Mirac couldn't tear his eyes away from the scene unfolding before him.
'I-I can't believe it!'
A cold shiver ran down his back, climbing up his spine.
It was in that moment that Mirac finally understood why those demonic creatures had once been so feared:
'T-The Rogthars… can regenerate?!'
Only then did everything come rushing back to him.
Two days earlier, when he and Carmen had faced those three Rogthars to save Blake, something had happened that at the time had only caught his attention in passing.
As he had been lunging toward the horned Rogthar, his eyes had glimpsed something strange: the wound on its calf that Carmen had inflicted shortly before with precise, deep strikes had vanished. The monster's rough, reddish skin had returned intact, free of blood or scars, as though the blade had never pierced it at all.
After the fight, Mirac had been the only one to notice. He had thought about it for a moment, almost absentmindedly, then that detail had slipped away, swallowed by the chaos of events that had swept over him in the days that followed.
And only now, watching that wound seal itself shut before his very eyes, did that forgotten detail resurface—sharper than ever, and terrifyingly clear in its meaning.
'Damn it! How could I have forgotten about this?'
Unfortunately for him, there was no time for self-reproach. No time for anything but action!
Mirac channeled all the Mana he could spare into his legs and arm, feeling the familiar warmth spread through his muscles like an underground current.
The blade trembled faintly, and the grey-silver veins lit up with a faint bluish glow, dim but razor-sharp.
Meanwhile, the Rogthar that had just regenerated was already back on its feet.
The creature's orange eyes—dull a moment before, now blazing once again with a ravenous light—settled on Mirac slowly, like something still gathering the threads of its own consciousness.
Then the monster let out a low growl, tightened its grip on its weapon, and charged straight at the masked boy.
Mirac didn't step back.
'Even if they can regenerate, two days ago Carmen and I still managed to take down those three Rogthars that were chasing Blake. All it took was cutting off their heads… So that's their weak point!'
That thought flashed through his mind like a bolt of lightning.
The Rogthar was already upon him. With a fierce growl, it raised its enormous sword and brought it down with brutal force toward him.
Mirac darted sideways at the last second, letting the monster's strike cut through the air just inches from his side. He felt the wind of the swing graze his arm.
The moment the Rogthar completed its swing and found itself exposed and off-balance, Mirac twisted his torso, brought his blade into position, and delivered a diagonal slash with everything he had.
The Mana exploded along his arm at the exact moment of impact with the Rogthar's neck, brutally amplifying the force of the blow.
The blade cleanly severed the monster's head, which flew off with a wet, heavy sound, rolling between the rail ties before coming to rest against a rusted wheel.
The decapitated body remained standing for a brief moment, almost as if it hadn't yet realized it was dead. Then it collapsed heavily to the ground, and this time it did not rise again.
Mirac, however, wasted no time celebrating.
With considerable urgency, he turned toward the center of the hall and shouted at the top of his lungs:
"Captain! These monsters can regenerate!"
The silence that followed those words lasted less than a second, but it was a dense silence—the kind that precedes something irreversible.
"What?!" Alvern exclaimed.
And he wasn't the only one to shudder at that revelation.
The masked boy's words struck the squad like a bucket of ice-cold water, shattering everyone's concentration for a moment—even those who had an enemy right in front of them.
Mirac pointed with a quick gesture of his bloodied sword toward the wounded monsters scattered among the tracks.
"Wounds to the torso, arms, legs… they're not enough! They get back up unless they're decapitated!"
The moment he finished speaking, his warning was confirmed in real time before the entire squad's eyes.
Not far behind, one of the Rogthars pierced by Lirael's arrows was writhing on the metal rails: the gashed thighs were stitching themselves back together with a wet, disgusting sound, the muscles winding back into place like taut ropes, the bones creaking back into place with short, dry, unnatural cracks.
Another—the one struck by the wagon and with its side torn open by Roric—let out a gurgling growl as the shredded flesh swelled and closed back up, the shattered ribs realigning themselves one by one.
Scattered among the tracks, even those that had lost limbs or suffered devastating wounds were slowly beginning to stir again.
Their flesh rebuilt itself unnaturally, the bones creaking back into place, while stumps regrew centimeter by centimeter.
