While Vaile was panicking and prepping his escape in order to avoid a skydiving Rattan whose parachute worked about as well as a certain ‘genius’ coyote’s, Zahra was leading her forces to the final, decisive victory over her most recent major adversaries. She had commanded her ‘pet’ to smash its way through the last major barrier protecting the Desert/Sand Elves from her forces, and it did so with slavish devotion.

Such was the power of the binding spell and psychological reconditioning on that combination of two of her most terrible foes that Zahra hardly needed the hieroglyphic enchantments and magical talismans that had been either seared into or embedded within its flesh in order to control her ‘pet’. At this point, her tool was essentially nothing more than just that; a tool. It had no real will of its own, and thus it made for the perfect sponge to absorb the fire from the Desert Elves now that they were fighting back.

As her supremely-sized scaled serpent smashed its skull through stationary sandstone, Zahra slipped into the sky and unleashed a sunlight-suffused smack to the surface of the mesa-top stronghold. With that strike, waves of solar force spread out from all sides, searing flesh and scorching stone with the same heat of a miniature star.

Yes, the alliteration is done now. No, I am not ashamed.

Anyways.

That one-fisted ground-pound was enough to reduce more than fifty people in the immediate vicinity to permanent shadows painted onto the ground and walls while many, many more were either blinded by the light or had their clothes and skin be set on fire by the thermal energy unleashed in that brief moment. Thankfully for Zahra’s people, both living and undead, a powerful ward had been placed up ahead of time to allow the heat and pressure to wash over and around them instead of through them. Now they merely had to wait for the ambient heat to die down so they could begin their assault.

Zahra stood up in the middle of the near-molten crater she had created and sent a quick glance towards a place far off into the sky. A smile formed on her lips as she chuckled quietly. She had expected that the Rattan would try and pull something, but building a heavier-than-air stealth aircraft in order to sneak into her lands and unlawfully steal what rightfully belonged to everyone was something she had not expected. Still, the craft was now on fire, falling from the sky and its pilot was face-first in the sand, a canvas of shame draped over the rat both figuratively and literally.

It did appear that they had at least one contingency plan to use, as a short while later the offending rat was whisked away from her failure by a portal. Zahra could have used this as grounds for all manner of things, but she was more of the mind that so long as Vaile did not end up being captured things were relatively fine. She turned her head from the distance and back to the scenery around her, watching the survivors of her little mini-nuke of a superhero landing crawl around in agony or try and peek their faces out from their hiding spots.

She waved her hand and immediately the temperature in the area dropped considerably, causing the victims of her attack to howl even louder. Anyone with a lick of engineering sense will tell you that superheating something or someone and then dropping that object’s temperature back to ‘normal’ will cause massive damage to the entity’s structural durability, and that effect was now bestowed upon people who were suffering from temperatures hot enough to cause their skin and clothes to burst into fire. Dropping the temperature down from that to around 100 degrees Fahrenheit in less than a second was enough to cause those currently alive to wish that they weren’t. Even the ruins of the fort were now even more heavily fatigued than they had been prior, and as a result, some of them collapsed on the heads of those who hid within them.

However, as previously stated, Zahra’s troops were untouched by the heat and therefore had nothing to worry about. Columns of her troops advanced through the breach as Zahra called her serpent ‘pet’ to her and shrunk it again to the size it usually was in. The snake coiled up to act as a throne for its master, and Zahra watched the carnage play out before her.

…

Melark huddled under some rubble as the sounds of violence rang out throughout his final retreat. He was hiding, but also waiting; waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike at the damnable Pharaoh. He would kill her, and he would be the martyr that would help prevent the end of the world from happening. If this monster and its ilk were able to challenge the true God, they could cause an event that would result in the whole of the world he lived in being erased. It would be bad enough if that happened, but if they managed to win it would be even worse, as those that Melark’s God sought to protect would be the next to suffer.

