Rethan pushed himself up unsteadily from one knee, and only then did he truly see what was behind him. The dust and incandescent grit had settled enough that there was no pretending it was just the chaos of battle,no blaming it on heat-warped vision.
Three figures lay motionless where there had been people a moment ago.
It didn't look like the boss's fire, or a stray hit. It looked like the aftermath of a shockwave so violent it hadn't cared what it struck. One body was missing an arm and part of its chest, as if something had ripped it apart and kept going. Another lay twisted at a wrong angle, a burned-through hole punched clean through its torso. The third was half-fused to the floor, as if for a moment the stone and the man had become the same material.
Something inside Rethan cracked.
"Caelan!" he bellowed, whipping around so fast it tore his throat raw. "Do you even see what you've done?!"
He pointed at the dead,his whole hand, like he wanted to throw the sight of them at the mage.
"Are you actually trying to get us all killed?! What the fuck is wrong with you?!"
The words came out with everything he'd been swallowing since they entered the dungeon,rage, fear, helplessness,and there was nowhere left for it to retreat. Not anymore. Not with bodies on the ground and no one left to protect with orders.
He turned slowly, staring across the chamber.
At the empty spaces where adventurers had been. At melted weapons. At scorched marks on the rock that still steamed.
"It hasn't even been a minute!" he shouted, his voice cracking under the strain. "One minute against the boss and they're dead. All of them. All of them! Do you understand that?! ALL OF THEM!"
He wanted to say more,to keep screaming, to hurl anything he could reach at Caelan,because in that moment he wasn't a commander or a veteran. He was just a man standing among the bodies of people who'd trusted his calls.
Caelan was about to snap back,about to blame them for getting in his way when he used his magic,
When a heavy, low tremor rolled through the floor.
Rethan's instincts yanked his gaze to the boss. The beast wasn't looking at him anymore. It wasn't looking at the dead.
It was staring straight at Caelan, and the glow in its eyes sharpened into a harsher color.
It was irritated.
At the same time, Dorian and Lysand reacted as if they'd sensed the shift in the air. Both of them triggered spells unlike anything they'd used so far,heavier in structure, alien to this place. The air around them thickened in a way even Rethan could feel.
The boss noticed at the last possible moment.
With a roar that wasn't sound so much as a shock of energy, it stomped. Lava and stone exploded up from the floor in front of it, growing in a split second into something between a wall and a shield,thick, uneven, pulsing with heat, like the chamber itself had risen to defend it.
The spells struck with a thunderous impact.
Most of the power shattered against the barrier, bursting sideways and washing across the chamber walls,but part of the attack punched through the unstable structure, slamming into the boss's shoulder and upper arm. New cracks spidered across the stone plating, and the beast was forced to take one heavy step back.
Rethan stood frozen for a fraction of a second, chest heaving, then dragged in a deep, forced breath,like a man who knew that if he let emotions take the wheel now, he wouldn't stop until he broke.
He spat a short, bitter sound,more at himself than anyone else.
"We'll settle this after," he snarled through his teeth, not even looking at Caelan anymore.
And he moved.
He ran straight at the boss without glancing back. There was no retreat now, no room for another argument. Every step over the heated floor was a decision that could cost a life,and the only decision that still made sense.
"Keep your distance!" he shouted over the chamber's low growl. "Hit it again, but aim where the exoskeleton doesn't cover flesh! The gaps! The joints! Anywhere the heat breaks through!"
The boss answered immediately.
It raised one massive hand. The cracks across its body flared brighter, the light concentrating like the chamber's entire heat was being squeezed into a single point,then it launched it forward as a straight, compressed wave of fire.
The attack streaked directly toward Dorian and Lysand.
"On me!" Dorian roared.
"Now!" Lysand barked in the same breath.
They lifted their hands almost in unison. The air in front of them shuddered, then thickened,layer by layer,into translucent, bluish sheets of energy. Cool in color, even as it solidified into a shield.
"Sync!" they shouted together.
The two barriers met in a blink and fused into one larger structure, pulsing with blue light. It snapped into place between them and the incoming fire an instant before impact.
The collision was savage.
Flame spilled sideways like water smashing into rock, exploding across the chamber walls and ceiling. The shield groaned, its surface flashing white, then orange,but it held. Both mages stood rigid, jaws clenched, pouring mana into it with everything they had, refusing to give ground.
