The cursed force

The infusion of ritualized blood had transformed Dracula and his Punishers into avatars of almost divine, though deeply cursed, destruction. The Prince of the Night was a tempest of shadows and solidified vitae; his obsidian wings, now larger and sharper, propelled him across the battlefield with the speed of a dark comet, leaving a trail of shattered Blood Fae in his wake. Each burst of blood that spurted from his hands was a death knell, decapitating or impaling multiple enemies with terrifying precision. The force of his blows shattered the ethereal forms of the Fae, scattering them like dark crystal.

Malakor, the Chaos Vampire, was an equally terrifying force of nature, though far less controlled. Enveloped in a crackling aura of hellfire and red lightning, he bore down on the Fae with the fury of a berserker god. Wherever it struck, the earth scorched, and the Fae exploded in showers of corrupted essence and unleashed elemental energy. Their flight was an erratic but unstoppable missile of pure destruction.

The other Punishers who had drunk from Dracula's flask fought with a ferocity bordering on madness. Their eyes burned with the same hellish light as their Prince's, their movements were blurs of speed, and their blows, once calculated and disciplined, were now imbued with a brutal force that tore the Fae apart without mercy. The air was filled with the high-pitched shrieks of the Fae and the guttural roars of the vampires, a symphony of annihilation.

They tore apart the Blood Fae by the dozens, then by the hundreds. The Cancún base became a slaughterhouse. The ethereal bodies, though quickly dissolving, left dark stains and a smell of ozone and burnt madness.

Yet despite the carnage, the Blood Faeries did not stop. They did not waver. They showed no fear.

The colossal mind of Cthulhu, operating from the depths of the Caribbean and amplified by the nearby vortex, propelled them forward with suicidal tenacity. They were a plague, an endless swarm of lethal beauty and unnatural grace, each a conduit of the Ancient One's will. For every Faerie Dracula impaled with a shadow spear or Malakor incinerated with chaotic fire, two more seemed to emerge from the darkness of the jungle or the crashing waves, their sickly green eyes fixed on the vampires with empty determination.

They flung themselves at Dracula's wings, only to be shattered. They threw themselves into Malakor's flames, becoming ephemeral torches. They crashed into the Punishers, willing to die to inflict a wound, a drain of energy, a moment of distraction.

From the command post, Aria, Merlin, and the others watched with a mixture of awe and growing horror. The power unleashed by Dracula and his people was prodigious, almost divine in its ferocity. But the tide of Faeries did not ebb.

"They feel no pain, no fear," Elena Rossi whispered, her instruments recording the constant surge of hostile psychic energy. "They are... automatons."

"Cthulhu's will is absolute over them," Merlin confirmed, his face grave. "And it seems their numbers, or the ease with which they are replaced or reanimated by his influence, is... considerable."

Morgana Le Fay, who had managed to briefly disrupt the control over some of the Faeries, now struggled to maintain her own sanity against the intensifying psychic pressure. Their dark Fae magic was powerful, but an Ancient One's mind control was on a different scale.

Dracula, in the heart of the storm, felt a pang of something that wasn't physical exhaustion—the ritualized blood prevented that—but a kind of cosmic fatigue. He could kill Fae indefinitely, but how many were there? Was this Cthulhu's true offensive, or just a diversion, a way to wear down Terra's mightiest defenders while something worse brewed in the depths?

The "accursed force" that imbued them was a consuming fire. It consumed their self-control, their ancient discipline, in exchange for overwhelming power. But even that power had limits against an enemy that valued no individual life and possessed a seemingly inexhaustible supply of troops.

The slaughter continued, merciless, with no end in sight. The vampires ravaged, the fae attacked, ready to die again and again. The night in Cancún was drowning in blood, madness, and the desperate struggle of a few evolved monsters against a tide of horrors controlled by a mad god. Victory, if it came, would taste of ash and the loss of more than just life.