Chapter 9

The Dark Forest – Castle of Witches

The night quaked with violence. From the vantage of his cragged overlook, Belial watched the clash unfold in the distance—shadows darting against the glow of spellfire, steel flashing like lightning through smoke. Ninjas in black, their movements honed to spectral precision, darted between bursts of sorcery; mages, robed and arrogant, hurled volleys of incandescent force that carved craters into the earth. The battlefield was a storm of clashing arts: discipline and steel against the raw chaos of magic.

Belial’s lip curled upward, a grin carved from equal parts amusement and contempt.
“That pup, Mordred,” he muttered, letting the words roll like gravel from his throat. “Vexing as he is, the boy was right about Ra’s al Ghul’s position. The whelp understands strategy.”

A low, rumbling chuckle followed. “He’d make a fine demon one day ... if I could pry his soul from that witch mother of his.”

The thought soured his grin. A growl escaped him—deep, guttural, resonant—and the sound alone made the demons and enthralled peasants around him flinch. Eyes glazed with infernal obedience locked onto him.

“We’ll do it the boy’s way for now,” Belial declared. His voice reverberated like iron dragged over stone. “Let the possessed go first. The rest of you hold your posts until I give the signal.”

A demon stepped forward, posture lowered, claws flexing nervously. “My lord ... what of the traitor?”

Belial’s features hardened at once. The air around him thickened with heat. “He hasn’t manifested,” Belial spat. “He still cowers inside that weak human skin suit of his.”

The demon opened his mouth to speak again, but Belial turned on him so quickly the creature recoiled, wings folding tight as though trying to make itself small.

“But rest assured,” Belial growled, each word a promise of violence. “As soon as Etrigan shows his cowardly face, I will go myself and finish him.”

Silence fell. Even the wind seemed to still. Then Belial faced the battlefield once more. His enormous hand rose, clawed fingers splaying against the night sky. He released a roar. It tore across the plains, shaking the very bones of the earth. Trees shuddered. Stones trembled. Dust lifted from the ground as though repelled by the force of his voice.

The possessed peasants responded instantly. Their eyes rolled back. Their mouths distended in impossible ways. And from a hundred throats came a single, feral scream—no human timbre, no human restraint, just pure predatory madness.

Then they surged forward. Not running, not marching—but lunging, crawling, bounding like broken, rabid things. Their limbs jerked in unnatural angles, their bodies driven by something far older and more violent than humanity. They hurled themselves into the fray, a tide of corrupted flesh tearing toward the mages and ninjas.

Belial watched it all unfold, arms folded, grin slowly returning. “Let the night remember whom it serves,” he murmured. And the battlefield obeyed.

Meanwhile...

The night erupted in a storm of war. Fire and lightning tore across the clearing as the mages unleashed the full breadth of their elemental arsenal. A blast of searing flame consumed three ninjas at once, their warded armor glowing white-hot before cracking apart. Another warrior vanished beneath a conjured boulder that crashed down like a fragment of the heavens. Wards crackled, runes flared, and still men died.

But the ninjas learned. They always learned. For every fallen warrior, the surviving ranks adapted—anticipating the arc of a lightning bolt, slipping beneath spirals of conjured wind, cutting through unstable glyphs with precise, well-timed strikes. Their bodies moved with austere discipline, honed reflexes working in tandem with the faint glow of the protective sigils laced into their armor.

The mages laughed. In arrogance. In mockery. In the certainty that no mortal discipline could withstand their arcane supremacy. Spells flew with taunts braided into them, contempt echoing across the battlefield.

“Dance, little shadows!”

“Kneel, little men! Kneel before real power!”

Ra’s al Ghul ignored their derision. He stood with the stillness of a blade forged in ice, eyes narrowed as he observed patterns the mages themselves were too proud to recognize. At his silent command, his elite guard formed a protective ring around the priests—robes fluttering as they ducked behind shattered stone and uprooted trees. Brother Aelfric, white-bearded and resolute, led them in chants that fortified the wards etched upon the ninjas’ armor.

The elites braced themselves, raising shields and blades forged from metals touched by ancient alchemy. Spell after spell crashed against them—cone-shaped bursts of frost, spears of emerald light, volleys of crackling fire—but the elites weathered it all, using their weapons like anchors against an ocean of sorcery.

Ahead of them, Merlin and Jason Blood carved a path through the chaos. Jason fought like a veteran of centuries, shield angled to catch spellfire, sword sweeping down to sever the limbs of any mage foolish enough to engage him directly.

Merlin’s staff throbbed with power as he countered spells in mid-air, unraveling sorcery at the precise syllable where its structure weakened. Several runes etched into the ninjas’ armor flared bright red—warnings screamed by magic itself.

“Traps!” someone barked.

The ground detonated. A geyser of dirt and arcane energy shot skyward, flinging bodies like ragdolls. Most of the ninjas spun away just in time—others disappeared into the blast and did not reemerge. Shrapnel of stone and burning embers rained upon the survivors. The mages laughed even harder.

“So fragile! So mortal!” They had lost only a handful, and their superiority inflated like a swollen sun.

