Jane activated the peak of her Beast Human nature. Her form underwent a wild transformation as her Lynx aspect fully manifested. Her fangs shot out razor sharp and her fingers contracted into deadly claws, while a crackling electrical charge burst directly from her muscle tissue and fur, shooting a thunderbolt into the air that visually formed a panther. But the true horror for the Inquisition rose right behind her. Space split open as her Beast Spirit appeared: a gigantic panther of pure shadow and crackling electricity, whose claws wore deep grooves into the obsidian. The panther roared in synchronicity with Jane’s bloodthirsty Lynx gaze, a sound that made the foundation of the corridor tremble.
Beside her, Cilla transformed into a serene horror. The ground beneath her feet froze, after which hundreds of ash white roses shot up from the obsidian splinters within a fraction of a second. The petals crystallized out of pure ether. The rose vines, packed with sharp thorns, wrapped around her legs and arms like a living armor. The white flowers opened simultaneously, pulsating with a pale light that instantly froze Sanguis’s falling rain of blood into shards of glass before it could touch her.
And Lyn made the most brute decision. She raised her massive, glowing forge hammer and swung it without hesitation, landing it with full force straight onto her own chest. The impact was an explosion of sparks and heat. Her armor ripped open and immediately fused with the liquid metal from the hammer. Her entire form mutated into a walking forge; her skin turned into glowing, black iron shot through with fissures of liquid gold. She was larger, heavier, an immovable goddess of forged steel.
The three of them stood ready, a wall of the electrical panther spirit, ice cold rose armor, and glowing steel, directly facing the Inquisitors.
Malakor the Iron Architect, Pyra Vael, and Velox looked at the three transforming rebels. No fear appeared on their faces. Instead, the three Inquisitors exchanged a short look of mutual understanding. They lowered their weapons into an offensive stance but deliberately stepped in front of the Nobodies, their backs turned toward the three girls.
A dark laugh tore from the throat of the Iron Architect.
“Leave the hits to us, girls!” Malakor roared, his voice echoing over the hissing blood of the monk.
Pyra Vael let her powder tails whip wildly around them, her gaze focused on the approaching chaos, while Velox was already in the starting blocks with his speed. With a chilling pride, they closed the line.
“This is the right place for us to die, legends!” Pyra screamed right after him.
It was a dark hint that hung like an icicle in the air. There was certainty in their voices, a secret that went deeper than this battle alone: on this specific ground of the colosseum, they were immortal. They did not defy death; they possessed it.
The symphony of the battlefield broke loose in a fluid, destructive harmony that rewrote the laws of combat. Malakor, Pyra Vael, and Velox no longer moved as individuals; they transformed into one murderous, synchronous unit claiming the front line. Their forms cleaved through the chaos, perfectly attuned to one another while the deep resonances of Beat’s drum vibrated through the foundation of the colosseum. Every hammer blow on the drum sent invisible, purple Enchenkov shockwaves through the air that struck the three legends directly in their nervous systems. The vibrations penetrated their muscles and drove their adrenaline to a bizarre level. Their brute forces were amplified; every fiber in their bodies screamed for total escalation.
“Feel that beat!” Malakor roared, his voice heavy with iron adrenaline as the copper plates around his arms began to glow. “The music of the rebels pumps straight through our veins! Velox, Pyra, we are cranking this beast to the boiling point!”
“Let those flames howl!” Pyra Vael screamed back, her gaze possessed as her powder tails whipped wildly around her, spitting hissing sparks into the darkness. “If they give us a rhythm, we dance toward their demise! Demolish him!”
On the other side of the destruction stood the object of their disgust: Brother Sanguis. His form underwent a transformation that defied all humanity, radiating carnal horror. The laws of human flesh were painfully inverted. His skin and arms were completely turned inside out, a raw, pulsating spectacle of exposed muscle tissue and bursting blood vessels. From beneath his tearing, blood soaked robes, dozens of deformed, anatomically impossible arms suddenly shot forth, clawing into the air, searching for flesh to tear.
“MORE BLOOD! MORE PURIFICATION!” Sanguis raged, foam on his lips as his stigmata wounds burst open with a hissing sound. “YOU CANNOT STOP THE SACRAMENT!”
“Shut your insane mouth, false prophet!” Malakor executed the order.
Velox began to flash around so fast that at one point he visually seemed to move backward, making everything appear to miss. Pyra pirouetted, simultaneously releasing powder with her tails, while Malakor stood there with illuminated eyes and rings, with which he suddenly gave them a turn to change their course, making everything appear targeted at him simultaneously. Velox struck with a neon burning dropkick while Pyra ignited the airborne powder, Malakor rewinding it and slamming with brute, combined elemental power into the monk. The impact was an explosion of liquid copper and fire. The shockwave was so immense that Sanguis and his form were thrown backward through the massive wall of a nearby civilian house. The building collapsed with a deafening crash, copper and stone breaking into thousands of shards.
But amidst the falling debris and dense dust clouds, the monk struck immediately.
With speed, his deformed arms clawed hold of a father and his children who were hiding there, trembling among the fragments. He lifted them without any effort, his inside out muscles tightly strained like hydraulic presses. The father screamed, trying to pull his children free from the bloody grip, but the bones in his own wrists were already cracking under the pressure. Sanguis raised them above his head, ready to rip their bodies open with a single brute yank.
The mother collapsed onto her knees in the rubble. Her nails scratched deep into the sharp copper and obsidian until her fingers bled. She wailed from raw mortal terror, a heartbreaking sound that cut through bone and marrow, completely drowning out the combat in the corridor for a moment.
