HLandslide!!!
The earth trembles. A concussive wave of sound rips across the battlefield, shredding the air. Soldiers on both sides clutch their ears and drop screaming. The ground quivers, stones crack, and Amazel hastily raises her hands.
'Aegis'
But her shield can't withstand the impact. It shatters like glass under the onslaught, the force throwing her back several feet.
Before Armourrrrrrr, Seb-ath undergoes a horrifying metamorphosis. His muscles bulge and swell, tearing through his old scales. They shed away, revealing a new, gleaming layer of armour interlocking, diamond-shaped emerald scales that glitter with an unnatural, hard light.
He stomps a massive foot. The ground heaves, splitting open in a deep fissure that races toward Amazel. She barely hovers in the air to avoid being swallowed. He stomps again, and this time, colossal chunks of bedrock launch skyward. With terrifying speed and precision, he punches and whips his tail, sending the massive stones screaming toward her like cannon fire.
'Aegis Maxima'
Amazel conjures her strongest barrier. A dome of light flares around her. The first wave of stone bullets cracks it like ice, the second wave nearly shatters it. Each impact sends vibrations into her bones, her teeth rattling in her skull.
In that moment of distraction, Seb-ath closes the distance with a single, powerful leap. His claws, now like polished scimitars, slash through her weakened shield as if it were paper. She tries to blink away, but he's too fast. A colossal hand grabs her leg.
"Caught you."
He slams her into the ground with apocalyptic force. Stone and dirt explode skyward. The earth craters beneath her body, and the shockwave topples soldiers like wheat before a storm. He smashes her into the ground again and again like a rag doll.
Before she can even gasp, he grabs her again, swings her around once, twice in a wide arc, building momentum, and launches her body like a projectile into the face of the distant mountain.
CRAAAASH!
Amazel impacts with a sickening crunch of rock and bone. A landslide of stone buries her.
A fraction of a second before she's crushed entirely, she teleports, reappearing on the summit. She is broken. Her light armour is in tatters. Her staff lies in two pieces at her feet. Blood streams from a dozen fractures and wounds. Every breath is a knife-edged agony.
She collapses against a rock, discarding her shattered shield. Placing a trembling hand on her chest, she pours the last of her energy into a spell.
'Greater Heal' A warm, golden light knits bones and staunches wounds, bringing her back from the brink. She is functional, but far from whole.
Her eyes dart down to the battlefield. Seb-ath is not pursuing. He stands frozen, chest heaving. Plumes of steam pour from his scales like a forge, hissing into the cold air. His reptilian eyes lock on her, unblinking, the pupils thin slits of pure predatory focus. 'Shh! I am overheated.'
'Why is he just standing there?' The thought cuts through her pain-fogged mind. 'He almost had me... Why didn't he finish me?' Suddenly her mind clicks. '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 raises a hand, not toward Seb-ath, but toward the sky itself. She draws the heat from the air, the moisture from the clouds. 'Blizzard.'
A blue ray shoots into the sky. The temperature plummets instantly. Thick, heavy snow begins to fall, blanketing the scorched battlefield in white. The effect on Seb-ath is immediate and drastic. The steam pouring off him lessens. His heaving chest slows. The cold stabilises him, easing the strain on his overtaxed body and making him more efficient, more deadly.
Instead of charging, he hurls more boulders, this time in wide, scattered arcs to test her.
'Torrent.' Amazel meets the attack not with teleportation, but with a precise, high-pressure jet of water from her palm that blasts the stones to gravel. She keeps the stream aimed, not at him, but at the ground around him, turning the earth to a freezing quagmire.
Seb-ath hisses in frustration, leaping back to avoid the water. His eyes dart to his shed scales on the ground and he quickly reaches for them, using them to cover himself from the cold. 'She knows my weakness.'
"Amazel!" his voice booms, a gravelly rasp. "Surrender yourself!"
'Huh…why this sudden change? He is definitely up to something.' Amazel keeps observing him and says, "And if I say no?"
He raises 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 remains silent, one hand still directing the water, the other hidden behind her back, fingers subtly tracing a pattern on her ring.
He expects horror, desperation, and bargaining from her. What she does next is unexpected. Amazel offers him a cold, bloodied smile. "Crush it."
The command is so flat, so absolute, it stuns him. "What? You would sacrifice countless innocents?!"
"They chose their side with a clear mind," she states, 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 speaks, the hidden hand behind her back closes into a fist. Her ring glows faintly.
"And your own soldiers?!" Seb-ath roars, 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 snarls, 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 shoots forward. The energy she'd been gathering, the cold, her rage, her resolve, fuse into a beam of absolute zero. 'Permafrost Ray'
Realising his defeat, Seb-ath makes his final, spiteful move. "Then we all die together!" He clenches his fist, crushing the red gem.
