Date: February 12, 542 years since the Fall of Zanra the Dishonored.
The creature, whose obsidian body was now crisscrossed with glowing amber cracks, went still. Its Spirit of Dark Proliferation suddenly changed its nature: the three remaining hounds tormenting the Warriors instantly crumbled to dust, and this black dust was rapidly sucked back into the master's maw. The air in the hall became so cold that the knights' armor was covered with frost.
"It's gathering everything it has left into one blow," Baron Kaelen breathed heavily, his golden mantle torn, a vein bulging on his forehead. "Grak, if we just stand under the dome, it will crush us along with this pyramid. Its power, even in this state, allows it to destroy all the space in this hall."
"Then we won't just stand," Grak boomed. His axe hummed so intensely it seemed the blade itself vibrated with impatience. "My Vessel is almost full, but the channels are already beginning to burn. We need one strike. Clean and final."
The Giant suddenly began to shrink. Its enormous size decreased, but the density of the power emanating from it increased exponentially. This was the guardian's final technique—"Abyss Collapse." A sphere of absolute darkness formed around the monster, which began to suck in stone debris, dust, and even light itself.
The knights of the Order and the Dynasty, thrown back to the very walls by the shockwave, could only watch. Their Warrior power was useless in this clash of titans. Liana saw Grak and Kaelen exchange brief glances. In this silent dialogue, there was more understanding than in all their previous arguments.
"Liana, Soren! Fortify your Vessels to the limit!" Grak shouted. "It's about to get hot!"
Kaelen made the first move. His Spirit of the "Golden Aegis" transformed. Instead of a shield around the detachment, he concentrated all his power into a narrow, dazzlingly bright beam aimed directly at the Giant's collapsing sphere.
"Aegis: Mirror Focus!" the Baron roared.
The golden light pierced the monster's darkness, not trying to break through, but creating a shell around it that momentarily locked the Adept's destructive power inside its own body. It was a technique of extreme control, accessible only to a Herald at the peak of his form.
This was the moment Grak the Axe had been waiting for. He lunged forward, using the inertia of Kaelen's golden flash as a springboard. His figure at that moment seemed larger than it actually was—the density of his presence in reality reached a critical point.
"Cleaving Strike: Wrath of Order!" Grak's voice echoed from the vaults, drowning out the roar of the collapsing space.
The axe blade, saturated with all the remaining energy of the Herald, descended precisely into the center of the golden cocoon. At the moment of contact, time in the hall seemed to freeze. Kaelen and the other knights saw grey spatial cracks radiate from the point of impact in all directions.
A sound erupted that was impossible to describe—it was the cry of matter being torn apart on a fundamental level. Kaelen's golden cocoon and the Giant's black abyss detonated simultaneously.
Grak didn't just cleave the monster—he split its essence in two, depriving it of the ability to hold its form. The Giant, the ancient Adept that had survived centuries of entropy, fell apart. Huge chunks of obsidian body crashed to the floor, turning into ordinary, lifeless stones. The amber glow in its veins flared one last time and went out forever.
The hall plunged into silence, broken only by the tinkle of falling debris. Grak the Axe landed on one knee, leaning heavily on his axe handle. His armor smoked, and blood dripped from under his helmet onto the stones. Baron Kaelen lowered his sword, his hands trembling noticeably, and the golden light of his Spirit became a barely perceptible flicker.
"We... are we alive?" Mark was the first to dare speak.
"Yes," Grak rose with difficulty, wiping his face with his sleeve. He looked at what remained of the guardian. "But we were damn lucky. Kaelen, did you see it? Its structure... it was eaten away by entropy by more than ninety percent."
"I saw," the Baron sheathed his sword, regaining his aristocratic composure, though his pallor betrayed extreme exhaustion. "If this Adept had been even half healthy, it would have simply erased us from reality as soon as we stepped into this hall. Our combined power in its full strength would have been no more than wind noise."
Grak nodded in agreement. "The Temple didn't even spare its own defenders. This place is a graveyard of greatness. But the guardian is vanquished, and the path to the Center is now open."
The Commander turned to his men. Liana saw not only fatigue in her mentor's eyes, but also a deep warning. They had just defeated the shadow of an Adept, spending almost all the resources of two Heralds. What awaited them ahead, in the very heart of the Temple where the energy of this place of power was most concentrated, remained only to be guessed.
"Gather up," Grak commanded. "We need to leave this hall before the smell of this slaughter attracts something else."
The combined detachment moved on. The two groups—Order and Dynasty—now walked even closer together. The shared horror of the battle with the Adept had temporarily erased the boundaries between enemies, leaving only one common desire: to survive this nightmare and find a way to the light.