The residual purple haze from DOOMTAG's self-destructive blast hung thick over the left flank, turning the shattered trenches into a suffocating wasteland. Inside the massive dome of hardened air, Drakye Void dropped his hands, his breath coming in heavy, jagged gasps as the invisible barrier dissolved back into the atmosphere.
Reid Gideon Swallow and Kylo stood beside him, their boots sinking slightly into the freshly cooked, cooling magma beneath them.
Through the thinning smoke, a low, guttural snicker broke the silence.
DOOMTAG was standing. The explosion had torn through her own flesh, exposing patches of tissue beneath her skin, but the wounds, where healing itself.
physical frame back together with sickening speed. Her pitch-black hair flew wildly, and her pink third eye dilated, pulsing with a manic, unhinged light that seemed to draw the very color out of the surrounding air.
"Is that all? Is that all the humans can do?!" she screamed, her voice splitting into a screeching chorus.
She exploded forward, her speed breaking the acoustic boundary without a sound.
She was directly in front of Reid in a microsecond, her clawed fingers aiming to tear his windpipe out. Reid didn't back down. He met her charge head-on, stepping into her guard and using a swift deflection to redirect the vector of her right claw upward, forcing her arm to swing harmlessly into the sky.
But DOOMTAG anticipated it. She used the upward momentum to flip her entire body, driving her opposite heel downward in a devastating axe kick targeted straight for Reid's skull. Kylo, tracking the movement perfectly, copied Reid's evoliths instantly, He thrust his palms upward, catching the kinetic energy of her heel and refracting the force horizontally.
The impact sent a massive shockwave tearing across the valley, blowing away the remaining dust, but DOOMTAG used the sideways refraction to twist mid-air, bringing her elbow down hard against Kylo's jaw.
Kylo stumbled back, spitting blood, but Drakye Void was already moving. Drakye stepped into the gap, executing a fluid martial arts sequence. He fired a rapid succession of palm strikes, each one accompanied by a localized burst of compressed air that hit DOOMTAG like a series of invisible iron pistons.
He drove her back three steps, then instantly shifted his posture, hardening a solid wall of air right behind her shoulder blades to trap her in place.
"Now, Shadow!" Drakye roared.
Shadow rose seamlessly from the dark patch of earth directly beneath DOOMTAG's feet. He didn't hesitate, wrapping his arms around her waist from behind in a tight suplex grip, utilizing his shadow manipulation to heavily anchor his own weight directly into the mantle of the valley.
He lifted her off her feet, crashing her spine-first into the stone floorboards with a brutal backdrop suplex.
The bedrock shattered completely from the impact, but DOOMTAG's hand shot backward, her clawed fingers burying deep into Shadow's shoulder blade. She hissed, ignoring the damage to her spine, and began pulling him closer to her face, her third eye pulsing a blinding pink light at point-blank range to crush his mind.
"Get away from him!" Dr. D shouted.
Dr. D lunged forward, his hands crackling with energy.
He targeted the precise space between Shadow and DOOMTAG, destabilizing the atomic bonds of the ambient air to trigger a concentrated, explosion. The pinpoint blast tore DOOMTAG's grip away from Shadow, launching her skidding across the gravel while Shadow dissolved back into the darkness to escape the heat.
DOOMTAG flipped herself upright, her long claws digging into the stone to halt her momentum. Her manic, psychotic grin grew impossibly wider.
She slammed both hands into the earth, forcing her corrupt purple energy to travel through the fissures of the valley floorboards.
"Earthquake of Ruin!" she shrieked.
The ground beneath the captains erupted. Spikes of jagged, corrupted stone laced with dark residue shot upward like an organic forest of blades. Drakye Void jumped into the air, instantly generating flat platforms of hardened air beneath his boots to walk above the hazard. He ran across the invisible steps, appearing above DOOMTAG and dropping a massive, heavy dome of compressed air directly over her head to pin her down.
DOOMTAG roared, her muscles swelling as she threw her hands upward to catch the crushing weight of Drakye's invisible dome. The stones beneath her feet sank three feet into the dirt from the pure downward gravity of his air manipulation.
Reid Gideon Swallow sprinted across the rocky spires, utilizing the platforms Drakye left behind.
He leaped off the final edge, his fist chambered back. As he dropped toward the trapped goddess, he applied a massive vector multiplication to his own body weight, turning himself into a human meteor.
" Inversion: Star Drop!" Reid commanded.
His fist connected squarely with the top of DOOMTAG's skull. The compressed air dome Drakye maintained shattered from the sheer force of Reid's strike, and the combined force drove DOOMTAG entirely through the crust of the valley, buried deep within a newly formed crater.
The captains didn't pause to celebrate. They knew her resilience was boundless.
True to their fears, the earth trembled.
A fountain of purple energy blasted out from the hole, forcing Reid to alter his personal vectors to launch himself safely backward into the air. DOOMTAG rocketed out of the pit, her face covered in blood, but her movements faster than ever before. She bypassed Reid entirely, recognizing Dr. D as the source of the molecular disruptions.
She appeared right in front of Dr. D, her clawed hand moving in a vertical execution slash.
Dr. D threw his arms up in a desperate cross-block, but her pure destruction strength was overwhelming. Her claws cut through his defensive aura, slicing deep into his forearms and sending him crashing into a nearby boulder.
"Dr. D!" Kylo yelled.
Kylo charged, his mind racing as he scanned the battlefield. Realizing they needed more raw physical stopping power, Kylo focused entirely on Drakye's movements, copying the air hardening ability. Kylo thrust his hands forward, creating a solid lance of hardened air that shot toward DOOMTAG's chest.
DOOMTAG sidestepped the lance with a manic laugh, but Kylo instantly shattered the air lance into a shockwave, using the expanding air pressure to disorient her.
Shadow capitalized on the split-second blind spot, manifesting right behind her and delivering a fierce, shadow-enhanced roundhouse kick straight to her ribs.
The sound of cracking bone echoed through the canyon, but DOOMTAG simply caught Shadow's leg on the rebound, her eyes flashing with pure malice.
She swung Shadow like a ragdoll, smashing his body directly into Kylo, sending both of them tumbling across the jagged stones.
Drakye Void dropped from the sky, his teeth clenched as He hardened the very air around DOOMTAG's limbs into tight, restrictive gauntlets, locking her arms and legs in a vice-like grip of absolute atmospheric pressure.
"Reid, finish this !" Drakye screamed, his nose bleeding from the cognitive strain of holding DOOMTAG.
Reid Gideon Swallow closed the distance in a flash. He didn't just aim a simple punch; he grabbed DOOMTAG by her shoulders, locking his fingers into her clothes. He focused his mind entirely on her internal biology, targeting the vector flow of her own blood circulation and kinetic energy.
"Full Reversal," Reid muttered, his eyes narrowing.
In an instant, every internal vector inside DOOMTAG's body reversed directions. Her blood flow, her muscular contraction, and her flowing purple energy clashed violently against themselves. Her eyes widened in genuine shock as her internal systems ruptured, a massive spray of dark blood erupting from her mouth as her posture collapsed forward.
The five fighters stood in a tight perimeter around her kneeling, broken form, their chests heaving as the cold wind whistled through the destroyed valley. The 4-hour countdown was still ticking, and they had given absolutely everything they had to bring the first child of Malkor to her knees.