Shona's cheeks burned beneath his segmented armor, the sting of embarrassment coiling in his gut like a serpent ready to strike. "Uncle," he muttered to the GodKing, his voice low but edged with frustration, "that blast wouldn't have touched you. You didn't need to—"
The GodKing cut him off with a raised hand, his star-forged helmet tilting slightly, crimson eyes gleaming with the weight of eons. "Never underestimate your enemy, Shona. Arrogance is the blade that cuts its wielder deepest."
Shona's smile returned, defiant and eager, his five arms flexing as electricity crackled faintly along his veins. "Then watch me not underestimate mine." In a burst of static, he vanished—teleporting to his spear embedded in the city's heart, the humiliation fueling his resolve like lightning to a storm.
Down in the rubble-strewn plaza, a squad of guards edged forward, their high-tech rifles humming with charged energy, barrels trained on the spear's crystalline shaft. The lead guard, his crimson skin glistening under the capital's harsh lights, barked, "Freeze! Step away from the weapon, or we'll—"
Before the words could land, the spear wrenched upward with a resonant hum, hovering protectively before Shona like a loyal sentinel. It split seamlessly into four identical copies, encircling him in a whirlwind of glowing edges.
The guards' eyes widened— "Hostile! Fire!"—their veins igniting on the exposed left sides of their bodies, currents surging to their hearts where cords linked to their advanced guns. The weapons roared to life, spitting red lasers in a deadly barrage, beams slicing the air with sizzling heat.
Shona's world slowed, time stretching like taut wire as he recalled his spar with the GodKing in Eden's Garden—the effortless slice through that strange, viscous fluid from the gourd. Resolve hardened; time snapped back. With spears whirling in each hand, he waved them in every direction—deflecting and bisecting the lasers in flashes of sparks and shattered light, the beams ricocheting harmlessly into walls and sky.
In a fluid shift, Shona lunged left, evading a fresh volley with lightning-like grace—his body a cobalt-traced blur streaking through the chaos like a storm incarnate. He blitzed past the nearest guard, his five arms whirling in every direction, spears swinging with divine precision: one blade sliced a helmet clean off in a horizontal arc, another thrust forward to pierce a throat mid-scream, a third whipped low to sever legs at the knees, the bodies crumpling in his wake before they could even register the assault. Another guard fired point-blank, but Shona was already gone—darting through the squad like a goddess of destruction, his whirlwind of lightning-wreathed spears generating a vortex that yanked them off-balance, shots veering wild as he mowed them down with effortless fury: heads rolling in sprays of crimson, limbs severed in mid-stride, blood painting the plaza like macabre strokes from a frenzied brush, the guards falling like wheat before an unstoppable scythe.
He vaulted to a nearby building's ledge, the guards below scrambling to pursue, their rifles tracking him as they fired upward in desperate bursts. Shona didn't glance back—deflecting the incoming projectiles with casual flicks of his spears, the lasers shattering against the crystalline edges without so much as a backward look. His focus burned ahead, toward the city's fortified center, where the Warlords, Queens, and Kings cowered in their spire, the air thick with the promise of retribution.
---
Meanwhile, in the streets below, chaos erupted—the GodKing's army swept through the capital like descending shadows, boots hammering across rooftops and stone in a flawless, disciplined rhythm. Citizens scattered in terror as steel met conjured barriers, Essence detonations blooming like violent stars across the night.
"They're everywhere!" a merchant cried, shoving past fleeing crowds.
An Essence User from the invading force flickered into existence amid a squad of Deatheny defenders, his blade carving through their ranks in a vicious blur of light and blood. Deatheny soldiers fought back with the hardened resilience that had carried them to victory across countless galactic campaigns—but against the GodKing's elite, even their discipline strained.
The streets convulsed with clashing wills—despair for the civilians, defiance for the defenders—as the capital transformed into a warzone beneath the crushing advance of a wrathful empire.
