The Return Of The Exiled Villain

Meanwhile...

The rest of the phoenix class has finally reached the boss chamber.

Even standing at its entrance, the scale of it was different from what Ellen’s projection had prepared them for.

A hundred meters of circular stone, mana vents bleeding luminous vapor along the walls in slow pulses, the ceiling lost somewhere in the dark above.

And at the center of it all... was the mutant serpent.

Fifty meters of coiled, scaled mass, its body wrapped around itself in overlapping rings, its head lowered and pressed against the dungeon’s core crystal, which pulsed an ugly, unstable crimson beneath it.

The mutation was visible even from the chamber entrance.

Its scales had partially separated along the spine, raw mana bleeding through the gaps in thin, volatile streams.

Its eyes were surprisingly closed.

”...It’s bigger in person,” Thessaly said quietly.

No one disagreed.

The class held their position at the chamber entrance, pressed close to the wall, trying to hide their presence as much as they could.

Their weapons were still raised, with their eyes moving across the space between them and the serpent.

The four guardians were immediately visible.

They were positioned at even intervals around the serpent’s coiled body, surrounding it like a protective barrier.

Each one of those creatures was at the Intermediate Great Grandmaster realm.

Even with the horde mostly cleared from the outer passages, these four hadn’t moved.

They hadn’t chased Gray’s bait as they seemed to be loyal to one thing only.

Beyond them, scattered across the chamber’s middle distance, a handful of surviving beasts from the outer sections had followed the serpent’s pull and taken up loose positions near the mana vents.

They weren’t really dangerous compared to the guardians, but enough to complicate movement across open ground.

”Gray’s not here,” Darya spoke, stating what everyone already knew.

”He’ll be here soon,” Cassandra replied coldly.

Her voice was even, but her eyes were calculating, moving across the chamber in the same way Gray’s tended to.

”The question is what we do before he arrives.”

”We could wait,” Wren offered.

”We can’t! Just look at the core.”

They looked.

The crystal beneath the serpent’s head pulsed again, and this time the crimson bled further up the serpent’s scales, a visible tide of ascending mana creeping toward its head in slow, unstoppable increments.

”It’s close,” Ysolde muttered in frustration.

”If it finishes the breakthrough before we interrupt it...”

She didn’t finish the sentence as she didn’t need to.

Maelis stood slightly ahead of the group, her eyes moving between the four guardians with a cold, assessing attention.

Her expression gave nothing away, but her grip on her staff had tightened.

”Someone needs to make a call.”

The group went quiet.

It was Reinette who looked toward the back of the group first.

Then Darya.

Then, one by one, several others.

Seraph hadn’t spoken since they entered the chamber.

She stood slightly apart from the group, her sword drawn low at her side, her pale eyes moving across the chamber’s layout.

She noticed the stares.

For a moment, she said nothing, her gaze still on the chamber.

Then she stepped forward.

”The four guardians are the priority,” she finally spoke.

”We can’t move on the serpent with them active. They’ll respond the moment we deal meaningful damage, and we won’t be able to manage all four simultaneously in open ground.”

”So we separately take them first,” Cassandra added.

”In pairs,” Seraph corrected.

”Two guardian engagements running at the same time, opposite sides of the chamber. Split their attention. If all four respond to a single point of contact, we lose the positioning advantage.”

Her eyes moved to the mana vents along the walls.

”Use the vents. The vapor disrupts mana sensing at close range. Approach under cover, engage simultaneously on signal.”

”And the loose beasts between them and us?” Thessaly asked.

”Clear them quietly on the way in. No large techniques though... Nothing that draws the guardians before we’re in position.”

A brief silence.

”That’s...” Darya started.

”Workable,” Cassandra finished, her eyes still on the chamber.

”It’s workable.”

Maelis said nothing, but she had already turned to study the vent positions along the left wall, which was answer enough.

Seraph stepped back slightly, returning to her usual aloof demeanour, as if she had said what needed saying and had no further interest in saying more.

