Servant-Master bonds are now in effect!

  You are now GLOWING with Hyperion Radiation!

  You have FAILED to save versus Excruciating Pain!

  You have been struck by Titanic Blow!

  438 Physical Resistance & Cuirass of The Underlord reduces Annihilating Blow to Critical Injury!

  Eric’s world had become one of seering brilliance and unending fire blazing through his soul.

  He choked back a shriek of agony as the roaring titan, glaring such hate at him still, lashed out with a massive fist suddenly moving at speeds that should be impossible, clearly less effected by the sudden flare of Wormy II’s radiation than Eric was.

  “You think you can stop me with radiation I mastered in my palace of bones centuries before you were even conceived? Fool! I can channel it better than any other!”

  The air roared with the monster’s gloating laughter as Eric choked back dizziness and agony while the world spun at shocking speeds all around him, desolate ground and lightning-filled sky trading places as the wind shrieked and howled.

  And Eric could do nothing to stop it. In that moment, he was so locked with a shocking degree of pain as Wormy II covered for the sudden emergence of so much more burning agony searing his soul than he had ever suffered before… he couldn’t even move.

  Only stream silent tears of white hot radiation blazing through the air as they fell to the ground.

  If the hideous and grotesque fusion of locusts that was now Malice in truth had any mortal emotion, it was sheer vindictive glee at seeing Eric suffer as he so clearly was.

  “This is where it ends, you pustulant sack of filth!” The gigantic abomination of withered ancient goblin and fused chitin gave a shockingly powerful inhale before turning to the massive glowing worm even now lurching to wrap Malice in its coils once more. Coils which, for a brief moment, Eric had actually thought would steel victory from nightmare as the locusts actually began to smoke and sizzle as if finally reaching a limit… before a snarling Malice had simply allowed his body to dissolve for long enough for Wormy to slip right through. And for all that he had sensed the obliteration of a tiny handful of Malice’s swarm… the creature reformed within seconds.

  And now he was about to make Eric’s Underlord pay the ultimate price, his nemesis’s massive chest inflating with the dark caustic cloud that would soon burst forth.

  “Burrow, Now!” Eric screamed in his mind as the air filled with a black billowing cloud and Eric prayed for his stunned solar plexus to ease its clenched grip on his lungs and allow him to BREATHE as he poured every last bit of the shocking degree of potency flooding into him that he could into Unified Restoration, compelling his enhanced cells to hyper-repair as he sucked in a glorious breath of air, wanting to cry with relief… but instead he raced through the winds as fast as he could when Malice abruptly spun around, spraying the air with death so potent that space itself collapsed in the void of oblivion momentarily created.

  The remaining air filled with the monster’s cold laughter, vile words forcing their way past Eric’s blood-infused ear canals to fill him with despair.

  “Flee like the coward you are, worthless seed! Flee, while I make my through the land you invested so much of your soul into blooming! A fruit now right for MY consumption! A fruit I won’t completely savor until your land lies desolate, and your reborn elves, MY reborn SLAVES, are once more in their cages, fit to be transformed into fresh batches of soul steel, their screams a glorious cacophony that will force your bitch of a mother back out of heaven, forced to face me once more!”

  Eric shuddered with the horrific essence of malicious hate now radiating off the nightmare abomination turning to face him as he raced as fast as he could around the mile-high abomination, his foe’s gaze tracking him even as Eric grit through his pain, injuries finally healing as Mach 2 became Mach 3, the last of the cracked ribs finally fusing.

  And that’s when he sensed it.

  The swelling of horrified dismay from his familiar as she tracked down Malice’s tether.

  Quickness Check: Critical Success!

  You have successfully dodged death once more!

  And in an awful epiphany of understanding, Eric sensed the trap, even as he weaved and juked past a fresh stream of caustic darkness the very air screamed in contact with.

  He choked back a scream as he caught sight of the broken figures hammered to crosses, steel helms of torment fused to their skulls. Awareness turned to a gibbering sob of despair, mind’s eye desperately locking onto the girl that he had fought and laughed beside just hours ago. A woman he had thought so strong, so fierce, a beautiful former Contender given a second chance at life and love who might actually be able to survive this perilous nightmare his world was now being forced to endure.

  A girl he had actually dared to hold in his arms and make his own.

  A brilliant green-eyed elf now covered in blood and burns with the haunted eyes of a woman who had been forced to endure the most horrific of crucibles.

