Susan’s chest rumbled as she shot through another cloud bank, droplets coating her scales as the world dimmed around her. She burst free on the other side to find herself flying through a world of bright fluffy clouds, as if she were surrounded by walls of cotton candy.

  “No, this isn’t the right way,” Elizabeth shouted from her head.

  “Ugh, fine!”Susan called back, her body twisting around to fly the other way.

  “NO! Don’t turn around,” Elizabeth snapped, “I that cloud looks a little darker, head toward it.”

  “Can you be a little more precise?” Susan roared, twisting her head around to find the ‘slightly darker’ cloud Elizabeth was pointing at.

  “Well, do you have a better idea?”

  “Fine!” Susan snapped, angling herself downward as she shot toward the latest bank of clouds.

  The stress of the situation was starting to eat away at her again, forming a knot in her gut next to the tugging of the summoning spell. Things had started out well, a quick bit of space warping allowing them to transverse the Atlantic in good time.

  But that was where their luck ended. Upon reaching Romania they had discovered that the expected location of the Demon King’s castle, the sprawling Carpathian mountain range that dominated the center of the country, was now guarded by thick walls of clouds. The same clouds that the two of them had been fruitlessly exploring for the past half hour.

  The problem was, neither of them actually knew what they were looking for. Abana’s description of the Demon King’s castle to Susan had been quite vague, ‘a castle surrounded by clouds’ as she called it.

  Meanwhile Elizabeth was working from what amounted to guidelines the Guardians followed to avoid getting killed in stupid ways. Assaulting the Demon King was at the top of the list, and his castle was outright considered a graveyard due to how many of their members had been lost there. Meaning she knew a dozen different ways to escape the Demon King’s grasp, but nothing to find it.

  Susan shook off her wandering thoughts as she finally reached the cloud. Rocketing through it, she found herself in another white valley of fluffy clouds.

  Her eyes narrowed at the sight.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said, eyes scanning back and forth.

  “What?” Elizabeth asked, leaning over from where she stood on Susan’s brow to look her in the eye.

  “The cloud bank we flew into wasn’t this large…” Susan frowned at the cloud bank in front of them, “Did Abana ever say anything about the castle being hidden by illusion?”

  “I don’t think so?”

  Susan hummed, then began sketching a wide circle in the air around her.

  “Doesn’t mean it isn’t,” she muttered as she finished the rune.

  The glowing lines of energy pulsed, then exploded into a wave of mana that washed over both sisters.

  Then the entire word fell into shadow. An awful droning sound filled the air around them, and Susan’s eyes were drawn to the side where an enormous plane was falling from the sky.

  It was a sturdy military cargo jet, slate gray with a bulbous belly for carrying troops and weapons. This one looked big enough to fit the Thunderbird’s dinosaur operative with room to spare.

  Now missing one wing, with the engines on the other burning, the plane tumbled to the mountains below where it hit the ground and vanished in a fiery burst.

  Two pairs of wide eyes watched the flames for a moment, then traveled upwards. They widened.

  “Abana needs to work on her descriptive skills,” Susan muttered as she took in the gargantuan construction.

  The Demon King’s castle could comfortably cover the footprint of an entire shopping mall, a triangular fortress of black stone.

  It was also flying. And upside down.

  The rather unique choice in construction transformed the architecture from something grand into something Eldritch. Instead of towering spires or grand halls, the rings of descending stonework were thick and bulbous, each downward facing surface peppered with arrow slits and murder holes. It gave the building the look of a gigantic, dark hornets nest, the kind you needed to call an exterminator to get rid of.

  Susan gave the construction a single look before deciding that she could appreciate it much better from further away; shifting the muscles in her chest to increase the airflow through her chest and rocketing away. She turned after a few seconds of flight, trying to get a better idea of what she was looking at.

  The clouds had changed when she ended the illusion. Instead of thick walls, they had spread out into low, flat, storm clouds. The castle jutted out from the bottom of the clouds, like a dark sun over a gloomy sky.

