At the Bottom of Apocrypha

{I downloaded a photo editing software and fiddled around with tutorials for a few hours to change the eye color in the pic I had for Yuri while adding text, and now I have my own real cover! Sort of. I'll work on it gradually, haha. Side note, I'm running out of things to read. If you have a fanfic to recommend, especially good Dragon Ball or One Piece ones, let me know.}

The girls put their wings away and started their offense!

Miraak pulled out a staff from thin air and started blasting at Alera with a flurry of sludge that created lashing tentacles wherever it landed on the floor. They bounced harmlessly off her shield and did no damage through the Dragon Scale Armor of 'Vulcan' make. As Ally charged forward, Toni was a blur that Miraak barely registered through his ESP. He barely raised his eldritch sword in time to block a ringing blow from one of Toni's swords at the exact opposite end of Ally.

He grunted from the impact, recognizing she is too strong to afford a blow from her. 'Where is this lean swordswoman hiding that power?!'

Toni prepared to follow through with her second red-coated blade into his unguarded stomach but Miraak leapt backward to not be pinned between them.

At once the two Dragonborn charged a shout of challenge from two corners of the triangle the combatants now stood.

"ARN VOLEI!" "VEN GAAR NOS!"

Miraak birthed a cyclone from his mouth that he had hoped to utilize for the other woman after Ally, but it was quickly torn through by the unfamiliar mutant Thu'um.

Miraak watched as a gigantic repulsion force tore through his rotating gale and broke his arms out to slap him in the face, pushing him back several feet while another force got in his guard.

Toni raised her blades to perform a cross slash at the staggered Miraak, but he managed to right himself out of the middle cut and swipe one sword towards the other, forcing them both aside while he raised his staff to spew her.

Toni puffed her cheeks and glared with her crimson eyes before spitting the same colored fire into his mask much faster, making him take a few steps back as his eyes were nearly burning. Behind him, he felt a shield about to clash into his back and that it would send him forward into a bladed clothesline. He quickly whipped around and made Ally halt her attempt to guard against the blade before he raised his staff over his back shoulder to blast Toni with the sludge which she narrowly dodged.

It was during this that he felt a mental probe pressing on him.

"HA! Do you think I'll be manipulated by such a youngling?! Try this!"

He gave Toni a glare and the eye slits in his mask glowed a powerful green light while Ally was forcing him back in a close exchange.

"What?" Miraak's mental probe fell into some kind of boundless murk that he couldn't advance past. A very high-level ward, likely permanent from her mysterious master. He abandoned that idea and focused on the madly swinging Dragonborn before him.

Even if he could tell her next move consistently, he couldn't deal with them effectively! They were too fast and too heavy, what was this form of hers?!

"What are they feeding you?!"

Tonilia dashed to him and formed a kick to his midsection which he frantically blocked with his vertical staff. Unfortunately, as soon as it came into contact with her leg, it snapped and her kick continued.

He was caught between a sword aimed for his left shoulder and a leg at his right leg.

"WULD NAH KEST!"

With a Whirlwind Sprint, Miraak slipped through their enclosure and arrived in the middle of the arena once more, tossing his broken staff aside and whispering to his blade as it gained an unearthly green glow ready to reap the lives of man or dragon.

"FUS RO DAH!"

He aimed to push Tonilia, the better close combatant, aside while he aimed for the other Dragonborn and the souls she carries with her. Unfortunately, Tonilia managed to dodge it as they both charged him. He swung his blade rapidly horizontally and a green cut blasted to them, forcing Tonilia to limbo dodge and Ally to block as her feet were dragged backward. They looked back up again and he was gone!

Tonilia's hair stood on end as she felt a deathly wind tickle the back of her neck. She raised her blades vertically and to her right side, saving her neck as a clash of green and red sparks ensued.

"Do you think you're the only one who can hide?!"

Tonilia roundhouse kicked the area she heard the voice from and hit nothing, bringing her guard back up and joining Alera.

