There was no other way to describe it, no visual cue of a transition, just the sudden fact of her being present where emptiness had been like some type of rogue skill. Her left hand snapped forward and a shape formed in it mid-motion: a halberd, the blade materializing from condensed mana as she swung, raw purple-white light sculpted into an edge in the fraction of a second before impact.
It caught the Rogue across the back. He tried to block with the daggers behind his back, but the impact was so strong that his own blades cut into him. The sound of the strike was too high that echoed through the entire courtyard.
He left the ground, crossed four meters of air, and hit a dead pine at the outpost's east wall, and the tree broke in half after the impact. The trunk cracked through at chest height, bark splintering outward, and the Rogue disappeared into the wreckage as the upper section collapsed around and over him. Silence. Then a small shifting of wood, and no further movement.
Sharon lowered the halberd.
Her right arm hung at her side, the burned skin catching the light. She breathed through her nose, controlled, and turned her head until she found Crow.
"The crystal," she said, "I'll break it… now."
The box at her belt was open, she'd opened it while forming the halberd, a parallel action that he'd missed while watching the strike. The crystal sat exposed. The thing is, it wasn't in the box anymore. It dropped mid-action and was now close to Crow.
Crow looked at it.
He looked at the Hero.
The Hero had stopped moving. He stood near the platform, 22 meters away, and he was watching Crow the same way Crow was watching him. Without advancing, he was just reading everything that they were doing. The luminescent sword pulsed at his side, the rhythm of it shifted slightly from what it had been, faster and deeper, as the hero walked slowly in Crow's direction.
He's building something. No way... he already has that skill? But it's too soon. This is bad.
The Ring of Wisdom flickered. Crow didn't trigger it, because it didn't work on the Hero anyway.
He is at least twenty percent stronger than Sharon.
Sharon, who just survived a mana detonation at close range and hit that Rogue hard enough to break a tree in half.
He was farming solo too... focusing all the XP on himself, this isn't normal, is he a player? Transported here like me?
And I was saying that the bomb might kill him...
He stood there with the crystal's proximity sitting in his awareness like a held breath, and did not reach for it.
If I move recklessly, he'll know that the crystal has the key to win this… he's too smart for me to risk picking it up, need to be someone else.
"Crow." Sharon's voice carried an edge.
"I heard you," he said, his eyes didn't leave the Hero.
They didn't say another word, because the plan was already set before this problem.
The Mage read the stall.
He raised his staff.
Crow drove himself sideways as the second fire-projectile crossed the space between them, smaller than the first, aimed at him rather than the courtyard center, and he hit the ground in a roll that put the Zweihänder between himself and the heat as it detonated against the platform stones behind him. Stone shrapnel peppered his back. The platform stones, everything disintegrated into shards after the blast. Heat flared across his arms. He came up and the Hero was already moving.
The Hero covered the distance to Crow in four strides and hit him with a strike that Crow dodged by a hair's breadth. Then the Hero punched him flat with no mercy or emphasis, and the impact drove Crow backward into the same platform he'd just been trying to avoid. His spine met the stone with the particular argument that told him something had compressed wrong. He stayed on his feet through pure stubbornness and high CON stat.
Yeah… too much… level gap…
Sharon engaged from the left.
The Hero turned into her without looking, a shoulder roll, sword repositioning, and the next 33 seconds became a sequence that Crow absorbed from the periphery while he recovered because he had no other option. Sharon was faster than she'd been at the start. She was running everything she had, eyes glowing more red than before. She drove the Hero back three steps, four, found an angle and closed it—
—He caught her burned arm. And squeezed hard.
The sound Sharon made was brief and involuntary.
He redirected her momentum, turned her, and released. She recovered in two steps but the tempo had broken.
The Mage appeared at the Hero's shoulder. His voice was low and taut.
"We pull back. The rest of the group… if we have them. If they're with us—"
"—I know," the Hero said.
"Then—"
"—I know…"
A beat.
The Hero looked at Crow. Then at Golem 4 on the platform behind him. Then back.
He's thinking about the golem.
Crow watched him.
He's figured out that the golem didn't fight, and that it has some type of value... I was right. This is bad. If I don't do something now whatever it is, I'll regret it more than making the wrong action.
The crystal lay against the stone.
