The four friends rushed downstairs and entered the first room they found, armed and ready to draw blood, but they were greeted with tables surrounded by men and women. There were twenty Lupe clan members were sat eating a meal, odds not in favour of Cleo at all, but she did not care. She would kill as many as necessary until she found Law. The numbers did surprise Winoa, Jim and Louisa, but there was no retreat. Their fight was now for survival.
Without any warning, Cleo called out a sheet of roiling flame across the room, obscuring herself and her friends from the eyes of those she intended to kill. A moment behind Cleo, Winoa raised her arms and began warping the air into barbs and strips of razor wire invisible to the human eye, before whipping the wind in the room into movement. The weightless, invisible traps that she had created began spinning around the room at high speeds and quickly cut the two of the outer layer of people in the room into shreds but as the flaming wall of death closed in upon the Lupe troops, the more reactive of the survivors exuding copious amounts of uncontrolled mana in order to block off the assault.
Just as the Lupes began to form a stable response Jim’s eyes began to glow a royal purple and his crown flew out of his forehead, taking its rightful place on his head. He grinned widely and watched as a single Lupe in the middle of the crowd assembling shields of mana drew a blade and silently stabbed it into the back of her companion. He cried out as he fell and she grabbed his head, before dragging the blade across his throat and letting him crumple to the ground. The more the woman moved, the more visible an odd purple glow around her became, and soon enough it became obvious that there was something wrong with her. She screamed and began forcing as many people as she could through the constructed shields into the flames and barbed air. She pushed a second person, then a third, but as she reached for the fourth person the group convened and pinned her down.
Four of the group held back the waves of fire and wind that cut against them with their shields of solidified mana, slowly pushing the perimeter back and making their movement space bigger, until it finally had space for the fifteen able bodied people remaining to move around. Two people held down the girl that Jim had begun controlling and the remaining nine turned to face the four people in front of them. Arcane ripples began forming around their hands as they began forming bolts of pure force that they fired off at Cleo and her friends. The balls of pure mana ripped through the air and passed through the shields, leaving small holes in their defence, and bombarding against that the shield Cleo raised quickly in response.
The fire wrapped around the approaching balls of energy, eating away at them before three punched through the obscuring flames and narrowly missing Cleo, only to crash through the wall behind them. If any one of the balls of mana hit them they would not be slightly injured, and without the support of Law or Yun, the injuries would be far more serious than any of them would like. However all of this was not worrying Cleo, instead it was making her excited. It was a chance encounter after the twelve other nests they had invaded, but finally they seemed to have found something important. The place was held by a Heaven ranker at the door and had a sizable force within which was completely asymmetrical to every other Lupe hideout that they had stormed.
Cleo could feel she was reaching a boundary with her skills within this room. She was becoming more and more connected to the fire in front of her, fueling her rage which she in turn fueled with her mana to send probing strikes through the breaches made by the balls of mana in the shield wall. Even so, her wall of fire was still being pushed back and spread thin.
As the flame wall became thin enough to see through, Louisa leapt into the fray and smashed through the Lupe defensive screen wrapped in Winoa’s barbed winds. Her tiny fists like sledgehammers as she crushed the skull of a defending Lupe into meat paste. Another Lupe clansman was about to make a swing at Louisa’s back when he stopped suddenly, turned and screamed in terror at one of his team-mates. That same arcane purple glow appeared round him, placing him under Jim's command as he thrust his sword into the side of one of the people holding Jim's former victim down who in turn struck out with the side of her fist against the other person holding her down.
A second person swung down against Louisa as she attempted to exit through the shields, but the mana knife in his hands only bit into the flesh of the man with the purple glow around him, leaping away from some imaginary demon and into the unwelcoming arms of his former ally only to then slip and fall on one of the many puddles of fragmented flesh, blood, and brain matter that littered the area within Cleo’s flames.
Louisa finally made a break for it, back through the shields and into the arms of her waiting teammates. She smirked as she looked at the results of her hit and run tactics; within the flames the group of twenty had fallen to eleven able and trustworthy soldiers in mere moments. They were still outnumbered, but they were in a much more stable position than before.
In response to the mayhem Louisa had caused and the chaos that was taking place between the thirteen Lupe within the flames, Cleo decided to make sure they were in as dominant a position as possible. “I’m going to make a flame cyclone,” she yelled at Winoa. “Give me a hand!” With but a nod, both girls began forcing the flames round and round, faster and faster, until the air within the shields not only began to roast but also started to get sucked out of the middle of the cyclone. The Lupe men and women within the cyclone began losing breath, as the precious oxygen within was being either burned away or sucked away. They gasped and two tried to push through the flames in order to escape, but to no avail. They simply ended up as charred corpses on the other side.
With each passing second Cleo felt more in control of the flames that she and Winoa were manipulating. She was becoming far more efficient with her control of the element and so began taking more and more control of the spell, even though it was far too much for a single Saint ranker like her to take. This did not stop her from taking a greater burden, even if she knew she should not. Soon enough she took control of the flames entirely and severed her friend's connection to the spell in question. She could feel the fire within her, guiding her mana and her thoughts in control of the forces at work. She began to glow brighter and brighter amidst her friends and the group turned to look at her with worry. They knew that none of this should be happening.
Suddenly and without warning the flames that surrounded the Lupe and were starving them of oxygen went out entirely. The room went near silent as the Lupe all began gasping for the precious air that rushed into the void that Cleo had made and her friends looked on at something they had no comprehension of. A crackling sound like wood burning in a fire began to come from where Cleo stood, as still as a statue, before all of her joints split open and flames pushed out from under her skin. She opened her mouth as if to scream in horror but there were no vocal chords for her to scream with, only flames that poured out of her mouth like dragon breath. Moment after moment her body was taken over by flames, her copper hair replaced by curls of flame red, her eyes burnt away by coils of arcane conflagration, even her skin transmuted into arcane embers with veins of lava. She was becoming fire incarnate but all she could do was scream.
Everything was fading into brightness, but as she lost sight of the world around her she saw a hammer smash into the ground in the midst of the Lupe. A smile cracked through her broken mouth before all she could see, all she was, became the flame.
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