The slimy, pulsating tips of the tentacles are already perceptibly scraping along their eyelashes. The suffocating stench of rotting blood and boiling iron forces itself into their lungs with the power of a hydraulic press, the absolute deathblow just a fraction of a millimeter away from total impact.
"Not yet…" Aurelius forces out through clenched teeth, while the veins on his forehead show dangerously thick swelling. "Not by a long shot!"
His Second Ignition explodes with the sound of a tearing dimension. Razor-sharp, kaleidoscopic prism rays flash straight from his pores with the brutal intensity of white-hot laser light. The visual escalation transforms the room into an insane hall of mirrors. The bright light breaks the falling shadows into millions of flashing, glittering glass shards that completely shred the darkness. In that blinding light storm, his blade flashes around twice at an inhuman, invisible speed. Two massive flesh tentacles are burned away to the cellular level and fall apart on the ground in howling, hissing strips.
On the other side, Beat roars, his vocal cords completely torn and distorted by the brutal, raw Oni power. With pure, reckless fury, he hacks into the entire left flank. His purple lightning claws pull deep, flaming grooves of pure electricity into the advancing mass of flesh, with sparks splashing around like glowing magma. Meanwhile, Silarias tightens every fiber in his massive back muscles. The deep blue, nuclear flames around his fists scream and howl from the accumulated tension, ready to deal the killing blow.
SCREEEEEECH!
A chilling, eardrum-shredding sound vibrates through the arena at such a brutal frequency that the stones around them spontaneously begin to crack. The colossal flesh heart convulses violently. In a bizarre fraction of a second, not two, but dozens of brand new, thick, pitch-black tentacles sprout straight from the head wound just struck. They pulse with a sickly life of their own, even thicker and more aggressive than the previous wave.
"What a shitty thing!" Beat curses mid-air, while he has to correct his grip.
The massive flesh mass strikes the core of the arena with the brutal weight of a crashing meteor. The ancient, heavy stone floor succumbs immediately under the immense pressure. Deep cracks race like lightning bolts through the entire width of the ground. With a deafening, thunderous roar that cuts to the bone, the entire foundation collapses. A gaping, pitch-black abyss of falling debris, gigantic boulders, and choking dust mercilessly swallows the three warriors into the depths.
But the darkness gets no chance to hold its ground.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Three consecutive, brutal shockwaves split the falling debris apart with a gigantic blow. The dark abyss tears open when a gold-black pillar of fire licking the sky, a razor-sharp cobalt-blue lightning bolt splitting the air, and a blood-red sea of light dominating everything shoot straight up like volcanic eruptions.
"Do you really think this shit will stop us?!" Beat's raw, echoing voice sounds through the chaos with a terrifying reverb. His purple electricity mutates on the spot under the extreme tension and flips into a nuclear, glowing cobalt blue with a crackling overload. The energy is so intense that the falling stones around him spontaneously pulverize. With six massive, electric Oni arms, he fully extends his reach. Like a possessed, bright blue lightning bolt, he shoots straight up through the gigantic falling debris, dead level with the pulsating bomb-heart.
Flanking from the blood-red sea of fire, Aurelius breaks loose. His Second Ignition has been brutally forced over to the blood-red, reinforced Ignition. His sword cuts through the air, leaving thick, liquid trails of glowing ruby that ignite the falling ash particles. Directly next to him, the gold-black flaming Lion Warrior bounces from piece of debris to piece of debris with incredible speed. Every brutal jump he makes causes the meter-sized stones under his feet to burst into fine dust with a loud bang.
Three bright, destructive color flashes swirl around each other in a lightning-fast spiral, a deadly and perfectly coordinated choreography that defies the complete laws of gravity.
"Aurelius! Now!" Beat roars, as blue lightning sprays from his eyes.
Four of Beat's massive cobalt-blue arms cling with an iron grip to the entire left flank of the tentacle storm. The brutal, high-voltage electric shocks sear the thick flesh jet-black immediately and make it hiss from the heat. Aurelius anticipates flawlessly and hacks his bright red lightsaber deep into the right flank, letting himself spin around mid-air at an insane pace to pull the remaining tentacles tight, block them, and completely immobilize them. The path to the pulsating core is now wide open.
"Silarias! Finish that shit off!"
Silarias activates his final sprint and accelerates to a bizarre level. His deep blue inferno eats through the remaining air resistance with a hissing sound, creating a vacuum behind him. With a brutal sonic boom, he rams both his fists up to his elbows deep into the spongy, pulsating tissue of the bomb-heart. His fingers dig themselves with brutal force into the struggling, thick veins pumping warm blood around.
