The southwest periphery was a cluster of mutated houses where the miasma had warped the architecture into impossible angles, walls bending into themselves, doorways opening onto rooms that should not have fit.

Romen and his people were hidden in the largest of them.

They never saw the approach.

Isalyn led them in under the cover of her Astral Veil, the entire group masked, and the first sign Romen’s side had that something was wrong was the bronze cube landing in the center of their hideout and detonating into light.

Golden light flooded outward, sealing the structure and the corrupted ground in a dome that snapped shut with a sound like a closing jaw. The air inside immediately became heavy.

Two minutes.

Romen’s people exploded into motion before the dust settled. Four veterans reacted on pure instinct.

Aelira moved first, trapping the five pieces of trash immediately.

"Pyrus Vale Fort."

Flames erupted around the five smaller targets in a tight rotating cage that slammed shut before any of them could rise. The walls screamed inward, searing and contracting, leaving them clawing at hastily formed barriers as the heat climbed. Romen’s shout vanished into the roar.

She turned her back on them and joined the real fight.

The first enemy came at Rodnis with a spear of compressed earth that cracked the air as it flew.

Rodnis stepped into it. Both palms thrust forward as a wall of force burst from his body and met the spear head-on. The collision buckled the floor between them. The spear shattered. Rodnis came through the debris already swinging.

The second enemy slammed both hands against the dome.

It held.

Isalyn took her in that moment. Wind erupted in a screaming spiral, twisting tightly around the woman’s frame, and her knees buckled as her arms were dragged downward like a mountain had landed on her shoulders. She crashed into the floor, cratering it, and Isalyn was on her before she stopped sliding.

The third enemy turned toward Rudrean.

Rudrean met him with the Combat Art already blazing, ribbons coiling and bracers flaring crimson and cyan. The man was strong, near-peak Soul Tree stage, a clear step above Rockwon. But Rudrean had fought above his stage before.

His Combat Art gave him the speed to stay in the exchange, and both Isalyn’s and Aelira’s semi-identical Arcane Paths gave him enough defense.

The dark blade came in low and fast. Rudrean caught the angle with one bracer and turned it past his hip, the impact ringing through his arm. He answered with the first swing of Hell Rampage Strikes, light and testing. The man blocked and pressed forward.

So Rudrean gave ground and let the sequence build.

Second swing. Harder. The man’s guard shook.

He was pushing himself to spend more mana than usual to keep up in the fight, so his consumption was already outpacing his regeneration.

And he couldn’t end it alone. Not against this one. The man’s raw power was a notch above what Rudrean could break through in two minutes by himself. But he didn’t need to break through alone. He needed to hold, to wear him down, to keep the man boxed in until the others freed up.

So he did exactly that.

He kept the third enemy chained to him, weaving through the blade strikes with the Combat Art’s flight and answering each parry with a swing one degree heavier than the last, refusing to let the man disengage and refusing to let himself be cornered. Every exchange cost him. His arms burned. The man’s strikes carried weight Rudrean had to brace for, and twice he was driven back across the cracked floor, boots gouging lines into the stone.

But he stayed in it.

The fourth enemy broke off to help the third.

Rodnis cut him off. A second wall of force erupted sideways, catching the fourth enemy mid-stride and flinging him into a bent support pillar that cracked under the impact. The enemy peeled himself off it, lightning crackling down both arms, and threw himself at Rodnis in a flurry of clawed strikes faster than the eye could track. Rodnis met every one of them, palm against claw, the corner of the room filling with concussive shockwaves.

Trisha moved through the chaos like she already knew where everything would be. Pale threads of light shot from her hands, lancing into gaps the others couldn’t see. A thread caught the second enemy’s wrist as Isalyn pinned her, locking the arm just long enough for Isalyn’s next strike to land cleanly.

The woman’s body folded around the impact. The wind crushed inward.

She came apart.

One down. Just past the one-minute mark.

Isalyn immediately turned toward Rudrean’s fight, and the third enemy felt the shift in pressure.

