The silent, cold inferno of Jade's Nether-Flame met Lady Anya's crimson-clad fury. He wasn't winning. He was surviving. Each time his black fire licked out to scour her away, she phased through it like mist, her laughter a silver bell of madness, her claws leaving shallow, freezing cuts on his arms. She wasn't trying to kill him; she was playing with her food, savoring the hunt.
Meanwhile, Zero was a storm contained. His Storm-Severing Step was a constant, crackling blur as he danced between the four vampire guards. A Heaven's Judgment would momentarily stagger one, leaving a smoking line across its chest, but they healed with terrifying speed, their coordinated attacks never ceasing. He was a pinnacle of efficiency, but he was being slowly, methodically worn down. The math was simple and grim.
Their backs met in the center of a ring of pulsing mushrooms, momentarily pushed together by the relentless assault.
"This is statistically unwinnable," Zero stated, his voice calm even as he parried a clawed strike that would have shredded steel. "There is a critical flaw in our current strategy."
"The flaw is their regeneration and numbers," Jade gritted out, a whip of Nether-Flame forcing Anya to dematerialize and reappear a few feet away, laughing.
"No," Zero corrected, his silver-green eyes flicking to Jade with a look of pure, analytical confusion. "The flaw is your inexplicable ability to attract powerful, deranged vampire women. This is the second one. What is the variable? Is it the white hair? The 'brooding aura'? I need data."
Jade, for the first time in the fight, was genuinely caught off guard. He deflected a slash from Anya, the impact shuddering up his arm. "I… do not have that data."
"It is a significant tactical liability," Zero continued, as if discussing a faulty piece of equipment. He vanished in a Storm-Severing Step to avoid a pincer attack, reappearing just in time to block another strike at Jade's flank. "First Seraphina, who wants to own you. Now this one, who wants to… what is her objective? She seems to want to consume you in a more literal, but equally unsettling, way."
"She finds my Nether-Flame… stimulating," Jade deadpanned, unleashing a wave of Obliterate that forced the vampires back for a precious half-second.
"Fascinating," Zero replied, his tone utterly flat. "So your primary defense mechanism is also a courtship signal to a specific, dangerous demographic. We are essentially screwed."
Lady Anya overheard them, her laughter ringing out, rich and genuine. "Oh, I adore you both! So practical in the face of damnation! It only makes me want him more!"
She gestured, and her four guards tightened the circle, their eyes burning with renewed hunger. The mist around them seemed to thicken, cutting off any escape route. They were trapped, outmatched, and outhealed.
Jade and Zero stood back-to-back, the psychotic purple of Nether-Flame and the crackling blue of Lightning their only beacons in the encroaching dark. They had no grand plan. No hidden power-up.
They were just two anomalies, one cursed with an irresistible aura for unhinged vampire nobility, and the other his long-suffering, lethally pragmatic partner.
And they were about to be devoured.
The circle of vampires tightened, their movements a synchronized, predatory dance. Jade's Nether-Flame and Zero's lightning were powerful, but they were finite resources against enemies who seemed to feed on the very energy meant to destroy them.
"Suggestion," Zero said, his voice a low hum as he deflected a strike aimed for Jade's neck. "We switch targets. You take the four deranged suitors. I will handle the one you somehow charmed."
Jade unleashed a concentrated blast of Obliterate, forcing two vampires to recoil. "Your logic is flawed. Your element is less effective against her intangibility."
"My element is not the issue. The issue is your… specialized social aggro," Zero countered, his delivery still perfectly deadpan even as he moved in a blur. "I am generating less threat. It is a basic mechanic."
From the edge of the fray, Lady Anya cooed, "He's not wrong, my icy prince! My eyes are only for you! Your friend is merely… collateral."
She lunged again, not at Jade, but at Zero, a feint to disrupt their formation. Zero met her with a Storm-Severing Step, their movements a clash of lightning and shadow. But as he passed through her mist-like form, a wave of psychic compulsion hit him—'Let me have him. He belongs with us.'
Zero landed, shaking his head as if to clear water from his ears. "Annoying. She is attempting to use a charisma-based debuff. My resistance is high, but it is… irritating."
