---

Amara blasted zombie after zombie, lining up her shots to hit more than one at a time with the Temple’s special ammunition. This was second nature to her, taking a shot and then spiraling around the green barriers to reposition and take another shot. Every battle came down to three things: Attrition, skill and power. The first two were Amara’s best fields, unlike the third that was often covered by Adepts. Methodical patience and precision won these types of wars, and often led to the enemy fumbling and nailing their own coffin shut.

So when the dragon appeared, and when the titan was nuked by Sycamore, she didn’t do much as flinch. She just adapted.

Fire rolled over the battlefield, and Amara was kept safe from most of it by cover. Her Kevlar armor was smoking like a bonfire, and she felt sweat start to build up under the vest she wore, but Amara was mostly fine. As was her nearest phantom, based on the fact that she didn’t feel any injuries get transferred.

Status.

Armor intact. One injured accounted for. The Cupbearer.

Amara’s head snapped around and she saw Sully crumbling on the forest floor. The fact that he was alive at all meant he must have gorged himself on the Chalice, she could barely see him between all the smoke and fire in the trees.

Help him. Now.

The phantom slung its shotgun over one shoulder and beelined towards the crispy man, smoke billowing off its armor like a meteor. It vaulted over falling trees and worked its way around the flames. Amara could feel a bullet just barely graze its waist just before it slide behind the barriers Sully was next to.

She pulled her radio out and made use of it before someone would come along and fucking melt the damn thing. She tuned it to the Aggro channel so she wouldn’t fuck anyone over on the artifact team. ”Who’s still alive out there?!” She asked, while the phantom tending to Sully pressed the Chalice into his hands and pushed him into an upright position.

”Drink deep, Cupbearer.” The phantom pressed Sully’s hand, with the Chalice in it, up against his face so all he had to do was ask it for the healing elixir.

Amara patted some embers off her arm and peaked back out to shoot again.

---

The phantom raised its pistol and took shots at the undead guards immobilized by Rien’s minion. 45 ACP rounds directly to the head, which practically exploded due to the Temple’s handiwork making these bullets that much more deadly. Ruby’s suggestion was a good one, and Amara ordered it to comply from afar. So it walked over and smacked its fist against the glowing rune.

”The soldier agrees.”

The Eustis Veil went back up, ensuring the island was mostly untouched by the rain of ectoplasm.

And then the phantom topped off its shotgun, on orders to stand guard.

---

When the monstrous dog reared its head, the phantoms already knew what they were going to do, because Amara was in their heads. One of them holstered a gun, drew an knife,
and then ran directly in front of the beast. Its intention was to distract the creature by launching itself directly onto its face and making itself the only thing there was to worry about. Like riding a bull, the phantom clambered up and made a commotion.

The other phantom fired its pistol at the beast’s foreleg.

”Move your asses, they’ll cover you.” The phantom spoke not in the usual ghostly voice, but in Amara’s. That was something she could do apparently, echoing as it was coming from an apparition. ”It gave you away, no more time for being-”

Amara’s voice cut out as there was clapping. The phantom turned and in the span of a moment, Cyrus as was gone and Adora was beating the god damn brakes off of a mobster. Taking a bit of initiative, the phantom aimed its pistol at him before he hit the ground and dropped the rest of its magazine into him.

Reloading, it carried on. ”We have taken control of the Eustis Veil. It remains until we are through, and then it is gone.”

---

---

Everything was going to shit.

Luca could only close his eyes and hope it would be a quick death as lightning was shot at him… but then it was blocked. He opened them to find a wall of plantlife - thankfully far enough away from him to not be damaged. One of the 317 had the mobster, Adora was absolutely wailing on the Undead King…

The reptile monster was chained by Alizee, with the Amaras fighting it. But it could still be a problem… and he didn’t want to leave Layla behind.

And there was a fire blocking the way. Even if one of the Amaras shouted for them to keep going - they couldn’t!

Fire was one thing he had no way of getting through. He burned like everything else - perhaps better, with how dry his skin was and the brittleness of his bones. It didn’t matter. He could do something to help. Take out the reptile while it was chained.

Luca pushed himself off the wall he’d been leaning against, taking a deep breath. There was a hint of rotting in the air as he pulled off his gloves, discarding them to leave his bare hands free. He jumped forward, crouching down and shoving his hands underneath the reptile. They shot up, hoping to slam into his stomach and rot through it.

