Two separate voices, one male, one female, issued from Radmus‘ mouth at the same moment. It was plain these two warriors meant to suppress the two blood corpses within him. Before the echo faded, both warriors swung their axes together.
The left warrior’s strike was sheer brutality, the wind stirred up by the axe rippling space like water. A jet-black arc of power cleaved straight toward Radmus‘ skull.
The right warrior’s motion was strangely supple; runes along the blade ignited, unfurling into a colossal black web that blanketed the sky, seeking to ensnare the target.
The two starkly different forces braided into a miniature energy storm, blasting the surrounding crimson mist completely away.
Radmus snorted, his earlier indifference gone.
Pressing his palms together, conjured a blood-red vortex before his chest. From its core, an arm clad in blue-green scales burst out, the very arm of the blood corpse!
The limb moved with impossible speed, leaving dozens of after-images as it smashed a clawed palm against the left warrior’s axe.
Boom!
With an explosive crack, the axe shattered bit by bit. The left warrior staggered backward, the black aura around dimming sharply.
Without pause, the arm splayed its talons, seized the black web woven by the right warrior, and ripped it apart. Runes screeched like grinding metal; the net collapsed instantly, the right warrior releasing a voiceless roar as his form trembled.
“Mere war souls dare show off before us?”
Mockery tinged Radmus’ blended voice. The blood corpse arm clenched into a fist, and two obsidian beams burst from its center, striking both warriors squarely between the brows.
Pfft!
Their bodies were like punctured balloons as torrents of black energy gushed outward.
They tried desperately to re-form, yet the runes along their axe blades disintegrated particle by particle under the blood corpse energy’s corrosion.
The left warrior cast a final glance toward Dincelius before the ghostfire in his eyes guttered out, and dissolved into a fading wisp of black smoke.
The warrior on the right released a guttural, unwilling scream, and his body shattered into drifting motes a heartbeat later; only the pair of pitch-black battle-axes tumbled onto the flagstones, their once-glimmering runes now fully extinguished so that they resembled nothing more than two ordinary iron axes.
“No… Even they…” Dincelius watched the two war souls disintegrate and felt the last filament of hope inside snap.
He understood all too well that these two warriors were the ancient war souls Jared had subdued within an ancient ruin. They were instruments once thought invincible, yet they had been felled with laughable ease.
Bloodbane Palace had truly been driven to the very edge of ruin.
“Do you still intend to struggle, Dincelius?” Radmus descended slowly from the sky, the blood corpse’s arm withdrawing back into his body.
Gazing down at Dincelius, let greed shimmer in his eyes. “Hand over the Bloodbane Crystal, and I will grant you a swift death!”
Dincelius let out a bleak laugh, the blood-specked froth coughed up pooled on his chest, flowering into a strange, scarlet blossom.
Suddenly snapped his head up, a light of unprecedented intensity bursting from his eyes. “Bloodbane Palace… Still has one final card to play!”
He bit through the tip of his tongue and spat a mouthful of blood essence rich with his very lifeforce; the blood essence coalesced in midair into a crimson sigil that hurtled toward the ruined ancestral shrine deep within Bloodbane Palace.
“Forebears of Bloodbane, hear me-your unworthy descendant Dincelius begs our venerable Ancestor to descend into this world!”
The moment the plea left his lips, a roar that shook heaven and earth rumbled from beneath the shrine‘s rubble. An ancient, awe-inspiring aura speared upward, ripping apart the blood-red haze enveloping the palace grounds.
The earth quaked violently. From the debris rose a colossal figure pieced together from countless bleached bones.
Those bones were draped in a tattered golden dragon robe, and within the skull’s deep sockets blazed two mill-stone-sized flames of molten gold, it was the soul remnant of Bloodbane Palace’s millennia-old Ancestor!
The Ancestor’s voice, like ten thousand wailing ghosts in unison, reverberated through heaven and earth, “Who… Dares trespass upon my Bloodbane Palace?”
For the first time, a grave shadow crossed Radmus’ gaze; sensed the terrifying energy housed within the skeletal giant, a power that was almost beyond the Wandering Immortal Realm.
