Bartholomew inhaled hard and nocked another arrow.

His hands were still shaking when he raised the bow, but the trembling no longer came from the same place. It had started as fear. Now it was mixed with pain, mana strain, and something hotter sitting underneath both.

He could win this.

The thought came suddenly and hit him harder than the serpent’s last charge.

Not because the fight had become easy. It hadn’t. His ribs burned every time he pulled breath in too deeply. His shoulder still throbbed from the impact against the tree. His right hand felt half-dead after [Skybreak Knuckle], and the monster in front of him was still larger, stronger, and one clean mistake away from swallowing him whole.

But he could win this.

The serpent dragged itself forward again, its wounded side scraping dirt and loose roots aside. One half of its rocky armor was fractured now, split by repeated hits from [Piercing Shade Arrow], and its jaw still twitched from the lightning burst he had rammed into it. Threads of pale mana clung in places where [Moonbind Arrow] had bitten in, their glow weaker than before, but not gone.

Bartholomew’s breathing slowed slightly.

’It’s hurt.’

The serpent surged.

He loosed [Piercing Shade Arrow] the instant the angle opened. Black light wrapped around the shaft, thin veins of glow twisting along the arrow until the mana compressed hard enough to scream through the air. The shot struck the cracked section near the base of the neck again. This time it went deeper. Not enough to kill it, but enough to drive pain through the monster’s body and force a violent recoil.

The serpent’s response was immediate. It did not retreat. It snapped sideways, mouth opening wider, and drove forward in a furious rush that crushed brush and snapped a young tree trunk in half.

Bartholomew moved left, cut right, then ducked under the broken trunk as it fell. The serpent’s body slammed after him and tore through the space he had just left. Dirt burst upward. Rock scraped against wood. The thing had stopped caring about conserving motion. Good. The bigger it was, the more that would cost it.

He reached for another arrow, but his left shoulder screamed the moment he tried to draw fully.

The serpent saw the hesitation.

It came faster.

Bartholomew dropped backward into a desperate slide as the head smashed past above him, then rolled and fired [Moonbind Arrow] from the ground. The silver-tailed shot sank lower this time, between two plates near the serpent’s midsection. Filaments of moon-pale mana spread outward like roots of light and wrapped around its body and the ground beneath it, forcing resistance into the next movement. The serpent dragged against it, twisted violently, and lost just enough rhythm for its own wounded side to scrape hard against a jutting rock.

A fresh crack split across the armor.

Bartholomew saw it.

So did Trafalgar.

From the edge of the clearing, Trafalgar followed the fight without moving an inch. His arms stayed folded, expression calm, but inside he had already stopped treating this as a simple pass or fail. Barth was actually doing it. Clumsy in places, yes. Sloppy when pain disrupted the draw. Far from clean. But he was adapting, controlling distance, forcing the serpent to turn on the injured side, and more importantly, he was thinking under pressure.

’He’s not just surviving anymore,’ Trafalgar thought. ’He’s leading the fight.’

The serpent tore itself halfway free and came again, lower and meaner, forcing the fight into open ground where the trees would not hinder it anymore. Bartholomew backed off with shorter steps now. Not because he wanted to, but because his body was starting to reach its limit. His ribs ached. His shoulder was getting heavier. Even pulling the string felt slower.

The serpent noticed that too.

Its mouth opened.

Bartholomew’s fingers touched an arrow and stopped.

No.

Not yet.

He switched his grip and grabbed another instead.

The shot left his bow under black compression once more. [Piercing Shade Arrow] shrieked forward and drove into the split armor high along the serpent’s side. The monster convulsed, hissed, and turned fully toward him with murder in every grinding movement of its plated body.

Perfect.

Bartholomew ran.

He cut sharply along the outer edge of the clearing, forcing the serpent to follow. It lunged after him, but each turn dragged its wounded section wider, each twist opening the same cracked point again and again. He loosed another [Moonbind Arrow] into the dirt near its path rather than into the body itself. Pale filaments erupted across the ground in a low silver web and caught under part of the serpent’s weight. The monster broke through it by brute force, but not before its damaged side dragged and tilted.