  “Susan,” Elizabeth spoke up.

  “Yeah?” Susan had to close her mouth to answer.

  “I think… we need to get to the top half,” Elizabeth said.

  “Top half?”

  Susan’s incredulous response hung in the air, but when Elizabeth leaned over her brow to give her a pleading look she decided to go with it. Tilting her wings back, she shot upward and into the cloying clouds.

  But as they drew close, Susan felt the air around her change. A downdraft caught her wings, pushing her away while lightning crackled through the clouds above to form a glowing barrier between her and the sky beyond.

  Then Elizabeth stepped forward onto Susan’s nose, Liss held pointing toward the clouds. Rearing back with both hands clasped around the blade, she brought it down in a heavy swing that barely missed the edge of Susan’s scales below.

  The sky split above them, the lightning scattering and the clouds moving to either side as if they had been physically cut. Bright light shone down on them as Susan shot upward through the portal, and she blinked in shock.

  The world around them was almost the complete opposite of the one below. The clouds formed a surface like a cheery cotton sheet, the sun dancing on the horizon in the far distance.

  Instead of more black stone fortifications, the top half of the castle was a beautiful ziggurat. It looked like it was straight out of ancient Sumeria, except blown up to even grander proportions. Huge tiers large enough to be runaways rose above the clouds until ending at the top with an oddly humble tower.

  But a closer look was all that was needed for the peaceful illusion to break and the signs of the hellish fortress below to show through.

  Wounds marred the sides of the ziggurat. Innumerable scorch marks, pockmarks from explosions, and deep claw marks as if a giant monster had torn at the walls. The tower at the top had been split open to make room for what looked to be an enormous mirror.

  Then there were the huge chains as thick as trees that rose up from the clouds below. Ending in cruel hooks, they dug into the golden stones of the top half. It looked as if the entire fortress below was hanging from the ziggurat above like a bloated tick.

  “Over there, on the far side!” Elizabeth shouted.

  She was pointing toward the front of the ziggurat, and Susan could see something decorating the stone there. A closer inspection revealed it to be a huge carving of a man’s face, his mouth open wide to reveal four enormous fangs. It had been cut deep into the gilded stone, only becoming visible as Susan passed by the side of the ziggurat. It was also the entrance, the open mouth of the carved face deepening into a dark tunnel that led further into the hulking ziggurat.

  “That should be the way inside!” Elizabeth continued.

  Susan nodded as she took in the cruel features of the carving, the way the mouth was just wide enough to show the tunnel inside sloping downward like a throat. As though the building itself was getting ready to swallow you.

  “Yeah hell no,” she said.

  “But-”

  “Elizabeth, we are so not going in through the murder door.”

  A banking turn took them further down, until they were flying next to one of the middle layers of the ziggurat. Drifting to a stop over some of the ancient stones, Susan landed before turning her attention back to Elizabeth.

  “Pass me Liss, would you?” Susan asked, raising a hand up to her head.

  “Uh, no?” Elizabeth tilted her head in confusion as she squinted back at her, “you said you’re not able to wield it.”

  “Yeah, but I built it.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m not an idiot, I know how its defenses work.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh. Now come on,” Susan’s hand waved impatiently, and a moment later Elizabeth deposited the blade in it.

  Then it began to grow. A lot. Elizabeth squawked as Liss exploded in size, reaching the length of a school bus in a matter of seconds. Susan didn’t pay her any attention, instead moving quickly to make four deep cuts into the wall of the pyramid in a rough rectangle.

  She wasn't fast enough though. The blade lit up as she made the last cut, shining with a deep red light that began eating away at her scales with a hiss.

  “Susan!” Elizabeth shrieked.

  “I know!” Susan snapped back, pulling the blade free before tossing it in the air for Elizabeth to catch.

  “You said you’d be fine!” Elizabeth said as Liss shrank back to human size in her hands.

