The Captain reached into the shaft, his fingers closing around the smooth, warm surface of the crimson crystal, and pulled it free.

The anchor point rose out of the darkness in a pulse of dense red light, sitting in his palm like a beating heart while the barrier around the statue flickered and stuttered as the power source was severed.

He was reaching for his claymore to finish it when a spike of stone punched through his shoulder from behind.

The impact was so sudden that his body did not register the pain for a full second, he felt the cool air hit the wound before the fire, a delayed explosion of agony that ripped through his arm and sent the blade tumbling from his grip.

He spun around, his good hand reaching for the weapon, but the thing that had hit him was not about to give him the chance, pulling itself free from a collapsed pillar at the far end of the ruins, stone scraping against stone as it rose.

It had been sitting there since they first entered, half-buried under rubble, and he had assumed it was dead.

He was wrong.

It rose to its full height, nearly twice the size of the first one, its limbs thicker and its jaw wider, the spikes running along its spine longer and sharper. It locked eyes with him, the crystal still glowing in his hand, and charged.

He tried to raise his claymore, but his wounded shoulder screamed and his grip slipped, the massive paw catching him square in the chest before he could react.

The impact lifted him off the ground and sent him flying backward across the ruins, his armor cracking under the pressure while his vision whited out for a split second, before hitting the wall.

The wall behind him shattered on contact, cracks spiderwebbing outward from the point of impact as his body punched through the weakened surface, dust and debris exploding around him while he slumped to the ground.

Blood ran freely from the wound in his shoulder, pooling beneath him in a dark stain that spread across the tiles, while his good hand still clutched the crystal against his chest.

Across the ruins, Helen heard the crash and turned her head just in time to see the Captain crumpled against the wall with the second statue walking toward him.

She reacted, trying to get to him but the her opponent was on her, lunging from her blind spot with its jaws snapping shut inches from her face, forcing her to spin back and block or lose her head.

The impact threw her sideways, her rapier barely catching the edge of its claw before she rolled away and landed on one knee, her eyes darting between the Captain’s body and the two statues.

One was between her and him, the other was walking toward him to finish the job, and she could not reach either of them in time.

’Not now,’ she thought, her mana flickering as the six shards around her wrist spun slower than they had a minute ago, ’I still have not fully recovered from yesterday, if this drags on I am going to run dry.’

The first statue circled her, its eye tracking her movements while she tried to calculate the distance, trying to figure out how to get past it before the second one killed the Captain, but the creature was not giving her an opening. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

It charged again, and she met it head-on, her rapier clashing against its jaw in a shower of sparks, but the impact drove her backward and she could feel her arms starting to shake in a way that had nothing to do with the force of the blow.

’This is bad,’ she thought, gritting her teeth as she deflected another strike, ’if I push harder I will burn through what I have left, and if I do not push harder he dies.’

"CAPTAIN!"

The word ripped out of her before she could think, raw and desperate, but the statue pressed harder, its jaws and claws working together to keep her locked in place while the second one closed the distance.

She watched its paw raise, watched the shadow fall over him, and felt something cold in her chest because she could not reach him.

The paw came down and the captain barely rolled out of the way.

It was not graceful, just a desperate scramble to the side while the statue’s fist cratered the ground where his body had been.

He hit the wall hard, his wounded shoulder screaming as stone dug into his back, but his hand found the hilt of his claymore and he pulled it toward him.

The statue turned, its eye locking onto him as he forced himself upright, its paw raising again for another strike.

She expected him to freeze, expected the same blank stare, the same inability to move while people paid for his hesitation, but he did not.

He stood there with blood running down his arm and his body shaking. When the statue charged and pinned him against the wall with its jaw opening for the killing blow, he just looked at it with a small tired smirk she had not seen on his face in ten years.

His claymore came up and he did not swing at the head or the chest, he drove the blade into the creature’s leg and twisted, stone cracking as black blood erupted from the gash and the statue’s knee buckled.

He followed up with a kick to the same spot, putting everything he had into it, and the statue stumbled sideways while he carved a deep arc across its exposed side, the blade biting into stone and tearing a chunk free.

Helen stared, because this was not the same man who had frozen yesterday, not the one who had let a worm talk him into a corner while men died around him, this was the Captain she had trained under, the one who had earned his rank at twenty-three and once cleaved through a three-Shard anomaly without breaking a sweat.

The statue swung at him again, its paw catching him in the ribs and sending him skidding back, but he got his feet under him and charged right back in, his claymore hitting the same wound on its side and opening it wider while the creature shrieked and black blood poured from the gash.

’Shit, focus,’ she thought, forcing her eyes back to her own fight as the first statue lunged at her again.

The statue reared back with its jaw opening as crimson light gathered in its throat, aiming straight for his chest, but he did not dodge, he raised his claymore with both hands and swung.

The blade met the beam head-on, the impact splitting the air with a deafening crack, and for a second she thought he was going to be vaporized, but the claymore held and the beam split around the blade, tearing through the wall behind him instead.

He closed the distance while the statue was still recovering from the blast and drove his claymore into the same leg wound for the third time.

The creature’s knee finally gave out as it collapsed sideways, its body hitting the ground and cracking the tiles.

He raised the blade above his head with both hands, "this is for the men you killed," he said, his voice low and steady, and brought the claymore down.

The blade split the statue’s skull clean in half, black blood spraying across the ruins as the light in its eye flickered and died, the stone body going rigid before crumbling apart into chunks that scattered across the tiles.