2543 They Come at Night (Part 3)
"That's impossible!" Syrah felt the air leaving her lungs and refusing to get in. "Only the holy bloodline of the Tyrants has absolute control over the elements and only Glemos could-"
"I am god Glemos to you!" The voice of her lord and master emerged from the crowned demon as his features shifted for a moment into those of the Tyrant's.
Once again everything was exactly as she remembered it. Thanks to Solus' memory Lith had no problem mimicking Glemos while Morok was using the Abomination's body like an exoskeleton to hide his presence.
'Was that Light Mastery?' The Tyrant asked after he and Lith had combined their bloodline abilities to let Morok absorb the elemental pillars that he had shot back.
Only the sixth one came from the Void. It was just a tier three Light Mastery spell, but to someone with no knowledge of it, it could easily pass for the power of a Fomor.
'Yes.' Lith replied.
'Can you teach me?'
'No. Ask Nalrond and shut up. Your turn is coming up soon.'
'Got it, thanks.' While Lith laughed maniacally and spread a thick black-violet aura, the Tyrant slipped out of the Abomination and retreated to the southern entrance unnoticed.
"How did you do that?" Syrah unleashed two more tier five spells that she combined into a single tower tier spell.
"What do you think?" The moment before the explosion spread, Lith snapped his fingers and activated the fire and air elemental sealing arrays from the Mouth.
The tower tier spell faded in a colorful yet harmless mist.
"You killed him! That's why Lord Glemos never returned to us!" The Queen growled but instinctively took a step back.
All those who had dared defy the Tyrant had died so she knew that if the crowned demon had managed to defeat him, she stood no chance.
"Indeed. Your god was a divine meal and came with two delicious side dishes" Lith had Typhos' and Echidna's faces appear on his chest as well, wearing the same desperate expression they had upon the moment of their death.
"Then Eryon was right." Syrah had no idea why Elder Urma had lied to them nor did she care. "Verhen was there the day they died. He killed them and you helped him!"
She had always considered the Undead Courts a bunch of untrustworthy parasites and that was just the proof she needed to know that the moment they got their hands on the Harmonizer, her people would be either enslaved or exterminated.
"Verhen?" The crowned demon laughed harder. "That idiot tried to save them, but he failed. Then he tried to warn you, but luckily, you fools didn't listen!"
Br'ey amassed the pure world energy that she had accumulated in her crystal until that point and hurled it toward the frontlines.
She had such fine control that the energy wave worked akin to Invigoration for the monsters, healing their wounds and replenishing their mana and stamina, and then turned into an avalanche of tier three spells the moment it reached the demons' ranks.
Lith and Tista raised their arms, conjuring both the original and the tower's Hands of Menadion. The combined power of the artifacts stopped the elemental onslaught but while Tista just wanted to deflect it, Lith took over the energy mass and split it into two.
He reverted the first half into world energy and used it to empower his Demons, evening the field again. The other half he shot it back, but not before adding a spark of his life force to it and conjuring the tier five Spirit Spell, Primordial Roar.
Light and earth trapped the monsters like insects in the amber while water magic drained the heat, turning them into popsicles. Air produced a shockwave that made organs and bones tremble while darkness ate at their victims inside and out.
Lith had shot the spell in the crowd but only the monsters died since Demons shared his same energy signature. They took over the corpses, using their battered flesh to evolve into Demons of the Fallen.
What Syrah and the others saw was an impossible magic that had slaughtered their people and then raised them into slaves forced to turn their hand against those they had tried to defend until a second ago.
"Why are you doing this to us? Why are you still hunting us down after millennia?" Syrah overcame her fear and jumped at the crowned demon, slashing at him with her Adamant claws empowered by the golden lightning and the strength of a hundred Hati.
"Because even after all this time, you have yet to learn your lesson!" Lith deflected the hits thanks to his superior mass and battle experience, locking the Hati's wrists in an iron grip. "Every action has consequences and I am yours."
Abomination Touch reverted her arms to those of a warg and robbed her of Ryla's golden lightning, further widening the gap in strength between them.
"Back then, your species slaughtered countless innocents with their experiments. It was their screams that called upon me and I came to put an end to your madness. For thousands of years I've laid dormant until you started the cycle anew, waking me up."
"We just want to live!" Syrah cried while taking in the power from one hundred more Hati and gaining the strength necessary to break the hold. "Why do we have to be punished for our ancestors' crimes?"
Each Hati possessed only a limited martial prowess due to their short lifespan but by summoning their consciousness and weaving together different styles before the demon king could adapt to one of them, the Queen managed to bypass his defenses.
Deep cuts opened in his ebony skin, each infused with darkness, lightning, or cold. Lith's Abomination form couldn't suffer a seizure nor had muscles that the frost could stiffen but darkness magic was its bane.
It eroded his body, consuming both his flesh and mana.
Syrah exploited his moment of weakness to hit the crowned demon with her palm while she added another 100 wargs to her mass, for a total of 300. On top of that, at the moment of the impact, she unleashed all of the spells that her army had kept at the ready, injecting them straight into the body of the demon.
The hit was strong enough to send him flying against the wall and leave a hand-shaped mark on his skin. Yet borrowing so much power came at a price. Syrah's arm shattered and the recoil from the impact cracked her legs.
The warg's ability to share magic, wounds, and life force was powerful, but there was a limit to the amount of strain that the Queen's body could handle. Once she reached a certain mass, her joints would collapse under her own weight and the simplest movement would tear up her muscles.
She was no Divine Beast and even though she could now release a power comparable to one, her flesh and bones lacked the necessary toughness to endure their own newfound strength.
In the same way, channeling too many spells through a single body meant suffering from mana abuse.
Dealing one single blow to the crowned demon had forced her to choose between passing the damage upon ten warg in the backline and putting them into a coma or dumping it all on a single warg that would die in the process.
