The three vertical eyes within the portal bzed with a cold, ethereal fire, a idesce that promised only oblivion, as Grimm tinued his relentless assault on the Ly horde. The once-pale stone ground, now transformed into a grotesque crimson vas, was slick with the blood of the sughtered beasts and their monstrous, re-mutated corpses. I souls, freed from their bestial prisons only to be cast adrift into the abyssal unknown, were unwittingly offered as fuel to Mikkelson’s dark design by the berserker’s rage. And Watters and Daniels stood frozen in helpless horror, witnessing Mikkelson’s brutal orchestra swell towards its horrifying cresdo, a symphony of suffering ducted by a madmaio drown the world in darkness.
“Mikkelson, you bastard!” Daniels bellowed, his voice crag with raw fury, shaking a fist ched white with rage at the maniacal warlock. “Those people were your people! They had families!”
Mikkelson’s smile widened, a chilling, predatory curve, as his eyes burned with a sinister emerald fire. “Were,” he stated simply, the single word dripping with cold indifference, erasing their existeh casual cruelty.
“You fug monster!” Daniels roared again, his trol snapping, as he unched himself at Mikkelson in a desperate, futile charge. But he froze mid-lunge, as if hitting an invisible wall. A sickly green glow enveloped Daniels’s body, tendrils of magical energy snaking around him, lifting him from the ground as if he were a weightless puppet. “Mikkelson, STOP THIS! Let him down!” Watters shrieked, his voice ragged with terror and desperation, as Daniels’s body floated, rigid and helpless, suspended in mid-air by Mikkelson’s casual dispy of ic power.
“Let him down!” Watters shrieked again, his voice crag with desperation.
“Fihen, if you insist.” Mikkelson waved a dismissive hand, a flick of sickly pale fingers downwards, as if swatting away an irritating i. Instantly, Daniels’s body plummeted from its suspended height, a siing, untrolled fall, and crashed against the unfiving stoform with brutal force. The sound of bone snapping echoed sharply – a siing crack that was instantly followed by a wet, grinding bsp;
“AAAAHHHHHHR!” Daniels’s scream tore through the air, a raw, primal howl of agony that mingled with the distah cries of the Lys below, a horrifying duet of suffering filling the arena.
Without warning, a blur of grey fury erupted from the chaos – a Ly corpse, propelled by Grimm's unseen force, smashed against the ptform wall with a jarring thud, sending tremors through the stone and stumbling Mikkelson backwards. The emerald vial, dislodged from his robes by the violent tremor, spun in the air and then tinkled across the stone, rollilessly towards Daniels’s shuddering form, a fragile bea of green against the crimson stain. Watters luowards Daniels, dropping to his knees beside the injured Inquisitor, desperate to offer some meager fort, some futile shield against the overwhelming agony.
Grimm unleashed a triumphant roar, a primal sound of absolute domihat reverberated across the arena, turning his monstrous head to fix Mikkelson with a chilling stare of alpha challehe Ly ranks below were utterly decimated, scattered remnants of fur and bone, a testament to Grimm's terrifying power. The air hung thick with the stench of blood ah. Mikkelson’s eyes narrowed to malevolent slits, burning with emerald rage, his hand snapping outwards in a gesture of furious and. The sickly green aura around him surged, intensifying to a blinding gre, crag with raw, untamed power. The portal throbbed in respos abyssal eyes widening, hungrily drawing iile energies, growing rger, more menag, an insatiable maw opening upon their world.
Watters, kneeling beside Daniels, barely registered the esg portal in his peripheral vision; his world had shrunk to the agonizing tremors wrag Daniels’s body. But then his gaze fell upon it – the vial, so close, bathed in the arena’s ghastly light. The portal… draining power… A chilling thought pierced his despair, quickly followed by a sharper, more focused question: Why did Mikkelsohe vial? His mind raced, pieg together fragments of observation, half-formed suspis solidifying into a desperate, electrifying idea. The vial… a cure. It healed Grimm from his past ailments… could it…? Could it purge the Ly iion from his blood? Insurahe chilling answer surfaced: Mikkelson, always the strategist, alrepared. He’d kept it as a tingency, a way to rein in Grimm if necessary. A desperate, fragile hope ignited in Watters’s chest. Maybe… just maybe… it could reverse everythihis sughter. But… the risk… Grimm's mind… his memories… gone if… No. He crushed the rising fear, the agonizihical quandary. No time for maybes. Too much is lost already. He had to try. Daniels’s life, tless others, hung in the bance. Desperate, reckless, fueled by a sliver of hope in the face of utter darkness, Watters reached for the vial.
“Five me, old friend…” Watters whispered, the words a choked ment, a painful farewell, as he snatched the vial, his fingers closing around the cool gss like seizing a st, desperate lifelihen, with heart heavy with regret and a surge of adrenaline-fueled resolve, he spun and sprinted back towards the stairwell, each pounding footstep eg his desperate gamble.
