The white she-wolf taunted, "For a kitsune Villar, you're embarrassing. You're cunning with your henchmen, pawns, and minions... But in a head-on battle? All you rely on is brute force!"
"My adopted family are cowards who shrink away from a straight-up fight! I don't rely on illusions or cheap-tricks, I am a true warrior!"
"Fighting fair is for chess and boxing," Morgonna used an utterly mundane light spell... beefed up to insane levels of a dozen flash grenades...
Villar adjusted his eyesight in moments, "Did you really think that was going to-"
Villar found himself swarmed by a dozen or so white she-wolves, the spiritual aura and intensity of the magic they gave off was identical, making find the real one harder than it should be. He zeroed in on one she-wolf that was staying back from the pack. 'No, it wouldn't be that one, she's not that stupid to leave that obvious an opening. So which one is-'
The she-wolf Morgonna burst out of the ground right below Villar, stabbing him in the stomach with her claws, and unleashing a classic fireball at the wound at point blank range, having shielded herself from the flames before she'd emerged.
Villar was blown back, and skidded on the ground. Villar narrowed his eyes darkly as the copies were reabsorbed into Morgonna. "That... hurt.."
-
There was a reason mortals feared the curse of the werebeast, the philosophy of the lycans was hardwired into the gift itself: 'nature was beautiful, nature was bloody, nature did not play favorites. Heed the alpha's experience. And above everything, protect your pack.'
More than one Lycan had turned enemies into allies simply by means of infecting them with the gift, and their new brother would die to protect their new packmates. There was a reason these beasts were feared on the full moon when the infection of the gift was all but instantaneous.
Wars of extermination went nowhere, as the Lycan could replenish their numbers from their defeated foes... Eventually the compromised was reached, where any mortal that happened upon the world of the Lycan was fair game, no questions asked, but in the realm of mortals, any mortal was free to kill any Lycan they saw if they were in wolf form (needed to spread their gift).
Of course... their gift could only be given to the living (one of the basic reasons undead wolf-beasts did not exist!)... meaning with or without Villar's magic granting his henchmen immunity to the lycan's bite, the liches had nothing to fear.
The Liches... were insanely powerful undead... each one a man so driven by power that the idea of dying and losing that power was an eldritch horror on par with the Old Ones (long may they slumber!). Naturally those so fixated on power were not about to share it, and this mean EVERY LICH who ever existed had to discover, develop and basically REINVENT the process to become an immortal undead with their soul stored away in some random object kept under a number of layers of security that truly only the power mad would enact.
Even one was capable of ruling small countries with sheer might. When formed into groups, it was their united desire for more power, and each one was ready to betray another for a larger slice of the pie, paranoia ran rampant in such circles (and for good reason!). Such alliances never lasted long by undead standards.
"You must be joking!" said a red robbed undead witch wearing a white beauty mask who had sacrificed the still beating heart of her own child as part of her ritual to become an immortal undead. "You deer are nothing but prey to these wolves! Be our foot soldiers, and they can be exterminated!"
"They keep our population down by culling our weak and sick from our herd, and we cull any incompetent or stupid hunters from their pack. It's how both our kinds have become what they are," said the deer doe, smaller than the bucks, but even this was still taller and stronger than a normal human. "If you ask any of the other herds, they will give the same answer."
"But don't you want more LIFE?! To live LONGER? Imagine all you can accomplish, all you can learn! All that can be yours!"
"It's the nature of life to want to live, it's why we fight each hunt to the bitter end... we kill to live, the same as the wolves. We are two sides of the same coin."
"You're wasting your time with these brain-dead primitives!" said a tall lich wearing multiple crowns he had smelted together. "Men such as us don't need to waste our time on them."
"Don't you find the being referred to as part of a group of men, sexist?" The doe asked.
The female lich said matter of fact. "I'm a wo-MAN aren't I?"
"... Point taken."
The lich remembered when she'd magically given a lycan a stroke and a heart attack at the same time... only for the Lycan to get up and rip her arms off (replacing those had been easier than you think).
Dragons were driven by money and power, and made sure any that were added to their numbers via reality manipulation magic were similarly driven by grasping greed... and the sycophants such men inherently attracted being perfect starters for their personal family of Kobolds, the little beasties happily riding on their masters' coat tails to greatness. Dragons were engines of destruction, no two ways about it, and adult dragons would boast they were armies unto themselves.
And the red lich STILL preferred dealing with DRAGONS... dragons you could bribe, offer them riches, offer them more kobolds, offer the younger ones stocks in the merchant empires that the genies had established across realms. (A merchant empire of genies that avoided the mortal realm like the plague since a clever wish made centuries ago by a descendant of King Solomon (the first mortal to outsmart a particularly sadistic genie lord millennia earlier, leaving room for the Tanuki to grow in status and wealth in their place) had made it so genies had to LOYALLY and DUTIFULLY serve the mortals who held their vessels rather than destroy said mortal in some vague relation to their wishes). Compared to dragons, trying to bribe a were-beast and the natives of their world was much much harder.
"Looks like we'll be doing this the hard way," the red lich said.
-
Gloria had finished hammering out the details (though realizing to his dread she HAD basically sold off a child into an adoption even if they hadn't decided on which one yet...), when a crimson were wolf burst in... his fur doing little to hide the blood that was seeping from wounds that weren't immediately closing.
"My Alphas! Deer that will not die approach! They move like puppets, they have no heart beat, and their flesh is cold! They attack all that come near them!"
Vega said, "... Walking-dead? Here? But we have a non-aggression pact with the realm of undeath! Don't we?"
"We have one with MOST of them!" Hilda corrected. "The realm of undeath is composed of several factions, as our world is composed of more than just us wolves who can spread the gift."
Winery said looking Gloria in the eyes, "Gloria... this isn't a negotiation anymore. I've grown up in the mortal world, I know how freaky this whole thing is! But unless you're packing stinger missiles, your best choice right now is to get OUT OF HER! Go back to your own world! You WILL get caught in the cross fire! And sooner or later, you WILL get so deadly hurt that making you part of the pack WILL be the only way to save you! I know how these things tend to play out!"
"... I have a feeling those things might be here because of me... Villar already attack you and your friends once, he wouldn't do that unless he was going to already come after you rather than provoke your family! ... Which means... I'm part of this too."
"Just don't say I didn't warn you," Winery said.