The iron weight of her kanabō still rang from deflecting Xellos's shadow spear. Ryelle's muscles burned from the explosive propulsion that had carried her here just in time, silver fire still crackling along her limbs. Above them, the grey field hung like a diseased wound in the sky, blight spreading steadily.

Liselotte's crimson feathers had dulled to ash-pink where the grey field touched her. The Harpy Queen's transformation flickered, white bleeding through red in patches that spoke of power fighting dissolution.

"Took you long enough," Liselotte gasped, wings beating unevenly as she fought for altitude.

"Had to catch my breath." Ryelle's feet found purchase on nothing, silver fire erupting from her soles to hold her aloft. The technique still felt unnatural, like trying to balance on explosions, but it worked. "That grey field—"

"Entropy," Xellos said, rising before them. The greyness had contracted around him, a sphere perhaps twenty feet across that drained color from the world. "The end of all things. Even gods burn out, given time."

Ryelle studied the field's edge, watched how it moved with him. Not an aura but a consciously maintained effect. When he'd thrust with the spear, the field had wavered, pulled inward. Limited radius. Maybe limited duration.

"Together?" she asked Liselotte.

"Obviously."

They moved in opposite directions, forcing Xellos to choose his facing. Ryelle drove left, fire-bursts carrying her in sharp angles that made targeting difficult. Liselotte swept right, her greater experience showing in how she used minimal wing movements for maximum effect.

Xellos chose to focus on Ryelle. Shadow-blades manifested in a spread pattern, each one aimed where her trajectory would carry her. She twisted, using a concentrated burst from her left hand to spin her body clear. The blades passed close enough that she felt their chill through her scales.

Behind him, Liselotte struck.

Wind condensed into a spear of solid air, driving toward his spine. He started to turn, raising shadows to block, but Ryelle was already moving. Fire poured through her legs, accelerating her beyond her usual limits. Her kanabō blurred, silver fire trailing its passage in ghostly afterimages.

Before her attack could reach him, Xellos dissolved into darkness, reforming a short distance away. The entropy field flickered during the transition—not gone but diminished, its grey pallor fading to mere shadow.

"The field drops when he shadow-walks," Liselotte observed, circling high above. "He can't maintain both."

Information worth having. Ryelle adjusted her position, fire-bursts keeping her level with Xellos while her mind processed tactics. Force him to move. Make him choose between offense and that draining defense. Wear him down through attrition.

They came at him again, synchronized without need for words. Liselotte dove from above, talons extended, while Ryelle curved in from below. The angle meant he couldn't shadow-walk without taking at least one hit—dissolving meant choosing which attack to accept.

He chose a third option.

The entropy field pulsed outward, doubling in size. Liselotte shrieked as it caught her wings, crimson feathers going grey, then white, then beginning to crumble. She pulled up desperately, shedding dying feathers like snow. Ryelle managed to reverse thrust, fire-bursts driving her backward, but even the brief contact left frost forming on iron and fire burning low.

"Learned that trick from watching you," Xellos said. "Expand power at critical moments. Though I'll admit, the cost is... substantial."

Sweat beaded on his grey forehead. The field contracted again, returning to its original size, but something in his posture spoke of effort expended. Not limitless, then. Not without price.

Ryelle swept low, gathered heat within her chest. The dragon-breath that emerged was focused, compressed—a line of silver fire no thicker than her arm but hot enough to turn sand to glass. It struck the entropy field's edge and... pushed through. Not easily, not without cost. The fire dimmed, cooled, but maintained enough heat to force Xellos aside.

"Dragon flame carries life force," she said, understanding dawning. "Your entropy can drain it, but not instantly. Not completely."

"Clever." He raised walls of shadow, but she was already moving, fire-bursts carrying her in a spiral that made prediction impossible. "But cleverness won't save you when—"

Liselotte's wind-blade caught him mid-sentence, opening a gash across his ribs. He spun toward her, shadows lashing out, but the Harpy Queen had already climbed beyond easy reach. Blood—definitely blood now, not shadow—ran down his side.

