A thin trickle of blood traced a path down the cold steel. The ruby brilliance of her life force betrayed her High Affinity, yet in this moment, she looked utterly forsaken.
Norak flicked out a serpentine tongue, his face twisted into a leering mask of ecstatic depravity.
"What kind of thing are you?" Seraph asked, his voice a glacial rasp.
Unlike the fractured desperation of General Leonis, the young man's face remained an unreadable void beneath his hood. He showed no outward tremor of rage or panic; his eyes were as stagnant and frigid as a millennial glacier.
Yet, within that frozen gaze, his heterochromatic eyes crackled with a lethal static—a killing intent so raw it made the hair on Norak's neck stand up in involuntary terror.
Norak narrowed his eyes, a snakelike irritation flickering across his distorted features.
"Tsk, tsk... I have an absolute loathing for that ice-sheet, emotionless mask of yours, you insufferable wretch!" Norak's voice had morphed into a shrill wheeze, utterly divorced from his former ursine baritone.
"Aren't you even human?" he leered, his tongue flicking out with nauseating speed to graze the girl's cheek. "You ought to show some terror—or at least a spark of rage—now that your little darling teeters on the edge of the grave! Heh-heh-heh!"
As he spoke, Norak's grin fractured, tearing toward his very ears to reveal a jagged row of teeth—stained, yellowed, and as serrated as a shark's maw.
"A Necromancer, then," Seraph countered, his voice remaining clinically calm. "Where have you hidden the real Norak?"
A Necromancer was a pariah among men, a devotee of an evil cult that operated within the stinking shadows of Laurasian society. These apostates were the puppeteers of the undead plague, weaving the liturgies that disturbed the sanctity of the grave. While both Liches and Necromancers possessed the power to reanimate the fallen, it was the clandestine operations of these cults that ensured human territories remained infested with the walking dead.
Historically, their numbers were so negligible they had escaped the scrutiny of the Arkflame Crown, dismissed as mere anomalies. Yet, a decade prior, during his pilgrimage as a vagrant amidst the urban sprawl of Arkpolis, the young man had stumbled upon the festering roots of this cult—observing their depravity in the lightless corners where no sentry dared to tread.
Seraph had sensed the festering growth of this cult as recently as two months ago, while tracking the shadows lurking within the Capital. He had discovered that their eldritch activities had metastasized since his childhood; the Necromancers were a ticking time bomb, a hidden malignancy that no kingdom had yet brought into the light.
"Heh-heh-heh! A wretch like you knows way too much for his own good!" Norak let out a jagged cackle that set everyone's teeth on edge.
"Don't waste your breath, you fool! I'm no Mimic. I'm the real Norak—there's no one else! I'm the same Norak all you simpletons loved so much!" he mocked, his grin tearing toward his ears in a display of pure madness.
A visceral metamorphosis began to rack Norak's frame. His eyes ignited with a sickly emerald glow, and threads of verdant corruption bled through his grey mane. The map of wrinkles on his face smoothed into a disturbing youthfulness as fangs and talons elongated with a wet crunch. Coarse fur erupted from his skin, his muscles swelling until they shredded his cloak into ragged tatters. He was becoming an ursine nightmare—a beast draped in the stolen finery of a man.
"How can this be? You... a demon? How long have you played us for fools!?" Leonis stammered, his voice cracking with shock. The General's strength failed him, and he recoiled a step, his eyes refusing to believe the horror unfolding before him.
"Heh-heh-heh! A dolt like you could never understand the strain of keeping up that hollow, fake smile! I've been sick of your kind for years, longing to flay your meat and feast on your vitals! Tonight, you're all just sacrifices for the Demon Lord!"
"Let her go," Seraph interjected, his voice absolute frost. "And I might decide not to unmake you."
"Release this brat? Heh-heh-heh! I'll give your little darling her life," Norak countered, his voice like oily viper. "But in exchange, you have to slaughter Leonis with your own hands!"
The Necromancer's voice surged with a demented ecstasy; his eyes bulged from their sockets as if he were physically unable to contain the sick anticipation of watching men tear each other apart.
"You monster!" Leonis bellowed, his fury a fractured thunder.
The gambit was a transparent attempt to erode their trust and bleed away their time—a distraction played out while the Crawler horde continued its relentless harvest of the innocent.
Around them, the shriek of enchanted steel clashing against demonic talons pierced the night, woven into the screams of the dying that gripped the very heart.
Then, a tectonic tremor began to vibrate through the earth from beyond the curtain walls—the thunderous stomp of a million footfalls. It was the return of the undead legions, launching a coordinated assault on the Ragguard Fortress at the exact moment the Crawlers enacted their internal slaughter. The roars of the damned outside and the desperate cries of the sentries within coalesced into a single, bloody cacophony of despair.
"Fine... I'll... DO IT!" Seraph roared, his arm snapping in a whip-like motion.
[SWIFT-FWOOSH!]
In a single pulse of movement, a pair of throwing blades vanished from the folds of his white cloak, transfixing Norak's wrist and shoulder with surgical violence.
"A-AAAAAAAGH!" the traitor shrieked, his grip failing.
The kris struck the cold stones with a metallic ring as Norak instinctively recoiled in agony. Seizing the opening, Rosalyn wrenched herself from his grasp. She spun with desperate speed, driving her fist into his distorted face with every ounce of her regained strength.
The sickening crack of bone meeting bone echoed through the square as his jaw shattered; several of his jagged, yellowed fangs were launched into the air amidst a spray of blood and bile. His nose fractured, and a torrent of crimson erupted from his snout.
"That's for fourteen years of lies, you scumbag!" Rosalyn screamed, her voice a fractured sob.
The girl vaulted backward, putting distance between herself and the beast, even as crystalline tears continued to trace a path down her cheeks.
The split-second transition within that single burst of motion did not escape the young magis's clinical scrutiny, yet the sight of blood erupting from Norak's snout sparked a flicker of doubt.
'He still bleeds the crimson of man?' Seraph mused, his mind a racing engine of calculation. 'It's clear he's invited the Demonic Fel into his marrow, yet his core remains anchored to his mortal lineage. Anomalous...'
The young man would allow no further lapse. As Rosalyn vaulted to safety, Seraph ascended from the cold stones, his frame buoyed by a surge of Mageia Power. He levelled the Rubyflame Sceptre at the traitor, his eyes burning with incandescent fury.
"Flamus Swiftrapier!" Seraph loosed the liturgy with jagged ferocity.
[SHING-FWOOOOOM!]
A bolt of concentrated solar malice ignited the heart of the Fortress, its amber-gold radiance casting long, dancing shadows against the masonry. Even the Crawlers engaged in their harvest recoiled into the shadows, gripped by primal terror as they recognised the signature of the flame aura that had previously decimated their legion.