The hundred-and-ten stories of the Willis Tower loomed like an obsidian monolith against the apocalyptic Chicago sky.
Around its antenna spires, a roaring vortex of sickly viridian lightning spun with hurricane fury. Thick, oily black roots of abyssal void-matter had crept up the structural steel beams of the skyscraper, shattering thousands of exterior glass windows into a continuous, deadly hail that showered Franklin Street below.
From the surrounding avenues, the mortal military had attempted to mount a counterattack.
National Guard Humvees and armored personnel carriers formed a frantic perimeter three blocks out, their heavy machine guns chattering fruitlessly against the reinforced carapaces of the Ashen Maw shock troops. Mortar shells detonated against the writhing void-barriers, harmlessly absorbed into the churning dark matter like pebbles thrown into an ocean of tar.
Then, from above the cloud deck, the heavens caught fire.
Gloom-Fang descended through the sheets of torrential rain, followed by a strike wing of fifty armored Night-Drakes.
"Drakes! Suppress their ground lines and clear a corridor for the mortal defenders!" Kaelen’s telepathic command snapped through the ether like a cracked whip. "Leave the tower to us!"
With synchronized roars, the Night-Drakes dived into the lower plazas. Streams of freezing void-frost and abyssal fire raked the corsair barricades around the entrance, flash-freezing siege-beasts and shattering the enemy cordon in an avalanche of ice and steel, giving the battered National Guard soldiers room to fall back.
Kaelen and Seraphina did not aim for the ground.
They aimed straight for the clouds.
Vaulting from the elder-drake’s saddle at ninety stories up, the royal pair surged through the driving storm on their own wings.
Kaelen’s eighty-foot canopy of dark matter beat with thunderous, rhythmic power, pushing aside the raging headwind, while Seraphina’s twenty-foot wings of solar starlight cut through the sheets of rain like glowing blades of pure plasma.
Around the hundredth floor, dozens of winged gargoyles—chitinous void-terrors bred from corrupted soul-iron—peeled off the building’s steel beams, shrieking as they swarmed the rising sovereigns.
"Behind you!" Seraphina called out.
She rolled in midair, drawing her sunstone bow and loosing four concentrated plasma bolts in rapid succession. The arrows screamed through the rain, detonating through the chest plates of four lunging beasts, turning them into falling meteors of ash that dissolved into the storm.
Kaelen swept Gloom-Weaver in a brutal horizontal arc. A crescent wave of localized gravity ripped through three more gargoyles, crushing their carapaces like empty eggshells and hurling their broken bodies into the sheer drop below.
"The Skydeck!" Seraphina pointed toward the glass observation ledges jutting out from the 103rd floor.
Inside the enclosed glass floor, an eerie, pulsing green glow illuminated the shadows.
Through the cracked glass, they could see Warlord Azgorath. The titanic four-armed monster stood at the center of the tourist pavilion, surrounded by the charred corpses of building security. He had driven his sole remaining executioner’s blade straight down through the concrete and steel flooring, siphoning the raw, ungodly energy of an Abyssal World-Breaker Spike into the building's central structural spine.
Below the skyscraper, deep in the earth, the bedrock beneath Chicago was groaning—a low, rhythmic rumble that shook the foundations of the entire city.
"He's drilling directly into the Ninth Sphere's anchor!" Seraphina yelled over the tempest, her heart pounding with frantic dread. "If he reaches the subterranean vault, the entire Loop will collapse into a sinkhole of dark matter!"
"Then we breach the glass," Kaelen growled, his molten silver eyes flashing with terrifying sovereign fury.
He caught Seraphina’s hand, lacing his fingers tightly through hers. Their magic—his abyssal gravity and her pure solar plasma—fused in a swirling, blinding vortex of synchronized power around their bodies.
"Together, my Queen!"
Side by side, they folded their wings and slammed headlong into the reinforced glass facade of the 103rd floor.
The sound of the impact was like a cannon shot.
Three layers of half-inch structural glass exploded inward into a million crystalline diamonds. Kaelen and Seraphina hit the slick tile floor of the Skydeck in a rolling crouch, their weapons drawn, their wings flaring wide to displace the howling gale rushing through the shattered window frame.
Across the ruined, blood-spattered observation deck, Azgorath slowly turned his horned, scarred visage toward them.
The green slit-eyes behind his helm burned with manic, triumphant glee as his three remaining hands tightened on the glowing hilt of his corrupted blade.
"Welcome to the end of your world, little birds," Azgorath rumbled, the tower swaying violently beneath their feet. "You are just in time for the final fracture."