Kiersty narrowed her eyes when she felt the obvious power of the creator of the bloodbeasts. She couldn’t exactly tell what Skill he used in his punch and palm, but they were certainly potent. And that image of the empty-eyed monster made her wary. But she snorted and gathered herself for another attack. As a Priestess of Arbor, she had a responsibility to step forward, despite the danger. She pulled back the first Divine branched and raised her left hand in preparation to make a second one.

But before she could move, Straud continued to speak. From his pocket, he pulled two objects. One was a drop of blood and the other was a coin. “First, let’s clear the way for our Lord to descend. With the formation, God has given me… With this Coin of Territory in my right hand, I claim this area in thy name!”

There was a strange ripple of the air. A breeze wandered through the stadium, touching upon the exposed skin of everyone gathered. Shivering, Kiersty was filled with a strange sense of deja vu from the sudden gust of air. She sensed an extremely familiar feeling that somehow felt dangerously foreign as it pressed down over the stadium. It wasn’t truly an image, but it was something close. The sense of strangeness seemed to reach out and grip the entirety of the structure.

Kiersty pressed her mouth into a thin line; she could sense that a strange barrier surrounded the stadium now that would prevent people from leaving.

Realizing that she couldn’t keep giving Straud more time to follow through with his plan, Kiersty raised her hands. Yet the opponent moved faster. Straud smirked over at her and said, “And as the new liege of this place… that being’s influence is banished!”

Kiersty yelped as the scion of Arbor beneath her rapidly began to wither. The blow struck her just as firmly as it struck Arbor’s incarnation. She tumbled to the ground and rolled for a few rotations before popping back up to her feet. Her expression twisted as she saw the Bandit King had bounded gleefully toward her to strike while she was down. And to her horror, when she reached for the power of Arbor, she felt that same strangeness in the air blocking her from reaching her Priestess Skills. Yet even as Kiersty’s heart began to pound at the danger, a voice cut in from the side.

“Do you really think the people of Earth are just gonna let you get away with this?”

The Bandit King cursed and rolled clumsily to the side as a huge, spiked sphere of iron smashed into the place where he had been about to step. Tykes hopped out of the stands and landed next to Kiersty. He beckoned and the huge metal sphere flew back to smack into his hand. His eyes were grim as he looked at the assembled Nemesai. The air became heavy as Tyke’s image spread out to fill the surrounding air. “Just come all at once. That will make things quicker.”

Yet Straud continued to seem serene as he looked down at the two people who had jumped onto the field. “And in my left hand… a drop of blood from a true God. With it… shatter the shackles and free our images!”

His left hand tightened into a fist. There was a strange rumbling and the air seemed to press down on them in an entirely different manner than the strange feeling from before. Kiersty only frowned from the weight, but she could feel that the individuals who hadn’t ever encountered an image before directly passed out beneath its pressure.

It was a ripple of boneless bodies collapsing in the stands. The crowd, which had been largely dumbstruck by the conflict on the field, began to scream and panic as its weaker members fell onto those fortunate enough to endure the attack. Chaos ensued as different groups began to try and help the unconscious while other people just fled. The Order Valorem guards surged into motion, but that was also the very moment that bloodbeasts began to pour forward out of the interior of the stadium and strike at their backs.

Before they could respond to the new threat, Kiersty could sense that almost a dozen of the guards had been killed. As their blood splattered on the ground, more bloodbeasts poured out of the bowels of the stadium.

As the crowd’s screams grew even louder, Kiersty looked grimly up at a towering figure that appeared in the sky along with the vast pressure. Because that figure was a weapon bared, but not wielded. The pressure they felt was simply the existence of the image.

The figure was a man. He was hairless and disdainful, sneering down at the world. His eyes swept across the stadium without seeing anything, more of a recording than a true intelligent entity. Which would help them survive it, but it still didn’t give Kiersty any good ideas of how to deal with its power.

Yet just as Kiersty began to fear how the image would attack, the image quickly faded away.

At the same time, Kiersty twisted to look in shock at the Nemesai as images far more powerful than any she had seen from them in the past erupted from their bodies. Straud glanced over toward the Winged Serpent. “There, it is done. You are freed from your shackles by the grace of my God. Now, do your part.”

“As it was agreed, so it shall be.” The eyes of the Winged Serpent began to glow. A huge stone wheel appeared in the sky, constructed by a series of consecutively larger circles of stone that moved independently of each other. Each circle was covered in carefully spaced runes with rigid designs. It was a thing of constant motion, filling the surrounding space with the noise of stone rubbing against stone.

And gradually, the different circles shuddered to a stop. The light in the Winged Serpent’s eyes increased. The screams grew even louder as the bloodbeasts finally managed to escape around the guards and cut into the vulnerable crowd. After a series of grinding clicks, each portion of the huge wheel aligned.

A line of runes spreading from the interior to the edge began to glow.

The Bandit King grinned over at Tykes as his image blasted outward and pushed away Tykes’ image. “Still want to act cool? Then how about-”

Bang!