  “I said I could deal with the defenses,” Susan said, waving her hand at Elizabeth.

  Even as they were speaking the scales had already begun to regrow, the edges flaking and breaking free as new material pushed up from below to replace it. Elizabeth’s mouth closed with a snap as she watched, and she eventually turned to glower back at Susan.

  “We need to go in quietly,” Susan continued, “then attack all at once. I’ll deal with the vampires, while you get to the Thunderbirds and teleport them out as fast as possible.”

  “Fine.”

  Susan nodded at that, and then with a quickly sketched spell ripped the newly cut block of stone free from the wall to send it spinning off into the air behind them.

  The gloom of the tunnel swallowed them as they stalked down its length. But despite its sheer scale, the walls of the ziggurat were deceptively thin. Susan could already see the other end.

  Reaching it, she stretched her head through and examined the room on the other side, Elizabeth leaning over the top of her eyebrows to get a better view.

  The interior of the ziggurat was grand, resembling an Ancient Greek temple with rows of columns stretching up around her to support a flat roof. Except this construction was far beyond anything ancient humans could have built.

  The tunnel Susan had cut was at the midpoint of the wall, high enough to give the two of them a good view of the room. It stretched out impossibly far, the furthest columns looking like toothpicks even to Susan’s enhanced eyes.

  Then there was the floor of the ziggurat. Entirely covered by a massive illusion, the flagstones acted like a perfect glass pane so that Susan could look through them to see the mountains below.

  There was also blood on it. A mess of red puddles and garish footprints that led through the center of the room and towards the back of the ziggurat.

  Susan growled softly at the sight, before leaping forward toward one of the pillars. Her claws latched onto it for a moment, before another leap forward took her to the next pillar in line.

  She followed the trail of blood that way, jumping from pillar to pillar with soft clicks of claw on stone. It wasn't long before the clamor of battle began echoing from up ahead, and her jumps quickened.

  The Thunderbirds weren’t doing well. Instead of the hundreds she had seen at the headquarters, there were only a few dozen Kevlar-suited agents fighting against a much larger group of vampires. Spells crackled and swords clanged as the smaller group attempted to fight through the vampires to reach a raised pedestal set against the wall of the ziggurat.

  A laugh echoed from the creature lounging on top of it, a sharklike smile covering its face as it casually lobbed a fireball at the Thunderbirds. Red skinned, enormous and muscled, it was the spitting image of a ‘Demon King’.

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  Susan’s eyes narrowed.

  “Wait a second,” she whispered.

  “No way, we have to get down there!” Elizabeth said, leaping from her back and down toward the battle lines.

  “Nope!” Susan’s arm reached down to snag her sister mid leap.

  “Hey!”

  With one arm occupied with pacifying her struggling sister and the other holding her to the side of the pillar, Susan had to bring her tail around to begin drawing another magic circle. As she drew the last line it flashed and a wave of magic blasted outward from it in an expanding circle. As it passed over the two groups of fighters, they seemed to shimmer, and with an ear popping wave of noise they switched places.

  Instead of a desperate last push, the Thunderbirds were the larger group backed up against the throne by the smaller group of vampires. A small wall of glimmering mana shields held back the vampires, while in the back instead of a lounging demon there were a half dozen mages perched atop the pedestal lobbing fireballs at the massed ranks of vampires.

  “What the-”

  “Yeah, he’s a special kind of bastard,” Susan growled, “now hold on.”

  A twist of her arm sent Elizabeth rocketing downward like a javelin, shrieking in surprise. Susan was following after her a moment later, both wings tucking against her sides so that she could accelerate downward like a very angry meteor.

  Elizabeth landed on the front line of vampires in an impact that sent the entire group careening back. A glowing wall appeared the next moment, growing from between Elizabeth’s outstretched hands until it encircled the entire group behind her.

  A ragged cheer erupted from the Thunderbirds at the sight, even as the vampires hissed and clawed at the barrier. Then the roaring from above seemed to catch their attention, eyes drifting up until they locked onto the hundred tons of dragon descending upon them.

