[IC] Icy Enmity: Battle in Oerelle's Halls - Alucroas vs Longinus

[Alucroas]

A faint blue light crackled and streaked across the frozen sky, appearing to shine ever brighter as its draconic source flew closer and closer to the strange architecture. Sensing his destination was near, lightning built at the back of his folding wings, and was compressed into a tight space that was infused with a soft, red underglow as the beast tilted into a vicious nosedive, all of the accumulated energy blasting out behind him in a purplish explosion of heat.

Moving at close to sub-sonic speeds, Zucroas blazed a burning trail through the forest, melting the snow off branches, vaporizing the ice along the ground, and leaving a linear steam plume behind as he zipped toward the thing that had aroused his spirit. The cold air was no hindrance to his sharply pointed snout – as a creature that was not of the natural world, as a dragon whose breath was made of the second strongest force in the universe, he could smell spiritual foulness like a hound sniffing the bloodtrail of a corpse that had been dragged into the woods, and the critters flowing through his blood ensured he felt the threat pulse through every cell in his body.

Such was the gift his new brother had given him.

Round eyes as deep as the ocean dilated wide to take in the palace, big, black pupils a stark contrast to his nearly pure white skin, with scales too smooth and flat to be seen without raising them. Twenty-foot wings folded downward like an umbrella to catch the wind, and a flexible tail, the latter swinging forward and the former opening up to slow him down just enough so that his momentum would land him on the vines. His long muscular arms reached out, the jagged crimson scar on his left, and the sapphire one on his right showing briefly as he used his claws to slice through the thorns in a violent, fast-paced ascent to the entrance, nostrils still flaring as the scent of danger intensified with each pull.

Growing ever more anxious, Zucroas wings flapped furiously, turning his scaling into aggressive leaps, viciously gouging plant flesh as he eagerly, violently rushed up to a massive horizontal split in the cliff-face. The ceiling was spaced a generous fifty feet from the floor, though narrowing considerably at the staircase leading up to the entrance. Zucroas threw himself over the edge, claws raking, and heels cracking the brittle ledge, his attention focused solely on the entrance that he instantly ran toward and up, even going so far as to grab the steps with his claws, and bounding his way into the atrium.

Upon finally making it in, the drake felt his spine tingle, muscles tense, like there was an entity trying its absolute best to fill him with dread and despair for having had the gall to step right into its jaws. What was Zucroas’ reaction to this? His claws on hands and feet alike clenched, neck craned and head swung, tail raised, and altogether at once, made all his joints crack, slammed his tail back down hard enough to break the ground he stood on. As his head finished its swing, Zucroas lurched forward, opened his mouth to a deadly width, and hissed a deep, nasty, meaty hiss, fangs and molars glistening with spilling drool, greeting the supernatural threat with vicious, primal savagery.

[L0nginus]

Zucroas broke into the court, utterly and completely feral by all accounts. The brutality of the monster rang true throughout the labyrinthine palace, his madness flashing across glacial glades. By aĺl accounts, the ruckus he had stirred up broadcast his presence to anything lurking within— to any foolish enough to try and kill him. Or, to another monster. The frozen embrace of the interior welcomed him, echoing with the grating candor of Zucroas' snarl, though that too eventually degenerated into a chorus of hushed whispers. Alien from their originator.

The ethereal, baby blue light was everywhere; yet, from somewhere off in that vast corridors of this place did a fuzzy absence seem to cloy at one of its many corners, which bestowed base upon the haunted cries. A faint umbral haze from which the first clatter of dainty steps sing in dissonant harmony with Zu's violence. Not quite a walk of peace, but it was easy to conflate the sultry serenity of the emergent Grecian woman with a sort of pacifying lull. Narcotic in the ease of which even her breathing seemed to lull even the most wrathful of titans. She came into this place, clad in a transparent chiton and himaton which hugged her slight build and fairer features, tinted scarlet with shimmering black patterns that raced through it with the grace of smoke curls. Orbiting the woman's head was a diadem of crossed, golden blades, which a waterfall of warm auburn hair threaded through with lilac flowed past. The darkness which regurgitated her stretched in her wake— joining with the abyssal embrace of her own shade with the diabolic yawn of a Hellmouth. The whispers grew in substance, as though Zucroas' frenzy had given voice to the voiceless, and the woman's presence here only served to bridge that stygian gap. From 20 feet away, the woman extended a delicate hand out for him to take wordlessly— her image splayed out across each crystaline face of the room where 'Croas found his absent. Her loveliness was not diminished, not even as she smiled.

