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.
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