"That's impossible!" Darick hissed, his eyes scanning in disbelief over the three Rogthars he had brought down just moments ago, now back on their feet without a single wound on them.
Those on the ground were no longer motionless corpses.
One after another they were rising, with slow but inexorable movements, their orange eyes flickering back to life with primordial hatred.
"Captain, what do we do?!" Roric demanded, his heart pounding wildly.
He wasn't the only one in the squad thinking they were done for…
"Stay calm, they're not immortal!" Mirac exclaimed, his voice urgent. "To kill them for good, you have to aim for the neck and cut their heads clean off!"
The squad members listened to him intently, without interrupting, and without showing any particular reaction—apart from the initial shock still evident on their faces.
A silence that lasted only a few moments, until the squad leader was the first to snap out of his daze.
Having taken in the masked boy's words, Alvern shook his head and his voice rose above the clashing of weapons and the growling:
"Did everyone hear that?! Aim for the head!"
The squad nodded in unison, shouting together: "Understood!"
Immediately after, they all sprang into action.
Darick was the first, launching himself toward the three Rogthars he had brought down moments before.
In the blink of an eye he reached them, dodging the first one's attack and closing in as close as he could.
This time, however, instead of aiming for the limbs as he had done before, Darick changed his angle.
The first horizontal slash came at neck height with surgical precision. The blazing blade severed the Rogthar's head clean off, sending it flying in an arc of dark blood, its mouth still wide open in a growl it never got to finish.
Without stopping, Darick twisted his torso and brought the second greatsword down on the second monster's neck, decapitating it as well. Its head rolled across the tracks with a dull thud.
The third Rogthar, furious, tried to raise its axe, but Darick was faster once again.
With a crossing slash of his two flaming blades, he finished the job: the third monster's head was cleanly separated from its body and fell heavily to the ground.
"Aaaagh!" Morwen snarled like a wild beast and hurled herself at her next target.
Her war hammer was already in the air.
She brought it down with everything she had—and Morwen had plenty—slamming into the head of a Rogthar that was pulling itself back up, the impact reverberating all the way up to the rocky vaults above.
The flames wrapped around the hammerhead erupted on impact in a muffled burst, and what remained of the monster was no longer a head: it was a shapeless mass of crushed bone and brain, burned flesh, and dark blood spattered across the metal of the tracks in every direction.
The Rogthar didn't move again.
Morwen stood for a moment with her hammer raised, eyes fixed on the motionless body at her feet, the muscles of her arms still tense from the impact.
No twitch. No flesh sealing itself shut. No gurgling growl.
Nothing.
Only silence, and the slow crackling of the flames still dancing on the steel.
"The masked boy is right!" the tattooed woman exclaimed. "Their weak point is the head. Without it they can no longer regenerate!"
Morwen's words echoed through the Rail Hall.
After that, everyone got to work, adopting the new tactic: those with a blade focused on decapitating the monsters, while the others knocked them off balance, creating openings and holding them in place.
From the far end of the Rail Hall, for instance, Lirael was doing her best to support the squad, trying to slow the Rogthars' movements—especially targeting those that were still regenerating.
'Damn, I'm almost out of arrows!' Lirael thought, without letting up on her shots.
Until she ran dry, she would keep providing her companions with covering fire.
Seren was contributing as best she could too.
With quick flicks of her fan, she launched precise, razor-sharp arcs of wind, but her "Wind Blades" weren't enough to cut through the monsters' thick necks, their massive musculature absorbing much of the force.
So Seren limited herself to wounding them superficially, deflecting their charges, or raising clouds of dust from the ground, blinding the enemies just enough to break a charge or open a gap for her companions.
Mirac, Alvern, Felisia, Roric and Carmen then seized the opportunity, sneaking up on the disoriented Rogthars and finishing them with a clean strike to the head, decapitating them without hesitation.
'Tsk! Decapitate them? Do I really have to follow orders from that little brat?! No, I'm not having it!'
The thought burned inside Joren more fiercely than the flames dancing on his blade.
His lips pressed into a hard line, his eyes darting between the enemy in front of him and the masked boy's voice still ringing in his ears.
