The bloodlust burning in Hirrus’s heart wanted him to charge back into the crowd. He wanted to grab a hold of the people who had killed Alric and rip them to shreds.

But that would have been wasting his efforts.

The adventurer had given his life so that Hirrus wouldn’t be dragged back into the crowd.

Hirrus had a responsibility to Alric’s memory. He would push forward and finish this.

He could control his bloodlust enough to push forward instead of backward, but the rage within him refused to go unheard. To that end, it was finally time to unleash his 4d657263790d0a Transform.

If his foes wanted to see a monster, he would oblige.

Hirrus’s body lit up like fire. He felt himself rearrange in a thousand little ways, not the least of which being the reshaping of his skull. Somewhere near at hand a half-dozen people shrieked in terror, understanding what was coming. Surprisingly, the foes didn’t close in around him while the transformation left him vulnerable. The physical agony of the transformation blurred his vision, but he saw that many of his enemies were trying to activate their own transformation to keep up with him. Others were trying to push their way through the mob backwards to escape the rampage that was to come.

Their efforts were in vain.

As the first to begin his transformation, Hirrus was the first to finish.

He had become the monster they feared.

His scaled hide would protect him from counterattack. His increased stature and musculature would crush all opposition. He had grown tooth and claw to augment his weapons.

The urge to do violence redoubled within him. He wanted to feel the ripping of flesh beneath his blade. He wanted blood running down clawed fingers and over his hands. He wanted to feel the vibration of a screaming throat between his teeth.

Alric’s death had made Hirrus into death itself.

Above him, Royal Levin crashed down another bolt near at hand, and while his magical stats were no longer inflated by X’ruhn’s Balance, the 20% flat stat boost of the transformation - along with the dregs of his magic-boosting Arcana - made the strike potent enough to kill the hapless soul it struck anyway.

No one stepped up to face Hirrus. So he stepped up to the thin barrier of bodies that had moved to separate him from Rumi’s cart. The transformation made him larger and heavier, and the bodies of those who had died by his breath attacks crunched underfoot like tree branches. He reveled in the feeling, even as he split his attention by employing his most challenging Arcana.

As he stomped forward, he left behind images of himself. Mirrored Echoes. It felt strange to see himself through their eyes, and see the monster that the Merciless form made him into, with his red scales and serrated triangular teeth.

But that wasn’t his concern.

He wasn’t using the Arcana for practice this time. It was time for proper application. It was time to test its destructive potential.

Even so, he could only bring himself to conjure six of them before the input of their senses, added to his own, threatened to overwhelm his mind.

It was a challenge to split his focus between so many bodies, but he had an immeasurable advantage. A lifetime of honing his martial skill meant his attacks were second nature, and the grief-stoked bloodlust roaring in his chest meant that every desire in his heart was overwhelmed by the physical need to do violence.

His Echoes fell in beside him to form a line, and they hit the enemy ranks as one.

Hooked blades and icy axes lashed out. The mirrors of himself only dealt two thousand damage a strike, when they weren’t critical hits or double strikes, but the speed and ferocity with which he directed them made their strikes add up.

Hirrus was so far beyond the strength of his foes that their defensive stats were nothing. The combined power of his buffs and his rage ripped them apart. Far surpassing that was his own body.

His physical attacks hit for nearly ten thousand damage each. The line of him and his echoes became a spearhead as he cut through Rumi’s robed cultists like a heated blade through butter, while the lesser versions of himself battered enemies away who might threaten his flanks or rear.

Hirrus couldn’t focus on any one foe. With his attention split between seven bodies and his heart screaming for blood, Rumi’s defenders ceased to be a collection of bodies, and instead became one great beast. He was not fighting an army to get to its leader. He was ripping through the armored flesh of a beast to reach its beating heart so that he could slice up and devour it. A voice deep within him urged him on. It reminded him that this beast had killed Alric right in front of him, and he felt a rumbling roar coming from his throat.

Previously, his transformation had made reveling in combat a joy, but now it was an act of revenge. He was not a destructive force this time.

He was judgement.

And as enemies screamed and died under his blades, barely able to scratch him as he reduced them to bleeding parts in the dirt. His hit points became irrelevant. His only concern was carving up the enormous beast that struggled to hold him back from reaching its heart.

A foe’s Arcana created a blue blast of force that destroyed one of Hirrus’s images, and on instinct he reared back and retaliated. Homiradiation blasted energy from his mouth, spraying five thousand damage into a huge area and leaving behind glowing green ground, in which his foes could not use Arcana. His Cosmic Barrette instantly undid all the damage he’d taken.