”Alright,” Reinette exhaled slowly.

”Who’s going left?”

At that moment, Cassandra was the one to speak, as she was the one who had control over the group after Gray.

”Left side...” she hummed thoughtfully.

”Maelis, Ysolde, Darya, Vivienne. You’re taking the two guardians on the western arc. Use the third vent cluster for approach cover. Darya, no fire until you’re already in contact. The light will give the position away.”

Darya looked like she wanted to argue, but she didn’t.

”Right side is mine,” Cassandra continued.

”Reinette, Sola, Wren, you’re with me. We take the eastern two.”

Her gaze moved to the remaining girls.

”Thessaly, Orin, Rue. You hold the entrance. If anything comes through that passage before Gray arrives, it doesn’t reach the chamber. Understood?”

Nods.

She looked at Seraph last.

Seraph was already watching her.

”You’re with me.”

Seraph nodded once.

”Signal?” Maelis asked, her eyes still on the western vent cluster, calculating the approach angle.

”Count to thirty after both teams reach position, and then we move together.”

”And if one team isn’t in position by then?”

”Then the other team waits. We go together, or the whole thing falls apart.”

Maelis accepted that with a slight tilt of her head.

The group split without further discussion, each of them going towards their own side.

...

The western arc approach took forty seconds.

Maelis moved at the front of her team, her footsteps completely silent against the chamber floor, one hand raised at her side with her fingers spread loosely.

The gravity field around her was running at its lowest possible output, just enough to subtly redirect ambient sound away from their approach vector, a trick that had nothing to do with combat and everything to do with the fact that she had been refining her mana control since she was seven years old.

The vent vapor swallowed them as they reached the third cluster.

The nearest guardian was twelve meters away.

Up close, it was a different creature from the silhouette Ellen’s projection had shown them.

The blade crest along its back was longer than a grown person was tall, and each scale overlapping its body was the size of a shield, layered and dense and faintly luminous from the core crystal’s crimson pulse bleeding through the chamber.

Its aura pressed outward like a physical wall.

Hssssssss...

Vivienne’s hand found Darya’s wrist in the dark and pressed down once.

’...Not yet.’

Darya stilled as they waited for the signal.

Meanwhile, on the eastern arc, Cassandra moved differently.

Her scythe had already been brought out as she eyed two loose beasts sitting between them and the vent cover.

Cassandra looked at the angle, and then at Seraph.

Seraph was already adjusting her grip.

They moved at the same moment.

Fwip!

Shk!

Two sounds, barely sounds at all.

Sola caught one body before it touched the floor. Reinette cushioned the other through a thin layer of displaced earth that absorbed the impact without a whisper.

They reached the vent cover with eleven seconds to spare.

Cassandra pressed her back to the wall and started counting.

Beside her, Seraph stood still, sword drawn low, and the energy along her blade began to change slighly.

Swish...!

It was more than the air immediately around the edge of the sword became very slightly wrong, the way air looked above scorched stone in summer, a distortion that had no color and no temperature but an unmistakable weight.

It was Sword Qi.

Reinette stared at it, then looked very deliberately at the wall instead.

Twenty-seven.

Twenty-eight.

Twenty-nine.

Cassandra’s hand closed around her scythe, and the mana threaded through her body surged from passive to active in a single controlled flood.

Thirty.

Cassandra came out of the vapor like something that had been fired.

WHOOSH!

The distance between her and the nearest guardian collapsed in just over a second, her scythe already swinging wide and laterally.

The guardian heard her at the last moment.

Its head snapped around.

SHHHHK, KRRACK!!!

Blade met crest in a collision that sent a visible shockwave rippling outward across the chamber floor, the impact splitting the ambient vapor in every direction at once.

The guardian’s body was driven sideways, its claws leaving four deep parallel gouges in the stone as it fought to hold its ground, a strained, furious sound tearing out of its throat.

GRAAAHHK!!!

It barely held, but unfortunately for it, Cassandra was already swinging again.