Instead he grasped something very much not a stomach.

”What the fuck?!” Luca let out a suppressed yell as the already disgusting tissue of the lizard’s dick sloughed off rotted layer by layer. Dark, sticky material slid across the back of his hands and dripped onto the floor. The heavy scent of decay wasn’t what had him gagging, one he’d gotten used to from his own body. No, it was the feeling of its comically large penis as he completely rotted it off.

At least it’s gone… oh God, that’s the first… Luca forced himself through the disgust, not letting the horror of that take him over. Then the Rot would latch on again and that was much much worse than touching a… monster dick…

”Just die,” he whispered, hands shoving up and towards the belly of the creature. He was aiming for the stomach - but all he needed to do was rot through to an essential organ, then he could easily kill it.

---

Before Rien could even comment on Ruby’s suggestion, the Ghost with them went and turned the Veil back on.

Well fine by them. If they didn’t have to walk back the way they came then it was much easier for them… though maybe they could hitch a ride with Spider Girl. Keeping it up did change the plan, because they couldn’t go help elsewhere. Not that they’d really cared about that…

“We don’t all need to defend it,” they commented, suppressing a yawn as they stuck close to Pearl - and her Ice Shield. They didn’t want to get hit by that gross Ectoplasm rain. Looked like a pain. Literally.

They then pointed to Jack, Amara, and themselves. “We’ve probably got it. Maybe someone else stays, two go?”

Rien turned to their two summons. Panoptes tilted her head, multiple eyes looking at Rien before they spread out in all directions someone could come from. Amanita just leaned against their leg.

“I’ll know when something’s coming for us.”

@Mixtape Ghost N Sloane @Atrophy Luca @FernStone Alexander@Estylwen

---

It hadn't taken long for the others to catch up, even if they were doubtful of why he'd dealt with the not-corpses The Greenwood girl had expressed mild disapproval in her need to remind him of what they didn’t need.

"... And we don't need to kill every zombie we come across,"

To that, Clancy had thrown up his hands in a half-shrug, thumb and forefinger tapping together to silently puppeteer her commentary. Need was a strong word, and particularly from someone who had probably been shitting her diapers while he was dealing with a different kind of monster. Her chastisement was a familiar talk-down he'd learned to suppress over years in half-doses.

He doubted she'd have appreciated it if he'd left one of the rotting carcasses to grab at their ankles and do what things that should be dead... did to the people that weren’t yet dead. Whatever that was. And he'd broken through enough of them in the sodden yard of Kari Wilson to know it was safer than leaving to chance.

“Personally, I’d feel more comfortable knowing there were less ghouls to potentially block our only known exit,”

Sloane blunted the edge of his irritation, gratitude enough for now. He tilted his head slightly upward in response, perhaps not so subtly exaggerating the nod in the process.

They came towards the supposed access point to the compound, a side-entrance with a loose door. He wanted to question whether it should’ve been that simple, but he’d seen plenty of smart people who still forgot the basics. A light here, a door there.

The Greenwood girls’ warnings echoed in his mind. No lights, no loud noises, and most importantly, no magic. Stick to shadows. All of those he could check easily enough, except for maybe the fact that he wasn’t functioning by natural means. His existence was unnatural. Did that mean being there would qualify?

Either way, there was something they needed here, and he doubted the others were any less noise than he was with their collective magic and parasites.

Soon, as foretold, the first of many cameras cropped up, the faint blinking LED indicating its presence as it slowly pivoted from left to right. It took maybe a quarter-minute to get the timings of the search pattern down, but then he had never really had to worry so much about them before now.

The others, on the other hand... Luca volunteered to go first, looking in his direction.

”I guess you could come with me?”

Without hesitation, Clancy had bobbed his head in agreement, then moved in lock-step with Luca, expressing a quiet contempt for the corrosive presence probing at his facade of a body as he escorted the skinny latino across the camera's blind spot like a good samaritan walking an old lady across the street.