To streams of branch thick lightning jolted to either woman and they took the hit for at least a second before they could lean to start blocking it. Miraak showed his skill by projecting both stream attacks with a single hand while raising his sword for another green beam.

Alera got in front of Toni to block while Toni raised her blades on either side of the block to combat the approaching green beam with her own, creating another wave of sparks at the clashing point between them.

"TEN BOLOOS!"

From Alera's mouth, an orb of white light was sent to Miraak who foolishly moved to block it until one of the Dragons he had imprisoned warned him.

'Shit!'

Miraak attempted to duck out of the way and dodge, but Alera merely ignited the Light Bomb early. Alera raised her shield and the girls gladly took refuge as an overbearing light broke out of the bomb, shaking the stage and breaking through the hastily built ward of Miraak whose outfit was burned until his backside was scorched.

Miraak glared hatefully and lurched forward to the girls even as the light didn't dissipate, causing Toni to break off and approach. But Miraak didn't play fair, using a Bend Will shout on her before Alera could stop it.

The wave of brown energy passed over Toni and halted her in place for a few hazy moments, letting Miraak raise his energy-ridden blade to go for the kill on her. If his stroke continued, the kill was assured!

A beam of concentrated blue light struck him in the hip mid-swing, breaking through his armor and tearing a hole in his side before he could even react. He was thrown aside and nearly fell off the Tower before he caught himself with spider legs he sprouted and set himself down before dispersing them.

Ally panted as her mouth billowed smoke. Miraak saw this and wondered how she did that without shouting? At least it seemed like it was costly.

"Rrrrrrrrgghhnnnn," Miraak groaned as the wound in his side that bore a great hole through his stomach burned and he spat blood on the inside of his mask. He raised his hand towards the closest dragon to him and it started to disintegrate, letting its power come to him as his wound slowly mended.

But footsteps sounded out like a machinegun before he was finished, and red ribbons of light stretched behind a furious black woman's dual blades.

Miraak widened his eyes while focusing to the limit, the girl was already before him and twisting her sword dance to clash with his singular guarding blade multiple times a second.

A blur of red eyes and red blades constantly pushing him back, the blue lines of causality were only giving him a fraction of a second to adjust to the path of her furious and tornado-like storm of sharpness.

*WHOO WHISHSPLURT!*

'WHAT?!'

One of his swords was pushed aside with hers as the other drew a gash in his open chest! The problem was, he didn't have time to react! The original line of her actions was erased and a new one was made at the same time as the cut!

'She faked out her own intent!'

These weren't threads of fate, but causality! Toni noticed the pattern and behaved erratically, ruining her own plans while sabotaging Miraak's ability to react to it with his dependence in the strings! Such is the flaw with using the strings in combat.

Toni became an unfettered storm of blades, not allowing Miraak to focus long enough on shouting her away as gashes kept appearing sporadically on his skin! Luckily, he was still being healed from the drag-

'Why am I being healed?!'

He briefly looked over and found that Alera had just killed the last Dragon, forcing their souls to evacuate to him immediately and losing their emergency purpose. Two more gashes appeared on his wrists as he looked away from the berserker that wouldn't relent, and Alera was closing in to pin him with the crazy swordswoman.

Miraak found it high time to change the rhythm.

"HMM!"

A green wave of horrible and nearly opaque energy erupted from him, throwing both the girls back and into the air in their cardinal directions with no balance to give them.

"Enough games, wretches!" Miraak bent his knees and leapt skyward, propending a pair of wretched wings from his back and flying above them as he charged his sword with enough energy to conceal it in a ridiculously bright green light.

As the ladies were getting back up, they were alarmed but had almost no time to react to dozens of green lightning bolts falling toward them.

Alera stood there firmly, letting Auriel's shield absorb some and shunt other bolts off its milky white surface. Tonilia was forced to block with her swords as the cursed electricity traveled down the blade and into her hilt-grasping hands.

Yuri frowned at this, recognizing he should've made them less conductive and a bit more defensive. But it would have been difficult to add any more enchantments to that thing and the material wasn't right for an absorption factor.

