"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE."

Lila’s hands found Sophie’s shoulders and shook her and Sophie’s head moved with it and her eyes stayed forward, still blue, still seeing whatever she had been seeing since she stood up from behind that ruin wall.

"He’s dead," Lila said. Her voice cracked on it. "Jayden is dead. You stopped him. You looked right at him and you told him to stop and he stopped and Kruel—"

"It’s the only way," Sophie said.

"WHAT IS," Lila shook her again. "What way? What did you see? What could possibly—"

"It’s the only way," Sophie said again. Same voice. Same words. Like she had nothing else and knew it and was standing in it anyway.

Lila looked at her face. At the blue still running in her eyes. At the King’s Gaze hanging at her side, the eye open, looking at something past the horizon.

She grabbed Sophie by the jaw and turned her face forward.

"Look at me," Lila said. "Sophie. Look at me."

Sophie looked at her.

"Tell me what you saw."

Sophie opened her mouth.

KRAAABOOOOM.

The shockwave hit them both before the sound finished forming, a wall of displaced air that picked Lila up off her feet and threw her six meters and she hit the alien ground and skidded and when she stopped moving she looked up and Kruel was gone.

He had leapt straight up. Both legs uncoiling from a dead stop, the force of it driving his feet into the alien stone deep enough to leave two craters where he had been standing, and he had gone up through the alien sky like a missile with intent, the fifth growing horn on his skull catching the light on the way.

Lila lay on the ground and watched him go and felt the blood running down the side of her face from where the landing had found something sharp.

From somewhere behind her, weak but present, Kelvin’s voice came.

"Comms," he said. His voice was wrong. Everything that usually ran underneath it, the energy, the momentum, the constant forward motion of a brain that never fully stopped, all of it flattened. Just the words. "All units. Fall back." A pause. Breathing. "We cannot beat this. Fall back now."

Nobody answered immediately.

Then from various points across the ruins came the sound of people moving.

---

Nyx saw Kruel coming from two hundred meters below.

He had been circling at altitude since the ground engagement started pulling all available attention downward, watching, reading the shape of it, the way he read everything from the air. Waiting for the moment his presence would change something rather than just add to the chaos.

Kruel coming up at him at that velocity was the moment.

Nyx folded his wings and dropped to meet him.

They hit each other a thousand meters above the alien ground and the collision sent a shockwave outward in every direction that the observers below felt in their chests before they heard it, a concussive pressure that rattled teeth and made the standing ruins shake dust from their surfaces.

Kruel grabbed Nyx’s foreleg on contact.

Nyx hit him with Inferno Storm at point blank range.

The storm that came out of Nyx’s throat was not fire in any conventional sense. It was superheated gas moving at the velocity of a hurricane, the temperature at its core hot enough to turn stone to liquid, and it hit Kruel across the chest and face and the grey hide went white in patches where it landed and Kruel held on.

He pulled.

Nyx’s foreleg was not built to go the direction Kruel was pulling it and Nyx roared, the sound of it dropping through frequencies that the alien sky had never carried before, and he beat his wings and went upward dragging Kruel with him because Kruel would not let go.

They climbed.

The Red Mist Cloak came out of Nyx’s scales as his body temperature climbed, a deep crimson vapor bleeding off him in sheets, and the cloud they were generating between them spread outward from their position in every direction, a red stain across the alien sky that the people on the ground watched growing wider with every second.

Ares hit Kruel from the right.

He came in fast with the Molten Core already running, his chest amber through his scales, and his shoulder drove into Kruel’s ribs at a speed that cracked three of them audibly. Kruel’s grip on Nyx’s foreleg loosened for one second and Nyx wrenched free and banked hard and came back around.

Kruel grabbed Ares by the throat instead.

He swung him. Full arc, both hands on his throat, using the mass of a Red Death Dragon as a weapon and swinging him at Nyx on the return.

Nyx took his brother across the face at speed and both dragons tumbled, the red mist pouring off them in clouds, and Kruel dropped thirty meters in the gap before catching himself on Ares’s tail on the way down.

He climbed back up Ares’s body hand over hand.

Ares twisted. Rolled. Beat his wings trying to throw him and Kruel held on, moving up toward the base of his skull with the steady patience of something that had decided where it was going and was going there regardless of what the journey cost.

Nyx hit Kruel across the back with a Magma Bomb.

The breath weapon came out dense and slow compared to the Inferno Storm, a pressurized ball of superheated material that hit Kruel between the shoulder blades and detonated and the explosion reshaped the cloud around them, red mist and black soot erupting outward in a ring that expanded across the alien sky and soot began falling, black flakes drifting down through the alien atmosphere toward the ground below.