They had his measure now. The entropy field was powerful but limited. Maintain distance. Force him to choose between defense and mobility. Wear him down with strikes from beyond his effective range.

For the next exchange, they did exactly that.

Ryelle's fire came in bursts—not the sustained streams that the field could drain but rapid pulses that struck and vanished before entropy could claim them fully. Each one forced him to shift position, to adjust his defenses. Meanwhile, Liselotte's winds attacked from every angle, invisible blades that gave no warning before they struck.

A pattern emerged. When Ryelle attacked, he'd focus the field forward, grey sphere distorting to cover his front arc. That left his rear vulnerable to Liselotte. When he spun to address her assault, Ryelle would already be repositioning, silver fire announcing her next angle of attack.

They carved him by degrees. A gash here from wind, a burn there from dragonfire. Nothing immediately fatal, but the accumulation told. His shadow-wings began to move out of sync. His counters came fractionally slower. The entropy field flickered between expansions, like a heart skipping beats.

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"Enough."

The word carried harmonics that made the air itself ring. Xellos spread his arms wide, shadows erupting from every surface within a hundred feet. Not attacks—summons.

Portals of darkness opened in the air around them. Bhutava emerged first, their stone-like flesh glistening with otherworldly moisture. Behind them came Shadaksha, six eyes each already glowing with eldritch power. A dozen demons materialized in seconds, arranged in a sphere formation that left no easy escape route.

"Now," Xellos commanded.

But the demons didn't attack. Instead, they screamed.

Shadows erupted from their bodies—not their own but threads of darkness that connected them to Xellos like umbilical cords. The Bhutava tried to flee, massive hands clawing at air as they were dragged toward their summoner. The Shadaksha's eldritch beams fired wild, painting purple lines across the sky as they fought the pull.

It didn't matter. The threads contracted, and demon flesh began to dissolve.

Ryelle had seen death before. Had dealt it today with fire and fist. But this was something else—consumption on a level that made her dragon nature recoil. The demons weren't just dying. They were being unmade, their essence drawn through those shadow-threads into Xellos's form.

His body convulsed as he absorbed them. Grey skin split along his arms, revealing something that wasn't muscle beneath but writhing darkness. His shadow-wings multiplied, four becoming six becoming eight, each one moving to its own alien rhythm. His height increased by half, bones cracking and reforming to accommodate the new mass.

A Bhutava's arm erupted from his shoulder, stone flesh merging seamlessly with divine grey. A Shadaksha's eyes opened along his ribs, six points of purple light that tracked independently. His face elongated, jaw unhinging to reveal rows of teeth better suited to a shark than a god.

"Better," he said, and his voice was a chorus of the consumed.

The entropy field exploded outward, no longer grey but shot through with veins of purple and black. Where it passed, reality itself seemed to fray. Space cracked like ice on a pond, revealing glimpses of an emptiness beyond mere shadow. That emptiness flowed toward Xellos, reinforcing his monstrous transformation.

Ryelle dove aside, fire-bursts barely keeping her ahead of the expanding death-sphere. Liselotte climbed hard, crimson wings beating against air that tried to forget how to hold her. The field pursued them both, patient as inevitability.

When it finally contracted, Xellos stood transformed. His body had become a blasphemy of merged flesh—demon and divine fused without harmony. The Bhutava arm growing from his shoulder flexed with stone-crushing strength. The Shadaksha eyes along his ribs swiveled independently, each one charging with eldritch power.

"Your coordination was admirable," he said, voices overlapping in harmonics that made Ryelle's teeth ache. "But I am no longer limited by a single body's constraints."

Purple beams erupted from the six eyes, each one tracking a different target. Ryelle threw herself into a dive, felt one beam sear across her shoulder. The wound went deeper than flesh—something in the eldritch energy tried to unmake her at a fundamental level. Only her divine nature kept it from spreading.

Liselotte wove between three beams, her transformed speed barely keeping ahead of their tracking. But Xellos was already moving, his new form showing no loss of agility despite its size. Shadow-blades manifested from multiple points on his body—hands, wings, even the Bhutava arm—creating a storm of cutting darkness.

