The silence of the park evaporated in an instant as Sora lunged with an animalistic abruptness. A wall of stone thorns sprouted from the ground in his wake, sharply dividing the group.
Miguel was the first to break the barrier. He smashed the rock with a clean punch that threw calcareous shrapnel toward Sora, immediately launching into a savage exchange of blows. The veteran's fists impacted with the force of a battering ram, disfiguring Sora's face and shattering his ribs at an absurd speed. However, the monster did not even blink; his flesh welded together at the same time he received the punishment, responding with brutal hooks infused with earth magic that made Miguel's forearms crack.
Zein and Naoko entered the flank to support, coordinating with the veteran's movements. Zein channeled wind currents into the edge of his sword to deflect Sora's counterattacks, while Naoko's katana traced clean arcs in the air, slicing the general's legs to reduce his mobility.
However, the trio's synchrony broke when the rest of the team tried to intervene. In the distance, Alexander summoned a dense runic circle to enhance his allies' muscles, but the sudden burst of strength caught Zein off guard. The boy misjudged the distance of a thrust and ended up colliding shoulder-to-shoulder against Naoko, breaking the guard of both. Sora exploited the mistake instantly: with a fierce offensive, he made oblique pillars sprout from the ground, sending both swordsmen flying through the air.
Kiomi, taking cover behind the trunk of a tree, opened fire with her musket loaded with fire magic; the bullet exploded on Sora's shoulder, charring his muscles. At the same time, Lyra opened a portal right beneath Miguel to reposition him behind the enemy, but the calculation failed due to the young girl's fatigue. Miguel fell backward onto the wrong portal and ended up intercepting the trajectory of some cutting threads that Kiomi had just laid out in the environment to trap Sora, forcing the veteran to roll along the ground to avoid being sliced by his own ally.
Despite being a six-on-one, the fight became an uncontrolled chaos due to the lack of communication. Sora moved through the park using the trees and debris as springboards, throwing flurries of sharp stones that forced Lyra to open defensive portals desperately, which wore her down by the second. Alexander ran from one side to another stabilizing Lyra with reinforcement magic, but that prevented him from covering Kiomi's back.
When Sora fell from the air like a meteorite toward the shooter, Kiomi drew her short sword to repel the direct impact, while Naoko slid along the ground cutting the general's tendons to save her. It worked, but when trying to retreat, the escape portal Lyra opened in a hurry appeared too close, causing Kiomi and Alexander to trip over each other and fall into a ditch caused by the impacts.
Sora's offensive was relentless, rough, and direct; he did not use refined tactics, but rather availed himself of his immortality to receive sword cuts to the chest just to be able to smash his opponents' heads against the concrete. Miguel returned to the charge time and again, being the only one capable of halting the general's direct onslaughts with his bare fists, shattering Sora's jaw and torso in a bloody loop.
Unfortunately, every time Miguel managed to subdue him, a poorly coordinated fire attack from Kiomi or a misplaced portal from Lyra interrupted his rhythm, forcing him to dodge his own companions' attacks and giving Sora the necessary second to regenerate completely.
Tired, bruised, and with their breathing ragged from the suffocating beating Sora was imposing on them, the six managed to retreat a few meters. They dragged themselves amidst the park's debris to form a tight circle. Miguel spat a trickle of thick blood while keeping his fists up, as Alexander tried to imbue one last wave of reinforcement magic into the group to reorganize a solid strategy once and for all.
Zein gritted his teeth, Naoko partially sheathed her katana looking for the angle for a definitive strike, and Kiomi prepared her remaining threads. They all looked at each other, understanding that they had to act as one if they wanted to win. But before they could take the first step forward, Sora, with his body completely restored and his eyes fixed on the formation, extended both hands toward the ground and smiled with malice.
The ground shook with unprecedented violence as the earth and rocks of the park rose like claws, converging upon Sora. In a blink, an enormous and compact stone dome enclosed him completely, isolating his presence from the battlefield.
The shell rumbled from the inside.
An explosion of debris flew in every direction.
The individual who emerged from the dust cloud no longer looked the same. A crust of dense, grayish, and almost metallic rock had fused directly with his skin, sealing his wounds and covering his human anatomy with an impenetrable natural armor.
Kiomi reacted by instinct and pulled the trigger. The shot from her musket, imbued with fire magic, impacted squarely on Sora's forehead, but this time there was no hole or blood; the bullet rebounded with a sharp clink, leaving barely a smoking scratch on the grayish crust.
Naoko slid at full speed, tracing an upward slash with her katana straight at Sora's Achilles tendon. The steel blade vibrated forcefully and bounced right off, numbing the swordswoman's arms due to the violent backlash from the target's hardness.
Even Miguel launched himself forward, concentrating all his strength into a straight hook to Sora's armored chin.
The impact resonated like a bronze bell.
Miguel's fist, which before used to disintegrate the general's flesh, this time stopped dead, failing to make Sora's head move a single millimeter.
Sora smiled beneath his stone mask, his gaze laden with pure malice. With a sharp, upward movement of his reinforced arm, he sent Miguel flying with a single backhand, forcing Zein to channel a gust of air to cushion the veteran's fall before he could crash into the trees.
The team reacted quickly, forcing an emergency coordination. Alexander positioned himself at the center, imbued with a continuous runic glow that kept Lyra's energy levels stable. Thanks to this, the young girl began to open small, precise portals right in front of Sora's attacks, deflecting the stone pillars he summoned so they would destroy each other in the air.
Taking advantage of the coverage, Zein and Naoko attacked in unison from the flanks, seeking the joints in the armpits and behind the knees of the armor. Sora, however, unleashed a suffocating offensive, using his armored body as a living battering ram; he ignored the edges of the swords and charged with brutal onslaughts that forced the group to stay on the defensive, grinding down the terrain with every step.
