Bang!
The heavy impact echoed across the battlefield.
Dust rose into the air like roaring waves at high tide, rolling outward in every direction with shattered dead branches and the corpses of the fallen in its wake.
Zheng Qing and Jiang Yu hid behind the black cat, while the black cat hid behind a pile of enormous dead willow branches. Only after the blast wave had rolled past did the three cautiously poke their heads out and peer toward the source of the impact.
At the center of the collision stood two towering monsters, locked horn to horn.
On the left was a short, squat creature whose body resembled a massive lump of flesh. Black tentacles thrashed wildly atop the lump like coiling whips; beneath it were thick, tree stump-like hooves; and on either side of it gaped mouths full of fangs, dark green viscous fluid dripping from their corners as they exhaled the stench of rotting vegetation.
On the right was a tall, slender thing resembling a long-legged tree stump. It had four long legs with reverse joints, their sharp hooves planted firmly in the earth like compass points. Besides the fangs-filled mouths on its stump-like body, it was covered in eyes of all sizes, their whites and blacks distinct as they rolled about. Their gazes were dull, yet brimming with savagery. From its head writhed thick branches like Medusa's serpentine hair.
They were the uninvited guests who had descended from the sky earlier and thrown the battlefield before the inner fortress into chaos: two servants of Shub-Niggurath. Under the grand blessing magic of Urban IX, headmaster of Atlas Academy, the craters they had smashed into the ground had been restored, and the two monsters had returned to the surface.
But blessings could restore a ruined environment, not hatred