The night sky over Chicago had turned into an apocalyptic war zone.
Rain lashed against the glass facades of the iconic skyscrapers, but the storm brought no relief; it was thick with the stench of brimstone, burning asphalt, and ozone. Along the wide expanse of Michigan Avenue, abandoned police cruisers with flashing red-and-blue lights sat crushed beneath overturned city buses. Thousands of terrified mortals scrambled for shelter beneath the concrete overhangs of Millennium Park as winged abyssal monstrosities swooped between the towers like giant leathery bats.
Then, the dimensional barrier overhead shattered with the roar of a dying star.
Ten thousand Night-Drakes erupted from the clouds, their rider-lances blazing with cold void-frost. The Black Vanguard descended in a terrifying, beautiful formation of winged shadows, instantly intercepting the abyssal flyers above the Chicago River.
"Vanguard! Form an aerial perimeter from the river to Navy Pier!" Kaelen’s sovereign voice boomed through the psychic leylines, cutting through the wail of air-raid sirens. "Shield the mortals! Annihilate anything carrying rusted iron!"
Gloom-Fang banked steeply over the Wrigley Building, banking hard around the clock tower before leveling off fifty paces above Michigan Avenue.
Below them, a massive phalanx of three hundred Dread-Corsairs was marching north, led by two colossal siege-beasts. The chitinous behemoths were battering down the barricades outside the Art Institute of Chicago, rounding up cornered civilians to herd them toward the glowing green leyline vortex bubbling in the center of Grant Park.
"Those are my people," Seraphina snarled, her Sunblood surging in a furious, blinding tide that lit up the entire avenue.
"Then let us introduce them to their Queen," Kaelen growled darkly into her ear.
He vaulted from the saddle of the elder-drake, his eighty-foot shadow-wings bursting open with concussive, atmospheric force.
Kaelen descended upon Michigan Avenue like a falling black meteor.
He landed directly between the cornered civilians and the charging siege-beast. The kinetic impact of his boots blew a twenty-foot crater in the asphalt, sending a localized shockwave of void-gravity that hurled forty corsairs backward into the glass storefronts.
Before the beast could swing its spiked bone ram, Gloom-Weaver flared in an arc of dark matter. With a single, god-tier sweep of his broadsword, Kaelen severed the behemoth’s massive front legs. The mountain of chitin and spiked armor collapsed forward with a deafening crash, shrieking as Kaelen leaped onto its skull and drove five feet of enchanted adamantine through its brain.
Across the avenue, Seraphina dove from the sky like an avenging angel of living dawn.
Her twenty-foot wings of starlight arched wide, casting an ethereal, golden brilliance that illuminated the panicked faces of the mortals cowering behind the museum lions. She unslung her sunstone recurve bow, notching three plasma arrows at a time.
Twang. Twang. Twang.
Each release was a thunderclap. Her golden arrows screamed down the canyon of skyscrapers, detonating against the corsair phalanx with surgical precision. The plasma blasts vaporized the enemy's rusted armor, incinerating the void-fiends into piles of glowing ash while leaving the surrounding concrete and trembling mortals completely untouched.
A cheer—ragged, terrified, but undeniable—erupted from the huddled crowd on the museum steps.
"It's... it's a woman with wings!" someone screamed through the rain. "She's fighting them!"
Seraphina touched down gracefully on the hood of an abandoned squad car, her white dragon-scale armor shimmering, her twin sunstone daggers drawn and blazing with superheated heat.
"Get inside the museum basement!" she shouted to the civilians, her commanding voice ringing with royal authority. "Barricade the inner doors! The Night Court holds this line!"
A corsair commander lunged at her from the blind spot behind an overturned taxi, his serrated halberd whistling toward her ribs.
Before the rusted blade could reach her, Kaelen appeared like a wraith.
His clawed gauntlet caught the blade bare-handed, shattering the steel to dust. His other hand closed around the commander’s throat, lifting the seven-foot brute effortlessly off the ground. With a cold, contemptuous twist of his wrist, he snapped the corsair's neck and hurled the corpse across the street.
He turned to Seraphina, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with her in the middle of the rain-slicked avenue, his molten silver eyes flashing with dark satisfaction.
"The perimeter around Millennium Park is secure, my Queen," he purred, his deep baritone sending a thrill straight down her spine despite the howling sirens.
Seraphina smiled fiercely, wiping a streak of black ichor from her cheek.
Then, the ground beneath their feet groaned.
A massive, sickening pulse of viridian light erupted from the south, centered directly over the iconic silhouette of the Willis Tower. The sky above the skyscraper fractured into a massive black vortex, and the colossal, four-armed shadow of Warlord Azgorath rose over the spire, holding a glowing, pulsating shard of celestial glass.
"He's at the tower," Seraphina breathed, her eyes locking onto the pulsing anomaly. "He's cracking the bedrock beneath the foundation!"
Kaelen gripped her hand, his fingers lacing tightly with hers as his shadow-wings flared into the storm.
"Then let us go tear down his tower."