A landslide of sound and stone erupted.
The earth trembled. A concussive wave of sound ripped across the battlefield, shredding the air. Soldiers on both sides clutched their ears and dropped, screaming. The ground quivered, stones cracked, and Amazel hastily raised her hands.
'Aegis!'
But her shield could not withstand the impact. It shattered like glass under the onslaught, the force throwing her back several feet.
Before her, Seb-ath underwent a horrifying metamorphosis. His muscles bulged and swelled, tearing through his old scales. They shed away, revealing a new, gleaming layer of armour—interlocking, diamond-shaped emerald scales that glittered with an unnatural, hard light.
He stomped a massive foot. The ground heaved, splitting open in a deep fissure that raced toward Amazel. She barely hovered in the air to avoid being swallowed. He stomped again, and this time, colossal chunks of bedrock launched skyward. With terrifying speed and precision, he punched and whipped his tail, sending the massive stones screaming toward her like cannon fire.
'Aegis Maxima!'
Amazel conjured her strongest barrier. A dome of light flared around her. The first wave of stone bullets cracked it like ice, the second wave nearly shattered it. Each impact sent vibrations into her bones, her teeth rattling in her skull.
In that moment of distraction, Seb-ath closed the distance with a single, powerful leap. His claws, now like polished scimitars, slashed through her weakened shield as if it were paper. She tried to blink away, but he was too fast. A colossal hand grabbed her leg.
"Caught you."
He slammed her into the ground with apocalyptic force. Stone and dirt exploded skyward. The earth cratered beneath her body, and the shockwave toppled soldiers like wheat before a storm. He smashed her into the ground again and again like a rag doll.
Before she could even gasp, he grabbed her again, swung her around once, twice in a wide arc, building momentum, and launched her body like a projectile into the face of the distant mountain.
CRAAAASH!
Amazel impacted with a sickening crunch of rock and bone. A landslide of stone buried her.
A fraction of a second before she was crushed entirely, she teleported, reappearing on the summit. She was broken. Her light armour was in tatters. Her staff lay in two pieces at her feet. Blood streamed from a dozen fractures and wounds. Every breath was a knife-edged agony.
She collapsed against a rock, discarding her shattered shield. Placing a trembling hand on her chest, she poured the last of her energy into a spell.
'Greater Heal.' A warm, golden light knitted bones and staunched wounds, bringing her back from the brink. She was functional, but far from whole.
Her eyes darted down to the battlefield. Seb-ath was not pursuing. He stood frozen, chest heaving. Plumes of steam poured from his scales like a forge, hissing into the cold air. His reptilian eyes locked on her, unblinking, the pupils thin slits of pure predatory focus. 'Shh! I am overheated.'
'Why is he just standing there?' The thought cut through her pain-fogged mind. 'He almost had me... Why didn't he finish me?' Suddenly her mind clicked. 'Reptile-like body, eyes, and behaviour... his metabolism must also be reptilian. If I'm correct, then his weakness is also similar to a reptile's.'
She raised a hand, not toward Seb-ath, but toward the sky itself. She drew the heat from the air, the moisture from the clouds. 'Blizzard.'
A blue ray shot into the sky. The temperature plummeted instantly. Thick, heavy snow began to fall, blanketing the scorched battlefield in white. The effect on Seb-ath was immediate and drastic. The steam pouring off him lessened. His heaving chest slowed. The cold stabilized him, easing the strain on his overtaxed body and making him more efficient, more deadly.
Instead of charging, he hurled more boulders, this time in wide, scattered arcs to test her.
'Torrent.' Amazel met the attack not with teleportation, but with a precise, high-pressure jet of water from her palm that blasted the stones to gravel. She kept the stream aimed, not at him, but at the ground around him, turning the earth to a freezing quagmire.
Seb-ath hissed in frustration, leaping back to avoid the water. His eyes darted to his shed scales on the ground and he quickly reached for them, using them to cover himself from the cold. 'She knows my weakness.'
"Amazel!" his voice boomed, a gravelly rasp. "Surrender yourself!"
'Huh…why this sudden change? He is definitely up to something.' Amazel kept observing him and said, "And if I say no?"
He raised a clawed hand, a ring on one finger gleaming with a malevolent red gem. "You fight for the people, do you not? This gem is linked to alchemical cores implanted in every one of my soldiers and buried beneath the city streets. I crush it, and my entire territory becomes a funeral pyre. In this grand explosion, your army will not be safe. Millions will die. Your victory will be ashes."
She remained silent, one hand still directing the water, the other hidden behind her back, fingers subtly tracing a pattern on her ring.
He expected horror, desperation, and bargaining from her. What she did next was unexpected. Amazel offered him a cold, bloodied smile. "Crush it."
The command was so flat, so absolute, it stunned him. "What? You would sacrifice countless innocents?!"
"They chose their side with a clear mind," she stated, her voice cutting through the blizzard. "They are not innocents; they are casualties of a war their leader started. Why should I value them over my purpose?" As she spoke, the hidden hand behind her back closed into a fist. Her ring glowed faintly.
"And your own soldiers?!" Seb-ath roared, the cold now beginning to seep past his scales, his movements growing sluggish. "They will be caught in the blast! You would murder your own?!"
"The moment they put on that armour," Amazel snarled, her eyes flashing with icy fire, "they accepted a soldier's death. If they die today, they die having purified this land of your filth. A noble end."
