The Dragon King's Servant: Rise of the Daemon King

Chapter Fifty-Five: Sorrowful Rage

Maalceus stared at his wife's decapitated dragon form. Her scaly body was slumped off to the side, bright red and yellow blood oozed out from the wound. Her draconic head with its eyes rolled back, lay motionless a few yards away. While Maalceus normally retained his emotions, keeping them reserved and level. Seeing his partner, love and mother of his children dead on the street broke the dam of his control. Every ounce of emotion rushed to the surface like a geyser.

The sword in his hand vanished into a rush of flames that caught onto his smoking body. In a plume of red and gray, his body burst from humanoid into daemonic dragon. Gray scales with glowing embers fumed with smoke and fire. A line of pure daemon fire burned along his back all the way down his tail. Maalceus' one hundred and fifty foot dragon form pushed at the broken buildings. His tail swept away the rubble and the broken bodies.

The pure heat of his aura set the stones and everything around them on fire. His citrine eyes blazed with intense heat that could have caused water to catch on fire. Bedelia stared up at him with a look of surprise. She hadn't anticipated the son of her brother to be able to take such a massive form. The surprise she felt wasn't enough to sway her decision though. She wanted revenge and he was going to be the instrument that gave her that revenge.

"You are not the only one who can shift." She shouted and reached into herself, pulling at her daemonic essence. Her body brightened as the flames intensified. From a bright red to a bright yellow. Like Maalceus, her entire erupted into a volcanic eruption of fire and magmatic energy. The flames reconfigured themselves as they grew. Her body elongated from nine feet to twenty. Then twenty to sixty.

*****

The two pure blooded daemons froze over. Their bodies growing darker as the fires inside went out. Without the ambient burn of the hellish environment they normally lived in feeding them, their ability to recover was dampened. While her ice continued to melt against their bodies, she layered it on until the daemons were encased in several feet of ice. Lucian watched from above, keeping an eye on any movement. Just as Melanie finished, he felt a massive pulse of power. Divine power. Melanie shifted her gaze and flew up to meet him.

'What is that?' She asked, sensing the energy.
'Divinity.' Lucian replied. 'I must meet it.'
An icy fear took Melanie and she wanted to beg him not to. She knew better though.
Especially since he had asked her to not fight in this war and yet she still did. She swung her head to the side and looked out over the city. Her draconic eye widened and the slender pupil narrowed as she used her natural telescopic sight. She saw the daemon army that was running through the city. The turned elves moved like a trickling river of red, yellow and black.

*****

Maaltaire's usually calm demeanor shattered like glass dropped from a roof top. The pieces scattered into a billion shards that could not be pieced together.
Aarush and Enya, having been put on their heels, took the moment of stillness to their advantage. Aarush dove forward, aiming to cleave Maaltaire in two. Enya fueled her daemon fire into a spear of pure flames. Neither one was prepared for the power of their target's rage.

Maaltaire's body stiffened. Every muscle and fiber of his being tensed and then he vanished for a brief moment. Aarush, so intent on hitting his enemy, did not see Maaltaire move. Fully committed to the death dealing strike, Aarush had no means of defense as Maaltaire's curved sword sliced through his arm, over his neck and across his side. Aarush barely felt anything before he hit the ground. Magmatic blood flooded the stony ground melting it's hard surface.

The daemon choked and gurgled, fully expecting his body to recover on its own. When the wounds didn't heal, true fear gripped him. Aarush tried to move, tried to gain some hold upon the situation. He failed. Maaltaire watched as the flames burning over his enemy's body extinguished and the embers along his skin went out. Enya watched her brother fall to the mixed breed.

With eyes wide and mind scrambling to understand why, she suddenly felt a sense of mortality. 'Why? We are pure. We are beyond mortal!' She thought, looking from Aarush's corpse and Maaltaire who was advancing now.

"Fuck you!" She screamed and palm thrust the spear forward.

Maaltaire side stepped with fast and cool decisive motion that made his body look like a blur. The spear of fire flew into the city where it struck a dilapidated building causing the last retaining wall to break. The twenty foot tall structure collapsed to the ground. Maaltaire paid it no mind as he stepped forward and launched ahead. Enya, sword in her hand, met her opponent. Her flaming weapon lit up with sparks as fire and metal clashed.

*****

So consumed by the thought of her mother, Shauna didn't think twice about leaving Nuri. As she turned around, ready to leap into the air; Nuri jumped out. With a rolling sweeping horizontal strike, her blade but deep into Shauna's ankle. The blue fires burned away at her scales and tore into the tissue. Shauna roared in pain and rage before turned back around and snapping her jaws down on Nuri's arms. Nuri shrieked and flailed about to no avail.

Shauna easily lifted Nuri up and without so much as a heartbeat of hesitation, she stepped down on Nuri pinning her to the ground. Then, she pulled. Nuri screamed out in pain as her arms were ripped free. Magmatic blood surged from the open sockets, melting the ground.