  Eric choked back a scream as the air filled with his enemy’s mocking laughter, already KNOWING who was to blame.

  But as Bunbun’s glimpse of the pair of sneering Inquisitors with their aquiline features, arrogant demeanors radiating absolute contempt for the entire Rising Sun corp they had effectively staked to crosses made clear… Malice wasn’t the only guilty party.

  No.

  Eric’s heart pounded as fury transcended fear, pain, and desperation once more. Recognizing those sneering countenances from the picture Caliban had given him along with a brutally honest transcription of the interrogation, recalling all too well the look of barely suppressed fear Caliban, a prince in his own right, had worn even daring to hint at what had gone down. Yet still he hadn’t hesitated to give Eric a full accounting of the cold-eyed Inquisitors that had been interrogating him and Nikita both.

  One and the same. Their arrogant sneers were unmistakable. And as horrific and unforgivable as their acts against his friends and lover had been… it clearly wasn’t their only transgression. He could sense it but not truly see it, even as he weaved and dodged in the air while Malice roared and cursed.

  The glaring blotch of darkness in the center of the crimson pentagram that was somehow utterly invisible to Eric’s senses, yet not Bunbun’s, if the jolt of panic coursing through her was any indication.

  Even Danger Sense II, a gift from Terra herself, was screaming a garbled warning that filled him with borderline panic, forced to appreciate in that moment as Elly’s distant screams carried so exquisitely by Bunbun’s ears and the mocking words of the pair of inquisitorial sellouts made it exquisitely clear just how convoluted, intricate, and lethal Malice Bane’s schemes truly were.

  A foe who, by the light of his giant twisted eyes, understood at that moment that Eric finally understood Malice’s true intent. This wanton destruction of an entire territory, feasting upon it, doing his utmost to generate an unending plague? An opening act. Softening an entire world for what came next.

  Malice, who now looked more like his original self than ever… no, a younger, more vital version of himself that had once, a thousand years ago, actually been handsome, twisted his now oddly human lips into a hideous grin.

  “And now comes the final act of our play. This world, all its delicious potential, so ready to be consumed. So EAGER to be exploited! So tell me, lastborn castoff! Are you a betting man? What do you think the odds are that the ENTIRE TERRAN COUNSEL will concede to my rule this very moment, while their interfaces all scream joint warnings of their imminent peril? Let’s ask them, shall we?”

  Eric could only gaze on in horror even as the part of his mind not screaming with despair at the sense of multiple traps so close to being sprung, traps he himself would spring to everyone’s peril if he dared come to Bunbun’s aid as her own panicked warnings had just made clear.

  He froze for one helpless, agonizing moment as Malice inhaled to belt out not caustic death but a command that seemed to shudder through Earth’s very core.

  COUNSEL OF TERRA! I, MALICE BANE, HAVE BEFORE ME THE TOOLS OF YOUR ULTIMATE DESTRUCTION!

  The words seemed to echo endlessly even as dozens of massive shimmering gates sprung open between the towering Malice and dozens of vaulted chambers filled with officious-looking men and women whose looks of imperious disdain and cold contempt for the unexpected interruption quickly morphed into dismay that morphed into horror. Countless conversations were replaced by panicked screams as their gazes were transfixed by the massive screen that had appeared before them, Eric sensed literally hundreds of protective spells and wards protecting scores of counsel chambers being torn free as if no more than gossamer strands before Malice’s dark ritual.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Spluttered one officious-looking Administrator with an Oxford accent. The salt and pepper haired gentleman was wearing a three piece suit and bowler hat from a chamber that looked suspiciously like every TV show depiction of the House of Commons, the speaker even now raising a cane radiating actual Bronze-Tier enchantments.

  Malice smiled coldly into the portals that had manifested before him. “This is your doom and final warning. Should you refuse to surrender and pledge your lives and souls to Malice Bane, your present and future lord and master, you shall all be eaten alive and your world consumed in Hellfire.”

  The British Administrator’s sideburns quivered in wrath. “You’re in violation of the accords, abomination! You will part Earth at once or—”

  His words cut off, even Eric frozen with awed disbelief to see that Malice hadn’t simply summoned the arcane or mystic equivalent of video displays but actual portals. Portals he coldly shoved his massive hand through, filling the entire House of Commons with locusts.

  Ravenous Bronze-Tier locusts that, starved of sustenance as Malice’s pawns for far too long, immediately began to feed.