Even as the others passed through, he chose to keep pace with Luca while some of the others moved ahead, letting them slip past him as though he was no different a fixture than any of the ornate decor of the place. Further in they pressed, keeping to narrow alcoves, blind spots and the like until they came to what he guessed was the security gate that had been mentioned earlier in the plan. While his intent was to keep an eye out for Luca, he warily glanced towards the others.

Layla and Alizee, bound as they were, were as unknown a quantity as he was to the rest of them; Britney and Sloane had been whispering to each other a moment before, about what he had no idea, while Adora and Aislin seemed to be keeping quiet for now, as were the Greenwood girls and Amara’s phantom.

Well, they were, until something at the periphery of his senses seemed to close in, off one blind corner away from the security gate.

Clancy was late to notice it, in light of the distant cacophony of sounds and smells pulsing across the island as the other groups made their play, but now he could distinguish it from the background noise, the large presence he felt was too close to ignore, footsteps that closed ahead and smells accompanying them. ”Something big, close-”

Gurgling, stinking mound of meat, the lizard-thing had been sighted by the Greenwood girl before rearing its ugly head, a toothy maw not unlike the books he’d seen when he had been a lot younger, still growing.

The same Greenwood girl was hollering a warning of an incoming adept, which he had figured by now meant magic-user, though ‘red’ and ‘purple’ were distinctions that meant nothing to him, and to one side he could hear the rumblings of Adora, ready to leave. Britney seemed a little more resilient.

"Came here so we could find the asshole who murdered my n-.." Clancy sharply reminded them, then changed trajectory mid-sentence "Your friends." Like the biker’s pet ‘dogs’, the lizard-thing was not something that gave him pause. If it came to it, like he’d guessed it could with the stone dog, he favoured his own chances of dealing with it.

At least, he had until a rush of air pushed out from behind, too close to ignore.

Prompted to turn, Clancy caught it just barely in time to catch two figures emerging from a distortion in the tunnel, for one to just as quickly disappear as some hulking corpse-king took their place, wreathing either exit in green fire.

The man that remained pointed at them, raving about Luna - the white-haired girl who’d been spying on them?

No, not raving. Revenge.

Manifest in power, surging forward. Clancy stepped out, trying to put something between Luca and the bolt spearing at them..

That something was himself.

The arc crackled over him, manifesting in the form of half a dozen obsidian fingers which seared at his clothes and gnawed at his instincts. One licked at the open mouthed, buck-toothed grin of the cartoon character portrayed on his mask, blackening it into a charred, hollow scream. Beneath the fabric, he could sense the recession of what accounted for his lower jaw, where the pale white expression of cold skin was peeled back to expose bare teeth and the black void yawning behind.

Another black kiss made his knee give out for a moment, not pain as he could describe it, but something that counted for discomfort, stalling him. Then, it stopped.

Vines and roots emerged to close off one mouth of the tunnel, binding the dark-haired mobster in a cocoon of tangled overgrowth, but Clancy’s eyes were dark, flinty chips of ice, set on the gaps where skin and clothing remained to showcase the outline of a body.

And the boy felt that malevolent instinct surging at the back of his mind, the hunger, the need for meat from some stupid asshole that tried to kill him.

All that worthless flesh.

Clancy threw himself forward and drove a hand through the overgrowth that bound the mobster, small fingers raking through plant matter to grasp at his entangled arm, still pointed outwards, at the point where the elbow connected to the upper arm.

His other hand grasped at the gnarled growth that stretched out from the mobster's trapped fingertips, intending to wrench the limb away. Noises were abuzz around him, his s senses fixated.

Clothing. Meat. Bone.

The boy, bathed in an iridescent green glow, crunched down at either end, the moment washing over them.

Kenshiro was already far ahead of Stormy's walking barriers, knowing how dangerous of a tool a Doomsday sphere could be. It was, after all, a massive ball of plasma that was encompassed purely by a gravity-manipulated pressure system. It was constantly tugging at everything within range (which happened to be substantial), and anything caught inside would meet a roiling death. Zombies by the dozens were gulped down by the hellish blue orb, flying into the air and ripping in half from the force before ultimately shredding apart. They were contributing to an ever-growing accretion disk of dirt and gore queued up to be consumed in a hollow blue heat death. Occasional bits of rock and bone would break from the orbit, launching themselves like high speed projectiles back out into the growing horde.

