On putrid and rotten wings that should not have entrapped even the slightest breeze, nevermind be capable of flight, Ren hovered above the chaos. From the rotten dragon’s back, he moved his hands, performing intricate gestures as a pale blue energy moved between his fingers.

Each movement of this energy brought with it an unnatural chill that infected the air around it, and seemed to let out distant and ghastly wails.

Ren continued his chants as he raised his hands high above his head, his eyes rolled in the back of his head, whilst the wailing energy gathered itself into a singular ball of pale blue energy which had shadows of screaming faces flowing over its surface.

With the final word of the chant, he thrust his hands downwards, causing the ball of wailing energy to explode and plummet to the ground in a dozen screaming meteors. They hit the earth and were immediately swallowed up by it, as they flowed through the stone and dirt without resistance, seeking what was buried deep beneath.

One lone stream swerved away from the earth, however, and instead plunged itself into the corpse of the Thunder Fang. The wailing energy infected the corpse, spreading through every muscle fibre and sinking deep into the bones, before the body twitched.

Pale blue flames flickered in the empty eye sockets of its exposed skull, but they didn’t fully light. They simply kept flickering, as the body constantly twitched, like an engine that was failing to start.

Ren gritted his teeth, veins on his forehead bulging as he strained himself against an invisible force. His hands were curled, as if he was trying to lift something that was just refusing to budge.

"Shit... I need... Sparky! Give the tiger a jump start, now!" Ren shouted into his communicator, as he continued to strain against the level of power that the Thunder Fang was trying to drain from him, which was unlikely to even resurrect it in the first place.

At the same time, the twisted monster’s head cracked and snapped as it reinflated itself, before it let out a low growl. An eye sprouted from its stomach, right below the trapped arm, as it glanced at the situation it was in, before simply lifting its arm out.

A fissure of earth that had been snapped closed, until it was barely thin enough to slip a sheet of paper through, and this creature simply pulled its arm out like it was nothing as its hand became completely two dimensional at will.

As soon as it was out, it regained its solidity as it immediately swept its claw towards Lucy.

The Demoness quickly raised her Maul, barely smacking away the razor sharp claws. However the follow up tail swipe caught her right in the side, crushing part of her Aura armour and sending her flying into the nearest wall, which crumbled down on top of her.

More eyes sprouted from the creatures body, all of which pointing in different directions and each moving completely independently of any other, yet multiple of them locked onto Valerie’s position as it let out a rumbling growl.

"Shit..." Valerie muttered, as the creature launched itself towards her. She heard Ren’s request, but she didn’t have much time to think about it as the nightmarish creature bounded towards her, crossing the space between them with horrifying speed as its limbs grew and snapped it forwards like rubber bands. In a moment of madness, Valerie pointed her cane away from the creature and sent an extra powerful bolt of lightning straight into the corpse of the Thunder Fang. But by that point the thing was upon her.

On instinct, Valerie tried to leap backwards as it lunged at her with its arm stretching out to swipe its claws across her face, but she had fostered those instincts as Belladonna.

Her legs tried to obey, only for them to tremble and collapse underneath her. She fell backwards, just missing the claws that would have taken her head, but left her right in front of the creature as it crawled onto the square ledge she had been using as a snipers perch.

Valerie quickly crawled backwards with just her arms, her heart thundering in her chest and her breathing panicked as it strode towards her. She waved her arms when they weren’t dragging her backwards, sending fireballs and lightning blasts into its face, but it did little to stop it as it opened its mouth wide and lunged towards her.

Its teeth sank into the surface of the shield she had just barely put up, as the thousands of razor sharp spikes scraped against the solid yellow light as it tried to break through. It barely gained Valerie a few seconds of reprieve, enough to catch her breath and get her panicked mind under control, before droplets of acid started to drip from the centre of its deadly floral mouth.

The acid sizzled as it hit the shield’s surface, before the shield rapidly melted away, creating small holes wherever the acid landed.

A bulge moved up its throat, as more droplets of acid rapidly dripped from its throat, which were quickly followed by the building torrent that soon drowned Valerie’s shield. Just before it landed, Valerie came shooting out of an opened section of the shield.

Her body slid and skipped across the ground as she propelled herself from a trail of fire that burst from the base of her cane.

She bounced across the rough, uneven ground, and had to quickly turn off the jet stream as she lost control before rolling and tumbling to a halt.

An eye on the creature’s torso locked onto her, pulling its attention away from the melted crater where she had just been, as it lunged at her again.

Vines burst from the ground, rapidly growing from the scattered seeds that Trivian had tossed, but every time they tried to wrap around it and ensnare it, its solid body became like a liquid and flowed through any loop that the vines tried to make. When one of them speared through its torso, it just stretched out the rest of itself, leaving everything else behind.

Then there was a roar of thunder, before a flash of lightning streaked across the air, slamming into the side of the abominations head. This one did not come from Valerie, but from the half melted, undead Thunder Fang that leapt out of the lightning bolt and sank its fangs into the abomination, sending waves of electricity through the sin against nature it called a body.

Valerie took a trembling breath and quickly looked to the side, her eyes scanning the battlefield rapidly before she dissolved into the shadow beneath her. She moved as far as her shadow veil could take her, which was nowhere near as far as she wanted, as it was less than the distance the creature covered to attack her.

Stepping out of the shadows onto another half-mined platform of granite, Valerie clutched at her heart, which had been still and unbeating until this moment, but now thundered so hard and fast it felt like it was ready to explode. Her breathing was trembling and rapid, as she felt like she couldn’t properly inhale and might have even forgotten how to breathe in her panic.

The wall exploding behind her really did not help with that.

She let out a sharp scream as a skeletal hand burst from the wall, dug its bony fingers into the stone, and dragged the rest of its body out.

A skeleton, dressed in the long rotten and tattered remains of a tunic with a rusted helmet covering the top of its head, stumbled out of the hole in the wall. A decayed and rusted spear was clutched in one hand, while a round, rotten wood shield was held in the other.

Its equipment, which should have degraded to beyond usable long before now, was held together by the same magic that allowed the muscleless skeleton to walk and fight, but even that could not restore it to its pristine condition.

The skeletal warrior turned its head to Valerie, gazing at her with the two blue flames that burned within its eye sockets, and tilted its head in curiosity. It chattered its teeth, before charging forwards and leaping off of the granite platform they were standing on.

It showed no hesitation as it charged towards the horrifying creature, waving its spear in the air as it ran and rattled the entire way. More skeletal warriors crawled from the ground or walls of the quarry as they dragged themselves from their eternal rest and into the thrill of battle once more.

<Pull yourself together.>

Valerie flinched slightly as Ren’s voice snaked into her ear, his voice dripping with disdain like venom. Although it was hard to say that it was all directed at her.

Still, she tilted her head up, her panic filled eyes locking onto the undead dragon beating its wings in the air and the pale, corpse-like man riding it.

<I know. I know better than anyone what you are going through right now. But you have two choices. Suck it up and pull yourself together, or die. You can sit there and cower in fear or have a panic attack, let everyone else fight for you.

But when your friends die because you were too much of a pathetic coward to do something, you will wish that you died alongside them. Trust me, I know.>