  The formerly distinguished hall filled with cries of confusion, roars and shouts and chanted spells that soon became desperate screams and shrieks and wild-eyed looks of panic before massive locusts tore free limbs and heads in sprays of frothy pink blood that Eric could see with such horrifying clarity. As could the dozens of floating portals that Malice so casually shifted to be looking right at what was happening to the United Kingdom’s Administrative Counsel.

  The air filled with panicked shouts as Eric caught sight of scores of men and women from so many different cultures and lands even if they were uniform in their lives of rank and privilege, no matter how different looking in facial features, skin tones and modes of dress. Yet all of them blanched in unified horror at what had just happened to a singular branch of their Terran Counsel. Because in the time it had taken the onlookers to register the true extent of the horror… it was done.

  Where over a score of distinguished Administrators had sat, there was nothing left.

  No trace of bodies spurting blood, decapitated heads silently screaming an instant before their eyes rolled back and they were devoured before all their eyes, desperate chants broken off when giant locusts launched themselves onto the backs of desperately rallying armored classers before snipping through the strongest plate and mail like it was tinfoil, devouring those stalwart defenders alive.

  Nightmare flashes they had all seen and no doubt wished they hadn’t, and what was almost worse than the snapshot of horror was how the blazingly fast the locusts with at least 100 Quickness had made it all disappear. Every last trace of the nightmare slaughter had been devoured in the blink of an eye.

  Now there was nothing edible left at all.

  Not even the silk tapestries or wooden furniture remained. Just a few hunks of metal and stone scored of absolutely every trace of organic matter, before the now hundreds of swarming locusts scuttled right out of the giant gate Malice had stretched wide, falling to the ground by Malice’s feet, where each locust immediately erupted miniature versions of itself, now scuttling in pointless circles, for this territory had already been stripped bare of everything save for lifeless dust, scored rock, and the howling winds buffering Eric and Malice both as hundreds of slack-jawed administrators gazed on, their wide-eyed looks of horror saying all that needed to be said.

  Because in the blink of an eye they could be devoured and consumed just as easily, just as quickly, with no trace of them even left behind for anyone to morn.

  As if they had never existed at all.

  The air filled with Malice’s laughter, even as Eric gave his Underlord a furious command.

  “I will have your sworn fealty, maggots. And I will have it now!” The twisted progenitor of the goblin flashed a monstrous smile, lips curling with unholy glee. “Body and Souls, maggots! As per the Bloodtear codicils you all signed upon obtaining your class, the class that MY pawns provided you, you all have rights over both the bodies and souls of your slaves. Your subjects! They have failed to overthrow you. They have failed even to protest, so it is so! Now give the oath, or perish just like the last counsel of fools that dared to question me!”

  “We need your assurance in turn!” Cried out a calm-featured man wearing the robes of a Tibetan monk. “Will you give us your oath to allow us to govern ourselves as we see fit, in return for tithe and… No!”

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  A sneering Malice answered in the way that suited him best, forcing his arm into another portal and another dozen Administrators were suddenly forced to fight for their lives, their desperate shrieks ending in only seconds as the mile-high monster pulled his bloated arm free once more, turning to sneer at the horrified countenances of an entire world’s worth of Administrators.

  Eric choked back a scream. Because it didn’t matter how much he wanted to help. He knew that his most furious attacks did absolutely nothing as it stood. And Bunbun’s desperate search for an answer, looking for the origins of the astral tether, had resulted in a revelation so awful that Eric knew there was only one path forward, bracing himself for pain his twisted nemesis paid no attention to as he delighted in cowing an entire world, eager to make them all subjects. And worse. Far worse.

  Didn’t these fools understand that they were doomed anyway?

  But there was no way they could, Eric realized, those poor fools having no idea of the nature of the final surprise Malice had in store for all of them, a surprise Bunbun could only convey in terrified whispers since even registering it visually had been somehow blocked from Eric’s mind, as one national counsel after another screamed their panicked submission, surrendering to Malice Bane in both body and soul. Not just themselves, but all the citizens under their care, which, by some extremely twisted use of System codicil or Malice’s own vile powers that somehow transcended the System itself, was actually netting him the potency of millions of souls.

  Billions of them.

  Far more survivors than Eric had feared.

  And perhaps even that had been planned in a scheme that had been in the works decades before Earth had ever ascended.

