The titanic eldritch flesh mass was constantly growing even larger at every second. New mouths opened and closed along its sides, each one devoured immediately by conjured shadow arms that the monster bird attempted to manifest. Yet even those arms were losing the struggle. Their movements were sluggish now, crushed by the sheer volume of tendrils choking them.
The air grew hotter. The pressure increased until everyone instinctively hunched, half convinced the atmosphere itself was collapsing on them. People from both sides, hardened awakened and desperate criminal fighters, abandoned their clashes and sprinted in every direction. The sight of two Rank Two titans falling out of the sky over the center of Belmont City ripped away every thought except survival.
Roman took one look at Neo, at the crushing weight of the battlefield coming apart, and made a split second decision. He shouted at her to let Yang go. Neo obeyed instantly, and kicked Yang away with her boot. The force was only enough to send the blonde stumbling, as her aura had recovered was now feeding into her Kinetic rune.
Neo and Roman didn't seem to care, however as they then broke into a full sprint across the rubble. Roman didn't even try to hide his worry. His eyes kept flicking upward at the descending sky monsters.
Ruby wasted no time. Her arm hooked around Yang's back while her other hand grabbed Jaune's arm. The Accel rune flared and there was a sound like a bowstring snapping. All three of them shot off the pavement like bullets fired from a cannon.
The pressure behind them rose to a deafening crescendo. Ruby didn't dare look back. She only focused on moving forward faster and faster, weaving around corners, dodging broken cars and collapsed storefronts, and skidding across concrete as the coming storm followed behind them like hungry wolves.
They burst onto the rooftop of a tall office building several streets away just as the world behind them exploded.
The impact was beyond anything Jaune had recently felt. The shockwave slammed into the building and nearly blew him off the edge despite Ruby's grip on his wrist. A tidal wave of heat roared across the district, melting street signs and shattering every window within blocks. The sound was not a boom but a deep continental groan, like the ground itself was cracking in half.
All three of them were knocked flat. Jaune only kept Ruby from skidding across the rooftop by grabbing her and anchoring himself against a rusted conditioning unit. Yang dug her fingers into the concrete, cracks forming under her grip as she braced herself.
When the trembling finally slowed, they pushed themselves to their feet. Smoke and dust rolled over the city in dense waves. Visibility was almost nonexistent. Everything tasted like dust and hot stone.
Ruby coughed, her eyes watery, and looked toward the plaza where Belmont's LUCID base used to be.
Or what was left of it.
The base complex was gone. Entire buildings around it had collapsed and were missing chunks of their structures. Concrete had been liquefied by heat and then cooled into warped, glassy shapes. Streets had caved inward like sinkholes. A plume of dust rose hundreds of meters into the sky, curling and twisting like a storm trying to form a vortex.
Yang's breath hitched sharply. She clutched her head with both hands and stared in disbelief.
Ruby stepped closer to the edge of the rooftop. Her voice trembled almost imperceptibly. All those people. The entire base. The unawakened. Even some awakened. There was no way everyone had escaped.
Jaune felt a cold twist in his stomach. He had only met most of those LUCID's members once. But they had been fighting the same fight together. They had believed in what they were doing. He did not know them well enough to feel grief, but horror settled over him like a heavy blanket.
As the dust cloud slowly thinned, faint pulses of force rippled from the center of the destruction. Not large like the titanic clashes from earlier. These were small, almost like the reverberations of something heavy adjusting itself.
Ruby frowned. Yang squinted. Jaune leaned forward.
Those were not shockwaves of combat. It felt more like something straining against immense weight.
The dust cleared just enough to reveal the source.
Jaune's breath caught.
The giant flesh mass had completely pinned Raven and Qrow's combined Corvid form. The monstrous two headed bird was barely visible beneath the layers of tendrils. Its wings were crushed down against the ground. Shadow arms were still manifesting but every single one was immediately caught and forced back. The two heads of the monstrous bird didn't even have room to lift themselves.
Above them, dozens of colossal limbs extended into the sky, each gripping a building sized crow clone. Those clones, the ones that had been summoned by Qrow earlier, were now held in the air. They were struggling to free themselves but the limbs of flesh were just too strong.
The giant flesh mass was winning.
It wasn't even a contest anymore. It was domination.
Ruby took a step back instinctively. Yang clenched her teeth so hard that sparks of fire flickered around her knuckles.
Then Jaune noticed something else.
Scattered around the edges of the crater, hidden under chunks of debris and glowing faintly through the vaporizing dust, were perfect spheres of shadow.
Almost like small cocoons.
He recognized them immediately.
Raven's shadow shields.
He had seen her use them a few times by now. They were strong and could hold anything, having the ability to protect almost anyone inside.
The realization struck him so hard he almost shouted.
There were survivors.
There were LUCID members sheltered under those shadows.
Raven must have done it in the last moments before the crash. A rapid burst of shields. Covering everyone she could. Springing up around the plaza before the collision hit.
Yang followed his gaze and gasped. Ruby's eyes widened, then watered with relief.
Those tiny spheres of darkness meant there was still hope. Even in the middle of that horrific crater. Even with a nightmare of flesh crushing their strongest fighters.
Raven had saved people. But the battle was not over.
The flesh mass shifted.