If he dies, the end is near. But I have no other choice. It's us or him, he didn't give us a chance to talk it out… I didn't want to end like this… you were my favorite… Akira.
Crow looked to his side.
Sha-sha was bleeding, one arm pressed against her ribs, appearing from behind the platform where she'd been repositioning since the second fire-strike, had reached the crystal in the same moment Crow had been trying to make a decision, pick it and use it to kill or don't kill the main character.
She'd moved through the chaos while everyone focused on the larger fight, quiet and purposeful, and now the crystal sat in her palm.
Her pale eyes found Crow. "If I survive this… tell me your answer about… my proposal…"
Seriously. She just… dropped a death flag.
She didn't ask permission as she reached for it.
The Hero saw it.
His hand dropped to his sword. He lifted it to eye level, holding it laterally as if posing, but the terrifying truth was that this was no pose. The luminescence in the blade responded immediately: the standard pulse was gone, now it was like an accumulation building on itself. The light gathered in layers, the way heat gathers before ignition. The air around the blade changed, charged; the temperature differential creating a slight shimmer at the edge.
I know that skill.
Mana Concentration.
Crow knew it the way he knew a death flag when he heard one. He'd watched it in forty different campaign runs online to see how to pass certain levels; he'd learned its wind-up, its plateau, and its ceiling. In the game, if the Hero let that skill reach full charge against a mini-boss—
"—MOVE!"
He didn't know who he was shouting at. Sha-sha, himself, everyone probably.
The Hero released.
The blade came down on Sha-sha.
What Crow saw, he wished he hadn't. The discharge came with the compressed release of everything the Hero had accumulated over 33 seconds of sustained charging, an edge wrapped in three layers of mana, striking with the compacted force of what felt like an entire level of progress grinded distilled into one motion.
Sha-sha moved.
Not enough.
The sword found her on the oblique, shoulder and collarbone, angled down through the left side of her chest. She left the ground, spun once in the air, and landed at the base of the platform with a sound that Crow felt in his back teeth. She lay there without moving. The crystal—still intact—rolled from her open hand and came to rest against the platform's edge.
The courtyard held its breath, absolute silence for a moment.
Crow stared at her.
Is she—
He couldn't tell. She hadn't moved. The blood pattern on the stone was bad. Everything about the angle of her landing was bad. But she was Sha-sha, and Sha-sha had a similar threshold of a vampire, at least much stronger than Sophia. She had just survived the kind of hit that ended unambiguous things and she stood up to just receive this one, she was tough, and he couldn't see her chest to confirm whether it moved or not.
He didn't have time to confirm.
Something in the smoke amidst the destruction emerged behind the Hero's backs.
"—K-kill."
For the first time, Crow sees the Hero's flying animation... in real life.
Sharon's voice cut the silence between them.
"We pull back."
The Hero's party was already repositioning, the Mage stepping away from the courtyard center, the Rogue emerging from the collapsed pine and moving toward him, one arm hanging at a compromised angle but moving. The Hero himself, after landing, stood in the space between Crow and the platform, sword still in hand, reading the room.
"Back," Sharon said again, and this time it was to Crow, and she was already moving, and the logic of the situation was simple and clear for them.
Crow moved. Picked Sha-sha and retreated with her in his arms.
The Hero's group advanced.
Sharon pursued simultaneously.
Wait, where is the crystal?
"K-kill?"
47 stepped on something slightly sharp.
Then the crystal shattered.
Just my luck.
The sound was clean and thin, a single high note, impossible to locate amid the noise of everything else. Crow heard it with his enhanced perception a fraction before he registered what it meant.
He looked back.
Sha-sha had moved, barely. Trying to force consciousness again.
The platform runes ignited.
Golem 4's eyes opened.
It stepped off the platform in the same moment the teleport 'geometry' locked, and then it was simply not there anymore. The violet pulse that had sat patient in its chest for 4 days blinked out, and the platform held empty air, and somewhere on the outpost grounds the crystal had broken and that was where the golem now stood.
The Mage stopped.
He turned to look at Golem 4's platform.
He turned to look at where the Hero stood.
Something in his expression changed, badly.
"That golem," the Mage said, "is a bomb."
The Hero looked at him.