  As Eric could now sense so clearly with the glistening darkness now radiating from his foe as the abomination he would NEVER think of as kin began to grow before Eric’s eyes, roaring his siren triumph.

  “Yes, yes! Give me your oaths, fools! For it is you! In your final desperate hour, that shall LIFT ME TO GOLD! AND IMPERIOUS CAN DO NOTHING, THE MOMENT I ASCEND!”

  Eric shuddered under the sudden weight of a world’s despair, the panicked screams of millions of souls becoming his own.

  “Eric? I’m ready.”

  Eric took a deep breath of shrieking winds that smelled like lifeless deserts and absolute despair, as he braced himself as best he could while slamming down his final Necromancer Perk point exactly where it was needed most.

  “Do it,” he whispered to his beloved familiar and Underlord both, bracing himself… and finding the agony beyond anything he could possibly have conceived.

  For even as Malice began glowing with the absolute pristine darkness of his twisted ascension, Eric began to glow as well.

  All the colors of the rainbow as he shrieked, his System interface blaring with messages all its own.

  “Repudio.”

  Bunbun’s words echoed in her mind even as Eric sensed her attempting to unlock the most complex Gordian knot of souls that made the prisons of spirit and bone she had unraveled back at that hideous soul foundry a level 1 joke in comparison. A thousand interlocked spirits in torment. And somehow, Bunbun was actually doing it. Using the echo of Eric’s gifts even as he ate her radiation burns, unraveling a nightmare that could so easily destroy them all.

  Only to be confounded by a barrier beyond even her, as the catastrophic weapon reached critical mass.

  “Eric!”

  He didn’t hesitate. Didn’t dare to as the System itself, Terra itself, pled for a miracle. Screaming as he tore a piece of his own endless potential in an act of sacrifice so alien to any power-gamer’s heart.

  You have permanently surrendered 1 Rank of Essence of Dominion to your familiar!

  You have saved versus Soul-Pain! You are currently under the effects of Extreme Agony!

  He held back a scream made all the worse as he sensed a desperation that went beyond Bunbun’s. Beyond his own.

  As if the Earth itself were crying out for a miracle.

  “You are free.”

  For one brief moment, Eric sensed the hope of Terra itself before it was replaced by the bright flare of excruciating agony beyond what he had suffered the moment he had brought Wormy II back and desperately retreated.

  Beyond even what he had experienced when first he dared place a Hyperion Core inside his ES Space.

  For what was Bunbun’s burden was now his own, even as his bulwark became her own. And now his screams drowned out the cries of countless panicked Administrators as he began to glow like the sun.

  He blazed brightly enough that even the chortling titan ascending to Gold on the backs of Eric’s people froze, as if sensing some unexpected flaw in his master plan, a weapon warded so well that even if Eric had somehow bested his monstrous foe, which totally hadn’t happened, Eric failing even to injure Malice... Eric still wouldn’t have even be able to register the instrument of his own destruction. Would see only the helpless look on a dying Elly’s face before his ultimate foe assured his utter destruction.

  And Malice had played his twisted hand perfectly. A thousand years of twisted plots against people and creatures as ruthless and Machiavellian as Malice had utterly trumped the year or so that Eric had walked his own path. Eric hadn’t had a hope in hell of spotting any of the wards and twisted traps his foe had designed with him and his family in mind.

  Fortunately, Eric hadn’t needed to.

  Because he had a thing called friends.

  Friends who would fight for him, just as he would eat their agony in turn.

  “Wormy, Now!” Eric wheezed, having no strength for anything else as his glow took on a rainbow hue, his living flesh sublimating in brilliant sparkles of light.

  You have DARED to embrace the burden of 3 Hyperion Cores destined for Fusion Cascade!

  Your Familiar’s ES Space mastery is inferior to your own! Radiation only reduced to a millionth of what it would otherwise be!

  NOTE! Hyperion Blazer Perk in FULL effect!

  420 Elemental Resistance is effectively DOUBLED against Hyperion radiation!

  All potency pools are now at maximum capacity!

  FATAL RADIATION LEVELS WILL BE REACHED WITHIN SECONDS!

  Potency Surge Unified Restoration buys you time!

  “Fools! You think your surrender will buy you mercy? It has only brought you death!” A cackling Malice, now glowing with what Eric was horrifically certain was the cusp of true ascension roared as countless Administrators continued to shriek and plead. Yet even in the throws of darkest revelation, his foe still sensed trouble enough to spin around and glare Eric’s way.

