The sky above the Grand Coliseum turned the color of bruised, rotting iron.
Suspended four hundred feet above the combat pitch, the fully fused Nether Blood-Fiend Avatar raised both of its giant, bone-ribbed fists toward the darkened heavens. The sheer sky shifted weight generated a vortex of screaming gale-force winds that ripped the royal banners from their brass support posts, splintered decorative pavilions across the concourses, and hurled burning tapestries into the clouds like autumn leaves caught in a jet exhaust.
Between the avatar’s clawed palms, a cosmic nightmare was taking physical form.
It began as a dense pinpoint of pitch-black light, heavier than a collapsed iron star. Then, drawing upon the leftover nether-marrow and the ancient fiery leylines deep beneath the megacity, it rapidly swelled into a huge, five-hundred-foot sphere of boiling, blazing bright blood star-fire!
The sphere hummed with a painful, low-hum gravity shaking that rattled the marrow of every living soul within twenty miles.
The surrounding heat was monstrous. Even three miles away in the upper royal district, the glazed golden roof tiles of the ministerial palaces began to smoke and buckle under the radiant heat load. Inside the coliseum, the bronze handrails along the upper tiers grew too hot to touch. The low-grade storage magic charms hanging from nobles’ belts began to pop and crackle like roasting chestnuts.