  Susan struck down in the middle of the vampires in an impact that sent bodies flying like ragdolls.

  “Go!” She roared as her eyes found the Demon King.

  He was easy to spot despite his place in the back lines of the group thanks to his clothing, a gaudy mess of brightly colored Victorian clothes. The explosion that wiped out the packed ranks of vampires had barely fazed him, his hat fluttering as if the tumbling mess of bodies had been sent flying by little more than a breeze. The only change in his demeanor was the slow raise of an eyebrow.

  “How unexpec-”

  Susan’s tail hit him in the face with a thunderous crack that sent him flying into one of the nearby pillars in a small explosion of brickwork. It wasn’t even a second before a clawed hand thrust itself out of the shattered brickwork.

  “Well that was rude,” The Demon King continued, face utterly deadpan as he pulled himself free. “Whatever happened to pleasan-”

  Susan’s claws erupted into volcanic heat before punching him back into the pillar in a second shower of stones. Then she wrenched her claws free and hit him again.

  Her teeth were clenched, eyes narrowed as she continued to hammer the Demon King into the pillar even as it shattered beneath her strikes. There was no careful planning, no grand spells she could call upon. There was only her parents and sister behind her, and the monster before her.

  So she kept punching, the strikes slowly forming a pit where the base of the pillar had been. Her mind entirely focused on following what little advice Abana had been able to give her for fighting the Demon King:

  Hit him hard, hit him fast, and don’t stop.

  Then her fist smashed into the pit, only to lock in place as something grabbed onto it.

  “Most people at least play at manners when meeting me,” a light voice echoed from the void of stone, sounding as if it was talking over tea. “It lets them live longer after all. But I suppose I’ll just have to do introductions another way.”

  A desperate attempt to tear her arm away failed, but before she could do anything else Susan felt the world blur as her back smashed into something. All the air was forced out of her body in a bloody wheeze and she felt her body’s regeneration activate before she was able to get her bearings.

  She came to, only to realize that she was embedded in the high ceiling of the ziggurat above where the Demon King had been buried. The cratered stones crackled around her as she forced her head free to look down at where he now stood below her.

  “Greetings,” he said, sweeping into a low bow, “I am Dhruv, the Demon King and your worst nightmare. And you are?”

  She responded with a flare of dragon fire that boiled the stonework even as it punched the Demon King deep into the structure below. A heave tore her body free from the ceiling, before she followed up with another blast of dragon fire into the hole she had already dug.

  “Hellfire to the face is not a proper name,” his voice came from her side, and Susan’s eyes widened.

  Leaping away from the voice, Susan latched onto one of the nearby pillars before turning to face the Demon King. He was hanging from one of the pillars right next to where her head had been buried in the ceiling.

  “Admittedly, I haven’t checked the English lexicon in a few centuries,” he continued, his free hand coming up to smooth the gaudy red shirt. “But considering the lack of fire breathing among the peasantry, I should be safe in assuming it's not in use by the common man.”

  Susan shifted to keep more of the pillar between them as she took in his blade expression. The bored discussion wasn't an act, there was no smell of sweat, no glimmer of magic. He really didn’t care.

  Her eyes flickered behind her to see Elizabeth still casting glowing lines of magic to each of the Thunderbirds in turn. She looked almost done, despite her wide eyed glances back at Susan as she worked.

  “Ah, I see.”

  Susan’s teeth grit as she turned back to the Demon King.

  “You’re too distracted for a proper conversation!” Dhruv said, snapping his fingers as if he was having a revelation. “In that case, let me be a good host and… show them out.”

  His voice dripped with so much implication that Susan’s tail was already swinging toward him even as he leapt toward the group behind her. But this time there was no whip crack as her tail connected with his flying form. Instead it felt like she was hitting a brick wall, her tail stopping flat and only barely arresting his charge.

