They're free! They're no longer a threat!

The battle at the Cancún base was an unbridled hell. Dracula and Malakor, imbued with a cursed, primal force, had become vortices of annihilation, tearing through the Cthulhu-controlled Blood Faeries with a ferocity that chilled the blood of friend and foe alike. The Punishers, following their prince's example, fought with desperate brutality, their discipline shattered, consumed by the dark power of ritual blood.

But the tide of Faeries, though decimated with each vampiric onslaught, kept coming, driven by the unfathomable will of the Ancient One.

Aria, watching the carnage and the spiral of violence into which her vampiric allies were sinking, felt a wave of nausea. The emerald and golden light emanating from her vibrated with anguish. "This is madness!" she shouted above the din. "Killing them won't stop Cthulhu! He's only using their bodies, their essences!"

She turned to Morgana Le Fay, who was struggling to maintain shields of thorny shadows against the Fae attacks. "Morgana! Your connection to the Fae, my perception of the Grid and the energies... Together! We could break the mental hold Cthulhu has on them! Free them!"

Morgana looked at her, her Dark Faerie Goddess eyes glowing with a cold, calculating light. She saw the desperate sincerity in Aria, and perhaps a chance to strike a different blow against the Ancient One, or simply to save what she considered a perversion of her own kind. "A risky gamble, mage girl," she replied, her voice a seductive and dangerous whisper. "But the alternative is to see my kind desecrated and your vampires consumed by their own fury. Let's do this."

Both sorceresses became the eye of a new storm. Aria extended her consciousness, sensing the Grid, the fundamental structure of reality that Cthulhu was corrupting to transmit his will. She visualized the threads of mind control as dark, poisonous strands, and with her new magic of Chi and Truth, she began to project a resonance of pure coherence, a vibration of freedom and individual consciousness.

Morgana, at her side, intoned an ancient Fae chant in a forgotten language, a melody of dissonance and liberation, weaving her dark magic not to destroy, but to unravel, to sever the psychic ties that bound the Blood Fae.

"Now!" Merlin shouted to the rest of the mages. "Focus your energy through the Grid that Aria illuminates! Quetzal, guide your warlocks! Sorcha, even your Chaos can be used to break chains!"

An unprecedented collective magical effort was concentrated. Ancient Umbrian magic, Mayan telluric power, the unstable energy of the Red Wizards—all channeled through the structure of the Grid that Aria now perceived clearly, amplifying Aria and Morgana's liberation countermagic.

The effect was instantaneous and dramatic. The sickly green light in the eyes of hundreds of Blood Fae flickered and died away, replaced by the natural, if often cruel, glow of their Fae eyes. The unnatural coordination of their attacks was broken. They stopped in mid-flight, looking around in confusion that quickly turned to absolute terror as they realized where they were and who they were facing.

"What... what happened?" wailed one Fae, her voice once a battle shriek, now a frightened whisper.

"Mercy!" begged another, seeing Dracula, his shadow wings dripping with blood and his eyes like hellish embers, turn toward them. "We were... controlled! It wasn't us!"

Waves of pitiful pleas rose from the newly freed Faeries. They begged for their lives from the very vampires they had tried to destroy moments before.

But Dracula, Malakor, and the Punishers were too sunk in the red tide of the "damned force." The power of the ritual blood had unleashed their most primal instincts; their thirst for destruction was now an uncontrollable compulsion. To them, the Faeries were still the enemy, the target. Their pleas were nothing more than the buzzing of insects before being crushed.

"Dracula, no!" Aria cried, sensing the vampires' murderous intent. "They're free! They're no longer a threat!"

But her voice was lost in Dracula's roar as he launched himself at the nearest group of terrified Faeries. Malakor, a comet of chaos and fury, followed, rending and burning indiscriminately. The Punishers, their eyes bloodshot, continued the slaughter with brutal and mindless efficiency.

It was a massacre. The Blood Faeries, disoriented, terrified, and disarmed by Cthulhu's will, fell like flies before the unstoppable onslaught of the crazed vampires. The mages who had freed them watched in horror, powerless to stop their own monstrous allies.

Aria's new magic had worked, but the result

It wasn't an even greater tragedy.

Only a few Blood Fae, the quickest or those on the periphery of the carnage, managed to grasp the situation quickly enough. With screams of pure terror, they scattered, fleeing desperately into the darkness of the rainforest surrounding Cancún, seeking refuge from the mad gods, the fallen angels, and now, the vampires who had lost all semblance of control.

The battlefield was littered with the shattered remnants of the Fae. The immediate threat of that swarm had been annihilated, but the price had been the sanity and souls of its vampiric defenders, and a new, bitter wound in Aria's heart.