Morrigan launched herself at the Anomaly with Konkushu raised above her head.
Behind her, the battlefield was collapsing into surrender. Lacert soldiers threw down their weapons and raised their clawed hands, scrambling toward the Anwansi defenders with desperate pleas. The sight of their decapitated commander and the reality-warping horror bearing down on them had shattered whatever remained of their fighting spirit. Guardians and volunteers herded the surrendering Lacerts over the first wall and toward the second, too busy evacuating to process the irony of saving their enemies.
Morrigan paid none of it any attention. Her focus had narrowed to a single point. The Anomaly met her charge head-on.
Its massive clawed paw swiped at her in a horizontal arc that would have bisected anything it connected with. Morrigan ducked beneath it by inches, the displaced air ruffling her flower crown. But the creature's body was longer than her dodge anticipated. Its serpentine tail whipped around from the opposite side and caught her across the stomach with a surplus of force.
Morrigan's body left the ground. She rocketed backward and crashed into the first wall, her spine hitting the timber so hard that the impact cracked the supports and sent tremors through the entire structure. Defenders who had been climbing over the top to escape toward the second wall stumbled and grabbed at the railing. One volunteer wasn't fast enough. His grip slipped and he tumbled off the wall's edge toward the ground below.
The anomaly didn't even slow.
It opened its mouth mid-stride and caught him like a thoughtless interruption. The sound of crunching metal and bone was brief. Then silence followed as it swallowed, continuing forward without hesitation, as if the man had never existed at all.
Luthiel screamed from the third wall, her hands gripping the railing until the wood groaned. Grub's jaw tightened but he said nothing. His eyes stayed locked on Morrigan.
The old kappa peeled herself from the wall's broken surface and dropped to the ground. She wiped blood from her beak, rolled her shoulders, and examined the creature as it turned back toward her. Its empty black eyes carried no satisfaction, no aggression or intent. Just hunger and immorality
Dust fell from her shoulders as she dragged in a breath, then another, and then drove her fist forward into the creature's advancing head. The impact forced it back a step. Her knuckles cracked, but she did not stop moving.
The blow landed clean and heavy, Anima-reinforced knuckles connecting with the monstrosity's skull beneath the ashen hide. The creature's massive head snapped sideways and its four legs skidded backward through the dirt, carving furrows over a kong distance.
She exhaled through clenched teeth. "Still standing."
It recovered almost instantly. Claws found purchase and it lunged again, its jaws yawning open to reveal a throat that seemed to stretch impossibly deep.
Morrigan spun Konkushu in a tight circle, building momentum, then brought the staff across the creature's lower jaw in a lateral strike that cracked scales and sent iridescent blood spraying across the scorched earth. The Anomaly staggered. She followed with a rising strike that caught it under the chin, then reversed into a sweeping blow that connected with the base of its front left leg.
The creature roared. The sound made the air vibrate with not just noise a but a ripple of instability. Then it bit down on her leg.
Morrigan's eyes widened as teeth sank through her reinforced skin and clamped around her calf. Before she could counter, the creature lifted her off the ground and slammed her into the earth with frightful force, creating a crater in the soil beneath her. Dust and debris erupted upward as the impact echoed across the field. Then it slammed her once again.
From the third wall, Lu watched with her golden eyes brimming with tears.
"What's happening?" Her voice cracked. "Why is Master struggling?"
Grub looked at the fight with grim calculation. He could see it clearly even from this distance. Morrigan was winning on technique. Every exchange she initiated, she came out ahead. Her strikes were precise, her footwork was immaculate, and her understanding of the creature's attack patterns was developing in real time.
But she was running low on Anima.
The battle against the Lacert army had already drained her significantly. Charging Konkushu, redirecting the arrow volleys, fighting Saander twice, and sustaining Current through dozens of individual engagements had carved deep into her reserves. And now her Equalization was active against a Dormant Tier 1 Anomaly, sealing whatever remained of her Anima to that creature's level.
She was fighting a full-strength beast with a nearly empty tank.
Grub grimaced as Morrigan coughed hard, but instead of retreating, she planted her staff into the earth and used it to twist herself free. She forced space between them with a shove, dragging her wounded leg back beneath her.
She seemed to be conserving now, avoiding her Forte entirely and relying on pure physical skill. Blocking the creature's lunges with Konkushu's shaft, sidestepping its tail sweeps, and landing counter-strikes whenever the beast overextended.
A devastating kick connected with the creature's midsection. The force was enough to make it gag. Something flew from its mouth and landed in the dirt nearby. A crumpled, mangled body. One of the soldiers it had swallowed earlier, partially digested and twisted beyond recognition.
Morrigan grabbed the creature's tail before it could recover and wrenched it sideways with both hands. The Anomaly's body left the ground for a brief, absurd moment before Morrigan pivoted and slammed it downward with all the force her depleted body could produce.
Suddenly, the ground beneath the creature collapsed and the creature dropped into a hidden pit.
