“That’s our cue, Byt.” Xenagrosh said while a tier two Chaos magic spell opened a hole the size of a baseball in the vampire’s chest. It destroyed her heart and killed Lethe on the spot.
“I’ll protect the humans, you kill the undead.” Xenagrosh jumped back, bringing Wren along with her on the stands.
“Who does what now?” Bytra was shocked seeing a wave of undead bodies belonging to all races flood the amphitheater while they emitted such an intense bloodlust that not even the Eldritch Abomination was immune to it.
“Kill them all!” Uria the White Lady had no plans to follow the rules of Xenagrosh’s game and led her army against the humans.
A burly undead reached the humans’ side with a single jump as he shapeshifted into a Grendel.
The creature in front of Xenagrosh was over 3 meters (10′) tall and had a round head, with feral eyes as big as a saucer. It had bright red irises and vertical pupils that were filled with a mix of hate and spite.
Its body was entirely covered by a dirty brown thick fur, akin to that of a giant sewer rat. The Grendel’s maw was lipless and so large that it was the entire lower half of his head. The mouth was filled with sharp, long fangs, each one about ten centimeters (4″) long.
“A Grendel? What an amiable and rare pet you keep in here. It’s like a small bird.” Xenagrosh shapeshifted as well, turning into her Shadow Dragon form. “It fits in just one hand.”
The Grendel froze in fear when he realized he had landed not on the floor but on a giant scaly hand. Xenagrosh’s four red eyes were staring at him in amusement and each one of them was as big as the Grendel.
The Dragon’s head scraped the ceiling of the cave while her claws dug deep into the ground that was forming craters under her feet due to her weight. Her wingspan covered the entirety of the amphitheater and prevented the undead from reaching the humans.
Xenagrosh killed the Grendel simply by clenching her hand and breathed a wave of purple Origin Flames that turned the first wave of assailants into puffs of smoke.
The undead stopped in their tracks, unable to believe their own senses nor to move a single muscle and the Hall fell silent for a second. After that, the stands full of humans burst into savage screams of joy as if it was just a football game and they were the fans of the winning team.
None of them had really believed in Dragons until that day, but seeing one appear in front of their eyes made all those teachings they barely remembered become deeply etched in their minds and hearts.
“We surrender. State your demands.” Uria the White Lady said.
Unlike Lith, Xenagrosh only had two sets of eyes. The first set was where it was supposed to be and the second was horizontally lined up with the first on the Dragon’s s snout, giving her a perfect peripheral vision.
“I have no demands. Palaron belongs to the Master, now. Your only choice is to either surrender and die or defeat one of us and survive.” Her voice was a deep, guttural roar that shook the nerves of everyone who heard it.
“Are you saying that if we attack the other woman, you will not interfere?” Uria asked, receiving a nod in reply.
“If we kill her, do I have your word that you will grant safe passage outside of the city to all survivors?” Another nod ensued.
“I thought we were friends, Zor. Why are you doing this to me?” Bytra was on the verge of tears, something that the undead appreciated as much as they did her staring at the Shadow Dragon instead of keeping an eye on them.
They charged at Bytra with the violence of a raging river and the grace acquired after hundreds of years spent on the battlefield. Each one of the undead despised the other member of the Court well enough to know the abilities of their competition as well as their own.
It allowed them to have seamless teamwork despite having rarely fought together.
“We are friends, Byt, but not the kind that travels Mogar to make wreaths of flowers and good memories.” Zoreth replied. “I need you to wake up. If you stay as you are, you’re going to die, either by the hand of our enemies or by that of our so-called allies.”
Bytra emitted a tier four Chaos spell, Howling Void, from each of her hands. They parted the sea of enemies in front of her, killing dozens of them, yet hundreds remained. All she had managed to achieve was to buy herself a second, maybe two.
“I don’t want to kill them, I barely know them, they are…” She managed to say before being drowned again in fangs, claws, and spells. The undead’s innate mastery of darkness magic allowed them to use its true magic form and to infuse it into their blows.
The spells that were hitting her non-stop ate at Bytra’s body inside and out while her flesh was torn apart by the living storm of limbs surrounding her.
“They are what? Innocents? Each one of them has probably as much blood on their hands as you. They are disgusting pigs, fattened on the flesh of their own neighbors. They know nothing of our hunger or our loneliness. Why do you keep holding back?”
Xenagrosh was seething with anger. Her best friend was being slaughtered in front of her eyes, yet she stood still. Red tears streamed down her scaly cheeks while her feet stomped the ground in the only way she had to express her outrage.
The red drums of the blood madness threatened to burst Bytra’s head open and the splitting headache it gave her eclipsed even the pain from her wounds. Yet hearing Zoreth’s voice, her desperate screams of incitement was more than she could take.
Bytra stopped resisting the madness and let her heart follow the beat of the red drums.
She shapeshifted into her Raiju form and fought back. A Raiju was the evolution of a Cyr (horse type magical beast) whose powers were based on the light and air element. Their appearance was that of a Chinese dragon fused with a warhorse.
The resulting creature had silver-white scales covering their horse body, with large branching horns over their head, long whiskers, a thick silver mane, and a long, scaled draconic tail.
Bytra, however, was an Emperor Beast-Abomination hybrid, making her body black, her mane blood red, and her eyes yellow. The transformation was accompanied by a burst of lightning and Chaos energy that blasted away the undead that were the closest to her and allowed her to escape the encirclement.
Bytra’s hooves emitted sparks of electricity every time they struck the ground, giving it an opposite charge to her own that made her gallop speed akin to a maglev train. She infused her horns with so much Chaos magic that they turned black.
Darkness magic was the bane of the undead and Chaos magic was still darkness, just several times stronger. All the undead in front of her charge disappeared in a puff of smoke as if they had just been mist figures instead of powerful beings.
The red drums of the blood madness beat faster with every life she took and soon the war song turned from sound into images.