Below, the barely-living Lys erupted in a final, grotesque paroxysm. Their mangled bodies bucked and spasmed, bones groaning under impossible stresses, flesh tearing with sii sounds. A faint emerald luminesce coalesced around them, then intensified, and with a shuddering sigh, they began to rise, h unnaturally above the crimson-soaked stohe corpses writhed in mid-air, limbs jerking and filing in a horrifying, silent ballet of mutation, then, with brutal finality, Mikkelson’s outstretched hand snapped shut into a vise-like fist. The ethereal green glow pressed violently, and the mutating Lys were crushed together in a siing aerial collision, a grotesque mass of filing limbs and dissolving flesh abruptly silenced, plummeting back to the bloodied ground with heavy, lifeless thuds.
The arena echoed with the mentations of the dying Lys, agonizing cries of unimagiorment and dissolving agony. The mangled corpses began to coalesce, a nightmarish amalgamation of fur and blood slithering and merging, f a grotesque, pulsating blob of flesh that shuddered with unnatural life. It was being something… wrong, something deeply vioting the natural rimm’s gaze, cold and predatory, fixed on the amorphous mass as it gealed and reshaped, drawing inwards, f a siing, anic co that throbbed with a faint, internal luminesce, a dimly glowing chrysalis of abomination.
Watters reached the stairwell’s base and froze, the horrific vista smming into him with brutal force. Shocked and repulsed, he stared, paralyzed, at the monstrous entity before him, a pulsating sac of unknown horror. The faint, sickly light emanating from within intensified momentarily, then stretched and ed, outlining a shape, a… “Grimm!” The name escaped his lips, a breath of horrified reition, cut short by a dawning, chilling uanding: “He’s… making a–” His warning died in his throat, choked off by the sudden, violent rupture. The co exploded outwards with brutal force, ejeg a torrent of thick, viscous bck goo, spttering the stone, mixed with streaks of vivid crimson and ks of bile-yellow matter, a horrifying biological eruption that rained down across the arena.
Watters threw up an arm to shield his face, but the torrent of gore was inescapable, the viscous filth spttered across his exposed skin, ging to his clothes, a ing baptism in biological horror. He lowered his arm slowly, his eyes narrowed to slits, struggling to clear the stinging residue and wrestle his vision bato focus, his stomach ing with revulsion. Then, a pierg, ear-splitting screech tore through the arena, a sound that vibrated in his teeth, annihiting the lingering sounds of death. Watters’s vision finally cleared, and his jaw dropped open in sck-jawed horror at the unholy spectacle before him.
Standing triumphant in the arena's gore-slicked ter, was no mere Ly, but a monstrous bastardization of life itself – a three-headed abomination sculpted from nightmare. Its flesh was raw and slick, devoid of fur, glistening with a foul, sickly bile that oozed across its exposed muscle tissue. Muscles rippled and bulged, corded with thick, bck veins that pulsed and throbbed like enged worms beh the skin, a horrifyiwork of living darkness c through its unnatural form. Patches of matted, gore-soaked fur g to its frame like festering wounds, remnants of its former Ly shape ging to the edges of its monstrous new form. Each of its three heads was a fused horror, melded together at some obse jun of bone and flesh, their skulls partially exposed, bone gleaming white beh stretched, translut skin, hinting at the raw, unfinished nature of its gruesome rebirth.
The two abominations fronted each other, monstrous forms casting long, distorted shadows across the blood-soaked stone. Savage snarls and guttural growls ripped through the air, a brutal exge of primal aggression as each beast savagely assessed its oppo. The mutant loomed taller, a disturbing leao its limbs, yet its cws were titanic, wickedly curved bdes designed for evisceration. Watters’s eyes flickered to the ptform, a desperate instinct pulling him towards Mikkelson, the source of this nightmare, but hope felt like a fn, fotten nguage now. Mikkelson remained a spectral figure in the shadows, his emerald eyes glowing with cold triumph, the architect of this gruesome spectacle. Watters’s breath caught in his throat, a strangled gasp of despair. Reach Grimm? It was madness. Suicide.
The mutant bellowed a challenge, a raw, primal sound that reverberated through the arena, demanding Grimm’s submission. Grimm’s response was ferocious, a deeper, more animalistic growl, a guttural promise of brutal violehen, the areed. The mutant charged with terrifying speed, a whirlwind of muscle ah, Grimm retaliating instantly, meeting fury with equal fury. They coiled back, monstrous arms drawing ba a synized, almost ritualistic motion, and then crashed together with bone-jarring force, hands g, cws grappling in a desperate, brutal deadlock, a primal battle for dominance about to begin.
The mutant’s triple heads snaked forward with terrifying ferocity, jaws gnashing and snapping inches from Grimm’s massive snout, as they remained deadlocked in a brutal test of brute force. The immense power radiating from the two batants was staggering, each creature’s muscles rippling and t, veins throbbing like bloated bs beh their strained hides. Grimm’s legs wavered, then began to bend, the mutant’s relentless power proving overwhelmingly dominant. It arched its grotesque, joined skulls backwards in a dispy of savage victory, then drove its razor-sharp teeth with siing forto Grimm’s matted, blood-soaked shoulder. A bestial roar of searing pain tore from Grimm, a sound of primal anguish that echoed through the arena as dark blood poured from the wound, staining his fur a deeper, more horrifying crimson.
