The necromancer froze entirely solid.
Time itself seemed to visibly slow down around her.
Slowly, with terrifying, mechanical precision, she casually wiped a thick glob of freezing mud from her cheek.
Her eyes, usually so cold, calculating, and haughty, now flared with something vastly worse than mere hatred.
They ignited with pure, unadulterated, blinding fury.
“That…” she hissed through tightly clenched teeth, her voice rapidly dropping, vibrating with a low, terrifyingly inhuman resonance” …was authentic Heracenian silk!”
Usually, whenever Yerga channeled her formidable magic, she was wreathed in an aura of sickly, necrotic green; the distinct color of rot and creeping mold.
But not now.
Now, her power was actively boiling.
The green aura brightened, rapidly gaining terrifying intensity, until it finally exploded in a blinding, raw, green-gold brilliance.
The very air around her began to visibly tremble and fracture, as if the physical world itself was incapable of containing this sudden, catastrophic escalation of raw power.
Her meticulously pinned updo snapped.
Yet her emerald curls did not tumble down to rest on her shoulders.
They shot straight up, standing completely on end, bristling and aggressively waving upward exactly as if she had just been struck by a bolt of lightning, forging a blazing, vibrant crown of wrath around her head.
She tilted her chin back.
Her pupils and irises vanished entirely, actively evaporating, leaving behind only terrifying, stark-white voids that radiated pure, unadulterated madness.
Beneath the ruined silk, her body tensed to its physical limits.
Muscles, whose very existence no one would have ever suspected on the slender, woman, instantly hardened exactly like carved granite, noticeably swelling in sheer volume.
The expensive fabric, already severely strained, now began to tear at the seams across her shoulders and back, completely unable to withstand the sudden, explosive expansion of this new, feral strength.
Her calculating mind narrowed down to a single, solitary word.
The name the Matron had spoken.
In the blinding grip of this unthinking fury, Yerga completely forgot what she was currently holding in her hand.
Her manicured fingers clamped down on the small, skeletal kitten; her very own, prized construct.
There was a sickening, dry crack.
The delicate little bones were instantly crushed into fine white powder, which cascaded uselessly through her tightly clenched fingers.
She paid it no mind whatsoever.
“Jorōgumo…” she hissed, and the frozen earth beneath her boots actively began to crack.
“Jorōgumo…” she repeated, her voice significantly louder, sounding exactly like the deafening grind of shifting tectonic plates.
“JORŌGUMO!” she finally roared, and the sound was a terrifying challenge hurled at the very concept of existence itself.
She drew both of her gilded sickles.
She did not run.
She literally exploded forward.
She transformed into a blurring, green-gold tornado of total annihilation.
The smaller, lesser yokai unfortunate enough to find themselves in her direct path were not merely killed.
They were vaporized.
They completely dissolved into a fine mist of red gore under the sheer, crushing pressure of her raw aura and her blurring, spinning blades.
An abandoned wooden merchant cart stood directly in her path.
She didn’t even bother to slow down.
She dropped her shoulder and slammed straight into it with the raw, devastating kinetic force of a charging battering ram.
The cart somersaulted through the freezing air, shattering into a thousand pieces against the wall of a nearby building, showering the bloody battlefield in hundreds of bright green heads of broccoli, which rolled across the snow exactly like absurd spoils of war.
She reached the beast.
Her sickles became completely invisible to the naked eye, instantly transforming into blinding streaks of lethal light.
She hacked blindly, fueled by a savage, primal fury.
She aggressively severed thick clumps of the sentient black hair, and brutally amputated dozens of the grasping human arm-legs.
But the beast was colossal.
These wounds, while undeniably painful, were entirely superficial.
Sharp steel, even imbued with a sacred blessing, was simply not going to be enough.
Yerga fully realized this.
She vaulted backward off the monster.
She did not turn her back.
She retreated via a series of terrifyingly agile backward leaps, never once taking her stark-white, hollow eyes off the Jorōgumo.
She finally skidded to a halt a few dozen yards away.
With sneering disgust, she casually tossed her beloved sickles into the bloody snow.
She had no need for them now.
She threw her arms wide, and then slammed her palms together directly in front of her chest, exactly as if she were brutally crushing an invisible piece of fruit.
The blinding, neon aura surrounding her condensed, rapidly darkening, instantly reverting to the deepest, most sickly shade of necrotic, corpse-green.
Between her pressed palms, a sphere of dense, pulsating energy rapidly coalesced.
This was not magical fire.
This was the pure, unadulterated, concentrated essence of absolute decay.
“ROT!” she shrieked, and thrust the sphere directly at the monster.
The projectile tore across the street.
The pristine snow directly beneath its flight path instantly turned ash-gray, rapidly melting into a foul-smelling, putrid slush.
The solid wooden facades of the nearby buildings instantly blackened, aggressively crumbling into dead rot.
The sphere slammed directly into the Jorōgumo’s bloated, human torso.
The monster did not howl in pain, but in sheer, unadulterated terror.
At the exact point of impact, its flesh; both the bloated human torso and the grotesque spider abdomen; began to , aggressively putrefy.