As a building nearby collapsed, it allowed the hidden Desert/Sand Elf to advance. He hoped that he would remain unseen, and his hope was seemingly fulfilled. He crept closer and closer until he was within distance for a single strike. He held his God-blessed Dagger tightly and then leaped from his cover.

“For Great Justice!” he yelled as he flew through the sky, only to grabbed from behind and held in a Full-Nelson by a shriveled old mummy who was decked out in all the regalia befitting his position.

“Found you at last, you damn monster!” Ratams shouted as he changed up his grip and German-Suplexed Melark, knocking the wind out of the Sand Elf. Ratams then bent back up while changing his grip once again, this time grabbing Melark by the ankles and whipping the ruler of the Sand People over his head and face-first into the ground. After that little two-hit grappling combo, Ratams proceeded to swing Melark to his left and hurl the dazed member of the Races into a still-standing piece of the ruined fort. The stone was barely durable enough to endure Melark’s abrupt and physical introduction to it, and Melark was still drastically under leveled in comparison to his foes. Ratams picked up the dagger that Melark had dropped during the scuffle and immediately dropped it again before picking up his personal ‘great-sword’ of a massively oversized khopesh and hacking the offensive object to tiny, tiny pieces.

Melark slowly stood up. He was now barely conscious, but he could not allow himself to go down without a fight.

“Is that… all you can… muster? I’m… still standing. I will… remain so until… I win! I won’t… let the world end… by your hands!”

Zahra looked over towards the nearly dead man, but there was neither pity nor admiration in her eyes, only the cold and simmering rage towards Melark and his people that had built up over the decades that the war had been going on.

“You’re standing, are you?” Zahra asked with contempt, extending her finger to point at Melark before firing a thin beam of magic from her fingertip and through Melark’s right knee, severing his lower leg from the upper part while cauterizing the wound.

“Do you still stand?”

Zahra’s cold question was met by Melark bracing himself against his pain and the wall behind him as he lifted himself up on his remaining whole leg, only for that knee to be shot out from under him and leaving him with nothing but his two upper legs and nothing beneath.

“I don’t hear no bell!” Melark yelled against his suffering, to which he was met with a magic blast severing his lower right arm from its upper part and a second shot doing the same to his left arm. Melark strained to keep himself from screaming and giving his foe any kind of satisfaction, but he figured his death would be almost as swift and quite soon. Maybe the twisted monster would shoot a hole through his head, lobotomizing him. Maybe she would behead him and take his severed cranium as a trophy. Maybe she would set him on fire or even draw and quarter him?

None of these were Zahra’s way of dealing with Melark. Zahra calmly stood up from her serpentine seat and the massive creature slithered towards the now crippled sole survivor of his marauding forces. Melark saw the snake getting closer and chuckled that he would die by fast-acting venom, but as the snake crawled closer and opened its maw, Melark began to realize his death was not going to be so quick or painless.

“YOU FUCKING MONSTER! I’LL-!”

His shouts were cut off as Zahra’s snake swallowed the Sand Elf whole. This was how Zahra wanted to get rid of her foe. After all, being slowly digested by a giant snake, something that could take days, if not weeks to deal with ingested prey and then being shat out at a later date was terribly funny as a form of execution, at least in Zahra’s eyes.

…

Vaile’s eyes opened after the bright flash and realized that he was hanging upside down in a cave. It was not an ice cave, so there were no abominable snow monsters, nor were there any signs of the Rattan. No, he was hung upside down by one foot, and that foot was stuck to a bunch of spider webs.

Vaile pulled himself up and managed to get himself loose from his predicament, only to fall and land not-so-gently on the rocky floor of the cave. Standing up and collecting himself, Vaile opened his minimap and walked towards what he assumed was the exit of the cave.

He never noticed the countless arachnid eyes gazing out from all sides, feeding their sight to a greater being. That creature would have smiled a true twisted smile if it could, but being a massive spider, one the size of an Olympic Stadium to be precise, meant that it lacked such features. Still, it now had a chance to do what those stupid rats had failed to do.

Vaile would belong to itself, and no one else.