Only when the firewave died and the air stopped trembling did the shield begin to fade. Its glow dimmed gradually, breaking into flickering motes before vanishing, leaving only the smell of overheated energy and a trail of melted stone on the floor.
Rethan was already moving.
He came in low, sword held tight at his side, reading the boss's mass, the rhythm of its movement, the lines of weakness in its armor. The storage ring on his hand flashed,and his sword vanished, replaced by something else.
Two short daggers appeared in his grip, unnaturally proportioned. Heavy for their size. Too matte to catch the lava light,built to swallow it.
They weren't dueling blades. They weren't for a clean fight.
They were tools for one job, and Rethan knew that job intimately.
The boss was still focused on the mages.
One massive arm remained raised from the last attack, the cracks along its plating pulsing irregularly as its energy failed to settle. Its gaze stayed pinned on Dorian and Lysand as they began to withdraw after holding the shield,creating the brief, imperfect opening Rethan had been waiting for.
He didn't stop. Didn't adjust his stance. He threw both daggers on the run, knowing there would be no correction at this heat and distance. Aiming took more instinct than sight,the air warped so violently from the heat that the world itself looked bent.
The beast reacted on instinct.
One arm snapped up, shielding part of its face. Too late to be clean, but enough,the first dagger slammed into stone plating and shattered uselessly, detonating too shallow to do real damage.
But the blast jolted the boss's posture for the barest instant.
And the second dagger,thrown lower, on a different angle,slipped past the raised arm and struck the beast straight in the eye.
The moment it made contact, it detonated.
The explosion was short and muffled, more impact than flash,but the result was immediate. The beast let out a horrific roar and its head jerked violently to the side.
Rethan didn't stop to watch.
The instant the dagger went off, he was already peeling away in a wide arc, refusing to put himself on the line of a wild swing,or a stray spell. Pain in creatures like this didn't mean confusion. It meant violent, uncontrolled reactions.
His ring flared again, brighter this time, and his sword returned to his hand,its weight familiar, steady.
Only when he eased his pace for half a heartbeat did his shoulders begin to scream as adrenaline loosened its grip. His breathing broke into short, shallow pulls, but he'd bought himself a safer position than he'd had a second ago,and in this fight, that mattered more than anything.
Caelan noticed it in the same instant.
His eyes flicked off the boss and locked on Rethan's hand, right where the ring's glow was dying. For the first time, Caelan's face showed genuine, unfiltered surprise.
Storage artifacts of that class didn't end up on "ordinary people."
And certainly not on someone Caelan had been dismissing with a flick of his wrist.
Caelan didn't have one. In his own House, only a handful of the most exceptional mages did.
There was no time to question it.
The boss staggered,half a step, then another,moving heavy and uneven, head canted toward the ruined eye. Caelan seized the moment on instinct, reaching for the same spell variant that had worked earlier. Right now, confirmation mattered more than experimentation.
The attack struck the boss's side, right where the structure was already compromised. It didn't split the armor open,but it forced the beast back two more heavy steps. And the howl it let out this time was sharper, less controlled. Something in its balance had been shaken for real.
Rethan stood with his sword in hand, dragging air into scorched lungs. His shoulders throbbed. His fingers trembled. But for the first time since they'd entered the chamber, the fight wasn't completely one-sided.
He shifted his weight onto one leg because the other still quivered from the sudden retreat and explosive effort. Every breath scraped,shallow, rough,like the heat itself resisted the act of inhaling. Still, he forced a deeper pull, throat burning, pressure tightening under his ribs as his body demanded payment for the pace he'd set.
He couldn't afford to stop.
Experience had taught him that against enemies like this, every second without movement belonged to the monster.
So he surged forward again,slower now, heavier, less springy than before, sword held closer to his body as he ran.
Mid-stride, he glanced sideways.
Dorian and Lysand had recovered their footing and were gathering mana again. Their auras thickened in a familiar pattern,only now with clear caution, like they'd learned more in a handful of seconds than in the entire dungeon run before this.
And Rethan couldn't shake the thought that the same dangerous certainty was forming in their heads again:
It stepped back and screamed. That means it can break,if we just hit harder.
Rethan's eyes went wide.
"Don't burn all your mana!" he shouted with everything he had.