"Toni!" Ally called.

"I got this!" Toni spewed through gritted teeth and looked up to Miraak with hatred. Her arms were numb but her muscles were absorbing the energy without letting the confusion and vitality drain effects seep into her like they were intended.

In a gap of the falling bolts Miraak was continuously swinging down, Toni launched her counterattack. Lines of red energy were thrown rapidly in Miraak's floating direction as he dodged the obvious lines of death while trying to get his own shots in at her.

Toni sprouted wings once more and charged upward to get even. Miraak snorted and turned up the heat, only to also get distracted by a counterattacking Ally who blasted at him with regular lightning magic.

Miraak followed the path Toni was taking and shouted an Unrelenting Force at her form, tossing the swordswoman back down to the tower and turning her into a puff of... a puff of dust?

The hairs on his back were raised as a deathly wind blew and he knew the berserk woman was once again upon him while the other Dragonborn was flying this way.

He blocked one sword and viciously shouted at the original Toni, but his shout was only a single word and lacked power.

"Unbelievable, that I would have to use this for these annoying flies."

Miraak sighed and prepared to waste away hundreds of years of accumulation. He hadn't forgotten about the master of these two women hanging over his head, and knew he would have to contend with 'Null' after killing these girls. There was no going back.

Wordlessly, an explosion of hundreds of Dragon souls concealed his form in a giant shroud of blinding orange and blue light as the noise of a hurricane broke out and sent the two ladies careening once more.

Yuri frowned once more, looking over to Herma.

"Did you know he could crystallize that many Dragon souls at once?"

"...It may...have come up once..."

"That's why you didn't care about them, you knew he would use them as a last resort, you damn trickster. Now I may have to get involved to save all that loot of his."

But Yuri merely grasped his Sigil hand tightly and the Purple-Gold glow lit even further, projecting to the owners.

'He may have those souls, but you have me.'

Alera and Toni, whose brows had knitted at Miraak's display of bottomless energy and power, gasped dramatically as they were suffused by warmth and power from their Sigil. They both looked to Yuri and smiled brightly, remembering they weren't alone even if they could've pulled it off by the skin of their teeth. Toni's spiritual blade light extended somewhat along the edge of her body and a blue and flame-like power erupted from Ally's skin as their eyes gained a greater sharpness and violence.

Toni dashed forward first, using her twin blades to carve a horizontal line in the curtain surrounding Miraak while Ally inhaled and breathed IHR KRADAS KADUUR into the gap, eliciting surprise and shock from the man who thought he was safe in there while blue flames broke in and swirled among the dragon souls. His skin burned and sizzled painfully, forcing him to direct energy to his healing.

"DAMN YOU, MORTALS!!!"

The curtain was fully blasted apart as tentacles wrapped in eldritch energy broke it open like an egg. Twenty-foot-long tentacles had broken out of Miraak's back, coated in sickly green rays. Presumably, he brought those out to combat their double-teaming, while making himself a bigger target.

Toni and Ally grinned at the giant monster they could now wound, but lost that grin when one of the thin tentacles flew to Ally at incredible speed and nearly cut her head off.

"Shit! They're fast!"

"Forget our own helper already?! Grow!"

Toni's wings were forced higher up her back as she grimaced and gritted her teeth, tentacles burst from her lower back and stretched another twenty feet, each wielding their own giant Shehai. Katana-shaped swords made from her red spiritual energy solidified and each of the six tentacles entwined dumbly but firmly around their hilts.

Miraak gritted his teeth and stretched his own tentacles to intercept Tonilia's to stop her from swinging while she grunted from the pressure of moving them.

"RRRRAAAAAA!!!" Toni screamed her shrill battle cry, and six swords swung in six directions, all aiming at Miraak. He caught four of them with his own, but two more of his were cut from his body and spewed a deluge of black blood.

"Hahaha, I did not expect this direction at all. They're adapting well, don't you think?"

"Everything...was already fated..."

