Without stopping his march, he raised the arm with the Gauntlet while opening his palm toward the firmament.
The air changed.
A deep vibration shook the castle, but not like an earthquake; rather, an atrocious suction force was born in the center of his palm, creating a vortex that ignored physical matter to hunt something else.
Dracula's fortress responded to the call; shadows from everywhere began to stretch and twist.
The laments that had been trapped in the stone for generations ceased to be mute echoes to become a visible tide.
Diffuse specters and agonizing faces sprouted from the cracks and peeled off the crumbled walls.
They were the manifestation of rancor, a dark mist that shrieked without sound while being dragged violently toward its new owner.
Hundreds, thousands of currents of shadows converged in the air. Forming a torrential river of darkness and despair that spun in a spiral, flowing unstoppably until being devoured by the gauntlet.
"W-What is this...?"
The words died in Carl's throat, while he backed away until crashing against Adam's leg, unable to look away from the horror.
The cold he felt chilled him to the bone upon seeing what composed that dark river.
In the vortex of black energy that flowed like a tornado, human shapes could be distinguished.
Faces contorted by pain, mouths open in mute screams, and hands that seemed to seek salvation.
They were centuries of sin and suffering condensed.
A few meters away, among the debris of the fallen column, Dracula sat up with difficulty.
But his arrogant expression crumbled instantly.
He could feel it in his blood.
They were the souls with which he had played, the lives he had extinguished slowly for pleasure...
He felt how they were violently ripped from the foundations of their prison, not to be freed, but to be consumed and turned into fuel.
Gabriel stopped his advance.
The fire that occupied the place of his eyes flickered for the first time, breaking his absolute impassivity.
Dracula was a fallen angel, a stain he had to clean, but that man... that being who devoured souls with that voracity represented a much greater heresy.
However, Lief did not grant them even a second to act.
Emitting a bestial scream, his Gauntlet finally devoured all the souls inside it.
A dark energy, like black smoke but very dense, burst from his left arm and completely enveloped Lief's body.
A second later, his body arched under the pressure while the energy began to solidify, transmuting into solid.
And before the astonished gaze of everyone, armor began to materialize over Lief, piece by piece.
First the greaves closed over his legs, followed by resplendent silver cuisses. Then, the breastplate formed over his torso, a piece so polished that it reflected the chaos around him like a mirror.
The edges of each plate were reinforced with thick golden borders, engraved with filigree that suggested a forgotten royalty.
Over his shoulders fell heavy rounded pauldrons, also of silver and gold, that granted him an immovable silhouette.
From beneath them and falling from his waist, a heavy cloth of deep red unfolded, similar to blood, embroidered with golden threads that formed unknown patterns in the center.
And as soon as the Helm covered his face, the ensemble was completed.
The golden visor hid his expression, leaving only a facade of metallic coldness.
But his accessories also underwent transformations.
The edges of his wings began to burn with golden flames and the sword in his hand responded to the new majesty of its bearer.
Layer after layer of golden light superimposed themselves upon the blade, widening it and making it grow.
On the surface appeared unknown patterns of bright red color, flowing like lava, and on the guard, the steel twisted and expanded, opening like a pair of small angelic wings that protected the hilt.
"Ready."
Lief's voice resonated with a deep echo from inside the armor.
With a fluid movement of his wrist, he tested the weight of the colossal sword.
It was just as light as always and wherever the blade passed a trail of residual light accompanied it.
Satisfied, he raised his head and locked his gaze directly on Gabriel.
"Let's start with you."
A few meters away, Dracula felt ice invade his veins, while an animal impulse hit his chest.
His instincts screamed a single order in his mind.
Flee
At that moment he understood that the hierarchy had been broken.
Staying there a second longer meant definitive death.
Without hesitating a second longer, his body exploded violently.
His figure came undone, collapsing into a cloud of crimson mist that fragmented instantly into thousands of living forms.
An immense horde of bats, the color of blood, filled the space with a deafening fluttering.
Dispersing with desperation, going toward the four cardinal points at the same time to maximize his chances.
It was his last resort. It didn't matter how many were shot down or incinerated today, if just one of those thousands of bats managed to get lost in the darkness and get away from that damned castle, Dracula would be reborn again.
"..."
Maintaining his attention fixed on Gabriel, Lief simply, like someone crushing an unimportant insect, extended his open left hand toward the distance.
And quickly his fingers closed.
Boom
The cloud of bats, which already covered the sky like a crimson plague extending toward the horizon, stopped dead.
Then, a disgusting sound, amplified a thousand times, filled the silence.
It was the noise of thousands of tiny bones breaking in unison and flesh being compressed.
The sharp screeches of the horde were cut short when a reverse and brutal gravity dragged them backward.
The blood, the mist, and the bodies of the bats were sucked with violence toward a central point, crashing against each other into a mass of flesh that restructured itself by force.
Instantly Dracula materialized suddenly a few meters from Lief.
"N-No..."
His eyes widened immensely while the muscles of his neck tensed. He tried desperately to dissolve into mist again, tried to raise a hand... But it was useless.
Since he felt that the weight of an entire mountain loomed over his head.
The space around him had closed, becoming a narrow coffin that not only immobilized his body, but crushed his very existence, denying him any possibility of escape.
"Wait your turn."
With those words, Dracula's body was impacted by an even more terrifying pressure suddenly on his head.
Crack...
The ground beneath him did not hold.
Dracula smashed through the floor, demolishing everything with the violence of a drill and continuing his descent, until sinking into the very foundations of his castle.
He had been buried.
When the rumble ceased, only silence and a dark, bottomless crater remained.
"..."
Anna felt her legs fail her and had to cling to her brother's arm not to fall to her knees.
The three of them had dry throats and no longer looked at Lief as a savior.
"..."
Gabriel observed the abyss where the vampire had disappeared with absolute coldness.
Dracula's absence meant nothing.
A stain he would clean later.
But the man in front of him was different.
That armor was not simple metal; to his eyes, that mixture of silver, gold, and fire was a blasphemy, a mockery of the natural order that dared to imitate the glory of the heavens without divine permission.
"Heretic."
With his six wings spreading to their full extent, he raised his right hand above his head and the air around him began to ripple.
The light began to materialize in his palm and condense until forming a blinding spear.
With that in hand, he descended.
Swish
"Your judgment ends here."
With Lief's expression hardening in concentration and with his wings beating violently. He also shot out toward the sky.
Swish
Two opposing forces crossed the distance separating them in a fraction of a second.
"..."
There was no sound at the exact moment of contact.
The Master Sword and the Spear of Judgment met in mid-air.
First came the flash, a sphere of mute energy that devoured the color of the world, turning everything absolute white and soon a ringing in their eardrums.
________
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