On the ruins, people watched it fall.

Eclipse members and Ares soldiers and task force personnel standing among their dead looking up at the red storm above them, the three shapes moving through it too fast to track cleanly, the flashes of light from Nyx’s fire and Ares’s heat and the detonations of Magma Bombs going off in sequence like something being taken apart piece by piece.

The black soot landed on upturned faces.

On Jayden’s body where it lay on the alien ground.

On Kelvin where he sat with his back against a ruin wall and one arm that was not his own anymore, talking into comms that half the surviving units were not answering.

On Sophie, still standing where Lila had left her, looking up.

Kruel reached the back of Ares’s neck.

He got both hands into the gap between the scale plates at the base of the skull, the place where the armor was thinnest, where the neck met the body, and he pulled in opposite directions.

Ares screamed.

The sound carried across the entire battlefield below and every person who heard it understood what it was without needing to be told. The pain of something enormous and dangerous being hurt badly.

He beat his wings at full power, the Molten Core flaring amber through every scale, the berserker healing running at maximum, and the wounds Kruel had been opening across his body were closing even as Kruel made new ones, his body fighting back as hard as it knew how.

It wasn’t enough.

Kruel pulled harder. The scale plates at the base of Ares’s skull bent outward and blood ran black down his neck and Ares drove his head backward trying to crush Kruel against his own spine and Kruel rode the movement and kept pulling.

Nyx came in from below.

He came up under both of them with his jaws open and bit into Kruel’s left leg at the thigh and clamped down and the teeth went through grey hide and into muscle beneath and Kruel bellowed, loud and raw, and released Ares’s neck with one hand to drive his fist down into the top of Nyx’s skull.

BOOM.

Nyx’s grip held.

BOOM.

Still held.

BOOM.

The third hit loosened it and Kruel drove his leg downward and Nyx’s jaw came open and Kruel kicked him across the face with the same leg and Nyx went sideways in the air trailing red mist and blood from his mouth.

Ares hit Kruel while his weight was committed to the kick.

Full body, shoulder into Kruel’s chest, the Molten Core detonating at point of contact and the explosion from it hitting both of them and neither of them caring, Ares because the berserker healing was running and Kruel because Kruel was Kruel. They fell together, locked, exchanging strikes on the way down, and the alien ground came up fast.

BOOOM

They hit it.

The impact turned a section of the alien coast into a crater that the ocean immediately began filling, water rushing in from three sides, and Ares was on his back at the center of it with Kruel on top of him and the water rising around both of them.

Kruel hit him.

Both fists, alternating, driving into Ares’s chest and throat and the sides of his skull, and Ares’s Molten Core was still running, the amber light blazing through his scales, the healing fighting to keep up, and it was losing. The rate of damage coming in faster than the body could answer, each hit opening something new before the last thing had finished closing.

Ares roared.

Not in pain. In rage. Pure undirected rage, the sound of something that had decided it was not going to stop moving regardless of what was happening to it, and his jaws closed on Kruel’s shoulder and he bit down and shook his head and tore a piece of Kruel away with him when Kruel pulled back.

Kruel looked at his shoulder. At the absence where the piece had been.

He looked at Ares.

He hit him again. And again. And again. The water around them was dark with two kinds of blood and Ares’s roars were becoming something lower and less frequent and the amber through his scales was dimming in patches where the damage had outrun the healing’s ability to reach.

Nyx hit Kruel from behind at full dive speed.

The Dive Bombing ability at full output was Nyx committing his entire mass and velocity to a single downward strike, and the strike hit Kruel across the back and drove him off Ares and through the water and into the sea floor and the explosion of displaced water went thirty meters into the alien air.

Kruel came back up.

He grabbed Nyx’s wing on the way up. The right one, the same wing that had been grabbed and released throughout the fight, and this time he twisted.

The wing joint went wrong.

Nyx’s cry was not a roar. It was something higher and rawer than a roar, the sound of genuine damage hitting a nervous system all at once, and it came out of him and traveled down through the alien sky and hit the ground below like something falling.

On the ruins Seraleth flinched.

She was still standing over the cocoon. Had not moved from it through Kelvin’s fall and Angel going down and Jayden’s death and Lila’s voice breaking on Sophie’s name. She was standing over it and her wings were out and her hands were at her sides and she was watching the sky.

She watched Kruel twist Nyx’s wing.

Watched Nyx fall thirty meters before catching himself, the wing working but wrong, the arc of his flight lopsided now, compensating.

Then something else caught her attention.

