He did not bother with it anymore.
Right now, his focus was on recovering.
He had pushed himself far beyond his limits, and his body was finally demanding payment for it. Every breath felt heavy. His muscles ached with a deep exhaustion that sleep alone could never cure.
The Grace of Cause was an exceptional ability — terrifyingly so.
But every it carried a price.
His chest tightened slightly.
This time, however, it was not pain.
It was a feeling.
A quiet sense of wrongness crawled beneath his skin.
Slowly, he lifted his gaze toward the creature once more, studying its body carefully from head to toe. He had already slain it. Of that, he was certain.
And yet…
The unease in his heart refused to fade.
Frowning, he pushed himself upright on his knees to get a better look.
Then, his eyes narrowed.
The opening in the creature's chest had sealed itself again.
Now, only a faint dark-purple shimmer remained at the center of its chest, flickering in and out of existence every few seconds like a dying star struggling against the void.
His expression darkened.
Something was wrong.
He tilted his head slightly in confusion and listened more carefully.
At first, he heard nothing.
Then, faintly, a sound echoed from within the creature's chest.
A heartbeat.
His expression changed subtly.
It was not that the sound had suddenly appeared. Rather, his mind had been too distracted earlier to notice it amidst the aftermath of the battle and the strain crushing his body.
Now that the silence had settled around him, the rhythm became impossible to ignore.
With every pulse, the dark-purple shimmer buried within the creature's chest flickered briefly before fading again. The dim light rose and vanished in steady intervals, almost resembling a countdown quietly approaching its end.
An uneasy feeling crept deeper into his chest.
***
At the outskirts of the village, the others waited in anxious silence.
The battle raging deeper within the settlement had long since gone quiet, and that silence alone was enough to fill everyone with unease. None of them knew what had happened. None of them dared to guess.
All they could do was hope Leonidas had won.
Meanwhile, Jurgen remained exactly where he was.
Still kneeling and unmoving.
Ever since that moment earlier, he had not shifted even slightly, as though his body had simply forgotten how to move. His swollen eyes remained lowered toward the trembling hands resting weakly on his lap, their emptiness making him resemble a man who had already begun collapsing somewhere deep inside himself.
From time to time, his comrades glanced in his direction silently, not out of comfort, but merely to reassure themselves that he was still conscious.
No one approached him.
No one knew how.
Nearby, Hazel's quiet sobbing continued to drift through the cold night air while she held onto Thorner's lifeless body. Grief had long exhausted her voice, leaving behind only broken cries that faded into the surrounding silence.
But by now, no one truly had the strength to focus on another person's pain.
Not because they had no heart for someone like her.
They were simply exhausted beyond words.
After enduring a nightmare like this, the only thing left in their hearts was the desperate desire to survive and leave this place alive.
Leonidas understood it then — not as a thought, but as a brutal certainty that settled into his bones.
The creature was going to detonate.
Not strike. Not retaliate. Erase.
His gaze snapped toward the direction where the others had were behind the shattered line of trees. The fallen forest there remained dense and unmoving, swallowing sight and sound alike, as though it had chosen to betray them in silence.
He forced himself up.
Pain surged through his body the moment he moved, sharp enough to blur the edges of his vision. Every breath felt scraped out of him, every step a negotiation with exhaustion. And yet he moved anyway, because understanding had finally caught up with instinct — and he agreed on the same truth: there was no time left.
He had not expected this. Not from the creature. Not from anything they had faced so far. It had been wounded, cornered, desperate.
But not defeated.
It still held a final card to play, and it intended to discard the entire board with it.
"Run!"
The word tore out of him, raw and fractured, carrying everything his lungs could give. It was not just a warning, it was a plea forced into sound.
But it vanished almost immediately into the forest.
The others did not hear him.
Or worse — they had not yet understood what there was to hear.
Distance swallowed his voice. The trees drank the rest, standing indifferent as ever, refusing to betray what lay beyond them.
There was no time to run.
No space to understand.
Leonidas, Jurgen, his comrades, the village itself were caught in the widening edge of annihilation, consumed by the greedy, violent wave that did not distinguish between flesh and stone.
And then nothing.
Only the lingering echo remained, rolling through the ruined air long after the light had faded.
In that silence, uncertainty did not arrive as absence.
It arrived as weight.
Heavier than death itself.