The battlefield was a throat-ripping roar of carnage.
Angels tore through the firmament like falling stars, their plumage hemorrhaging brilliance against the soot-choked sky. To meet them, black dragons rose—living ink-blots of shadow that uncoiled and twisted through the radiance. Below, the mud swallowed the scream of steel and the sizzle of sorcery.
Fennaro walked through the center of the slaughter.
He moved with the unhurried, liquid gait of a man strolling through a sun-drenched garden, his deep red robes snapping in the hot wind of passing projectiles. He looked almost pained by the sheer lack of effort required to survive. He lifted a hand, a gesture as lazy and dismissive as a yawn.
A needle-thin crimson beam darted from his fingertip. It was quiet. It was precise. It was intimate.
It touched an angel's chest.
Then, it blossomed.
A violent supernova of red light erupted, erasing a cluster of divine warriors in a soundless flash. No gore followed, no screams—just a sudden, hollow space where life had been a heartbeat before.
Fennaro sighed, flicking another bolt over his shoulder without bothering to look. It curved through the air, split into three jagged streaks of lightning, and deleted an entire squad.
"Dull," he muttered.
He sidestepped a plunging spear with a bored tilt of his head. As an angel dove for his throat, he simply tapped the creature's sternum with two fingers. A red pulse sent the celestial spiraling away, its form dissolving into glittering dust before it even hit the dirt.
He didn't break his stride.
Then, the air changed. A pressurized gust slammed into the earth, and the sun vanished behind a sudden, towering shadow that felt like the weight of a mountain.
This angel was a monument to divinity. Its wings were massive, every feather burning with white fire that turned the atmosphere into a kiln. Armor of etched gold hummed with a celestial frequency, and its blade radiated a heat so intense it turned the surrounding air into a shimmering, distorted haze.
The creature's eyes were voids of blinding white. Its expression was an arctic chill.
The angel landed, and the impact fractured the ground into a spiderweb of craters that swallowed the lesser soldiers nearby.
"Your death," the angel intoned, its voice a chorus of breaking glass, "will be anything but peaceful."
Fennaro's eyebrow twitched upward, a spark finally catching in his gaze. "Oh? Finally, a heartbeat."
The angel vanished.
Fennaro's eyes widened. He ducked.
A blade of pure light sheared through the air exactly where his neck had been a millisecond prior. Fennaro spun, firing a point-blank beam, but the angel batted it aside with a casual, ringing swipe of its gauntlet, scattering red sparks like dying embers.
The angel lunged again.
Fennaro skated backward, his boots leaving glowing red ley lines scorched into the soil. He flicked his wrist, sending a crescent arc of energy upward. The angel merely folded its wings, the feathers interlocking into a shield of divine fire that drank the attack whole.
"Cute trick," Fennaro smirked. He stomped.
A crimson shockwave rippled outward, forcing the angel into the sky. It responded instantly, diving blade-first like a falling comet. Fennaro caught the strike between two trembling hands, a red barrier flickering and cracking under the monumental weight of the divine blow. He twisted at the last second, letting the blade bury itself in the earth. The resulting explosion of light leveled the landscape for a hundred yards.
Fennaro retaliated with a feverish volley. Hundreds of red needles spiraled through the air, homing in like starving insects. The angel spun in a blur of motion, its wings slicing the beams into harmless glitter.
It countered with a torrent of white energy. Fennaro crossed his arms, manifesting a red dome that absorbed the impact but dragged him backward, his heels carving deep, smoking trenches into the battlefield.
He stopped, exhaling a plume of hot air. "Alright. You're actually strong."
The angel appeared behind him in a flicker of light.
Fennaro whirled, firing a pulse that sent the angel skidding across the dirt. But the celestial didn't falter; it flapped its wings once, launching itself forward like a kinetic missile.
Fennaro reached back. A massive, spinning clockwork of red circles formed behind him, humming with a low, dangerous frequency. He thrust his palm forward.
A titanic pillar of crimson erupted, wide enough to swallow a cathedral.
The angel roared, slicing into the heart of the beam. It pushed forward, wings glowing with agonizing brightness, cutting through the red tide inch by inch. Fennaro gritted his teeth, his knees buckling under the pressure. The angel's blade pierced the light, coming within a breath of his face.
Fennaro snapped his fingers.
The beam didn't fade—it detonated into a violent spiral, catching the angel in a vortex of raw energy and hurling it through the air.
Fennaro leapt. Red lightning coiled around his arm as he swung a massive arc across the sky. The impact sent the angel crashing into the ground with the force of a falling moon.
Dust choked the air.
Fennaro landed softly, his lungs burning. The angel rose with agonizing slowness, its armor shattered and its wings dimming to a dull, ash-grey.
"You... are not mortal," the angel rasped.
Fennaro wiped a smudge of soot from his cheek. "Never claimed to be."
The angel charged one last time, a desperate, final gambit. Fennaro inhaled deeply, drawing every scrap of red energy into a single, microscopic point at the tip of his finger.
The angel closed the gap.
Fennaro whispered: "Pierce."
The beam was a thread of silence. It struck the angel's heart and expanded into a pillar of red that reached the heavens. When the light died, the angel was gone, leaving only a few shimmering particles to drift away on the wind.
Fennaro let out a sharp, ragged breath. His legs gave way, and he dropped to one knee.
"That... was almost fun," he croaked.
A shadow enveloped him. A black dragon landed with a heavy thud, its form shifting and shrinking into a tall, scaled humanoid with eyes like molten gold.
Without a word, the dragon-man reached down and scooped Fennaro up by the waist.
Fennaro didn't fight it. He leaned his head against the dragon's shoulder, his eyes fluttering shut. "Alright, alright... I'm done. Take me home."
The dragon's wings unfurled, beating once to lift them toward the clouds. Behind them, the war continued its mindless roar, but Fennaro was already asleep.