Hexabulous swept the colossal blade—a jagged slab of myth-forged steel—through the air in a wide, predatory arc. Flames trailed in its wake, born not just from draconic breath but from the sheer friction of its passage, edges glowing white-hot as if the weapon resented the atmosphere itself.

  The swing carved a sonic boom that rolled outward like thunder from a clear sky, hurling pallid Sycophants from their feet in tumbling heaps. A wave of superheated air followed, scorching the cobblestones and forcing the survivors to reel back, clutching at blanched flesh that blistered and peeled under the assault.

  The Blanched Knights endured where lesser devotees could not—pallid armor gleaming defiantly amid the inferno—but even they yielded ground, ethereal blades flickering as priests among them wove shimmering barriers of sorrow-tainted light to blunt the dragon's casual apocalypse.

  High above the First Temple's spires, a black column billowed upward, seeded by RX414's opening salvo: thousands of precisely calibrated explosions that had blossomed across the massed ranks below. The machine's bombardment had not been indiscriminate; each detonation chain followed probabilistic cascades computed in nanoseconds—optimal disruption vectors designed to fracture formations, sow panic, and clear lanes for its companion's advantage.

  The machine hovered motionless at the heart of the devastation, a titanic steel arachnid suspended on anti-gravitic fields. Its aerodynamic chassis gleamed coldly, underside bristling with deployed artillery arrays. Invisible sensor webs blanketed the battlefield—sweeping every fragment of rubble, every flicker of corrupted flesh, every structural weakness in the ancient stonework. To the machine's digital perception, the Shimmering City was a solvable equation, living and dead alike, reduced to data points awaiting optimization.

  Behind veils of self-generated heat, Hexabulous reveled. The Red Dragon spun cyclones of flame—roiling funnels of incandescent wind that tore unpredictably through boulevards and alleys, uprooting stalls, igniting tattered banners, and sending hundreds of Blanched fleeing in mindless rout. Their keening wails rose in discordant harmony with the roar of fire, a dirge for the unraveling of their dominion.

  The dragon's nostrils flared as he sampled the acrid air. Beneath the pervasive brine-stink of the city, one odor dominated: the bristling, oceanic reek of the Spined Sovereign—Ossuran, that ancient aquatic nightmare that lurked in the depths. Even Hexabulous felt a flicker of primal caution; it was a relic nearly as old as themselves, a predator even Old Father’s arms avoided.

  He wondered what brought it to the Wyrm’s side, it had never shown any interest in the bloated monster before. He suspected the answer to that question had already charged into the First Temple.

  Hexabulous’s nose twitched, his lips curled.

  Beneath Ossuran’s overpowering poisonous musk lay another scent—one more subtle, and far more insidious. A clever veil, using Ossuran's stink to mask something far more dangerous skulking in the shadows.

  It could have been easily missed, but he was Hexabulous, and this was his world.

  He snorted, embers scattering from his maw. A low, contemptuous growl rumbled from his chest, vibrating the cracked pavement. He was not so easily deceived.

  With joyous abandon, the crimson beast danced across the temple courtyard—breathing streamers of liquid fire that he caught upon his blade, whipping them into intensified vortices before hurling them outward. The enhanced conflagrations slammed into clustered foes, driving Knights and priests alike to scramble behind crumbling walls or into structures that groaned ominously under the onslaught.

  Overhead, RX414 maintained its vigilant stasis, unleashing a methodical barrage from ventral cannons—slow, even spreads of suppressing fire that pinned survivors and eroded barriers with calculated inevitability. A secondary volley followed: an expanding umbrella of spherical myth-metal bearings, kinetic penetrators that ricocheted through cover to neutralize threats Hexabulous's chaos overlooked.

  Then, with a thunderous downbeat of vast wings and a bounding leap that cracked flagstones, the dragon launched himself down the widest thoroughfare. Flames jetted ahead in guiding lances, trailing in his wake like a comet's tail.

  An upward sweep of the massive blade carved the street itself—ancient paving stones erupting skyward in a hail of improvised projectiles. They punched through facades and walls, exposing huddled devotees within and burying others beneath cascading rubble.

  The guardians pressed their assault without mercy—order and chaos in perfect, terrible synchrony—drawing all attention away from the First Temple, where Mereque fought alone.

  Amid the cataclysmic onslaught, scattered pockets of defiance emerged. A handful of Blanched mustered the fanatic courage to charge—pallid forms surging through flames with keening cries. Others, towering brutes of slabbed muscle and bleached sinew, convinced themselves their sheer enormity could contest the invaders, hurling themselves forward in furious counterassaults.

