In line with his sense of danger, Krumtor moved swiftly back, creating distance between himself and Dahlia. She swung her arm at him - with no chance of hitting anything - and splattered her liquid flesh onto the sheets of snow. In one second Krumtor was bemused by this attack, but in the next he was shocked out of his mind as she instantly teleported onto her liquid flesh, suddenly looming over him and thumping her arms down. He swapped places with another of his four blade segments and saw her smash it into the ground, absorbing it into her body. From the sizzling in the areas where her flesh had splattered and the intensifying foul stench, he could tell that her body was dangerously caustic. This thought became set in stone when he lost connection with the absorbed blade segment, its frame ravaged beyond use inside of her.

Despite her large, freakish frame, Dahlia was deceptively quick as she swept her arm into the air again, spraying where he stood a heartbeat after he swapped out. This blade segment was lost as well, leaving him with only two lifelines left. His muscles bunched and sprung as he dashed for his life; his flesh would hardly do a better job of resisting her caustic pulp than his blade segments. Wet sloshing sounded out behind him, and a shadow suddenly fell over him. He swapped places to the third blade segment without delay, but he became surprised when he didn’t lose connection to it after a second. Glancing over, he saw a thick mana barrier had materialised around Dahlia, barricading her to the spot.

Krumtor felt relief instead of anger at seeing his duel being interrupted; in the first place, this was hardly a fair fight when Dahlia had weaponised herself such that he had no chance of attacking her. But his relief was short-lasting as Dahlia slapped the barrier once, coating it with her flesh, twice, and it shattered without warning. This was Karaes’s barrier, the strongest he knew of on Idroa, and this Abomination had destroyed it effortlessly. Before the shock of the moment could really set in, he heard Dimas’s voice from the hill.

“Back off, Krumtor. She’s losing flesh with every step, so there’s no way she can keep this form up for much longer.”

Peering closer, he saw Dimas spoke truly. Dahlia, who had initially loomed at ten-feet, had dropped some inches since. It wasn’t a big change, and yet it was a significant one. Resolve flashed through Krumtor’s eyes as a plan to defeat her emerged in his mind, and he swapped with the last blade segment with conviction. As soon as his feet hit the frosted ground, he was scrambling up the hill, crunching snow with every step. He was no longer surprised when Dahlia appeared behind him, instead maintaining his calm and swapping between his two remaining blade segments, keeping his life by mere inches every time.

From the vantage, Dimas watched with his two manastone daggers clenched in his gloved hands. He had already fired one into Dahlia’s neck from her flank, but it had sunk deeper than he had expected, only to be harmlessly absorbed. Perhaps magic would work, but he had the feeling that too was unlikely. No, the only countermeasure against this ability was to let her waste herself away.

Karaes groaned from beside him. “I can’t open a portal. The mana won’t stabilise for it.”

Dimas turned and regarded her carefully through the eyeholes in his mask. She was miming the portal shape with her tattooed arms, but it wasn’t forming. “Can you tell what’s wrong?”

She exhaled deeply. “I don’t know. I haven’t come by this issue before.”

“What about other magic?”

Fire burst to life from her fingers, but she considered it with a frown. “No issue, so it must a targeted hitch for the portals.” Her face sprung up after a moment, just as he arrived at the same conclusion. “Do you think it’s those organisms you sensed in the distance? They’re organised enough to have located us, after all, so maybe they intended this too.”

“Or it could be a side-effect of Dahlia’s transformation,” he suggested, although with little conviction. “Either way, we need to…” He peered into the distant clouds, spotting a faint red streak which appeared to be growing in size. “… leave.”

Karaes followed his gaze, but he knew she wouldn’t be able to see it considering her perception. “If we can’t teleport, we’ll fly then. Let’s go.”

Dimas didn’t respond for a long moment, staring at the streak until, finally, he made it out. Underneath his mask, his face set into a look of terror. “Let’s go! Now!”

Sensing the turbulence in his voice, Karaes nodded and levitated, lifting him too. “K, over here!” she shouted. Krumtor glanced over and swapped places with the nearest blade segment to them, bounding up the rest of the way with Dahlia hot on his heels. When he came near enough, Karaes raised him from the ground. They shot through the sky as one, Dahlia chasing from below but quickly falling behind. This was not the case with the red streak, however, as it only grew clearer and more terrible with time, revealing itself to be two humans. One was a man, another a woman, both Arabian. Suddenly, the two humans put on a wild burst of speed, gaining on the Avatars within heartbeats.

“Put me down,” Dimas shouted.

“Me too,” Krumtor yelled with him.

Karaes lowered them to the ground just as the humans caught up. The woman plummeted down to Dimas, seemingly riding a motorbike of coalesced blood. She crashed into the snowy ground before him, causing an explosion of red and white. Before either of the other two Avatars could react, a dome-shaped mana barrier formed around Dimas and the woman, trapping them both.

This was Karaes’s trick, the same one she had used on Silas and Krumtor a month before, but this time it hadn’t been her to cast it. Her gaze flicked to the man who had been riding the blood motorbike with the woman, now hovering in the air with a crooked grin directed at the nymph.

Down on the ground, Krumtor headed for the mana barrier to break it from the outside and free Dimas, but he stopped midway when a foreboding chill raced up his spine. He looked over his shoulders and saw Dahlia cresting the nearest slope, lobbing her flesh down the incline. The furthest splodge landed hundreds of metres from him. She appeared on it in an instant, now only six-feet tall. Her next lob of flesh brought her tens of metres away from him, even as he ran, and the last fling finally caught him on the skin.

