The Cursed King, Chapter 55

He whispered to the wind, “Blood Field: Red Storm.” 

In the distance, a legion of alien monstrosities charged without pause. His wings—one crimson and feathered, the other bat-like and leathery—fluttered at his back as a vortex of blood took shape in the air around him. It spun with such force that anything within its grasp was rendered to ragged shreds. The howling of the creatures rose in unison, their screams echoing across the scorched plain.

The vortex swelled in moments, becoming a towering cyclone of red that drew in dust and debris and the abominations alike. They roared and writhed until that crimson tempest devoured them whole. He allowed a faint smile, then ascended, looking down upon the wreckage below: black smoke trailing into the sky, billions of corpses strewn across the ruined battlefield.

Still the tide of creatures did not waver, nor did their numbers diminish. He considered them for a moment. An extermination, he thought, and under other circumstances he might have summoned orbital fire. But this was a proving ground for his newfound Cursed Technique.

He stretched out his hand. Threads of Cursed Energy flickered from his fingertips. 

“Expand,” he said. The vortex rushed outward in an instant, feasting upon the horde. Then it dissolved beyond his command. His brow tightened. 

He recalled how Vulkan and Horus had honed their strength over countless years of trial, how they drove themselves beyond mortal limits. Only a single year—by his reckoning—had passed since he awakened his Jujutsu. That thought lingered as he hovered above the carnage, crimson energy sparking around his hands, the battlefield filled with the wailing of beasts yet to be slaughtered.

A hush lingered in the aftermath of the vortex’s collapse. The great cyclone of blood had dwindled into a crimson mist that clung to the mangled earth. Ribbons of gore shimmered along the broken ground, pooling in cracked ravines and slick hollows. Sanguinius hovered above the battlefield on wide-spread wings: one a sweep of crimson feathers, the other a leathery appendage marked by black veins. He moved through the air with an ease that belied the ruin below. Across the plain, rising hills of debris burned in silent conflagration. The smoke twisted upward and bled into a dark sky that spat ash as if the heavens themselves despised the land.

There came a roar across the miles: an unbroken tide of chitinous bodies surging from the horizon. They swept past the corpses of their own kind, indifferent to the mangled limbs and devoured remains. The scattering of dust rolled before them in a low cloud. Their eyes shone in the dimness like orbs of tempered steel. Their claws raked the ground with an endless chittering. Their ragged forms—part insect, part reptile, wholly abomination—swarmed over the fields of blackened stone and half-melted structures, heedless of their losses, drawn to him like moths to a burning pyre.

He lowered his eyes. A single breath hissed between parted lips. His gloved hand lifted with a slow deliberation, each finger splayed. The faint hum of Cursed Energy gathered against his flesh, distorting the air around him. The swirling currents of his power bent the sunlight and cast strange refractions on the battleground. A wind rose, then fell, then rose again. Where the Red Storm had raged only moments before, a lingering vortex of dust and shredded alien tissue still spun in reluctant circles. His heart pounded hard in his chest, and in response the tide of blood below twitched as though tethered to his pulse. Though no expression crossed his face, the slight crease near his eyes spoke of concentration and a hunger for greater mastery.

He descended toward the broken plain. When his boots touched the ground, the soil cracked and sank beneath him, still saturated with half-coagulated gore. He passed among the wreckage of bodies. Some were missing limbs. Others had been twisted so violently they no longer had recognizable forms. The black shells of these creatures glinted with a dull sheen in the gloom. The wind picked up again, carrying with it a raw stench that clung to everything.

He pressed a palm against the air before him, as if warding off the advancing legion. A sharp current of Cursed Energy spiraled outward, sweeping across the flats. The nearest aliens paused, their spined legs bristling. Others hissed and leapt forward. Sanguinius did not move. His wings twitched. A sound like the flutter of tattered sails in a storm rippled across the silence. The swirling dust around him turned a darker shade of red and began to climb upward in a sinuous funnel. Fine droplets coalesced in the air, suspended for an instant before knitting themselves into fresh streams of dancing liquid.

