Chapter 90: Storm Breaks
The creatures met on the grasslands between the second and third trench lines, and the earth broke.
The Hydra came from the east — three heads raised, golden eyes blazing, the oil-slick scales streaming marsh water that evaporated in the heat of divine energy radiating from its body. Gorthan rode the dorsal platform behind the central head, his scarred hands locked into the thorn grips, his body leaning with the creature’s movement the way a sailor leaned with a ship in heavy seas.
The Thornwyrm came from the south. Living wood in serpentine form — bark-plated coils grinding across the broken ground, thorn ridges scraping furrows in the earth, acidic sap dripping from the joints between its articulated segments. Where the sap touched grass, the grass died. Where it touched stone, the stone smoked. Siltjaw, the Frogman Warden, crouched in a hollowed cavity near the creature’s head, his webbed hands pressed against the inner wood, channeling commands through the Warden bond.
They circled. Two divine creations — one of fire and scale, one of wood and thorn — moving around each other in the flattened grassland like predators assessing the space between them.
The Hydra struck first.
The left head — the venom head, the one that had killed the Toad Lord years ago with precise chemical injections — lunged at the Thornwyrm’s midsection. Needle-thin fangs punched into the bark armor. Venom pumped.
Nothing happened.
The Thornwyrm was wood. Living wood, but wood — no blood vessels for the venom to ride, no circulatory system to carry it, no biological processes that the chemical payload could disrupt. The fangs penetrated the bark and delivered their payload into dead cellulose.
The Thornwyrm responded. Its tail segment — a massive, barbed appendage of compressed hardwood and thorn-clusters — swung in a flat arc that caught the Hydra across its lower body. The impact lifted twelve meters of scaled mass and threw it sideways. Gorthan gripped the platform and held. The Hydra’s coils scrambled for purchase on the torn ground, three heads shrieking in unison — the first time an enemy had physically moved the creature since its creation.
Zephyr processed this instantly. Venom is useless. The Thornwyrm is organic but not biological. Chemical warfare won’t work. Switch to physical.
Through the Warden bond, through Gorthan, to the Hydra: *Lightning. Storm domain. Now.*
***
The Storm domain crackled through the Hydra’s scales.
Lightning — not natural lightning, not the random discharge of atmospheric electricity, but divine storm energy channeled through a living divine creature — arced from the Hydra’s central head in a sustained bolt that struck the Thornwyrm’s upper thorax. The wood ignited. Bark exploded outward in burning chunks. The Thornwyrm’s entire upper segment caught fire — a pillar of flame that rose twenty meters into the overcast sky, visible from both trench lines.
The Thornwyrm burned. And then the Thornwyrm stopped burning.
The living wood regenerated. Not growth — this wasn’t the creature gaining something new. The burned sections sealed, bark re-forming over the blackened wounds, the damage closing the way skin closed over a shallow cut. The Thornwyrm’s wooden body was self-repairing terrain — Demeterra’s Growth domain had built the creature to heal, and healing was what it did.
It repairs, Zephyr realized. The Growth domain built it with restoration as a core function. I can burn it faster than it repairs — barely — but that drains Storm FP at a rate I can’t sustain for more than—
He ran the numbers.
Twenty minutes. I have twenty minutes of Storm domain output before the FP cost outpaces my generation. After that, the Hydra fights a creature it can’t poison and can barely burn.
"Gorthan!" Zephyr couldn’t speak to the Warden directly — only through the Hydra’s bond, a chain of divine energy that translated intention into instinct. But the message was clear: Go hard. Go now. Everything.
The Hydra charged.
Three heads struck simultaneously. The right head — the screaming head, the one whose metallic vibrations could shatter bone — clamped onto the Thornwyrm’s lower coils and vibrated. The resonance tore through the wood, cracking the bark armor from the inside, splitting the living material along its grain. Chunks of splintered wood flew like shrapnel. The central head drove forward into the gap, tearing, ripping, pulling sections of the Thornwyrm’s body apart with the raw mechanical force of a serpent that could bench-press a building.
The venom head abandoned its chemical attack and went structural — biting, tearing, using its needle-fangs as pitons to rip strips of bark away from the inner core.
The Thornwyrm thrashed. Its coils constricted around the Hydra’s midsection, crushing, the living wood tightening with a force that cracked scales and compressed organs. Gorthan’s platform tilted. The minotaur shifted his weight, braced, held.