Not even as she wore the smile of one who brought only woe.

[Alucroas]

A permeable curtain of darkness appeared before him, and as something wholly unexpected walked through its veil, his hissing sharpened, aggression tempering into a cold stare of savage malice. Her deceitful appearance did nothing to calm his nerves, and in fact worsened his agitation, eyes filling with crackling blue light as the atmosphere shifted from palpable tension, and evolved into blatant, snarling hostility. By time she was thirty feet away, the scars on his arms had become aglow with primal spirit-energy, claws surging with a thickening film of blue and red light as he readied himself for the impending calamity that was about to befall this temple.

In the moments between her final steps toward the looming dragon, in the depths of crystalline mirrors, something besides the woman's many vile reflections slithered and flew as horned serpents made of lightning so often do. Matter-vibrations from the infinity of neighboring universes connected to this palace flowed along a network of maroon lines, synthesizing a ghostly membrane with which to grant significance and substantiality, and ultimately authenticity of form to the alluring visages. If the provocative woman was as perceptive as she was dangerous, she would see the colored lines fading into transparency, whilst feeling their existential threads sewing her skein to the ones in the mirrors.

Alas, when she arrived at her position before Zucroas, and the fiend raised her hand to what the beast read as a facade of benevolence, electricity accumulated at the back of his throat, chest filling as his hissing was replaced with loud buzzing. Within his mind’s eye, and possibly the woman’s own, he saw the serpent’s converge on the parallel entities, maws wide, and bodies moving in a murderous lunge that sunk fangs into throats. Whether she’d live through their massacre was anyone’s guess – not that she had time to make a prediction, for a densely packed beam of lightning the size of her own body was being streamed from the dragon’s mouth with an intent that was all too real.

[L0nginus]

Pray.

Zucroas sutured tight the gaping wound of causality, weaving Creation itself upon the needlepoint of his tooth and claw. There was little mercy in the act, save for the swiftness of his execution of that loose woman. But, there was something.. strange. Not just in the ease of which he managed to intercede into her being and that of countless others, but in the fact that the connection was already preexisting? Come to think of it, from the moment she entered the frozen forum, the gaze of her reflections seemed to focus on him. It was a ubiquitous kind of attention, the kind of uncanny ease with which an old painting's eyes seem to follow you everywhere. They each adopted her saunter and sway, almost with intent. But that would be silly, right? They're her reflections. They didn't have to try. It is just what they do.

Unfortunately, the Draconite spat in the face of the wench's mercy. Her lovely smile was soon bathed in the radiance of countless volts of electricity and x-rays, flashing the squirming sight of her skeleton in a black-bodied silhouette that danse macabre'd in the wicked frenzy of her "pain". She fell to the floor in a heap, crackling with astral thunder that arced throughout the environment in branches of electric fury. Perhaps the most interesting aspects of the exchange were two things, however, were two-fold. Well, technically three. Firstly, her hand was fully outstretched whilst she collapsed into a smoking wreck upon the floor— her hand curled into what Zucroas perceived to be faux acceptance. Secondly, though her images were all molested with the unbridled fury of the serpents ripping into their throats, they were all.. bloodless. The electricity that the astral predators emitted did conduct into them too, but the charge was consumed by the yawning vortex of something lurking within the now-real reflections, something which mirrored her too-long shadow. Their smiles widened.