There.

The underside of the neck flashed into view for less than a second.

Bartholomew stopped dead, turned on his heel, and fired [Piercing Shade Arrow] straight into the exposed flesh.

The arrow vanished nearly to the shaft.

The serpent’s whole body buckled.

Its head crashed into the earth hard enough to shake dirt loose from nearby roots. For one bright, savage instant, Bartholomew thought that had done it.

It hadn’t.

The serpent rose again.

Slower now.

Wobbling slightly.

Bartholomew stared at it, chest heaving.

His mana was running low. His body was worse. One more clean hit from that thing and he might not stay upright after.

The bracelet on his wrist gleamed faintly in the sunlight filtering through the thinning forest edge.

No.

He had not come this far to be dragged out by a bracelet.

His fingers closed around one last arrow.

And that was when the answer hit him.

Not because it was elegant. Because it was ugly and short and dangerous, which meant it would probably work.

’Five seconds,’ he thought.

That was all [Sleep] would give him against something like this. Maybe less if the serpent’s resistance kicked in fast. Five seconds was nothing in most fights.

In this one, it was enough.

The serpent gathered itself for another rush, mouth opening, body coiling despite the pain ripping through it.

Bartholomew steadied his breath.

The mana around his next shot did not form in black compression or pale silver. It barely showed at all. Just a thin shimmer in the air, almost invisible, a faint disturbance like heat bending space over stone.

He fired.

The arrow itself was ordinary.

That was the point.

The serpent tracked it too late. It expected another heavy impact, another screaming mana shot meant to crack armor. Instead, the shaft struck near the wounded neck and the hidden mana of [Sleep] rippled outward in a soft, subtle vibration.

The serpent’s body jolted.

Its head wavered.

For an absurd second, its expression changed from rage to blank confusion. The coils loosened. The massive neck sagged. Then the whole thing dipped, eyes rolling as its head slammed into the ground.

Asleep.

Bartholomew did not waste a heartbeat.

He was already moving before the body fully settled. He sprinted straight at it, boots tearing through dirt, bow thrown aside mid-run because he did not have the time or angle for another draw. Mana compressed around his hand again, pale blue and white lines racing over his knuckles like stormlight cracking across glass.

He jumped onto the lowered head and drove [Skybreak Knuckle] down into the serpent’s injured neck, right where [Piercing Shade Arrow] had repeatedly broken the armor and torn the flesh beneath.

The impact exploded with a dry, brutal crack.

Lightning burst into the wound.

The serpent convulsed on instinct, not yet awake but no longer truly under. Bartholomew shouted through clenched teeth, ignored the pain in his shoulder, and slammed his hand in deeper, forcing the current through torn flesh and exposed structures. The body arched once, violently, and the wounded section near the neck ruptured under the combined pressure of internal damage and electric force.

The serpent woke only long enough to die.

Its body thrashed once, twice, tail tearing a groove through the clearing.

Then it collapsed.

Completely.

The grinding of stone plating stopped.

The coils slackened.

The enormous head rolled sideways into the dirt and stayed there.

Bartholomew stood frozen on top of it, panting, one hand buried in blood and broken scale, the other hanging useless at his side.

He blinked once.

Twice.

Then it hit him.

"I DID IT!" he shouted.

The sound tore out of him loud and raw and without a trace of embarrassment. He actually jumped off the corpse, stumbled on the landing, nearly fell, caught himself, and threw one fist up anyway. "I ACTUALLY DID IT!"

Trafalgar watched him in silence for a second, then walked forward at last.

Bartholomew turned toward him, still breathing hard, face lit up with a kind of open, disbelieving joy he usually kept buried under nerves and apologies.

Trafalgar stopped a few steps away and glanced at the dead serpent before looking back at him.

"You did well."

That was all.

Bartholomew’s face went red almost instantly.

"I-I mean..." He pushed his glasses back up with blood on his fingers, realized that only made it worse, and turned even redder. "I had to, right? Since you were watching and all and I couldn’t exactly humiliate myself after saying all that before and"

Trafalgar snorted.

Bartholomew shut up on the spot.

But the grin would not leave his face now.