  Yet whatever bravery they discovered proved dishearteningly futile. Blows glanced off impervious scales or were vaporized mid-swing; projectiles shattered against invisible barriers woven by RX's silent vigilance. The guardians advanced unhurried, chaos and order eroding the city's defenses with an unstoppable certainty.

  Perhaps most dangerous among the enemy legions were the Children of the Moon—lumbering colossi whose crude weapons, forged from uprooted trees and salvaged iron, could pulp mortal flesh with casual ease. No human frame, on any world man walked on, could match their scale; they loomed like living monoliths amid the ruins.

  Overhead wheeled the Umbral Glooms—behemoths whose corrosive payloads arced downward like siege boulders. The same monsters that had ferried the assault on Havenlocke Harbour. Each globule, wagon-sized and trailing viscous slime, threatened indiscriminate devastation. Yet their trajectories were ponderous; Hexabulous and RX evaded or annihilated them mid-flight with contemptuous precision—draconic flame or machine cannon reducing the slugs to harmless mist before they landed.

  Where volleys strayed, they cratered boulevards in explosive geysers of stone and ichor, hurling dozens of Blanched skyward in sprays of severed limbs and blackened blood. Friendly casualties meant nothing to such mindless engines of war.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Hexabulous banked sharply through the smoke-choked air, wings beating concussive gusts that shredded adjacent walls into swirling debris. Fire roared from his jaws in sustained torrents as he rounded a shattered corner at breakneck speed—crashing headlong into a waiting phalanx of three Children, their oversized implements already raised in ambush.

  The giants descended upon him instantly, swinging with force enough to topple spires: a jagged metal shovel the breadth of a gate, a stone hammer veined with sharpened corners, a pick that whistled through the air.

  The dragon roared—a sound laced with gleeful thunder—as the blows landed true. Chunks of crimson scale sheared away in molten sprays; draconic blood hissed and steamed where it spattered the ground.

  Hexabulous was no stranger to war's embrace. He had clashed with horrors beyond mortal reckoning—abyssal things that would shatter saner minds. Battle was his exultation, the unchaining of ancient animosity long pent in reluctant vigil.

  Too long had restraint bound him; here, at last, were foes worthy of his unchained might—doomed, perhaps, but numerous enough to savor.

  He welcomed their harm with predatory joy, reveling in the pain as proof of worthy contest.

  The giants faltered momentarily, stunned that their strikes drew blood yet failed to slow the beast. Stone cracked scales: jagged edges bit deep. Still, Hexabulous accelerated, laughter booming from his furnace maw.

  He smashed into the foremost giant like embodied apocalypse. A single sweep of his colossal sword—gripped in taloned foreclaws—shattered one hammer into gravel spray, momentum carrying the blade onward to shear the nearest Child's head from its shoulders in a clean, cauterized arc. Without breaking stride, he twisted, serpentine jaws clamping onto the second giant's arm at the shoulder—tearing it free in a crunch of bone and tendon, arterial ichor fountaining black against his scales.

  Then he was gone—slipped past them.

  The remaining giant wheeled in panicked frenzy, their blind swings pulverizing their one-armed comrade into a gory paste amid the haze.

  Smoke and flame boiled through the thoroughfare, obscuring vision. The survivor staggered, squinting into the roiling inferno, looking for the crimson blur that had vanished.

  An adjacent wall erupted inward.

  Hexabulous burst through in a storm of flying brick and mortar, having already circled around, sword point leading. The blade drove chest-deep into the giant, lodging fast between unyielding ribs. For a frozen heartbeat, the dragon strained at the hilt—embedded, momentarily vulnerable.

  A lancing motion blurred into him from behind, pain drew a roar of outrage. He had been stabbed! A single puncture in his back—leaving an oozing hole.

  He spotted the cause. The source was already rapidly withdrawing. One of Ossuran’s spines, multi-jointed, it was telescoping away in a folding motion. The creature wasn’t anywhere near him, but I had reach. He snarled.

  The final Child seized the moment in desperation, hurling its mountainous bulk onto the dragon, despite being impaled by his blade. Massive arms encircled Hexabulous’s serpentine neck in a crushing grapple.

  A folly of ironic proportions. For even among giants, laying hands upon a true Red Dragon invited ruin; but upon Hexabulous—the embodiment of pure chaotic volcanic wrath—it courted an exquisite demise.

  The colossus's triumphant bellow twisted into an agonized scream as subdermal spines and ridges erupted outward—razor barbs flexing with muscular precision, perforating palms and forearms in scores of lancing wounds. Tendons severed; flesh shredded as the spines burrowed deeper, crippling both limbs in bloody a mess.

