The forest of Mystic Falls which had been peaceful and quiet the whole night was rewarded with a huge bang and with that, it suffered a molecular collapse.
When the Wendigo slammed into Michael with its speed, they both became nothing but a blur of kinetic violence that ignored the laws of friction and biology. They tore through the outer compound wall, pulverizing three centuries-old oaks into splinters that ignited instantly from the friction of the impact. They skidded nearly half a mile into the deep woods in a single, prolonged heartbeat, carving a trench into the earth that smoked with the scent of burnt minerals and ancient rot.
The Wendigo that had taken in the shape and face of Matt had succeeded in separating the hellhound from his adopted siblings. The nine-foot-tall horror of jagged bone, necrotic sinew and a skeletal frame draped in skin that looked like a parchment, pinned Michael to the floor of the massive crater they had created, its long claws that were as sharp as steel shredding tool, shredded his shirt and carving deep, steaming grooves into his chest.
Michael lay in the center of the debris, the back of his head smoking. But he wasn't screaming, instead he was laughing in a disturbing way that suggested a great deal of amusement, to some people it would sound like madness, "Improved speed," Michael rasped, his eyes snapping open. They weren't just red; they were glowing like dying stars, the pupils swallowed by a furnace of white-hot intent, "Cade really did give you a tune-up, didn't he? A little grease for the engine of the apocalypse."
The Wendigo shrieked in response, a sound that froze the sap in the trees and shattered the remaining glass in the manor half a mile away. It aimed to impale him with its second hand, aiming for Michael's throat, its jaw unhinging behind the mask to reveal rows of needle-like teeth coated in a black, oily ichor.
Michael moved just then. He twisted his waist with the fluid grace of a dancer, his body becoming a blur of orange light and freed himself from its hold quick enough to catch the Wendigo's wrist in mid-air, and the atmosphere between them ignited with a sound like a thunderclap.
"My turn."
Michael's fist connected with the creature's ribcage. He infused the punch with enough hellfire that it became a localized supernova. A burst of compressed hellfire erupted upon impact, the kinetic force multiplied by a thermal expansion that blasted the Wendigo backward. The creature tore through a dozen trees, but the wood didn't snap, instead it turned to fine grey ash before the beast's body even made contact.
Michael righted himself, his skin beginning to fissure. Glowing cracks, like veins of molten lava, spread from his chest to his jaw, pulsating with the rhythm of a heart that beat with the power of a tectonic plate. He rolled his shoulders, a manic grin spreading across his face. He didn't have time to waste with this abomination, he had to finish up here and go back to deal with the little witch, "Come on!" Michael roared, his voice shaking the ground. "Show me what the Lord of Hell thinks constitutes a threat to me!"
The Wendigo surged out of the darkness, moving in a flickering pattern that would have defied the eyes of a vampire. Michael met it head-on in the center of a burning clearing.
The battle became a symphony of destruction. Michael's movements were a masterclass in supernatural combat, reminiscent of a dark god at play. Having lived for over two thousand years, there was without a doubt none in this world that could match him in fighting style. He swung his arm in a wide arc, and from the palms of his hands, white-hot fire constructs materialized. Chains of solidified flame, lashed out like living serpents. They wrapped around the Wendigo's neck and limbs, the heat so intense that the creature's grey skin began to blister and peel in seconds causing it to let out a shriek.
Michael yanked the chains, slamming the nine-foot beast into the bedrock with a force that carved up the earth. He followed up instantly, blurring into the creature's guard with a rain of flame punches.Each strike left a glowing, molten crater in the creature's chest, the smell of burning rot filling the air.
But then, Michael's grin faltered.
He had just vaporized the creature's entire left shoulder and arm. He could see the charred bone, the blackened marrow sizzling under the heat. But as the Wendigo slid across the scorched earth, the flesh began to bubble and churn. In a sickening display of cellular recursion, the arm didn't just heal, it snapped back into existence, fully formed and dripping with fresh, black ichor, in less than a second.
Michael blurred forward again, his hand forming a blade of pure thermal energy. With a single, horizontal sweep, he decapitated the beast. The head rolled away with its eyes still twitching. A new head sprouted from the neck stump before the old one even hit the dirt.
"What is this?" Michael muttered, his head tilting as he dodged a swipe that pulverized a granite boulder behind him. He caught Wendigo's face in a crushing grip and blasted it point-blank with a beam of concentrated heat that should have melted diamond. The creature's head became a charred husk behind the mask, only to peel away like a cicada's shell, revealing a fresh, snarling face underneath again.
Michael leaped back, landing on a branch that instantly burst into flames. He watched the Wendigo standing in the center of the wasteland with a blank expression, its body knitting itself together with a frantic, desperate speed.
'It's like Ankhar,' Michael realized, his mind racing through the archives of his memory. But... deeper. Ankhar used souls as fuel for regeneration. He had a lot of souls as well. But this thing... It feels like it has a reservoir ten times that size. Thousands upon thousands of souls, all being fed into a spiritual meat grinder just to keep this one necrotic body standing.