BOOM!!!

The second strike hit lower, at the joint beneath the crest, and this time the guardian’s legs buckled, one knee crashing into the floor hard enough to crack the stone beneath it.

CRACK, CRACK, CRACK!

Fracture lines spread outward from the impact point like a broken mirror.

On the opposite side of the chamber, Seraph arrived at her guardian without a sound.

The sword qi left her blade in a single, total release.

KRRAAAANNG!!!

The guardian’s primary scale segment, which had been built to deflect concentrated mana blasts, developed a fracture line along its surface that ran from shoulder to mid-body in one unbroken arc.

The guardian screamed.

SHHREEEEEE!!!

A high, grinding, furious sound that bounced off the chamber walls and came back from every direction simultaneously.

It spun toward her, crest swinging in a wide horizontal arc that would have taken her head off cleanly.

Seraph ducked under it without breaking her forward momentum and drove her blade upward toward the inner jaw in a single straight thrust.

SHING!!!

The guardian’s scream cut off.

It crashed sideways into the chamber floor, its crest striking the stone with a sound that rang through the enclosed space like a struck bell.

Across the chamber, the second western guardian had oriented toward Seraph’s position and was already moving, its blade crest forward, a bulk of muscle and scale and fury crossing the distance with terrifying speed.

BAAM, BAAM!

Each footfall shook the floor.

Maelis raised one hand, and suddenly, the guardian stopped in its tracks.

THRUUUM!

The gravity field that collapsed around it was invisible and absolute, pressing inward from every direction at once, and the sound that came out of the guardian as its own weight multiplied several times over was low and grinding and desperate.

GRNNNNHHH!!!

Its legs buckled, and its crest scraped the floor. Every muscle in its body strained against a force it had no framework for resisting.

”Darya,” Maelis said.

FWOOOO!!!

The fire column that followed was not wide.

It was a single piercing lance of concentrated heat aimed directly at the joint beneath the third scale segment behind the head, compressed so tightly that it burned white at its core before it even made contact.

At that range, with the guardian pinned and motionless, it hit exactly where it was intended to hit.

CRACK, BOOM!!!

The explosion of contact blew a chunk of scale clean off the guardian’s shoulder and drove its entire upper body into the floor.

The heat that rolled outward from the impact washed over Maelis’ gravity field in a wave that made the air between them shimmer violently.

The guardian did not get up.

THUD.

One down.

The last remaining guardian, the fourth, had abandoned its patrol loop entirely and was now crossing the chamber toward the largest concentration of threats with the slow, grinding momentum of something that had decided it was done being patient.

BOOOM!

It was heading straight for Cassandra.

Her first guardian was still down, struggling to push itself upright, one leg failing to respond properly beneath it, but the fourth was fresh and moving fast, and the distance was closing quicker than comfortable.

Cassandra turned to face it.

She rolled her neck once.

The mana flooding through her body shifted its distribution in a way that was entirely internal and entirely invisible from the outside, concentrating into her arms, her shoulders, her core, every major muscle group loading simultaneously like a mechanism being drawn back before release.

The guardian closed the last ten meters in a single lunge.

SKREEEEE!!!

Its crest came down in a vertical strike aimed at splitting her down the center.

Cassandra stepped into it.

”[Blessing of War].”

She brought the scythe up in both hands and caught the crest on the blade’s inner curve, redirecting its force sideways rather than absorbing it, letting the guardian’s own momentum carry it past her, and as it stumbled through she pivoted on one heel and swung the scythe around in a full horizontal arc at the precise height of the joint beneath its third scale segment.

SHHHHK, KRAAAAACK!!!!

The impact produced a sound like a cannon being fired inside a stone box.

The shockwave that followed it blew Sola’s hair back from twelve meters away.

The guardian hit the chamber floor and stayed there, a long, low, fading groan working its way out of it as its legs gave out entirely beneath it.

Grrhhh... hssss...

Then... the previous silence returned.

The four guardians were now dead.