Thirdly? From the drooling chasm of her throat spews viscera. Frothing, bubbling scarlet, like sea foam. And much like the sea, there was quite the volume of it too. An unreasonably large amount for someone of her small stature. It seethed in its sluggish trek, spilling out and tainting her smooth, delicate skin with that sticky red. The tide advanced, racing to engulf his shins in her gore. In the same fashion that her doppelgangers seemed to have happen to them, Zucroas' breath rolled over the woman, but passed through the boundary of something unseen. That roiling abyss which persisted in spite of the light of his cataclysm. A brief whine— a shriek— called out from the other side into the material as his lightning seemed to twist as though it got passed through an event horizon, before being yanked down into the endless gullet of her shadow, which blossomed with a bouquet of countless bloodshot eyes.

Wait. There was yet one reflection accounted for. The reflection of her in his eyes, though a reflection it did not remain for long, likely to his chagrin. It blossomed into psy-flame from within the corridors of his gaze. This was no scalpel, nor was it a hammer to batter down the battlements of his mind. It was a jackhammer. Left unattended, from the moment it proliferated itself into being, it sought to consume his skull, though this.. thing.. bore no heat, no severity of the elements. No, it brought a far more destructive gift. Ego death. Its caress made to boil away his psyche, all the way down to his instincts, leaving the creature a hollow, empty existence. A perfect thing to be remade as she saw fit.

[Alucroas]

An umbral abyss opened its lightless maw, its hungry, swirling shadow pulling the elemental serpents into its dark gullet. Strangely, and quite unexpectedly, the drakes did not resist, for along the sides of their crackling, undulating forms, rifts in the forms of jagged scars traced an opening to a much deeper layer of the astral world. Within that layer, chaos reigned as the dominant spiritual force, and it was from such a disorderly place that a surge of shimmering red and blue substances poured out. It had a thick, gelatinous texture that was highly viscous, sticking to whatever it touched, and functioned as a digestive sponge to foreign energies by overwhelming them with the essence of its origin, reducing them to pure potential that was void of form and purpose. This ethereal plasmic membrane rapidly enveloped and conformed to the serpent's bodies, providing a pre-emptive defensive shield that would safeguard them against being destroyed within the vortex, and consequently gave them an uncannily invasive quality, as seen by many bloodshot eyes, whose realm they drained into.

Fully armed with the familial gift of protection, a vicious assault began as the serpents dove straight at the staring orbs, horn-tips spewing crimson clouds of nanoscopic dust in their wake, which itself emitted the very same maroon light used in sewing the many reflections together. In no time at all, they would make short, vicious work of their sight, just as they had done to the many throats of the women foolish enough to just let themselves be maimed.

The eyes…windows to the mind– the ones leading to Zucroas’ had been filled with scorching lightning, blinding in its luminance and hazardous to any entities attempting to pass through the electric inferno. If setting fire to his psyche is what she wanted to do, then she’d find her own burnt to a crisp as the same maroon energy used to bind and make clones of her reflections manifested as counter-offensive outlines around the drake’s eyes, strengthening the psychic connection to the point of it feeling like there was a giant, clawed hand wrapped around her throat, the sturdiness of strong, thick bones, and powerful muscle forming the bridge that forced stable passage. Here she would bear witness, and experience first-hand the wrath of the dragon, whose sacred space she sought burn down:

A purple ocean rose and fell beneath a fresh yellow sky, its waves whipped into a violent storm. Above it, a crackling cloud of smoke and ash rolled forward, dead remnants of the psy-flame blown into motion by tremendously flapping wings of the purest white, their length reaching both ends of the horizon. Behind the cloud, long, muscular arms hung, each bearing the jagged red and blue marks that symbolized the scars of the dead, both pouring waterfalls of red and blue gel into the astral ocean, giving it its unique color. Mounted atop the wings was a draconic face roaring endless, unrestrained fury, horns aflame and eyes seething static electricity, for the full brunt of its rage had been wrought forth by the woman's maleficent threat against his mind. Absent the restrictions of time and space, the apocalyptic stormcloud bloomed larger, vicious maws swelling, stretching, and collapsing in on themselves, only to lunge out with terrifying instantaneity, followed by an internal explosion that expanded the supercell outward, sending a wave of suffocating psychic energy that would choke her spirit’s voice like volcanic ash filling airways, raze her thoughts like pyroclastic flows shredding the land beneath a blotted out sun, and engulf her soul under the immense weight of a monster who vindictively wanted to crush, immolate, and bury her like lava smothering a person.