  With a cry, the giant tried to escape, yet Hexabulous denied him. He coiled his long neck and sinuous tail around the thrashing foe, wings folding like leathery shrouds to pin the giant inescapably close.

  A spine-chilling roar built in his throat—then unleashed.

  Fire poured forth in a focused, unrelenting stream, enveloping the trapped Child beneath scalding folds. The giant was cooked alive within the dragon's embrace—flesh blistering, bones charring, screams muffled into gurgling silence as Hexabulous held him through the final, convulsing throes.

  Embers danced in the dragon's eyes as he discarded the smoldering husk, sword wrenched free at last.

  The street lay silent save for distant cannonade—RX's methodical bombardments echoing.

  More foes awaited. The temple's heart beckoned.

  Hexabulous spread vast wings and surged onward, laughter trailing like smoke.

  Shadows fell across his path, Umbral Glooms tracking him from above, he felt one of their spit balls miss his left side by a hair.

  He raised his head and emitted a sharp, piercing whistle—a signal honed across millennia of uneasy partnership.

  From the First Temple’s distant outline, twin cobalt beams lanced across the skyline—RX414's response, precise and instantaneous.

  The energy spears pierced the flying fiends, melting through corrupted bodies like molten lances melting through snow. In the span of a heartbeat, two were falling, smoke trailing behind them.

  Outraged bellows rippled through the Shimmering City—deep, guttural cries in a tongue as alien to Earth's remnants as Mereque himself.

  The Children of the Moon, once emboldened by numbers and fanatic zeal, now wavered on uncertainty.

  Their patron, after all, was not the Weeping Wyrm, he was a long dead god—the Lunar Lord, Chronar. Whatever loyalty they held, was shallow at most and their home, that was a long way from this place.

  Hexabulous ignored their complaints. His true focus lay deeper: buying the spaceman time to reach the temple’s heart. Grace’s rescue depended on holding the Blanched hordes—and their unlikely allies—at bay.

  Even he was surprised by this menagerie of aberrations fighting shoulder-to-pallid-shoulder with the Blanched. Intolerant zealots by nature, they brooked no rivals—yet Glooms, Marms, Children, and other twisted things skirmished alongside them.

  A few kilometers distant, Ossuran shifted—a seething mass of barbed malice propelled on a million skittering limbs. Its briny reek carried on the wind; Hexabulous sensed its cautious advance, blocks devoured by it in a single undulating surge.

  He answered with a roaring challenge that cracked the air, flames licking from his jaws—a deliberate provocation.

  Ossuran stopped. The Spined Sovereign was not so bold, it never had been. Preferring the way of ambush and erosion, birthing horrors like the Sunken Marms that had assailed Havenlocke—rather than facing fire head-on. In many ways it was a mirror of the Weeping Wyrm.

  As the dragon glided between crumbling spires—obliterating any unfortunate souls in his path with casual sweeps of wing or blade—he noted its retreat with satisfaction. Lesser foes were nuisances, fleeting distractions for ancients such as he and RX. True threats lingered elsewhere in this fractured reality, demanding at least one of them move with measured caution.

  Hexabulous had never been that one. Impulse ruled him—fiery, unrepentant—and regret was a stranger's emotion.

  Around the First Temple, the Blanched legions had been driven away, block by bloodied block. The combined devastation—draconic inferno and machine precision—had wrought catastrophe beyond any expectation. Perhaps the first true siege this glimmering hive of fouled souls had ever experienced; unprepared despite their vast numbers, they reeled as the ground itself trembled anew.

  The Wyrm stirred—restless shifts in abyssal slumber sending shocks through the land. The tallest spires toppled in cascades of alabaster, masonry fracturing loose amid rising dust clouds.

  Ossuran poised for withdrawal, content in its role as stalker rather than vanguard. But shadows thickened unnaturally amid the battlefield's ruins—coalescing forms that carried a subtler, more insidious scent.

  Hexabulous's nostrils flared. He banked sharply, ascending above shattered rooftops in a tightening spiral, then wheeled back toward the temple courtyard where RX hovered in vigilant stasis.

  He landed with earth-shaking impact, wreathed in ashen smoke and trailing embers, wings folding as flames danced along his scales.

  A low, ominous growl rumbled from his chest.

  "They're here," he rumbled, eyes narrowing to slits of molten gold. "We are surrounded. I can sense them."

  The machine's sensors whirred faintly in response, the odd couple poised amid the shifting dark—ancient guardians facing shadows that were older than themselves.