It cauterized his flesh, but the pain was manageable, so he continued to run. Then she emerged out of his skin, or more specifically, her torso launched out sideways from the skin of his chest. There was nowhere to escape now… Her arms swung down and clapped him on the shoulders.

Dahlia disappeared right then, giving him a brief moment to breathe. The pain was like Themir himself had come to claim Krumtor - beyond words and enveloping his entire mind. Fortunately, this all went away in the next second as Dahlia reappeared, this time standing upright on the ground where Krumtor had been. He was wholly lodged in her body, struggling mindlessly for a few torturous heartbeats before he was completely gone. Consuming him, Dahlia grew from six-feet to eight and regarded her surroundings for her next meal.

Meanwhile, Karaes whizzed around in the sky, shooting down wiry imps which launched themselves at her, only to explode when they came close enough. They appeared from within the ground, soaring with skeletal wings and frozen smiles. She didn’t even have the opportunity to take the offensive or escape as it wasn’t dozens of imps that materialised but rather hundreds, all grinning and suicidal. They battered into her mana barrier and wore it down until one slipped inside, its smile being the last thing she saw before it latched onto her head and blew it out in a magnificent boom. Her body flailed out of the sky, smashing into the ground. It rolled over in the snow and came to a stop, her neon blue tattoos dimming.

Simultaneously, the dome-shaped barrier around the Arabian woman and Dimas came down. She strolled out with a masked head in her hand. Ripping its mask off, she peered in at the large angular head. Its skin was withered and pasted against the protruding bones as if it had been drained of all blood, an ugly sight to behold, for sure. She chortled at it, raising it so that her companion could see it too. “I knew he was an ugly fucker with how hard he was hiding his face.”

Dahlia glared at the two newcomers, momentarily hesitating between attacking them and leaving them alone. Finally, she broke out of the transformation, all the excess flesh washing off her body like goop, revealing a nude, entirely normal woman underneath. However, this woman was gone as quick as she had appeared, scarlet scales emerging as she rose a few feet more and gained a disconcerting countenance. Her demonic claws undertook the growth of several years in a few seconds. “You’re lucky I’ve just eaten,” she said to the two strangers, who turned to her as one.

“Actually, you’re lucky we saved you,” the Arabian woman said. “You were in quite the fucked position before we came.”

Dahlia grunted. “I didn’t need your help, but I won’t be ungrateful either.”

“Huh, I’d expected you to be more arrogant and overbearing,” the Arabian man said, eyeing her carefully.

“Well, I don’t even know who you are,” Dahlia replied. To this, the man raised a critical eyebrow with a tilt of his head, while the woman openly scoffed. “Alright, alright. I’m guessing you’re Kuraim. As for you, I honestly don’t have the slightest.”

“Zafeera,” the woman said with a bite. “How do you not know who I fucking am?” The Blood Ripper had sun-kissed skin, and a buzz cut all across her head except for the ponytail which hung down. She wore a tight-fitting shirt and jeans, both mahogany-red, although it was unclear whether this was by design or through use. Despite the fight she had just been in, she looked picture perfect without a dot of mud or smear of blood on her skin.

“Calm it, Zee,” Kuraim said, raising a hand. “This might be the only person on Idroa who you can’t win against.” He had long wavy hair and a full beard. Although he had a prominently hooked nose, Dahlia’s attention was wholly on the unabashed mania in his eyes. Unlike Zafeera, he was actually dressed for the cold in a fur coat, thick trousers, and beige boots.

“Yeah, listen to him, and watch it,” Dahlia warned with a sneer. “I can always squeeze some extra room in my stomach.” Although the fighting would definitely be tough, she knew she could take them on, if need be. If it was one by one, there would be no issue at all, but if they fought together, Dahlia knew they would be a tough pill to swallow. “Now I’m guessing you didn’t just randomly happen to wander by into this frozen wasteland.”

Kuraim nodded. “Now what would you say if I told you that our good friend Lucian’s had a grand old party, where he set the entirety of the human race against us?”

“When?” she asked, watching out of the corner of her eyes as Zafeera chucked Dimas’s head back to its corpse. This very corpse stood up and attached its head back on, just as Karaes’s corpse rose from the ground and ambled over.

“A few days ago. I heard about it a while back but hadn’t thought the whole thing possible. But some of my friends went anyway, and they returned to tell me it very much was possible, and that he really doesn’t like us.”

“And you didn’t try and stop this?”

“I’m not retarded,” Kuraim replied with a sudden toothy grin.

Dahlia hummed with a small nod. “That’s fair. He is a tough nut to chew.”

“So what would you say to what he did?” Kuraim asked again.

“Well, I’d say that’s not very friendly of him. That it would be a sweet idea if we retaliated by grouping together and snapping his head off. That should teach him some respect,” she answered.

“Spoken like a true number one,” Kuraim said.

Zafeera giggled beside him. “I thought you’d be dumb and all, but you caught on pretty quickly.”

Dahlia rolled her eyes, not taking offence yet. “I worked in a lab on Earth, you know.” Her eyes drifted to the distance, where she saw the lines of Kuraim’s horde converging on their spots, countless zombies and men and ghoulish beasts. Her belly rumbled, more by instinct than hunger. Her eyes bounced back to the Avatars’ corpses, which were standing at attention in front of Kuraim now. “And who were these freaks? Came to rip me a new one on purpose, I swear.”

Kuraim waved his hand dismissively, sneering at the dead Avatars. “Oh, just the leaders of a broken faction. Honestly a bit lacklustre, but it is always good fun marauding through their villages.”