Chapter 162: The Crimson Woe Collects

Syraleth smiles meekly as Vexena looms over her, staring at own hand like it had personally betrayed her.

Vexena’s face contorts into pure, unrestrained fury.

"So..." Syraleth starts, voice as soft and unthreatening as possible. "I know this looks ba—"

"HERETIC!"

Syraleth’s explanation is cut short by Vexena’s thundering roar of accusation, a sound that rattles loose stone, shakes birds from trees a full mile, and sends every one of her soldiers across the field dropping instinctively to one knee.

A sound that seems to press at the very fabric of reality.

"Vexena," Syraleth pleads, "let’s not do anything—"

Vexena rips her frozen hand clean through the temporal bubble like it was wet paper. Magic shatters around her wrist in a spray of glittering, dying sparks and she snatches Syraleth by the throat before the shock can even register across the Baroness’s own face.

The two of them bullet across the battlefield in a single, blinding blur of violence, Vexena dragging her screaming captive straight through the earth itself, a smoking, glowing trench ripping open behind Syraleth’s as she tears through rock and stone for a full hundred yards before Vexena hauls her back up.

"Puh...Pleeeease..." Syril begs, sputtering and spitting out dirt and teeth alike. "J... just wa—"

Vexena instead drives a flaming uppercut into the bottom of her jaw with so much force it splits the air on impact with a thunderous crack that tears throw Syraleth’s skull sending her rocketing skyward, a limp, leaking mass of hair and limbs flopping loose and utterly boneless against the darkening sky, a comet of black smoke and broken pride travelling in the completely wrong direction.

Vexena appears mid-air an instant later, snatching Syraleth by the neck once more, mid-ascent. The baroness squeals as Vexena twists her around to meet her eyes.

"How dare you!?" she hisses, her voice booming in Syraleth’s skull, "How dare you meddle with forbidden magic. You deserve death for that alone, more than anything else you’ve done this day. Die, heretic!"

Vexena hurls Syraleth back toward the earth viciously, leaving even Veena slack-jawed at her mother’s apparent voracity.

The Baroness falls like a meteor through the sky, trailing smoke and embers behind her in a long, flaming arc across the air before she crashes into the ground with a concussive boom that rolls out across the entire field, carving out a fresh, massive crater deep enough to swallow a house whole. The impact shakes loose the foundations of every standing structure for a hundred yards around it, knocking the last few of her wobbling soldiers clean off their feet.

The kitsune twins and remaining monks all hitch at once, concentration shattering entirely at the sight of their mistress being pummeled into the earth by the most feared being on the continent.

Eris, Pip and Maribelle erupt free of the temporal holds on their bodies an instant later. Eris and Maribelle gasps, stumbling forward into motion again, muscles screaming from being frozen mid-breath, mid-fight, for what felt to them, like no time at all had passed.

Eris nearly tumbles face-first into the mud before catching herself on her own scythe, blinking hard against the sudden rush of returned sensation as her eyes dart around the battlefield, trying to make sense of what’s happened and was still happening around her.

The kitsune shriek in unison, grab what’s left of their exhausted, staggering monks, and tear open a hasty, crooked portal with the last of their combined strength. The remainder of Syraleths forces all run, shove and dive through it screaming. Moments later the portal swirls shut, sealing closed behind them with a final, echoing snap. Leaving nothing behind but scorched grass, discarded robes, and numerous dead bodies.

Eris drops to her knees, catching her breath in ragged, heaving gulps as she looks up at Vexena floating in the air above her, the queen’s eyes flaring with fury, locked on a crater down below.

Maribelle stumbles forward through the wreckage, incredulous, staring wide-eyed at the ring of Vexena’s soldiers standing sentinel around the ruined field, hundreds of them, unmoving, entirely loyal, utterly unlike the chaos and smoke and screaming they’d all just survived.

Then her eyes finally find Vexena herself, sinking out of the sky before strutting toward a smoking crater where Syraleth had landed.

Meanwhile, the instant his systems had regained function, Pip burst into motion. He doesn’t waste a single second as he immediately jets across the battlefield carried by columns of air and jets of pressured water, tearing through death and debris in a straight, desperate line, toward his creator. He scoops Vuvi up out of the muck mid-motion, both arms around her like she weighs nothing at and yet holding like she was his entire world.

He carefully wipes blood and grime from her face with cautious, trembling fingers, scanning every visible inch of her for damage, a rapid, anxious stream of worried beeps spilling out of him faster than he can properly process them.

He sets her down gently on a patch of clean, undisturbed earth and she cracks open one swollen eye, grinning weakly up at him, dragging a muddy hand across his chest plate as she sighes with relief at the mere sight of his golden glow.

Pip pulls Vuvi tight against himself, gentle despite the faint tremor still running through his own frame, chest glowing warm and steady against her bruised cheek, and she groans into his shoulder, "I think I broke something." half laughing, half wincing, completely content to have her construct back beside her.

He answers with a soft, apologetic whistle, already scanning her for the worst of it, and she pats his arm feebly, reassuring him without a single word that she’s not going anywhere.

Behind them, Vexena rises out of the smoking crater one slow, deliberate step at a time, obsidian armor scorched but unbowed, pulling a bruised, battered and thoroughly broken Baroness by one ankle through the churned dirt.

Vexena drags her back to the group, hauls her up by the throat just long enough to make sure everyone gets a good, clear look at the aftermath of her decisions, and tosses her limp body down in front of the whole gathering with all the ceremony of a hunter dropping off the day’s first kill.

Nobody says a single word for a long, stunned moment as the greatest threat they’ve ever faced lays broken and bleeding in a pool of her own blood before them.