Ra’s exhaled slowly, watching their formations, their blind spots, the smug looseness in their stances.

He glanced at Masaki. “Alright,” he said, voice calm as a death sentence. “I believe we have allowed these sorcerers enough amusement.”

Masaki nodded once and raised his hand. The signal was given. The battlefield shifted. From the shadows behind the mages—places wards had not been designed to detect—ninjas rose like smoke becoming flesh. They crept in silently, waiting for the precise moment the mages leaned too far into their own arrogance.

Then they struck. A mage in mid-laughter unleashed a transformation spell that turned an onrushing ninja into a croaking green frog. He grinned triumphantly—until he heard a wet, choking gurgle behind him. He turned. Several of his comrades clutched shredded throats, collapsing face-first in the mud. He barely had time to inhale before a shadow surged toward him.

“Begone!” he shrieked, flinging a transfiguration spell.

It washed over the ninja like harmless mist.

The mage’s eyes widened. “How—”

The ninja’s blade answered for him, slicing his abdomen open in one smooth, surgical movement. The mage tried to teleport, hands trembling through the sigils, but his concentration died before his body did.

Across the field, the counterattack became absolute carnage. For every ninja that had fallen earlier, a mage now died screaming. Some were beheaded, their heads tumbling across the dirt. Others were dragged down and crushed beneath superhuman kicks and hammerlike fists—Lazarus-enhanced blows that splintered ribcages. Kunai and shuriken filled the air in lethal patterns. Poison bombs released choking green clouds that left mages gasping and clawing at their own throats.

Desperate, the mages conjured barriers—circles of shimmering light, domes of reinforced mana, spirals of defensive glyphs. The ninjas cut through them. Their warded blades split the spells cleanly, shearing magical constructs as though slicing through silk. The mages stumbled backward, exposed ... horrified.

A telekinetic shout lifted one ninja into the air, limbs pinned by invisible force. But before the mage could snap the man in half, three more ninjas surged forward. The mage threw out a telekinetic blast to scatter them, but their wards glowed defiantly and they pressed on, unaffected.

One blade flashed. The mage screamed as his arm fell to the dirt—severed cleanly at the elbow, blood spraying in a hot arc. Panic finally claimed the sorcerers. They began teleporting away in frantic bursts of light, abandoning their positions, their pride dissolving into terror.

But it was too late. The ninjas could track them now—senses sharpened by Lazarus rejuvenation, instincts heightened by the wards and the priests’ chanting. The moment a mage blinked out of existence, a cluster of ninjas vanished into the shadows after him.

Screams echoed from the treeline. From the ravines. From the forgotten corners of the battlefield. One by one, the mages died in the dark. And the night belonged to the ninjas.

The surviving mages staggered back, robes torn, faces pale with sweat and disbelief. Panic twisted their features as they attempted once more to vanish in bursts of arcane light.

But Merlin’s voice thundered across the field. “Obstrinum Portarum! Nexum Transitus!”

A ripple of blue energy swept outward, crackling like lightning across a stormfront. The air thickened. The ground pulsed. Every attempt at teleportation shuddered, cracked, and collapsed inward as the spell severed their connection to the ley-lines. The mages gasped as the magic slipped from their fingers like water. Trapped. Defeated. Their desperation broke into wails.

“Mercy! Mercy, please!”

“We surrender!”

Merlin turned toward Ra’s al Ghul, staff still glowing faintly. His expression was unreadable.

Ra’s sighed, as though irritated that the matter required his input at all. “Take them prisoner,” he said at last. “Use the enchanted bindings.”

At once the ninjas moved, producing chains that glowed an eerie silver-blue—each link etched with archaic runes that shimmered as though alive. These were Merlin’s craft: restraints forged specifically to choke magic at the source, choking spellcraft into silence.

One by one, the mages were shackled. Their power guttered out the moment the runes touched their skin. The arrogant sorcerers trembled like children as they were marched into a holding circle.

But no one celebrated. The rumble came first—a low, rising thunder. Then the screaming. From across the field, an army of possessed peasants charged in a frenzied tide. Men, women, youths, even children—all twisted by demonic influence—raced forward on limbs that jerked and spasmed like broken marionettes.

They hit the ninja line with the force of an avalanche. Several ninjas were trampled before they could even raise their blades, swallowed beneath a stampede of clawing hands and gnashing teeth. The possessed tore into anything within reach—warrior, mage, or one another—driven by no strategy, no reason, only the raging need to kill.

One bound mage screamed as a possessed villager sank its teeth into his throat. Another fell beneath three snarling children whose eyes rolled white with madness. The sorcerers shrieked, helpless and stunned. The wet squelching of flesh being ripped apart filled the air. Even hardened warriors flinched.

Ra’s lifted a single hand. The elites obeyed instantly. Shields slammed forward with a resonant crash as the elites and ninjas moved in unison, forming a barrier of interlocked steel and braced bodies. The possessed slammed into them, clawing, biting, writhing. The barricade held—barely.

Behind the formation, the bound mages cowered, realization dawning that they had been abandoned by their dark allies ... left as fodder.