He opened his hand. The funnel widened, and in that roiling swirl one could see flayed flesh. The swirling red turned opaque, a living fluid that glistened with savage intent. Torn scraps of the fallen rose from the ground and merged with the vortex. The howling wind grew. He stood unmoving in its center, hair whipped about his face. His eyes remained calm, and the lines of his jaw set firm. Outside his vortex, the nightmarish horde advanced. Their scaly bodies brushed through the debris. Their shrieks rattled the atmosphere, answering the roars and booms of distant orbital thunder. They came in uncountable numbers, an unholy wave blotting out the horizon.

He spoke in a low voice, half-lost beneath the wind: “Blood Field: Crimson Sky.”

His eyes fixed on the heavens. Overhead, the clouds dimmed to a deeper shade of red, as though siphoning color from the swirling mass around him. The entire sky seemed to convulse. Crimson tendrils spread from horizon to horizon, painting the firmament in shades of fresh blood. The stench grew thick, so tangible it seemed to coat the skin. Across the planet’s surface, the gloom took on a lurid cast, as if some giant artery had burst in the firmament.

A trembling hush passed over the battlefield. Even the aliens hesitated in their advance. They slowed, jaws slack, compound eyes reflecting that unearthly glow. For a moment, they seemed to sense the promise of violence in the suspended hush. Then came the first spear: a barbed spike of crystalized blood that seared the air with a whistling pitch, burying itself in the midst of their front ranks. The impact cracked the bedrock and sent shattered debris spiraling outward. Another spear followed. Then another. Soon, a barrage rained from the scarlet clouds, each projectile trailing vaporous contrails. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Each one shrieked with the speed of a meteorite, slamming into the alien horde with a thunderous roar.

The plain convulsed beneath the strike. Chunks of flesh and black exoskeleton spattered in wide arcs. Limbs and fluid splashed across the ridges of stone. More spears hammered into the ranks. They pinned creatures to the ground like insects on metal spikes. They tore holes in the packed mass of bodies. They crashed through the lines, leaving smoldering craters in their wake. A murky haze spread across the battlefield, so thick one could barely see five paces ahead. In that haze, thousands upon thousands of those invaders perished, shrieking and clacking with mindless fury until their screams were swallowed by the next wave of blood spears.

Still, the deluge did not slow. The sky was a trembling mass of crimson clouds, swirling at Sanguinius’s command. The spears rained in a steady torrent, and each time one fell, a thunderous clap rolled across the plain, echoing off distant mountains. Sanguinius remained in his stance, gloved fingers flexed. His cloak of blood-laced energy swirled around him. The entire field was in motion, as if the land itself had awakened to feast upon the intruders.

When at last the spears eased in frequency, the view across the plain was a graveyard of colossal proportion. Billions of corpses stacked upon each other in unholy mounds. The stench rose in waves, reeking of iron and entrails. Many of the spears still stood upright, forming a forest of blood-red crystals jutting from the earth, each spike a totem of slaughter. Some of the spikes lay broken where too many bodies had piled, but even these had wrought devastation. Beyond this forest, the horizon still seethed with fresh ranks. Even after the unimaginable toll, the aliens were endless. The ground quaked with the hammering of their countless limbs. Their shrill howls filled the air, challenging the sky.

Sanguinius lifted his gaze and tilted his head as if listening to some distant resonance. He rose from the ground with a strong downward thrust of his wings. Where his feet had stood, only a maroon stain remained. His movements were measured, neither fast nor slow, carrying him above the forest of impaled monstrosities. He passed over them like a silent wraith. Some of the creatures still twitched on the spikes. Others lay with their eyes open, lifeless, shattered carapaces leaking vile fluids. Yet the next wave was nearly upon him. He could see them from his vantage, a tide that stretched from one edge of the horizon to the other, unbroken in their march. They advanced over the corpses of their brethren without pause, pressing forward with single-minded hunger.

He paused in midair. His wings beat once. He stared past the ring of fallen spires to the towering presence of that living ocean of horrors. His expression remained inscrutable. His armor caught the glow from the burning sky, turning its polished plates a deeper red. The beating of his heart reverberated in his ears. The alien roar answered from below. They charged over the churned soil, their numbers a living black storm. Some leapt upon the crystalized spears and shattered them with powerful limbs, clearing paths for those behind. The fracturing of blood crystals rang out like muted chimes across the battlefield.

