"FUCK NO—!"
"GG̷R̸A̶A̷A̴H̶H̸—̷"
The cry came out wrong. Layered. As though three voices were trying to use one throat and none of them agreed on the pitch — a sound that skipped and tore at the edges, like a word spoken through breaking glass.
A blade of light the size of a man swung through the dark, and a black beam lashed out alongside it, and the two of them carved the storeroom apart. The crate they were hiding behind split clean down the middle.
"Damn it! Wha—"
Aim couldn't react fast enough.
No sound.
Aim's instincts screamed.
Death.
The blade descended.
And a silver flash intercepted it.
A deafening shriek erupted as steel met light.
"—!"
Aim's eyes flew wide.
Isolde stood before him.
The rapier in her hands trembled violently. Her boots carved grooves through the broken stone as the impact drove her backward, meter by meter.
The Entity did not stop.
It merely continued pressing downward.
As if crushing her was the most natural thing in the world.
Cracks spread across the ground beneath Isolde's feet.
Her arms shook.
Blood trickled from the corner of her lips.
"Get... up...," she forced out.
The blade sank lower.
The rapier dulled.
A little more.
A little more.
And then—
The world exploded.
A shockwave tore through the room.
Aim felt his body leave the ground.
For a moment, he couldn't tell which way was up.
Then the pain came back, and he was falling, and the floor rose to meet him—
Isolde caught him just in time.
"S-Sol..."
Not far off, the broken pillars shifted where the blast had thrown her rapier. It spun loose from her grip and clattered against the rubble, almost lost.
Neither of them could stand.
The Entity remained where it was.
It moved.
But it was untouched.
The glowing sword rose, slowly, once more.
As though the exchange just now had meant absolutely nothing at all.
---
Aim got to his feet in stages, the way a drunk does — knees first, then a hand against the rubble, then the rest of him, swaying.
Isolde gripped the rapier again.
It's over, it's over, it's over—
Wait!
The light in its head — and the light ray forming in the air!
A beam tore loose.
"Move!"
Aim threw himself sideways and shoved her — the graceless, total lunge of a man knocking someone out of the path of a carriage, no technique to it, only the body deciding to live a half-second before the mind agreed.
The beam carved the floor where she'd stood.
"How the hell did you see that coming!"
"I don't know — but—"
Steel met the corrupted light again.
"Damn it—!"
A sound came out of Isolde — not a scream, something worse, the dry creak of bone deciding whether to hold.
"Shitt!!"
She held.
Fwoo. Fwoo.
A fireball and a shard of ice surged through the wind — the bonded artifacts firing on instinct — and barely scratched the thing.
But it stopped it. For a blink.
The light in the air — it's forming into a beam again.
"Left!"
The detonation came white and total, and Isolde wrenched right, just in time, the heat peeling along her cheek.
"Right!"
She threw herself left. The beam went through where her shoulder had been and opened a crater in the wall, raining hot stone.
Aim's mind was racing now — not on the Entity, but on what was showing on the lens. The drifting colors. The lines.
There. Before it fires, the lines in the air gather first. They pull toward it!
"I'm the bait!" he shouted. "Sol — you cover, you read me, I'll keep it looking at me—!"
"YOU WILL DIE, DUMBASS—"
"AS IF WE NOT GOING TO!"
"That's the stupidest—"
"Left, now!"
She moved. The beam missed.
And it worked, in the awful clumsy way that desperate things work. Aim ran his mouth and his feet and stayed one half-step inside the limit of a human body, and Isolde — faster, stronger, a Lethward through and through — read the half-second he bought and turned it into a dodge, a parry, a slash that bit and did nothing and bit again.
"IT'S NOT WORKING!" she snarled, blood on her teeth. "NOTHING GOES IN—"
"Keep—keep going!"
TSK TSK TSK!
The corruption. The path. Where it steps—
And he saw it.
The ground where it walks — it corrupts wrong. Faster.
"SOL!" His voice cracked. "PURIFY IT!"
"That would only give us DEAD AND WASTE OF TIME! ARE YOU—"
"TRUST ME—"
Isolde drove her purify ray surge through air into it — and the entity stopped.
It lurched.
For one heartbeat, the blade of light wavered.
And the Entity *screamed* — and the scream was like human.
Not glitched. Not layered. For one bare second, underneath all of it, there was a person's voice in there, somewhere, screaming the way a person screams.
"—now, GO!"
They went.
---
They ran.
Behind them the Entity howled, a long warbling wail, and as it thrashed against the broken floor a strip of the black husk peeled back from its surface — and beneath it came a sound, and the sound was the worst thing in Sancturia yet: the wet, throat-shredding shriek of a man being burned alive inside a bronze shell, muffled and endless and trying to form words it no longer had a mouth for.
They didn't look back.
The chamber blurred. Rubble, gold, the dead grey light. The mouth of the hallway ahead — almost there—
Aim saw it half a second before it happened.
The light in its head — it's guttering — going dim — that means—
Ahead of them. The air at the end of the chamber went bright. Brighter. White-hot, swelling, a sun being born in a doorway, and the Entity was *there* now, where it had not been, where nothing had been a heartbeat ago, the great blade already lifting—
Too fast.
The limit of a human body — it's not enough. Not this time.
The light grew until it hurt to look at, until his eyes streamed, until the world was just that one terrible brightness pouring down the hallway toward them—
So this is how it ends.
Aim turned his head, in the last of the seconds, to look at Isolde.
She was already looking at him.
They closed their eyes.
THRM!
...huh?
The two of them, who had already accepted it, opened their eyes again.
THRMMMM! — louder this time
A figure had come down out of the air with a bootheel buried in the Entity's neck — driving it into the floor so hard the stone caved beneath its feet yet it still standing, a crater blooming outward from the point of impact.
The thing was not dead. Not even close to dead. But it was *hurt*
Hope came back into two human chests at once.
"I *told* you to trust me—"
FWOOOOOSH—THRM!
The Entity's answering swing tore a shockwave clean through the far side of the chamber, pillars folding, the wall opening to the night.
And there, amidst the flames and the falling stone, he stood.
Const.
Not unharmed.
Simply unconcerned.