The rain beating down on Eryndor could no longer wash away the blood covering its streets. Dawn was approaching, but the sky remained a sticky black, saturated with the smoke of fires and the corrupted Aether escaping from the center of the city. The offensive of the Legion of Remnants and Eden's army had deployed with mathematical brutality, dividing the coalition's forces to maximize their chances of breaking through enemy lines.
On the main avenue, seventy percent of the troops led a frontal assault of unprecedented violence. This colossal strike force, gathering the majority of Eden's archangels and the elite Awakened of the Legion, was led by Raguel and Dante, Nicole's stoic deputy commander. Their mission was simple: draw the attention of all hell. Dante, armed with his lightning spears, coordinated the defensive maneuvers of the Awakened while Raguel's golden claymore opened bloody breaches in the compact ranks of the Nightmares. The din of their clashes shook the foundations of the ruined skyscrapers, creating the perfect diversion.
Far from this deafening chaos, taking advantage of the bloodletting carried out by Dante and Raguel, Seven and Barachiel pierced the front line like a scalpel through necrotic flesh. They drove straight toward the red dome, the heart of the ritual. Their movements were of lethal fluidity, but the atmosphere around them was weighed down by a tragedy neither could ignore.
The enemies throwing themselves at them were not only abominations born of the abyss. Among the demonic ranks stumbled corrupted Eryndorians. Civilians. Men and women whose souls and bodies had been distorted by the unholy Aether of the ritual, transformed into misshapen puppets of flesh, drunk on rage and pain.
Seven dodged the disorganized strike of a creature whose arm had mutated into a jagged bone blade. Pivoting to counterattack, his gaze met the assailant's face, half-melted beneath dark growths. His azure blue eyes widened by a fraction of a millimeter. It was the former pastor of the south district church, a gentle-eyed man who had offered him asylum and food during his first weeks of wandering in the city. A few meters away, Barachiel repelled a screaming mass of flesh that still wore the shreds of a bus driver's uniform with whom Seven had often chatted at dawn. Further on, a fruit vendor whose smile once illuminated the shopping alleys crawled toward them, spitting an acidic miasma.
Seven's world, the one he had learned to know and tolerate since his awakening without a past, was being massacred before his eyes, by his own hands.
There was no hesitation in his movements, for his cold and analytical mind knew these people were already dead, devoured by corruption. His onyx chains sprang from his wrists, whipping the air with surgical precision. They decapitated the corrupted pastor, pierced the driver's heart, and pulverized the vendor in a spray of black blood. However, as the blood of these mutilated innocents repainted the concrete, a dark and oppressive aura began to escape the young man's body. The silent guilt and cold fury boiling in his veins acted as a catalyst. The power of Azrael, the Angel of Death, sensed this emotional breach and began to devour him from the inside. His irises, usually a brilliant azure blue, abruptly darkened, turning to a deep, almost hypnotic lapis lazuli, freezing with feigned indifference.
Barachiel, whose immaculate wings were now stained with black dross, brought down his spear to finish off a final group of mutants. He turned to the young Awakened, observing the darkness beginning to tint the edges of his aura.
"Are you alright, Seven?" asked the archangel, his voice laden with a compassion that war could not extinguish.
Seven remained motionless for a second, his breath short. He looked down at the pastor's decapitated body, his lapis lazuli eyes reflecting the sickly light of the dome. His face remained a marble mask, smooth and unreadable, refusing to let the slightest crack show.
"It was necessary..." he murmured in a flat voice, before clenching his fists and resuming his relentless march toward the heart of the ritual.
While this deadly duo pushed toward the epicenter, the western flank of the city hosted the third act of their strategy. Thirty percent of the coalition troops, the infiltration and assassination squad, slipped through the shadows under the direct command of Nicole Lawyer. Liah moved by her side, her daggers coated in a paralyzing poison, slitting the throats of demonic sentries before they could even alert their superiors. The rest of the squad neutralized isolated patrols with silent efficiency.
Nicole analyzed the air density, her glasses adjusting to the thermal and aetheric data of the environment. Her gauntlets continuously diffused colorless toxins that liquefied the lungs of higher demons ambushed in the ruins. The approach was flawless. They were going to be able to take the ritual's close guard from behind.
But as they reached a decimated intersection, bordered by ashen buildings, the wind abruptly dropped. The rain froze in mid-air. The atmospheric pressure became so dense that several archangels of the squad fell to their knees, coughing up blood, their eardrums ruptured.
— Spell: Vastitas Caelorum.
The voice seemed to resonate from the abysses of space itself, soft yet infinitely heavy. Above them, tearing through the sticky sky, Abezethibou made his appearance. The Scourge with six shattered halos descended with the slowness of a monarch, completely ignoring the kneeling troops to fix his lavender eyes on Nicole.
"How ironic," the demon murmured. "I was looking for the fractured soul that caught my eye... and I find only a buzzing insect."
Without another gesture, Abezethibou simply raised a finger in the commander's direction.
— Spell: Lex Tenebris.
A wave of dark force, capable of dislocating matter and mind, shot forward at the speed of sound. The attack hit Nicole head-on. Her body twisted under the impact, her armor dislocated with a sinister crack, and she was thrown against the facade of a building that collapsed on her in a crushing cloud of dust.
Abezethibou lowered his finger, looking weary, ready to turn back toward the vanguard.
But a cold, almost mechanical sneer echoed behind his back.