It didn't move like a living creature so much as a mountain of tissue deciding to rearrange itself. Folds of meat peeled back, tendrils sliding aside as the entire front of the horror split apart. A long vertical opening widened from top to bottom until it resembled a gaping wound. Within that wound sat a monstrous mouth lined with teeth that spiraled inward like a vortex made of bone. The mouth flexed once, twice, and then it spoke.
The sound was not a simple voice. It was pressure manifest, vibration coming from the grinding of what seemed to be titanic stone slabs in a cavern far below the world's surface. Jaune felt the words rumble through the world. It was so loud that even at this impossible distance he understood what it said.
"Arias, the agreement is done."
A chill ran down Jaune's spine. Yang and Ruby froze beside him, unable to comprehend how something so large and grotesque could produce speech. The words seemed to linger in the air long after the mouth had closed, like the echo of thunder trapped in an enclosed space.
Moments later the air inside the crater warped.
A distorted shimmer flickered into existence and Arias appeared beneath the hovering tendrils. The man was in terrible shape. His clothes were almost entirely shredded. His skin was torn by dozens of deep wounds that had somehow crystallized into a jade-like green texture. His arm was half encased in a petrified sheen that pulsed faintly with trapped runic light. Blood trickled from the side of his mouth as if he had been coughing it up. Yet somehow he still carried himself with the bearing of someone who had not been defeated.
Grasped in his hand was Evergreen's neck.
The once regal Rank Two base leader looked almost unrecognizable. His runic might that once manifested as a jade jungle was nowhere to be seen. A multitude of gashes crossed his chest and back. His right arm was gone, severed at the shoulder. His left leg was missing from mid thigh downward. A chunk of his torso had been carved out as if some colossal creature had taken a bite from him. He was limp and pale, dangling in Arias's grip like a wrecked doll.
Ruby covered her mouth with both hands. Yang's eyes went wide with horror. Jaune felt his stomach drop as if he had stepped off a cliff.
Arias let Evergreen fall.
The limp body hit the broken ground at the edge of the crater with a dull thud. There was no stirring or groan. No flex of fingers or twitch of remaining limbs. He was breathing perhaps, or maybe not. The only certainty was that he no longer posed any threat. Arias stood tall in the center of the devastation, victorious.
Dragon Gang had won.
The flesh mass acknowledged him with a slow ripple of its tendrils. Arias nodded back, weary but resolute. Then he vanished.
Jaune barely had time to blink.
A breath later disorientation slammed into him so violently that he stumbled. He was no longer on the rooftop. Ruby and Yang were no longer several steps away from him. They were all in the crater. The ground beneath their feet was hot and uneven. Steam rose in thick plumes around them. The air was heavy with iron and dust and the oppressive pressure of two Rank Twos locked in stasis nearby.
Jaune could not breathe for a second. The presence of the monstrous entities was overwhelming. The Corvid monster bird that Raven and Qrow had become was so close that he could see individual feathers turning into swirling darkness and then shattering into motes. The flesh mass was so large that its tendrils blotted out what remained of the sky above them. Being this close made every hair on his body stand up.
Ruby gasped and fell to her knees. Yang clenched her teeth and tried to stay upright but her legs trembled like she was standing under ten times normal gravity. Jaune felt something similar, his limbs felt unbearable heavy and he couldn't even form words. Yet... he fared better than either of the two. He had once been in the presence of something far more greater and far more terrifying.
In any case, the Rank Two auras were still crushing them.
Arias disappeared and reappeared again and again. Each time he brought another cluster of people. Members of LUCID stumbled into place with dazed expressions and bloodied faces. Dragon Gang members appeared as well, many of them shaking, several severely injured. Even Roman and Neo were dragged into the crater. Roman nearly collapsed as he landed but stayed upright through sheer stubbornness. Neo looked wary, her mismatched eyes darting toward the monstrous flesh entity with visible emotion.
The girl who was apparently Arias's daughter was held carefully in his arms, despite the man's injuries. She was still unconscious, her breathing shallow.
Eventually everyone who had been part of the battle was gathered. Scores of people stood in a wide ring around the crushing center where the two titans remained locked. The crater itself resembled an enormous wound carved into the city, its edges glowing faintly from the heat of impact.
The flesh mass shifted. The giant vertical mouth opened only slightly this time and a quieter, more deliberate voice rolled out.
"Will you proceed with the final act, or do you wish for me to do it, Arias?"
The words were softer, yet they still shook the air. No one dared to breathe. No one dared to move.
Arias exhaled slowly.
He looked around at the assembled fighters from both sides. His gaze lingered on the cowering Dragon Gang members before moving toward the bruised and battered LUCID fighters. His jaw tightened.
"No one from the Dragon Gang. Only LUCID."
There were murmurs of confusion among the members of Arias's own faction.
Jaune himself was confused but an inkling of meaning took shape in his mind and inkling that turned confusion into horror.
Only these people.
Only LUCID.
The flesh mass responded in that low cavernous tone.
"Agreed."
Silence fell instantly. It was the kind of silence that felt like the moment before a guillotine fell. Every heartbeat in the crater seemed to pause at the same time. Dust drifted slowly downward from the hovering tendrils above them.
Jaune felt a terrible pressure building in the air. Ruby instinctively reached for him despite her trembling arms. Yang stepped in front of both of them even though she could barely stand upright. She could not shield them from a Rank Two. Yet she refused to move aside.
Arias raised his hand.
.
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AN: Advanced chapters are available on patreon