  “GO!” Susan shrieked, risking a look back to see a wide eyed Elizabeth clap her hands together and the Thunderbirds vanished in a flash of light.

  A wordless cheer escaped her lips at the sight, and she turned back to-

  Something gripped her tail, and then Susan found herself whipped around again into one of the pillars.

  “I’ll admit to being a tad frustrated,” The Demon King said, still in that casual tone.

  A tug ripped Susan free of the wall, before she was sent flying again, this time into one of the pillars on the other side of the Demon King.

  “It’s not every day that entertainment delivers itself.” Susan was torn free of the pillar again, this time being sent crashing into the ceiling.

  “Oh, well. I’ll just have to make do-”

  He was interrupted this time as the scales along Susan’s tail flashed with heat. Her dragonheart, stoked to its maximum power, sent energy flowing through her body and directly into the scales of her tail. Before the Demon King’s bemused gaze, the carbene infused scales of the tail tip heated to their maximum capacity and then beyond.

  The explosion that resulted as Susan overcharged her scales popped both of her ears and sent her tumbling free from the ceiling of the ziggurat. A flap of her wings straightened her fall, and she landed in a crouch on the floor.

  Across from her, the Demon King had been knocked free from where he had been hanging from the ceiling. Silent except for the flapping of red and black cloth as he fell to the ground below. He landed perfectly upright with a small clack of shoe on stone, hair askew as he turned to her with wide eyes. Then a smile, a real smile split his face.

  “Fantastic! Simply fantastic,” he exclaimed, voice echoing strangely on the huge pillars around them. “See, this is why I love you archdragons so much. Maestros in the art of body crafting; it's simply so much fun to kill you!”

  Susan took a large step back, her eyes flickering back and forth as she searched for something else to put between herself and the thing in front of her.

  “So many secrets, little details to discover as I pry you apart. Like those sudoku puzzles Jaroslav loves!”

  For a moment, Susan’s eyes met Dhruv, and she couldn’t help taking a few more steps back. The smile was that of a sadist, but his eyes were… empty. Like he was pretending to be happy.

  Ten thousand years, the thought flitted through her head, that was how long he had been stuck on earth. Humans could go mad after only a few weeks of isolation, and Abana said he had been trapped here longer than recorded history.

  She wasn’t being attacked for gold or glory. It was all just some demented sort of self therapy.

  “Well, enough talking,” Dhruv continued, oblivious to Susan’s realization. “Let’s see what the next ability is.

  Prancing forward like a child toward a new toy, he shot Susan a wide smile. Then he stopped as light flashed behind him and a shimmering blade erupted from his chest. Except instead collapsing in a lifeless heap, he just let out a light cough and frowned.

  “I feel like the latest generation needs to work on its introductions,” he said as he turned around to face his attacker.

  But as he took in the sight of Elizabeth standing behind him he paused. The easy smile he had worn the whole fight vanished into a dead eyed stare that regarded the junior Guardian like a roach.

  “Hello, jailor,” he growled.

  Elizabeth tore the blade free, then swung it downward with a yell. He caught the blade between two fingers.

  “I’ll deal with you later.”

  Then he was smashing a fist into her face, and Elizabeth vanished into the pillar behind her in an explosion of flying masonry. He kept hold of Liss, eyeing the blade with a critical eye.

  A scream tore its way free from Susan’s chest even as she leapt forward towards where Elizabeth was buried. Only to find her flight arrested when the Demon King took a leap towards her and punched her so hard she was sent skidding away over the tiles.

  Claws scrabbling against the ground to arrest her momentum, she skidded to a stop only to collapse. A look down revealed that a crater had been punched into the scales of her chest. Her healing activated, but it was a long climb back to her feet and Susan found herself stumbling as she tried to get her breath back.

  “Really now,” Dhruv tutted, the empty smile returning as he focused on her, “what a wonderful little bit of destructive magica, do you mind if I take a look at it?”

