Garun fought mechanically. The passion of youth had died with youth, now all that was left was the simple doing of it. There were enemies ahead, allies behind. One side would live and the other would die. He had to make sure his was the one still breathing at the end of everything. So he fought, mechanically. His halberd thrust outwards, perfectly tuned with the other blades beside him, and the poor sods met with defending against Kaltans from one side and Arbites from the other melted back away from them. They advanced unimpeded.
He tasted victory, spat it out. Kept his focus. Everywhere was a mess of tangling limbs and scraping steel, sparks actually leaping into the air at some collisions and blood flooding it in others. Just because his was the winning side, didn’t mean he’d live. The enemy’s desperation was deadly enough. Still, they were losing. The day belonged to Arbite. Garun had, as if to illustrate that fact, run the tip of his halberd clean through one defender’s bowels when the shadow above cast itself across him.
It lasted only a moment, the span of a single thought. Then Garun turned, took his halberd tightly in both hands, and drove it through the neck of the man behind him.
***
Galukar’s men went mad, all at once. He’d have been confused had he not seen Lilia hovering high above them already. He roared. It was a wrathful cry, the very sort which had sent enemies scrambling back from him mere moments before, but not a one of the berserking soldiers seemed to even hear it. It was only when the Godblade came alight that the frenzy stopped.
Alight, in truth. One moment it was six feet of scarred steel, the next Galukar’s fingers were tight around a great length of brilliant white fire. Men shied back from it, some screamed. And those who mere moments before had been ensnared by supernatural rage and violence suddenly calmed. Galukar felt his confidence grow. However he’d used the weapon, whatever his abuses, the Godblade was still the Godblade. Vampiric magic was not suffered to survive its proximity.
“HOLD!” Galukar roared, letting his voice cut over the sounds of battle and panic, but reigning it in just enough to keep from perforating the eardrums of those men closest to him. “STAND READY, THE VAMPIRE QUEEN EMERGES!”
Of all the things to say, that seemed to have been the right one. Nothing like a warning of Lilia herself’s presence would snap so many thousands of attentions over to him as one. The weight of their attentions made the Godblade hotter in his grip, and Galukar swung it without thinking. In one stroke he felt the magic of Lilia’s mental-powers broken apart.
Then he turned his gaze to the skies, saw the Vampire Queen stunned by her shock, and leapt.
***
Lilia had not known what exactly Galukar would do when he first saw her, run perhaps. She’d been an idiot. His response ought to have been the most predictable she’d ever seen. He had been changing, less certain, of late. She’d dared to hope that might have blunted him. Perhaps it had. Now he was a hammer flying towards her rather than an axe.
Her shield came fast, a pillar of blood thickened with mass and magic to withstand a falling star. The Godblade hit it like ten, searing the air and sending Lilia back with the concussion of its impact. Galukar came blasting through the spattered ichor and swung at her once more, forcing Lilia to dip low in the sky and watch as the King flew past. He didn’t fly for long, twisting in the air and continuing until his feet touched the tip of one towering spire. He kicked off it, beheading the structure as he shot back for her. This time, Lilia was ready.
She called down lightning, and bolstered it with her own power. The crimson arcs struck King Galukar head-on and actually left his skeleton exposed amid transparent flesh for a fraction of a second before everything around him came apart in a blast of vaporised water and sizzling gas. Human eyes would have been burned out to behold it, Lilia’s almost stung. Still the King powered on. She might have been impressed, were she not distracted by the feeling of ancient iron carving through less ancient meat.
Lilia’s blood redenned the air as she fell down towards the ground, Galukar falling beside her. He hefted his sword for an ending blow, missed as she rolled upon impact and left the ground for ten yards in every direction a jagged crater. She came up, let the blood fall down upon him. It was a river, then a settled lake. Then it was the surface of a stormy sea, pressed inwards by vitakinetic magics and compressing the great sword-wielding gorilla buried beneath.
The gorilla burst forth regardless.
***
Everything was chaos, except for the sky. The sky was a constant, unyielding death. Erik stumbled back as a great pillar of blood flew clear of King Galukar and missed him by mere yards, the sheer wind of it knocking him almost off his feet and sending dirt flying in all directions. The debris hurt, that’s how fast it was, and there was no doubt in his mind that he’d have been obliterated were any of the stray attacks to actually hit him.
It did hit others. Hit lots of others, and they just…Stopped existing. Turned into more blood, either transmuted or, perhaps, hit so hard Erik’s eye couldn’t even make out the moment of their destruction, only its results.
The ground shook, the air was clotted by debris. The fighting was over. What was the point of continuing it? Both sides saw clear as day that victory was out of their own hands, whichever won between the Vampire Queen and the Godblade’s wielder would decide who won the conflict. No point bleeding and dying just to surrender afterwards.
But there was no order to this consensus, merely terror. Everyone ran, fifty thousand men scrambling in fifty thousand directions all screaming and thrashing and gasping out prayers to every god they knew that theirs would not be the next skull to catch a piece of rubble. Erik was among them.