Back on the physical plane, Zucroas saw the vomit of unnatural blood and instinctively leaped, flapping hard and throwing himself into a backflip, his still firing beam gouging the upper wall and ceiling. The maroon lines siphoned a surplus of energy from the extra-versal gates, swelling with power as they gorged on extraversal nourishment, channeling it all into the beast as he hit the floor on all fours. Riding the momentum of his maneuver, Zucroas swung his head up, lightning beam thickening, widening, blossoming with intensified might and resilience as it made contact with the sanguine flood, vaporizing a trail through to the woman.

Before the path he made could seal itself shut, Zucroas turned off the beam and broke into a mad charge, the film that had initially coated only his claws now covering his whole body, much the same way the serpents had protected themselves. Bowing his head, the dragon’s horns aimed ahead of him, tips covered in a sandy crimson dust, as were his claws, talons, and tail, sparing no precaution as he aimed to skewer her upon his three foot weapons of war.

[L0nginus]

Pray II

Zucroas leapt back from her sanguine elixir, moving with such force, such aggression, that the countless reflections of the tangible woman before him couldn’t help but swoon in unison.. though, she made no such gestures. How could she, bleeding out as she was, right before his eyes? His breath's radiance bleached the room in a stark, bone white— juxtaposing against the ever deepening abyss of Oblivion's maw, leaving it to be cast across the forum like the bleak, open wound upon the borders of life and death that it truly was. An umbral scar upon the corridors of this palace. The woman twitched, but for as inrealistic as it were, that was somehow enough for her to build sufficient momentum to send herself tumbling to her right; narrowly avoiding the cosmically-charged electron beam, as its fury discharged into the pool of blood around her— leaving both a harrowing red mist and the mirror like viscera pond yo race with bands of his power. However, he rushed in soon after, led in with his sheer bloodlust. The lightning, however, would never reach her. Not before he did, at least, though it was trapped in a closed-circuit loop around her; the ionized gore storing far more energy than feasibly possible, with impossibly complex matrices of covalent bonds that wove his fury into tangible, material form. Stagnant, isolated. Usable. Lending to itself more mass This led them to the crux of the oncoming storm of violence. He charged at her, through the gap. He fell headlong through the crimson fog, bringing all he had to bear, before the river of scarlet dried up like the Euphrates. Converted into theoretical, potential value— a veritable slew of horror that converged upon the energy quotient of the blood mist the instant it occurred, which was upon contact. Zucroas' death knell sang with the rupturing of countless fermions into a counterfeiture of celestial light. The distended vomit of Creation— otherwise known as reality cancer, and threatened to baptize him in the collapsing of countless possibilities into a single inevitability.

"How unfortunate," the chorus sang, coming from every direction save for her own lips. No, they hung agape, drooling in debased ecstasy, her eyes emptily taking in the sight of Zucroas' silhouette through the implosion. Her joints crunched and snapped wetly as she disobeyed the conventions anatomy demands; hoisting herself to a half-stand as her knees rotated in the opposite direction to pivot upright. The false halo hovering above the woman's head had since ceased being an addition to her garment, and unfurled into a collection of 6 golden blades of various western ethnic style. The Swords of Hekate. Those blades, fashioned of a metal with the density of neutron star matter with a quarter the weight, they thrusted forward upon their own initiative to bury themselves into his skull, save for 2 which made to run through his traps to dismember Zucroas adjacent to the shoulders all the way down through the ribs. The woman leapt back, evidently unbothered by the incorrectness of her legs, like the vectors of her motion were moving in Kintar's stead. In that same illogical way, the curvature of spacetime conformed around her weapons, for their sheer mass and density were enough to grant them their own orbital fields. Nevermind how much force they had to generate to move themselves at subsonic speeds, their mere presence was enough to disorder the geometry of the dragon's flesh and yank him into their flight path with his inertia compounding into it.

