The inner keep of the fortress, the sounds of combat dimming beneath the roar of the blazing fires outside.

The battle between the players and the wolves had reached its final tired thrusts and bites. After the keep had been breached, the wolves had poured in, tearing apart the trainees and pinning the higher-level Villagers until The Wolf Emperor could consume them, the Beast Tamer captain being eliminated first.

Now, all that remained was one last human squad, huddling in a corner. While their mage rushed a spell, their Crusader tank attempted to swipe off the wolves, smacking them with alternated strikes from a shield and an over-sized plate-mail gauntlet.

The wall behind the squad crumbled.

They turned to find a mouth hovering above them, stretched as wide as a great white shark’s.

"Fuck that," said the mage, cancelling his spell.

In unison, the squad activated their suicide function, disintegrating into a cloud of lights.

And so, the humans lost, the day won for wolf and wolfkind.

Emperor Wisguh barked at its minions. “Keep away!"

It leapt forward and bathed in the humans' scattering soul-lights, some of which were absorbed into its giant bulk. The beast's brain then surged with a sudden heat. The next moment, as if some obstruction, like a blood clot, had been flushed out of its head, the monster king felt as though it'd awoken a new yet somehow familiar sense, distinct and vibrant as hearing or sound.

The floor of the keep was littered with the gory remains of wolves that'd been hacked, halved, and splattered.

Wisguh focused on their fallen forms, and, by some strange instinct, the blood oozing from them began to vibrate, to flow from their dead veins.

'Nothing, my lord,' a telepathic message came in from a commander.

'Nothing here either, my lord.'

The Emperor's minions were currently spread throughout the inner keep, sniffing at every wall and crack. Receiving yet another notification of their failure to find the target, Wisguh set aside the new power for now and transformed into a wave that swept through every inch of the keep.

By the time it reemerged outside, however, in the centre of the fort, it still had not found its prey.

Although the humans had been wiped out, their target, the one whom The Great Black One had called The Tyrant, had not been amongst the slain. Even if he'd removed the disguise, The Wolf Emperor had marked his scent, and the smell of his blood wasn't present anywhere.

All around the beast king, its minions were standing uncomfortably atop their dead comrades, staring at their lord and awaiting the next command.

Ignoring them, Wisguh clicked its tongue with irritation. "Tyrant! I know thou hearest my call! The prophecy hath ordained these paltry flames to be thy graveyard! Revealest thyself!"

At that moment, a glow imbuing the coats of itself and its minions dissipated, marking the end of a that'd been maintained throughout the battle.

The Wolf Emperor, observing the magic's expiration, although the surroundings were calm, was overcome by an intense spike of paranoia. Wisguh's sensations sharpened, ears sifting through the roar of the burning exterior walls, nose sifting through the smoke, water-sense through the droplets of moisture in the air.

At that exact moment, before Wisguh of the Wolf Wave could howl to recast the protective blessing, a she-human stepped from out of thin air, several metres in front of the beast's face. Pouncing forward, she delivered a dainty thrust, despite the distance being seemingly too far for the sword in her hand, yet as the muscles of her arm extended through the brisk motion, the tip of her sword extended, too.

The Emperor, in an instant, was severed from all worldly sensation. The sights and smells of the strange she-human, the internal sense of its own imperial muscles, all these vanishing into a state of total emptiness, emptier than the blackest of nights.

Wisguh felt...nothing.

But this empty state was not unfamiliar, one of the arrows hitting The Emperor earlier sending it into the same void. Its soul-consciousness had been banished to the nullness of temporary death, its brain somehow skewered by the woman's sword.

Quickly, however, Wisguh's internal life force began to mend the neural damage, allowing the sensations to return.

The Emperor prepared for the moment to spring forth and swallow its mystery assailant.

Alas, before the sense of the outside world could be reformed, before the beast king could regain its bodily control, the connection was severed again.

And again.

What was this? wondered Wisguh in alarm.

What trickery was The Tyrant using to prevent it gaining control of its body? And why wasn’t this she-human minion being stopped by the wolf army?

As the Wolf Emperor body's healing again, it managed, with a fraction of a second, to telepathically command its wolf commanders to lend their senses.

Not long afterwards, a vision came through of its giant body splayed out unconscious on the ground while the she-human stabbed repeatedly at its forehead.

...Her sword's blade had stretched into a glowing white beam as thick as a leg and as long as three wolves nose to tail. The thrust passed cleanly through the back of The Emperor's skull, causing an eruption of pink brain matter...

Worldpiercer! realised Wisguh, recognising the weapon mentioned in The Great Black One's prophecy, the sword impaling his head as effortlessly as it might've impaled the planet.

But how had this she-human obtained it?

Focusing on the smell in its commander's vision, it caught a whiff of The Tyrant’s scent on her, the dishonourable knave having sent a hired hand to deal with his dirty business.

The Emperor, enraged by the insult, focused all its concentration, awaiting a moment of control so that it could transform into its incorporeal form.

But the woman's stabs were delivered with such regularity that this space was never given. It could only continue watching its unconscious body being desecrated again and again through transmitted snapshots.

...As its minions charged the she-human, she flicked her hand and uttered a syllable...

...The leaping wolves were transformed to ash by a tornado of flames that had engulfed her...

...Other wolves, throwing themselves in the way of the thrusting rapier, provided less resistance than water...

...In a vision sent from another wolf commander, The Tyrant emerged from out of the spot where he’d vanished, which'd been covered in illusion magic...

...Before any of the wolves could react, The Tyrant was swallowed by a door of flames...

...In a watchtower, he stood as glowing axes burst from him in all directions...

‘Flee! Flee! Flee! Flee!’ The Emperor tried to warn its minions to no avail.

...The burning logs in the surrounding wall creaked as they began to rise...

...The logs arranged themselves in the sky, blotting out the moons, creating a solid roof of flame that covered hundreds of metres around the fortress...

...This roof lost its support and began to collapse, to rain down like comets smiting the sinful earth...

...Within the scene of falling fire, the she-human continued to stab...

...And The Tyrant watched from on high, sighing at the destruction...

...Wisguh's mind seized with collective pain came of his commanders as their bones snapped beneath the falling weight, as their organs burst...

...How miserably their flesh was scorched, their lungs were ransacked of oxygen, and their ears were filled with the roar of flame and the howls of tens of thousands of crushed and burning kin...

'O Great Black One,' the Emperor tried to speak out into the void, 'I beg of thee, givest unto your humble servant a mere second or two!'

Only a second or two was needed to transform, after which—Wisguh knew by its recently unlocked instinct—it could summon forth the waters of the river to douse this wretched fire engulfing its army.

A second or two was all The Emperor needed to save himself and his doomed kin.

However, destiny would offer no further hand of mercy. Its meddling work had been accomplished in bringing the two foes together, and now the two were left to complete their mortal struggle with only the company of each other.

As for the mercy of Wisguh's foe? The Tyrant would similarly offer no reprieve, no chance to correct its lapse in vigilance, no break to demonstrate the hidden talents yet to be revealed inside Wisguh's noble soul, no breath to fill its lungs and howl another word of its imperial saga. An ant caught in a stampede of mammoths, it'd glanced up at the shadow of a descending foot and dared to bite; whether one called the creature arrogant or heroic, this would not stop its decimation in one step.

The wolf king received only the final messages of its army. The pauses between their anguished transmissions stretched further and further, as, one by one, their young lives wilted like seedlings in a summer drought, never allowed reach fruition by a land devoid of rain and love.

Before long, all outside communication ceased.

And then The Emperor died, just like all the others, his carcass joining the mountain.