Uriel threw himself against the enemy lines like a comet of scales and fury. His sea dragon body, eight hundred meters of contained power, shattered everything in his path. Each swing of his tail split abominations in half. Each lash created waves of shredded flesh that dyed the water an even darker shadow. His scales, hardened by layers of essence and will, were like blades that effortlessly sliced through the corrupted beings that stood in his way.
But it wasn't enough.
The tyrant's army seemed endless. For each creature Uriel destroyed, two more emerged from the river's depths, summoned by the ancient will that ruled those waters. Corrupted abominations of all shapes and sizes swirled around him like flies around an open wound. Great abominations, monstrosities the size of hills, advanced slowly toward him with their deformed limbs and mouths overflowing with fangs.
And the great tyrant still hadn't moved.
He remained there, in the distance, observing the massacre with his countless bluish eyes. Those glowing orbs flickered with ancient and cruel intelligence, as if he were enjoying the spectacle, as if the death of his own subjects were mere entertainment before the true feast.
Uriel invoked Nyx. Darkness spread from his body like a living tide, enveloping hundreds of abominations in a lethal embrace. The Curse activated.
Sleep. Hundreds of corrupted beings closed their eyes and sank into the riverbed, falling into a slumber from which they would never wake.
Weakening. The great abominations felt their muscles turn to liquid, their bones turn to plaster, their power crumble like sandcastles.
Confusion. The monsters turned against their own allies, blindly attacking anything that moved, sowing chaos in the tyrant's ranks.
Sloth. A supernatural heaviness seized the limbs of the fallen, their movements becoming slow, clumsy, useless.
Fear, paralysis, blindness, deafness. A dozen more curses were unleashed from Uriel's shadow, spreading like a blessed plague among the enemy hordes. The abominations fell by the dozens, by the hundreds, writhing in the water as their bodies and minds were corroded by Nyx's darkness.
But still, it wasn't enough.
The tyrant's army was vast, immeasurable. For each creature that fell cursed, three more took its place. The great tyrant watched impassively, his blue eyes gleaming with amusement as his army was massacred. It was as if that carnage meant nothing to him, as if those subjects were mere disposable tools in a larger game.
Uriel knew it. His will, as powerful as it was after absorbing countless domains and bending thousands of creatures to his command, was not powerful enough to cause serious damage to a Great Tyrant like that one. The difference in scale was abysmal. The tyrant had spent centuries, perhaps millennia, accumulating power in the depths of the great river. He was the river itself made will, a force of nature corrupted by its own existence.
But if Uriel managed to survive the fight... if he managed to keep extending his domain over the enemies he massacred to add them to his troops... then he would have a larger army. More essence. More power to deal with the great tyrant.
It wasn't a clean strategy. It wasn't heroic. It was raw, desperate, a gamble where every second counted. Consuming his enemies to strengthen himself while fighting against an infinitely superior force. Devouring so as not to be devoured.
He let out a roar of fury that shook the river's waters and used his will. He sharpened it with the intention to consume and kill, turning it into a weapon as lethal as his fangs and claws. His will, fed by the thousands of subjects he controlled, by every mind connected to his domain, strengthened until it became an almost tangible pressure. He used it to wrap himself in an impenetrable armor, a second skin of pure determination that repelled enemy attacks while he continued his massacre.
Slowly, he began to control and subjugate the corrupted abominations.
The Beasts were the first. Their rudimentary minds, barely conscious, fell before his will like houses of cards. One moment they were attacking his subjects; the next, they turned against their former masters with the same ferocity.
Then came the Monsters. More resistant, more stubborn, but equally vulnerable to the pressure of a domain forged in countless battles. Their wills broke one after another, adding their strength to Uriel's.
After them, the Fallen. Creatures that had once been something more, now reduced to shadows of what they were. Their minds, twisted by centuries of servitude to the tyrant, resisted fiercely. But Uriel did not yield. He pushed his will against theirs, breaking the old chains to forge new ones.
Finally, the Devils. Cunning, treacherous, with wills of their own that twisted like snakes to avoid his control. These required more time, more effort, but Uriel added them one by one to his growing domain as the battle raged around him.
The great tyrant felt that.
For the first time since the confrontation began, those countless blue eyes stopped looking with amusement. A tremor ran through his colossal body, a vibration of contained fury that made the entire river shake. Uriel was stealing what belonged to him. He was taking his subjects, his tools, his army.
The tyrant finally moved.
His massive tentacles, thick as towers, launched themselves at the sea dragon with a speed that defied their size. Five, ten, twenty tentacles converged from all directions, seeking to crush Uriel between their rings of muscular flesh and devour him alive.
