It started with a light show.
Everywhere that one looked, small wispy apparitions of golden light started to float into view.
Confusion ran amok amongst the populace, as no one was really sure what these beautiful lights were.
Only Erica in the form of a flaming phoenix seemed to have some inclination as to what they could be, but even then she did not fully understand this scene.
Lesser spirits don't just show up of their own volition.
Though they are said to be everywhere, they never let themselves be seen by regular mortals.
And they especially do not show up in Luxuria where so much of Abaddon's presence is easy to be felt.
So why the change?
She and everyone else watched as the light show culminated on the ruined walls protecting the city.
They formed a sort of funnel above the rubble, and spun around and around as if they were stuck in permanent rotation.
They had no facial features, but for some reason they almost seemed... excited?
Three figures started to form at the bottom of the spirit funnel.
The first to be formed was a young woman with tanned skin who no one had ever seen before.
Her green hair and golden eyes flung side to side wildly as she looked all around her, clearly confused as to why they'd ended up on some sort of battlefield.
Suddenly, another young woman appeared, and with her there was finally a glimmer of recognition.
"It's the first princess!"
"Thea!"
The princess looked around with a shocked expression as she took in the sight of her ruined home.
It was a sight that would have made her considerably more terrified, had she not seen everyone that she loved alive and well.
Well... she was admittedly confused as to why there was a large deer on the battlefield.
But when she saw one of her mothers was missing an eye and her grandfather was horribly disfigured, her heart broke inside and she felt her eyes becoming wet.
Once Bekka saw the way that her daughter was looking at her, she used her long hair to cover the left half of her face, in the hopes that Abaddon would not see it.
She didn't want their reunion to be spoiled by sad looks after all.
When Thea finally pulled her eyes away from her mother, she saw a man staring at her who was a few feet away from them, and she rightfully guessed him to be the culprit.
Her own anger shot through the roof, but all that she could do was clench her fists and remain silent.
This was not her fight to partake in.
Beside Thea, the figure that was the largest of the three of them had finally finished forming, and caused the onlookers to take a reflexive step back.
It was an enormous monster in the shape of a man, with a huge muscular body and the head of a fearsome dragon.
In the center of it's chest, thirteen gems of all different colors could be seen shining brilliantly.
It's snow white hair blew behind it in the breeze, and it's golden eyes scanned the ruined city as if it were searching for something.
His vision locked onto eight assembled women who were staring at him with eyes containing disbelief and exhaustion.
He felt his heart clench in his chest, as he could feel the relief washing through their bodies that was evident of the difficulties they had to go through.
His focus was so set on them, he did not even bother to address the unwanted pair of eyes he could feel watching him in the sky above.
"..Honey... You're back..!"
Lisa was the first one to actually voice her joy out loud, and all of the other wives followed shortly behind her.
In the end, Abaddon could do nothing but smile wryly in his monstrous form.
"Indeed...I'm sorry I'm late."
Jadaka clenched his sword so hard that he would have snapped it had it been a lesser creation.
Finally, the opponent that he was fated to face had appeared before him.
Though he had never heard tale of this strange appearance of his, that hardly mattered.
Here and now, he could kill him in front of all of these onlookers, and cement his status as the supreme force of this world!
"You've come out of hiding, half breed! I am glad that I did not have to search for you!!"
Abaddon calmly stared at Jadaka with his golden eyes.
He had to admit, the fact that he was the apostle was very surprising.
He had never even been in the same room with his uncle before, the only reason why he even knew who he was due to the family portrait in Helios' grand hall.
The fact that he had turned out to be the apostle was every bit as shocking to him as it was to everyone else.
But Jadaka couldn't tell what Abaddon was thinking from his look alone.
So to him, Abaddon was just staring down at him coldly without an ounce of respect or fear in his eyes.
And that irked him to no foreseeable end.
"Remain obstinate all you like! It might serve you well when you visit the afterlife!"
Lunging into the air, Jadaka raised his sword high above his head as he released a proud roar.
Abaddon remained firmly locked in place with his hands clasped behind his back, not intending to move from his place for any reason.
Jadaka finally came within striking distance of Abaddon and slashed in a downwards arc with his blade.
Aiming for the space on the side of Abaddon's neck, he swung his weapon with the intention to decapitate him and present his head before Yara.
BANG!
As soon as Jadaka came within striking distance of the hulking dragon, a pillar of earth shot up from the ground.
He was struck square in the stomach with the force of a moving truck, and his eyes bulged outward as he was flung backward before his blade could even graze his opponent's perfect skin.
"So, earth acted this time, huh..? You're lucky." He muttered.
Had the element of shadow chosen to protect him, Jadaka likely would have lost his ability to bear children.
She could be... very mischievous in her devotion and cruelty.
Abaddon watched his opponent hit the ground just as his own feet finally touched it, causing patches of wild grass and flowers to spring up everywhere he walked.
He strode right past the coughing Jadaka and approached all of his wives, with his main focus being on one in particular.
Walking right up to Bekka, he cupped her face in his overly large hand and pushed aside the grey hair covering half her face.
Her left eye was missing, and she had an embarrassed smile on her face like she was trying to hide her nervousness.
"Did he do this to you..?" Abaddon asked in a hollow voice.
Bekka couldn't bring herself to tell him yes, but her silence was the only answer he needed.
He quickly checked any of his other wives for wounds, but found nothing.
