The war continued without mercy beyond the hill.
Steel clashed against steel while fire and smoke rose endlessly into the burning night sky overhead, soldiers from both sides cutting each other down across the open plains below while the sounds of battle roared upward through the wind.
Belladonna stood at the crest of the hill alone, she watched. Her troops were falling.
Not retreating falling. Being cut down one by one across the field below while the kingdom forces pushed forward with everything they had left, the tide slowly turning in a direction she hadn't planned for.
Her expression didn't change.
"Pointless…" she muttered quietly, eyes still fixed on the battlefield below while cold wind pulled through her hair. "But I can already feel her moving."
Mentioning her sister was advancing. She didn't need to see it to know.
She could feel it.
Beside her stood another Project X, motionless and silent, guarding the containment shell behind them—a massive iron structure bolted shut from every side, large enough to dwarf the soldiers standing near it.
Whatever was inside had been throwing its weight against the walls since before the battle even started, the deep metallic crashes resonating through the ground with each impact.
Clank.
Clank.
Clank.
Belladonna turned her head slowly toward the Project X beside her.
Then she gave the signal with one slow nod.
The Project X moved immediately, pulling the massive door of the containment shell open with both hands while the iron hinges groaned beneath the weight of what they had been holding back this entire time.
Then silence for exactly one second.
Then the hydra emerged.
Three heads. Each one massive, serpentine, moving independently on long coiling necks that swayed slowly as the creature pulled itself out from inside the containment shell, its enormous scaled body uncoiling across the hilltop while cold eyes scanned the battlefield below with something older than hunger.
It was enormous.
The kind of enormous that made the soldiers nearest to it go quiet before they even understood why.
But size alone wasn't what made it dangerous.
Magical spite flowed visibly through the hydra's body—pulsing faintly beneath the scales like something burning from the inside, threading through every inch of the creature's cold-blooded frame in currents of dark energy that hadn't come from nature.
This thing hadn't been born. It had been captured and been enhanced by the substance.
Belladonna looked down at the battlefield one more time, the faintest trace of something crossing her expression before it disappeared again.
"Now…" she said quietly, almost to herself, watching as the hydra's three heads turned slowly toward the kingdom forces below.
"Let's see if they can stop this."
The hydra moved, Not charging—sliding. A slow, deliberate descent down the slope of the hill with her three heads swaying low to the ground, each one tracking independently while her massive coiled body followed behind her like a wave that hadn't broken yet.
She was hungry.
Not the kind of hunger that comes from missing a meal—something older than that. The kind that had been building inside a containment shell for however long Belladonna had kept her locked away, denied and compressed until it became something closer to rage.
And the magical spite flowing through her body was reacting to it.
Pulsing faster now. Darker beneath the scales with every movement she made down the hill, the energy feeding off her momentum while the ground trembled faintly beneath her weight.
On the battlefield below, someone noticed first.
Then another.
Then the screaming started.
"Watch out—!"
Too late, the first head struck before the warning even finished leaving his mouth, snapping down with enough force to lift a soldier clean off the ground before the second head swung sideways and took two more in a single motion—armor, weapon, and all.
Then the third head dropped.
And the hydra stopped being something soldiers were watching from a distance.
She was inside them now. Moving through the battlefield like the field itself had turned against both sides—kingdom forces and Pandemonium troops alike, the hydra making no distinction between the two while she tore through everything within reach.
There were no sides anymore.
Just her.
Atop the hill, Belladonna hadn't moved.
She stood exactly where she had been, watching the chaos unfolding across the battlefield below while the hydra's three heads continued working through the soldiers with mechanical patience, the screaming carrying upward through the wind toward where she stood.
The corners of her mouth curved slightly she was enjoying this.
Hydra hit the frontline like a collapsing wall.
Rook saw it from the moment she cleared the hill three heads sweeping independently through the formation while her body crushed everything underneath it, soldiers scattering in every direction as she moved deeper into the battlefield without slowing down once.
Beside him, Omen watched in silence.
Rook's grip tightened around his spear.
"Spartans." His voice cut through the chaos around them, steady and controlled. "Line up. Every spear you have on my command."
The Spartans responded immediately.
They pulled into formation without hesitation, locking position while the hydra continued advancing through the frontline ahead of them, each of her three heads working through the soldiers between her and them while the ground shook faintly beneath her weight.
She was getting closer.
"Hold…"
Rook tracked her movement. Waited.
"Hold—"
The hydra entered range.
"Now!"
Every spear left formation at the same moment, tearing through the air in a dense volley before striking across the hydra's body all at once some driving into the scales along her torso, others finding the necks, two hitting one of the heads directly.
And hydra barely reacted.
The spears that struck her body had pierced the outer scales but hadn't gone deep enough to matter. The ones that hit the head were worse they deflected clean off the surface like the skull beneath was something harder than bone, clattering uselessly against the ground below.
One Spartan stared.
"What the…"
Another beside him went quiet for a moment before the words finally came out low.
"Are we gonna die.."
Grimwatch hit the frontline at a dead sprint.
He saw the tail first one brutal sweeping motion that caught three soldiers mid-stride and sent them tumbling through the air like they weighed nothing, one of them hitting the ground at the wrong angle with a crack that carried over the entire noise of the battlefield.
He slowed to a stop.
Then the leftmost head dropped.
It came down fast—faster than something that size had any right to move and the soldier beneath it didn't even raise his weapon before the jaws closed.
The sound was brief and terrible. When the head rose back into position, it rose alone, the man below reduced to a collapsing mess of armor and guts spreading slowly across the broken ground.
Another head swung sideways and took a running soldier directly across the midsection.
The impact folded him completely before the teeth finished the rest, the upper half of the body hitting the dirt several feet from where the lower half had stopped moving, organs spilling dark and steaming into the cold air while nearby soldiers stumbled backward away from the sight.
Grimwatch didn't look away he needed to see all of it.
"How the hell did they get this…"
The magical spite moving through that creature was unlike anything he had felt before dense and wrong, pulsing visibly beneath her scales like something burning through her from the inside.
It wasn't natural energy. It had been forced into her.
Fed into every part of her cold-blooded body until whatever she had been originally was buried somewhere beneath it.
Then Elyndra pulled up beside him, chest heaving from the sprint, eyes already tracking the hydra's movement across what remained of the frontline.
The third head came down into a cluster of Vikings trying to regroup.
It didn't come back up empty.
Two men. One motion. The jaws worked briefly before the head lifted again, blood running freely down the length of the neck while the screaming around that section of the field dropped sharply in number.
Neither Grimwatch nor Elyndra spoke for a moment.
The Project X-002 they had been engaged with minutes ago was already gone withdrawn the instant the containment shell opened, pulling back alongside the elite enhanced Pandemonium soldiers who had been stationed across the field.
They hadn't run because the fight was going badly.
They had run because they knew exactly what was inside that shell and they had no intention of being anywhere near it when it came out.