The demon pivoted instantly and brought down the edge of his hand, projecting a second shockwave that pulverized the ground where the sound had emerged. Nothing. Just flying rubble.
"If you were trying to crush me, Scourge," let slip Nicole's gravelly voice, echoing from the shadows to his left, "you should have first made sure you aimed at the right person. Look at your fourth wing."
Abezethibou imperceptibly furrowed his brows and turned his head. On the shadowy appendage of his fourth wing, a large, fluorescent green stain was gnawing at the very structure of his spiritual being. A deep, bubbling burn, the appearance of which he had not felt at all.
Emerging from the invisibility granted by her suit's optical camouflage, Nicole appeared about ten meters from him, intact, calmly adjusting her gauntlets. The illusory corpses of her own body projected against the wall began to dissipate into wisps of bluish smoke.
— Arcane: Memorial Synthesis, stated Nicole, her cold and doctoral tone contrasting with the madness of the situation. "My power isn't meant to make sparks, demon. It is infinitely more demanding. To materialize a substance, I must know its exact chemical structure by heart. Every atom, every covalent bond, every carbon chain. But the advantage is that I can isolate the effects."
She tapped a dial on her forearm, and her armor's valves opened with a faint hiss.
"The gas you've been breathing since you descended contains a purified derivative of Scopolamine, coupled with synthetic Aether. A neurotropic hallucinogen so powerful that it forced your brain to see me where I wasn't. The attack you just launched shattered nothing but a hallucination."
Abezethibou's halos accelerated, threatening to warp space, but the demon suddenly realized a strange lethargy was numbing half of his back.
"Are you wondering why you didn't feel the acid eating away at your wing?" Nicole continued with a carnivorous smile. "In parallel, I vaporized an anesthetizing neurotoxin, modeled on the structure of lidocaine but modified to attack the pain receptors of spiritual bodies. In itself, this toxin is useless in combat. It immunizes against mild pain. But that was exactly what I needed to bypass your vigilance."
Abezethibou looked down at his own body. Greenish micro-fissures were beginning to radiate under his perfect skin, spreading through his veins like fluorescent ivy.
"Thanks to this anesthesia," the scientist added, taking a step forward, "I have already administered to you about thirty distinct poisons without your autonomous defense system reacting. One of them is currently destabilizing your entire central nervous system. That's the beauty of science, Scourge. I can create poisons that are absolutely lethal to divine or demonic entities, yet would remain perfectly harmless to simple humans."
With a sharp flick of her wrists, Nicole triggered her gauntlets' compressors.
— Arcane: Fluoroantimonic Acid Rain.
A jet of pressurized liquid, glowing with a toxic light, shot out and sprayed Abezethibou's wings before he could deploy a full shield, his reaction time atrociously slowed by the neurotoxin. The overpowered acid reacted instantly with the demon's dark Aether. With a piercing shriek of sublimated matter, three of Abezethibou's wings melted, reduced to puddles of smoking tar that charred the ground.
The Scourge staggered, a knee hitting the cracked concrete.
Nicole walked slowly toward him, towering over the kneeling silhouette of one of the most dangerous creatures in hell. She reached up to her face and slowly removed her tactical glasses, letting them dangle from her fingertips. Revealed in the pale light of the dome, her brown eyes shone with relentless intensity, devoid of the slightest fear.
"You said you were disappointed that a human was playing war with glass tubes. Don't worry... after all, you have to be able to take on creatures like you to be a captain in the Legion of Remnants," she threw at him, looking down, the rain sliding over her hardened features.
A leaden silence fell over the square, broken only by the sizzling of the acid gnawing at the Aether.
Then, slowly, Abezethibou's shoulders began to tremble. A dull, cavernous laugh escaped his throat, resonating not in the air, but directly in the minds of Nicole and all the soldiers present.
"Fascinating," the Scourge breathed, slowly raising his head. "Your intellect is as sharp as a blade, human. You dissected my physiology. You deceived my senses."
Abezethibou stood up, ignoring the melted flesh of his back. His lavender eyes blazed with a light that no longer held the arrogance of a bored predator. It was the gaze of a god of destruction who had just found a worthy adversary.
"But you made a fundamental error in your equation. You assumed that my body was the source of my power, rather than a mere shell I can discard at will."
The demon raised both hands toward the sticky sky. The six shattered halos floating around him stopped spinning and aligned in a perfect vertical axis.
— Spell: Oblivion.
Space around Abezethibou didn't freeze this time. It fractured. Reality itself seemed to shatter like a mirror. The demon's poisoned flesh, his veins saturated with toxins, and the remains of his melted wings were brutally ripped from his body and sucked into the spatial rifts. By deliberately sacrificing the infected matter, he had purged himself of Nicole's chemistry. Shadows of absolute purity surged back from his wounds, instantly weaving new wings, immaculate and terrifying. The gravitational shockwave that accompanied this regeneration pushed Nicole back with unprecedented violence, her boots scraping the concrete for several meters to keep her balance.
The playing field had just been reset, but this time, the Scourge had no intention of underestimating her.
While the duel of wits and absolute destruction resumed with greater intensity on the western flank, threatening to wipe this district off the map, the monumental doors to the heart of the city finally rose in the bloody mist. Seven, his eyes shining with a piercing lapis lazuli blue, and Barachiel, his spear dripping with unholy blood, crossed the final rampart. The architect of this massacre awaited them there, and the hour of Eryndor's final judgment had struck.