Kiomi tried to entangle Sora's legs with her super-strong threads, managing to tauten them with the help of a quick portal from Lyra, but Sora simply pulled with brute force and snapped the bindings, generating a shockwave that destabilized Alexander. The mistake was minor, but enough for Sora to advance and, with a stomp, create a fissure that forced the entire group to scatter in a stampede.
Miguel returned to the charge, interposing himself between a downward strike from Sora and a defenseless Lyra. The veteran crossed his arms to block, feeling his bones crack beneath the massive pressure of the reinforced earth magic, forcing him to drop a knee onto the pavement while the ground beneath him sank.
The weight of the battle became unbearable, but Zein, staring intently at the enemy's movements from a distance, noticed something crucial: a small crack on Sora's shoulder began to release fine wisps of dust, and the grayish gleam of his skin seemed to lose intensity millimeter by millimeter. The armor was not eternal.
Sora let out a hoarse laugh, raising both fists wrapped in sharp rocks to definitively crush Miguel's guard and finish off the group once and for all.
Sora roared, unleashing his twin fists with the force of an avalanche upon Miguel's guard. The impact kicked up a curtain of earth and debris that momentarily blinded the group, sinking the veteran's boots several centimeters into the shattered concrete.
—He's not going to hold forever! —Zein shouted, sliding between Sora's legs while cutting the air with his sword—. Look at his shoulder! The armor is cracking!
The warning ignited the last spark of energy in the group, which finally seemed to tune into the same rhythm. Alexander, the veins on his forehead marked by the effort, gritted his teeth and concentrated the entire flow of his reinforcement magic into a single strike. The runic glow left his body to transfer directly into his companions' weapons; Zein and Naoko's swords flashed with an intense, white edge, while the barrel of Kiomi's musket vibrated dangerously from the pressure of an overloaded cartridge.
Sora, sensing the accumulation of energy around him, swept his arm in a violent arc, creating an earth shockwave that forced Naoko to jump backward.
—Lyra, now or never! —Alexander bellowed, holding her by the shoulder to inject his last reserves of energy.
The young girl, on the verge of fainting and with trickles of blood running down her nose due to exhaustion, opened three simultaneous portals around Sora with a precision she hadn't possessed all night.
The counterattack was surgical.
Kiomi fired at point-blank range through the first portal. The fire-imbued bullet hit directly into the fissure on Sora's shoulder, expanding into an internal detonation that sent the first pieces of living rock flying. Without giving him a second to react, Naoko appeared from the second portal suspended in the air; her katana, blessed by Alexander's reinforcement, traced a downward arc of blinding speed that struck the exact same spot with millimetric precision.
The sound of the stone breaking resonated throughout the park like tempered glass shattering to pieces. Sora staggered, losing his balance for the first time in the entire battle and letting out a cry of pure frustration.
Zein seized the gap immediately. Propelling himself with a gust of wind that erupted from his feet, he crossed the third portal to appear right in front of the enemy's exposed chest. With a shout that drowned out the whistling of the wind, he drove his sword with both hands directly into the grayish crust. The blade sank under pressure, causing dozens of luminous cracks to spread like spiderwebs across Sora's entire torso and armored arms.
—Now, Miguel! —Zein bellowed, holding the weapon with all his strength as the stone structure creaked and tried to imprison the edge of his sword.
Sora raised a hand, attempting to crush Zein's head, but it was already too late.
Miguel, who was waiting for the exact moment with his knees bent and his fists wrapped in a murderous tension, took a step forward that sank the concrete beneath his boots. All the strength of his decades of combat concentrated into his right arm. With a visceral roar, he unleashed a direct strike with the soul of his fist, hitting the pommel of Zein's sword as if it were a demolition hammer against a chisel.
The impact was colossal, and a circular shockwave swept dry leaves and dust several meters around.
Sora's stone armor exploded into a thousand pieces, breaking away from his skin in a shower of calcined fragments and leaving his vulnerable, bloody flesh exposed once again.
But instead of getting frustrated or worried, Sora simply laughed out loud.
The group couldn't understand why Sora was doing that until, suddenly, the general brought both of his palms together, making a strange movement. Then, as if dealing with a lighter, he snapped his hands, making the entire environment shake.
—Imaginary Technique: Sovereignty of the Manigua —Sora said, while his hands lay extended out to the sides.
Instantly, around Sora, a circle of light close to the ground began extending at great speed from the epicenter of his body. This circle of light grew immense in an extremely rapid manner.
Zein, upon hearing those words, knew instantly what that meant, so he spun around and tried to warn everyone in desperation.
—Quick! Get out of the circle! It's not safe! —he shouted to the group.
Everyone at that instant ran to get out of the circle, which had stopped at a certain distance from Sora.
Suddenly, from the sky, a small wooden disc was created several meters above Sora; this disc extended outward to the sides, creating a sort of dome around that perimeter.
Most managed to get out, but Zein, Kiomi, and Miguel were still missing, running against the clock to cross the line.
At the last moment, and seeing that he wouldn't make it himself, Zein made a collective decision. He reached out his arm and pushed Kiomi out of the circle with all his strength so she would save herself.
Just before the dome closed completely over Zein, Kiomi managed to look back. She looked at him with genuine shock and bewilderment; she, who detested him and preferred him dead, would have never believed that Zein was the type of person capable of prioritizing the lives of others, and much less hers, above his own safety.
A deathly silence took over the park. In the area, only an immense, hermetic wooden dome remained, spanning a large radius of space. Outside, uncertainty reigned; inside, Zein and Miguel had been left completely trapped alone with the monster.