The two creatures rolled. Locked together, tearing, crushing, burning, repairing. The grassland beneath them was destroyed — cratered, scorched, soaked in venom and sap, unrecognizable as ground. Soldiers on both sides stopped fighting to watch. Not because the spectacle was beautiful — it wasn’t. It was terrifying. Two gods’ weapons, tearing each other apart with the systematic viciousness of entities that couldn’t feel mercy because mercy wasn’t in their design.
***
Durnok descended.
The Minotaur vassal — Rank 2, the Rootbound, whose Earth and Strength domains made him Demeterra’s siege specialist — manifested physically on the battlefield. Descent was the most expensive act a god could perform: the projection of divine consciousness into a physical form, burning FP at catastrophic rates, limited by rank and reserves to a window measured in seconds.
Durnok’s window was ninety seconds. At Rank 2, with his reserves, he could maintain physical form for a minute and a half. After that, the FP drain would force him back to his divine space, depleted and vulnerable.
He appeared near the Thornwyrm — a towering figure of stone and muscle, a minotaur amplified to divine proportions. Three meters tall, his hide replaced with granite-textured divine flesh, his horns wreathed in earthy light. He carried no weapon. He didn’t need one. At divine scale, his fists were siege equipment.
Seventy-two seconds remaining.
He crossed the battlefield in three strides, each footfall cracking the scorched earth. The Hydra was locked with the Thornwyrm, three heads buried in the living wood, scales smoking where the sap burned through. The creature’s attention was consumed — all three heads committed to the Thornwyrm, Gorthan directing the assault through the bond with the focused intensity of a man who knew he was only as alive as his creature was.
Durnok’s fist hit the Hydra’s left neck.
The impact was not physical in the conventional sense. Divine force — the concentrated output of a god’s domain channeled through a manifested body — struck the base of the left head with enough power to deform the scales, crush the vertebral column, and sever the connection between head and body.
The left head — the venom head, the one that had killed the Toad Lord, the one that had been part of the Hydra since its creation — detached.
It fell. Three meters of serpentine neck, ending in a head whose golden eyes still blinked, whose fangs still dripped venom, disconnecting from the body with a wet, final sound that was louder than every weapon on the battlefield.
Gorthan screamed.
The Warden bond transmitted the severance as pain — not physical pain but something deeper, the sensation of a part of oneself being removed without anesthetic. Gorthan’s hands spasmed on the platform grips. His back arched. A sound came from his throat that was not a word in any language.
The Hydra screamed with him. The remaining two heads — the central head and the screaming head — released the Thornwyrm and whipped toward Durnok with a fury that was beyond tactical direction. Pure reactive violence. The central head struck Durnok’s manifested body, fangs scraping divine granite, finding no purchase.
Thirty-one seconds remaining.
Durnok stepped back. He’d done what he came to do. One head removed. The Hydra was diminished — permanently, irreversibly. The venom capability that had been its most versatile weapon was gone.
He dissolved. The divine form collapsed inward, the projection failing as FP reserves hit critical. Durnok’s consciousness retreated to his divine space — shattered, depleted, a Rank 2 god who had burned half his reserves for ninety seconds of apocalyptic violence.
On the ground, the severed head lay in the mud. The golden eyes dimmed. The venom glands emptied into the earth. The fangs — needle-thin, precise, the instruments of a hundred kills — curled inward as the divine energy sustaining them bled away.
[DIVINE CREATURE — DAMAGE REPORT]
[Hydra: Head Lost (Left — Venom)]
[Cause: Durnok Descent — divine force impact, cervical severance]
[Damage: PERMANENT — divine creatures do not regenerate]
[Remaining: 2 heads (Central + Screaming)]
[Combat Effectiveness: -40% (venom capability eliminated)]
[Restoration Cost: 50% of original creation FP (currently unavailable)]
[Warden Gorthan: Bond trauma — functional but impaired]
The Hydra coiled around the Thornwyrm’s lower body, two remaining heads tearing at the living wood with a desperation that had replaced strategy. The Thornwyrm was damaged — sections of bark burned away, splits in the wood leaking sap, the central core exposed in three places. But it was repairing. And the creature that fought it had just lost a third of itself.
The head is gone, Zephyr thought. The venom head. Permanently.
He felt the loss as data — a capability removed, a variable erased from the equation. Not grief. Gods didn’t grieve for weapons.
But Gorthan, on the platform, bleeding from a bitten tongue, hands cramped around the grips, felt it as something else entirely.