The blue ray hits him square in the chest. The steam freezes instantly into a crystalline shroud. He transforms into a perfect, terrified statue of emerald ice.
For a heart-stopping second, nothing happens. Then, deep in the enemy ranks and in the city beyond, stomachs begin to glow with a hellish red light beneath armour and clothes.
But then, a different magic activates. A network of faint blue lines, the teleportation circles Amazel had woven into the very foundations of the enemy's stronghold nd linked to her ring flare, came to life.
Instead of a cataclysm on the battlefield, the explosions happen 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 erupts miles away, a series of fireballs culminating in a massive mushroom cloud that stains the sky. The battlefield is silent, save for the falling snow. The enemy army stands unharmed but utterly broken, witnessing the total annihilation of their home.
Amazel falls to her knees, utterly spent. "It is... finished."
She teleports back to her camp. Her soldiers stare, dumbstruck, at the distant, burning horizon. She stumbles into her command tent and collapses onto her cot.
A moment later, she feels a presence. A sinister, cold aura that feels both foreign and familiar. She jerks upright, energy flaring defensively in her palm.
Julie stands in the doorway. But she is changed. A crimson haze, like misted blood, coils from her skin. Her eyes hold a flat, dead calm.
"Julie? What... what happened to you?"
"I awoke my Godhood," Julie states, her voice a monotone.
"Awoke? But that's... impossible without..." Amazel's voice trails off, confused by the immense, slaughterous power rolling off her scout.
Silence hangs between them until Julie breaks it. "General. When did you plan all of this?"
Amazel lets 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 is low, laden with a sorrow she can no longer fully feel. "We won. But… we lost 60% of our force. Another 10% are crippled. That includes Commanders Elfir and Tylon." She pauses, the name hanging in the air. "And... we lost Gobuka."
Amazel closes her eyes, absorbing the blow. Her face hardens 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 nods, understanding the dismissal and the grief behind the order. She turns and leaves her general to the silence.
---
Meanwhile, in Dracula's Territory
A rift tears open in the sky before the gothic spires of Dracula's palace. From it steps Hectate. She is a vision of deadly elegance in a sleek black dress with silver accents and a dramatic white train. A wide hat and gloves complete the sombre look, her parasol tapping lightly on the ground like a sceptre.
At the entrance, Dracula awaits, his crimson wings folded around him like a living cloak. "Welcome... witch," he hisses, his voice a discordant chorus.
Hectate doesn't break her stride. "I offer you a choice, bat. End yourself, or I will do it for you."
"F**k yourself! You B***h!" he shrieks. His wings unfurl, and a storm of razor-sharp blood lances materialises and shoots toward her.
Hectate gives her parasol a single, dismissive tap. A silent shockwave pulses out, disintegrating the lances into harmless mist. The wave continues, pressing down on Dracula himself.
Enraged, he unleashes his power. 'Blood Hurricane' A vortex of crimson mist and screaming souls erupts around her, seeking to drain her life.
'Void' she murmurs. A tiny sphere of absolute blackness appears at the hurricane's centre and implodes, sucking the entire maelstrom out of existence in an instant.
Dracula's eyes widen in genuine fear. He launches himself into the air, fleeing.
"Do you really think you can escape from me?" Hectate sighs. She taps her parasol again. 'Crossroads.'
A ripple of crimson energy washes over the landscape. Dracula flaps frantically, only to find himself staring at the same courtyard, the same palace, the same smirking witch. Disoriented, he doesn't see the earthen spears that erupt from the ground. One grazes his cheek. Another pierces clean through his wing.
He crashes down, kneeling. "Your Highness! Please, spare this lowly insect!" he begs, crawling toward her.
As he gets within reach, he lunges with a final, desperate slash.
Hectate doesn't even flinch. A dozen stone lances erupt from the earth, impaling him from every angle. A few drops of black blood splatter onto her pristine white train.
She looks down, her expression shifting from boredom to pure, unadulterated fury. "…My dreamamamamamamss. Hades made this dress… and you ruined it."
Her voice drops. 'Lunar Wolf'
A pure white orb materialises behind her, morphing into a massive, spectral Lunar Wolf. It needs no command. It pounces on the immobilised vampire, its ethereal fangs tearing into him.
Hectate carefully plucks the blood drops from her dress with a thread of magic, her face a mask of utter contempt. "Useless pest."
She glances at the mangled vampire. Her aura intensifies, pressing him into the dirt. 'Void'
A final sphere of nothingness appears. It doesn't explode and it simply erases him from existence, leaving only a perfect, clean circle of missing earth behind.
She smooths her dress, takes a deep breath, and continues toward the palace as if she'd merely stepped on a bug.