Spikes rose from below and drove upward through flesh and scale.
Grub's lips tightened into something close to relief. "Still there," he muttered. "Good."
It was one of Grub's own. Stone-lined walls and sharpened stakes jutting upward from the bottom. The fire corridor had burned everything above ground, but the underground structures remained intact. Morrigan had remembered. She had maneuvered the creature directly onto the concealed pit and used its own weight against it.
The Anomaly crashed through the false floor and impaled itself on the spikes below. Its shriek echoed from the pit's depths as stakes pierced its hide in half a dozen places. Iridescent blood pooled beneath it.
Grub allowed himself a tight smile. At least the pit traps were still useful. And Morrigan's battlefield awareness let her weaponize his engineering mid-fight without hesitation.
The creature thrashed inside the pit. Its claws tore at the stone walls, cracking them, widening the hole. Then slowly and grotesquely, it began climbing out. Stakes snapped beneath its weight as it hauled its skewered body upward. Its back was riddled with wounds leaking that strange iridescent blood, but it showed no pain or a hint of hesitation. Just the same empty, mechanical hunger that had driven it since it emerged from the trees.
It pulled itself onto solid ground and faced Morrigan with those pitch-black eyes.
Morrigan laughed and wiped sweat from her brow before leaning on Konkushu for just a moment.
"You're not so bad, fucker. But even now I can tell you've got no real shot at beating me."
She charged before the creature could settle its footing. Konkushu connected beneath its jaw in a savage uppercut that lifted the Anomaly's front half off the ground. Its serpentine body bent upward, legs flailing, and for a surreal instant the massive creature hung suspended against the smoky sky.
Morrigan followed instantly, leaping after it. Her foot caught the creature's exposed underbelly and drove it sideways with a kick that sent it hurtling across the cleared ground. The Anomaly crashed through three charred trees, snapping each trunk like a matchstick, before coming to rest in a heap of broken wood and disturbed earth.
She finally landed with her usual poise and sighed before rolling her neck, and wincing at the bite wound on her leg. She shook the injured leg before turning toward the tree line where the beast had crashed.
Grub saw it before she did and his blood went cold.
Morrigan suddenly stiffened. Her body locked mid-turn, her eyes going wide. A thin stream of blood escaped the corner of her beak. Slowly, her head tilted down.
Then she let out a small cough. Blood splattered the ground in front of her. Her legs buckled and she dropped to her knees, Konkushu slipping from her fingers and clattering against the dirt. Her hands reached for the wound but couldn't find leverage. Her body shuddered once, twice, then collapsed forward into the scorched earth.
The Great Sage Equal to Heaven lay face down in the mud, bleeding and motionless. On the third wall, Luthiel's scream split the air.
"MASTER!"
The word tore out of her with a force that transcended any single aspect. It wasn't Lu's bright soprano or Thi's harsh rasp or El's measured monotone. It was all three at once, layered on top of each other, a sound that carried the combined anguish of every piece of her fractured identity converging on a single point of horror.
The crowd below gasped. Guardians who had been evacuating the wounded froze mid-step. Volunteers dropped their weapons. Even the surrendering Lacerts turned to stare, their yellow eyes wide with confusion.
Grub's mind was racing. Did the Anomaly strike her from behind? Was it poison? Venom in the bite wound taking delayed effect? He cycled through every possibility at desperate speed, trying to make the scene below fit a logical explanation.
Then a figure materialized from behind Morrigan's fallen body.
Stepping out of what appeared to be thin air, as if peeling away from the shadows themselves, stood a Lacert unlike any in the attacking army. His scales were pitch black, absorbing the afternoon light the way ink absorbs water. His eyes burned a vivid, horrible red that stood out against the darkness of his face like twin embers in a furnace.
In his right hand, a dagger dripped with Morrigan's blood. And he was smiling.
The smile was simple, wide, and utterly insane. His red eyes swept across the stunned battlefield with a satisfaction so deep it bordered on ecstasy.
"I wondered when you would notice me," the assassin said softly.
Grub's hands tightened on the railing until his knuckles cracked.
He knew exactly who that bastard was.
Cordylus.
The pitch-black prodigy from the Lacert camp. The sadist who tasted blood for sport. The soldier Grub had fought and humiliated months ago, whose scarlet eyes had stared wholes into him. The first person to realize he was not like them.
He was here. He must have been here the entire time, hiding in wait. Watching Morrigan exhaust herself against an army and an Anomaly before sliding a blade into her back the moment she turned away.
Cordylus raised the bloody dagger to his mouth and ran his tongue along the flat of the blade. His red eyes closed briefly, savoring the taste, before snapping back open with renewed intensity.
"Mmm." His voice carried across the silent battlefield, soft and theatrical. "So that's what a Great Sage tastes like."
Grub's Nihil pulsed in his chest. His fingers wrapped around the morning star's handle. He wasn't supposed to leave the third wall.
He was about to anyway.