-AGHARRRR-!!!!!

"Motherfu-!" I stared in dumb stun while the roar hit the freezing air and kept going, rolling across the basin, and for one full second, I completely forgot about the Outsider horde, the supporting knights holding the flanks, and the two streams of Fragmentation Pebbles churning through golden outlines, and just stared at the silhouette in that dust cloud hanging above the collapsed mine.

I could see it through the moonlight, that massive, irregular shape moving within the settling cloud of pulverized rock and dust, and something in the back of my skull that had been calculating odds and adjusting tactics since the moment the doors blew inward went very, very quiet.

I still kept both streams roaring on pure muscle memory, kept sending new knights out at sixteen per second from the gold orbs blooming at my Domain’s edge, kept the line because the line had to be kept, but my remaining eye was locked on that cloud, refusing to move. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

I even stopped hearing the shrieks of the Outsiders pressing toward me, stopped registering the explosions of my own Fragmentation Pebbles detonating through the leading wave, stopped tracking the clashes of the supporting knights on the flanks, because none of it was finding purchase in my brain anymore.

All of it was still happening. I just wasn’t there for any of it. And then-

-Thoom-!

The first footfall reverberated through the ground and into my boot like a deep, grinding tremor, sending my heart into a beating frenzy.

-Thoom-!

-Thoom-!

The second and third sent the dust cloud shifting ahead of the silhouette that was growing larger and larger in the moonlight with every step, while low, guttural growls resonated outward with each footfall in a kind of echo horror that pressed on the chest and squeezed.

And then it stepped out of the dust.

I had been watching it through the cloud’s thinning edges for several seconds already, and I had known roughly what to expect after everything this night had put in front of me, but what I saw as it stepped out still hit me like stepping off a ledge I hadn’t seen.

The bone plating was gone.

Every ridge and pale section of armored exoskeleton that had been shrugging off my Fragmentation Pebbles and AP Pebbles alike for the past however long was stripped away entirely, while the dense red flesh beneath it was drenched in blood, running in dark rivulets down its flanks and dripping from the ruined gaps where the plating had been torn free while the freezing air turned the exposed meat a deeper, angrier red.

The massive curved claw that had carried the curse was broken, snapped clean somewhere in that final exchange, its tip gone and the remaining length hanging at a wrong angle from the joint, though the red shimmer on it still pulsed in dim, weakened beats.

But the other arm ended in a bleeding stump.

Its maw was open, and the long serrated teeth caught the moonlight while blood and something thicker dripped from between them into the dirt below, and the growling that rolled outward with every exhale vibrated the very air around it.

But none of that was what stopped my eye.

It was the chest.

Almost the entirety of it had been ripped open by the force of the knight’s final swing, tearing out a massive wound that exposed its pulsing interior, and there, in the center of that cavity with the flesh and dense muscle surrounding him on three sides, was the Cultist.

Only his head, chest, the upper strip of his stomach, and his arms from shoulder to elbow were visible while the rest of him was submerged entirely into the monster’s pulsing chest, with his arms spread wide at the elbows, and his head hung forward at a downward angle.

And stabbed into him at the point where the ribs ended, driven deep into the narrow strip of stomach, was the sword, the same sword he had used to begin all of this, its blade buried to the hilt, and the cursed red shimmer on it pulsed in that same slow, rhythmic beat it had been pulsing since the moment he had turned it on himself.

I stood there, my eyes almost refusing to leave the sword, before I noticed the flesh.

Around the edges of its shredded chest, the torn and ragged meat was beginning to move, knitting inward from every side in slow increments that gained speed with each passing second, drawing the cavity closed with a steady inevitability, and the man inside was already disappearing.

And I have read enough novels and played enough video games to know what it all signified.

[Now or never!]

I immediately dropped everything.

Both Fragmentation Pebble streams cut instantly, the knight production stopped mid-orb while a half-conjured unit dissolved before it finished forming, while I threw my one good leg forward and hit Temporal Step before the foot had fully left the ground.

-Kzzzt-!

Ten meters closer, and I was already reconfiguring Ice Reinforcement mid-blink, pulling it back from its current distribution and slamming it into an even spread across my body, and the crystalline sharpness flared hard through my right hand and left foot within seconds, coating my arm and foot in dense, hard-packed layers of armored ice that locked into place as I surfaced from the blink.

-Kzzzt-!

Ten more meters, and behind me the Outsider horde registered the dropped streams and the halted production of knights and came flooding in the direction I had vacated with the immediate, shrieking unanimity of thousands of things handed an opening all at once, and I felt their mass, that vast, seething press of golden outlines cascading after me, but I did not look back.

