Morrigan moved through the battlefield like a natural disaster.
She cut across the gap between the tree line and the first wall in seconds, her staff already swinging before she reached the fighting. The first Lacert she encountered took Konkushu to the ribs and was launched sideways into three of his companions, toppling all four in a tangled heap. The second received a palm strike to the chest that redirected his own charging momentum backward, sending him tumbling across the scorched earth.
Everywhere she moved, Lacerts fell. Grub watched from atop the third wall, unable to tear his eyes away.
She wasn't simply stronger. She was far more efficient with each attack.
Every motion served three purposes. Her swings created openings and the openings were exploited by the Guardians and volunteers fighting beside her, who surged forward into the gaps Morrigan carved with renewed ferocity. The old kappa moved between engagements without pause, her beaked face carrying a grim focus.
Pazuzu was on his last reserves, the horned Guardian's grey skin was slick with sweat and mottled with burns, his ivory sickle moving in sluggish arcs that lacked their usual precision. A Lacert soldier had him backed against the fortification, spear leveled at his chest.
His Forte flickered on for a moment, and for one second the attacking Lacert hesitated. The next it returned to normal.
Pazuzu staggered.
"Damn..." he muttered.
The lizard's spear came flashing towards him, ready to skewer him. Until a blur shot between them.
Morrigan's foot connected with the Lacert's spine and sent him cartwheeling into the dirt. She didn't slow down or look back. Just moved on to the next cluster of enemies as Pazuzu collapsed against the wall, breathing in ragged gasps.
From the third wall, Grub watched the battle transform beneath Morrigan's influence. One woman was reshaping the entire engagement through skill and positioning alone. The Lacert advance, which had been grinding steadily toward breaching the first wall, stalled and then reversed as Morrigan's presence tipped the balance.
The defenders reclaimed ground one bloody meter at a time.
Beside Grub, Luthiel smiled brightly. Lu had taken control sometime during the fighting. Her golden eyes sparkled in the middle of her neatly framed face.
"Master's amazing..."
Grub silently nodded. Amazing wasn't even the right word. Monstrous fit much better.
A question surfaced in Grub's tactical mind. Her Maladroit equalized her to her opponent's level, but which opponent? If she was fighting a dozen Lacerts simultaneously, did Equalization measure the strongest individual in range? The combined threat? The average? He had no way to know from up here, but whatever the answer, she was eviscerating them regardless. Her technique operated so far above theirs that equal power meant nothing.
Another burst of Anima exploded from Morrigan's staff. Three Lacerts were thrown into the wall. A fourth crumpled before she even reached him.
He watched her basin slosh during another particularly violent exchange. Water crested the rim and spilled down her shoulder. For a fraction of a second, her movement hitched. Then Current caught the falling water and guided it back up the side of her head and into the basin without her breaking stride. The correction was seamless, automatic, executed mid-combat with the casual ease of breathing.
Grub's stomach dropped slightly at the sight. During their match, he had treated the basin spill as his winning move. An irreversible vulnerability that could decide the fight. But watching her redirect spilled water back into place while simultaneously fighting half a dozen soldiers told him exactly how much latitude she had given him that day.
The battle at the first wall was tilting decisively in Anwansi's favor. Lacert soldiers were breaking formation, their morale crumbling as Morrigan dismantled their lines with methodical brutality. Small bursts of Anima sent soldiers flying backward when she struck forward, Current carrying the force through angles that made the impacts land from impossible directions. Volunteers who had been fighting desperately minutes ago were now pressing forward with renewed confidence.
Then—
WHOOSH!
A wave of fire swept across the battlefield.
Morrigan leaped sideways and the fire scorched the ground where she had been standing, leaving a blackened streak across the earth.
Across the battlefield, Saander was on his feet.
The crimson Lieutenant Colonel stood at the edge of the burned corridor, blood streaming from his ruined face. One eye was swollen completely shut. His jaw hung at a wrong angle. Several of his scales had been cracked clean off, exposing raw pink flesh beneath. By any reasonable assessment, he should have been unconscious. Yet hatred still burned within his crimson eyes.
"You..." he rasped.
Morrigan frowned. "I was wondering when you'd stop pretending to be dead."
Saander ignored her.
Instead he suddenly screamed toward the remaining Lacerts.
"LET IT OUT!"
The battlefield froze.cSeveral Lacerts looked toward him in confusion.
"Sir?"
"LET IT OUT NOW!"
Two Lacerts immediately broke formation. Instead of charging the defenders...they sprinted away. Straight into the jungle.
Grub frowned. "What are they doing?"
Morrigan watched the two Lacerts leave and her expression changed. She shot after them instantly.
But Saander began to dance.
The flames from the fallen torches had spread across the battle zone, pooling in scattered patches of fire that licked at debris and bodies alike. Saander's feet traced desperate patterns in the dirt as he tried to gather those scattered flames into something minacious. His movements were sloppy, his rhythm broken, nothing like the graceful choreography he had displayed earlier.
But the fires answered anyway. Tongues of flames burst from the abandoned torches, weaving between his movements before hurtling toward Morrigan like flaming serpents.
She clicked her tongue and turned her attention to dodging the attack. The delay lasted barely a second. But it was enough. The two fleeing Lacerts vanished into the trees.
Saander allowed a wet, broken chuckle to escape his mouth. The crimson Lacert laughed, yet his expression showed desperation and anguish.
Morrigan scowled and closed the distance in three strides. Her fist buried itself into his stomach. The crimson Lacert doubled over, vomiting blood and bile onto the scorched ground. The gathered flames scattered as the Lacert dropped to the ground.
