Chapter 731: Not Good Enough

Anderi stood there for a moment before falling on his back into the ruined carcass of the fiend.

A moment later, movement stirred within the underbrush at its edge. Two massive shapes rose from the shadows, low and half-formed, more shadow than wolf, their edges still smoking as they crawled up the ravaged fiend.

They stopped at the edge of the pit gouged out in the fiend’s side, fur raised in alarm, teeth already bared at the enormous figure lying amid the ruin of the abomination.

They stared down at the figure with their lusterless eyes, low growls escaping their throats as their shadowed muscles tensed, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice.

Then a woman stepped from the shadows between the two, quietly placing a hand on each wolf’s side. The simple touch seemed to reach through their tension, and the two shadowy beasts eased, if only slightly, their bared fangs lowering as their muscles slowly relaxed.

She was hard to look away from even here, even with the carnage of a bloody battle still smoldering all around her, skin a soft, dusted slate rose that caught the broken light strangely, almost luminous in it, and two tall feline ears rising from hair the same pale rose shade, flicking forward as she took the scene in.

She carried the savage presence of a predatory beast, yet there was something undeniably refined about her demeanor.

Her eyes swept once over the man lying in a pool of putrid blood, purple and gray, bubbling as it drowned his body, her gaze lingering for a moment on the crown still fused against Andrei’s bloody brow before finally settling upon his clear blue eyes.

"Are you alright, my love?"

Andrei looked down at himself, considered the state he was actually in, blood and gore matted through his hair, and then, after moments of silence, gave her a thumbs up.

"All good." A beat, something almost sheepish crossing a face that, minutes ago, had belonged to something with jaws the size of a small building. "Just got a little caught up in the emotions."

She visibly exhaled, sighing in relief.

"Good." She said before turning, her gaze washing over the treeline where the remainder of the horde churned on in the confused, leaderless way of things who didn’t know what to do. "Get to work. Clean the remnants."

The wolves needed no second command.

They surged past her in a stream of black, almost becoming flat shadows on the ground, only rising once they were amid the gathering horde of Devourer beasts, and unlike before they could hardly pass as wolves, now standing nearly ten meters tall, with multiple sets of eyes, and blade-like teeth lining their abyssal maws.

They went to work, not fighting the horrid abominations so much as unmaking them, jaws finding throats before a creature could turn and retaliate, bodies torn apart like bloody ribbons and dragged whole into shadow that closed over them, erasing any sign of resistance.

The few Devourer beasts who did react in time and landed any strikes had their claws and talons simply phased through the shadowy wolves, and so the cleanup continued, the clearing thinning out at a pace that looked less like combat and more like something being quietly erased.

The wolves were not the only ones doing the cleanup work, as moments after Syrian’s gave the command, a few figures stepped out from the shadows of the jungle.

A hulking crimson Ork came in from the far treeline a heartbeat later, carving a path of his own through the restless horde, his great battle axe cutting through abominations and trees alike.

He was a hulking giant towering nearly four meters, thick muscles piling across his immense form, chest and back covered in scars of old wounds, twin tusks jutting up past his jaw, and vermillion red eyes shining on his menacing face like twin blood moons.

Soon, the ork was surrounded on all sides. However, anyone watching would have realized he had deliberately moved through the battlefield, drawing more and more Devourer Beasts toward himself until hundreds of the horrid creatures now encircled him.

And standing at the heart of them all, the ork merely lowered his head and let out a deep, rumbling laugh.

As the creature pounced on him from all sides, he didn’t even try to defend himself. He just raised his arm, and as the creature drowned him beneath claws and fangs, a burst of blood-red light gathered above his outstretched palm.

The energy began condensing, thickening, drawing something dark and wet out of the air itself until a massive ork skull the size of a small hill hung suspended over him, bearing a fanged grin.

An explosion thundered a breath later, as the ork jumped into the air and threw the blood skull down with a roar that matched its size, sending it crashing down through a cluster of a few hundred Devourer beasts like a blood moon.

While that happened, a small figure left the jungle canopy, barely two and a half feet tall, dark fur bristling with static, a scatter of tiny stars already gathering around her small frame before she had finished the fall.

She launched them upon the horde beneath her. Some burned white-hot on impact, while others froze whatever they struck mid-motion. A few simply crushed their prey, gravity weighing down onto a target until there was nothing left but blood and gore.

She landed square on the back of a beast with an oddly serene, almost handsome face for something built out of horror, and pressed one small foot down against its skull.

"Get crushed," she said, entirely cheerful about it. "Don’t want you dirtying my hands." A pause, considering the foot currently doing the work. "Feet." Another pause. "Whatever."

Another figure descended from the sky, cloaked in black, with bladed wings cutting silent arcs through the trees, his silhouette dark and angular against what little light touched him, his face a flat mask, a shifting smear of black and steel gray that gave away nothing at all.

But soon even that was gone, his figure simply vanishing into thin air, like he was not even there. The Devourer beasts who roared at his arrival were left turning their heads in search.

A breath later, small dark beads began to rain from the sky, and before the creatures could react, they burst into searing white flames, not flames that burned, but flames that erased. Creature and jungle alike vanished wherever they touched, flesh and foliage simply melting and crumbling into ash and dust.

And against the deafening chaos that had filled the clearing, each detonation was barely louder than a pebble dropped into a pond.

In less than a few minutes, the thousands of remnant Devourer beasts were gone, dragged into the embrace of shadows, torn apart, crushed, or simply erased from existence.

The clearing settled into something that almost passed for quiet, the wet aftermath of it steaming faintly in the broken light, four very different kinds of violence folding back into stillness at roughly the same moment, as if they had rehearsed it.

Andrei now resting atop the fiend’s carcass of his making, with the wolfkin lady sitting by her side, grimaced, working something deeply unpleasant off the back of his tongue.

"I really have to stop eating these ugly bastards," Andrei muttered, mostly to himself, mostly disgusted. "They taste horrendous."

"You are not supposed to eat them." The voice came from behind him, light and entirely unbothered by the carnage that surrounded them. "You are supposed to control them."

Andrei tilted his head back, finding the lady who had made the comment standing behind him, looking down with a solemn look, having arrived there at some point.

She was, without question, breathtaking and looked out of place against the carnage around her, dressed in a fitted black shirt beneath a pair of flowing pants, a white overcoat falling to her knees and somehow spotless despite where she was standing.

There was something almost clinical about her appearance; her attire was immaculate, while her hair was tied into a neat bun, held in place by a simple pencil.

She looked far more suited to a pristine laboratory or a physician’s ward than the blood-soaked battlefield around her.

"Trying a new hairstyle?" Andrei said after looking at her for a moment, smiling. "Looks good, Guardian Elmara."

"One minute, fifty-three seconds." She said, ignoring the comment. "New personal best, for what that’s worth." Her tone made clear exactly how much stock she put in personal bests. "Previous record was one-forty-one. So twelve seconds of progress, technically."

"Sounds like a win to me," Andrei offered.

"It isn’t." She said, not even looking up from the crown, picking at details only she could see. "One-fifty-three seconds is how long you maintained deep synchronization before resonance overflow reached critical, and your own neural signature was buried beneath forty thousand minds, all saturated with rage and hunger, flooding through the connection you established."

"Past that point, you had no chance of imprinting your command upon them. You were simply one of them, consumed by rage and directed by hunger."

She paused, her tone remaining entirely clinical.

"You failed to seize control again. Just as you have in every trial since we began. You were just not good enough."