“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you; I’ll kill you; I’ll KILL YOU!” Monarkea screamed as she smashed her possessed father’s head into the ground, again and again, seemingly unaware that his whole head was now small enough to fit inside her clawed fist. She ripped Vyviir from where he lay and yeeted him across the terrain, and the flew with such speed and force that when he eventually impacted the ground her rebounded off of it and spun about like an empty can of cola putted by a sledgehammer.

“Rrrr…” Vyviir groaned as he finally righted himself in the air and landed with a backward skid on the ground, his claws trying desperately to grip the terrain that inertia was pushing him through. His wings unfurled and he used the increased area to slow his movement further, only for him to look up and see a massive wall of fire rushing towards him.

The plume of dragonfire reached him before he could even get fully off the ground and, like a blast from a high-yield explosive infused with pure elemental fire, it sent him tumbling across the ground again as the percussive force and incredible heat forced him away by the impact alone. Still, the fire washed over him as the wave finished forcing him against a large rock formation, up until the formation itself melted away and drenched the former tyrant in molten rock.

“I am a GOD!” Vyviir roared as he struggled to stand up straight as a series of meteors added to the weight placed upon him. “And I will NOT be bullied by my own rebellious daughte-!”

Before he could finish he was yanked by his tail and thrashed about like a flail as his heir and successor roared in blind fury before then tossing her increasingly smaller father away and through one of the few surviving settlements not inhabited solely by draconids.

As he righted himself again and shook off the debris, Vyviir found himself coughing as the dust and detritus filled his immediate vicinity. He was barely able to wipe the irritants from his eyes before a massive clawed foot slammed his head into the ground before doing so over and over again.

“GOD?!” roared the near incoherent Monarkea. “I SEE NO GOD HERE BUT LORD VAILE, AND YOU KILLED HIM YOU TRAITOR!”

Vyviir found his unusual calm replaced with a growing sense of fear, and he finally began to use the power that was stuck inside his head. Slithering out of the rock embedded into his forehead and down through his nerves, muscles, and bones, the unnatural power began to twist him in ways that he could not help but feel were.. off.

His strength began to return, and his wounds began to heal, but the damage being heaped upon him either kept pace with or simply exceeded what he was capable of doing to repair and empower himself, and each blow that he managed to land was about as effective as that of a three-year-old human trying to out-box and professional heavyweight boxer during the peak of his career. All the while, Monarkea kept getting stronger and kept upping the damage she was inflicting, utterly heedless of the collateral damage that was being inflicted on the surrounding environment.

Vyviir, or rather, the will manipulating him that could not easily remove itself from him, was beginning to panic and tried to think of any possible way to avoid certain doom. If it fell in its totality, then the great plan to end this damn system would suffer a serious setback, if not a dangerous blow that it could not recover from.

Already the Wardens had lost more than a handful of assets and parts of themselves that could not easily be replaced, and as such, if it was lost, then the Wardens would have lost another valuable piece of themselves, putting the planned destruction of everything here on hold until a suitable repair could be done. That could not, and would not, be allowed to happen.

It just needed an opening. It just needed a way to take the virus’ attention away from the fight and give it an opportunity to jump ship and turn the current enemy into its new host.

Then, out of the corner of its vessel’s eyes, it spotted it.

“Wait! Daughter! That fool yet lives!”

This was met by a pair of claws wrenching open the host’s mouth and a gout of raw magic being forced down the host’s through like some kind of twisted mockery of CPR before the host’s jaws were forced shut and used as the handle for another bit of full-body flailing. After being pummeled for a bit longer by the irate dragoness, the rock in Vyviir’s head made him try one more time, raising a claw in desperation to point at the place and the person it had tried to erase.

“He…. Lives…”

Monarkea growled and looked aside for a brief moment before she realized that her father, or what was left of him, told the truth.

“My Lord….” She mumbled as sanity and rationality returned to her formerly near-berserk mind.

This was just what the glitch-rock needed, and it used its power to shoot itself off on Vyviir’s head and towards Monarkea’s. It grew closer and closer, nearly about to make contact and attempt to burrow deep into her head so that nothing could ever hope to remove it without killing such a valuable asset, but it was stopped as a scaled fist formed around it and held it in a weak but firm grip.

“As if I’d let an abomination such as you ever dare to taint my daughter with your filthy presence!” roared a weakened but now mentally unshackled Vyviir. “Know your place, you damn Wardens! Know that you can never hope to stop what is coming! The world you protect will be ours, and therefore, it will belong to our Lord!”

Monarkea immediately turned her head at these words and saw the brilliant light emanating from inside her father’s right fist. She backed away, thinking this could be one last desperate attack, but Vyviir surprised her by using his left hand to rip his right forearm off and toss the limb and the rock inside it up into the higher reaches of the atmosphere.

“Take your Vaile-damned piss-rock back, you inferior beings!” the now one-armed Vyviir yelled in delight as the rock exploded and took his arm with it, providing a brilliant bit of fireworks that would make Hiroshima look tame by comparison.

“Father…?” Monarkea asked, half dreading the resulting answer.

“Yes, yes, my dear daughter, I’m back.” Vyviir laughed as his right limb grew back and the old dragon’s seemingly insignificant power and size ceased to be the current state. The resulting explosion of power and the increased size/ mass of Vyviir knocked Monarkea away, but she righted herself and realized that her father was not merely back to the state he was in days ago, but at the absolute peak of his power as if he had never entered his decline in the first place all those centuries ago.

“Are you…?”

“Yes.” Chuckled Vyviir as he stretched and loosened his body up. “Vaile preserve me for my slip up back then. I honestly had no idea that the rock that I’d found would be one of those bastards in disguise. Still, you should be proud that your old man fought against that damnable agent of the Wardens for as long and as hard as he did, right?”

“And yet, you tried to-.”

“And yet, I failed, partially thanks to my own small influence remaining. Now, let’s go and see if we can stop the extinction of all draconids, shall we?”

“Yes, we-.” Monarkea paused mid-sentence. “Wait, what?!”