Zucroas' serpents surged into the abyss, the realm of death. An afterlife known as Hell. A realm of aught terrible, where the damned torment each other in absence of God. There was no light in this stinking pit of black-burning fire and brimstone, and their luminous into it shone upon those 'eyes', revealing their true nature. They were all an endless swarm of ashen skinned men and women, ferally clawing over and onto each other amidst the stink of their own feces and urine. Various wounds adorned their flesh like the paintings of a sadistic child, leaving them to reach for the serpents which acted with pure malice. The red dust spilled amongst the masses as that astral plasma rendered them into entropic slime, ripping and tearing through the still-moving carcasses of deadmen. But, as was the natural order of things, Hell is paradoxically a place of imbalance and contradiction. The Karma of this place stunk of Kintar's deceitful dominion, and imbued onto the formless ones a purpose, and if not a purpose, a form, for one begot the other and with neither there was only the opportunity for renewal. Their inherent uselessness was fed to the other accursed like pig-slop, strengthening them; bolstering them with infernal might. With each evisceration, with each man or woman turned to goo, the masses grew more potent in their workings as they sought to crush the serpents beneath the clutching and ripping tide of their misery.

Meanwhile, in the mental realm.

Zucroas outputted enough psychic might to pop the brains of countless psions into grey sludge, but it was all for naught. This was no meeting of minds, but a flame that devoured his psyche. His mental energy. What he did was tantamount to pouring gasoline into a fire, which he may as well of done, for that was the literal outcome here. The psy-flame was emboldened by this outcome, if not held at bay briefly, before flowing back into the corridors of his wrathful mind to render his sacred mind palace to a rundown hovel. Though, two other things were of note here. Firstly, his mind registered the attack, but imprinted the response onto a caricature of the woman which his mind conjured up in that exchange. This created effigy soon blossomed into an instance of the real thing, to his detriment. Much like the Kintar in front of him, it glutted itself upon his Wrath, and used his inherent sin as a gaping hole in his supernatural defenses to exploit for the sheer presence of it. The creature swam within pyroclastic flows, and danced upon slipstreams, finding nourishment upon his anger; infesting his mind with his malignant touch, until eventually it proliferated enough to try and cut-off his mind-body connection, infiltrating into his nervous system to shut down his motor controls.

"Mmm, KiKi likes you very much." It whispered, its sultry voice like a finger trailing down Zucroas' spine, and a breathy moan into his neck.

[Alucroas]

The battle was roaring into motion, and Zucroas’ defensive preparations rewarded his offensive charge well. His horns pierced the bloody mist first, followed by his claws, both covered in dust, the physical functions of which were nearly invisible to the naked eye. The dust performed a critical, life-saving maneuver as it leaped off the dragon’s body, passing through the film covering his skin, coating itself with the protection it granted. Bright, heat-emitting yellow light beamed off the dust, increasing its speed, as the bottom half stripped whole layers of concrete off the atrium floor, producing an expanding cloud that rushed forward in the shape of a growing wave, the whole mass radiating maroon light.

If there were eyes that could perceive nanoscopic forms, they would see a swarm of autonomous draconic machines, known in their progenitor's mind as the draco machines-- they were bipedal like Zucroas, and possessed all of his traits: scars of the dead secreting an ethereal, gel-based solvent that absorbed, purified, and expelled harmful energies–a fantastical control over lightning, as well as other aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum, and were primarily responsible for controlling the existential ley-lines, the source of the maroon lightshow. Lastly, and most immediately relevant to aiding the dragon’s charge, were their tails that had been modified in real time to feature a deadly number of tiny, protruding blades capable of adaptively calibrating their vibration frequency to be exceptionally proficient at cutting through targets. Semi-detaching themselves at the waist, the legs raised into a sitting position, inclined at the knees, tilted sideways, and rotated into a horizontal axis with feet bent at an inward angle, causing them to resemble the broken, taloned hands of a clock.