He sprinted, not jogged. Sprinted. Spear discarded, shield torn from his arm, helmet kept on only because a moment of sanity had reminded him he might be struck in the head by thrown debris. He sprinted even as his lungs burned and his legs liquefied, eyes streaming with tears, heart thundering with pressure. He needed to be gone. He needed to be anywhere but—
—The ground shook, knocked him fully off his feet to roll and scrape in the mud. Erik stared high into the air and felt his eyes burned away to uselessness as blisters spread across his face. The last thing his vision ever caught was the sight of a maelstrom skywards. Clouds roiling and boiling, thunder crackling, pillars of blood cutting through the air faster than crossbow bolts. And amid it all, King Galukar swung the Godblade like he meant to kill the world itself.
Perhaps, Erik thought, he’d manage it.
***
Collin had quickly lost control of the battle. It was hard to put his finger on when, exactly. Perhaps it had been before everybody collectively lost their shit and started running away, or maybe it had come just after. Regardless, the basic fact remained that he no longer had much of any sway over how the events around him would proceed.
And he couldn’t exactly blame anyone for why. Already, Collin had been struck in the head by a piece of stone moving fast enough to take most skulls apart on impact. He’d seen just that happen to another man, whose body now twitched as blood dribbled from the jagged stump which had once joined shoulders to head.
Maybe it was Shaiagranzi’s Fleschrafting, maybe it was dear old dad’s Ranger blood. Maybe both. He was still alive and kicking- or rather, not spasmodically kicking- and Collin needed to figure out what he’d do with that. He looked up at the sky.
A spire was caught in the vortex now, hundreds of tons of mangled stone and wood twisting and spinning as it circled the pair of fighting Heroes like a leaf in a whirlpool. The pair of creatures fighting in its midst weren’t even visible behind all the light and shivering air, practically cloaked in their magic with how thick it was. The ground trembled again as one of Galukar’s swings missed.
Yeah, fuck that. Collin decided that his contribution to the battle pretty much ended with the arrival of people whose skin his arrows would crumple against. He legged it like the ghost of all dead rats, but got only a few paces before he heard a cry.
Collin spun, stared. Saw Ado stumbling, dazed and bloody. She’d not been hit by one of the bigger bits of shrapnel—he could tell by her still being alive— but the woman was clearly without her senses.
Not a good state, in the maelstrom around them. Shame that—what the fuck was he doing?
Collin reached her after a moment, tackling her to the ground and pressing his torso over her just as a spray of fingertip-sized stones raked them. Collin winced, but didn’t feel anything break. Bruises, at worst. Below him Ado slowly regained coherence, blinking and frowning as her addled thoughts settled down and her mind quickened back up to full speed.
“W…What the fuck is—”
“Lilia and Galukar are squaring up.” Collin told her, getting off the woman but keeping both eyes out for any more unexpected blasts of debris. Fortunately, or unfortunately he supposed, most of the nearby buildings had already been flattened past the point of flinging more death at them. Ado’s reaction to the fact was far less relieved, and far more concerned. It was, he supposed, her damned city.
Or not. That really wasn’t in their hands anymore, now it was all…The fighters’.
***
The Godblade came down, a solar guillotine biting into the creature’s neck. It came apart, splitting from crown to chin and gushing out volcanic magma as Galukar shot back. He righted himself, twisted, kicked off air that suddenly felt hard as stone and swung again.
Behind the throng of bodies, Lilia the Vampire Queen conjured yet more abominations. A dragon of stitched flesh and cateracted eyes reared up before Galukar and felt ancient iron bite deep into its body. Spirits encircled him like starving sharks, melting back as the weapon’s light blazed ever brighter. The air was scorched, the ground cracked, the heavens themselves weeping acidic rain as if the battle aggrieved it.
Neither of them relented.
Galukar cut open limbs of blood compressed to the durability of cold iron, and withstood lashes of the very same stuff that opened his skin and scratched the muscle below. Lilia hovered back from him, ever maintaining the space between them, ever fearful of his anger in close quarters. His every stroke was a thundercrack, his every blow an earthquake. But each thundercrack was deflected as a typhoon reared up before it, and every earthquake drowned in a flood. Lilia’s powers were every bit his equal and then some.
It didn’t matter. Galukar didn’t fight because he was stronger. He fought because it was right.
He chased the vampire, a whirlwind of razored iron. She melted back, a cloud of imperceptibly fast meat. He needed only to catch her once and Galukar could seize victory. She knew it as well as he did, and so more attacks came. The blood was in waves and limbs, parting with every stroke. Creatures emerged from behind it: elongated, serpentine dragons and many-limbed carrion beasts the size of buildings. All moved fast, all died faster.
“Stop!” Galukar thought he heard, some weak, fragile voice barely cutting out over the winds roilinga round his battle. He ignored it. There was no stopping now.