Enemies were closing in behind him now, and his five remaining echoes closed in from a spearhead to a ring. Enemies crashed against the echoes behind as Hirrus cut his way forward, stomping his way inch by inch closer to the cart.

There was a thump, and someone landed in the middle of the circle. Another scaled Merciless form in heavy armor had used an Arcana like Hirrus’s High Jump to get through the ranks. Their enormous greatsword raised to smash down an Echo who was unable to defend itself from the back. Even though his focus was split to engage in combat with six different bodies, Hirrus knew that this could be his undoing.

A second thump came shortly after, but it wasn’t the greatsword landing. Another figure landed on the back of the first, and a wide-bladed dagger plunged into the top of his skull so hard that it split open like a pumpkin dropped from a great height.

This figure was another Merciless formed beast, but Hirrus recognized her instantly. Nidra’s Merciless form had more horns and spikes than Hirrus’s, and between that and her extended snout full of serrated fangs, her hood and mask were just scraps of red cloth dangling from the sharpened parts of her new head and face. Her scales were a dusky gray, which was well-suited to the stealth tactics she favored.

Before he could register anything else about her, she was gone again, leaving the twitching corpse behind.

Hirrus wondered why she wasn’t ripping Rumi apart right now, but he could see why. Over the heads of his foes, the cart - barely more than ten feet away now - was bristling with Arcana-conjured defenses. That rain of glowing red metal surrounded it, and what appeared to be glimmering thorn bushes made of bone-white metal had sprouted and filled every point of egress. Wherever there was room enough for a pair of feet to stand atop the cart’s roof, there was a defender there. Three of them had hands outstretched in a warding gesture that was accompanied by a shimmering shield of semitransparent force.

The immobilized cart had been turned into a fortress. Nidra needed his overwhelming might to shatter its defenses.

It was the wake-up call he needed. He didn’t need to sate his bloodlust. He didn’t need to avenge Alric by carving a hundred people into bloody chunks. He needed to finish the job. They were here for a reason, and that reason was cowering in a metal box with a handful of hostages, surrounded by all the defense he could conjure.

Hirrus cast an Arcana up at one of the defenders. As soon as it landed, he broke his own concentration of Mirrored Echo to give this next part his full attention. The second activation of Seeker’s Spike teleported him across the scant distance, right on top of the shielded defender. The shimmering force field exploded into splinters under Hirrus’s axe, though the caster was unharmed, but for the glowing explosive charge Seeker’s Spike had left on him, now only seconds from exploding.

That had been Hirrus’s plan all along. He jumped and rocketed his foot into the man’s chest with Hiden Sokyaku. It did a paltry two thousand damage, but the knockback was the real goal, punting the man into the thick nest of thorny defenses.

His victim screamed as the barbed barrier ripped at his skin, but not for long. Seeker’s Spike exploded, dealing six thousand damage and finishing the job.

Not just that, but the blast cracked and damaged the thorny barrier.

Hirrus stepped up and smashed the cracked vines with his greataxe, shattering the damaged bit of the barrier and making a narrow opening. Inside the cart there was a terrified shriek.

“Rumi!” Hirrus roared into the opening. “Come out! Take this opportunity to display a single moment of honor before I end your miserable life! Face your death!”

He peered inside and saw Rumi holding a shortsword. He was cowering at the back of the cart, clinging desperately to the little old woman, who was still chained to the wall. His blade was beside her neck, presumably to keep her as a human shield, but his wild eyes showed too much terror for him to have enough control of his faculties to use her as a proper hostage.

“Get away!” one of the other defenders barked. Her voice cracked with fear as she lunged across the roof of the cart at him with a mace. “Get away from him!”

Hirrus’s hooked blade was too fast. He caught her weapon on his and deftly parried it, but another of the defenders stepped up. He had a sword and shield, and forced him to lock the head of his axe with his sword to avoid the tip of the weapon driving into his eye.

After that, he felt the opportunity to close with Rumi slipping.

Arcana pelted out of the crowd at his unprotected back. A conjured washbasin slammed into his shoulder, throwing his balance off and nearly sending him tumbling off the cart and into Rumi’s defensive rain of glowing red blades. A bolt of energy struck his leg hard enough to take it out from under him, and the woman with the mace used the opening to smash her weapon into his forearm. None of the attacks did threatening damage alone, but up here he had become a lightning rod.

The people on the cart only needed to physically put their bodies between him and Rumi, and he was a big obvious target for all of the Arcana-wielders of the crowd below.

But there was another shriek from within. This time not terrified, but pained. With a glance, Hirrus saw that the opening in the thorny defenses had caught something. A little scrap of shredded red cloth.

His opening had let Nidra get into the cart. And as the conjured thorn bushes sparked and crumbled to dust, he knew the end of his fight was at hand.