Galukar swore his teeth were loose. It was novel. He hadn’t been hit as hard as he had today in…Well, ever. Ordinarily that might have been exhilarating, today it was just an obstacle to butchering the damned animal who’d turned his sons into monsters.

  But he did not let the rage take him, not yet. He would hold it back, keep it chained like a hunting hound, and release it only when he knew victory was theirs. Galukar had no intention of surviving the day, but he had every intention of making sure the Dark Lord didn’t.

  When he swung, it felt like the release of something hard and tense. Something he couldn’t name.

  The Godblade didn’t miss, but its connection was shallow and sour. Sparks flew as it etched a new scar into the Dark Lord’s pouldron, target melting back and retaliating with his mace. Galukar blocked it, flying from his feet as the strength came unexpectedly greater than before. He landed hard, rolled up, and saw the foot coming just an instant before the ice appeared before it.

  Princess Ado was certainly doing her best, but Galukar didn’t actually notice the impediment slow his enemy’s strike before heel met nose and filled his sinuses with metallic blood. Once more, he stumbled back.

  Blood whipped around in great tendrils, for once making Galukar glad to see the unholy magic as it shielded him through the precious moments needed to counter attack. The Dark Lord was already pulling back, of course, focusing now on the Vampire. She held her ground rather than flee. Had she done otherwise, Galukar knew she’d simply have been run down.

  He and the Vampire were both wounded, both badly. Galukar had been injured by the Dark Lord first, and now he’d collected a new set of scrapes and gashes from slaying his horde of Demons. She was not much better.

  With their strengths combined they could last, but it was an inherently up-hill battle. And one made harder by the Dark Lord’s bolstered power. Galukar fought with every inch of might he could muster, managing to last entire seconds before being cast aside with another rib broken. The Vampire fell shortly after.

  As he landed, though, he found a sense of victory overtaking him. Because from the corner of his eyes he saw Silenos Shaiagrazni approaching, body healed, wounds half-closed, motions smoother and less clumsy than they’d been seconds before. He attacked the Dark Lord in just the way Galukar would have.

  A surprise cannon-shot to the back.

  Galukar had seen great warriors fight, he had seen great casters fight. He’d never seen anything- anything at all- like this.

  Shaiagrazni opened the battle first, great tendrils of flesh erupting from the carpet of ruined bodies at his feet. Their heads were barbed with keratin, and they shot for the Dark Lord like the undulating limbs of a kraken. The Dark Lord replied as he might have been expected to, mace thrashing out to deflect them, cracking the hardened tips and bursting the fleshy bodies like rotten fruit.

  But this was not the New Dark Lord’s only effort. While it still occurred, something more formed at his feet. Large, broad, reinforced. A cannon, Galukar realised. A cannon aimed in such a way that he was overlapping the sight line. He scrambled aside just in time for its fireball to miss him, ears ringing as something impossibly large tore through the air. Hundreds of undead came to pieces, perhaps thousands. Then the projectile hit something solid enough to stop it and detonated. It was like watching the sunset touch the ground, a great cascade of obliteration which scoured an entire acre of all habitation.

  At the end, the Dark Lord still lived.

  He rose up high, higher, higher still. Taking flight as if the defiance of natural law was too small a slight to even register beside his others. Shaiagrazni’s body shifted, mass redistributing as wings shot outwards, and he was soon following. Slower, but more confidently.

  With a gesture, the Dark Lord tore something into the air before him. From it emerged a Demon, snarling and thrashing, its flesh made of hemp rope and eyes burning with the colour of jealousy. It shot down for its prey- a powerful one, this!- but failed to reach him before Shaiagrazni’s answering stroke interscepted.

  Spirits. Incorporeal undead; wisps, wraiths, there were an abundance of names for them. Galukar had rarely seen the things, usually they could only be produced by carefully creating the right circumstances. Apparently Shaiagraznian Necromancy was not limited in such a way. The spectres swarmed their Demonic prey, sending it falling out of Shaiagrazni’s path as sheer weight of numbers let the preternaturally strong spirit-things tear into it despite the great weight of magic giving it strengt.

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  Cannon-arm raised, Shaiagrazni fired at the Dark Lord and clipped his shoulder. That armour was becoming damaged, now, its protection compromised more with every shot. The Dark Lord closed for a melee.

  He was forced to veer off, inky shadestuff cast out into a wall before him. Those precious moments’ delay were time enough for limbs to explode out of Shaiagrazni by the dozen. Some with keratinous lances and cannons, like his main arms, others merely coated with armoured gauntlets. Several reached out now and cast a sheet of inky shadestuff out. Galukar watched it wash over the Dark Lord, sizzling and eating at his armour. The mace came around, smashing Shaiagrazni in one of his numerous shoulders and tearing the offending limb entirely off.