But Uriel was elusive. His dragon body, long and serpentine, twisted between the tentacles like an eel between the fingers of a giant. He moved through the darkness, using the shadows that Nyx wove around him to slip from one place to another, appearing where least expected, dodging by centimeters the suckers that opened to trap him.
The tyrant bent the world to his will.
The very concept of darkness twisted under his influence. The spaces between shadows, the places where Uriel found refuge, were sealed one after another. The sea dragon felt how the shadows became solid, how the paths he once traveled freely turned into impenetrable walls.
He was deprived of moving through darkness.
A tentacle reached him, its suckers biting into his scales. Another coiled around his tail. A third approached his neck with murderous intent.
Uriel had no time to think. He opened his enormous jaws, showing rows of fangs the size of lances, and bit into the great tyrant's flesh. His jaws closed with the force of an earthquake, tearing off a chunk no more than a hundred meters wide from one of the tyrant's limbs.
Blood gushed forth, dark and thick as crude oil, staining the water around him. But for the tyrant, whose body stretched for entire kilometers, that wound was insignificant. A mosquito bite. A barely perceptible scratch.
Still, it was something.
Uriel had proven that he could wound him. That the river god's flesh was not invincible.
He sent the Krill he commanded, that flying swarm of microscopic devourers he had absorbed in a previous domain. Millions of tiny creatures launched themselves toward the open wound like a cloud of locusts, beginning to devour the tyrant's flesh from within. They might be small, almost invisible to the naked eye, but their appetite was insatiable and their number, immeasurable.
As quickly as he could, Uriel moved the flying swarm away, shifting them dozens of kilometers downstream where he could still control them. He didn't want the tyrant to destroy them in a fit of rage. He couldn't afford to lose such a valuable tool.
Then he ordered the Winter Beast to use its powers.
The titanic creature, which until then had remained on the sidelines of the battle, raised its body above the river and let the cold inside it spill out like a river of liquid ice. Immediately, the temperature in the great river began to drop rapidly. The water became thicker, slower. Crystals of ice began to form on the surface and in the depths. The weaker abominations felt their bodies grow numb, felt the cold seep into their bones and paralyze their muscles.
The tyrant reacted with fury. His colossal body rose above the river's surface, breaking the layer of ice that was beginning to form as if it were paper. Dozens of tentacles reached toward the Winter Beast, seeking to trap it between their rings and destroy it before it could freeze more water.
But Gunlaug emerged from the water.
The golden-flamed warrior placed himself between the tentacles and the Winter Beast, raising his sword made of pure fire. A sea of golden flames poured from his being, not common fire but a light that burned in the very soul of beings. The golden flames struck the tentacles, and for the first time, the tyrant showed signs of pain.
Soul fire could not be ignored. It could not be extinguished with mere water or flesh. It was a flame that burned the very essence of existence, and the tyrant, no matter how ancient and powerful, was not immune to it.
Uriel took advantage of that moment of weakness.
The tyrant's attention had shifted toward Gunlaug and the Winter Beast. His control over his troops, that constant pressure that kept his subjects in line, weakened for just an instant. Just one instant.
But it was enough.
Uriel extended his domain like an invisible net and began adding the great abominations to his army. Creatures the size of hills, monstrosities that had served the tyrant for centuries, felt the chains of a new master close around their wills. Some resisted. Others, tired of centuries of servitude, accepted the change almost with relief.
The great tyrant became furious.
His countless blue eyes fixed on Uriel with a hatred so ancient and deep that it seemed to have weight. He focused his will on the sea dragon not as a warrior attacking another, but as a god crushing an insect. It was an overwhelming, unbearable pressure that sought to bend every fiber of Uriel's being, that forced him to submit, to kneel, to accept his inferiority.
Uriel cursed under his breath.
His domain began to falter. The connections with his subjects weakened. The minds he had conquered began to slip from his control like water through his fingers. Even his sea dragon form, that massive construction that had cost him so much essence to maintain, began to destabilize.
The tyrant's will was too powerful.
Uriel felt his own consciousness begin to blur, felt the line between himself and that ancient presence become fuzzy. The tyrant did not only want to kill him. He wanted to absorb him, turn him into part of himself, add his will to the formless mass of his being.
He was losing.
Until he heard a voice in his mind.
It wasn't the voice of the spell, that constant temptation that lurked in the shadows of his power. It was another. More familiar. More... human.
"Well, well, what a predicament," the voice said, with a hint of irony that Uriel knew well. "I can't let you die that fast. You still owe me one."
It was Shade.
The bastard had woken up.