Sanguinius drew a long breath. He spread both arms wide, hands open to the sky. The swirling mists of blood thickened around him, siphoning from the debris below. Streams of gore spiraled upward. The energy roiled like a serpent coiling around its prey. High above, a single break in the clouds revealed a glimpse of distant stars shining beyond that red pall. The gloom parted for an instant, as if the heavens took notice.

His wings spread, the pinions of one shimmering in the ruddy light, the other slick with half-dried blood along the edges. He set his jaw. Thin veins of cursed power branched across his forearms and traveled under the skin of his neck. The once faint hum turned to a low thrumming that pulsed in the still air. He spoke, clear as a hammerfall in the silent cosmos: “Maximum Technique: Bleeding Star.”

The clouds overhead churned into a swirling funnel. The entire dome of red began to twist with glacial slowness, revealing more of the black night that lay beyond. Within that darkness, there appeared a fiery haze: a swirling mass that seemed to belong to no known star. It flickered at first, an errant glow. Then it surged, a burning reservoir of light and liquid menace, suspended in the void where no star had shone before. The battlefield fell into a hush so absolute that even the shrill chirping of the aliens seemed momentarily hushed.

A single drop fell from that stellar reservoir. It landed far beyond Sanguinius, near the heart of the advancing legion. The hiss of contact was deafening. A flash of blinding red followed. The drop sizzled through the crusted ground and sent up plumes of molten rock. Creatures around the impact site disintegrated instantly, their shells dissolving into steaming gore. Then came another drop, and another. Each slammed into the planet’s surface with a detonation that rattled the sky.

Within seconds, a downpour ensued. It was not water nor the crystalline spears of moments before but molten blood, thick and roiling with heat beyond measure. Columns of superheated fluid crashed onto the field in thick, lurid torrents, boiling on impact and generating clouds of searing vapor. The aliens caught beneath these sudden waterfalls burst apart, their forms liquefied by a heat that melted metal, let alone living tissue. Those that escaped the center of each torrent reeled away, shrieking with the fury of the damned. Even from above, the heat radiating from each point of impact could be felt in the very air.

In a matter of moments, the entire battlefield was awash in a molten tide. Rivers of sizzling blood carved channels through the debris and devoured the nearest corpses, old and new alike. The swirling heat churned with unstoppable momentum, guided by the twisted impetus of Sanguinius’s Cursed Energy. Long streams of this molten fluid poured off into the distance, forging bright channels of sizzling red that scarred the planet’s surface. The alien legion shrank back, but there was nowhere to hide. More continued to march into the deadly rain, forced onward by the endless press of numbers behind them. They tumbled into those molten flows and were lost amid the seething expanse.

Sanguinius hovered at the epicenter, wings buffeted by hot gusts that tore at his plumes. The swirl of Cursed Energy around him drew inward, then surged outward in a thunderous pulse. The blood that rained from the sky appeared to intensify, each drop flaring like a dying sun. Impacts etched deep craters into the land, blasting aside boulders and collapsed war machines. White-hot steam obscured his figure in a swirling veil, and silhouettes of frenzied aliens flickered in the haze. They struggled to crawl free of the molten mire, their limbs incinerated to stumps, their torsos fused to lumps of congealed remains. Many simply dissolved, sinking into the scorched ground beneath that unrelenting downpour.

His chest rose and fell with each deliberate breath. He watched the carnage unfold beneath him. Columns of vile smoke erupted as entire swaths of the planet’s surface melted away. The black carapaces of the aliens bubbled in the intense heat and sloughed off, revealing glistening tissues that charred and popped. Their voices, once so loud, dissolved into a chorus of agony that ended as soon as it began. The molten tide spread in a slow wave, devouring everything in its path. The horizon flickered with the glow of that unstoppable flow, streaking the ground with fiery streams that shimmered like a sea of living embers.

His output and reserves wavered after all the techniques he’d performed. Sanguinius huffed and shook his head. “I suppose I’m not strong enough to decimate an entire world just yet, Sukuna.”