  “What scheme do you think you can pull off in the final—”

  His eyes widened in disbelief, as a screaming Eric could no longer suppress even a trace of the brilliant corona flaring off of him, turning the air super hot, so hot that the counselors cried out and backed away from the displays, no matter that only standard light could breach Malice’s rifts… and of course, the bastard himself.

  “You dare to ride my coattails, to fuse my ascension with your own?”

  Malice’s eyes glared with the fury of a man who could only see the self-interest of others.

  “How dare you! You castoff worthless—”

  “NOW!”

  Malice’s words cut off in a furious roar of surprise.

  Because with all his focus on a prismatically glowing Eric, he paid no attention to his feet.

  Or the giant worm that had actually grown since Eric sent him off. Grown massive enough to ascend up one of Malice’s massive legs just as effortlessly as it had once burst through Blue Palace. Only Wormy’s maw was now one and a half times Malice’s legs circumference, surrounding it like a pants sleeve, ending at the hip.

  The panicked Administrators’ desperate cries and pleas abruptly cut off, hard eagle eyes sensing a shift in something, even if far too terrified to dare utter a peep, after what had happened to their compatriots.

  Not even when Malice’s snarl became a surprised shriek, inhaling to expel obliterating death. But would he aim at his own leg? The question instantly becoming mute as, with a monstrous crunch, Wormy bit down on his target, before falling right back into the ground with a splash as if it were no more than water as a transformed Malice spurted caustic blood from what appeared to be a very real leg stump, and not a hundred thousand bug carapaces at all.

  “No!” Malice furiously roared as he stumbled and collapsed, gazing at his leg stump with disbelief, before glaring up at a still glowing Eric, giving him his middle finger.

  “Yeah, I could tell the Hyperion goodness was doing a number on you. Saturating those dark strands of fate something fierce, no? Protected your bugs… which I guess is now you, from any damage that would be channeled right into your dead ass moon that you’ve already given up on, am I right?”

  Eric winked at the look of dismayed fury upon Malice’s features.

  “But here’s the kicker. We know from the handful of bugs actually crushed by Wormy that you’re not immortal. His coils had only cut off a few bugs completely. Those dark cords are pretty resilient and feisty! But what would happen if all those dark cords of fate were cut off in all directions? Say, for example, if your leg was snipped off at the hip, and then those hundred thousand bugs, or I guess what’s really your leg now, was surrounded by a Hyperion core’s worth of radiation with no way of channeling all that glorious chaos? My guess is that all those suckers, or your leg, would cook just as fast as if they had no protective wards at all!”

  Eric dared to laugh. FORCED himself to laugh through his agony. “And guess who just went up MULTIPLE Master Necromancer ranks? Fucking awesome!”

  Malice’s look of wild-eyed fury was music to Eric’s tormented spirit, the monster’s near transcendent killing glare more than sufficient to crush the soul of anyone of Bronze rank, let alone someone like him, Eric was dead certain, were they not simultaneously at risk of erupting with the shocking degree of Hyperion energy blazing through their soul.

  If anything, the shocking degree of monstrous hate radiating from his nemesis, glaring at Eric like he would crush him to oblivion was a relief, helping him to keep from exploding like a quark bomb himself.

  “No. There is no way you could know that. NO WAY! Such is warded from your eyes, TORN from your mind!”

  “We renounce oaths given under duress!” Cried out a pair of men with German accents, Eric realizing that his interface was, in fact, instantly translating the shouts and cries of everyone speaking their native languages that clearly Malice understood as well, able to not only listen but convey with his forked black tongue words that everyone somehow understood.

  And those Administrator’s bold pronouncement earned a dozen shouts of accord, desperate men and women clearly sensing the tide turning.

  Eric forced himself to smile even as he felt his eyes cooking out of his skull. “Sorry, asshole. I’m afraid Earth is NOT for sale!”

  “Wrong, Fools!” Malice roared as the pair of German administrators burst into black flame, their dying shrieks, as if it wasn’t their bodies but their very souls that blazed, was clearly audible to the countless shocked-looking administrators forced to look on, as were the desperate screams of the rest of the German contingent swearing to serve their master still.