And then out of the corner of his eye, he saw two more things that almost made his heart stop.
One was the spirit of a three headed dragon that was hovering in the sky silently among the rest.
The other were his very own father and mother standing right outside his home.
His mother looked like she'd been crying an awful lot, and his father... he was a mess.
His face was scarred, his body was bruised terribly, and he was missing one of his arms.
He pretended to be relatively indifferent to his old man ever since he'd come back into his life, but the truth was that he loved him just as much as his mother.
And to see him mangled like this was so morbidly painful.
"ABADDONNNN!!!"
Jadaka stood back up, so enraged that scales were beginning to cover his face and torso.
He didn't much like that cheap trick from earlier, and now he had to give his all to make him pay for it.
Looking up at the dragons overhead, he raised his sword high as the gem started to glow once again.
"My kin, annihilate him!" he ordered.
...
Jadaka waited and waited, but his drones in the air above did not move.
They merely remained locked in their places as they stared at Abaddon with some kind of reverence in their long dead eyes.
"Why aren't you moving...?" Jadaka asked in a shocked tone.
The answer to his question was nothing he could have ever anticipated.
Since these creatures had been stripped down to nothing but their natural instincts, they were incapable of going against Abaddon.
They could sense in him a very very old ancestral calling.
Since they were formed of his discarded flesh and given life by Gabbrielle, they were living breathing extensions of him.
Like his great great great great grandbabies.
Normally, a connection like this would have been significantly harder to sense, but Abaddon was different after coming back from the spirit realm.
His blood and soul had been purified within that domain, bringing his presence a bit closer to that of when he was whole eons ago.
It was a small change, but it was drastic enough to illicit this reaction in all dragons; his closest related descendants.
Jadaka however had no knowledge of this, and to him his creatures had just stopped obeying him out of the blue.
Building his rage to a level so great that he could have exploded.
And then... he did.
Boom.
With a wet popping sound, Jadaka exploded into millions of bloody chunks that rained down onto the ruined cement.
Everyone but Abaddon, Thea, and Sabine were confused as to what the hell had just happened.
But what everyone was witnessing was only the latest of Abaddon's repertoire of unfair abilities.
And the absurdity was only getting started.
The blood and flesh that had been explosively flung all over the place started to move on it's own and come back together.
Under the stupefied gaze of everyone present, Jadaka's body was reformed from his bloody remains.
The dragon king sat on the ground naked, shocked, and confused.
"What.. did you just-"
Boom.
Jadaka exploded a second time, with this occasion causing him to end up in larger chunks.
And then... it came back together once more, with his eyes finally showing some degree of panic.
He had just died twice without even being able to follow what happened.
If this was some kind of game, then it wasn't very funny.
"Speak! What have you-"
Boom.
This scene repeated itself twelve times over.
Jadaka was continuously killed again and again without even knowing the reason why, and by the twelfth time he was on his hands and knees, his eyes showing pure terror.
"Stop.. this..!" he demanded through gritted teeth.
Abaddon walked calmly over to Jadaka and kicked him hard in the chest, sending him onto his back.
Spirit magic is the raw and unrefined energy of life and creation.
Divided down into individual elements, it brings significantly more power and potential to those aspects of reality, and in turn it's few lucky users.
It is the reason why higher spirits stay locked in their own realm and why the elves guard them so fervently.
With spiritual flame one could posses a fire only slightly inferior to origin flame, and with spiritual earth one could fashion their own world given enough time.
The possibilities were just that grand and astounding.
But it was also volatile, dangerous, and required complete attunement of oneself to the cosmos.
What Abaddon had done was use three of his awakened spiritual elements in conjunction with each other.
Destruction magic to break Jadaka down at every cellular level and reduce him to a pile of sludge.
Death magic to bind his soul to his remains as a means to assure that he couldn't pass on to any afterlife.
Blood magic to rebuild his body from the puddle of pudding that he became and make him as good as new.
And all of it had been accomplished without so much as batting an eye.
"You know... I am not angry with you." Abaddon said strangely.
He placed his foot on the chest of his fallen uncle and looked at him with no small amount of contempt.
"You... are just a symptom, a manifestation of the disease that is the gods..!"
He picked up Jadaka's fallen sword and snapped it in half with minimal effort, making Jadaka's eyes pop out of his skull.
No one was supposed to be able to touch this weapon but him, least of all another dragon!
Jaldabaoth had told him that it would devour the powers and abilities of anyone that he so much as poked with it!
So why the hell was this monster still fine?!
"My father's lost arm... his scarred face... the life of my grandfather... my beloved wife's eye... the home we built together..!
I won't place those things on your shoulders. No, the blame for those things lies solely on those overgrown children in the heavens!"
Reaching down, he grabbed Jadaka cleanly by the head and yanked hard.
His uncle's head and spinal cord immediately came loose from his torso, but because his soul was locked inside of his body he was unable to die.
"I'll charge it to the angels, the bastards of Olympus, Valhalla, Heliopolis, there will be nowhere where they can run from me when I come to avenge this debt!!!"
Abaddon was so upset he'd already cracked Jadaka's skull, but his hatred still was not relieved.
Suddenly, an idea occurred within his mind.
Searching his enemy's soul, he found exactly what he was looking for.
A small thread was connected to his soul, traveling from here all the way into the heavens far above.
It was time to send a message.
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