  “Screw you!” Susan snapped, earning an eye roll from him.

  “While that’s fair, I would appreciate it if you came up with a more original complaint,” Dhruv said. “Bah, no matter. Instead, let me show you a little trick I figured out over the years.”

  Flipping Liss into the air he caught the handle with practiced ease. Then he began advancing towards Susan, a small smirk crossing his face as he began to talk.

  “All mages forever seek to create the greatest and most powerful weapons possible. But those that succeed find themselves presented with a conundrum. Now that they have their artifact of incredible power, what’s to stop the wrong person from using it?”

  Susan finally managed to get her breath back as he spoke, her claws firming their grip on the ground as she watched the Demon King come closer and closer.

  “Inevitably, a wonderful idea will occur to them. All they need to do is guarantee that only the right kind of person will use their artifact. So they cast a spell so only the pure of heart can wield the weapon.”

  Dhruv’s smile sharpened to a razor sharp halfmoon, and he raised Liss to point it at her.

  “And every one of them forgets that evil can be just as pure as good.”

  Liss inverted itself in his grip, and Dhruv’s mouth fell open as the blade sliced into his hand. For a split second his smile seemed almost honest, like he really felt wonder at the surprise. Then Susan reached out and caught the blade in her grip, and the next words out of the Demon King’s mouth were cut off as Liss began to expand.

  “Well that’s the advantage of science isn’t it?” Susan shot back as Liss expanded to fit her grip, “you learn from other’s mistakes.”

  Then she swung upwards, bisecting the shocked Demon King before bringing Liss down and around to cut him in half again. She continued swinging, heaving the blade up and down and around again to reduce him into a pile of smaller and smaller chunks.

  She only stopped when the pain finally overcame the adrenaline, looking down at her hand to see blood welling from exposed flesh. Liss’s corrosive light had grown to a furious red by this point. It cut off as Susan let it fall to the ground with a clatter and a heavy sigh.

  “I told Hadwigis we should have installed an override,” she muttered.

  A rumbling behind her made her turn to see Elizabeth pulling herself free from the wall of the Ziggurat. A smile crossed Susan’s face at the sight.

  “Are you alright-”

  “Look out!”

  Susan jumped up on instinct, only to see a form pass by below her in a blur. It skidded to a stop, only to stumble as its leg fell straight off. Her mouth fell open as she recognized the form of Dhruv, the hundreds of hunks of his body held together by a mess of glowing lines.

  A hand reached out to snag the leg and reattach it. Then he was stumbling to his feet to shoot Susan a jagged jack-o-lantern grin.

  “Nith onn!”

  He slurred out a compliment as Susan landed back on the ground. His voice was a mess of warbling tones as his mouth stitched back together under the golden glow.

  Then he stumbled backward as Susan shot him point blank in the chest with a burst of dragon fire. She didn’t let up, bringing both her wings down to balance on them as her hands came up to sketch enhancement runes in the air around her.

  A moment later the beam of energy expanded to a meter wide, swallowing Dhruv whole. The stones boiled beneath him as the beam continued on until it punched through the far wall on the other side of the ziggurat.

  Susan felt her mana reserves straining themselves as she devoted every speck of mana not holding off the summoning spell to enhancing her breath attack as much as possible. It was a full minute later when she finally let the beam of energy taper off. It left behind a river of molten stone that led far into the distance where the faintest glimmer of sunlight could be seen through the wall.

  “You alright?” Elizabeth’s voice came from the top of her head, and stepped down onto Susan’s nose to look her in the eyes.

  “Great,” Susan gasped, her chest heaving as she tried to get her breath back.

  “Is he…” Elizabeth spared a glance back at the glowing stone behind her.

  “Dead?” Susan finished for her, eyeing the glowing channel as it cooled. “God I hope so.”

  She hadn’t seen or felt any kind spell go off during her attack. There hadn’t been any last minute defense or teleportation. She’d hit him straight in the chest and blown him away. It was just…

  There was a spot in the channel, right where the Demon King had been. It was the same brilliant amber as the rest of the molten stone, but instead of slowly congealing like the rest it seemed to be glowing more.