Plasma thrust blasted from their wings and foot soles, accelerating the lower-section into a violent, positively charged spin, followed by a revving that was neither seen, nor heard, yet boldly present in the execution of their objective; the revving of countless harmonic chainsaw’s growling activations. Function, fury, and a fine-tuned analysis of the blood mist's composition, relayed back through the maroon light, fed the machines all the data they needed to generate a counter-frequency that would disrupt the mist’s molecular stability. Multiple pass throughs would be needed to ensure every cell was sliced through and eviscerated, but the majority of the work was taken care of with unparalleled efficiency, partly due to the natural pull of protons and electrons attracting each other, resulting in the blood being forcibly sucked into the saw's lethal blades, and also because the draco-machines had feasted on the concrete floor, converting mundane rock into vicious, metal mayhem. Meanwhile, Zucroas’ tail swung hard to his left, throwing him into a turn that dragged his claws and talons against a surface that should not have been there, but nevertheless emitted sparks of maroon ether, his turn nearly finished.

Throughout the whole contest, using intuitive sight shared with him by the draco-machines, Zucroas tracked the mist’s displacement pattern that was caused by Kintar's evasive maneuver.

This chase was far from over.

–

A psychic specter swam through the ruins of her own psy-flame, but the apocalypse had only just begun. Kintar tried to bathe Zucroas’ world in fire, and now it was time for her to drown in the blood of his spirit, already whipped into a cleansing, oceanic surge via the flapping of his monstrous wings. Four colossal waves swelled up on all sides of the pyroclastic storm, towered briefly overhead the superheated cloud, and crashed down on top of it, leaving no room for escape, polluting a small portion of its vast mass in the process. In what felt like mere seconds, however, the ashen blemish was being crushed in the overwhelming tide, for even if its might were akin to a mountain that reached into Heaven, Zucroas’ determination was a thing that reached all the way down to Hell.

On Soran, he experienced the loss of his clan at the hands of aliens seeking to remedy a problem that was not theirs to solve–and still, he was able to find renewed innocence in a creature named Aludon. In the depths of Phlegethon, the two encountered a tormented cyborg without a purpose; his name was Tage, and though they were at first fearful of each other, eventually through the merging of body, mind, and soul, they became a single, unified being. Amidst the scorching winds of Kilamara's vast desert, the one became three, and together, primal love sowed the seeds of tragedy and trauma into a trinity of dragon, aptosite, and machine.

Lost and found.

Reclamation and reformation.

Damnation and salvation.

A personal violation against Zucroas’ mind was committed, and his solution was to counter-attack Kintar with her own reverse-engineered malice. An exploitation of his motivations was futilely attempted in order to pervert his emotions, and ascribe pathology in the place of basic, visceral psychology. Indeed, he was a beast prone to bouts of rage in the midst of that which threatened his soul–but such feelings were natural. More important than that though, and more precious than the preservation of his soul, was the preservation of his brothers. Keeping each other alive, preserving their bond...that's what mattered–that is what brought Zucroas to this palace of madness.

The woman's short-sighted understanding of Zucroas’ wrath had led her to naively denote–supplant the presence of sin in the place of an eternal instinct that existed in the hearts of all noble beasts. For that, she would pay.

Now the qualities inherent to her desires, to those which allowed her to plant such insidious seeds, and light such soul-blackening fires would come under attack. It began with a simple abstraction, translated to a pseudo-physical reality via the simple fact that fire was virtually impossible to light while underwater. This basic axiom malignantly multiplied itself, weaving its truth throughout the twilight yellow sky, quickly darkening into a star-dotted canvas that did not last long, as the cosmic darkness of space was aesthetically refashioned to the composition of a black ocean, with the zone betwixt that which dwelt above, and that which dwelt below being the only place not swallowed by the astral anomaly.