“Ow! Fuck!” Again, the Bandit King stumbled backward while cursing. But Kiersty saw how his suddenly more powerful image had dispersed most of the force of the bullet. After using only a second to recover, the Bandit King turned and glared over to the side. Out of the tunnel to the Vipers' locker room walked Hank Howard. He idly spun his repeater in his left hand and his revolver in his right.

Behind him, the hunched form of the Dragon Broodmother Wivyana cantered forward with Alana upon her back. Alana shared a glance with Hank and frowned. “They broke the image shackle on Earth all in one go? Well then… I suppose there is no more reason to carefully suppress our own power.”

Chuckling, Hank Howard nodded. And immediately the image pressure rolling off both of them increased. Yet Kiersty couldn’t help but worry; although the two’s strength did jump upward a fair amount, it was only a small increase compared to how much the Nemesai improved. They perhaps now possessed half the strength of the Nemesai’s image.

The situation in the stands was becoming increasingly chaotic. People rushed toward the exits, but they skidded to a stop as bloodbeasts began to pour out and start to kill everyone in sight. Hundreds of people were helplessly cut to pieces before the crowd pushing behind them realized the danger. Some of the audience had enough strength to resist, but they were a minority.

Very few people seemed to have brought their weapons to the inaugural football game. Or if they did, they were content to protect themselves and their family while avoiding the bloodbeasts that sought out easier prey.

The Order Valorem guards quickly moved to help, but as they finally made a counter-attack, half of them were possessed by Straud and attacked their fellows in the back. The new ambush wounded the guards from the Order Valorem even further, but it wasn’t enough to stop the Order from acting. That situation gradually stabilized, because those who were possessed were basically just physical puppets, but the guards couldn’t get through the crowds to stem the tied of bloodbeasts rushing out into the stands.

Again and again, Kiersty used her will to hammer at the strange otherness in the air that prevented her from wielding Arbor’s power. But it seemed the other side really had been prepared for her. She could only bite her lip and produce a javelin from her interspatial ring.

“Still plan on hiding? Everyone should come out to play.” Straud glanced coolly over toward the Stallion’s locker room. After a few seconds passed, there was movement from within that area too.

A heavy iron square of a vehicle rolled slowly out of the tunnel. Standing on top of the vehicle with his arms crossed was someone who looked like a teenager, but wore a crown of jade. And that teenager was perhaps the owner the most potent image that Kiersty had felt today, aside from Straud himself and that figure that was conjured from the drop of blood.

To have another fighter who could stand against the Nemesai brought a surge of joy to Kiersty’s chest. It seemed that Zone 1 really had prepared everything for this day. The Jade Prince clenched his fists and looked coldly out at the assembled Nemesai. “Did you think I would allow you to simply run rampant in my Zone?”

There was the sound of engines engaging and the Jade Prince hopped down off of the heavy vehicle. There was a sound of locks disengaging and steam vented out through the breaks in the paneling along the iron square. Metal screeched against metal and the vehicle slowly unfolded on itself. The unfolding portions twisted and opened, revealing metallic hands. The treads that had carried the vehicle into the stadium bent and split to become legs. A hatch opened and a head slid upwards.

A humanoid mecha that was wreathed in venting steam slowly pressed its large steel hands into the ground and slowly straightened. Its limbs were covered with dense Engravings that pulsed with power. A portion of its back popped off and a large metal sword fell into its waiting hand. The sword was even more densely filled with Engravings than the mech itself, to the point that the sword seemed to constantly glow.

Ghost’s voice boomed out over the stadium. “Let’s see then which of our sides made better preparations then.”

The shoulders of Ghost’s mech opened and a dozen small and sleek drones shot outward into the sky. They rapidly twisted midair and shot out beams of energy toward the concentrating Winged Serpent who stood beneath its image of the stone wheel. But before the beams could land, Straud waved his hand and conjured a large crimson dome that protected the Winged Serpent. The beams shot by the drones caused the dome to flicker, but it quickly recovered its bright color after that attacks ran their course.

Across the stadium, the screams slowly transformed into sobbing and whimpers as more and more people were butchered by the bloodbeasts without the chance to resist. The Order Valorem guards were being slowly hemmed in by the bloodbeasts, but luckily almost a hundred of the ape variety of drone loped out of the locker room behind Ghost and leapt up to the stands. People noticed the reinforcements and hurried down to the lower portions of the stands. The bloodbeasts finally began to be beaten back.

On the ground, the individuals who possessed images powerful enough to near the image of Straud all lowered their heads and charged forward at the same moment. The light emanating from the grinding stone wheel that floated above the Winged Serpent’s head was growing larger every second.

And with the increase in the brightness, the scent of blood in the air grew positively stifling. Kiersty didn’t need a Skill to tell her that they needed to get to the Winged Serpent before it finished whatever it was doing.

“Ah… God will certainly love your passion…” Straud flexed his hands. The Nemesai moved to engage the group from Earth.

Tykes gave Kiersty a questioning look. Kiersty shook her head and gestured Tykes forward. With gleaming eyes, Tykes charged forward toward the Bandit King.