Grimm’s wild gaze burned, fueled by a desperate, primal fury. Then, in a blinding fsh of brutal inspiration, Grimm wrenched his attacker’s arms outwards with savage force, dislog them at the shoulder with siing pops, and catapulted himself like a living on directly into the mutant’s gut, impaling himself upon it and sending both moumbling backwards in a flurry of gore and broken limbs. The abomination inned, helpless, beh Grimm’s monstrous weight, his massive, hairy knees grinding into the mutant’s shattered shoulder sockets, anch it to the crimson stohe creature shrieked in mortal agony, a sound that shattered the remnants of the arena’s silence, just befrimm unleashed a torrent of brutal sshes, cws tearing into his foe’s siing, joined skulls.
Ssh after ssh, each blow a viscous tear through flesh and bone, ripped opeant’s skulls in gaping, oozing wounds, further painting the arena floor a shade of impossible crimson. One could believe the savage g was enough, but Grimm’s primal rage demanded more, a final, absolute annihition. The cws stilled momentarily, only to be repced by a savage barrage of bone-breaking haymakers, each punch exploding against the mutant’s skulls with shockwave force. The monster’s skull was noulverized ruin, a grotesque and unreizable parody of its former form. One head was literally obliterated, reduced to a pinkish, gore-slicked paste, while the others were shattered beynition, jawbones cracked and splintered, eyeballs lolling and dangling like broken ors. The battle itself was cluded, but Grimm’s dominance remaio be irrevocably etched in blood and bone. In a final, savage act of utter supremacy, Grimm seized the creature by its ravaged neck, positioned his massive paws on its pulverized shoulders, and with a titanic, earth-shatteriion, tore the entire skull from its body, hoisting the severed head, still dripping gore, aloft by its gaping, exposed spine.
Grimm’s roar detohrough the arena, a seismic wave of sound that shook the ptform and jolted even Mikkelson, his carefully cultivated grimace flickering into a frown of stunned defeat. This was it. The opening. Watters unched himself forward, every muscle in his legs igniting with desperate purpose, a human missile fueled by adrenaline and fragile hope. He hurled himself into the air, vial clutched tight in his outstretched hand, the needle gleaming, poised to pluo Grimm’s exposed back. Then, without warning, a monstrous bck blur erupted from the shadows, smming into Watters with bone-shattering force, catapulting him across the arena and smashing him against the unfiving stone wall, the vial torn from his grasp and skittering across the blood-soaked floor like a lost hope.
The Doctor’s body collided with the stoh a deafening thud, the sound of impact eg in the sudden silence before he slumped lifelessly to the ground, sciousness extinguished. Mikkelson’s ughter exploded from the ptform, a triumphant, eg bellow of pure, unadulterated glee, his hand raised in supplication towards the portal. “Now, Master! Cim your due!” he shrieked, his voice crag with fanatic ecstasy as the vile, ic eyes within the portal fred with terrifying iy, bathing the arena in their unholy light. Grimm’s monstrous gaze sowards the doorway of ic horror, his triumphant roar dying in his throat, repced by a dawning dread, as he witnessed dozens of slick, writhing bck tendrils, dripping with viscous ooze, erupting from the portal’s depths and snaking towards him with terrifying speed. Each tendril shed out, ing around Grimm’s massive wrists with viselike grip, and began to pull with inexorable force. Grimm’s incredible strength strained and roared, his muscles corded and screaming as he desperately fought to resist, but the tendrils were too many, too powerful, their otherworldly strength overwhelming. His monstrous frame remained rooted, a testament to his raw power, yet his massive body began to slide inexorably, inch by agonizing inch, closer and closer to the gaping maw of the portal, towards an unknown, abyssal fate.
Watters’s senses lurched back to agonizing life, his eyes snapping open to a blurred world of red and grey, a distorted vas of pain and muted light. His vision was clouded, indistinct, smeared with the residue of unsciousness, but the overwhelming sense of horror was brutally clear. He moaned, a breath hitg in his throat, and massaged his throbbing temples, fighting to banish the lingering fog and force his eyes to focus. Reality snapped into sharp relief, and the full weight of their defeat crushed down on him: the portal, a colossal vortex of ic dread, dominating the arena, leeg Grimm’s strength and dragging him inexorably towards oblivion. Agony hrough his body, a searing pain exploding in his left shoulder, sharp and undeniable – shattered. He dragged his gaze upwards, his head swimming with dizziness, towards the ptform where Mikkelsned supreme, a silhouette against the portal’s unholy light. Mikkelson stood bathed in emerald radiance, his face a tapestry of manic triumph, his eyes gleaming with the promise of his monstrous vision about to be realized. Hope was gone. Only the abyss remained, yawning wide before them, and the terrifying question of what horrors would crawl forth when Mikkelson’s symphony reached its final, devastating note.
