A searing heat burned behind her eyes. The iron taste of blood filled her mouth. The acrid, chemical sting of poison gas scraped her throat with every ragged breath. Nike's eyelids, heavy as tombstones, fluttered open.
Her vision swam, a blur of murky green and bruised purple. Slowly, shapes resolved from the haze not of living soldiers, but the dark mounds of the fallen, their armor glinting dully through the poisonous fog. A choked moan came from her left, the desperate clang of metal ahead. And through the swirling gloom, she saw her sister Bia.
A lone, unwavering silhouette standing between the monstrous, serpentine coil of Ophium and what remained of their ravaged army.
"No…"
With a trembling hand, Nike fumbled for an arrow. Her muscles screamed in protest as she nocked it, the bowstring feeling impossibly heavy. She drew, her hazy vision swimming as she tried to aim at the colossal serpent.
Swoosh.
The arrow flew true, slicing through the chaos to strike Ophium just as he poised to deliver a final blow to Bia. The Titan reeled back, plucking the arrow from his hide as if it were a thorn. His serpentine eyes, glowing with malevolent intelligence, locked onto Nike.
He didn't speak. He didn't need to. A volley of poison needles, glistening with venom, shot toward her.
Defenseless, Nike dropped her bow and shut her eyes. "Sorry…Bia..."
A series of sharp pings rang out. She opened her eyes to see a flurry of daggers deflecting every needle, spinning in a protective arc before her.
A calm voice spoke from behind. "You've done enough. Rest. I'll handle this."
Ophium tightened his serpentine tail around Bia's unconscious form. "Ssssh... Who are you?"
Julie didn't answer. She simply closed her eyes, and a single dagger floated into the air before her.
Let's test this new move.
In her mind's eye, she wrapped the blade in the crimson energy of slaughter. To the onlookers, the dagger darkened, then glowed with a deep, bloody light, the air around it warping with heatless power.
Ophium responded with another hail of poison needles. But to Julie's heightened perception, they now moved through the air with the lazy drift of feathers in a breeze. She sidestepped them with contemptuous ease, her movements a blur to everyone else.
A flick of her wrist sent the ensorcelled dagger slicing through the air. It didn't just fly in a straight line; it curved, weaved, and shot through a dozen enemy soldiers in the space of a heartbeat before returning to her. They fell, lifeless, before they even realized they'd been struck.
"Experiment successful," Julie murmured. A dozen more daggers rose behind her, a semi-circle of gleaming death awaiting her command.
Enraged, Ophium threw Bia's limp body aside and charged. "Attack!"
His entire army of human-serpent hybrids surged forward. Julie didn't flinch. She simply vanished, reappearing moments later to catch Nike as she collapsed. In another blink, she had both sisters settled in the shade of a distant rock formation.
She stared at the approaching horde, now shrouded in Ophium's poison mist. A devious smile touched her lips as she drew twin daggers. More blades floated into position behind her. "I love hide and seek."
She vanished again.
At the center of his toxic cloud, Ophium stood surrounded by his soldiers. 'My instincts scream danger!' He pulsed his poison sonar through the mist, searching. "Wait... where are all my subordinates?"
He dissipated the mist to reveal a field of desiccated corpses, their life essence drained away. Before he could process the horror, Julie materialized behind him.
"Checkmate," she whispered.
Her blade flashed. Ophium's head tumbled from his shoulders. A vibrant red haze streamed from his corpse, flowing into Julie as his body crumpled. "After reaching Chief God, killing High Gods becomes... trivial."
"General!"
Julie looked north to see her unit arriving, riding ice sledges across a frozen path she'd created.
"Amar! Heal Bia and Nike. Search for any other survivors."
The angels rushed to the fallen commanders as Julie surveyed the devastating cost of their "victory."
---
Meanwhile, at the Southern Pillar
General Boreones watched the lines of his twenty thousand soldiers facing Menoetius's Titan host. The formations were perfect mirrors—three evenly divided flanks in straight lines.
When the battle horns sounded, both sides surged forward. At first, it seemed like a conventional clash. Then Boreones noticed the irregularity—the enemy's left flank advanced slower than the center and right.
"A miscoordination?" he murmured to himself. "Menoetius is all brute force. Perhaps one of his captains hesitates..."
Seeing what he thought was a fatal error, Boreones made his decision. "Signal the right flank! Wheel inward and crush their center before they recover!"
His forces obeyed, the right wing surging forward to envelop the enemy's center. For a glorious moment, it seemed to be working. Then Boreones saw the truth, "hesitant" left flank wasn't disorganized, but a coiled spring now releasing its energy.
With terrifying discipline, it pivoted and smashed into the exposed flank of his own over-committed center.
"No—" Boreones's word was cut short as the roar of battle drowned beneath the screams of his own soldiers. The line shattered.
Through the chaos, Menoetius's chariot thundered toward him, the Titan's face split in a brutal grin. Boreones raised his sword, but it was too late. Menoetius's blade fell in a terrible, final arc, cutting the mortal king in two.
As blood showered the triumphant Titan, the wind died suddenly, then reversed direction, pulling toward the eastern coast. The very light changed, casting a deep, aqueous blue-green hue across the sky as if a second, alien dawn were breaking. A low-frequency vibration pulsed through the ground, felt in the bones more than heard.
A Titan scout stumbled toward Menoetius, breathing heavily. "My lord! Lord Krios and the Leviathan... their battle at the eastern pillar... the sea itself is tearing apart!"
Menoetius wiped blood from his face, his grin widening. "Let them play. The real war is already won."