The weeks slipped by quickly. Between helping the mortals stockpile resources, moving his denizens into position, and holding meetings with every person of authority in the area, Matthias had little time to himself. He did not balk or complain. Instead, he led by example—lending a hand where needed or delegating tasks to ensure that everyone was as comfortable as possible with what was coming.
Time flew by in a flurry of activity, and then the dark shapes appeared on the horizon.
The southern forces arrived first. It was a veritable tide of flesh, claws, fangs, fur, and chitin. The ground trembled beneath the synchronized thunder of countless feet. The sound was not merely heard—it was felt, a constant vibration that crawled up through the soil and into bone. The air grew thick with the musk of wet fur, sulfurous breath, blood-slick iron, and the sour rot of creatures that had never known cleanliness. There were too many different kinds of monsters for any single one to stand out amid the mass. Limbs overlapped. Wings tangled. Horns jutted at jagged angles like a moving forest of bone.
Above them, dragons kept pace, their wings beating in heavy, rhythmic pulses that churned the already unstable sky. Each downstroke displaced sheets of rain before it even began.
Matthias’ influence had long since expanded far beyond the forest most attributed to him. The land his enemies now surged across was not dense woodland, but open, rolling hills. Grass flattened in waves ahead of the tide. Small animals fled in blind panic, burrowing or sprinting for shelter. In their frenzy, the invaders hardly noticed the faint tingle at the backs of their minds—a subtle pressure like unseen eyes watching from beneath the earth. They did not heed the warning that they were walking into the jaws of a predator.
The skies above churned violently now, clouds twisting into slow spirals. The scent of ozone sharpened. With a bone-deep crack of thunder, the heavens split open.
Rain did not fall—it crashed. A sudden, suffocating deluge that blurred sightlines into gray smears and reduced the battlefield to shapes and motion. Sound became distorted beneath the roar of water striking armor, hide, scale, and soil.
Shapes burst from the clouds above, silent as graves as they slammed into draconic wings. Wyverns and manticores tore into webbing and muscle, shrieks swallowed by the storm. Dragons spiraled downward, massive bodies striking the earth with impacts that sent mud and blood spraying outward in red-brown geysers. The rain quickly turned pink, then crimson, rivulets of diluted blood running downhill between trampling feet.
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As blood soaked into the soil, the earth responded.
The ground split with a wet tearing sound. Insects the size of siege engines erupted upward. Chitin scraped against stone. Mandibles snapped like bear traps. The air filled with the dry, grinding hiss of exoskeleton grinding against exoskeleton as they fell upon the unsuspecting tide.
To the west, the Devourer charged—a living avalanche of hunger. Its roar struck like artillery, concussive and disorienting. When it cleared the rain between itself and a dragon, the sudden silence in that corridor was almost obscene. The dragon’s answering scream was cut short as it crashed.
The Devourer’s landing shattered bone like brittle timber. Flesh tore. Steam rose from hot blood meeting cold rain.
Yet still the enemy came.
They climbed over their own dead without hesitation. They slipped in gore and regained their footing. They were too many. Too mindless. Too driven by whatever distant will had loosed them upon this land.
And to the north, Matthias finally moved.
He inhaled.
The air rushed toward him in a gale as his body began to swell. Stone rippled beneath his skin as if mountains were shifting under flesh. Vines burst outward, thick as ship masts, wrapping and braiding around limbs that lengthened and thickened with every heartbeat. The sound of his transformation was not a roar but a tectonic groan—the grinding of continental plates forced into sudden motion.
He dropped to all fours, and the impact of his weight alone sent visible shockwaves through the rain. His spine arched and broadened, vertebrae stacking like cliffs rising from the earth. Soil and rock fused seamlessly into his hide. Roots punched downward from his forming mass, ripping through bedrock and anchoring him even as he walked.
On his back, saplings erupted into towering trees in seconds. Bark split and expanded. Leaves unfurled in explosive bursts of green despite the storm. An entire forest rose upon him, swaying with each step, lightning flashing between branches as though the sky itself had mistaken him for a mountain range.
He grew until each pillar-like leg dwarfed the Primeval Hydra in girth. Seven immense necks coiled upward, thorn-choked and writhing. The heads that crowned them were monstrous blooms of predatory plant and serpentine hunger. Petals flared like war banners. Purple miasma leaked from between layered teeth, thick and luminous.
His shadow stretched for miles, warping beneath sheets of rain.
He did not merely loom—he imposed.
The enemy line faltered. Creatures that had known nothing but forward motion slowed. The sensation pressing against their minds intensified, no longer a tingle but a suffocating presence. It felt like standing before a mountain that had decided to breathe.
Matthias roared.
The sound was not singular—it was layered. Seven voices, seven pitches, harmonizing into something that vibrated in the marrow. The clouds ruptured. The rain turned violet as toxin infused every droplet. The storm itself became an extension of him.
The poison was cloyingly sweet. Addictive. It made wounds feel euphoric. It turned pain into bliss even as necrosis spread quietly beneath the surface.
He had prepared antidotes for his own.
But for this tide?
This absurd, reckless flood of bodies?
He intended to feast.
The Vital Hydra stepped forward.
And the world shook.