  Eric couldn’t help quailing, fearing himself an absolute fool, even if he had been desperately buying Bunbun a few more precious seconds. And perhaps it didn’t even matter, for Malice’s leg had stopped spurting. Worse, Eric sensed a new one growing with horrific rapidity as the body shrunk enough to compensate, and all the while, Malice’s ebony hue grew darker, every darker, glowing or glooming pristine darkness as massive Luciferian wings sprouted from his back.

  “FOOLS! You sacrifice was already made! Your treasures already surrendered! You can no more back out of your oath than a slave can the collar around his neck!”

  The air chortled with the ascending demon’s laughter as the wildly whipping winds began to shriek as the earth itself groaned under the weight of the blackest of Gold-tier ascensions.

  Eric choked back a scream, terror and agony now in perfect equilibrium as Heat Sense and Unified Perception told him everything that his eyes no longer could.

  Sensing the Earth itself beginning to warp against the forbidden, even as Eric and Bunbun both burned with the weight of the three cores that could end them all in the blink of an eye.

  “BEHOLD THE INSTRUMENT OF YOUR DEATH!” The hideous creature that was Malice ascendant cried out as a final projection of twisted screams and tortured light formed for the edification and dismay of every surviving Administrator present.

  Before the picture had even focused into being, countless Administrators were howling in pointless desperation.

  “Please, master! We did as you asked!” Pled the Nigerian contingent. “We surrendered our lives to you, the lives of our people for clemency! You’ve already won! Earth is yours!”

  “FOOLS!” Malice sneered. “YOU THINK I CARE ANYTHING FOR THIS PATHETIC WORLD? IT IS UPON THE WEIGHT OF YOUR SOULS THAT I WILL DESCEND! A RIPE HARVEST THAT I WILL CLAIM… NOW!”

  Even as he said the words, the crackling picture finally came into focus, both Malice and his captive audience rendered speechless by the sight before them.

  A handful of bodies so badly irradiated that nothing but smoking heaps of ash remained, and a massive pentagram glooming ebony midnight that still held six crosses of blackened soul steel, in clear sympathetic resonance to Malice’s own dark transformation.

  Yet even in the extremis of his agony, Eric noted that he could at least sense with Unified Perception that which had been hidden to him before. The center of that pentagram, now holding nothing of significance at all.

  Wild eyes filled with hate and a half-step Gold’s killing aura snapped up to glare into Eric’s eyeless sockets.

  “YOU! THIS IS YOUR DOING!”

  Eric flashed a bitter smile. “Damn right it is, motherfucker,” he wheezed, spitting out blood that boiled in furious sprays of light in the air.

  Malice’s eyes widened in growing disbelief. “YOU CONSUMED THE CORES!? IMPOSSIBLE! YOU WERE HERE! THE BOMB WAS WARDED FROM YOUR VIEW!” Monstrous lips then twisted in a cruel smile. “BUT THIS IS FINE, FOUL GET! LET ALL THE ADMINISTRATORS SEE, LET THE WORLD ENTIRE SEE, THAT IT IS YOU THAT WILL DOOM YOUR REALM! FOR YOU HAVE ONLY SECONDS BEFORE YOU PERISH. I CAN FEEL IT! AND ONCE YOU DO, YOUR ENTIRE WORLD WILL PAY THE PRICE!

  “THE SOULS OF YOUR ADOPTED PEOPLE SHALL BE THE SACRIFICE THAT WILL ELEVATE ME, AND THE ETERNAL BLAME FOR THEIR FALL SHALL BE YOURS ALONE TO BEAR!”

  The now fully restored Malice flashed the darkest of smiles.

  “FOR THE GATE BETWEEN OUR REALMS IS ONE THAT FATE ASSURES YOU WILL NEVER ENTER!”

  Eric forced a laugh, for all that he spat out was fiery blood and screams.

  “I know. And that’s what makes what’s coming next so fucking FUNNY!”

  Malice froze, all his focus turning to the crackling portal before him, it taking him only a split second to spot the telltale paw print melted into what seemed a sheet of dark obsidian. Just one among many.

  Eric’s Infravision and Unified Perception spotted more than one wide-eyed Administrator daring to peer his way as he flooded the entire Administrative Corpse with a panicked message, no matter how many of them despised him and had once worked to destroy the Sylvan faction and assure his demise. That, he suspected, had been a local issue, and most of those terrified frightened souls present wanted only to survive the nightmare they found themselves trapped in.

  E.S. - FLEE WHILE HE’S DISTRACTED, YOU IDIOTS! FLEE WHILE YOU CAN!