In mere moments the stars sank beneath the waves, thickening into mud, and smothered the stellar mass with its oppressive weight. Soon after, the mud hardened into a riverbed, whose cracks belched plumes of maroon smoke, symbolic of the plague. Soon, it would coming for Kintar too, and Zucroas had no intention of letting her out of the trap he secured through her hubris, evidenced by a hard glaze forming over the freezing surface of the ocean he created. In its depths, more of the elemental serpent drakes freely swam, taking full advantage of the woman who tried to feast on Zucroas’ anger, but instead found herself locked in an empty buffet. Now she was caught, the submerged storm nearly faded as more drakes manifested themselves through its remnants, maroon glow pulsing through their crackling forms on a wild intercept path, brazenly taking advantage of Kintar’s hollow feast in favor of their malice that fully aligned with the storm.

Even so, such an advantage could not be maintained for too long. It wasn't normal for forms to exist within a gelatinous ocean that reduced all things to empty potential. The fiend was no less susceptible here, as the ocean stickily clung to her exposed spirit, eating away at her ego with its digestive properties. Something was coming, a revelation was on its way, the sky hearkened as such with the billowing of more smoke through that dried riverbed.

Chaos will rise again.

–

Cellular carnage formed an organic smog of crumbling, ionizing matter, whirling around fast flowing eddies of crimson and maroon. Light from the latter bathed the room in its color, followed by a burst of purple from the scars of the dead's combined colors producing an inhibitor field constructed with the everpresent ley-lines, restricting the shadow's growth using a barrier that was two parts ethereal and spatial. This was far from the only effect though, for where the shadow faltered, a muddier darkness took its place, flowing in from the spirit world and merging with the space surrounding the reflections and Kintar's reorienting form.

Zucroas ground to near stop on the newly revealed floor, now composed of a maroon, hard light surface, the psychic tether connecting their minds having transcended the astral world to appear as something startlingly physical. It was dark like maroon, and coated in a thick, cosmic essence that sparkled with stellar radiance, stretching elastically as the dragon leaned into the last bit of momentum he had gained, pulling in all the electrons released by the harmonic chainsaw’s cutting action. His lightning filled eyes fully focused on her every disturbing move, which for him did naught but elicit a hostile grin, and a brief glint of cold, reptilian excitement steaming off his burning teeth and hissing tongue.

Then she fired those strange blades. The draco-machines broke the dam separating the abstract sky from the physical plane in several key spots, spewing artificial space-time that seethed with a primed electromagnetic pull, its properties amplified, compounded, and intensified by the ley-lines. A full-blown intercept occurred, sucking the blades down a smooth vector, accelerating their speed like bullets racing down the barrel of a railgun. Their first destination led them through the army of the damned, where the blade’s geometry distorting properties were given a conniving boost in power by another unit of draco-machines, whose initial directive had been to merely aid the serpent-drakes in combating the disgusting corpses. Now their directive had changed to environmental destruction. This was accomplished by drinking in the power those parallel universes they were connected to held, and through such nourishment, turned what was originally meant to be a precise attack designed to warp Zucroas’ body, into a weapon used to implode the shadow realm, and everything inside it–not through hijacking control though, rather through boosting the radial effects of the phenomenon to be globally devastating as opposed to locally decimating.

With spatial mass compounded, and the ley-lines circuitry so tightly interwoven into the freshly collapsed dimension, its existence became akin to that of a cosmic cannon ball. Reflection after reflection felt its kinetic punch, and in the event they were able to evade like the original Kintar had done, the space in which they resided would still suffer the effects of such a brutal collision, namely because when the draco-machines became apart of the mass, so too did the aspect of harmonic armageddon resonate through the absorbed power of the harmonic chainsaws.

The end of this extremely cunning attack was the atrium’s demise as the draco-machines tore it to pieces, the mirrors exploding, and Zucroas slingshotting himself at Kintar jaws first, all using the cord that connected them mentally, physically, and in all likelihood, fatally.