"You're not just a monster you mongrel," Michael laughed, his excitement returning tenfold, his laughter echoing through the burning woods. "You're a walking graveyard! A buffet of the damned!"
The Wendigo shrieked in response, the sound now carrying the weight of a thousand distorted voices. It reached down and gripped a towering, ancient pine tree. With a feat of raw strength that rivaled Michael's own, it ripped the tree from the earth, soil and rock falling from the roots like rain. It swung the massive, forty-foot trunk like a baseball bat, the sheer displacement of air creating a localized vacuum.
Michael, momentarily caught in the tactical analysis of his opponent composition and very being, didn't move fast enough.
CRACK.
The tree shattered against Michael's ribs with the sound of a falling skyscraper. The force was so immense it sent him skipping across the forest floor like a stone over a pond. He leveled fifty yards of burning vegetation, his body acting as a plow that turned the earth into a trench of fire, until he slammed into a granite cliff face with enough momentum to cause a rockslide.
Wendigo didn't wait for him to recollect himself and It leaped through the air, its shadow blotting out the moon, its claws extended for a killing blow.
Michael pulled himself out of the rock, he looked up at the descending horror, and his grin became something truly monstrous. It wasn't the smile of a man; it was more a smile of someone who is about to defile another would look like.
"Okay," Michael whispered, "No more games let's turn on the heat shall we you mongrel?."
He planted his feet in the center of the crater and charged up his flames. The ground for a hundred yards in every direction liquefied into glowing slag. Michael's body underwent a complete, terrifying transformation. The cracks on his skin opened wide, revealing more flames that didn't just surround him; they flowed through him like a secondary circulatory system, turning his veins into conduits of hell fire. His hair stood on end taking an orange color and flickering like corona discharge.
At this moment the whole area around him was reduced to nothing more than molten mess, the very ground below him was but a slag of liquid fire. He was a pillar of the sun brought down to earth.
The Wendigo landed, its claws raking across Michael's chest, but the moment the grey flesh touched Michael's skin, It evaporated. The creature's fingers vanished in a puff of foul-smelling steam before they could even find purchase. The heat radiating from Michael was so intense that the air itself began to scream, the nitrogen and oxygen combusting in a continuous, roaring loop of fire.
The Wendigo slowed and its regenerative powers finally began to stutter. The souls within it were being burned away just by being in his presence. It lunged again, a desperate, animalistic strike, but Michael was gone.
He moved with the speed of a lightning strike, leaving afterimages of fire in his wake. He appeared behind the Wendigo, lashing out with a kick that sent the creature spiraling through the air. He appeared above it before it could land, slamming his heel into its back and driving it six feet into the solid bedrock.
Michael noticed it then, through the haze of battle. Amidst the carnage, the only thing that wasn't dissolving or regenerating perfectly was the mask-like bone structure of the Wendigo's face. It must be the anchor. The center of the storm where Cade's magic was most concentrated and keeping it alive.
The Wendigo scrambled out of the pit, its movements becoming erratic and frantic. It tried to retreat into the shadows of the deeper forest, but there were no shadows left. Michael had turned the night into a world of blinding orange and gold. Every leaf, every blade of grass for a mile was either ash or incandescent light.
Michael didn't bother to chase it and as the smoke cleared up he was gone.
The Wendigo stood in the center of the burning wasteland, its blackened pits of eyes searching around for the entity of fire that had mysteriously disappeared, its nostrils flaring as it tried to scent its prey through the overwhelming smell of ozone.
Suddenly, the earth beneath the creature heaved like a tectonic shift. Michael emerged in an explosion of lava and light, rising directly in front of the beast.
He had sunk into the earth, his body merging with the molten soil he had created.
He held his hand out, palm up, just inches from Wendigo's mask. Between his fingers, a sphere of fire began to form. It was small at first, no larger than a marble, but it was so dense that it began to warp the light around it. It pulled the surrounding flames, the forest fire, the heat of the air, the very light of the moon into itself. It turned from orange to white.
The sphere hummed with the sound of a thousand hornets.
"Sol Invictus."
The Wendigo's eyes widened. For the first time in its existence, the spirit of hunger felt something other than a void. It felt fear. It felt the end.
Michael thrust the ball of fire directly at the creature's bone mask.
"Catch," Michael whispered, his voice calm amidst the roaring inferno.
The contact was silent for a heartbeat, there was a heavy, pregnant pause where the world seemed to hold its breath. Then, the compression failed and ruptured.
The world went white.
A pillar of white fire erupted from the center of the forest, a spear of light that pierced the clouds and could be seen by every soul in the state of Virginia. The shockwave leveled the remaining forest for miles in a perfect, clinical circle of ash and fused glass.
As the smoke began to clear, Michael stood in the center of a glass-bottomed crater, his lava-veined skin slowly dimming back to a dull red glow. He stood over the spot where the Wendigo had been, watching the scorched, skeletal remnant of the mask sizzle in the heat, waiting to see if anything born of Hell could survive the unfiltered touch of the sun.
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