"She's trying to charm you now too?!" Jade growled, his frustration boiling over. He was a sovereign of annihilation, not a prize at a supernatural bachelorette party.
"It appears to be a secondary effect of your unique condition," Zero analyzed, his blade a silver arc in the gloom. "Like a contagious madness. We must find a cure. Or, at the very least, a repellent."
The sheer absurdity of the situation was their only weapon. They were two of the most dangerous beings in the Sanctuary, being slowly worn down not by a monstrous abomination, but by the romantic obsession of a centuries-old vampire and her very persistent bridesmaids. They were completely, utterly, and hilariously screwed.
It was then that Jade's eyes, glowing with violent purple, fell upon the Twilight Gardens themselves. The pulsing, magical flora. The rich, loamy soil thrumming with latent energy. His Obsidian Core, a void of hunger, pulsed in recognition.
Feed it.
The voice was his own, yet not. It was the whisper of the World-Eater.
"Zero," Jade rasped, a psychotic grin stretching his lips. "Clear a path. I'm going to feed the flame."
Zero didn't question. He didn't hesitate. He simply became lightning.
"Storm-Severing Step!"
He vanished from Jade's side, becoming a crackling tempest that slammed into the four vampire guards. It wasn't an attack to kill, but to disrupt, to shatter their perfect formation. Arcs of wild energy sent them stumbling back, their synchronization broken for a single, precious second.
It was all the opening Jade needed.
He dropped to one knee, slamming his palms onto the vibrant, magical earth of the garden. He didn't aim for the vampires. He aimed for the world itself.
"OBLITERATE."
This was not a wave or a lance. It was a root. A black, voracious tendril of Nether-Flame that plunged into the ground. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the garden screamed.
The bioluminescent fungi didn't just dim; they were drained, their light and magic violently siphoned away, turning to gray dust. The twisted trees writhed as their life force was ripped out, the vibrant colors of their leaves bleaching to ash in a heartbeat. The very air, thick with enchantment, was scoured clean, the mana torn away to fuel a growing inferno.
Jade's Nether-Flame, supercharged on the stolen life of an entire ecosystem, erupted from him in a silent, expanding sphere of annihilation. It was no longer under his control. It was a force of nature—his nature. A black star, hungry and cold, devouring everything in its path.
The vampire guards, caught in the edge of the wave, didn't have time to scream. Their forms unraveled, unmade into flickering motes of shadow that were consumed by the hungry dark.
Lady Anya's eyes widened in shock, then ecstasy. She dematerialized, but the wave wasn't aimed at her form; it was aimed at her very essence. It scoured the space she occupied, and a shriek of pure, primal fury was torn from her as she was violently forced back, her misty form solidifying for a moment, scorched and smoking.
"YES!" she screamed, her voice a mixture of pain and rapturous delight. "THIS IS THE POWER I CRAVE!"
The wave subsided as quickly as it had come, leaving a massive, silent, blackened scar on the landscape. The beautiful, deadly Twilight Gardens were gone, replaced by a circle of absolute nothingness.
In the center, Jade stood for a single, swaying moment. The Obsidian Core within him was dark and still, every drop of mana and stolen energy utterly spent. The world swam in and out of focus. His legs gave way.
But he did not hit the scorched earth.
Zero was there. A blur of silver and fading lightning, his arm snapped out, catching Jade under the shoulders, taking his full weight with effortless strength. He held him upright, a pillar of silent support amidst the ruins.
Through the ringing in his ears and the encroaching darkness, Jade's mind, ever analytical even in shutdown, fixated on the most bizarre data point. He looked up at Zero, his violet eyes fading back to exhausted crimson, and asked the only question that mattered.
"...Are they NPCs... or real?" he slurred, his voice barely a whisper, his head lolling against Zero's shoulder.
Zero looked down at his partner, then at the retreating, very real, and very vengeful form of Lady Anya. He adjusted his grip, hefting Jade's limp form more securely.
"The threat was real," he stated, his voice characteristically flat, yet carrying a new, unspoken weight. "The rest is irrelevant."
A System alert, stark and final, burned in their vision.
As the world dissolved around them into light, the last thing Jade felt was the steady, solid support of his partner's arm before consciousness fled.