  One had been removed, scores more remained. A blast of energy came out, burning two more of Shaiagrazni’s arms to desiccated slivers of ash. Demonic, Galukar thought, another foul trick in the Dark Lord’s repertoire. But in a duel of dark magic he doubted any could match the sheer versatility of his tenuous ally.

  As if to prove the point, Shaiagrazni moved again. Limbs and torsos began liquefying on the ground below him, flying up to congeal before him into a great, coiling mass. From it emerged…Dark Elves. Many, all attacking. For one moment Galukar didn’t understand.

  Then he did. Shaiagrazni was resurrecting his enemy’s slain soldiers? Such a psychological attack seemed unlikely to work on a man as unapologetic as the Dark Lord, but he supposed it was worth an attempt if nothing else.

  But it didn’t work, not even delaying the caster, who smashed through them and came for Shaiagrazni. That was when the mass of flesh erupted, revealing another jet of shadestuff which blasted the Necromancer back. A perfect misdirection. Shaiagrazni pounced on it as eagerly as any creature had pounced on any thing.

  His lance tore a pauldron clear off the Dark Lord’s armour, and while his guard was raised there a cannon shot blasted his guts at point-blank range. Scraps of black metal flew apart, and this time blood trickled from the injury. The damage was adding up, his defences eroding, his strength failing. He backed away, Shaiagrazni closed in, mastery of the air clearly to his favour and used excruciatingly well as his assault became three dimensional. Up, down, diagonally; his attacks came in from every way they could and suddenly the disparity of skill seemed fully reversed against the Dark Lord’s favour.

  The Dark Lord’s arm splayed out, a blast of Demonic magic which blasted Shaiagrazni backwards and bought him a moment. He used it to close, swinging his mace around in a crippling blow. Shaiagrazni blocked it, barely, flakes and chips smashing from his lance as he shot back. His enemy pressed the advantage, swinging one way and the other. Galukar turned to the Vampire queen.

  “Do something!” He snapped. “You must be able to.”

  But she just stared at him, clearly as perturbed by her lack as he was his own.

  “They’re too high, too fast, and too durable.” She replied, through gritted teeth. “Shaiagrazni is on his own.”

  He was, but even as the Vampire said it he started to push back the Dark Lord’s advantage. Clearly, the armoured caster was no undead, because he wore the fatigue of his injuries openly in his slowed movements and weakened strikes. Shaiagrazni broke out from the pinning barrage with another cannon shot aimed for his head, then smashed the lance against his chest as he retreated. His other arms landed their own hits; smaller, scraping blows without his bodyweight behind them, but nonetheless grinding away the face of his armour and reaching precariously closer to the meat below it.

  Galukar hadn’t thought anything in the world could defeat the man who’d killed his sons. Now, though, he knew better.

  The Dark Lord faltered, breaking back into a retreat which Shaiagrazni intercepted with all the hesitation of a starved tiger. He closed in, raising above his enemy and blasting him downwards toward the earth with his cannon. The Dark Lord pulled up just moments before impact with the ground.

  Shaiagrazni did not.

  Nine thousand pounds of flesh, bone and armour plating smashed into the Dark Lord and drove him into the earth so hard that it was blasted into a crater. They churned it away, drilling down and not stopping until they’d formed a hole so deep he couldn’t even see the bottom. Debris was sent flying out in every direction, stunning stronger undead and ripping the weaker ones to pieces. By the time the air had finally cleared, they still hadn’t emerged.

  Everything fell silent, save for the undead. And somehow even they remained still, as if they were waiting to see whether they crumbled to dust at their master’s death before attacking. Then, finally, after what felt like an age, movement in the crater.

  Something shot out of it, landed, bounced and rolled. A smouldering, black thing of twisted plates and oozing blood. The Dark Lord. A moment later Shaiagrazni emerged, landing just yards from him and looking down at the caster.

  “You have given me considerable inspiration to improve my weaponry.” The Fleshcrafter announced, nonchalant as ever.

  The Dark Lord shifted, slowly making his way up to his knees. Galukar stared, taking the sight in, waiting for the sense of victory. He felt none. Only the rage.

  “MURDERER!” He roared, sprinting ahead and forgetting all about his injuries and exhaustion. The Godblade was starved, and the Dark Lord’s blood seemed a banquet enough to fix that. He’d closed only a few paces before the magic became visible.

  It was subtle at first, then obvious. Thickening and deepening in its colouration until even a blind man would have spotted it. A roiling, boiling tempest of dark energy and unfathomable depth. Galukar almost hesitated. Almost. Then he charged on regardless.

  The magic leapt outwards as quickly and eagerly as a flame doused in oil. It slowed Galukar, sending out winds with force enough that even his preternatural strength was tested in marching through them. He strode on, managing another two paces before he stopped altogether. Then the winds intensified.

  Galukar watched as the air twisted and imploded, falling into itself, coiling around some invisible epicentre and thickening to an almost liquid density. Then it all stopped at once. With a flash of light and a blast of magic, the world went pure, searing white.