It was when he looked at his cut side that he felt danger approaching from the other one, glistening claws of gold wrapped in burning blue power that could rend through cities stretched over 25 feet tall and were swinging down on him.

In dread, Miraak could do nothing while his other tentacles were still holding the arguably deadlier Shehai at bay. The giant claw coming from that damned new Dragonborn took off the entire right side of his tentacles, leaving only one more as the Shehai were now falling towards him.

"GOD DAMNIT!"

In a panic, Miraak released his space suppression and teleported away from the site narrowly before the Shehai severed the air he previously occupied. Above he floated miserably, flashing a glare at his insufferable audience. That Null hadn't even officially stepped in, he had no idea if he could even beat him after this.

"DAMN YOU, NULL! THIS ISN'T THE END!"

Miraak motioned to cut open a portal to flee to another part of Apocrypha as fast as he could, Toni and Alera tried to flash to him and cut him down before he could but Yuri was faster.

From his hand, nine chains stretched across the horizon and trapped it in an orb shape in every direction. The veil Miraak had cut was bound in black and brown chains before it was forcibly closed. The arm he had led inside it was severed, he could no longer teleport and two blades descended onto either side of him.

A giant shehai and a giant claw landed on his green-coated shoulders, throwing him down toward the mire of black waters.

Miraak flew into a rage, throwing his sword up and directing as much energy through it as possible to get a gruesome kill on at least one of them! Tongues of plasmatic and eldritch fire licked the blade and finally released, forming a pencil straight and devastating pillar that rose to meet his foes.

Toni and Ally glared at the beam and moved to match it. Ally put herself in a horse stance and clenched her teeth and blue fury billowed from her throat and her eyes contracted to their limit. Tonilia retracted her tentacles and twirled like mad, her eyes threatening to swallow Miraak in hate. In an odd yet beautiful joining of emotions, Toni and Ally shouted the same thing.

""BRING IT ON YOU BASTAAARD!!!!""

Yuri raised himself from his imaginary seat as the light of this collision flashed across his face and reflected in his eyes, sending as much power through his Sigil as he could at once while bouncing up and down.

The blue flames that erupted and violently tore through the atmosphere from Alera's mouth turned into a bright and lightsaber-like beam that made sonic rings around its descent. Toni spun so fast and swung so frequently that the number of blade beams she was sending looked like a solid red 'X' tearing through the sky in a single cross-shaped executioner's pillar. Toni had to stop cutting, but her work was done when the fifty-foot-long 'X' was descending.

The green pillar perfectly collided with the blue beam of concentrated fire, while the red X weaved through it and continued past their battle. Miraak watched as the clash of blue and green sparks remained inconsequential to the torrent of blades that tore at him, being caught between two faces of a coin of destruction.

He shrouded him as densely as he could with as much energy as possible when the blades found him and clattered against his shield mercilessly. Cracks split across the shield and the beam fighting the Dragonborn's gout was losing ground rapidly.

"THIS IS NOT HOW I EEEEEEEN-"

*KRRRK SHEEN!*

To the North, South, East, and West, Miraak was divided as the red cross went past him and cut the black seas into a giant X. Miraak's green beam lost most of its power, and the blue providence split it like rotten bamboo as it fell at the speed of thought. Into the four cardinal pieces the blue light collided and consumed as a black silhouette was only visible inside the beam. The X in the sea was torn open into a giant hole and Miraak was thrust to its depths. A hole continued to be burned through the bottom of the Realm while Miraak's ashes were continually torn from his pieces and sent into the deepest grave in the Aurbis until even his shadow was no more.

The lights settled and revealed the bottom of a deep black hole at the bottom of Apocrypha garnished with a cross-shaped gash. The black sea only remembered its original shape after 10 whole seconds and the sound of rushing water was all that was left in the realm.

"He...hehe...he-"

Ally and Toni looked at each other while they panted, their eyes grew hazy while giving each other foolish grins and their transformations dropped.

Coincidentally, so did they. Yuri flashed to them and caught them, then held them like two sacks of potatoes while grinning just as foolishly.