[b]Redana and Bella![/b]

Thunder roars as you stand against Sagakhan. 

All her marks of humanity have fallen away. Her soldiers have left her. Her hands can no longer hold a sword. Her fine clothing and delicate butterfly wings have torn to shreds. And now her last daughter and tool has turned against her. Serpentine eyes stare and her necks sway in harmony only with themselves. There no longer seems any intelligence in her eyes. As you, Bella, have emerged from the shell of XIII, she has fallen into her own biologically programmed monstrosity. 

And she lashes out like a monster.

Gone is skill and precision. Gone is Artemis' guidance, the deadly focus that keeps a true assassin on the path. Gone is Zeus' intervention. Gone is Aphrodite's cruelty. Your opponent here is nothing of the divine. Your opponent is the intelligence who found a newly lethal way to weave DNA together and the goddess who will not let the result die.

As she fights, she grows. As her heads multiply her body has to become shorter, more muscular and more bestial to support them. Soon she falls to all fours like a quadruped and still her teeth lash out, dripping with venom. In place of strategy, manipulation or cunning what will speak your end is grim mathematics. As the fight goes on you will become weaker and she will become stronger. 

You may as well fight the rainforest that now towers around you in every direction of this former desert. As long as the rain falls there shall ever be life.

[b]Alexa![/b]

"Alright," said Beljani, gingerly stepping into the narrow gaps between bodies. "I believe she went this way."

Corpses on battlefields don't just pile up randomly; they're not evenly distributed over a range of territory. The way they fall tells the stories of battle. Large empty spaces followed by the concentrated wreckage where the lines crashed, verdant grass and tree sprouts from the emerging rainforest before reaching the toxic wastelands where concentrated volleys of SP fire left their scars. An experienced soldier can trace the lines of formation, shock, flight and pursuit as a detective might examine a crime scene.

And the scene left by Epistia is a nightmare. It's a highway of ruin. Kaeri and Alcedi pulled from the sky, phalanxes shattered - metal and bone sundered into pieces. And there, bloody red, she hunches atop the body of a horse, silhouetted by the lightning. Her broken legs have ceased to trouble her. Her fur is matted and jagged, standing on end, eyes filled with deep crimson light. She holds a Kaeri soldier like a broken doll in her right hand while her left holds her scythe, and heartsblood drips from her jaws. In ancient days they told the legend of the [i]werewolf[/i], and her she is - another monster gracing a battlefield increasingly filled with them.

She smoulders like fire. Where the spikes of her fur end wispy clouds of toxic SP smoke fume and hiss and crackle. She is one with the dread lord Ares, the aspect of terror itself.

Beljani's phalanx pulls nervously closer. The Assassin sets her jaw and then hands your head, Alexa, off to one of them to carry. She flicks her wrists and then rolls up her sleeves, the absolute icon of dignity.

"Well," she said, with a dreamlike confidence, drawing a shortsword and unfurling a razor-edged fan, "I cannot complain that I was not trained for this."

[b]Vasilia and Dolce![/b]

"If you do not mind," snapped Demeter, "I [i]believe[/i] I have given you a sufficient quantity of mercy. You have dared [i]much[/i] already, which I will permit as a courtesy to Aphrodite, but at this point I really must insist. Remember your place, mortal, and take what you have been given."

You do not need to look around to feel the blades of the hedge trimmers in the Queen of Spring's hands.