Reyna watched the siege from the crest of a blackened ridge, arms folded, crimson eyes narrowed against the smoke.
Below her, Vaelor's Reach burned with beautiful precision.
Her forces moved like a well-oiled machine — Legion soldiers in tight ranks advancing under cover of cultist whispers, siege engines rolling forward on schedule, flames licking exactly where the models had predicted structural weakness. No wasted motion. No chaos. Just the clean, infernal efficiency she demanded.
She had a contract with Kragorak's forces. Enough souls harvested from the city and the pact that bound her would shatter. Freedom, at last. A simple transaction, really. Cities fell every season. This one should have been no different.
Yet the walls still held.
Longer than her models predicted. Longer than the last three cities she had broken.
Reyna's tail flicked once, the only outward sign of irritation. She hated when numbers lied.
A lieutenant approached, saluting with mechanical crispness. "Outer districts are falling on schedule, Huntress. The inner wards are proving… stubborn."
"Stubborn is a word for children," Reyna said, voice smooth as oiled steel. "Adjust the eastern flank. Push the cultists forward. Let them taste fear before the blades do."
The lieutenant bowed and vanished.
Reyna turned her gaze back to the city, cataloging every flicker of resistance, every delay, every unexpected pocket of defiance. She was already rewriting the next wave in her head when something new entered her operational theater.
A woman with living ribbons of pink and azure carved through the demon lines like they were an inconvenience.
The ribbons moved with alien grace — lashing, shielding, striking — while the woman herself fought like someone who had already decided the outcome. A small mossy gremlin rode her shoulder, thorns and imps exploding outward in perfect sync. The three of them moved as one creature, cutting a path straight toward the inner districts.
Reyna went very still.
The way all great hunters go still when they see something they have never seen before.
She didn't move. Didn't signal. Didn't even breathe louder.
She simply watched.
Cataloged.
The ribbons' color. The way they responded before the woman gave any visible command. The impossible coordination between host, symbiote, and creature. The way the demon ranks parted around them not out of fear, but because the trio refused to be slowed.
Reyna's lips curved into the smallest, sharpest smile.
New variable.
Unexpected.
Delicious.
She started planning before the woman had even cleared the third rank of Legion soldiers.
The contract had just become far more interesting.