She looked down at the cocoon and saw something strange happening.

There was purple mist oming out of it.

Not from a crack. Not from a gap in the tendrils. From the surface itself, bleeding through the cocoon the way smoke bled through a keyhole, thin at first, just a suggestion of it rising from the edges of the cocoon where it met the alien ground.

Seraleth took one step back.

The mist kept coming.

It spread outward from the cocoon in every direction at ground level, moving across the alien stone the way fog moved across water, low and patient and covering everything it touched. The dead Harbingers the tendrils had already drawn from went darker where it passed over them, the grey of them going towards a deep charcoal, and the mist kept spreading.

Eclipse members and Ares soldiers who had been moving toward extraction stopped.

They looked at the ground around their feet.

The purple was everywhere.

Kelvin saw it from where he sat against the ruin wall. He looked at his comms. At the evacuation that was half-complete. At the mist moving outward from the cocoon in a radius that was growing every second.

"What’s happening to you, Noah?"

Above them Nyx and Ares were still fighting. Ares back in the air now, the Molten Core burning bright again, the healing having found something it could work with in the brief window Nyx’s dive had given it. Both dragons circling Kruel who hung between them in the alien sky with the fifth horn fully present now, the white hide gleaming through the red mist that Nyx was still bleeding into the clouds.

Kruel grabbed Nyx’s tail.

He swung him at Ares the same way he had done it before and Nyx saw it coming and fired Inferno Storm back along his own body at Kruel’s hands and the superheated gas hit Kruel’s grip and he held on through it and completed the swing anyway and the two dragons collided again and the red mist around them detonated outward from the impact in a cloud that turned the visible sky the color of blood.

The black soot fell heavier.

On the ground the purple mist was at the ruin walls now, climbing them, spreading up through the cracks in the ancient stone, the void energy in it doing something to the material it touched that the material couldn’t resist.

Seraleth had stepped back three more times without deciding to.

She was five meters from the cocoon now and the mist was between her and it and still moving outward and she looked at it and held her ground because she had decided she was holding her ground and that was still true.

Above them Kruel had both hands on Nyx’s throat.

He was squeezing and Nyx’s wings were beating and the force of them was enormous, each stroke generating enough wind that the observers on the ground had to brace against it, and Nyx was pulling upward with everything he had and Kruel’s feet were off the alien sky with nothing beneath them and he held on by his hands alone and squeezed.

Nyx’s fire aura was active. The heat coming off his scales should have been enough to make holding him impossible. Kruel’s hands were burning where they made contact, the grey going wrong there, and he held on.

Then all of a sudden Kruel stopped squeezing.

Not because of the heat. Not because Nyx had done something new.

He just stopped.

His head turned.

Slowly. Deliberate. Away from Nyx, away from Ares, away from the ruins and the survivors and the bodies and everything the last two hours had built.

Toward the cocoon.

Toward the mist.

On the ground the purple had reached the outer edge of the battlefield. Moving outward from its source in a circle that was now forty meters across and growing, the void energy in it visible as a faint luminescence that turned the alien stone under it a deep bruised violet.

Seraleth watched Kruel’s head turn.

She watched him look at the cocoon from a thousand meters up, through red mist and black soot and alien clouds, and she watched something change in the way he held himself. The loosening of a grip. The slight adjustment of a body that had just registered something it needed to think about.

He released Nyx.

Nyx fell twenty meters before his wings caught and he pulled up, his throat raw, the amber of his Fire Aura burning angry around him.

Kruel leaped down from Nyx.

He landed at the edge of the purple mist.

Looked at it spreading across the alien ground.

Looked at the cocoon at its center.

The battlefield was quiet in a way it had not been in two hours. The fighting done, the survivors still, the only sounds the distant creak of damaged ruins settling and the alien wind moving through the gaps they had made in things that had stood for centuries.

Kruel looked at the cocoon for a long time.

Then he could hear a sound.

Everyone alive could hear the sound.

It started below hearing. A vibration that arrived in the chest before the ears caught it, the bass of it passing through the alien ground and up through the feet of everyone still standing and into their bones before it became something the air was carrying.

It built.

And built up.

It climbed, the kind of sound that made every instinct in a human body fire at once, the sound a person heard in a nightmare right before they woke up screaming, except nobody was waking up from this. It had bass in it that rattled teeth and chest cavities simultaneously, and it had something else underneath that, something older, the cry of every predator that had ever made prey freeze in place before it could think to run.

And from the cocoon, through the purple mist, two eyes opened.

Slitted and purple.

And the eyes were moving.

Fast.

"KRUEEELLLLLL!!"