  Before two sets of wide eyes, the glowing liquid began to rise. Shedding a vibrant gold light, a glob of the stuff rose into a thin pillar before warping and splitting. Thin lines began flowing from it, the minuscule branches begging to fill out the area around the pillar into the rough shape of a man.

  A humming began echoing from the golden lines, a shimmering timbre that thrummed like a laugh as the lines became finer and finer. The perfect image of human blood vessels became apparent, before red muscle and bone began forming around the golden veins.

  The timbre deepened, becoming a throaty laugh as lungs formed below a throat, and the hands raised to come together in squelching slaps as the Demon King applauded.

  “Wonderful!” He cheered, even as his muscles filled out, “it's been millennia since anyone managed to decorporealize me like that!”

  Susan took a few stumbling steps back as she stared wide eyed at the reforming Demon King.

  “Susan?” Elizabeth whispered, “what do we do?”

  “I…”

  Susan’s eyes flicked to Liss where it lay on the ground next to her, then down to the glowing runes that still filled the air around her. The mana empowering her Dragonheart was pumping through her, but the power to punch through mountains now felt hollow as she stared at the growing flesh.

  “We need to run,” she whispered.

  “No no, none of that,” Dhruv shouted, eyes latching onto them as they reformed in his skull, “don’t go wasting all that effort I spent in bringing you here!”

  “What?” Susan said, needing to stop herself from stumbling as she took another step away from him.

  “You know, the little mana eater I sent to get your attention? The visions I sent to seers promising my demise at your hand, the promises of glory I whispered in the ear of the BSMP. Don’t tell me you missed them all.”

  “Death threats aren’t invitations!” Susan snapped, the insanity of his words breaking through the cloud of fear that hung around her.

  “Only for boring people!”

  Susan didn't respond to that, just taking another few long steps away before turning and letting the flaps around her neck flip up to let air begin running through them.

  “Looks like I need to raise the stakes then.”

  A wave of mana exploded past Susan, making her leap away before realizing it wasn’t an attack. Instead the energy had passed her by to seep into the Ziggurat. Her eyes widened as it lit up around her, ancient carved runes lighting up with a crackle of energy. Then the runes lit up in a flashbang of light as an oceans worth of mana passed through them to power a single all encompassing spell.

  Susan’s world blinked, and her head whipped around as she tried desperately to find out what had happened. Then her eyes drifted downward, and she gasped as she saw the floor.

  Instead of grey-white mountains, neighborhoods speckled with glowing street lights and split by small roads spread out below them. It didn't take longer than a second to Susan recognize the shape of the streets below her.

  “Susan!” Elizabeth gasped.

  “I know!”

  Her eyes flickered back to the sword, back to the glowing lines. Back to the still reforming Demon King who grinned at her with teeth that were only just now beginning to poke through the gum.

  “Rats always fight the hardest in their lair. How will you do in yours?” Susan shivered at the wide stare, made worse by the lack of eyelids.

  “Susan…” Elizabeth whispered, and Susan joined her with a low whine that hissed through her teeth.

  She needed… something. Better weapons, a better plan, more time- Her eyes widened.

  “Hold on,” she said.

  “Ooh, what now?” Dhruv asked, his skin finally reforming enough for his face to give a narrow eyed grin at her words.

  Then his eyes widened as Susan cut off the flow of mana running through her. The pull of the summoning spell roared as it was set free, the air around her crystallizing as her entire body was sucked inward.

  But even as she was torn away the Demon King moved. His limbs blurred as one arm came up, a ball of mana launching from it and shooting towards Susan’s chest.

  Her breath would have caught if all the air hadn’t been pulled from her chest. But just as the ball touched her scales the summoning spell fully activated. She and Elizabeth vanished in a pop of air as they were torn from their reality.