"Don't you dare touch our world!" Silarias growls with a voice that makes the ground tremble, while he pumps his deep blue sea of fire at absolute maximum power straight into the internal core. The flesh heart swells terrifyingly in the blink of an eye. The tissue becomes so intensely hot from the inside that it begins to glow white-hot and is on the verge of tearing open with brutal force.
"NOW SILARIAS!!" Beat and Aurelius scream synchronously with everything they have in their lungs, balancing on a gigantic, falling piece of debris that begins to spin due to the immense pulling force.
With a brutal, superhuman swing that tests his muscles to the limit, Silarias grabs the glowing, white-hot flesh bomb. He whips the gigantic object upward in an immense arc, away from the arena. The object shoots into the darkest, highest depth of the orbit with insane speed.
For a fraction of a second, it remains dead silent. The entire world seems to hold its breath.
Then the sky explodes.
The blow that follows is so bizarrely intense and apocalyptic that it feels as if the moon itself is tearing apart into millions of sharp pieces. A blinding, pure white shockwave resonates through the entire space with a destructive force. The sonic pressure that is released knocks the few remaining arena walls into invisible powder in a single blow. The brutal, immense recoil of the nuclear blast fires Silarias backward like a launched cannonball, straight at the positions of Aurelius and Beat. The gigantic impact hits all three of them at exactly the same time, lifts the control over their bodies, and launches them with a devastating speed straight through the entire field of falling debris, deep into the distant, black, bottomless void.
The three bodies cut like glowing projectiles through the thin air with insane speed. The whistling wind howls like a madman past their ears, while the pitch-black depth of the night passes them like a blur of pure speed.
Silarias spins completely out of control in the air. His chest rises and falls wildly and his breathing immediately shifts into heavy, suffocating hyperventilation. Pure panic grips his throat, fear gnawing at his brain: Did I fail? Was that flesh bomb not far enough? Are we all going to die now?
His downward spiral of fear is immediately interrupted, roughly and forcefully. Beat and Aurelius claw themselves onto his shoulders with brutal force in the middle of the free fall.
"Open your eyes, crazy!" Beat roars, his voice distorted by the screaming storm. "Look around you! We are still alive! But we are falling like bricks, so do something about it!"
"We need that firepower, Silarias! NOW!" Aurelius screams immediately after, while the red glow of his Ignition flickers in the wind.
Silarias opens his eyes wide. The realization finally hits him with the force of a sledgehammer: they are still alive, but the ground is approaching at a murderous pace from a bizarrely extreme height. He immediately locks his gaze with the burning eyes of Beat and Aurelius. The panic in his chest ebbs away and makes room for an all-consuming wave of pure adrenaline.
"Woaaaahhhh… uhh uhh… NOW!" Silarias screams, his vocal cords on the verge of snapping.
With a brutal, backward movement, he rams his arms behind his body. His heavy, metal gauntlets ignite in a fraction of a second into an intense, roaring sea of gold-black fire. Like a set of brutal rocket engines, his fists spew pure destructive energy backward. The enormous shockwave that is released launches the trio forward even harder with a gigantic bang, straight through the sound barrier.
During this insane acceleration, their gaze travels downward. Deep below them, a massive, heavily fortified outpost of the Inquisitors looms. The three warriors look at each other, and simultaneously, a wide, hungry, and psychopathic grin appears on their faces. This is going to hurt.
Within the thick walls of the Inquisitor outpost, a serene, almost arrogant atmosphere prevails at that exact moment. The Inquisitors sit shoulder to shoulder, eating and partying loudly. The liquor flows freely to celebrate that they have taken complete control of the ward. Their progress is flawless, the victory is already in the bag in their eyes.
Everywhere in the various rooms, the disgusting activity is in full swing. In the gigantic kitchens, large-scale cooking is taking place for the entire garrison, with a monstrous refrigerator in the center. The thing is so bizarrely large and so overstuffed with meat and supplies that the cooks had to put the heavy steel behemoth on enormous chariot wheels to be able to move it through the room at all.
Further on, in the damp, lush botanical room, ram-men walk around with grubby, devious looks, whispering about the rare, magical flowers they are cultivating. In the adjacent, iron rooms, the Inquisitors laugh loudly while guarding their slaves, including the terrified child slaves locked up there for horrific, inhuman experiments. The atmosphere breathes total control.
Until the entire outpost tears at its foundations from a devastating, deafening bang.
The slaves and the experiment children, who until recently lived in the suffocating grip of the Inquisitors, stare with wide-open eyes at the inferno unfolding before them. The walls that separated them from freedom have turned into glowing rubble. While Silarias, Beat, and Aurelius race through the space like divine destroyers, the fear in the children shrinks and gives way to a blinding adoration.