He committed everything to one desperate technique, the dark blade extending into a three-meter crescent that swept through the entire space between him and Rudrean in a killing arc.

Rudrean had been waiting for exactly that overcommitment.

He stepped in instead of back and took the fifth swing into the crescent. The blade cracked down its length, the man’s eyes widened, and Isalyn’s wind hit him from the side at the same moment, dragging him off balance and pinning his feet to the floor.

That was all Rudrean needed.

The sixth swing smashed the man’s guard flat. The seventh did not look like a strike. It looked like a single horizontal line of crimson and cyan drawn through the air, and the man came apart along it.

Two down. Just under ninety seconds gone.

The fourth enemy was still locked with Rodnis and losing now. He tried to break for the dome wall.

Trisha’s threads caught both his ankles. He stumbled. Rodnis’s wall of force slammed into his back and pinned him against the golden surface, spread out and helpless.

Isalyn arrived.

The wind gathered above her in a dense screaming column, weight stacking upon weight until the air warped, and then she dropped it. The column came down like the sky itself falling. The floor collapsed two meters downward. When it cleared, there was nothing left to clear.

Three down.

The first enemy, the spear-thrower, had been circling for a gap the whole time. Finding none, he turned at the last second and threw himself at the flame prison to free the heirs and use them as leverage.

Rudrean got there first, but his arms were spent and his Combat Art was running low. He didn’t try to end it alone. He intercepted the man, locked him up, took two heavy hits on his guard that drove him to one knee, and held on just long enough.

Rodnis and Isalyn closed in from both sides.

The man had nowhere to go. Force pinned him from one side, wind crushed him from the other, and Rudrean’s final clean strike split the gap between them.

Four down.

Silence dropped over the warped house. Rudrean stayed on one knee for a second, breathing hard, his arms trembling from the strain. He had survived a fight against four enemies above his stage. Barely his role, but he had held his piece of it, and that was enough.

Forty seconds remained on the dome.

The flame prison contracted, then opened.

Romen spilled out onto the cratered floor, scorched and gasping, his four friends collapsing beside him. They had watched every protector die through the gaps in the fire, and there was nothing left on their faces now except raw fear.

"Wait," Romen rasped. "Wait, my family will pay, anything you want, just..."

"You invited this death yourself," Rudrean said quietly as he got back to his feet. "Why didn’t you just mind your own business?"

Romen’s mouth worked, but no sound came out.

The red-haired heir scrambled backward and triggered a band on his wrist. A barrier snapped up. The other three triggered theirs as well.

"B-But the signal won’t reach our families..." one heir said in despair.

He looked at Romen hatefully. "Bastard, you are getting us killed, and our families won’t even find them!"

Another knelt before Rudrean and the others.

"Please, we had nothing to do with this. We were just accompanying this bastard Romen."

Aelira looked at the four flickering shells and smiled with no warmth at all.

The barriers were built to survive one fatal blow. Against a team with thirty seconds left and nothing to rush for, they were merely a formality.

Aelira’s revolver shattered the first. Isalyn’s wind crushed the second flat. Rodnis broke the third with a single pulse of force. The fourth heir was on his knees, hands raised, begging in a voice stripped of every trace of arrogance. His barrier cracked, then broke.

Then only Romen remained.

He had stopped begging. He simply looked up, breathing in ragged pulls, hatred and terror fighting for the same space on his face, and both losing.

"You picked this place," Rudrean said. "A perfect graveyard. No witnesses, no bodies."

All the heirs were burned until not even their ashes remained.

The dome dropped a few seconds later, its two minutes spent, releasing into the corrupted air of Mirewatch with nothing left inside to release.

Trisha let her threads dissolve.

Rodnis lowered his arms.

Isalyn drew her veil back across her face.

Aelira stretched and looked at Rudrean, the cold leaving her eyes. "You held your ground against four of them above your stage. Not bad, darling."

Rudrean rolled his aching shoulder and managed a tired grin. "Barely."