Morrigan looked down at him. "Goodbye."
She raised Konkushu, and anima flooded the weapon.
In a flash, BOOM
The staff struck the lieutenant colonel's jaw, and Saander's head exploded clean off his shoulders. The headless body remained kneeling for a heartbeat before collapsing into the mud.
The Lacert soldiers nearest to the impact froze. Their commander's body lay broken in the dirt, his crimson scales dulled by blood and dust.
Their leader was dead. The battle was over. Or it should have been.
A sound cut through the aftermath. Low at first, barely audible above the groaning of the wounded and the crackling of scattered fires. Then it grew far more harrowing. A guttural, unholy screech that vibrated in Grub's teeth and made the hairs on his arms stand straight.
Morrigan spun around. So did everyone else on the battlefield, Anwansi and Lacert alike.
Morrigan gaze faced toward the jungle.
"...No."
Her voice was barely a whisper.
Something impossibly fast raced through the forest. The creature burst from the tree line at a speed that made Grub's eyes struggle to track it. Four legs carried its massive body across the scorched earth in a skittering, insect-like gallop that looked fundamentally wrong. Its limbs moved too fast, bending at joints that shouldn't exist, each stride covering ground in a way that defied its size.
Grub's breath caught as he took in the details.
The creature was enormous. Its body was long and serpentine, like a snake that had been given legs and then stretched to fill a nightmare. Its hide was a dark, ashen grey that seemed to absorb the light around it rather than reflect it. A long snout jutted forward from a skull covered in strange markings, black lines that ran across its face in patterns that resembled writing but meant nothing. Its eyes were pits of absolute black, carrying no reflection, no intelligence, no recognition of anything around it.
And reality warped in its wake.
The air shimmered around the creature the way heat distorts a horizon, but this distortion was even more aberrant. The ground beneath its feet seemed to ripple slightly. Shadows bent toward it. The sound of its movement arrived a half-second after the movement itself, as though physics was struggling to keep up with something it hadn't authorized to exist.
In its jaws, one of the Lacert soldiers who had been sent to release it dangled limply. The creature threw its head back and swallowed the body whole. The second soldier was nowhere to be seen.
Grub stared at the monstrosity from the third wall. His hands gripped the railing so hard his knuckles went white.
He had never seen anything like this. And yet, something about it tugged at a thread buried deep in his memory. A sense of recognition that he couldn't trace to any specific event. Like a word sitting on the tip of his tongue that refused to come forward.
I've seen something like this before. Haven't I?
Below, Morrigan's voice thundered across the battlefield.
"EVERYONE FALL BACK! NOW!"
The old kappa turned to face the oncoming creature, her staff gripped in both hands, her basin churning violently. The casual confidence she had carried through the entire battle was gone. In its place was something harder and sharper. The expression of someone who recognized exactly what was coming.
Grub couldn't breathe.
Why...Why does this thing feel familiar?
A strange chill crawled up his spine. Somewhere. He had seen something like this. Not exactly this.
But...Something close.Something equally...wrong.
Morrigan planted Konkushu into the dirt. Then she shouted once again with enough force to silence the battlefield.
"RUN!"
"EVERYONE RUN!"
"IT'S AN ANOMALY!"
The word cut through the chaos like a blade. Guardians who had been pressing forward stopped dead. Volunteers who had been celebrating their momentum turned pale. Even the surviving Lacert soldiers abandoned their weapons and began scrambling backward, their war forgotten in the face of something far worse than any enemy army.
Morrigan barked orders at the Guardians nearest to her. "Get the wounded behind the second wall! Move the civilians deeper into the shelters! Nobody engages this thing except me!"
She studied the approaching creature with narrowed eyes. The beast was closing fast, mauling Lacert soldiers in its path without discrimination. One of the fleeing Lacerts screamed, but the vile creature reached him before he could escape. Its jaws opened impossibly wide and the lizard disappeared whole. Blood sprayed as it crunched down. The beast never slowed it's pace. Another Lacert tried to flee, but one massive claw tore him in half.
The monster continued forward with the man's arm hanging from its mouth. It chewed once. Then swallowed.
Without caring who stood before it, or caring who it killed. It simply kept coming.
"If I had to guess," Morrigan muttered, loud enough for the nearest Guardians to hear, "it's Dormant rank. Low end of rankings, but Tier One within it. However, most people here aren't Dormant Tier 1, and even someone who is at the bottom of the Cultivator rank may find it difficult." She spat. "Nobody here is strong enough to fight it except me. So get the hell out of the way."
On the third wall, Luthiel had gone rigid beside Grub. Lu's golden eyes were stretched impossibly wide, her mitten-like hands clasped over her mouth. Her entire body trembled as the creature's distorted presence washed over the battlefield.
"Oh gods," she whispered through her fingers. "Oh gods oh gods oh gods."
Fear unlike anything Grub had ever heard filled every word. She took an involuntary step backward.
"Mister Grub..."
Grub tore his eyes away from Luthiel and looked back at the creature. It had reached the open ground between the tree line and the first wall, its four legs churning through the scorched earth as it bore down on the defenders. Reality rippled around it with every stride, the air bending and snapping back like a rubber band stretched too far.
His hand drifted to the morning star on his back. The faint Nihil in his chest pulsed in response to the creature's presence, as if recognizing something kindred in the wrongness that surrounded it.
Below, Morrigan stepped forward. Alone.
The Great Sage Equal to Heaven raised her staff and faced the charging Anomaly head-on.