The dust choked the air on the left flank, dyed a deep, toxic violet by the constant eruptions of power coming from DOOMTAG.
The war of attrition had reached a boiling point. With the four-hour countdown ticking away silently in the back of every captain's mind, the operational squad knew they could not let up for even a fraction of a second. DOOMTAG's manic laugh echoed through the rocky trenches, her pink third eye pulsing in a rhythmic, unsettling cadence that threatened to snap the mental focus of anyone who looked directly at it.
"More! Give me more to break!" she shrieked, her voice twisting into a dual-toned howl as she lunged through the remaining smoke.
Her clawed hands, slick with dark residue, targeted Drakye Void first.
Having already tasted his blood, she sought to completely sever his arm from his shoulder. Drakye did not flinch. He thrust his uninjured arm forward, condensing the air instantly to build a thick, invisible shield of hardened air directly in the path of her trajectory.
*CLANG!*
The impact sounded like titanium hitting concrete. DOOMTAG's long claws scraped against the hardened air shield, leaving deep, white gouges in the compressed atmosphere but failing to breach the defense.
The shockwave rumbled through the ground floorboards, cracking the stones beneath Drakye's boots.
"Reid!" Drakye shouted, his teeth gritted against the physical strain of holding the barrier against her immense weight.
Reid Gideon Swallow materialized over Drakye's shoulder. He swung a low kick aimed at DOOMTAG's knee, modifying the force vectors upon contact to drive her leg straight downward into the bedrock. The sudden shift in orientation forced her posture to collapse, her knee shattering the stone as she sank into the earth.
DOOMTAG merely grinned wider, her psychotic resilience completely ignoring the physical damage to her joint. Using her pinned leg as a pivot point, she threw her entire torso forward, executing a vicious, fluid headbutt directly toward Reid's face.
Kylo dropped from the air above, his eyes wide as he perfectly replicated Reid's evoliths .
He intercepted the path of her skull, altering the forward momentum of her headbutt into a sharp downward angle. DOOMTAG's head crashed violently into the dirt, causing a miniature crater to erupt where she struck.
"Kissing the ground!" Shadow said with a dangerous smirk crossing he's face.
From the absolute darkness beneath DOOMTAG's collapsed form, Shadow unleashed a rapid sequence of shadow strikes.
Thick, solid spears of darkness erupted like a cage of black iron, impaling through her clothing and pinning her torso firmly against the broken stone terrain.
Dr. D moved in tandem with the shadow restraint. Raising both hands, he manipulated the atomic structures of the immediate area, shifting the molecular bonds of the air into an unstable, high-energy state.
A massive, white-hot firestorm exploded directly on top of her pinned body, the flames roaring over fifteen feet into the sky and turning the surrounding gravel into glowing orange magma.
The intense heat forced the captains to shield their eyes, but the respite was short-lived.
*BOOM!*
A violent wave of purple, corrupt energy shattered the firestorm from the inside out, scattering the atomic flames across the valley.
DOOMTAG rose from the melted stone, her hair flying wildly and her third eye bleeding a dark fluid as it unleashed a devastating wave of mental trauma.
The psychic pressure struck the squad simultaneously. Shadow and Dr. D dropped to one knee, their visions blurring as their minds fought off the suffocating despair.
DOOMTAG capitalized on their disorientation instantly. Slipped past the residual flames, she appeared directly in front of Kylo. Her clawed hand shot out like a whip, slashing across his chest. Kylo gasped as blood sprayed from the deep lacerations, his body being thrown backward across the rocks.
Before she could follow up and execute the vice-captain, Drakye Void intercepted her line of sight. He swung his arms in a wide arc, creating a curved shield of hardened air to protect Kylo's fallen form while simultaneously generating three distinct blocks of compressed air around DOOMTAG's head and torso.
"Get off him!" Drakye roared, slamming his hands together to contract the hardened air blocks inward to crush her.
DOOMTAG caught the invisible blocks of air with her bare hands, her dark residue burning against the compressed atmosphere. Her muscle fibers tore and healed in rapid succession as she physically pried the hardened air blocks apart, shattering them like glass.
She leapt into the air, spinning her body to deliver a high-velocity heel drop directly onto Drakye's shoulder shield.
The hardened air shield Drakye built cracked under the sheer force of her kick.
The force drove Drakye down to both knees, the stone floorboards splitting apart into deep fissures beneath him.
Reid closed the distance from the side, attacking doomtag.
DOOMTAG launched a barrage of rapid- claw strikes, each one aiming for vital arteries. Reid moved his hands in a blur, his evoliths deflecting the tips of her fingers mere millimeters away from his skin, redirecting her slashes into the air around them, creating deep atmospheric lacerations that whistled through the canyon.
Kylo, pushing through the pain of his chest wounds, forced himself back up. He focused entirely on Reid's movements, copying he's evoliths to assist in the defense.
Together, the captain and vice-captain functioned like a dual-geared machine, meeting every single one of DOOMTAG's psychotic, erratic strikes with absolute mathematical precision, neutralizing her kinetic output before it could touch their flesh.
"Shadow! Dr. D! Clear the path!" Reid commanded, his forearms bruising from the constant deflections.
Shadow cleared his mind of the psychic trauma, his eyes turning entirely black.
He dove into the shadows on the floor, reappearing directly behind DOOMTAG. He didn't use tendrils this time; instead, he encased his own arms in dense shadow constructs, turning his fists into massive bludgeons.
Shadow delivered a brutal double-axe handle to the back of DOOMTAG's neck, forcing her to stumble forward into Reid's waiting strike.
Reid channeled all his energy into a single point, executing a vector inversion punch directly into the center of her chest. The impact took the entire momentum of her forward stumble and multiplied it inward, fracturing her sternum.
DOOMTAG coughed up a spray of blood, but as she fell forward, her psychotic grin never faded.
She grabbed Reid's jacket with her clawed fingers, dragging him down with her as her third eye flashed a blinding pink light at point-blank range.
"CaptainDrakye, shield!" Kylo screamed, throwing himself forward to break her grip.
Drakye Void created and expanded his hardened air shield into a massive dome that enveloped Reid and Kylo just as DOOMTAG exploded in a self-destructive blast of purple energy. The shockwave rattled the entire left side of the valley, leaving the five fighters standing in a smoking wasteland, their breaths ragged, locking DOOMTAG into an unrelenting, brutal war w
here there was absolutely no turning back.