“NO! NO! FOR GOD’S SAKE, NO!” she screamed, her voice cracking with panic and despair. “Let them go! Take me! Look at me, you monster! Take me! Let them live! Tear me apart, break me down until there is nothing left, but leave my children alone! I beg of you! I surrender, take my blood!”
The monk held the victims in the air and slowly bent his deformed, bloody head forward. It was a moment of chilling calmness amidst the madness. He did not ignore her screaming, but responded with a mechanical slowness. He snuffed the air deeply, his nostrils trembling. He bent his deformed face toward the baby, who cried incessantly in his grip. Sanguis snuffed deeply, tasting the innocence, and then moved his bloody snout toward the terrified father, whose breathing stopped.
The monk tasted the air, tasted the fear, and his grin faded for a brief second into a look of deep, chilling disdain.
“Impure…” Sanguis muttered, his voice a rancid whisper coming out of his stretched open throat. “Not yet ready for the altar. No value for the sacrificial bowl.”
With a dry, careless swing, he hurled the father and the baby away from him, as if they were worthless toys. They hit the ground hard, but they were still alive. His gaze, now completely stripped of any human rationality, focused with intensity entirely on the pleading mother lying there trembling in the blood. Her mortal terror was the only thing triggering him. His hind limbs tensed like heavy, metallic springs, the muscles pumping full of black blood, ready to peer at her with a deadly leap and completely reduce her form to ash.
“YOUR SACRIFICE… IS ACCEPTED!” he roared, his voice filled with a sick, religious ecstasy. “YOUR BLOOD SHALL SPEAK!”
The mother closed her eyes, ready for the impact, ready to be torn apart for her family. Her lips moved in a final, silent prayer as the monk pushed off from the ground.
But before his feet could fully leave the terrain, hell broke loose in the stratosphere above him.
“Not in my sector, you bloody parasite!” the thundering, concerned but furious voice of Balamore echoed across the battlefield. “Keep your filthy claws off those people!”
Balamore slammed his hands together with a loud clap, his veins swelling as he activated his totem with an explosion of spiritual energy. He summoned his Giant Serpent. The air split open with a terrifying crack. The gigantic snake, a creature of shadow and ancient power, shot forth with speed from the deepest darkness of the vaults. The reptile opened its gigantic jaws, caught Brother Sanguis full in its deadly, suffocating grip just as he wanted to leap, and slammed him straight into the air with an upward kinetic thrust.
The impact of the upward thrown body was so hard that Sanguis cleaved through the air like a living meteor, striking a thick, massive cloud completely away from the moon high in the stratosphere.
At that exact micro moment, the light arrived. The bright, cold moonlight broke through the darkness. In that single, ice cold flash, the entire battlefield was illuminated. For a fraction of a second, the world stood still. Beat stood with his purple neon veins and grin, Apollo as the sharp, agile sun god, Nicola pulsating as a god of kinetic neon energy, the Chrome Mimic as a mirrored wall of quicksilver, and Jane, Cilla, and Lyn back to back in their transformations, while the rescued family below crawled toward one another in the dust. It was a visual of divine chaos.
Then the image flashed immediately, abruptly, and with a transition back to the reality of the rubble and the hissing blood.
The monk still hung high in the air, but his madness knew no gravity or mercy. He recovered his momentum mid air with an inhuman jerk of his deformed spine and turned his bloodshot gaze downward, straight toward the source of the attack that had disrupted his ritual.
“BALAMORE!!” Sanguis screamed from the sky.
With speed, he leaped with all his outstretched, bloody claws straight toward the gigantic totem of Balamore. He landed with a crushing, deafeningly hard impact on top of the sacred object. A sickening, dry crack echoed through the entire arena. Under his brute weight, the totem finally shattered into thousands of glowing, spiritual splinters.
Balamore let out a cry, the spiritual backlash slamming like a steam hammer into his chest, his nose instantly beginning to bleed from the destruction of his medium. But before he could fall backward, the monk already had him. Sanguis tightly clamped the breaking, splintering remnants of the totem in his deformed hands and began to vomit prayers with rolling, milk white eyes. His voice cracked into a hysterical chanting:
“Sanguis Meus! Sanctum Signum! BURN IN THE GLORY OF THE CRUCIFIED! CLEANSE THIS GROUND!”
The spiritual energy and the sacred material of the totem immediately began to mutate and melt into a boiling, liquid substance due to his dark, Latin verses. Sanguis meanwhile held Balamore in an iron grip by his neck, cutting off Balamore’s air and causing his face to turn purple. As the melted remnants of the destroyed totem dripped down hissing and smoking, the boiling substance landed directly on Balamore’s bare flesh. The hissing of burning meat mixed with the suffocating choking of Balamore and the insane laughing of the monk.
Sanguis opened his jaws so wide that the skin in the corners of his mouth tore open, the blood running over his chin as he bellowed it out across the entire battlefield, a sound that made the foundations of the colosseum shiver with religious madness:
“PUNISHMENT MUST BE SERVED!!”
The tension reached the boiling point. Without losing a single second, he threw the severely burned Balamore aside. With his adrenaline far past human limits and his bloodlust at the maximum, the inside out monk turned his gaze away from the burning remains. His dozens of arms clawed wildly in the air as he threw himself forward with speed, his eyes wide open toward the remaining Legends.
“WHO IS NEXT FOR THE ALTAR?!” he raged, ready to continue his bloody slaughter with total devastation.