In an environment like the Rail Hall—low rocky vaults, companions fighting just meters away—unleashing his flames with wide-ranging attacks was not an option he could afford.
Fire didn't distinguish allies from enemies, and an uncontrolled burst in that chaos of bodies and metal could prove just as fatal to the squad as to the Rogthars.
Joren took a step back, parrying a slash from a Rogthar that had lunged at him.
And in that instant, an idea took shape in his mind.
'I'll keep burning these bastards… but this time, I'll do it from the inside!'
A thin flash of satisfaction crossed his eyes as he drove his blade into the belly of the Rogthar he was facing.
The tip pushed in between the ribs, deep, making sure the blade didn't come out the other side.
Only then did Joren unleash his flames, holding nothing back, letting them flow along the blade buried inside the monster.
'Burn, you bastard!'
The Rogthar screamed—a broken, inhuman sound—as the fire devoured it from within, consuming organs and flesh in an instant too brief to be called merciful.
The monster's body swelled, and the Rogthar could do nothing but gape in a silent scream: red flames erupted from its eyes, its nostrils, and its throat.
When he judged it was enough, Joren yanked his sword free with a sharp pull.
What remained of the Rogthar was a blackened husk, like a spent cinder, that toppled backward between the tracks.
"Heh!" Joren glanced around with a slight smile on his lips, his face lit by the quiet satisfaction of someone who had found his own solution without having to ask anyone for anything.
"Decapitating them isn't the only option!" he called out to the squad at last, not looking at anyone in particular. "Incinerating them from the inside seems to work too…"
He didn't even have time to catch his breath before another Rogthar came charging straight at him, driven by blind fury.
Joren intercepted the blow, twisted his wrist, and once again drove the blade into the enemy—this time below the ribcage—letting the metal and fire do their work from within.
Once again, Joren waited for the flames to reach the brain before pulling his sword free.
The monster pitched forward, leaving behind a sharp stench of burned flesh and the ground stained with dark blood.
From that moment on, the battle took on a different shape.
It wasn't a sudden turning point, nor a single blow that reversed the tide of the fight.
It was something slower, more methodical—a gradual erosion that played out strike after strike, body after body, until the Rogthars still standing were no longer a horde, but a scattered group of isolated beasts, surrounded by fighters who now knew exactly how to stop them.
The new tactic had made all the difference.
The Rogthars that fell no longer got back up.
Those that tried to regenerate were intercepted before they could complete the process—with a clean cut to the neck, with Morwen's hammer crashing down on them with devastating force, or with Joren's flames devouring from the inside what iron couldn't reach.
The hall began to fill with a strange silence, broken only by the final blows and the increasingly infrequent growls of the few monsters still on their feet.
"ROOOAAARGH!"
All of a sudden, an enormous roar rang out from the entrance of the Rail Hall.
For an instant, everyone stopped what they were doing, turning toward the source of that sound.
It was then that the squad members saw it: the horned Rogthar—which had remained at the rear until then—emerged from the mass of the few monsters still standing.
It looked furious. The reason wasn't entirely clear—perhaps because the humans had begun to permanently eliminate its subordinates after discovering the winning tactic—but one thing was certain: it was about to join the fight.
"Captain! That horned monster is definitely the leader of the horde!" Mirac spoke up, without taking his eyes off the creature advancing toward them. "It'll certainly be stronger than the ones we've faced so far, but I assume its weak point is the same as the others!"
Alvern nodded, taking the boy's words to heart.
"I'll handle it. The rest of you deal with the ones still standing."
With that, squad leader Alvern charged toward the horned monster.
Roric and Darick covered his advance, intercepting the Rogthars that tried to get between him and his target.
"Stay away from our captain!" shouted the younger of the two.
Meanwhile, Alvern had reached the horned Rogthar.
He channeled mana into his arms, then into his battleaxe, and finally unleashed a horizontal slash.
The creature stepped back, managing to parry the blow with its own sword.
With a furious roar, it counterattacked, pushing the human back and forcing him into a quick leap backward.
'Not bad!' Alvern thought. 'Unlike the others, this one seems to know how to fight!'
The squad leader didn't lose himself in further reflection, however.
He lunged at the horned beast again, but after a quick exchange of blows it became clear that, at that rate, he wouldn't be able to take its head off.