---
Floating just below the clouds, the wind whipping at their clothes like invisible hands, the ground sprawling far beneath them—a bizarre tapestry of gleaming metal and steel that defied everything Ezmelral knew.
Her planet clung to the middle ages: stone castles piercing misty skies, mages weaving spells in candlelit towers, villages alive with the hum of enchanted forges. But here? Towering spires scraped the heavens, machines whirred and clanked in endless motion—strange vehicles zipping along elevated paths, lights flickering like artificial stars, and weird tendrils spiraling from the city's core, pulsing with energy that hummed through the air. To her, it was just another form of magic—advanced, unfamiliar, a spell her world hadn't yet unraveled.
She saw Essences she had never encountered before: barrages of sharp ice shards piercing through flesh like frozen daggers, void rifts tearing open with shadowy arms lunging out to drag enemies into inky darkness, one warrior even turning the foes' spilled blood against them—shaping it into lethal spikes that impaled neck after neck in crimson sprays.
Some of the more skilled defenders dodged with augmented grace, thrusters on their backs firing in short bursts to propel them sideways, while others dove behind reinforced barriers—shimmering force fields flickering to life from hidden emitters in the ground. A few bold ones charged forward, firing back with beams of searing light from their rifle-like weapons, the air sizzling as the projectiles cut through the haze, leaving trails of ionized smoke.
One managed to graze an Essence user, sending him staggering with a scorched shoulder, but at close range, the mortals' tech faltered against the invaders' supernatural agility.
As the battle raged, the one-sidedness became glaringly apparent, a brutal tilt in favor of the invaders that twisted Ezmelral's gut. Essence users among the GodKing's forces—figures cloaked in auras of raw power—began to teleport in flashes of distorted space, materializing behind those hunkered in cover with godly speed that blurred the line between motion and miracle.
Ezmelral's gaze snapped back to Shona—she watched as mechanical tendrils lashed out, attempting to halt him in his tracks, lunging toward him like serpents from the abyss. He flipped mid-stride, evading with effortless grace—the attack slamming into the building he'd just vacated, shattering concrete and steel in a explosive collision that sent debris raining down like jagged hail. Ezmelral's breath caught as he landed nimbly on one of the tendrils, racing up its coiling wire like a shadow defying gravity. Other tendrils surged in—two from opposite sides in a pincer strike, aiming to crush him between them. He leaped slightly upward, the attacks colliding harmlessly below in a tangle of sparks and screeching metal. Mid-air, he hurled a spear downward, thrusting it through the two pincer tendrils and puncturing the one he'd been running on. The three appendages crashed to the ground, impaled and twitching like dying beasts.
Ezmelral watched as Shona ascended toward the sky, his form cutting through the haze like a bolt of defiance. On the way up, he summoned back the spear that had impaled the three tendrils, yanking it free with a resonant hum as it flew to his grasp. He floated high above, catching the weapon effortlessly in one hand, its crystalline edge still crackling with residual energy. Then, in a swift, deliberate motion, he hurled the spears in multiple directions toward the furthest edges of the capital city—one streaking southeast, another northwest, then northeast, and finally southwest.
The last spear he launched straight upward, piercing the toxic clouds that darkened to an inky black, as if a storm were brewing on the horizon. His five arms splayed wide, veins pulsing with electric fury, as he began a resonant incantation, his voice building like thunder rolling in from the void.
"LIGHTNING ESSENCE: DESCENT OF THE LIGHTNING DRAGON!"
In response, the spears connected via threads of static energy, weaving into an intricate formation that hummed with raw power. The clouds above darkened to an inky void, swirling like a maelstrom unleashed. A deafening roar erupted from their depths—primal, earth-shaking—as the colossal head of a mythical beast emerged, draped in writhing lightning, its maw gaping wide with fangs of electric fury, eyes blazing like twin thunderbolts ready to consume the world below.