to the issues that tended to plague demons fighting in Lagyel’s environment.

Hurricane-level winds buffeted him constantly, backed by sand that was supposed to slice through mana. And he was one of the most powerful demons I knew. As a general rule of thumb, the more powerful a demon was, the more their body turned into mana masquerading as flesh.

Add in Crewe’s weird race? Well, he was supposed to be getting shredded out there every time the golem so much as looked at him funny.

Instead, somehow, he was using his body to tank it all. And while I had only met him once and wasn’t a great judge of such things, he looked like he was having the time of his life.

It’s the weird worm-things. It has to be.

My mind was a whirlwind as I considered the way he had merged himself with the local super-fauna. The process must have strengthened his body against Lagyel’s natural and unnatural environments.

That is to say, Crewe was handily winning, at least for the time being. Unless the golem could pull off a miracle, it wasn’t going to kill the lieutenant general.

As if the construct had heard my thoughts, it paused in midair. Its body parts started to spin, drawing massive amounts of both sand and mana into the golem.

I vaguely heard shouts of alarm and outright terror around me, but it was only when Glaustro lifted both me and Mia off the ground and started to sprint that I realized what was happening.

The stupid thing was going to blow.

It couldn’t win, so it was trying to overload its own ability to gather and process mana and the sand. I didn’t one hundred percent know what that would end up doing, but I could make a few healthy guesses. Grains of sand, launched at who-knows-what speeds, in who-knows-what quantities….

Yeah, staying to watch was a pretty good way to get killed.

At the last moment, Glaustro dove for what cover he could find. Earth rose up to swallow us, shielding us in its embrace as a new, terrible sun lit up the world.