They were not going to catch me.

-Kzzzt-!-Kzzzt-!-Kzzzt-!

Each blink left a pocket of crumpled space-time smoothing itself back out in my wake, and through the gold outlines of Amaterasu’s Blessing, I could watch the leading Outsiders hit those spatial distortions mid-sprint and stumble, their trajectories stuttering through the crumpled reality while I kept the distance widening between us.

The wound was closing faster than it had been a few seconds ago.

The man’s stomach was fully gone beneath the mass of flesh and blood, the sword’s hilt was still above the surface, yes, but the flesh was convulsing around it from every side with a speed it hadn’t had when the cavity was at its widest.

-Kzzzt-!

Fifty meters out, and the man’s chest was just a sliver above the closing tissue, the strip of exposed flesh around the sword’s hilt narrowing with every second.

-Kzzzt-!

Forty meters, and I was angling left, coming around to approach straight-on because the sword was centered in what remained of the wound and I needed a clean line.

The monster itself was still panting, its broken claw hanging loose at its side, its maw dripping blood and drool while those deep growls rolled outward.

-Kzzzt-!-Kzzzt-!

"COME ON!!!"

Twenty meters, and the sound that came up through my throat was just a tearing scream of pure terrified desperation, because I knew there was no coming back from this.

All the while, the cavity narrowed to a slit around the sword’s hilt with the regenerating flesh pressed in from every direction. The man was completely gone from view, everything of him swallowed in a mass of pulsating meat, except the grip of the sword still above the surface.

And the second I came out of my last blink, I angled the exit point up at the hilt of the sword before-

-Kzzzt-!

And felt my hand closed around the hilt.

My fingers found it the instant I materialized, closing hard on the grip, and for one breathless second, I had it.

I could feel the curse on the blade even through the ice armoring my palm, felt the deep resonant wrongness spreading up through my fingers and into my wrist, but I did not care at all.

And then the monster came alive.

There was no wind-up; it was simply still, and then it wasn’t as it swung the broken claw in from my left in a single explosive arc and-

-CRACK-! – Aaargh-!

The broken, blunt claw shoved into my ribs with indescribable force, and I felt something shatter deep within, ripping the breath out of my lungs mid-yell before sending me airborne,

Ten meters of open air passed in a long, weightless, breathless arc while my vision strobed white at the edges, and the left side of my ribcage sent cascading signals, and every single one of them was a fresh wave of agony, and then the ground came up.

-Crash-!

I hit on my right side, rapping out a trench into the ground.

The impact alone drove through every existing wound simultaneously, the stump, the gut, the eye socket, all of it lighting up in a single overwhelming wave that drowns every thought, every sensation with sheer pain... and fear.

My teeth clamped shut hard through the convulsions from the ground I dug a trench through and found the side of my tongue, flooding blood into my mouth that dripped from the corner of my lip as I skidded across the frozen ground in a long grinding arc that threw up grit and dirt into the side of my face before I finally stopped.

I lay there in the dark with the basin still raging around me and my left side sent out overwhelming wave after wave of agony, while I fought with everything I had just to breathe, taking it in shallow and incomplete gasps because my entire left side simply refused to participate.

Anything deeper than a half-breath immediately found the fracture lines and let me know they were there, while the blood flooding my mouth kept dripping off my chin into the dirt beneath my cheek.

[Not now!] I told myself as I fought with all my might just to stay conscious, wrestling every instinct that told me to just close my eye for a brief moment.

Slowly, I lifted my head and looked up through my one working eye at the basin.

And found the monster had not moved from the spot where it had sent me flying.

It was standing in the same position, its maw open and those deep guttural growls still rolling outward across the frozen ground, its eyeless face turned directly toward, and that broken claw frozen in the arc that sent me flying.

And it was not moving.

It just stood there while I lay here with broken ribs and one arm and leg, with every Spell Spliced stream I had been running sitting at zero, and the Outsider horde somewhere behind me.

And the only thought that looped around my head was... [I failed...]

Until... a red shimmer caught the edge of my eye.

I turned my head, and a few feet from my outstretched fingers, lying in the dirt with the cursed light still pulsing in its slow, dim rhythm, was the sword.

My head instantly snapped back at the monster standing motionless with its growls and its dripping maw and its eyeless face pointed straight at me before I looked back at the sword in the dirt between us.

And as the picture finished assembling itself, I felt the air push out of me in something between a laugh and a wheeze.