Only in the sweetest point of its wake could one move; the barrier created by Ken's control over it. Most times, Drake was the one driving it forward with the graceful arcs of lightning to track its pathway. But this constantly rotating sphere of energy was under total telekinetic control, and was doing just as much damage as a dangerous sawblade as it was an all-consuming ball of hot gas. Spinning with it, Ken whipped across the field like a skipping rock, smashing the ground several times in a row before Ken yarded it to a stop at the foot of the magma titan.

Then his whole world lit up. The kinetic beam from the sky, were it not for his ultimately stable position at the rear of a black hole, would've most likely engulfed him in a flaming Hellscape along with the Titan... It seemed like that problem was taken care of, or would at least be so distracted that its initial purpose was moot... This left the flaming lizard in the sky.

Leon, in an attempt to conserve a bit of energy, pushed himself to the limit of his everyday power. He was sprinting as fast as humanoid legs could take him, taking him all the way back to those football games he missed going to. Missed being a part of. It only became more real to him when he heard Sully's scream of pain from across the field.
Such a shame... He was so cute...
The lumbering giant of a man pivoted hard, in a split second releasing the first sequence of gates that would allow his power to begin pooling up.
If he's so cute, you want to protect him, right!?
Cute is a dime a dozen. But I wish to drink from the cup...
Then it's settled!

”Who’s still alive out there?!”

"This is Leon! I'm moving to support Sully, confirm!?"
”A phantom is with him, stay together and keep an eye on Sully while he heals!”
"You got it!"

In a single pistoning of his leg, Leon's foot broke ground and kicked him forward with the force of a car. Around the same time, Ken was at the foot of the Magma titan when the Phantombane Spiritbomb went off, giving him the perfect moment to pick up some spinning momentum on the Doomsday again... Seeing as how whatever power necessary had already been put into it, keeping it contained was the only consistent draw from his own reserves. Light work in comparison...
Using the weight of it like an Olympic hammer thrower, Ken rotated once, twice, three times, and another... Then with an absolutely ear-shattering blast, the sphere was dragging him up into the sky hurtling toward the Dragon flapping itself around. As it lost debris, the pale blue light of the internal plasma became more and more brightly visible until he was just a sphere of blue flying through the sky. Each adjustment sounded like fireworks being set off in the clouds overhead.

As the orb climbed ever upward, Leon caught it in his vision and grinned. For a moment, he missed his magics... But the horde of undead closing in on Sully and the Amara clone's position had to be dealt with. Like a bullet, Leon transferred his frontward momentum into his legs, turning himself into a spear that toppled over a swath of the menacing shamblers. Enough that it stopped his momentum fully, letting him softly land on his feet and in stance. He didn't stop for pleasantries, his half-changed appearance resembling what he'd looked like at the meeting in the abandoned bar. His hair was pale white, body larger than it already was, and each swing saw his arms extend like cartoon rubber to cable-drag more zombies down into the ground.
Where the fuck did they get this many bodies?
Go drink...
Wha-No! He's wounded! We can't even try yet!

Leon felt Lelou grumbling... So his head turned for a split second.
"Sully! Buddy!? You gotta drink!"
He ripped the backpack he was wearing off with his teeth, letting his neck extend and crane enough that he could send it flying toward the Amara Clone.
"If he won't drink, force-feed him the green stuff in there!"
And then the blast wave really hit them. Leon's body reactively turned flat and wide, soaking up debris and the harsh shearing winds so that nothing would hit his brother-in-arms, or the clone tending to him... It was only then in that bright light that he saw Lila's oily black wings furled around her... He could smell someone unfamiliar with her, but couldn't do anything until the devastation rolled over them.

Ken was still making for the source of the pain at breakneck speeds, hoping to catch the Dragon directly in the accretion disk of the Doomsday to bring it to the ground. He vaguely knew how to seal entities, and as it was mostly belief, he liked to believe that this ball of hot plasma would be enough... But it wasn't permanent. He'd have to spend a weapon, or a scroll... But that was only if this worked to begin with. He could feel the pressure system the thing's wings were making, as well as the bomb-blast from behind that was probably something crazy happening... But he didn't care. This package needed to go somewhere important. Somewhere that it would really make a difference.
"Eat this, fucking Lizard!" he screamed, sound completely drowned out by the rushing air around him.