Mary, she had found a door.

How she had found it and how she had gotten it open, Noah had no idea, but it was open and it led somewhere that wasn’t here.

He filled his lungs with air.

"EVERYONE!! GET OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW!!"

His voice hit every corner of the chamber and came back from the walls. Students who had been mid-movement froze for a second and then moved faster.

Damien’s head came up and his eyes found Noah across the space. worry there, sharp and immediate.

"DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME!!" Noah held his gaze.

"DAMIEN, TAKE EVERYONE OUT!!"

Damien’s jaw worked.

Then he gritted his teeth and turned.

Grabbing the nearest student by the arm and pulling them toward Mary’s door.

Lyria was already moving, one arm supporting a student who couldn’t walk unassisted. Steering him firmly in the right direction.

Arisha cast one last look toward Noah.

Her golden eyes finding him across the chaos, reading his face for a second. Then made a decision.

She got her shoulder under another student who was struggling and broke into a run.

The hall filled with the sound of footsteps and people calling out to each other, everyone moving in the direction at the door in the wall.

Few of them still remained behind.

But when life on line, they could help everyone.

So, they help as many as possible.

But few still remained behind.

While Marbas started laughing.

It was a ruined sound, broken by blood and damage. But it carried through the chamber clearly enough.

"HAHAHAHA!!" His voice rose, raw and unhinged, echoing off the stone.

"NO ONE GETS AWAY FROM THIS!! I — MARBAS ACHERON! SACRIFICE MYSELF TO YOU, MY LORD!! ACCEPT MY OFFERING!! ACCEPT THESE LIVES AND MY OWN FOR YOUR GLORY!!"

The symbols appeared on his skin.

Dark red markings erupted across every surface of Marbas’s body. His skin, then his face, his remaining arm. They started to glow.

From beneath like something burning inside him was leaking out through every crack.

The same symbols spread outward from him to the floor and then climbed the walls and found the enormous carved eye at the back of the chamber.

The eye began to glow.

The same dark red, deep and pulsing, the vertical pupil filling with light from its edges inward.

"DAMMIT—"

Noah didn’t think.

His free hand snapped up and an ice dagger formed in his palm in under a second.

It was small and sharp.

It conjured from nothing but urgency and whatever mana he had left.

He drove it down across Marbas’s wrist.

The grip didn’t release immediately.

He slashed again, harder, and the second cut found something vital enough that the fingers spasmed and loosened.

Noah ripped his arm free and stumbled back few steps back.

He looked at the wall.

The eye was still glowing. The symbols on Marbas’s body were burning brighter.

Noah turned and ran.

His boots hit the stone floor in hard rapid impacts.

Each stride pushing everything his body had left into the next one.

The door was visible ahead.

The gap in the wall where Mary had forced it open, a sliver of dim light coming through from the other side.

Most of his group were already through it.

He could see the few students ahead of him scrambling toward the opening.

While there were few behind him.

Some running, some half-limping, some pulling each other forward by the arm.

Noah couldn’t help anyone who was behind him.

Afterall his own life was on line.

Behind him, Marbas was still laughing.

The sound of it had changed.

It wasn’t the controlled, composed voice of a demon who had been managing the situation perfectly.

It was something looser than that.

Something that had let go of all pretense and was just laughing because nothing mattered to it anymore.

Noah didn’t look back.

He heard it anyway.

The deep resonant pulse that came from the wall.

It was not a sound exactly, more like pressure moving through the stone and the air and the floor beneath his feet simultaneously.

The torches along the walls flickered and then extinguished one by one in rapid sequence as something consumed the light around them.

He looked back once.

He couldn’t help it.

The carved eye on the wall was gone.

In its place was a portal. It was enormous, consuming the entire back wall of the chamber from floor to ceiling.

Its surface a churning deep black that moved like liquid but wasn’t liquid, like darkness given depth and dimension and looked like there was another world on that sude of darkness.

The red glow that had preceded it pulsed from somewhere within, coloring the edges of the portal in dark crimson.

Then something came through it.

It emerged slowly, which was somehow worse than if it had come fast.

A shape pushing through the black surface of the portal the way something large pushes through water.

"It moved slowly and heavily, with no rush at all, as if nothing in the room could make it hurry.

A skull.

Massive. Goat-shaped. The bone surface was yellowed and ancient, deep scratches and fractures running across it like a record of things it had survived. Two enormous curved horns rose from the top of the cranium and swept outward and upward, each one longer than a grown man was tall. The jaw hung slightly open and the teeth within it were countless and uneven, packed together in rows that had no concern for symmetry or function beyond the obvious one.

And in the eye sockets — set deep within the bone — two points of dark red light burned like coals that had never gone cold.

They moved.

They found the room. They swept across it with the slow patience of something that had waited a very long time and was in no rush now that it had arrived.

Noah faced forward and pushed harder.

The door was close. Twenty meters. Fifteen.

Behind him Marbas screamed.

But not in pain this time.

But in ecstasy, the voice of a man watching the exact thing he had devoted everything to finally happen in front of him.

"YES!! ACCEPT MY OFFERING MY LORD!! TAKE THEM!! TAKE—"

The jaw came down.

It closed with a loud sound. It was dangerous.

It was a killing force.

A powerful wave of wind and some kind of dark energy burst outward from the point of impact.

And moved forward to hit everything in the chamber at once.