‘We can’t risk a Demon rising from the shadow of a hostage and rescuing them. The moment we meet Verhen, play bad guy and then kill the prisoner in front of him. The angrier he gets, the less prone he will be to call and wait for reinforcements.
‘We need him dumb and frenzied so that we can kill him quickly and get out of here. I don’t want to go out in a blaze of glory. I don’t give a fuck about being celebrated. I want to get out of here as undead as I got in, understand?’ The Ghoul said via hand signs.
The warning was mostly perfunctory since creatures as ancient as those assassins had long since lost any warrior honor or naïve concept of fair fight. As long as they won, they could make themselves appear as heroic and noble as they wanted.
Their dead opponents couldn’t tell their side of the story and the truth would be whatever the winner wanted.
The assassin unit used darkness magic to cover for their smell and their unnaturally lithe bodies to make less noise than a falling petal. They almost got discovered by the patrols more than once, forcing them to backtrack and choose a different path.
Yet each encounter made the undead feel more confident instead of discouraged. Their intel wasn’t fully accurate but it was solid. Thanks to their skill and careful planning, they had managed to dodge every bullet that Verhen had thrown at them.
Arrays, traps, guards, they were one wrapped around the other like an annoying gift box made of so many boxes that the final present turned out to be a coin. Yet with each protective layer they disabled, the members of the unit came closer to the master bedroom.
‘Fill up, boys!’ Rakshu took a chunk of still-bleeding human flesh from one of his pockets and wolfed it down while his colleagues each fed upon their preferred source of life force and mana.
Reaching their destination had taken longer than expected and they had all consumed quite a bit of energy, needing a refill to get back to their peak condition before facing their mark.
Ghiaro, Argo, and Zamo did a last sweep of the area before Upha got to work on the door’s lock. A Clean Slate spell undid the imprint on the handle, a Closed Field spell trapped the linked alarm signal in a loop, and the lockpicks opened the door without making a sound.
The undead counted down to three to make sure that nothing happened before barging through the door with weapons unsheathed and spells blazing.
“What the fuck?” Upha said out loud since there was no point in secrecy anymore.
The path that the undead had taken didn’t lead to the master bedroom but to the Mansion’s Keep. The circular room was over 50 meters (166′) high and 30 meters (100′) across.
Right in the middle stood a tall tower comprised of white-streaked grey stones around which a Voidfeather Dragon was coiled. It would have resembled the Verhen insignia if the Dragon had been wrapped vertically instead of horizontally and if he spat flames instead of releasing smoke from his nostrils.
Seven eyes stared in hatred at the intruders as the Voidfeather Dragon slowly raised his long serpentine neck. His figure was 30 meters (100′) long from head to toe with an 8 meters (26′) long tail coming out of his back.
Slightly curved horns came out of his temples, forehead, and crown of his head. The latter were the smallest but they also formed what looked like a crown of bone spikes each burning with a different color.
The flaming crown would go from rainbow to emerald, from emerald to silver, from silver to blue, and then start over again. Each one of the red scales the size of a tower shield covering his body was set ablaze with Cursed Flames and carried a unique rune that none of the undead had ever seen before.
The black feathers were now streaked each with a different elemental color that formed a runic pattern depending on its inhabitant.
Worst of all between the clawed hands of the Dragon rested a much smaller creature that bore a striking resemblance with her parent.
“Are you here for me, my daughter, or my wife?” The Voidfeather Dragon asked, his voice sounding like stones rumbling against each other during an avalanche.
His body lay still on the ground, the only movement that of his hands closing around the small whelp to shield her from the noise.
Rakshu gave the signal for plan D, spread out and attack with Frozen Wasteland, an anti-Dragon spell based on air and water magic, from every direction. The fact that Lith had multiple forms was public knowledge and before infiltrating the Mansion the undead had devised different ways to counter each one of them.
The Ghoul shifted his weight to the right to jump to his position in the attack formation while the others compressed their muscles like springs to do the same, even infusing themselves with a fraction of the power stored inside their blood cores to boost their physical prowess.
Great was their surprise when they realized that they were all stuck in the same place as when they had entered and that no power flowed through their bodies. The group of assassins stood there, still like statues each looking at the other with a confused expression on their faces.
“Don’t stay there like idiots. Move!” Upha the Vampire started to shapeshift his body into mist but an emerald glimpse from the Dragon’s Spirit Eye put him back together.
“Ready and hold!” Ruksha was using the code to activate the spells they had at the ready and those stored inside their spell-holding rings.
He too had tried and failed to use his bloodline abilities but he could feel that the mana he had prepared for the assault still answered his command.
The Ghoul extended his hand and unleashed his tier five spell, Frozen Night. It was comprised of a mix of water magic that would freeze the Dragon while the darkness magic it carried would sap his strength and hopefully break his focus.
‘Nothing we have prepared is worth squat if we can’t use it. Yet if we break this curse, it’s our victory.’ Ruksha thought and he was right.
The problem was that once again his body betrayed him and the same happened to his accomplices.
The hands, mouths, eyes, and whatever part of their body they had chosen to emit their respective spells turned against their nearest ally and unleashed their magic on each other.
Some burned, others froze, and a few got mild damage from electrocution but all of them suffered from darkness magic, the greatest weapon and bane of all undead species.
The Dragon kept looking at them, his only worry to shield the baby Dragon from the cries of agony of his prisoners.
“I’ll ask you only one more time. Have you come here to take my life, my daughter’s, or my wife’s?”
“Fuck you, that’s who!” Argo unleashed the gravity array, Moon Fall at great cost for his blood core, consuming a huge chunk of the light element it stored.