[L0nginus]

Shadow of Intent

The woman's feet tap against the harshness of frost-laden stone in jolting hops, careening about the pale oblivion. Her joints crackle, muscle fibers crawling beneath the smooth veneer of her bronzed skin like so many ants. They snapped back into order— the sweet agony of her false flesh mirrored in the excited crooning of her doppelgangers. They, like her, were all of the Deceit; the first Lie spoken by their then pure Father, Pride. Multiversal copy-pasting or not. It was in the darkest aspirations of the creature's nature to mislead and cajole the unaware, and it was in that unempathetic string of 1s and 0s that her song reached the ears of the Dracomachines. The information they recieved changed subtly, their equations skewed. After all, in studying the demon, they opened themselvds up to its Daemon, for it was the information itself, in the same way it was the mind-ghost that Zucroas' psyche projected in an attempt to understand and defend against mindfire.

The DMs in that same way did their jobs a little.. too well. Whether or not the mist remained as blood was irrelevant, for the red mist was always meant to be destroyed in the end. The accelerated process fed the force of their harmonics into the haze, before the inevitable change dried up the wells of potentiality. The sheer amounts of energy offloaded onto the mass of the mist was enough to obliterate its fermions— its elementary particles. From that reaction spewed a shower of color, bleaching all it came into contact with a state of becoming inert. No possibility to move, no possibility to function. No possibility to exist. Zucroas' Dracomachines fell prey to this first, being in the immediate blast radius and acting as a buffer for the worst of it, before inevitably succumbing to the glorious radiance of his falsified antithesis. A kind of Order, if it were that, which should not be. The blasphemous touch of an endless falsehood bleached the Dragon in the loss of several variables, chief among which: the capability of Zucroas' vessel to utilize ESP (ExtraSensory Perception). That same light rode the currents of the Kintars' voices, using the sonic frequencies as a means to proliferate and infest the space in arcing bands of light. Where their rays touched, brief instances of the environ overlapped with this one; leaving brief impressions of a case where the stage was bathed in lava, or one where men were imprisoned beneath frozen cradles. The end result was a blighted gateway upon the mirror-worlds that the other Kintars fell in from, growing drastically more numerous by the moment with each shattered mirror. After all, what did breaking glass do except make more mirrors? Her doppelgangers fell in corpse-maiden rain, bridging their inherent qualities with the Primus. So many different, other Hells to intermingle with her own in a fibrous mesh of darkness, compressing and expanding like the breath of a living thing. Their bodies smashed into icy rock and impaled themselves upon trees, but all brandished the same golden blades before each sword promptly vanished, even the ones Zucroas would of originally ricocheted off into other realities. There was brief silence, save for perhaps the odious snarls Zucroas took, before the screaming warp of super dense matter blades reentered the space a moment later. They crumpled spacetime like so much paper machè, owed in part to Zucroas amplifying their gravitic fields, and the rest in their rapid asexual procreation. A thorny, adamantine wall rested squarely a foot away from the dragon, and rushed to meet him at the natural speed of lightning; scraping the floor, walls and ceilings as the environ distorted into an indistinct haze, leaning far too close toward the swords. In that same way, the barrier Zucroas erected to constrain Oblivion was yanked away, for even non-physically aspected forces were leashed into the threat. Perhaps Kintar's saving grace here was the capability to evade the threat by standing at the boundary between living and dead.

The mental realm is a place of metaphor. Often times things that appear plainly obvious aren't always so, and precious little was ever made simple. It was a place of loaded sentimentality, especially within a world of one's own making. After all, who would dare ascribe wrath to a man on a mission to save his brothers?! Every father trying to save his daughters from bad men making big mistakes inside of them. Every jilted lover seeing their beloved in the arms of another. Every cornered animal. Why was Zucroas lying to himself? In what comfort did he seek in this falsehood of absolution from his own anger? His own hatred? The truth was, there could be no salvation. No forgiveness. Not in front of this Dajjal. Zucroas dragged down the sky, submerged light within darkness, and reconciled the illogic of heaven being folded over the sea with the might of his mind palace. But it was all for naught. The creature had already escaped into his nervous system, for this act of seld-deception had already cost him. He felt his body refuse to respond to his commands for that brief instant, before impact was assured.

Now the question was: would it cost him everything?