They retreated, regrouped, tried again.

This time Ryelle led with wide-area attacks, dragon-breath sweeping in arcs meant to overwhelm. But the stone flesh of the Bhutava arm raised itself as a shield, absorbing silver fire that would have melted steel. When the flames cleared, the arm showed only minor charring.

"Demon resilience combined with divine regeneration," Xellos noted, shadow-wings carrying him forward with frightening speed. "Your fire needs to burn much hotter to matter now."

He proved it by walking through Liselotte's wind blades. They carved lines in his flesh that sealed almost instantly, divine nature repairing what demon endurance had already minimized. When Ryelle's kanabō struck his shoulder, the impact that should have shattered bone merely drove him back a few feet.

Worse, he was learning their patterns. The Shadaksha eyes gave him peripheral vision in all directions. The additional limbs let him attack and defend simultaneously. When they tried their coordinated strikes, he met both with equal force—shadow-spears intercepting Liselotte while the Bhutava arm caught Ryelle's weapon mid-swing.

The stone fingers crushed down on divine metal. Her kanabō groaned under the pressure. She channeled fire through the weapon, trying to make him release it, but he simply endured the heat.

"Inferior tool," he said, and squeezed.

The kanabō shattered.

Fragments of divine metal scattered like shrapnel. One piece opened a cut along her cheek. The majority simply fell, their purpose ended.

She stared at the broken haft in her hands. That weapon had been part of her identity, the weight that anchored her fighting style. Without it...

A wind blade from Liselotte forced Xellos to release her. She recovered, disengaged, and let dragonfire cauterize the bleeding edges of her wound.

"One down," Xellos said, turning those multiple eyes toward Liselotte. "Shall we make it two?"

He erupted upward, all eight wings beating in synchronization. The speed caught even Liselotte off-guard. She tried to climb away, but he was already there, the Bhutava arm sweeping toward her in a crushing arc.

She rolled aside, but not fast enough. Stone fingers caught her left wing-arm, crumpling flesh and bones like paper. Her scream cut through the air as she spun wildly, unable to maintain controlled flight with one wing crippled.

Ryelle moved without thinking. Fire burst from her feet, launching her toward the falling Harpy Queen. She caught Liselotte around the waist, using controlled bursts to slow their descent. But carrying another's weight made the technique almost impossible to manage. They tumbled more than flew, crashing through tree branches before hitting the ground in a shower of leaves and broken wood.

"Can you stand?" Ryelle asked, helping Liselotte upright.

"Can you fly?" Liselotte shot back, cradling her ruined wing. "Because he's coming."

Shadow fell across them as Xellos descended. The entropy field expanded again, grey death creeping across the forest floor. Trees withered to dust. Grass became memory. The very earth cracked and crumbled, as if time itself fast-forwarded to heat death.

"No more aerial games," he said, touching down nearby. "No more dancing in the sky. Just the three of us and the inevitable end."

Eldritch beams charged in those stolen eyes. Shadow coalesced around his multiple limbs. The entropy field pulsed, ready to surge forward and claim them both.

But even as Xellos prepared his killing strike, new portals opened behind him. Larger ones this time, promising greater demons. Bovikara began emerging—the four-armed commanders she'd faced earlier, their bull-heads turning toward their summoner.

"Ah," Xellos said, not even glancing back. "My reserves have arrived."

Shadow-threads burst from the Bovikara before they could fully materialize. Their roars of protest meant nothing as they began dissolving, pulled into Xellos's ever-growing mass. His form started to shift again, preparing to accommodate new power, new abilities.

Time to act, before he completed this next transformation.

"Keep him busy," Ryelle said, then charged toward the transforming god.

Not to attack—that would be suicidal. Instead, she dove between Xellos and his dissolving victims, silver fire erupting from her palms. But this time, the flames carried something more. Where they touched earth, vegetation exploded into violent growth. Thorns the length of sword blades burst from the ground. Vines thick as her arms whipped through the air, disrupting the shadow-threads.

For a moment.

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