"No golem in this world holds more mana than a mage, the amount of mana is like that of an Archmage… this can't be." His staff came up, pointed, the fire focus already warming again. "That one does. If it releases, we need to finish this now."
Minion 47 looked at Golem 4, which had just appeared where the crystal had shattered and was now moving.
"K-kill?"
Golem 4 turned its head toward the Hero.
The violet pulse in its chest accelerated.
The Mage moved first.
Three heavy projectiles launched in succession at Sharon spiraling outward from the staff's head and arriving at staggered intervals, a sequencing that made a single target's dodge more difficult. The first passed her. The second clipped her burned arm. The third she caught and absorbed with a mana shield that cracked under the impact and held.
She was already visibly diminished from the first explosion. The shield cost her. Crow saw it in the way she set her feet to compensate for what her arm could no longer do.
The Hero turned to the golem.
He read the violet pulse, tried to figure it out. Then he looked at the Mage, and the Mage gave him one sharp nod—yes, I'm telling you it's a bomb, yes, I'm completely serious—and the Hero turned back to the approaching golem and raised his sword.
The area strike had no wind-up.
It erupted outward in a disc of compressed force, the radius of the skill Crow knew from the campaign's crowd-control toolset, designed for clearing multiple targets across a wide area, the damage spread thin but the reach substantial. It caught Golem 4 mid-stride. It caught Sharon simultaneously, who had nowhere to go. It caught the east wall of the outpost and removed a section of it.
Crow dove flat, pulling Sha-sha on top of him.
We cooked.
The pressure wave rolled over him, the ground shaking against his back, and when he lifted his head Sharon was down and the golem too.
Minion 47 lay on the ground, silent, the left side of his body gone.
The golem 4 was still standing. Damaged. The violet pulse disrupted, irregular now, skipping beats, the internal mana-structure compromised by the area strike. But standing. The light behind its chest plate flared once, twice, the rhythm… abnormal.
The cube is damaged? Yeah, we are cooked.
The bomb-golem raised its arms.
It had no comprehension of what it was. It had one instruction and it still had the capacity to execute it, probably, even as the violet light behind its chest plate turned white. No, something is very wrong with it, because it began to bleed outward through the seams of its frame, through every joint and gap, the contained mana pressurizing past every limit its construction had been built to hold.
This is bad, it's gonna blow.
Crow looked at the unconscious Sha-sha in his arms; she was bleeding. He tried to walk away, but he was too injured and bleeding too much too.
He looked to his sides, trying to find someone else alive, all the soldiers were dead, he didn't even know how, then he saw it.
Sharon…
She was there… or what was left of her. Her body was broken, scattered like a discarded doll across the cold stone, blood everywhere. She hadn't anticipated the reach of that area attack skill, making it impossible to dodge.
As the Hero approached to deliver a finishing blow, striking downward to end her, she surged from the ground one last time. With an empty-handed, mana-infused strike, she tore through his leg at the exact moment his blade came down, ripping her in half.
Crow groggily stood up, cradling Sha-sha in his arms, and looked at the Hero. He was considerably injured, but not enough. His left leg had been completely destroyed by Sharon, and yet he stayed still there.
The Hero looked at him.
"Happy now?" Crow asked, his voice trembling with a low, bitter anger. "Is this what you wanted? I just wanted to talk, but you didn't even give us a chance... and look what you did." He glanced at the golem preparing to explode and continued. "Good, now you die in vain. Congratulations."
They were too close to the golem, close enough to just accept reality. The Mage and the Rogue were nowhere to be found.
Something passed between them in that fraction of a second—not recognition exactly, but the acknowledgment of two people who both understood what was about to happen and had run out of time to do anything about it.
The Hero replied, "I can just try again."
"What—"
—The golem detonated.
Crow experienced the first half-second clearly.
The light. The pressure, it was warm. His body lifted off the ground. The sensation of everything in the outpost turning to dust because of the concentric wave of released mana expanding from the golem's position.
Yeah, Alice really wanted to cook everyone after all…
I probably should have broken the crystal sooner. But it's too late to think about it now.
[NOOOOOO, I DON'T WANT TO DIEEE TOOOOOOO!]
The soul of the sage vanished when the ring turned to dust.
And then nothing.
Darkness.
…
"Geometry... hehe."
A goofy voice, slightly amused.