Her hidden hand shot forward. The energy she had been gathering, the cold, her rage, her resolve, fused into a beam of absolute zero. 'Permafrost Ray.'
Realizing his defeat, Seb-ath made his final, spiteful move. "Then we all die together!" He clenched his fist, crushing the red gem.
The blue ray hit him square in the chest. The steam froze instantly into a crystalline shroud. He transformed into a perfect, terrified statue of emerald ice.
For a heart-stopping second, nothing happened. Then, deep in the enemy ranks and in the city beyond, stomachs began to glow with a hellish red light beneath armour and clothes.
But then, a different magic activated. A network of faint blue lines, the teleportation circles Amazel had woven into the very foundations of the enemy's stronghold and linked to her ring, flared to life.
Instead of a cataclysm on the battlefield, the explosions happened there. In the enemy barracks. In the town square. In the depths of Seb-ath's own castle.
KABOOM! KABOOOM!
A chain reaction of detonations erupted miles away, a series of fireballs culminating in a massive mushroom cloud that stained the sky. The battlefield was silent, save for the falling snow. The enemy army stood unharmed but utterly broken, witnessing the total annihilation of their home.
Amazel fell to her knees, utterly spent. "It is... finished."
She teleported back to her camp. Her soldiers stared, dumbstruck, at the distant, burning horizon. She stumbled into her command tent and collapsed onto her cot.
A moment later, she felt a presence. A sinister, cold aura that felt both foreign and familiar. She jerked upright, energy flaring defensively in her palm.
Julie stood in the doorway. But she was changed. A crimson haze, like misted blood, coiled from her skin. Her eyes held a flat, dead calm.
"Julie? What... what happened to you?"
"I awoke my Godhood," Julie stated, her voice a monotone.
"Awoke? But that's... impossible without..." Amazel's voice trailed off, confused by the immense, slaughterous power rolling off her scout.
Silence hung between them until Julie broke it. "General. When did you plan all of this?"
Amazel let out a weary sigh, the energy fading from her hand. "After the stampede. I calculated that Seb-ath's cruelty would extend to more than we could predict. So, I had my infiltrators plant the teleportation anchors days before the battle. The magic in your armour was never a shield. It was a beacon, synced to my ring, to pull you all to safety if his final spite ever came to pass."
Julie's voice was low, laden with a sorrow she could no longer fully feel. "We won. But… we lost 60% of our force. Another 10% are crippled. That includes Commanders Elfir and Tylon." She paused, the name hanging in the air. "And... we lost Gobuka."
Amazel closed her eyes, absorbing the blow. Her face hardened into the mask of a general. "Gather the dead, Julie. All of them. Tomorrow, we return home. They will have their heroes' farewell."
Julie simply nodded, understanding the dismissal and the grief behind the order. She turned and left her general to the silence.
---
Meanwhile, in Dracula's Territory
A rift tore open in the sky before the gothic spires of Dracula's palace. From it stepped Hectate. She was a vision of deadly elegance in a sleek black dress with silver accents and a dramatic white train. A wide hat and gloves completed the sombre look, her parasol tapping lightly on the ground like a sceptre.
At the entrance, Dracula awaited, his crimson wings folded around him like a living cloak. "Welcome... witch," he hissed, his voice a discordant chorus.
Hectate did not break her stride. "I offer you a choice, bat. End yourself, or I will do it for you."
"Fk yourself! You B*h!" he shrieked. His wings unfurled, and a storm of razor-sharp blood lances materialized and shot toward her.
Hectate gave her parasol a single, dismissive tap. A silent shockwave pulsed out, disintegrating the lances into harmless mist. The wave continued, pressing down on Dracula himself.
Enraged, he unleashed his power. 'Blood Hurricane.' A vortex of crimson mist and screaming souls erupted around her, seeking to drain her life.
'Void,' she murmured. A tiny sphere of absolute blackness appeared at the hurricane's centre and imploded, sucking the entire maelstrom out of existence in an instant.
Dracula's eyes widened in genuine fear. He launched himself into the air, fleeing.
"Do you really think you can escape from me?" Hectate sighed. She tapped her parasol again. 'Crossroads.'
A ripple of crimson energy washed over the landscape. Dracula flapped frantically, only to find himself staring at the same courtyard, the same palace, the same smirking witch. Disoriented, he did not see the earthen spears that erupted from the ground. One grazed his cheek. Another pierced clean through his wing.
He crashed down, kneeling. "Your Highness! Please, spare this lowly insect!" he begged, crawling toward her.
As he got within reach, he lunged with a final, desperate slash.
Hectate did not even flinch. A dozen stone lances erupted from the earth, impaling him from every angle. A few drops of black blood splattered onto her pristine white train.
She looked down, her expression shifting from boredom to pure, unadulterated fury. "…My dress. Hades made this dress… and you ruined it."
Her voice dropped. 'Lunar Wolf.'
A pure white orb materialized behind her, morphing into a massive, spectral Lunar Wolf. It needed no command. It pounced on the immobilized vampire, its ethereal fangs tearing into him.
Hectate carefully plucked the blood drops from her dress with a thread of magic, her face a mask of utter contempt. "Useless pest."
She glanced at the mangled vampire. Her aura intensified, pressing him into the dirt. 'Void.'
A final sphere of nothingness appeared. It did not explode; it simply erased him from existence, leaving only a perfect, clean circle of missing earth behind.
She smoothed her dress, took a deep breath, and continued toward the palace as if she had merely stepped on a bug.