The chitin cracked and sloughed off in rotting sheets; the pale skin instantly turned ash-gray and peeled away, horribly exposing the rapidly liquefying, rotting meat beneath.
The sheer kinetic force of the impact staggered the behemoth, entirely breaking its concentration and visibly, severely weakening its profane connection to the encroaching shadows.
The shockwave of decay rippled outward.
“To me!” Neira screamed, watching the encroaching wave of death.
The priestess threw her arms wide.
Her radiant pink aura shot upward and outward, instantly forming a shimmering, iridescent dome that completely enveloped her, Lengos, Zedora, Perval, Duria, and Figlin.
The tidal wave of necrotic energy slammed brutally into the barrier.
The dome hissed and flickered frantically, but it held, actively shielding the crew from the unrestrained wrath of their own companion.
Yerga burned out just as suddenly as she had ignited.
The blazing aura surrounding her instantly dissipated into nothingness, and her muscles immediately lost their unnatural, terrifying bulk, rapidly reverting to their slender, proportions.
Exhausted to the very limits of mortal endurance, her eyes rolled back into her head, and she collapsed exactly like a felled timber straight into a deep snowdrift.
The pristine snow around her hissed , sending up thick plumes of steam; her body, still running a fever from the flow of sheer power, was melting the ice on contact.
The ruined, shredded remains of her priceless silk gown hung limply from her frame, exposing large swathes of pale, bare skin across her thighs, abdomen, and back, but the necromancer was far too unconscious to care about modesty.
Zedora and Lengos couldn’t possibly afford to help her.
They were far too engaged in a desperate fight for their own survival.
They hacked and blocked frantically against the surging wall of corrupted meat, buying the rest of the crew precious seconds.
Amidst this chaos, through the blinding flurry of flying limbs and flashing magic, Figlin’s sharp eyes managed to spot exactly what everyone else had missed in the frenzy of battle.
The steel shaft protruding from the beast’s thick neck; the grim souvenir of the heroic temple guard.
The dwarf squinted hard, instantly recognizing the shape.
“Duria!” he roared, pointing the smoking barrel of his pistol directly at the Jorōgumo, who was currently struggling to right herself following the devastating impact of the sphere of rot.”What in the blazes is that contraption sticking out of her neck?!”
The vampire, just finishing a flawless pirouette that cleanly decapitated yet another shadow-beast, followed the dwarf’s pointing finger.
Her crimson eyes flared with sudden, brilliant excitement.
“That is a ‘Thunder Spear’!” she shouted, actively screaming over the din of battle.
She assessed the tactical situation in a fraction of a second.
She was significantly too far away, Figlin was far too slow, and Zedora and Lengos were entirely bogged down.
There was only one viable option left.
She looked directly at the monk, whose bare limbs were still blazing with the vibrant pink light of Neira’s magic.
“Perv!” she called out melodically, pointing a slender finger directly at the weapon protruding from the beast.”Make us some hanabi (fireworks)!
Pull the trigger!”
The monk did not waste a single breath on questions.
He understood instantly.
“Enlightenment always arrives with a bang,” he whispered.
He bolted forward.
He didn’t merely run across the ground.
Fueled by Neira’s potent magic, he launched himself straight up into the air.
He executed his first leap, brutally crushing his glowing heel directly into the swollen, festering blister on the back of a creature that looked exactly like a flayed human torso scuttling on unnaturally long fingers.
With his second leap, he landed on something desperately trying to pass as an arm; a densely compacted mass of writhing, sickly-blue umbilical cords and screaming faces permanently fused into the meat; treating the living nightmare exactly like a convenient stepping stone.
With his third and final leap, he soared directly toward the colossal spider-woman.
In mid-air, he executed a flawless cartwheel, spinning mere millimeters past snapping jaws dripping with thick, caustic slime, and landed with perfect feline precision squarely on the beast’s thick neck, directly beside the embedded weapon.
His hand clamped tightly around the trigger lever.
He squeezed.
There was a muffled…
BOOM.
The sound resonated from within the monster’s very bowels, sounding exactly like someone had just detonated a full barrel of black powder inside a sealed, underground cellar.
The Jorōgumo’s bloated body swelled for a fraction of a second.
The monstrosity rigidly arched its back in a silent, agonizing scream, but no sound escaped its throat.
Instead, its milky-white eyes exploded outward, aggressively spraying thick black gore and jagged chunks of brain matter in every direction.
The immense internal pressure literally tore her apart from the inside out, completely destroying whatever unholy magic was actively binding her physical form together.
The colossal body went completely slack in an instant, crashing to the earth with a deafening thud that shook the entire street.
But the carcass did not remain there for long.
It rapidly began to crumble, desiccate, and turn a sickly ash-gray, steadily dissolving into fine dust that was instantly swept away by the howling, freezing wind.
With the ultimate, total disintegration of the Jorōgumo, the iron will actively holding the horde in check was completely shattered.
The nightmares did not simply vanish like smoke, however.
Entirely devoid of their master’s controlling influence, they instantly descended into an animalistic, chaotic panic.
Their profane tether to this dimension was rapidly failing, but their raw survival instinct remained entirely intact.
