The collision in midair sent a shower of blinding gold and poisonous violet sparks cascading over the stone terraces of Machu Picchu.
Matron Vestra’s six chitinous spider-blades struck like lightning-fast scythes, each blow coated in glistening, acidic venom that hissed violently where it brushed Seraphina’s white dragon-scale armor.
Seraphina parried with ruthless, surgical precision.
Her twin sunstone daggers were a blur of incandescent white heat, severing the sticky strands of dark-matter silk before they could entangle her twenty-foot wings. Spinning through the thin Andean air, she delivered a spinning roundhouse kick that connected solidly with the spider-queen's porcelain mask, cracking the enamel and sending the monster tumbling backward onto the terrace flagstones below.
Vestra landed on all eight limbs, hissing with rabid venom.
"Flesh and bone!" the matron shrieked, scuttling up the vertical stone wall of the Temple of the Condor with unnatural speed. "Your fragile mortal heart cannot withstand the poison of the Carrion Web!"
From her abdomen, Vestra fired a barrage of barbed, necrotic silk-spikes straight at Seraphina.
Below in the central plaza, Kaelen moved like a god of war.
Gloom-Weaver flared with abyssal lightning as the High Sovereign cleaved through the remaining fifty Grave-Weavers. Without breaking stride, his molten silver eyes tracked the barrage aimed at his Queen.
He didn't need to shout; his bond with her was instantaneous.
Kaelen slammed the flat of his gauntlet into the ancient flagstones, unleashing a targeted, upward gravitational repulsor. A massive, jagged slab of Incan granite was ripped from the terrace floor, rocketing thirty paces into the air to form an immovable stone shield between Seraphina and the incoming spikes.
Thump-thump-thump!
The venomous barbs shattered against the stone slab, dissolving the granite into smoking green sludge.
Using the floating slab as a springboard, Seraphina vaulted over its top edge.
Her starlight wings exploded with the azure resonance of the Heart of Susanoo, crackling with raw, high-altitude atmospheric lightning. She tucked her body into a dive, plunging toward the crawling matron atop the temple wall.
"My heart isn't mortal anymore, bitch!" Seraphina snarled.
She drove both daggers down into the root joints of Vestra’s two upper spider-limbs.
The superheated dawn fire fused through chitin, flesh, and nerve in a fraction of a second. Vestra wailed in agony as her top two appendages were severed clean from her spine, tumbling into the gravel below in a smoking heap of black ichor.
Vestra thrashed violently, her four remaining legs kicking outward to gouge Seraphina’s torso.
Before the blades could find their mark, the air behind the spider-queen imploded.
Kaelen Vance materialized from the shadows of the temple wall like a phantom of the void.
His eighty-foot shadow-wings surged forward like massive obsidian vice-clamps, pinning Vestra’s remaining limbs against the stone. With terrifying, regal dominance, Kaelen clamped his left armored gauntlet around the matron's porcelain face, his dark-matter grip crushing her jawbone to powder beneath his fingers.
"You dared threaten the Queen of the Night Court," Kaelen growled, his deep baritone vibrating with lethal sovereign fury that froze the mountain wind.
Vestra squirmed in his iron grip, her black compound eyes bulging with sudden, hysterical terror as she realized the sheer, ungodly force holding her pinned.
"Vance... the Mother... already has the Antarctic..." she wheezed through her broken mask.
"Then she can mourn you there," Kaelen answered coldly.
With a brutal twist of his arm, Kaelen tore Vestra clean from the temple wall and hurled her straight into the air above the Sacred Valley.
"Seraphina, light her up!" he roared.
Seraphina was already in position.
Hovering twenty paces above the descending monster, she drew her sunstone recurve bow to the absolute limit. A tri-elemental bolt of pure dawn, azure lightning, and void-gravity formed at her cheek, humming with catastrophic power.
Twang.
The arrow pierced Matron Vestra dead center in her thorax.
The celestial resonance detonated inside the spider-queen's body, transforming the horror into an expanding supernova of blinding, purified light that scattered across the Andes like falling stardust.
The Carrion Web was broken.
The necrotic mist suffocating the valley rolled back, revealing the pristine, snow-dusted green peaks beneath a canopy of brilliant southern stars.
Kaelen stood upon the terrace below, his heavy chest heaving as he looked up at Seraphina.
She glided down gracefully, her starlight wings folding into her back as her boots touched the mossy granite. Her face was flushed, her amber eyes burning with the intoxicating rush of combat and triumph.
Without a word, Kaelen closed the distance between them.
His large hands seized her waist, lifting her effortlessly off her feet and pulling her flush against his armored chest. His mouth crashed down onto hers in a fierce, possessive kiss that tasted of thin mountain air, ozone, and unbridled passion.
Seraphina wrapped her arms around his neck, her fingers tangling in the dark strands of his hair, matching his hunger with equal, breathless intensity.
When they parted, her heart was thundering against his ribs.
"Six anchors secured," she whispered against his lips, smiling softly.
Kaelen’s silver eyes softened, a faint, dark smirk touching his lips as he set her feet back on the ancient stone.
Then, deep in the earth beneath the Intihuatana, an ancient, crystalline frequency began to resonate, pointing toward the southern horizon.
"One remains," Kaelen rumbled quietly, his gaze turning toward the south. "Antarctica. The Seventh Anchor... and the final lock on the Ninth Sphere."