At least, not alone…
Felisia rushed to his aid, zigzagging nimbly between the Rogthars' corpses and the wagons scattered across the hall.
In the blink of an eye, she reached the horned monster from behind and struck it with a relentless flurry of thrusts, her daggers coming in one after another without pause.
The creature arched its back with a cry of pain and, on instinct, reached its arm back in an attempt to grab her.
Felisia slipped out of its grip with a fluid twist of her torso, then darted backward in a long, feline leap.
Blinded by fury, the horned Rogthar decided to make the human who had attacked it from behind pay dearly.
First, however, it dealt with the other opponent.
It struck a violent blow at Alvern, who managed to block it with the flat of his battleaxe, but was nonetheless sent flying backward several meters.
Only then did the creature turn slowly, finding itself face to face with the human who had wounded it: she held two daggers, their blades still stained with its own blood.
The horned monster took a fighting stance, as if about to deliver a slash. And yet, at the distance separating it from the human, it couldn't even have grazed her.
'What is that brute planning?' Felisia wondered.
The Rogthar snorted, then moved, swinging in a wide horizontal slash that seemed to strike nothing but air—or so the young Assassin thought.
But she was dead wrong…
All of a sudden, an arc of fire burst from the horned Rogthar's blade, straight at Felisia.
The flames traced a "C" shape through the air and came so fast that the girl only perceived the attack at the last second, when it was already about to hit her full-on.
'Damn it!'
Felisia thought she was finished… until someone yanked her by the cloak, pulling her downward.
That intervention saved her life. But unfortunately, it wasn't enough to avoid contact with the flames entirely…
The arc of fire managed to graze her face before burning out as it slammed into the wall.
Felisia fell to the ground, bringing her hand to her left eye.
"AAAAGH!" she screamed, as the searing pain tore through her face.
"Hey, hey, are you alright?"
Felisia had instinctively shut both eyes, but she slowly opened the uninjured one, managing to make out who had saved her—though from the voice alone, she had already recognized who it was.
Crouched in front of her was Ananya, the red-haired woman, holding her head with evident concern.
"I-It hurts like hell, but I'm fine, don't worry…" Felisia stammered.
The horned Rogthar, however, gave them no respite.
With a roar of triumph, it advanced heavily toward the two women on the ground, its sword already raised to finish the job.
But just as it was about to reach them, a violent gust of wind exploded in front of it.
Seren had intervened, throwing up a wall of dust, sand, and debris that struck the monster full-on.
Carmen seized the moment immediately.
"Let's go! We can't stay here!" she said urgently, looping an arm around Felisia's waist and helping her to her feet. "In this condition, you can't keep fighting. It's better if Aisha takes a look at you."
Felisia would have liked to argue, but as if she were facing a mother, she didn't dare contradict her.
If there was one thing she hated with all her heart, it was being a burden to others. And in that condition, she wouldn't have been much help to her companions.
So, with her hand pressed over her burned eye, Felisia ultimately said nothing and gave a tight-lipped nod.
The two Assassins withdrew quickly toward the rear, using the curtain of dust Seren had created to take the long way around.
In the distance, all the members of the squad had witnessed the scene.
Some had followed every detail closely, others only in part, but more or less everyone understood what had happened.
The horned Rogthar had delivered what looked like an ordinary horizontal slash, but as the blade swung before it, the sword heated up until it radiated with heat, releasing an arc of flames that shot toward the young Assassin.
When the dust cloud cleared, the horned Rogthar found itself facing nothing: the two humans had vanished.
It snorted with rage, its chest heaving violently, its gaze burning with frustration at having let its prey slip away.
Meanwhile, the cuts Felisia had dealt across the monster's back began to close rapidly. By the time the Rogthar turned back toward Alvern, not a trace of those wounds remained.
"Damn bastard! You really are different from the others…" Alvern growled, gripping the handle of his battleaxe tightly, frustrated at having allowed the monster to injure the girl. "Not only do you have regenerative powers… but a Syntony with Fire as well?!"
Alvern's words fell like a boulder, and in that moment everyone understood that the fight against the horned Rogthar was going to be a very different matter entirely…