The Lord Dreadwing had fallen.
In the center of the devastated crater, the victorious Lord Great Badger stood over the crushed corpse of its rival. It was a complete, horrifying ruin. Half its face was melted down to the gleaming white skull. Its massive neck was laid open, bleeding out from a severed artery, and the towering, sixty-foot phantom armor encasing its body flickered erratically, like a dying lightbulb.
It should have collapsed. It should have allowed its exhausted, battered soul to finally drift into the ambient essence of the Great Orrath.
But as the dying Lord Badger raised its half-melted, ruined head, its one remaining, glowing yellow eye swept across the blood-soaked valley.
It didn’t see victory. It saw its kin getting masscared.
On the periphery, the fight between the lackeys and the ant swarm had devolved into a mindless, apocalyptic bloodbath of mutual destruction. Enraged by the death of their kin, the surviving Badgers waded into the rusted-red ocean, crushing hundreds of insects with every step. But the ants were endless.
The Lord Badger watched, its failing heart skipping a beat, as a juvenile silver-backed Badger was pinned to the muddy earth. The pup screamed as a dozen Obsidian Commanders ruthlessly ripped it limb from limb, their superheated scythes cauterizing the stumps as they tore the young beast apart.
A profound, ancient grief violently twisted into pure, world-ending rage.
The Great Badger let out a roar that physically shattered the remaining petrified trees on the edge of the valley. It went completely, irrevocably berserk.
Instead of slowing down, instead of succumbing to the agonizing weight of its fatal injuries, the beast tapped into a terrifying, terminal adrenaline. It knew its end was coming. It knew it was going to die in this mud.
And it chose to take the orchestrator to hell with it.
With the hyper-evolved instincts of an apex predator, it ignored the countless ants biting at its legs. It traced the invisible, heavy psychic web of the telepathic commands backward. It followed the scent of the chemical markers.
Past the meat grinder. Past the acid pools. Past the tree line.
It looked through the dense foliage and instantly spotted them in the deep shadows: the tiny, bipedal human sitting atop a Commander, and the massive, bloated form of the Ant Queen resting on her living palanquin.
The dying Great Badger locked its single, glowing eye directly onto Sol.
The sheer, suffocating terror of a berserk Layer 3 Lord’s undivided attention slammed into Sol like a physical punch to the gut. The ambient essence around him violently dropped in temperature.
"Oh. Oh," Sol breathed, the color completely draining from his face as his confident, logical smirk vanished into pure panic. "Seems like there is some miscalculation here."
He didn’t hesitate for a single microsecond. Sol hurriedly vaulted off the broad back of his Layer 2 mount, hit the mud, and ran. He flooded his legs with every drop of Golden Liquid he could muster, sprinting backward into the dense jungle with the desperate, frantic speed of a terrified gazelle.
He fired a frantic command down the silver tether. RETREAT! RUN!
The Ant Queen received the command. She instantly ordered her pickers... the dozen massive Layer 2 Commanders acting as her palanquin... to flee. Their jagged legs scrambled frantically, tearing up the mud as they tried to turn her massive bulk around.
But with her bloated size... the size of a three-story building... she simply couldn’t run. The commanders’ legs sank deep into the muddy earth under her colossal weight.
The Great Badger Lord came charging toward them.
It was a juggernaut of jagged stone and pure malice. It plowed straight through the battlefield, killing absolutely everything in its wake. Layer 2 Obsidian Commanders that bravely leaped into its path were literally torn in half by its teeth, their upper torsos tossed aside like bloody rags. Rusted-red soldiers were crushed into paste under its massive, stomping paws.
It breached the tree line in three seconds flat. It ignored Sol’s fleeing form entirely, its primal rage zeroed in exclusively on the Hive Mother.
It lunged directly at the Ant Queen.
Realizing physical escape was impossible, the Queen didn’t cower. She was a Sovereign. She fully unleashed her mental power, firing psychic blast after psychic blast like invisible artillery shells directly into the Badger’s brain, violently fighting back to crush its mind before it reached her.
Seeing their Hive Mother under attack, her elite guard went into a suicidal frenzy. Dozens of massive Layer 2 Omen-Blood Commanders leaped from the canopy and the underbrush, dogpiling directly onto the Great Badger.
They desperately tried to drown the colossal mammal under their sheer numbers. They buried their superheated scythes deep into its spine, slashing wildly at its melting face and exposed, bleeding neck.
But the Great Badger was completely lost to the berserker rage.
It didn’t care about the mental agony tearing at its brain. It didn’t care about the superheated blades carving burning trenches into its flesh. It ignored the Commanders swarming its body entirely.
It slammed its massive, glowing paws directly into the Queen’s bloated, pale abdomen.
The impact was sickening. Its gravity-infused claws violently ripped through her thick obsidian thorax, tearing her wide open. The Badger drove its snout into the wound, gravely injuring the already battered Ant Queen. Pale spiritual mist and gallons of glowing, acidic fluids erupted all over the jungle floor.
The Hive Mother shrieked, a horrific, high-frequency sound of pure, unadulterated physical agony that shook the leaves from the canopy.
Pushed to the absolute brink of death, her physical body ruined beyond repair, the Ant Queen made her final, tragic play.
She abandoned all physical defense. She stopped commanding her soldiers. She gathered the entirety of her remaining life force and her fractured soul, condensing her colossal intellect into one ultimate, hyper-dense spear of absolute psychic annihilation.
At the direct expense of her own soul, she unleashed her full mental power and drove the psychic spear straight into the Great Badger’s brain.
For a second that felt like an eternity, the world went completely, deafeningly silent.