Standing on top of this pyramid was Elandriel, who, I was pleased to see, was still crippled and missing the limbs I’d lopped off his body. Intense crimson light shone from his upraised hand. It seemed that he was the source of the great column of red light that was blasting up into the sky and turning it red.
He hadn’t noticed my presence, so I cocked my wrist crossbow and took aim at him. If a single shot could end this war, I figured I may as well try. I loosed the bolt, and it zipped through the air and slammed into his neck. He gasped and staggered forward, and the flow of red light was cut off.
“Elandriel, you sick fuck,” I said, “this ends now.” I blasted out my entire supply of bolts into him, riddling his feeble body with them.
He fell to the ground, writhing in agony and shouting out in pain, but it didn’t take him long to shake off the Tree magic and get back onto his feet.
“Did you honestly think those puny trinkets could stop us?” he roared, and the voice that came out of that feeble, wrinkled body was like the combined shout of ten thousand northern barbarian berserkers. “God of Nothing, welcome to hell! First, we will destroy you. Then we will destroy … everything!”
“Not if I can help it, you piece of shit.” I raised both my arms like a puppetmaster and cast the spell that would mass-resurrect the thousands of corpses into a Death Titan.
As Elandriel started chanting his own spell, the corpses twitched and jerked and convulsed as Death energy filled them with fresh life. Then they started piling on top of each other, like iron filings drawn to a massive lodestone, and forming a titan twice the size of the one I’d used to defeat the Warlock.
While it was forming, I rocketed my spirit off the Black Plane and pulled out all of the energy I could from the Gray Sentinel. This titan would not only be twice as large as the one I’d defeated the Warlock with, it would be four times as strong.
“You are too late, you ignorant little fool!” Elandriel hissed when he finished his incantations. “Behold, the terrible majesty of the Blood God taken physical form in this realm once more, after millennia!”
All of the blood coating the sides of the inner pyramid began to run upward, first coating Elandriel’s pathetic, wrinkled body. Then, as the red light began to intensify, he grew and swelled, ballooning in size. Additional limbs began sprouting from the grotesque blood form he was becoming. Three new, horrendously ugly heads began to emerge from his torso. Every second he doubled in size. Before long this foul creature of blood would be bigger even than my Death Titan.
Below him, the two fully formed Demogorgons stepped out of the vats of blood. They were massive red demons with powerfully muscular bodies covered in red scales, grotesque horned heads, and glowing red eyes.
“Kill the God of Nothing!” Elandriel—who was now the Blood God incarnate—roared at the Demogorgons. “Then lay waste to all around you! Now is the dawn of the Blood Age!”
My Death Titan was now fully formed, towering over the two Demogorgons. I jumped across the gap into my creation’s head, feeling a jolt of power as my doppelganger’s body and my spirit merged with the Titan’s form. I filled the Titan’s fists with furious power, creating Death Fists the size of wine wagons. If I could vaporize a Blood Demon with one punch from a human-sized Death Fist, I figured I could do some damage to the Demogorgons with Death Titan-sized fists.
The two monstrosities blasted supercharged Blood Lightning at me, but I punched both veins of lightning with my Death Fists. The impact of the immense Blood power colliding with the Death power caused an explosion so enormous that it blew out one exterior wall of the Blood Pyramid. Thousands of house-sized red boulders flew hundreds of feet through the air to come crashing down on the Blood Army, squashing and popping hundreds of Blood Demons at once.
My Death Titan stood head and shoulders above the Demogorgons, but they were almost as powerful as my titan, and there were two of them, in addition to the Blood Titan form the Blood God was taking. The best I could hope to do here was delay them long enough to get the dragon resurrected, and maybe kill one before the three destroyed my Death Titan.
“Let’s dance, motherfuckers,” I growled, then charged the two Demogorgons with my Death Fists swinging.
I decided it would be best to focus the entire force of my attack on just one Demogorgon, because then I could at least be sure that I’d take one out completely, rather than just injuring both of them before my Death Titan got destroyed. I charged the nearest one, ignoring the blast of red lightning the farther one rocketed into me, which blew a huge hole right through the torso of my titan, and started laying into the beast with my fists. I pummelled it with furious blows, each Death Fist punch packing enough force to level a castle. The Blood God, who was not yet fully formed, screamed out a wall-shaking bellow of fury as he witnessed the destruction I was visiting on his creation.
Behind me, the other Demogorgon roared and pounced on my titan from behind, tearing chunks of my titan body out with its massive clawed hand. My focus, however, was on the Demogorgon in front of me. I didn’t care that I was being ripped apart by the other one. I felt my titan’s right leg being ripped off, but I carried on punching, slamming my Death Titan fists
