In front of them was a collapsed marketplace, or what little remained of it. Once it must have been a bustling square filled with vendors, shouting traders, and laughing children, but now it was nothing more than a graveyard of shattered stalls and overturned wagons half-buried in ichor.
To make things even ssier, there were also so odd trees with black-colored leaves. The trees jutted out unnaturally from the cracked cobblestones, their roots splitting the stone like brittle parchnt. Their bark was a sickly gray, and their black leaves dripped a tar-like sap that hissed when it touched the ground.
There was also sothing else that was odd. Damon noticed that for a while now, there were no creatures of the abyss flying at him, wanting to rip him apart. This was odd considering the fact that this place usually teed with spawn, the Abyss vomiting out wave after wave without pause.
For there to be silence here, for the fog to hang still, sothing had claid this ground. Not one of the frenzied battlethirsty minions, but sothing stronger.
Damon slowed his pace, crimson eyes narrowing as he scanned the ruined marketplace. He glanced at Magicaa, who stood trembling, sweat beading his brow as though the trees themselves were staring back. "So this is where they’re hiding?" Damon asked. "Or did you lead right into so kind of trap?"
Magicaa imdiately started shaking. "No. No. Please believe . Don’t kill again. I swear on my grandmother. This is where everyone is hiding. At least when I was there with them, this is where they were. Please. Don’t kill again."
Damon’s crimson gaze lingered on the mage, unblinking, like a predator weighing whether to snap its prey’s neck now or later. The man’s panic reeked of sincerity, though Damon had long since stopped trusting words at face value.
Still, the fear rolling off Magicaa was almost pathetic, too desperate, too broken to be anything but true.
"Relax," he said as he sent a needle that finished the job, and he sucked the blood essence from the guy one more ti. "I believe you." Damon smiled as he watched the light go out of the guy’s eyes. "That’s exactly why I do not have any more use for you."
Magicaa’s body collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, dissolving into the familiar motes of forced respawn light. The jagged monolith pulsed again in the distance, already preparing to drag him back into another cycle of tornt.
Damon chuckled as he looked around. "See you in five minutes, sunshine."
He only barely finished his al when, all of a sudden, a growl sounded sowhere in the distance. The next mont, it sounded a lot closer to him and rattled through the broken market like a thunderclap. Damon straightened slowly. Sothing was coming for him, and it was fast.
For a mont, everything was silent, and then it happened. A loud, enraged roar blared and shook the entire plaza, rattling the shattered wagons and sending flakes of ichor dripping from the black-leafed trees. Before Damon could see what it was, a roar of black fire ca at him.
A tidal wave of black fire surged from the fog, devouring everything in its path. The cobblestones hissed and lted into tar, the warped wagons dissolved like paper, and the strange black-leafed trees shriveled into ash, their tar-sap exploding into hissing steam.
Damon’s crimson eyes flashed as he instantly threw up a blood barrier, black blood flaring around him like a cocoon.
The impact hit like a teor. His shield cracked, heat and abyssal essence bleeding through, burning at his skin even through his defenses. Damon snarled, forcing more blood energy into the barrier until the inferno finally ebbed.
Smoke curled upward, and for a mont, the entire plaza was a silhouette of fire and smoke. Then he saw it. The beast stalking out of the fog was a big ass fucking wyvern, but sothing about it was familiar. It only took a mont for Damon to see it. This thing was not a wyvern. It was once again a mutated wyrm!
It couldn’t possibly be the sa damn mutated wyrm he had killed. So how the hell did this one co up here? That too seed to have so aspects of an abyssal essence, as if it too had been born from the abyss.
However, Damon had no doubt where this one had popped up from. It looked like his dear friend from the blood hall siege had more than one mutated wyrm under his control. "This bastard." Damon cursed him, but he was grinning widely.
After that last battle with the damned beast in Niera city, his hands had been itching for a rematch. He was not at all happy with how things had ended.
He might have won that battle, but he too was almost dead and crippled, with his soul a broken ss, and the thing had even triggered his mana core to beco a primordial mana core, which was essentially a ticking ti bomb in his body.
This ti, things were going to be a lot different. The wyrm’s roar rattled the shattered wagons and sent a shockwave through the ichor-soaked plaza.
Its obsidian scales glistened with liquid ichor, veins of molten violet fire glowing between the cracks like fissures in volcanic rock. Its wings were shredded, not feathered or leathery but ragged veils of abyssal fla that flared with every movent.
The beast crouched low, abyssal flas licking across its scales. Its tail lashed the ground, sending slabs of broken stone flying like shrapnel. Damon’s blood barrier still stead from the last blast, but he didn’t retreat.
The wyrm lunged, its abyssal fire scorching a path straight toward him. Damon spread his arms, blood and shadow swirling together into a storm. "Co on then," he roared, slamming his hands together as a tide of crimson spears erupted into the air. "Let’s finish what we started!"
***
Mass release sponsored by Syphatrol
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