A small boy with deep abrasions on his arms, who served as a guinea pig for the gruesome experiments, crawls out from between the splinters of a pulverized table. He stares at the cobalt-blue flash of Beat, his eyes wide and mouth half-open in dumb amazement. "Wow…" he whispers, momentarily forgetting all his pain.
A young girl, her face stained with soot, stands on shaky legs. She looks at the gold-black pillar of fire from Silarias and the red Ignition of Aurelius. In her gaze lies a kind of magical wonder, as if she is looking at shooting stars instead of a fight. "It looks like fireworks…" she says softly, with a dreamy, almost happy smile that does not fit the chaos around her at all.
As the refrigerator thunders past with a rumbling roar and the three warriors break outside through the ceiling like an insane meteorite, the children clap their hands, their little faces beaming with excitement. "Again, again!" one of them shouts, jumping on a pile of rubble.
The three warriors hear the cries through the whistling wind. For a fraction of a second, while they carve through the air on the runaway refrigerator, there is a silence in their own raging minds. The realization that they are no longer just warriors, but a source of pure, childlike admiration for those they have just snatched from the iron grip, fills them with a new, almost terrifying power.
"Do you hear that?" Beat roars with a wide, psychopathic grin at his companions, while the refrigerator begins to tilt for their dive downward. "We have fans, men! Time to take this show to an even higher level!"
"Then let's show them what a real encore looks like!" Aurelius answers, his sword still resonating in red, while they initiate the free fall together with the steel mass towards the horizon.
While Silarias grabs the refrigerator and throws it back to its place, all three of them look at them.
"Surprise, motherfuckers!"
Silarias, in his gold-black flaming Lion Warrior form, rams straight through the meter-thick outer walls with the brutal force of a crashing meteor. The blow is apocalyptic. Without slowing down even a millimeter, he crashes in one straight line through all the rooms. Walls explode into fine dust, heavy oak tables splinter into millions of pieces, and Inquisitors fly through the room like ragdolls.
"Oh no, Wrong building!" Silarias roars with a cackling, sarcastic laugh, while he continues to pulverize everything around him with his burning claws.
Directly in his wake, Beat flashes through the wreckage like a possessed, cobalt-blue lightning bolt. With his six massive, electric Oni arms, he grabs the thick main power cables from the walls in a fraction of a second.
"Lights out, party over!" Beat screams, after which he pulls the entire power supply apart with a hard tug. Everything explodes in a sea of sparks and heavy short circuits, while Beat dances laughingly and flashing through the dark rooms, neutralizing every Inquisitor he encounters.
"CALEIDOS!!" Aurelius's chilling, clear scream suddenly sounds through the burning hallways.
Prismatic, razor-sharp light flashes shoot crisscross and at impossible angles through the rooms. Aurelius transforms the room into a slaughterhouse of light. In his blood-red, reinforced Ignition form, he flashes everywhere in between with a drawn weapon at an inhuman pace. His sword possesses its own possessed entity and screams with a resonating, terrifying voice through the outpost: "DESTROYY!!! DESTROYY!!!"
Aurelius hacks through the machines of the experiment room with one heavy, fluid sweep. The brutal blow activates a catastrophic chain reaction. The entire factory connected to the room explodes with a gigantic, fiery red burst of flame. Immediately after, the heavy emergency generators detonate with a series of consecutive, brutal bangs.
The immense, outward-slamming pressure wave of the factory explosion launches the three warriors full-force against the back of the gigantic refrigerator.
BOOM!
The monstrous refrigerator is immediately thrown on its side by the brutal impact. Due to the momentum, the steel behemoth transforms into an improvised, runaway rocket on chariot wheels. Silarias, Beat, and Aurelius cling to the top of the rolling refrigerator while thundering through the botanical room at insane speed, flattening flowers and ram-men.
At that exact moment, the very last, most extreme main explosion of the outpost goes off.
The gigantic bang projects the refrigerator, including the three warriors, straight into the air at an all-consuming speed of Mach 6, away from the burning ruins.
"WRONG WAY!!!" all three roar synchronously with wide-open eyes, their voices drowned out by the roaring wind, as they realize that they are not fleeing forward, but are being shot straight into the stratosphere like a rocket.
Due to the immense, asymmetrical weight of the steel behemoth, the refrigerator tilts at the highest point of the arc. The upward force dies out and gravity mercilessly takes over. The refrigerator turns around and shoots straight down like a loose brick at a murderous speed.
At that moment, something snaps in their heads. The fear disappears, the tactics are thrown overboard, and the pure, unadulterated sensation takes over. They forget the entire shit they just came out of.
"YEEHAW!!!!" the three of them scream at the same time, near a fit of laughter due to the absurd situation.
Like an insane, steel meteorite on wheels, they shoot downward at top speed, faster than the human eye can even register, towards the distant horizon.