The army of deformed horrors wavered.
The monsters began to aggressively hiss and rapidly backpedal, desperately seeking any possible avenue of escape back into the shadow realm from whence they had crawled.
The smaller beasts frantically attempted to squeeze themselves into the narrow cracks between the cobblestones or actively seeped into the gutters exactly like dirty water, while others simply dissolved into thick, bubbling black puddles that steamed in the frost.
“Oh no, you don’t!” Zedora roared, watching her sworn enemies actually dare to turn their backs on her.
She possessed zero mercy for fleeing prey.”You’re not going anywhere!
No bloody prisoners!”
She launched herself into a dead sprint, aggressively chasing down the retreating mass.
Her twin axes, still fiercely blazing with the residual heat of Neira’s magic, fell brutally upon the backs of the fleeing creatures.
She hacked blindly, relentlessly butchering any beast that wasn’t quite fast enough to vanish completely into the dark.
Lengos did not give chase.
He methodically finished off a crawling, multi-mouthed torso, brutally crushing it beneath the rim of his kite shield a mere second before it managed to scuttle beneath a ruined cart.
“Clear!” Figlin shouted, sending one final lead ball tearing after a shadow desperately trying to scale the side of a building.
The struck entity shrieked piercingly and instantly dissolved into a thick cloud of black dust.
Only when the last of the monsters had been hacked to pieces or had successfully slunk back into its hellish burrow did a silence finally settle over the ruined street.
It was, however, a silence, broken only by the ragged, exhausted panting of the warriors and the wet crunch of dirty, gore-soaked snow beneath their boots.
The heroes stood completely alone amidst the brutal carnage, as the snow continued to drift down from the pitch-black sky, slowly and methodically burying the grim evidence of the slaughter beneath a pristine, innocent white blanket.
The battle had ceased just as abruptly as it had begun, rapidly giving way to something infinitely more unsettling; mundane normalcy.
The locals began to emerge onto the streets.
Not to loudly cheer their heroic saviors, nor to offer tearful prayers of thanks to the gods for their miraculous survival.
They emerged carrying brooms, wooden buckets, and sturdy handcarts.
With a practiced, chilling efficiency that clearly proved this was by no means their first rodeo, they immediately began to clean up.
The yokai carcasses that hadn’t fully dissolved into dust on the wind were unceremoniously heaved onto wooden carts exactly like sacks of cheap rice.
The splatters of black gore were methodically scrubbed from the wooden walls using buckets of steaming hot water.
In place of the shredded paper lanterns, shopkeepers casually hung fresh ones, acting exactly as if those few minutes of total hell had simply never transpired.
“These people are completely mental…” Figlin stated flatly, watching an elderly noodle vendor casually kick the severed, twitching leg of some monstrosity straight into the gutter so he could set up his stall anew.”They’re literally sweeping the bloody apocalypse under the rug.”
Against the solid wall of the inn, Neira knelt gracefully beside the unconscious necromancer.
Yerga lay motionless in the deep snowdrift, extremely pale and exhausted, her shredded gown currently revealing significantly more than it concealed.
The succubus gently placed a hand directly on the necromancer’s freezing forehead.
“Wake up, my dear.
It is not yet time to sleep,” she whispered intimately.
A steady stream of warm, vibrant pink magic flowed directly from her palm.
The potent energy surged directly into Yerga’s body, physically forcing her heart to beat stronger and her lungs to draw a desperate, ragged breath.
The necromancer’s eyes snapped open as she gasped for air.
Lengos immediately extended a hand toward her.
“Let me help you,” he offered, and his deep voice was laced with genuine, unfeigned concern.
She stared down at his offered hand, then at her ruined couture, and finally looked straight into the paladin’s eyes.
Her pride could not be broken nearly as easily as her mana reserves.
“I can manage perfectly well on my own,” she snarled, swatting his hand away.
With immense effort, her bare legs visibly trembling, she slowly hauled herself out of the snowdrift.
She meticulously gathered the tattered shreds of her remaining dignity, straightened her spine, and, with a unsteady but incredibly proud gait, marched directly toward the entrance of the ryotei.
Inside, relative calm had finally been restored, although the main hall looked exactly as if a hurricane had just torn through it.
Neira wasted no time.
The sensual priestess instantly transformed back into a professional field medic.
She moved methodically among the wounded.
She attended to Zedora first.
The barbarian’s chest and abdomen were covered in nasty, chemical acid burns from the Jorōgumo’s gore, which actively hissed with every single breath she took.
“This is going to sting significantly worse than before,” she whispered, gently placing her glowing hands directly over the smoking skin.
Zedora merely ground her teeth together refusing to utter a single sound.
Next, she moved on to Perval.
The monk, incredibly tough though he was, was bleeding profusely from dozens of deep lacerations and puncture wounds inflicted by the vicious claws of the lesser yokai.
She efficiently sealed the deepest, most life-threatening furrows with her magic, leaving behind only shallow, pink scars.
Finally, she moved to soothe the lingering pain of the terrified guests, utilizing soft whispers and gentle touches to ensure the worst of the nightmare rapidly began to fade from their fragile memories.
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